I thought again of Dickens - Hope Jahren's science memoir Lab Girl

Through a mix of Twitter flattery and reverse psychology, influential biologist Hope Jahren tricked me into reading her memoir Lab Girl (2016).  It is an unusually good book.  (Other authors, please do not try this again – each spell works only once).

Jahren and her longtime lab manager Bill collect large samples of material – soil, moss, fossils – and run them through a mass spectrometer or some such machine.  Thus, the lab, her own lab, a series of labs that she and Bill have built from scratch and scraps.  The series of labs are one of the frames on which Jahren builds the book.

Another frame is a series of short chapters about tree biology.  All of the tree science is in these little chapters, but the trees are also clear-cut for metaphor.  Pulped for metaphor.  Jahren is as a rule good with metaphor – “The students spilled out of the van like an undone bag of marbles” (114) – but the tree chapters do something well beyond the single image.  Some of the extended metaphors are more obvious than others, but I am looking at the fascinating 2.3, about the symbiotic relationship between trees and certain fungi – “the best – and really only – friends that trees ever had” (104) – where her friend Bill is (also) the fungus.  “Why are they together, the tree and the fungus?”  It’s a dang allegory.

This is like that.  But I have written before about how scientists need metaphor as much as anyone in literature.

In Chapter 1.4, Jahren writes about her first science-like job, preparing intravenous medicine in a hospital pharmacy, a job that is not exactly David Copperfield’s child labor in the bottle-washing factory but with the empty bottles, labels and seals is like it, enough like it that Jahren interlards the chapter with direct quotations from the Dickens novel.

Lydia was magnificent at her workstation, possibly because she’d been doing this sixty hours a week for almost twenty years.  Watching her sort, clean, and inject was like watching a ballerina defy gravity.  I watched her hands fly and thought… in an easy amateur way, and without any book (he seemed to me to know everything by heart), from chapter seven.  (44)

Lydia is a great character, one of those Dickensian creations that are called caricatures by readers who have limited acquaintance with the variety of humanity.   Here is another David Copperfield quotation, upon visiting the hospital psych ward:

What originally struck me as cryptic in chapter fifty-nine was now mundane: they are turned inward, to feed upon their own hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeling.  (49)

Not only is the chapter full of David Copperfield quotations, but they all contain the word “heart.”  Jahren says she was working on a paper for her English class, making this a truly heroic feat of undergraduate recycling.  I suppose this could look like a gimmick; to me, it looked like a triumph.  The chapter could stand on its own as a short story.

The book is much funnier than I have suggested.  See the chapter with the trip to Monkey Jungle, a Florida tourist “attraction”:

Three Java Macaques that had been straining their brains over some problem that they could neither solve nor abandon propelled themselves toward us, supposing that we somehow represented an answer.  A white-handed gibbon was draped limply across our walkway, either asleep or dead or someplace in between…  A single howler monkey sat high on a branch in the back, wailing out the entire Book of Job in his native tongue while periodically raising his arms in an age-old supplication for an explanation as to why the righteous must suffer.  (116-7, the ellipses conceal a Beckett reference)

But the Dickens chapter was the only part of this fine book that I really wanted to write about, surprise surprise.

I stole the title of the post from a later chapter, p. 61.

But this was not a method, it was an idea - science and The Invisible Man

Here comes science fiction book #3.  Ideally it would round out and definitively prove my arguments about science fiction, but I fear it does not.  The Invisible Man (1897 – I have returned safely to the 19th century) is barely a science fiction novel at all.  I have been calling science fiction a branch of fantasy; the Wells novel at least supports that argument.

Oh sure, there is plenty of science.  Whatta ya call this if not science?

I found a general principle of pigments and refraction – a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions.  Fools, common men, even common mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression may mean to the student of molecular physics…  But this was not a method, it was an idea, that might lead to a method by which it would be possible, without changing any other property of matter – except, in some instances colours – to lower the refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air – so far as all practical purposes are concerned.  (Ch. 19)

Just ask this scientician! (Warning, the link talks).  The invisible man might as well be a practitioner of alchemy for all it would matter in the novel.  And if Wells had any actual interest in science he would not make the invisible man a sociopath.  That decision kinda narrows the possibilities of the story.

