3. Idols of the Marketplace in the Eighteenth Century. Reordering the language of classification to potentiate the correct answer.
As stated above, the inorganic theory lost its best potential rationale when the late-seventeenth-century triumph of modern scientific styles of thinking (the movement of Newton’s generation that historians of science call “the scientific revolution”) doomed Neoplatonism as a mode of acceptable explanation. In this new eighteenth-century context, with the organic theory of fossils victorious by default, a clear path should have opened toward a proper interpretation of hysteroliths.
But Bacon, in his most insightful argument of all, had recognized that even when old theories (idols of the theater) die, and when deep biases of human nature (idols of the tribe) can be recognized and discounted, we may still be impeded by the language we use and the pictures we draw—idols of the marketplace, where people gather to converse. Indeed, in eighteenth-century paleontology, the accepted language of description, and the traditional schemes of classification (often passively passed on from a former Neoplatonic heritage without recognition of the biases thus imposed) established major and final barriers to solving the old problem of the nature of hysteroliths.
At the most fundamental level, remains of organisms had finally been separated as a category from other “things in rocks” that happened to look like parts or products of the animal and vegetable kingdom. But this newly restricted category commanded no name of its own, for the word fossil still covered everything found underground (and would continue to do so until the early nineteenth century). Scholars proposed various solutions—for example, calling organic remains “extraneous fossils” because they entered the mineral kingdom from other realms, while designating rocks and minerals as “intrinsic fossils”— but no consensus developed during the eighteenth century. In 1804, the British amateur paleontologist James Parkinson (a physician by day job, and the man who gave his name to Parkinson’s disease), recognizing the power of Bacon’s idols of the marketplace and deploring this linguistic impediment, argued that classes without names could not be properly explained or even conceptualized:
But when the discovery was made, that most of these figured stones were remains of subjects of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, these modes of expression were found insufficient; and, whilst endeavoring to find appropriate terms, a considerable difficulty arose; language not possessing a sign to represent that idea, which the mind of man had not till now conceived.
The retention of older categories of classification for subgroups of fossils imposed an even greater linguistic restriction. For example, so long as some paleontologists continued to use such general categories as lapides idiomorphoi (“figured stones”), true organic remains would never be properly distinguished from accidental resemblances (a concretion recalling an owl’s head, an agate displaying in its color banding a rough picture of Jesus dying on the cross, to cite two actual cases widely discussed by eighteenth-century scholars). And absent such a separation, and a clear assignment of hysteroliths to the animal kingdom, why should anyone favor the hypothesis of brachiopod molds, when the very name vulva stone suggested a primary residence in the category of accidents—for no one had ever argued that hysteroliths could be actual fossilized remains of detached parts of female bodies!
A 1755 illustration of hysteroliths on the same plate as a stalactite that accidentally resembles a penis.
As a pictorial example, consider the taxonomic placement of hysteroliths in a 1755 treatise by the French natural historian Dezallier d’Argenville. He draws his true hysterolith (Figure A in the accompanying illustration) right next to slits in rocks that arose for other reasons (B and 3) and, more importantly, right under a stalactite that happens to look like a penis with two appended testicles. Now we know that the stalactite originated from dripping calcite in a cave, so we recognize this unusual resemblance as accidental. But if hysteroliths really belong in the same taxonomic category, why should we regard them as formed in any fundamentally different way?
When these idols of the marketplace finally receded, and hysteroliths joined other remains of plants and animals in an exclusive category of organic remains—and when the name hysterolith itself, as a vestige of a different view that emphasized accidental resemblance over actual mode of origin, finally faded from use—these objects could finally be seen and judged in a proper light for potential resolution.
Even then, the correct consensus did not burst forth all at once, but developed more slowly, and through several stages, as scientists, now and finally on the right track, moved toward a solution by answering a series of questions—all dichotomously framed once again—that eventually reached the correct solution by successive restriction and convergence. First, are hysteroliths molds of an organism, or actual petrified parts or wholes? Some proposals in the second category now seem far-fetched—for example, Lang in 1708 on hysteroliths as fossilized sea anemones of the coral phylum (colonies of some species do grow with a large slit on top), or Barrèr in 1746 on cunnulites (as he called them, with an obvious etymology not requiring further explanation on my part) as the end pieces of long bones (femora and humeri) in juvenile vertebrates, before these termini fuse with the main shaft in adulthood. But at least paleontologists now operated within a consensus that recognized hysteroliths as remains of organisms.
Second, are hysteroliths the molds of plants or animals, with nuts and clams as major contenders in each kingdom—and with a quick and decisive victory for the animal kingdom in this case. Third, and finally, are hysteroliths the internal molds of clams or brachiopods—a debate that now, at the very end of the story, really could be solved by something close to pure observation, for consensus had finally been reached on what questions to ask and how they might be answered. Once enough interiors of brachiopod shells had been examined—not so easy because almost all brachiopod fossils expose the outside of the shell, while few living brachiopods had been observed (for these animals live mostly in deep waters, or in dark crevices within shallower seas)—the answer could not be long delayed.
