HIDDEN CORNERS

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 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 but intellectually more compelling close observations of the natural world in the tradition of Gilbert White’s legendary The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (first published in 1789; the Library’s earliest edition is 1813).

The golden age begins, appropriately enough, in the furthest reaches of the basement, the ultima Thule of Topography (Voyages), with Joseph Banks’s pioneering botanising expedition from 1768 to 1771 to the South Pacific on Captain Cook’s HMS Endeavour, at a time when the world was so much bigger than our own, its oceans wider, mountains higher, full of the promise of marvels ‘beyond imagining’ .

Banks’s first encounter with the kangaroo, in his survey of the flora of Australia, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771 (2 vols., ed. J.C. Beaglehole, 1962), conveys the surprise and excitement of it all. ‘In gathering plants today I had the good fortune to see the beast so much talked of, ’ he recalls in his journal for 25 June 1770. ‘As large as a greyhound, of a mouse colour and very swift – what to liken him to I could not tell, nothing that I have seen at all resembles him. ’ A couple of days later a species of white ants commands his attention; their six-foot-high pyramidal dwellings, he notes, ‘very much resemble the Druidic monuments which I have seen in England’ .

There are exotic creatures aplenty in the next great work of this novel literary genre, Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804 (trans. Thomasina Ross, 3 vols., 1852–3), with its memorable passage of his being kept awake at night by the nocturnal cacophony of the jungle: ‘The wild cries of animals rung through the woods … the monotonous, plaintive cry of the howling monkeys, the whining, flutelike notes of the small sapajous, the grunting murmur of the striped nocturnal ape (which I was the first to describe), the fitful roar of the great tiger … and a host of parrots, parraquas and other birds … if one asks the Indians why such a continuous noise is heard on certain nights, they answer, with a smile, that “the animals are rejoicing in the beautiful moonlight” . ’

In Humboldt’s wake many followed, their literary efforts filling the shelves of Topography (America, South): H.W. Bates’s (of Batesian mimicry fame) Naturalist on the River Amazon (2 vols., 1863); John Ball’s Notes of a Naturalist in South America (1887); W.B. Stevenson’s A History and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (1825) and a legion of others. Open any at random and within a couple of pages there will be some striking novelty; Stevenson describes a species of vulture ‘the size of a hen’ that feeds on venomous reptiles – ‘Opposing its wing to them as a shield, it seizes the reptile near its head and soaring aloft lets it fall’ – or Charles Waterton’s brilliantly observed description in his Wanderings in South America (1825) of the sloth’s ingenious adaptations to its life in the canopies of the forest: ‘He moves suspended from the branch, he rests suspended from it, and he sleeps suspended from it.

To enable him to do this, he must have a very different formation from that of any other known quadruped … if we examine the anatomy of his forelegs, we shall immediately perceive by their firm and muscular texture, how very capable they are of supporting the pendent weight of his body, both in climbing and at rest; and, instead of pronouncing them a bungled composition … we shall consider them as remarkably well calculated to perform their extraordinary functions. ’

Throughout Topography there are many further variations on the theme of ‘A naturalist in … ’ , but the apotheosis of this genre is undoubtedly Charles Darwin’s The Voyages of the Beagle (introduction by H. Graham Cannon, 1959) in S. Science (Gen.), and a 1922 edition of Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise (first published in 1869) in T. Malay Peninsula &c. Both are, to be sure, repeatedly anthologised, but read in their entirety they are quite brilliant, as when Wallace, almost incapacitated by painful ulcers on his legs from septic mosquito bites, describes the mating ritual of a species of bird of paradise, in a passage notable for his attention to the detail of the colouring of its feathers: ‘The long plumy tufts of golden orange feathers … are raised vertically over the back … and expand till they form two magnificent golden fans striped with deep red at the base … the whole bird is then overshadowed by them, the crouching body, yellow head, and emerald green throat forming but the foundation and setting to the golden glory which waves above. ’ Wallace’s inventory of his 8-year long, 16,000-mile journey through the Archipelago included more than 8,000 birds which, together with the examples of mammals, reptiles and insects and butterflies he collected, would add up to a staggering 125,660 ‘specimens of natural history’ .

Five floors up from Topography, in the fertile browsing grounds of S. Natural History, the inexhaustibility of Wallace’s tens of thousands of novel species is paralleled by the very different, more intimate knowledge of the natural world exemplified by White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, its enduring popularity reflected in a dozen editions (there are 200 in all) that fill an entire shelf. His vivid and sympathetic portrayal of the lives and habits of bats, swallows, owls, mice, worms (and his ‘old tortoise’ Timothy) would transform natural history into a national obsession, so that by the mid-nineteenth century there was scarcely a middle-class drawing room in Britain, it has been remarked, that did not have its aquarium or butterfly cabinet or collection of sea-shells.

The Revd White’s spirit pervades S. Natural History, taken up and elaborated by two prolific Victorian naturalists, Philip Henry Gosse and John George Wood. Gosse travelled widely in Canada and Jamaica before returning to England and settling in Dorset, where his pioneering descriptions of the curious and endlessly fascinating forms of life teeming in tidal pools – including no less than 34 hitherto undescribed species of sea-anemone – converted successive generations of seaside holidaymakers into aspirant naturalists.