Yet The Invisible Man is an entirely different creature than the kind of dream-fantasy George MacDonald or Lewis Carroll wrote.  The invisibility is magic but once that is granted the rest of the novel proceeds logically.  The section describing Mr. Invisible’s frustration with his superpower is especially amusing:

"I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again."

"I never thought of that," said Kemp.

"Nor had I.  And the snow had warned me of other dangers.  I could not go abroad in snow – it would settle on me and expose me.  Rain, too, would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man – a bubble.  And fog – I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity. Moreover, as I went abroad – in the London air – I gathered dirt about my ankles, floating smuts and dust upon my skin.  (Ch. 23)

This, to me, was among the finest inventions in the novel, the image of the ambulatory man-shaped bubble of air pollution (quaintly called “fog” in olden times).  The business about eating refers back to an earlier memorable scene, in which an observer notes  that Mr. Invisible has been eating cheese and bread.  Ick!  Fortunately the superpower conceals his excretory tract.  Our standards of permissibility have made one of the novel’s shocks invisible.  I do not know another Victorian novel that spends so much time emphasizing – concealing but by concealing revealing – digestion and male nudity.

The face of Mr. Cuss was angry and resolute, but his costume was defective, a sort of limp white kilt that could only have passed muster in Greece. "Hold him!" he bawled. "He's got my trousers! And every stitch of the Vicar's clothes!"  (Ch. 12)

The invisible man flees the dangerous city for an English village, which is where the real fun lies.  He is, at his worst, just one naked maniac, but he acts as a chaos seed in the quiet, orderly villages.  Coordination against him is impossible, plans collapse, and no one seems to realize that blankets would make decent weapons.

I suppose The War of the Worlds (1898) repeats the idea.  In both novels, the peaceful English countryside is disrupted; in one case the threat is small, in the other enormous.  Comic rather than sublime.  Blissfully free of ideas, except perhaps that the English villager will, after several clumsy missteps, come through in the end.

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.

Now I want to visit Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan... - I may not be reading this book correctly

The book is Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine (2009) by ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan. Here's the author's website. The title, but not the subtitle, suggests that this is book is a relative of The Omnivore's Dilemma and similar books. Third cousins, maybe.

Nabhan's book is a hybrid of biography, travel, bioscience, and advocacy. The biography is of a great Russian scientist, of whom I had never heard, the botanist Nikolay Vavilov (1887-1943). That last date should give a clue as to his end - what important Russian died of natural causes in 1943? Vavilov, who spent his life working on the science of food supply, was deliberately starved to death by Stalin.

Vavilov's story could hardly be more interesting. Because Vavilov traveled the world studying agriculture and  searching for seeds, wild and domestic, something not so different from what the author himself does, Nabhan mixes accounts of Vavilov's expeditions with his own travel to the same regions. As a result, I added a few places to my "To Go" list.

Specifically, Wahat Siwa, a Berber oasis in Egypt that now has 20,000 inhabitants. It's known for its variety of date palms, among other things. Lots of tourists go there now, since a paved road was built. I want to be one of them.

Then there are the Ethiopian highlands. I guess I have always wanted to go there, though, at least as long as I have known anything about Ethiopian culture. Nabhan, visiting an open air market under huge, shady trees, writes that he feels like he is visiting the original market, a cute conceit.

The valleys of Tajikistan, those were new to me, though. And the apple orchards of Kazakhstan. No, not the orchards, but the forests, the forests of wild apple and pear trees. Nabhan writes "[t]he fragrance of the Kazakh forest was unlike any I had ever known, for the pervasive smell of ripening and rotting apples and pears filled my nostrils." (113)

I don't think the point of the book was to encourage international travel, but that's the effect it had on me. Kazakhstanis - please preserve your apple forests. I want to see them.

