Other things are doubtful, but that is certain - some Wellsian political allegory, and even some science

Two more modes or lodes or nodes Wells uses in The First Men in the Moon.  Politics and science.

The novel is not just an excuse for inventing wondrous atmospheric explosions and moon sunrises and so on.  It is also an anti-imperialist allegory.  Not a bad one at that, although Wells makes one really cheap decision.  His moon is, it turns out, abundant with gold.  Sure, why not gold.

"On the other hand, here's gold knocking about like cast iron at home.  If only we can get some of it back, if only we can find our sphere again before they do, and get back, then –“

“Yes?”

“We might put the thing on a sounder footing.  Come back in a bigger sphere with guns.”

“Good Lord!” cried Cavor, as though that was horrible.  (Ch. 18)

Cavor is the scientist, at once narrowly devoted to the cause of knowledge yet in the end much more of a humanist than the narrator who is always wishing for guns.  He wants to conquer the moon people and plunder their resources, an impulse that he feels is entirely natural, while the scientist just wants to study them.  Here we see that  Cavor has joined a Committee for the Abolition of War:

“Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it.  And then ... Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another, and against these moon people; it will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war.  In a little while, in a very little while, if I tell my secret, this planet to its deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead.  Other things are doubtful, but that is certain.”  (Ch. 18, italics in original)

It was really the spears that caught my attention, though.  The moon people are a highly advanced, tightly organized society that fights with spears.  The Anglo-Zulu Wars were fought in 1879, not that long before the novel was written.  I suppose there are other relevant colonial conflicts.  I don’t know.

The science – that actual science.  Wells was trained as a biologist.  Jules Verne wanted him to be an engineer, but in The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds, the scientific principle under investigation is that of Charles Darwin.  In The First Men in the Moon Wells ingeniously prefigures sociobiology.  The moon people are part of a superorganism, an ant colony that has evolved to the point of employing language and advanced technology by means of extreme specialization, each individual “exquisitely adapted to the social need it meets” (Ch. 24).  Wells is the prophet of E. O. Wilson.

These two strands, the political and sociobiological, are combined at the novel’s end, as the scientist fumblingly explains to the big-brained ruler of the moon ants impossible concepts like nations, democracy (“When I had done he ordered cooling sprays upon his brow”, Ch. 25), and war.  However extraneous the satire, Wells does fold it back into the plot in the last few pages.  He is still a novelist more than a reformer at this point.  The scientist becomes the simian snake in the moon ant Eden, destroying their innocence and leading them to commit their first act of war.

The sequel can be found in what must now be hundreds of science fiction novels, stories, and movies.

I for one welcome our new insect overlords.

Why did I read a book about leafcutter ants?  It interferes with all of my important projects, the one’s where I – do – well – all of those important things I was thinking of.  I don’t remember what those things were.  Ants, why not ants?  The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct (2011), by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, that’s the book.

I read the book because: a) it was on the New Books shelf at my library, b) it is short, c) it is full of hideously detailed close-up photographs of leafcutter ants cutting leaves and doing all of the other strange things they do:

Please note how the one mandible becomes a serrated knife while the other guides the path of the cut.  Please note how the foreleg lifts the severed edge of the cut.  Please note how horribly spiky the ant is.

Millions of leafcutter ants, all over South and Central America, are as I write sawing up vegetation, which millions of other ants carry back to their enormous underground fungus farms, where millions more tiny, specialized ants carefully dismember the plant fragments and feed them to the symbiotic fungus, while other tiny ants harvest the fungus to feed the hive.  Other parasites and symbiotes wander through the system.  It is all so wonderfully strange.

A team of Brazilians researchers have become leafcutter nest archeologists, specialists in “the megalopolis architecture of Atta colonies” (115).  They pump a nest full of liquid cement (for one particular nest, over 6 tons of cement), and then excavate the ant city using standard archeological techniques:

One reason to read a book like this is to witness the creativity of scientists.  There are so many kinds of creativity.

The little leafcutter ant book is an expansion of a chapter of another recent Hölldobler and Wilson book, The Superorganism, which is presumably packed with forbidden knowledge beyond the ken of mortal man.  The leafcutter ants, though, are “the greatest superorganisms on Earth discovered to the present time” (127).  That last qualifier scares me.

This schematic of a leafcutter ant brain is just a bonus illustration for 50 Watts, who likes this kind of thing, as do I:

If you have a niece or weird uncle who is into zombies, get them this book for Christmas.  They will be furious at first, but they’ll enjoy it and will thank you, perhaps many years later.

I began to grow hungry for real knowledge - John Muir on how to read

John Muir was born in Scotland.  When he was eleven, his father moved the family into the wild Wisconsin forest, which ended Muir’s formal schooling.  Instead, “when I was about fifteen or sixteen years of age, I began to grow hungry for real knowledge,” and he became obsessed with reading.  This is all from Chapter VII of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913).

What did a hard-laboring farm boy read in the five or ten minutes a day he had for reading?  Math books, religious books (approved by his father), Scott’s novels (hidden from his father), poetry:

I remember as a great and sudden discovery that the poetry of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton was a source of inspiring, exhilarating, uplifting pleasure; and I became anxious to know all the poets, and saved up small sums to buy as many of their books as possible…  I think it was in my fifteenth year that I began to relish good literature with enthusiasm, and smack my lips over favorite lines, but there was desperately little time for reading, even in the winter evenings – only a few minutes stolen now and then.  (119)

I did not make that discovery until I was eighteen, or later.  Mmm, smack, smack.  That’s some gooood poetry.  And so on.

