Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms Read online

  All fads, however brightly they may burn for the moment, seem to run their appointed course in relatively short order. The aquarium craze dominated amateur interest in natural history during the 1850s, but quickly subsided during the next decade. By 1868, another popular naturalist, the Reverend J. G. Wood, could write:

  Some years ago, a complete aquarium mania ran through the country. Every one must needs have an aquarium, either of sea or fresh water, the former being preferred . . . The fashionable lady had magnificent plate-glass aquaria in her drawing room, and the schoolboy managed to keep an aquarium of lesser pretensions in his study . . . The feeling, however, was like a hothouse plant, very luxuriant under artificial conditions, but failing when deprived of external assistance . . . In due course of time, nine out of every ten aquaria were abandoned . . . To all appearance the aquarium fever had run its course, never again to appear, like hundreds of similar epidemics.

  Even the most ephemeral episode of public fascination teaches us many lessons about the social and ideological context of all scientific movements. We have already seen how the aquarium craze relied upon chemical discoveries, a philosophical notion about natural balances, a social system that supported a substantial class of domestic servants in wealthy homes, and the development of a technology first exploited in a previous craze for ferns. Further reading reveals other important ties to political and technological history, most notably the necessary repeal, in 1845, of the heavy tax that had been levied upon glass. Gosse’s “how to” book of 1856, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea, exposes the social or technological solution to a number of practical problems that would probably not occur to a casual reader today. How, for example, could an urban enthusiast get sea water for his home aquarium? Gosse advises:

  In London, sea-water may be easily obtained by giving a trifling fee to the master or steward of any of the steamers that ply beyond the mouth of the Thames, charging him to dip it in the clear open sea, beyond the reach of rivers. I have been in the habit of having a twenty gallon cask filled for me, for which I give a couple of shillings.

  And how can specimens be safely transported to town with adequate speed? By fast train, of course. Gosse writes:

  The more brief the period during which the specimens are in transitu the better. Hence they should be always forwarded per mail train, and either be received at the terminus by the owner, or else be directed “To be forwarded immediately by special messenger.” The additional expense of this precaution is very small, and it may preserve half the collection from death through long confinement.

  Any social movement must illuminate its own time, so we should scarcely be surprised by such enlightenment from the aquarium craze of the 1850s. But what can we say about the even more interesting (and practical) matter of definite and permanent influences extending forward to our own day? Can a movement that trod so transiently (however intensely) on the pathway of history—and then was gone like the wind—leave any lasting imprint upon posterity? In one trivial sense, of course, we can only answer this question affirmatively, for aquariums retain strong popularity in all scales of life—from hokey commercial theme parks, to lofty public museums, to research laboratories throughout the world, to home displays (with an interesting tie to social circumstances, at least in the United States, where cultivation of tropical fishes remains as resolutely working-class as bowling, while the skiing and sailing crowd favors bird watching or African safaris for their natural-history fix).

  I take a far greater interest in “invisible” matters usually passing beneath overt notice, because solutions seem so obvious that we do not even acknowledge the existence of a question. Some ways of knowing or seeing seem so blessedly evident, so unambiguously ineluctable, that we assume their universal and automatic practice from time immemorial. Og the caveperson, Artie the australopithecine, even Priscilla the Paleocene primate ancestor, must have used the same devices. But when we can show that such a strategy of thought or sight arose from a recent and specific episode in our actual history, then we obtain our best proofs for the important principle that all knowledge must arise within social contexts—even the most “obvious” factual matter based on direct and simple observation (for one must first ask the right question to secure the proper observation, and all questions emerge from contexts).

  Little examples of big principles strike me as most intriguing of all—for I declare my allegiance with several common mottoes proclaiming that God, the devil, or any matter of great pith and moment, lies in the details. I believe that we can identify one of these admittedly small but “obviously” permanent and universal modes of seeing as, instead, a direct legacy of the mid-nineteenth-century aquarium craze, and therefore not much more than one hundred years old as a Western way of knowing.

  How shall we draw marine organisms and more-general scenes of underwater communities? The answer to such an inquiry seems so evident that we may wonder why anyone would bother to pose the question at all. We always draw such scenes in their “natural” orientation today: in the “eye-to-eye” or edge-on view, where a human observer sees marine life from within—that is, as if he were underwater with the creatures depicted, and therefore watching them at their own level. Isn’t this orientation obviously best? After all, we wish to show these creatures as they live, pursuing their ordinary behaviors and interactions. How else could we possibly draw them except from within their own marine environment?

  Such a preference may seem both natural and unassailable—and therefore constant and permanent in human practice—but the history of illustration reveals a different and much more interesting story. Until the mid-nineteenth-century, marine organisms were almost always drawn either on top of the waters (for swimming forms, mostly fishes) or thrown up on shore and desiccating on land (for bottom dwellers, mostly invertebrates). These views from above, and from a terrestrial vantage point, had become conventional in the history of art. For example, to invoke the “gold standard” of pre-nineteenth-century illustration for the history of life, consider the engravings for the origin of fishes and marine mollusks in the Physica sacra of the Swiss savant J. J. Scheuchzer, published in the 1730s.