Nabhan's prose and storytelling are functional. They're fine, nothing special. The book has a foreword by Ken Wilson, Executive Director of the Christensen Fund, that is so badly written I sometimes suspected parody. But I learned something - whatever your skill as a writer, commission a forward by someone much worse. Makes you look good.

I read this book because my sister-in-law thinks I should read more about science, and also because I agree with her. But every book like this I read means one novel of poetry book that I don't. That's this omnivore's dilemma.

Hey, speaking of travel: Morocco.

I am willing to believe it. I can believe anything. - Sean Carroll abuses Mark Twain, or vice versa

All right, now I have a real complaint about Remarkable Creatures: its author abuses literature. I didn't actually discover this; mia moglie gets all of the credit.

Here's the epigraph to Remarkable Creatures, or part of it, since it's very long. That's right, this is all about the epigraph:

"What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea--to discover a great thought--an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before... These are the men who have really lived--who have actually comprehended what pleasure is--who have crowded long lifetimes of ecstasy into a single moment."

Plenty more like it in those ellipses. It's the beginning of Chapter 26 of Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain. I ask you, does that sound like Mark Twain? I mean, "many a brain-plow"? Mia moglie looked it over and sagaciously asked what comes after this rather gassy paean to discovery. It's this:

"What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover?--Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. One charm of travel dies here."

All right, that sounds like Mark Twain. The high-pitched rhetoric is never more than a setup for the deflation. In this case, at least, Twain doesn't literally contradict the idea of the first passage - he just says that it's unavailable to most people, which may merely contradict a major theme of Carroll's book.

In fairness, two points. First, I actually don't care that Carroll's epigraph crushes the irony of the passage. In fact, I'm positively happy. Epigraphs destroy the old context and create a new one; that's how they work.

Second, who am I to complain, since I once believed that there were locomotives in Arab countries that burned mummies for fuel. In fairness to myself, I read this, stated as fact, in at least two places, although I don't remember where, and neither time did the author tell me that his source was Mark Twain, which might have tipped me off. We're still in Innocents Abroad, chapter 58:

"I shall not speak of the railway, for it is like any other railway--I shall only say that the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly, 'D--n these plebeians, they don't burn worth a cent--pass out a King;'--[Stated to me for a fact. I only tell it as I got it. I am willing to believe it. I can believe any thing.]"

Remarkable Creatures has an excellent bibliography

In a sense, I'm not quite the right reader for Remarkable Creatures. Not because I already have the history of science covered - ho ho, no - but because I am interested enough to read more. A lot of what Sean Carroll is doing - a lot - is summarizing other books that are worth reading. He does it adeptly (although the seams show, sometimes), so for many people his book will be porridge of the desired temperature and consistency.

I'm willing to push a little farther, both in terms of difficulty and length. To stick with Darwin, for example. Carroll's thirty page chapter on Darwin (less, really, including the illustrations and map) gives half of its length to the Beagle voyage, five years of Darwin's life. For Carroll's main theme, the urge to go out and discover something, this makes sense, and I have no argument with his account of the trip. Or only one argument, which is that The Voyage of the Beagle is very much worth reading on its own, entirely accessible, well written, and even funny. It's also five hundred pages, not thirty.

Darwin's Beagle is the only primary text of Carroll's that I have read, so one real benefit to me of his book is the bibliography. I already knew that I wanted to read Henry Walter Bates's account of his eleven years in the Amazon, mostly during the 1850s. But I had not expected Arthur Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1890) to sound so good. Let's look that one up - how long is it? 544 pages, I see.

How about T. rex and the Crater of Doom (1997) by Walter Alvarez, about the discovery of the Yucatan asteroid impact and the extinction of the dinosaurs? 216 pages; all right, definitely reading that one. Carroll covers this ground in an action-packed eighteen pages. OK, how about Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish - 256 pages, almost a real book (seventeen pages in Carroll, and a must read for fans of Arctic exploration stories). In general, the old books - the ones that belong here on Wuthering Expectations - are long and longer, while more up-to-the-minute science books are rather more petite. Well, who knows when I'll read any of them, but I've made a list.

