The Lying Stones of Marrakech (13 page)

In 1753, Linnaeus recognized hysteroliths as brachiopod molds and illustrated them with other brachiopods that do not mimic female genitalia
.

Let me close by tying the two parts of this essay together with a story that unites Bacon (the anchor of the first part) with Pliny (the progenitor of the second part) in their common commitment to this liberating compulsion to ask and know.Pliny died because he could not forgo a unique opportunity to learn something about the natural world—as he sailed too close to the noxious fumes
of Vesuvius when he wished to observe a volcanic eruption more closely. Bacon died, albeit less dramatically, in the same noble cause and manner when he devised an experiment one cold day to determine whether snow could retard putrefaction. He stopped his carriage, bought a hen from a poultryman, and stuffed it with snow. The experiment worked, but the doctor died (not the patient this time, for the hen had expired before the procedure began!), as Bacon developed a cold that progressed to bronchitis, pneumonia, and death. He wrote a touching last letter (also quoted in a footnote to chapter 7) expressing a last wish for an explicit connection with Pliny: “I was likely to have the fortune of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of the mountain Vesuvius: for I was also desirous to try an experiment or two, touching on the conversion and induration of bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well, but…”

Tribal idols may surround us, but our obsessively stubborn tribal need to ask and know can also push us through, as we follow Jesus' dictum that the truth will make us free. But we must also remember that Jesus then declined to answer Pilate's question: “what is truth?” Perhaps he understood that the idols conspire within us to convert this apparently simple inquiry into the most difficult question of all. But then, Jesus also knew, from the core of his being (in the conventional Christian interpretation), that human nature features an indivisible mixture of earthy constraint and (metaphorically at least) heavenly possibilities for liberation by knowledge—a paradox that virtually defines both the fascination and the frustration of human existence. We needed two hundred years of debate and discovery to turn a vulva stone into a brachiopod; but the same process has also stretched our understanding out to distant galaxies and back to the big bang.

*
Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the literature on hysteroliths are mine from Latin originals.

B
UFFON'S
S
TYLE AND
S
UBSTANCE

A
N AVERAGE NOBLEMAN IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
France, including his wig, did not match the modern American mean in height. Nonetheless, at a shade under five feet five, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, struck his own countrymen as short of stature. Yet he bestrode his world like a colossus. When he died, in 1788 at age eighty, his autopsy, performed by his own prior mandate, yielded fifty-seven bladder stones and a brain “of slightly larger size than that of ordinary [men].” Fourteen liveried horses, nineteen servants, sixty clerics, and a choir of thirty-six voices led his burial procession. The
Mercure
reported:

His funeral rites were of a splendor rarely accorded to power, opulence, dignity…. Such was the influence of this famous name that 20,000 spectators waited for this sad procession, in the streets, in the windows, and almost on the rooftops, with that curiosity that the people reserve for princes.

Buffon lived to see the first thirty-six volumes of his monumental
Histoire naturelle
(written with several collaborators, but under his firm and meticulous direction at all times); the remaining eight tomes were published after his death. No other eighteenth-century biologist enjoyed a wider readership or greater influence (with the possible exception of his archrival Linnaeus). Yet outside professional circles, we hardly recognize Buffon's name today. His one “standard” quotation—
“le style c'est l'homme même”
(style is the man himself)— comes from his inaugural address following his election as one of the “forty immortals” of the Académie Française, and not from his scientific publications. (See Jacques Roger's remarkable book,
Buffon's Life and Works
, translated by Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi, Cornell University Press, 1997.)

We must not equate the fading of a name through time with the extinction of a person's influence. In so doing, we propagate one of the many errors inspired by our generation's fundamental confusion of celebrity with stature. I will argue that, under certain definite circumstances—all exemplified in Buffon's life and career—a loss of personal recognition through time actually measures the spread of impact, as innovations become so “obvious” and “automatic” that we lose memory of sources and assign their status to elementary logic from time immemorial. (I do not, of course, challenge the truism that most fadings record the passage of a truly transient reason for celebrity; Linda Tripp and Tonya Harding come immediately to my mind, but surely not to the consciousness of any future grandchildren.)

Two prerequisites of intellectual fame have been well recognized: the gift of extraordinary intelligence, and the luck of unusual circumstances (time, social class, and so forth). I believe that a third factor—temperament—has not been given its equal due. At least in my limited observation of our currently depleted world, the temperamental factor seems least variable of all. Among people I have met, the few whom I would term “great” all share a kind of unquestioned, fierce dedication; an utter lack of doubt about the value of their activities (or at least an internal impulse that drives through any such angst); and above all, a capacity to work (or at least to be mentally alert for unexpected insights) at every available moment of every day in their lives. I have known other people of equal or greater intellectual talent who succumbed to mental illness, self-doubt, or plain old-fashioned laziness.

This maniacal single-mindedness, this fire in the belly, this stance that sets the literal meaning of
enthusiasm
(“the intake of God”), defines a small group of people who genuinely merit the cliché of “larger than life”—for they seem to live on another plane than we petty men who peep about under their huge
legs. This mania bears no particular relationship to the external manifestation known as charisma. Some people in this category bring others along by exuding their zest; others may be glumly silent or actively dyspeptic toward the rest of the world. This temperament establishes an internal contract between you and your muse.

