Robert Huxley, EditorLondon: Thames & Hudson, 2007
$39.95/Hardcover
The ~ 25 foot long Steller's Sea Cow seems strangely out of place among the more recognizable skeletons of chickens, giraffes, and even humans, that make up Paris' Galeries de Paléontologie et Anatomie comparée (Hall of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy). This 'super-sized' version of the familiar dugong is not a mineralized form of a Cretaceous sea monster, but the actual bones from a three-ton behemoth that roamed the Bering Sea until the species was driven to extinction from hunting some 250 years ago. Were it not for the careful collections made by one of The Great Naturalists, Georg Steller, the knowledge of this species and many others might have forever remained in the realm of myth and anecdote. Before the science of natural history developed, many fictitious creatures, like the Ethiopian Dragon described by Ulisse Aldrovandi, made it into the corpus of biological knowledge. More generally, progress in natural history has often occurred at the expense of received wisdom and public imagination, which probably explains ongoing ambivalence about the greater contributions of natural history. However, as anyone familiar with the work of 'great naturalists' knows, the splendors of organisms like Steller's Sea Cow surpass human imagination, not least because they are real.
I. The Great Naturalists, edited by Robert Huxley (Head of Collections, Department of Botany, Natural History Museum, London), is a compilation of short essays on the major naturalists working in four historical periods: Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the 19th century. The book ends at the dawn of the 20th century because "[a]fter Darwin, the science of biology and geology were no longer the province of amateurs, but were to become increasingly specialized and professional, a key element of the prevailing industrial society" (19). For those familiar with the history of science there will be few new names, though I was impressed at my own ignorance of pre-Enlightenment figures like anatomist Pierre Belon and botanist Andrea Cesalpino. The entries are generally too meager to cover much detail about any individual, but "Further Reading" is suggested. Taken together, the mini-biographies provide a succinct and fascinating chronology of how natural history progressed, hitting the major advances like invention of the microscope (Robert Hooke) to the first taxonomic system (Theophrastus), as well as bits of trivia that make for an engaging read.
Among the difficulties encountered by the early naturalists, accurate intergenerational dissemination of data was the chief impediment to progress. Unlike the written word, minute differences in color, texture, form, and so forth, between various forms of animal, vegetable, mineral require detailed and accurate illustrations to be of use. Fittingly, Great Naturalists is replete with 198 illustrations, most of them taken from journals, personal collections, and original texts. They impressively document the technological and methodological innovations that made natural history possible. Leonhart Fuchs in particular seized upon hand-painted wood-cuttings for their ability to accurately reproduce the original. Fuchs also increased the utility of illustrations by making 'unnatural' depictions of plants that juxtaposed multiple species and life stages simultaneously. Later naturalists used finely crafted drawings to report on lands far from Europe. Such exotic images were not only sold to finance the trips, but were scientifically and artistically influential, as in the case of Audubon's exquisite watercolors of North American birds. As most of Great Naturalist's artwork is exceedingly rare and restricted to museums, the book is an unexpected visual treat.
II. The naturalist is still commonly viewed as a dispassionate collector and describer of the outside world. This distorted image belies a much richer narrative on how natural history has influenced larger currents of human progress. The goals of some naturalists were, for example, intimately tied to practical concerns. The Italian botanist Ulisse Aldrovandi combined his interests in natural history and medicine to publish an official pharmacopia for the city of Bologna.
On a more philosophical note, natural history has—tracked if not directly spawned—dramatic shifts in how humans view the earth and its creation. As a book geared toward a casual readership, Great Naturalists does not advance any controversial arguments regarding the interplay between natural history and society, though it's hard to avoid. In Huxley's introductions to each section, he barely conceals what must be a great frustration with the historic and on-going antagonism between truth revealed through scientific discovery and that handed down through religious and cultural authority. He describes the interlude between Ancient Greece and the Renaissance as such:
From the end of the Classical period until the 15th century original thought and speculations about natural history were effectively stifled. The scholars who kept alive the traditions of Aristotle and Theophrastus were firmly bound by the Church's doctrines, and attempts to consider the deeper questions concerning the natural world were answered with mystical or religious interpretations for want of what we would now regard as a scientific explanation. (45)
In challenging received wisdom, naturalists have introduced many startling (for the time) discoveries like the antiquity of the earth, the shared ancestry of all life, and the anthropogenic causes of the decline and extinction of species. More important (and contentious) than the discovery itself have been their associated normative repercussions. Our innately anthropocentric worldview is no longer tenable on a planet where we are but one minute twig on the tree of life. As such, naturalists continue to influence the ethics of environmentalism and conservation, to take one example. This is not to say that naturalists are necessarily misanthropic, and in fact many have influenced humanist philosophers by disabusing us of theories positing special creation.
III. Given the seminal role 'great naturalists' have played in scientific and more general human progress, it is important to ask where and by whom natural history is occurring today. There are some who would say that natural history no longer exists, and perhaps it's for the best. In some sense, the great naturalists were too great. Other than a few hard-to-reach ecosystems, there are no more continents to be explored and described in the way that Humboldt and Wallace did. Some will also argue that natural history was never that scientific. Collections and descriptions are an important substrate for research, but they do not test hypotheses. Even revered naturalists like Linnaeus based their taxonomies on a capricious interpretation of God's design. While these arguments have their merit, neither is especially convincing.
Natural history has played and continues to play a pivotal role in science, definitions notwithstanding. The opening quote in Great Naturalists, taken from Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos, echoes my own working definition: "Unity in diversity, and of connection, resemblance and order among created things most dissimilar in their form, one fair harmonious whole…" (7). Humboldt's reference to natural history is apt, and makes it difficult to dismiss the field as antiquated and unscientific. More crucially, there is still much very basic natural history yet to be done. There are no new continents to discover, but millions of yet undescribed species have much to tell us about pattern and process in biology. There is also the vast and poorly described frontier in the genomes of organisms. Outside a few model organisms that have been scrutinized and sequenced, we lack enough natural historical accounts to, say, describe the general patterns of genetic change that correspond to adaptation or the origin of new species, though progress is occurring rapidly. Thus, the challenge to annotate every gene in the human genome bears a qualitative resemblance to the naturalist's attempt to catalogue the diversity of life at the macro level. As Linnaeus, Charles Lyell, and Darwin synthesized a massive amount of information to produce a coherent picture of how nature works, contemporary scientists are charged with the task to make similarly profound breakthroughs with the emerging data. The Great Naturalists reminds us of the astounding accomplishment and the personal qualities of past natural historians and prescribes a worthy model for future scientific advance.
