HIDDEN CORNERS
THE WONDERS OF
LIFE
Most of the natural history titles have dwelt on the Library’s shelves for many years, an evocative reminder of the golden age of exploration and discovery of new species of flora and fauna. James Le Fanu delves into a few key titles in this fascinating collection, some of them beautifully illustrated. The immense enthusiasm for natural history throughout the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries extended beyond the scientific, the close observation of the myriad forms of the living world, to encompass an aesthetic appreciation of its beauty and harmony. ‘Take a butterfly into your hand, ’ urged the Victorian naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, ‘words cannot do justice to its surpassing beauty. What brilliant hues! Note the burnished metallic gloss, look at the distribution of the colours … the whole surface is a mosaic, the most minute, the most elaborate and the most perfect that can be conceived. ’
And it was spiritually uplifting, too, offering the most compelling evidence for many of the creative power of divine providence. ‘The study of nature, ’ observed the philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes, ‘is truly inexhaustible. We may begin where we please, we shall never come to an end, our curiosity will never slacken. ’ That inexhaustibility is reflected in the Library’s impressive collection on natural history and related themes. But time passes and fashions change, and now those serried ranks of volumes in Biology, Birds, Botany, Ferns, Fishes &c., Insects and Reptiles and so much else besides that seem to occupy an almost disproportionate amount of space in Science and Miscellaneous, remain for the most part firmly on the shelves, opened only rarely, if at all, over many long years. My first intimation of the riches concealed behind those fading titles came when, browsing in the Library shelves, I chanced upon J. Arthur Thomson’s The Wonder of Life (1914, Mod.). Thomson, Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen University from 1899 to 1930, was famous in his day – his books selling in the hundreds of thousands – but The Wonder of Life is his great work, a magisterial survey, elegantly written and superbly illustrated, of the near Above Two-wattled cassowary, from J. Arthur Thomson’s The Wonder of Life (1914). Left Colour plate of marine animals, from J. Arthur Thomson’s The Wonder of Life (1914).
infinite diversity of the living world. He opens with the chapter ‘The Drama of Life’: ‘To many observers of living creatures it has seemed as though they were being allowed to see just a little of a complex and long-drawn-out drama, ’ he writes. ‘All the world is the stage, on which, without any fall of curtain, scene has succeeded scene since life began. ’ And sure enough, as the reader progresses through ‘The Haunts of Life’ , ‘The Insurgence of Life’ , ‘The Web of Life’ and ‘The Cycle of Life’ , so that glimpse becomes a grand Olympian view of its multifariousness and interconnectedness, permeated with a sense of astonishment at the extraordinariness of the phenomena he describes – of the ant-milking mosquito and the fish that fishes, the flight of gossamer spiders and the starfish with 200 million eggs. This happy if fortuitous stumbling on The Wonder of Life prompted inevitably a search for its provenance, similarly neglected masterpieces from the preceding one hundred years that would have inspired it. The Library’s collection of books from this golden age of natural history falls into two distinct but related categories: first, the accounts by intrepid naturalists of their epic journeys that would result in the discovery of the stupendous variety of never previously described species of trees and plants, fish, birds, insects and mammals; and, second, the seemingly more prosaic
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