Buffon, all five feet and a bit of him, surely stood larger than life in this crucial sense. He established a rhythm of work in early adulthood and never deviated until his brief and final illness. Every spring, he traveled to his estate at Montbard in Burgundy, where he wrote
Histoire naturelle
and acted out the full life of a tough but fair seigneur and a restless entrepreneur (working to extend his agricultural projects, or building forges to smelt the local iron ore). Every fall he returned to Paris, where he dealt and cajoled to transform the Royal Botanical Garden (which he directed) into the finest general natural history museum in the world—a position certainly achieved by the following generation (and arguably still maintained today) when the successor to Buffon's expansion, the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, featured the world's three greatest naturalists as curators: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Georges Cuvier, and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

Buffon worked at least fourteen hours every day. (He refused to alter any detail of this regimen, even in his last years when bladder stones, and various other maladies of old age, made travel so painful.) Jacques Roger describes the drill: “Those who worked with him or were under his orders had to adapt to his lifestyle. And everywhere, the same rule was in force: do not waste time.” Buffon himself—in a passage that gives a good taste of the famous style (equal to the man himself!) of
Histoire naturelle
—attacked the Stoics with his personal formula for a life of continual enjoyment and action. If we accede to the stoical view, Buffon warned:

Then let us say … that it is sweeter to vegetate than to live, to want nothing rather than satisfy one's appetite, to sleep a listless sleep rather than open one's eyes to see and to sense; let us consent to leave our soul in numbness, our mind in darkness, never to use either the one or the other, to put ourselves below the animals, and finally to be only masses of brute matter attached to the earth.

As for the other two prerequisites, the necessary brilliance shines forth in Buffon's work and needs no further comment. But Buffon's circumstances should have precluded his achievements (if temperament and brilliance had not
pushed him through). As the son of a successful bourgeois family in Burgundy, he was not badly born (he received his later tide of count from King Louis XV, and for his own efforts). But science, as a career, scarcely existed in his time— and non-Parisian nonnobility had litde access to the few available opportunities. Buffon got a good education at a Jesuit
lycée
in Dijon, and he showed particular early talent for a field quite different from the later source of his triumph: mathematics. He wrote an important treatise on probability, translated Newton's
Fluxions
into French (from an English version of the Latin original), and applied his quantitative skills to important studies on the strength of timber grown on his own estate. He then worked through this botanical door to his eventual post as director of the king's gardens in Paris. The rest, as they say, is (natural) history.

Thirty-six volumes of
Natural History
appeared under Buffon's explicit authorship during his lifetime—one of the most comprehensive and monumental efforts ever made by one man (with a little help from his friends, of course) in science or literature. He intended to cover the entire range of natural objects in all three conventional kingdoms of animal, vegetable, and mineral. In truth, for he started at the traditional top and worked down, he never got to invertebrates or plants (or rather, he bypassed these “lower” manifestations of organic matter to write several volumes, late in life, on what he called “my dear minerals”). Moreover, despite plans and sketches, his own work on vertebrates didn't proceed “below” mammals and birds—and his colleague Lacépède published the last eight volumes (for a total of forty-four in the complete first edition) on reptiles and fishes (including whales) after Buffon's death.

Buffon treated all the great subjects of natural history in their full generality—from geology, to the origin of life, to embryology, physiology, biogeography, functional anatomy, and systematics. He regarded humans as a species of animal with unique properties, and therefore also covered most of anthropology, sociology, and cultural history as well. The general and theoretical articles of
Natural History
inspired endless and passionate debate—and made him a rarity in the history of literature: a man who became wealthy by his wits. (Inheritance and patronage didn't hurt either, but Buffon's volumes were bestsellers.) All sectors of French intellectual life, from the Encyclopedists to the Theological Faculty of the Sorbonne, took up his themes with gusto (agreeing with some and lambasting others, for Buffon's work was too multifarious, and too nuanced, for anyone's outright approbation or dismissal). He fought and made up with Voltaire, Rousseau, and nearly anyone who mattered in the closing years of the
ancien régime
.

But these general articles do not form the heart of
Natural History
. Rather, more than twenty volumes present long, beautifully crafted, descriptively detailed, and passionately opinionated treatises on mammals, birds, and minerals—with each species or kind granted its own chapter. These pieces, illustrated with engravings that became “standard,” largely through endless pirating in later works by other authors, remain as charming (and often infuriating) as ever. As an example, consider Buffon's summary comments on his least favorite mammal, the sloth. (I imagine that Buffon, living at his own frenetic level, had even less patience with these slow creatures than those of us who operate at an ordinary human pace can muster):

Whereas nature appears to us live, vibrant, and enthusiastic in producing monkeys; so is she slow, constrained and restricted in sloths. And we must speak more of wretchedness than laziness— more of default, deprivation, and defect in their constitution: no incisor or canine teeth, small and covered eyes, a thick and heavy jaw, flattened hair that looks like dried grass … legs too short, badly turned, and badly terminated … no separately movable digits, but two or three excessively long nails…. Slowness, stupidity, neglect of its own body, and even habitual sadness, result from this bizarre and neglected conformation. No weapons for attack or defense; no means of security; no resource of safety in escape; confined, not to a country, but to a tiny mote of earth— the tree under which it was born; a prisoner in the middle of great space … everything about them announces their misery; they are imperfect productions made by nature, which, scarcely having the ability to exist at all, can only persist for a while, and shall then be effaced from the list of beings…. These sloths are the lowest term of existence in the order of animals with flesh and blood; one more defect would have made their existence impossible. (My translation.)

I cannot begin to make a useful summary of the theoretical content of
Histoire naturelle
, if only because Buffon follows Bacon's lead in taking all (at least natural) knowledge for his province, and because Buffon's views do not always maintain full consistency either within or between sections. But short comments on three central subjects may provide some flavor of Buffon's approach to life, and his most important contributions to later research: