1996 - The Island of the Colorblind (30 page)

74
Marie Stopes was born in London in 1880, showed insatiable curiosity and scientific gifts as an adolescent, and despite strong disapprobation (similar to that which delayed the entry of women into medicine at the time) was able to enter University College, where she obtained a Gold Medal and a first-class degree in botany. Her passion for paleobotany was already developing by this time, and after graduating she went to the Botanical Institute in Munich, where she was the only woman among five hundred students. Her research on cycad ovules earned her a Ph.D. in botany, the first ever given a woman.

In 1905 she received her doctorate in science from London University, making her the youngest D.Sc. in the country. The following year, while working on a massive two-volume
Cretaceous Flora
for the British Museum, she also published
The Study of Plant Life for Toung People
, a delightful book which showed her literary power and her insight into youthful imaginations, no less than her botanical expertise. She continued to publish many scientific papers, and in 1910 another popular book,
Ancient Plants
. Other writings, romantic novels and poems, were also stirring in her at this time, and in
A Journal from Japan
she gave poignant fictional form to her own painfully frustrated love for an eminent Japanese botanist.

By this time other interests were competing with botany. Stopes wrote a letter to
The Times
supporting women’s suffrage, and became increasingly conscious of how much sexually, as well as politically and professionally, women needed to be liberated. From 1914 on, though there was an overlap with palaeobotany for a few years, Stopes’s work dealt essentially with human love and sexuality. She was the first to write about sexual intercourse in a matter-of-fact way, doing so with the same lucidity and accuracy she had in her description of the fertilization of cycad ovules – but also with a tenderness which was like a foretaste of D.H. Lawrence. Her books
Married Love
(1918),
Letter to Working Mothers
(1919), and
Radiant Motherhood
(1920) were immensely popular at the time; no one else spoke with quite her accent or authority.

Later Stopes met Margaret Sanger, the great American pioneer of birth control, and she became its chief advocate in England.
Contraception, Its Theory, History and Practice
was published in 1923, and this led to the setting up of Marie Stopes clinics in London and elsewhere. Her voice, her message, had little appeal after the Second World War, and her name, once instantly recognized by all, faded into virtual oblivion. And yet, even in old age, her paleobotanical interests never deserted her; coal balls, she often said, were really her first love.

75
The Copernican revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its revelation of the immensity of space, dealt a profound blow to man’s sense of being at the center of the universe; this was voiced by no one more poignantly than Pascal: ‘The whole visible world is but an imperceptible speck,’ he lamented; man was now ‘lost in this remote corner of Nature,’ closed into ‘the tiny cell where he lodges.’ And Kepler spoke of a ‘hidden and secret horror,’ a sense of being ‘lost’ in the infinity of space.

The eighteenth century, with its close attention to rocks and fossils and geologic processes, was to radically alter man’s sense of time as well (as Rossi, Gould, and McPhee, in particular, have emphasized). Evolutionary time, geologic time, deep time, was not a concept which came naturally or easily to the human mind, and once conceived, aroused fear and resistance.

There was great comfort in the feeling that the earth was made for man and its history coeval with his, that the past was to be measured on a human scale, no more than a few score of generations back to the first man, Adam. But now the biblical chronology of the earth was vastly extended, into a period of eons. Thus while Archbishop Ussher had calculated that the world was created in 4004 B.C., when Buffon introduced his secular view of nature – with man appearing only in the latest of seven epochs – he suggested an unprecedented age of 75,000 years for the earth. Privately, he increased this time scale by forty – the original figure in his manuscripts was three million years – and he did this (as Rossi notes) because he felt that the larger figure would be incomprehensible to his contemporaries, would give them too fearful a sense of the ‘dark abyss’ of time. Less than fifty years later, Playfair was to write of how, gazing at an ancient geologic unconformity, ‘the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.’

When Kant, in 1755, published his
Theory of the Heavens
, his vision of evolving and emerging nebulae, he envisaged that ‘millions of years and centuries’ had been required to arrive at the present state, and saw creation as being eternal and immanent. With this, in Buffon’s words, ‘the hand of God’ was eliminated from cosmology, and the age of the universe enormously extended. ‘Men in Hooke’s time had a past of six thousand years,’ as Rossi writes, but ‘those of Kant’s times were conscious of a past of millions of years.’

Yet Kant’s millions were still very theoretical, not yet firmly grounded in geology, in any concrete knowledge of the earth. The sense of a vast geologic time filled with terrestrial events, was not to come until the next century, when Lyell, in his
Principles of Geology
, was able to bring into one vision both the immensity and the slowness of geologic change, forcing into consciousness a sense of older and older strata stretching back hundreds of millions of years.