Two books on the list are by Sean Carroll, so I guess that's some praise. Carroll is not actually a science historian, but rather a leader in a field called evolutionary developmental biology. Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2005) and The Making of the Fittest (2006) will apparently tell me what that means.

Asteroid strikes, jungle expeditions, prehistoric fish, and so on - Sean Carroll's Remarkable Creatures

This will almost be a proper book review.

Sean Carroll's Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species is a pop science book about naturalists and their expeditions. Each chapter, beginning with Alexander von Humboldt's Amazonian journey of 1799-1804, describes a scientific adventure that led to a major discovery. The earliest expeditions - Humboldt, Darwin on the Beagle, Arthur Wallace on the Malay Archipelago, Henry Bates in the Amazon, Eugène Dubois digging up the "Java Man" - really are like traditional adventures, long, slightly crazy voyages to barely known lands by naturalists who have no idea what they will find, while later chapters are inevitably stitched together from the work of a multitude of researchers, although one or two scientists always keep center stage.

Still, each narrative really is an adventure story, even if a lot more of the work moves into the laboratory. The Roy Chapman Andrews-led 1922 Monogolian Expedition is pretty exciting, with nomadic bandits, tents full of vipers, and the discovery of the first dinosaur egg fossils. But the steps that led Luis and Walter Alvarez to the proof that an asteroid strike ended the Mesozoic era and wiped out (most of) the dinosaurs is at least as thrilling, although it would be harder to turn into a movie.

Carroll's style is conversational and pleasant. The quality of his writing is comparable to that of a good National Geographic article. Each piece is logically structured - I was never confused - and the book as a whole successfully presents an overarching argument.

Remarkable Creatures fits in well between two other recent books. The Great Naturalists (2007) begins with early modern naturalists and ends just after Darwin, just as biology professionalizes. Carroll can't compete with the amazing illustrations in The Great Naturalists, but he's a better storyteller than most of the many contributors to that book, and of course the loss of those stunning paintings is part of the story of how the science changed. And he demonstrates that the era of great expeditions has changed, but not ended. Carroll's last chapter, on the history of the study of Neanderthals, is like a shorter version of Nicholas Wade's equally exciting Before the Dawn, which blends various strands of up-to-date research on human prehistory into a coherent story about the global spread of Homo sapiens.

Many conventional book reviews include some piece of pro forma negative criticism, to show that the reviewer is a serious person, I guess. Let's see. Carroll is inconsistent with the use of first and last names. In the chapter on the Leakey family, for example, it's easy to see why first names are necessary (Louis, Mary, Richard). But why is Darwin "Charles" while Charles Walcott (discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossil deposits, among many other achievements) is "Walcott"? Hmm, why?

I have a more serious - well, not a criticism, exactly - idiosyncratic comment, let's say, that I will save for tomorrow.

Carroll's book is almost propagandistic, for Darwin and natural selection, I suppose, but also - but mostly - for scientific fieldwork, for getting out of the lab and into the world. I understand that Carroll has put together a not-quite-the-same version of the book, Into the Jungle, where the propaganda is directed at high school and university biology students. I found the propaganda to be extremely effective. Really, what could be more satisfying than identifying a previously unknown species, or finding a new fossil. Carroll's book gives stay-at-homes like me an easy way to share some of that excitement. A little too easy! No, that's for tomorrow.

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!

Poe's Eureka - angels should exercise caution in the vicinity of Jupiter

I have been organzing Poe's works by genre, I now see. My default is chronology, but that doesn't work for Poe. He's always doing more than one thing.

For example, Penguin Classics publishes a volume entitled The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, which overlaps his entire career. This book contains, I think, very little of Poe's best writing,* but Poe really was a pioneer in the genre, so I understand the book's use. And it includes the baffling Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), so it's valuable for that alone.

Eureka is a hundred page essay or pamphlet or meditation about science. Gravitation, electricity, the diffusion of light, astronomy, the distribution of galaxies, the formation of the solar system. Some of it is jokey, especially the first twenty pages or so, with the philosophers Aries Tottle and Hog (Francis Bacon). Some of it is highly technical and, to me, dull; the sections on gravitation and light, in particular, completely lost me. But most of it is readable, more or less, and, conceptually, at least, quite interesting.