Muir is nothing if not a problem-solver, and he solves the problem of his limited time by ingeniously exploiting a promise of his father’s:

“If you will read, get up in the morning and read.  You may get up in the morning as early as you like.” (120)

Young Muir begins awaking at one o’clock in the morning, which gives him plenty of time (“Five hours to myself… five huge, solid hours!”) to read and do all sorts of other things, including making a homemade saw, inventing clocks (having “learned the time laws of the pendulum from a book”),  inventing a clock that “could be connected with a bedstead to set me on my feet at any hour in the morning; also to start fires, light lamps, etc.”

This is pretty much what we all did when we were fifteen, yes?  Working in the fields, or chiseling an eighty foot well from sandstone, from dawn to dusk, going to bed at eight, and then, in the middle of the night, reading Shakespeare and inventing clocks.  Yes, pretty much.

Like the autobiography of E. O. Wilson (Naturalist, 1994) I read a couple of years ago, the primary task of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is to give some sense of how John Muir (boy) became John Muir (famous naturalist).  And then there is the corollary:  why have I not become a famous naturalist?  Muir’s memoir (Wilson’s, too) is an admirable success.   It decisively answers that question.

Page numbers from the Library of America collection of Muir's work, Nature Writings.

Among the most aesthetically pleasing of all insects - the prose style of naturalists

So if I were to take this idea seriously - when and how did poets and novelists start writing seriously about animals - I would have to look to their models, the naturalists and scientists and travelers, the Gilbert Whites and James Audubons and Charles Darwins and so on. Not that the direction of influence only had to go one way, or that a genius like John Clare needed their help, but that's where I think I'd start.

Herman Melville's Mardi (1849), for example, is full of nature writing. A bit overpacked and encyclopedic, even. Chapter 32 is titled "Xiphius Platypterus," and is entirely about the swordfish. An earlier chapter is about sharks and pilot fish. A later one describes whales playing in a medusa-illuminated sea. Often, this is directly pinched from other books. Much of the novel is built like a collage, upon which Melville founds his rhetorical flights (a bit on the swordfish):

"A right valiant and jaunty Chevalier is our hero; going about with his long Toledo perpetually drawn. Rely upon it, he will fight you to the hilt, for his bony blade has never a scabbard. He himself sprang from it at birth; yea, at the very moment he leaped into the Battle of Life; as we mortals ourselves spring all naked and scabbardless into the world."

Not what I'm looking for - I do not believe this tells us much about the swordfish.

Most of Melville's contemporaries are simply prosaic. I've read enough books about traveling in the American West to be tired of the repetitive descriptions of buffalo, grizzly bears, and prairie dog villages. Even John Kirk Townsend, an expert in birds, writes surprisingly flat descriptions of nature (the fun of his Narrative of a Journey across the Rocky Mountains (1839), I should say, is his irrepressible naivté). Here's Josiah Gregg, a merchant in the Santa Fé trail trade, with an unusually nice description of a buffalo charge:

"The buffalo never attacks, however, except when wounded... I have crouched in the tall grass in the direct route of a frighted gang, when, firing at them on their near approach. they would spread in consternation to either side. Still their advance is somewhat frightful - their thundering rumble over the dry plain - their lion-like fronts and dangling beards - their open mouths and hanging tongues - as they come on, puffing like a locomotive engine at every bound, does at first make the blood settle a little heavy about the heart." (Ch. 27 "Animals of the Prairie", p. 366)

That's from Commerce of the Prairies (1844). Gregg is trying to write a useful book, so most of his descriptions of wolves and mustangs and horned lizards are functional, designed to assist travelers. But there's good writing here, too.

I now realize that, today, we are awash in high quality nature writing. Maybe I take it for granted. The current issue of Smithsonian magazine has an article about geoduck clams and the people who work with them that is so well written that it's easy to ignore how good it really is:

"Its long, leathery neck can stretch to the length of a baseball bat or recoil to a wrinkled nub. The neck resembles an aardvark's snout, an elephant's trunk or a monstrous prehistoric earthworm emerging from a fist-size shell, among other things."

The author is Craig Welch; Smithsonian also published, a couple of months ago, a piece of his on the spotted owl of similar quality. Apropos of nothing, except that someone gave it to me, and it's interesting, I'm reading the memoir of entomologist E. O. Wilson (Naturalist, 1994). He begins by telling us about a memory from when he was seven, when he came upon a jellyfish:

"Its opalescent pink bell is divided by thin red lines that radiate from center to circular edge. A wall of tentacles falls from the rim to surround and partially veil a feeding tube and other organs, which fold in and out like the fabric of a drawn curtain. I can see only a little way into this lower tissue mass." (pp. 5-6)

This is not the child's view, but the adult scientist's, aware that the astonishing beast was a Chrysaora quinquecirrha, or sea nettle. I marvel at all of the metaphorical language Wilson needs to describe accurately the jellyfish, not just the "drawn curtain," but also "wall" and "veil" and "bell." Good metaphors are not simply flourishes - what easier way is there to communicate just how the mass of tentacles are folded?

Wilson's specialty is ants, so how about some ants:

"The dacetines are slender, ornately sculptured little ants with long, thin mandibles. Their body hairs are modified into little clubs, scales, and sinuous whips. In many species a white or yellow spongy collar surrounds their waists. Clean and decorative, they are under the microscope among the most aesthetically pleasing of all insects." (133)

Not a fancy passage. I am always skeptical when someone says that "not a word is wasted," but this comes close. As usual, the amount of fine writing, on whatever subject, turns out to be enormous, once I begin to look for it. I'm not convinced, though, that much of it, regarding animals, I mean, can be found in 19th century fiction!