As my example in the foregoing essay, I wrote: “Some beliefs may be subject to such instant, brutal, and unambiguous rejection. For example, no left-coiling periwinkle has even been found among millions of snails examined. If I happen to find one during my walk on Nobska beach tomorrow morning, a century of well-nurtured negative evidence will collapse in an instant.” I then ended the essay by reporting my walk in a world of righties: “I must have looked at a thousand periwinkles this morning. Still no lefties. Maybe someday.”
I expected no overturn. Occasional left-coiling specimens are common enough in right-coiling species, but their frequency varies, and many species have never yielded a single left-coiling individual. Since the periwinkle, Littorina littorea, is among the most common of all snails within our purview (as the standard shoreline mollusk of both western European and eastern American coasts), this form has become the classic example of an all right-coiled species (literally dextrous and righteous, as opposed to gauche and sinister left-handers). So the textbooks always say, and so did I report.
On the auspicious day of February 14, Solene Morris, then curator of mollusks at the British Museum, decided to check in her museum’s incomparable collections. (Solene now holds the neatest job available in our bailiwick—for she is, as curator of Darwin’s home at Downe, the closest thing to a grail keeper that our profession can muster.) She sent me a letter, circumscribed with a huge blood red heart, and labeled as the new St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Museum drawers are the greatest sequesterers of unpublished and unacknowledged treasures. (I have written several essays on great discoveries made not directly in the field, but among forgotten and misclassified material in museum drawers—see Essay 16, page 240, in The Flamingo’s Smile, or my entire book Wonderful Life.) Sure enough, one lefty periwinkle lay in a vial—and had so resided since 1937—in the back of drawer 3 among the collection of Littorinidae. Solene wrote to me (partly in verse I later realized, though she masked the poetry in a prose paragraph that I now disentangle):
However, in the best tradition of my (incidentally left-handed) father, whenever it has been stated that such a thing cannot be found, it is our duty to find it. So, on the morning of the 14th of February, I searched…amongst the monstrosities and littorinids until…Eureka!
What did I see
Lodged in a vial in the back of drawer three,
amongst the dextrally coiled Littorinidae…
Purchased of a Mr. E. F. Smith of Acton, in 1937, for twenty-five shillings (old currency).
I can almost hear you cry:
“You can’t be serious!”
When the sinistral face of the fact you spy—
Littorina littorea var. johnmacenroei!
I include Solene’s picture of the specimen, lest any zealots, recalcitrants, or other species of doubters remain. There the specimen had resided, since 1937, unknown to all as textbooks continued to propagate their little falsehood.
A nasty, ugly little fact: A left-coiling periwinkle exists. Courtesy of The Natural History Museum, London.
How very lovely that my own point should be proved—at my expense to be sure—by the quick and unambiguous destruction of my own example.
One final aspect of this tale should give us further hope. Solene also sent me the correspondence between Mr. Smith of Acton and the British Museum. He knew what he had (I guess he had read the texts too), and he wasn’t parting cheaply. He didn’t quite demand recompense at the scale of Van Gogh’s swirling flowers or that Honus Wagner baseball card, but twenty-five bob, in those days, could at least get you a fancy meal or two. He wrote making his offer. The Museum responded on March 22 stating that they needed permission from the trustees (talk about bureaucracies saddled with small items because they don’t properly delegate authority!), but allowing that such should be forthcoming if Mr. Smith still wanted to sell. Mr. Smith responded—now get this, for here’s the point of the tale—on March 22, stating that he would be happy to accept. This means, of course, that the London mails were then so efficient that a letter posted one morning could reach its destination and elicit a response on the same afternoon! (Of course, all readers of mystery stories, and anyone who lived in Britain—as I did for a year—before 1970, knows perfectly well that their postal service was once so quick and impeccable. In one of Dorothy Sayers’s wonderful crime novels, Lord Peter Wimsey struggles for months to close a case and then absolutely must get his solution to London by the next morning, or all is lost. He calmly writes his brief as a letter and simply drops it in the nearest public postal box, absolutely confident that it will reach the right hands on time! Can you imagine doing such a thing in America today? But then, do not despair. Our postal service may not so deliver (without the added expense of ten bucks for Express Mail). Yet we now have those demons, those horrid ultimate invaders of all privacy—e-mail and the FAX machine. Who says that life and culture do not progress!
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