Poe uses Eureka to make sense of all the shocking scientific discoveries of his day, particularly in astronomy and physics. Neptune had only been discovered in 1846, for example, and at the time of Eureka's publication, the tenth asteroid had just been discovered. Eureka is an imaginative engagement with these ideas and novelties, a "mental gyration on the heel" (1262). I suspect Poe thought he was also making actual scientific contributions, but the Prose Poem subtitle gave him an escape route. Actual scientists also create and work within imaginative conceptions of their ideas, but that's as close as Poe gets to actual science.

The most accessible section, for me, was Poe's attempt to understand the changes in the scale of the universe, in it's size and age and parameters. Poe imagines, for example, an angel in the path of Jupiter:

“Not unfrequently we task our imagination in picturing the capacities of an angel. Let us fancy such a being at a distance of some hundred miles from Jupiter – a close eye-witness of this planet as it speeds on its annual revolution. Now can we, I demand, fashion for ourselves any conception so distinct of this ideal being’s spiritual exaltation, as that involved in the supposition that, even by this immeasurable mass of matter, whirled immediately before his eyes, with a velocity so unutterable, he – an angel – angelic though he be – is not at once struck into nothingness and overwhelmed?” (p. 1335)

In other words, splat. NASA informs me that the mean orbital veolcity of Jupiter is 13 km/second, which one must admit is pretty fast. An irony of this jab at medieval scholasticists is that Poe's own exercise here is not so different from theirs.

Eureka is one of many contemporary examples of literary writers attempting to comprehend science. Tennyson's In Memoriam was being written around the same time, and a number of passages in Emerson's journal show his interest in actual scientific discoveries. And this is before Darwin unleashes the deluge ten years later.

I don't think Poe's concerns are particularly religious, which does set him apart a bit from Tennyson or Arthur Hugh Clough** or the like. Poe's religious beliefs, whatever they are, do not seem to be threatened. God is simply a writer, a superior version of Edgar Allan Poe:

"The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God." (1342)

Eureka is Poe's solution to God's tricky plot.

Page references to the Library of America Poetry and Tales. The Edgar Allan Poe society puts Eureka here. And please see Poe Calendar Rob for a clearer idea of what Poe was up to.

* But don't miss "The Descent into the Maelström," which has some of Poe's best descriptive writing, or "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," in which a dead man is kept alive through hypnotism, with horrible and bizarre results.

** Clough is more worried by historicist Biblical scholarship, but the idea is the same: "Matthew and Mark and Luke and holy John \ Evanished all and gone!", from "Epi-strauss-ism."

Don't know much about geology

I'm reading Voyage of the 'Beagle' as a travel or adventure book, not as a science journal. But one aspect of Darwin's scientific background is striking to me. Darwin is in the first generation that could take the concept of "deep time" for granted, that did not have to argue about whether the age of the earth was in the thousands of years, or the millions. The latter position had won the field, and then some. I think even the debates between the Neptunists and Vulcanists were over by the point Darwin was working.

So Darwin and his colleagues were out in a world with this new, powerful way of seeing things. Literally seeing - a rock or riverbed looked different to someone trying to deduce its million-year history. Combine this with the Linnaean system, and the flood of specimens and descriptions brought back by travellers from all over the world. Explanations were suddenly available for all sorts of phenomena that had been mysteries for centuries. People were looking at animal and plant physiology, geology, oceans and currents, fossils, almost everything, with new, wide-open eyes. It must have been an incredibly exciting time to be a natural scientist.

I thought Stephen Baxter's short book on James Hutton (Age of Chaos) was an excellent amateur introduction to deep time. Amazing to think of great intellects like Johnson or Hume, Johnson pious but indifferent to whether the world started 6 or 10 or 100,000 years ago, Hume dismissing the traditional chronology as nonsense, but neither with any idea, any imaginative conception, of the truth, of an earth that is 4.5 billion years old.