Gosse may be remembered (if at all) for his fundamentalist and (even at the time) eccentric creationist views, as described in his son Edmund’s memoir Father and Son (1907), though there is no escaping the metaphysical implication in his lyrical portrayal of the beauty and bizarreness of the living world. Here he is, in A Year at the Shore (1865), waxing enthusiastic about the form and colour of a ‘magnificent species’ of sea-anemone, the Dahlia Wartlet, so-called because of its striking resemblance to the flower of the same name: ‘crowding one upon the other … or seated in single majesty … we see them flaunting the most gorgeous colours … the column may be olive, or deep green, or purple-crimson, or light green splashed and streaked with scarlet like an apple; the disk is equally varied, but generally displays diverging bands of rich red … while the tentacles, short, stout, and conical, may be white with pellucid rings [or] deep crimson … with a broad ring of lilac. ’

Or what is one to make of the minuscule marine worm, Euryelpta vittata, whose mouth is ‘situated most strangely in the very midst of the belly’ , and ‘if an individual be cut to pieces, every portion continues to live and feel, from whatever part of the body it may be taken … and begins to move in the same direction as that in which the entire animal was advancing, as if the body were actuated throughout by the same impulse; and, moreover, every division, even if it is not more than the eighth or tenth part of the creature, will become complete and perfect in all its organs. ’

When the tenth part of an obscure marine worm could reconstitute itself in its entirety then Nature could, or so it seemed, do virtually anything it wanted, as the supreme synthesiser of Victorian natural history, John George Wood, expounded in half a dozen or more influential books including the whimsically titled Homes Without Hands: Being a Description of the Habitations of Animals (1865) and Nature’s Teachings: Human Invention Anticipated by Nature (1877). They could scarcely be more comprehensive, each running to around 600 pages, infused throughout with a sense of charm and wonderment. How many types of burrowing mammal can one think of ?

The Revd J.G. Wood cites 18 in Homes Without Hands : the mole, weasel, badger, prairie dog, armadillo, etc., and the same for burrowing birds, burrowing reptiles, burrowing molluscs, spiders, insects and beetles, each scrutinised with the same perceptive eye for the unexpected and telling detail. ‘Dull and sombre as the mole appears to be, it is by far the fiercest and most active mammal within the British Isles … full of life and energy actuated by a fiery activity’ , not least when constructing its underground fortress of straight and interconnecting tunnels. It is ‘not an easy problem’ to explain how he does so when blind and living underground for, as Wood observes, even for ‘eye-possessing animals’ like ourselves, ‘to walk in a straight line with closed eyelids is almost an impossibility’ .

As for Nature’s Teachings, there is scarcely an aspect of the vast range of human ingenuity that is not just anticipated but surpassed by nature – whether War and Hunting (the club, sword, spear and dagger, projectile weapons, poisons, the hook, defensive armour) or Architecture, Tools, Optics and Domestic Comforts.

Two floors below S. Natural History, in S. Botany, the art critic John Ruskin’s Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers (2 vols., 1879–86) confronts another profound truth of nature – its unimprovable aesthetic perfection. It seems entirely plausible reading Ruskin on the poppy (‘all silk and flame like a burning coal fallen from heaven’s altars’) to see evidence of some divine artistry: ‘We usually think of the poppy as a coarse flower; but it is the most transparent and delicate of all the blossoms of the field. The rest – nearly all of them – depend on the texture of their surfaces for colour. But the poppy is painted glass ; it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines through it. Wherever it is seen – against the light or with the light – always, it is a flame, and warms the wind like a blown ruby. ’

Three stacks over finds S. Insects, and the works of the retired French schoolmaster turned entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. His many brilliant insights into these remarkable creatures were grounded, like those of Philip Gosse, in the most painstaking and detailed observation, typified by his account in Souvenirs Entomologiques (10 vols., 1907) of an episode when sitting on a stone at the bottom of a ravine studying the behaviour of the ‘Languedocian Sphex’ (sand wasp, Sphex languedocian): ‘Three women, vine pickers, pass in a group on the way to their work. They give a glance at the man seated, apparently absorbed in reflection. At sunset, the same pickers pass again carrying their full baskets on their heads. The man is still there, sitting on the same stone, with his eyes fixed on the same place. My motionless attitude, my long persistency in remaining at that deserted spot must have impressed them deeply. As they pass by … all three made the Sign of the Cross. ’

The fruits of Fabre’s patience fill an entire shelf, exemplified by his description in Social Life in the Insect World (1913) of the mating ritual of the male mantis, unaware of the terrible fate that awaits him. ‘He throws himself timidly on the back of his corpulent companion; he clings to her desperately … and the embrace will sometimes last for five or six hours … Finally the two separate, but they are soon to be made one flesh in a much more intimate fashion … During the day, or at latest on the morrow, he is seized by his companion, who first gnaws through the back of his neck … and then devours him, mouthful by mouthful, leaving only the wings. ’

There is, of course, so much more. My indebtedness to Professor Thomson for prompting this quest is matched only by that I owe to The London Library for having so many of the great works from this golden age in its collection, which must, on reflection, be among the most comprehensive and certainly most readily accessible anywhere in the world. This all-too-brief survey certainly clarifies why Thomson’s The Wonder of Life should have made so powerful an impression, its magisterial scope and sense of astonishment informed by living in an era when the inexhaustibility of the natural world, whether in the forests of the Malay Archipelago or the tidal pools of Dorset, had only so recently been revealed. And what a truly amazing story it is, as Walt Whitman observed: ‘Praised be the fathomless universe, for life and joy and for objects and knowledge curious. ’