  This amazing work—the equivalent, for its time, of an elaborate television series with the usual tie-ins from books to coffee mugs—includes 750 gorgeously elaborate, full-page engravings depicting every biblical scene with any plausible implication for natural history. The creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 provide obvious fodder for an extensive series of illustrations. All marine organisms appear on top, or out of, the waters—that is, from the perspective of a human observer standing on shore. The figure for the creation of mollusks shows clams and snails draped over a rocky arch, or lying on the beach in the foreground, while no organisms at all appear in the background ocean. The creation of marine vertebrates shows a garland of fishes along top and upper side borders (that is, above the ocean), while a few swimming whales and fishes partially protrude above the surface, and flying fishes grace the air spaces above!

  I can only imagine one reason for a strong convention of such strikingly suboptimal illustration. Artists must then have avoided—or not even been able to conceptualize—the eye-to-eye, within-their-own-environment viewpoint so “naturally” favored today. Illustrators must have eschewed this edge-on orientation because most people had never seen marine organisms in such a perspective before the invention of the aquarium, and the craze for maintaining such a display as a rustic adornment in the home converted the formerly inconceivable (because unseen) into a commonplace. Water is usually muddy and largely opaque when in motion. No technology of face masks, diving bells, snorkels, or oxygen tanks existed—and humans do have to come up for air after very short periods of potential observation. The vast majority of Western people (including most professional sailors) couldn’t swim, and wouldn’t think of immersing themselves voluntarily in marine waters. So where, before the invention of aquariums, would most people ever have seen (or even been incl
ined to imagine) marine organisms in their own environments? The conventional, if uninformative, view from the shore (and down upon the waters) surely represented the “natural” way of human knowing before aquariums opened a new perspective.

  Martin Rudwick, an excellent paleontologist in his early career and now the world’s most distinguished historian of geology, first made me aware of this interesting change in the history of illustration, and the probable inspiration provided by the invention of aquariums. In his remarkable book on the history of drawings for prehistoric life (Scenes from Deep Time, 1992), Rudwick noted that virtually all early illustrations depict marine organisms exclusively as assemblages desiccating on shore—quite a limit for learning about past communities and environments, especially when you realize that most of life’s history featured marine organisms only! Rudwick writes:

  Most scenes from deep time . . . portrayed ordinary marine organisms as having been washed up on a shore, in the foreground of a landscape seen unproblematically from a human viewpoint. In this respect, they simply continued the established pictorial convention . . . In effect, the aquatic world from which most fossils were derived was depicted only from the outside, from the subaerial-world to which a time-travelling human observer could more plausibly have had access . . . This suggests how difficult it may have been for the public . . . and perhaps for most of the geologists too, to imagine a viewpoint that was not only prehuman but also subaqueous—at least until mid-century, when the famous aquarium craze made the underwater world generally accessible for the first time.

  I don’t mean to exaggerate the exclusivity of this theme. The eye-to-eye view is not that hard to imagine, even if one has never seen marine life in this orientation—and fishbowls did provide some simplified hints. Thus, one occasionally encounters the “modern” view in old illustrations. (The earliest I have seen comes from a sixteenth-century German book on military tactics, and shows a soldier—or should I say a marine—stealthily walking along a lake bottom to access an enemy ship and dril! some holes for a sinking. The figure shows a few fishes swimming in the water, but in a very stiff and clearly subsidiary role.)

  But Rudwick is surely correct in noting the rarity of such drawings—and he also points out that occasional exceptions usually involve irregular or humorous purposes, while the same artists then used the conventional onshore view in textbooks and other standard sources. For example, in 1830 and long before the aquarium craze, Henry de la Beche, the first director of the British Geological Survey and a skilled illustrator as well, made a famous drawing of Mesozoic marine life in Dorset—from the “modern” eye-to-eye perspective. He printed this figure as his contribution to a campaign designed to raise money for Mary Anning, the celebrated fossil collector who had become impoverished. But when de la Beche, only two years later, published figures of the same ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs in a popular textbook, he drew these animals either on shore or on top of the waters.

  I have informally monitored this theme in my historical readings during the past five years—and I can affirm Rudwick’s claim that the “natural” edge-on view did not become at all “obvious” until the aquarium provided a venue for ordinary human observation. Moreover, since all inventions experience some “lag time” before general acceptance, I have also noted that eye-to-eye marine views do not predominate during the aquarium craze of the 1850s, but only achieve preferred status during the next two decades. To cite two examples of reluctance to abandon old conventions, Shirley Hibberd (in 1858) does show several figures of aquariums from the side. But nearly all Hibberd’s drawings, while presenting a side view through glass, take the perspective of an observer looking down upon an aquarium from above, not directly from the side (and level with his fishes). Moreover, Hibberd’s decorative drawings for the first page of each chapter continue to promote the desiccating shore-bound view, as illustrated by the grotto of invertebrates gracing chapter one on the “marine aquarium.”