We may close this happy tale of virtue (for both sexes) and knowledge triumphant by citing words and pictures from two of the most celebrated intellectuals of the eighteenth century. In 1773, Elie Bertrand published a classification of fossils commissioned by Voltaire himself as a guide for arranging collections. His preface, addressed to Voltaire, defends the criterion of mode of origin as the basis for a proper classification—a good epitome for the central theme of this essay. Turning specifically to hysteroliths, Bertrand advises his patron:
There is almost no shell, which does not form internal molds, sometimes with the shell still covering the mold, but often with only the mold preserved, though this mold will display all the interior marks of the shell that has been destroyed. This is the situation encountered in hysteroliths, for example, whose origin has been debated for so long. They are the internal molds of… terebratulids [a group of brachiopods]. (My translation from Bertrand’s French.)
But if a good picture can balance thousands of words, consider the elegant statement made by Linnaeus himself in the catalog of Count Tessin’s collection that he published in 1753. The hysteroliths (Figure 2,A-D), depicted with both their male and female resemblances, stand next to other brachiopod molds that do not resemble human genitalia (Figure 1,A and B)—thus establishing the overall category by zoological affinity rather than by external appearance. In Figures 3 to 7, following, Linnaeus seals his case by drawing the fossilized shells of related brachiopods. Two pictures to guide and establish a transition—from the lost and superseded world of Dezallier d’Argenville’s theory of meaning by accidental resemblance to distant objects of other domains, to Linnaeus’s modern classification by physical origin rather than superficial appearance.
Bacon’s idols can help or harm us along these difficult and perilous paths to accurate factual knowledge of nature. Idols of the tribe may lie deep within the structure of human nature, but we sho
uld also thank our evolutionary constitution for another ineradicable trait of mind that will keep us going and questioning until we break through these constraining idols—our drive to ask and to know. We cannot look at the sky and not wonder why we see blue. We cannot observe that lightning kills good and bad people alike without demanding to know why. The first question has an answer; the second does not, at least in the terms that prompt our inquiry. But we cannot stop asking.
In 1753, Linnaeus recognized hysteroliths as brachiopod molds and illustrated them with other brachiopods that do not mimic female genitalia.
Let me close by tying the two parts of this essay together with a story that unites Bacon (the anchor of the first part) with Pliny (the progenitor of the second part) in their common commitment to this liberating compulsion to ask and know.Pliny died because he could not forgo a unique opportunity to learn something about the natural world—as he sailed too close to the noxious fumes of Vesuvius when he wished to observe a volcanic eruption more closely. Bacon died, albeit less dramatically, in the same noble cause and manner when he devised an experiment one cold day to determine whether snow could retard putrefaction. He stopped his carriage, bought a hen from a poultryman, and stuffed it with snow. The experiment worked, but the doctor died (not the patient this time, for the hen had expired before the procedure began!), as Bacon developed a cold that progressed to bronchitis, pneumonia, and death. He wrote a touching last letter (also quoted in a footnote to chapter 7) expressing a last wish for an explicit connection with Pliny: “I was likely to have the fortune of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of the mountain Vesuvius: for I was also desirous to try an experiment or two, touching on the conversion and induration of bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well, but…”
Tribal idols may surround us, but our obsessively stubborn tribal need to ask and know can also push us through, as we follow Jesus’ dictum that the truth will make us free. But we must also remember that Jesus then declined to answer Pilate’s question: “what is truth?” Perhaps he understood that the idols conspire within us to convert this apparently simple inquiry into the most difficult question of all. But then, Jesus also knew, from the core of his being (in the conventional Christian interpretation), that human nature features an indivisible mixture of earthy constraint and (metaphorically at least) heavenly possibilities for liberation by knowledge—a paradox that virtually defines both the fascination and the frustration of human existence. We needed two hundred years of debate and discovery to turn a vulva stone into a brachiopod; but the same process has also stretched our understanding out to distant galaxies and back to the big bang.
* Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the literature on hysteroliths are mine from Latin originals.
II
Present
at the
Creation
How France’s
Three Finest Scientists
Established
Natural History
in an
Age of Revolution
4
Inventing Natural
History in Style
BUFFON’S STYLE AND SUBSTANCE
AN AVERAGE NOBLEMAN IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY France, including his wig, did not match the modern American mean in height. Nonetheless, at a shade under five feet five, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, struck his own countrymen as short of stature. Yet he bestrode his world like a colossus. When he died, in 1788 at age eighty, his autopsy, performed by his own prior mandate, yielded fifty-seven bladder stones and a brain “of slightly larger size than that of ordinary [men].” Fourteen liveried horses, nineteen servants, sixty clerics, and a choir of thirty-six voices led his burial procession. The Mercure reported:
His funeral rites were of a splendor rarely accorded to power, opulence, dignity…. Such was the influence of this famous name that 20,000 spectators waited for this sad procession, in the streets, in the windows, and almost on the rooftops, with that curiosity that the people reserve for princes.
