MAN IN THE NATURAL WORLD

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32430, 17 October 1970, Page 10

MAN IN THE NATURAL WORLD

The Eternal Quest. By Alexander B. Adams. Constable. 509 pp. Man is still groping and fumbling his way towards the discovery of his place in the natural world. Through the years naturalists have uncovered a few of the mysteries and some of the great ones are featured in this most rewarding study by Mr Adams. His goal, he announces in an introduction, is not to prepare a textbook or a reference work but to write the story of man’s understanding of natural history and to show the qualities and characters of some of the men who did the discovering. The tale is a fascinating one for the author is an adept story-teller and writes skilfully of important scientific advances in terms that are easily accepted by the lay reader. The intricacies of new discoveries are explained against the varying lives and times of the men who made them. The ancient world had many fine thinkers but one of the greatest, especially in natural history, was Aristotle. Few persons have ever exerted a more profound or prolonged effect on human thinking, remarks Mr Adams. The most famous Roman naturalist was Pliny the Elder, an encyclopaedist rather than a scientist. Then barbarism and warfare destroyed the learning of Europe but after the Dark Ages came Copernicus, one of the world’s greatest astronomers. His discovery that the sun was the centre of the universe and that the moon revolved around the earth struck at the roots of man’s scientific, philosophic and religious tenets. It destroyed man’s conception of his dignity and importance. Vesalius provided the foundation for modern anatomy, Kepler determined that planets move in ellipses and that their rotation is not uniform, and Galileo’s telescope made great revelations of the heavens. In England, Francis Bacon preached a new approach to science, Isaac Newton created the concept of a mechanically rather than a spiritually-ordered universe, William Harvey showed the true function of the heart, veins and arteries and Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes contributed greatly to the development of biological sciences. But the author sees the end of the seventeenth century as the turning point Many old ideas had been overthrown, many new advances had been made but man stood on the threshold of fresh discoveries about himself and his world. The time of the great naturalists had arrived. Firstly came Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish son of a curate, who gave the world a practical means of classifying and arranging the thousands of forms of life and of seeing their relationship to one another. Then there was Georges Louis Buffon, a French naturalist who wrote a leading reference work and helped to make the study of natural science popular.

Jean Lamarck, with his theory of evolution, broke through the barriers imposed by theological and scientific tradition. He was continually attacked and derided by his colleague, Georges Cuvier, yet in one of the great paradoxes of science, Cuvier gave the later evolutionists one of their most important tools, for he helped to perfect the study and reconstruction of ancient fossils and many consider him the founder of modem palaeontology. Representing the collectors, who provided the foundation on which others could build, are the contrasting characters of the American ornithologists, Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon. With his spectacular travels in Latin America and explorations in Russia, Alexander von Humboldt was honoured

not for a single brilliant discovery but for a wide variety of new ideas. The British geologist Charles Lyell showed that the geological past could be read by studying the geological present, thus dispensing with the hypothetical theories of the past and placing the science on a realistic basis. And Louis Agassiz made outstanding contributions to science with his studies of fossil fishes and the development of his Ice Age theory. Three scientists are bracketed on the question of the discovery of the principles of evolution. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were the co-discoverers and Thomas Huxley became one of evolution’s most formidable defenders. On the principles of evolution, Mr Adams notes that the rising generation of naturalists can hardly realise the novelty of the idea or that at the time it was considered a scientific heresy to be condemned rather than seriously discussed. The author deals fully with Darwin’s five-year voyage around the world on HALS. “Beagle,” including a visit to New Zealand where he found the

natives filthily dirty and offensive. “I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand,” he quotes. "It is not a pleasant place. Amongst the natives, there is absent that charming simplicity which is found in Tahiti; and the greater part of the English are the very refuse of society." Finally, the author describes the work of Gregor Mendel, who, on a tiny patch of soil behind the wall of a Czechoslovakian monastery library, laid the basis for modem genetics. The author has a very human approach to the men he writes about He notes that few of them had what could be termed a good education. Although no case can be made for college dropouts, there seems to be evidence that certain independent minds do better with a necessary minimum of academic training. Apparently they are then freer to go their own ways and think their own thoughts. Mr Adams is a firm supporter of the critical approach and yet urges us to regard with humility the obstructionists and uncritical thinkers in the book. The reader too could be one of them without knowing it Problems, he says, are conquered only by fresh open minds. Mr Adams also suggests that we should respect what the naturalists have taught us about natural history —that man is not necessarily here to stay unless he can find a better means of preserving himself in his environment. Man is the creator of many of the droughts from which he suffers, the spreader of many of the diseases from which he dies, he pollutes the air he breathes and contaminates the water he drinks. His filthy habits are second only to those of the rat. “If man can leant to contemplate his existence with greater admiration for its magnificent mysteries and strive to live in greater harmony, not only with his own species, but with the whole natural world, he will have justified all that has gone into his making.” Together with acknowledgements, bibliography and an index, there are some most worthwhile notes, a helpful appendix of biographical sketches, a description of classification, a geologic table and an outline of Mendel’s discoveries. It all makes for very satisfying reading.