  In a striking example (cited by Rudwick as well), the immensely popular French naturalist Louis Figuier—the Carl Sagan or David Attenborough of his day—published the first major book of chronologically ordered scenes for each period of life’s history (La terre avant le déluge, or The Earth Before the Flood). His lithographer, Edouard Riou, also worked for Jules Verne (among others) and was the most celebrated illustrator of popular science in his time. In the first edition of 1863, Riou drew all marine creatures in positions of death and desiccation on shore. He retained these figures in later printings, but added, in the fourth edition of 1865, a much more informative drawing of Carboniferous fishes and marine invertebrates in the newly familiar edge-on aquarium view.

  Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most “obvious,” “accurate,” and “natural” style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement. To end with a parody on a familiar text, we only learned the “natural” way to see marine life when the invention of aquariums permitted us to see through glass clearly, and to examine a brave old world face to face.

  II

  BIOGRAPHIES IN EVOLUTION

  4

  THE CLAM STRIPPED BARE BY HER NATURALISTS, EVEN

  IN BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S OPERATIC SETTING OF HENRY JAMES’S TURN OF the Screw, the boy Miles sings a little ditty to his governess during their Latin lesson:

  Malo: I would rather be

  Malo: in an apple tree

  Malo: than a naughty boy

  Malo: in adversity

  Britten embodies all the fear and mystery of James’s eerie story in setting this doggerel as a searing and plaintive lament that then cycles throughout the opera, emerging at the very end, but this time intoned by the Governess as Miles lies dead on the stage. Britten’s device works well because Miles’s text is so insipid (yet at the same time so expressive of his fears about personal evil). The English doggerel scans properly, rhymes, and makes sense, but the pedagogic joke lies in the fact that each of the four English lines (made of several words) can be fully translated by the single Latin word malo (the first person singular of the verb malle, to prefer; the ablative of the noun malus, an apple tree; etc.).

  Miles’s poem, in fact, belongs to a venerable genre of crutches devised to make children love their Latin—obviously an ancient problem for teachers to overcome. Latin versions of various children’s classics—Winnie Ille Pu most prominent among them—represent our most conspicuous modern effort toward the same end.

  But children of the generation just before mine often encountered a much more pungent spur to their diligent study—namely, sex. Several men of my father’s generation have told me that they applied themselves earnestly to the ancient tongue because some neighborhood kid always had access to his parents’ copy of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis—that great late-nineteenth-century compendium of case studies in every conceivable kind of sexual peculiarity (so graphically expressed that even Mr. Justice Stewart would recognize the genre). The main text had long before been translated into English—but, following Krafft-Ebing’s own expressed wishes, all the juicy case studies remained only in Latin!

  I missed all the fun. I never learned the kiddie mnemonics because I only studied Latin in graduate school. And I never relished the sexual prod because Krafft-Ebing’s case studies had made their way into English before my prurient years. Thus I greatly enjoyed a little belated amusement last week when I finally got some ribald pleasure out of all that graduate-school effort. But I wasn’t reading Krafft-Ebing. I was studying the 1771 treatise on mollusks, Fundamenta testaceologiae (never translated from its Latin original), by none other than Carolus Linnaeus.

  Yes, we are discussing clams—though Linnaeus seems to be talking about the sexual anatom
y of women. Linnaeus’s treatise begins in the stolidly conventional mode of most taxonomies. He states that he will classify mollusks by their shells (so often prized by naturalists), rather than the animals within (biologically better, but rarely collected). He then makes a primary division into Cochleae (basically snails, with a few other single-shelled creatures thrown in, including scaphopods and even an errant worm tube or two), and Conchae (basically clams, or bivalves, but also housing multivalved mollusks like chitons and a few creatures that don’t belong at all by genealogy, including brachiopods and barnacles).

  He then, still in conventional fashion, provides a list of technical terms for the parts of shells—and he begins his compendium for clams with one of the most remarkable paragraphs in the history of systematics. He regards the hinge between the two valves (cardo) as a defining character, and he then writes: Protuberantiae insigniores extra cardinem vocantur Nates—or “the notable protuberances above the hinge are called buttocks.” He then names all the adjacent parts for every prominent feature of sexual anatomy in human females—ut metaphora continuetur (“so that the metaphor may be continued”). Clams have a hymen (the flexible ligament connecting the two valves at top), vulva, labia, and pubes culminating in a mons veneris (various features at the top of the shell behind the umbos—our modern term for Linnaeus’s buttocks); and, in front of the umbos, an anus.