Buffon lived to see the first thirty-six volumes of his monumental Histoire naturelle (written with several collaborators, but under his firm and meticulous direction at all times); the remaining eight tomes were published after his death. No other eighteenth-century biologist enjoyed a wider readership or greater influence (with the possible exception of his archrival Linnaeus). Yet outside professional circles, we hardly recognize Buffon’s name today. His one “standard” quotation—“le style c’est l’homme même” (style is the man himself)— comes from his inaugural address following his election as one of the “forty immortals” of the Académie Française, and not from his scientific publications. (See Jacques Roger’s remarkable book, Buffon’s Life and Works, translated by Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi, Cornell University Press, 1997.)
We must not equate the fading of a name through time with the extinction of a person’s influence. In so doing, we propagate one of the many errors inspired by our generation’s fundamental confusion of celebrity with stature. I will argue that, under certain definite circumstances—all exemplified in Buffon’s life and career—a loss of personal recognition through time actually measures the spread of impact, as innovations become so “obvious” and “automatic” that we lose memory of sources and assign their status to elementary logic from time immemorial. (I do not, of course, challenge the truism that most fadings record the passage of a truly transient reason for celebrity; Linda Tripp and Tonya Harding come immediately to my mind, but surely not to the consciousness of any future grandchildren.)
Two prerequisites of intellectual fame have been well recognized: the gift of extraordinary intelligence, and the luck of unusual circumstances (time, social class, and so forth). I believe that a third factor—temperament—has not been given its equal due. At least in my limited observation of our currently depleted world, the temperamental factor seems least variable of all. Among people I have met, the few whom I would term “great” all share a kind of unquestioned, fierce dedication; an utter lack of doubt about the value of their activities (or at least an internal impulse that drives through any such angst); and above all, a capacity to work (or at least to be mentally alert for unexpected insights) at every available moment of every day in their lives. I have known other people of equal or greater intellectual talent who succumbed to mental illness, self-doubt, or plain old-fashioned laziness.
This maniacal single-mindedness, this fire in the belly, this stance that sets the literal meaning of enthusiasm (“the intake of God”), defines a small group of people who genuinely merit the cliché of “larger than life”—for they seem to live on another plane than we petty men who peep about under their huge legs. This mania bears no particular relationship to the external manifestation known as charisma. Some people in this category bring others along by exuding their zest; others may be glumly silent or actively dyspeptic toward the rest of the world. This temperament establishes an internal contract between you and your muse.
Buffon, all five feet and a bit of him, surely stood larger than life in this crucial sense. He established a rhythm of work in early adulthood and never deviated until his brief and final illness. Every spring, he traveled to his estate at Montbard in Burgundy, where he wrote Histoire naturelle and acted out the full life of a tough but fair seigneur and a restless entrepreneur (working to extend his agricultural projects, or building forges to smelt the local iron ore). Every fall he returned to Paris, where he dealt and cajoled to transform the Royal Botanical Garden (which he directed) into the finest general natural history museum in the world—a position certainly achieved by the following generation (and arguably still maintained today) when the successor to Buffon’s expansion, the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, featured the world’s three greatest naturalists as curators: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Georges Cuvier, and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
Buffon worked at least fourteen hours every day. (He refused to alter any de
tail of this regimen, even in his last years when bladder stones, and various other maladies of old age, made travel so painful.) Jacques Roger describes the drill: “Those who worked with him or were under his orders had to adapt to his lifestyle. And everywhere, the same rule was in force: do not waste time.” Buffon himself—in a passage that gives a good taste of the famous style (equal to the man himself!) of Histoire naturelle—attacked the Stoics with his personal formula for a life of continual enjoyment and action. If we accede to the stoical view, Buffon warned:
Then let us say … that it is sweeter to vegetate than to live, to want nothing rather than satisfy one’s appetite, to sleep a listless sleep rather than open one’s eyes to see and to sense; let us consent to leave our soul in numbness, our mind in darkness, never to use either the one or the other, to put ourselves below the animals, and finally to be only masses of brute matter attached to the earth.
As for the other two prerequisites, the necessary brilliance shines forth in Buffon’s work and needs no further comment. But Buffon’s circumstances should have precluded his achievements (if temperament and brilliance had not pushed him through). As the son of a successful bourgeois family in Burgundy, he was not badly born (he received his later tide of count from King Louis XV, and for his own efforts). But science, as a career, scarcely existed in his time— and non-Parisian nonnobility had litde access to the few available opportunities. Buffon got a good education at a Jesuit lycée in Dijon, and he showed particular early talent for a field quite different from the later source of his triumph: mathematics. He wrote an important treatise on probability, translated Newton’s Fluxions into French (from an English version of the Latin original), and applied his quantitative skills to important studies on the strength of timber grown on his own estate. He then worked through this botanical door to his eventual post as director of the king’s gardens in Paris. The rest, as they say, is (natural) history.
The Lying Stones of Marrakech Page 9