Lyell’s first volume was published in 1830, and Darwin took it with him on the
Beagle
. Lyell’s vision of deep time was a prerequisite for Darwin’s vision too, for the almost glacially slow processes of evolution from the animals of the Cambrian to the present day required, Darwin estimated, at least 300 million years.

Stephen Jay Gould, writing about our concepts of time in
Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle
, starts by quoting Freud’s famous statement about mankind having had to endure from science ‘two great outrages upon its naive self-love’ – the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. To these, Freud added (‘in one of history’s least modest pronouncements,’ as Gould puts it) his own revolution, the Freudian one. But he omits from his list, Gould observes, one of the greatest steps, the discovery of deep time, the needed link between the Copernican and the Darwinian revolutions. Gould speaks of our difficulty even now in ‘biting the fourth Freudian bullet,’ having any real, organic sense (beneath the conceptual or metaphoric one) of the reality of deep time. And yet this revolution, he feels, may have been the deepest of them all.

It is deep time that makes possible the blind movement of evolution, the massing and honing of minute effects over eons. It is deep time that opens a new view of nature, which if it lacks the Divine fiat, the miraculous and providential, is no less sublime in its own way. ‘There is grandeur in this view of life,’ wrote Darwin, in the famous final sentence of the
Origin
,

that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

76
Karl Niklas speculates on this:

One can only wonder at the lengths of the huge rhizomes that anchored
Catamites
to the ground. Interconnected by these subterranean roots, hundreds of
Calamites
trees actually made up single organisms, possibly the largest living things in Earth’s history.

When I was in Australia I saw a forest of antarctic beech said to date back to the last Ice Age, and at twenty-four thousand years old to be the oldest organism on earth. It was called a single organism because all the trees were connected, and had spread by runners and offshoots into a continuous, if many trunked and many rooted, plant fabric. Recently a monstrous underground that of fungus,
Armillaria bulbosa
, has been found in Michigan, covering thirty acres and weighing in excess of one hundred tons. The subterranean filaments of the Michigan that are all genetically homogeneous, and it has therefore been called the largest organism on earth.

The whole concept of what constitutes an organism or an individual becomes blurred in such instances, in a way which hardly arises in the animal kingdom (except in special cases, such as that of the colonial coral polyps), and this question has been explored by Stephen Jay Gould in
Dinosaur in a Haystack
.

77
Though they are sometimes similar in appearance, ferns, palms, and cycads are unrelated and come from quite different plant groups. Indeed many of their ‘common’ features have evolved quite independently. Darwin was fascinated by such examples of convergent evolution, in which natural selection, acting at different times, on different forms, in different circumstances, might reach analogous ways of solving the same problem.

Even so basic a feature as wood, Niklas has stressed, has arisen independently in numerous different plant families, whenever there has been a need for a light, stiff material to support an erect tree form.

Thus tree horsetails, tree club mosses, cycads, pines, and oaks have all arrived at different mechanisms for wood formation, while tree ferns and palms, which have no true wood, have developed other ways of reinforcing themselves, using flexible but stringy stem tissue or outer roots to buttress their stems. Cycads produce a softer wood, which is not as strong, but they also reinforce their trunks with persistent leaf bases, which give them their armored appearance. Other groups, like the long-extinct
Sphenophyllales
, developed dense wood without ever assuming an arboreal form.

One also sees convergent evolution in the animal kingdom, with the separate evolution of eyes, for example, in many different phyla – in jellyfish, in worms, in Crustacea and insects, in scallops, and in cuttlefish and other cephalopods, as well as in vertebrates. All of these eyes are quite different in structure, as they are different in origin, and yet, they are all dependent on the operation of the same basic genes. The study of these PAX eye-coding genes, and other genes like the homeo-box genes, which determine the morphogenesis of bodies and organs, is revealing, more radically and deeply than anyone could have suspected, the fundamental unity of all life. Richard Dawkins has recently provided an excellent discussion of the development of eyes, in particular, in his book
Climbing Mount Improbable
.

78
Sir Robert Schomburg described his great excitement on finding
Victoria regia
:

It was on the first of January 1837, while contending with the difficulties which, in various forms, Nature interposed to bar our progress up the Berbice River, that we reached a spot where the river expanded, and formed a currentless basin. Something on the other side of this basin attracted my attention; I could not form an idea of what it might be; but, urging the crew to increase the speed of their paddling, we presently neared the object which had roused my curiosity – and lo! a vegetable wonder! All disasters were forgotten; I was a botanist, and I felt myself rewarded. There were gigantic leaves, five to six feet across, flat, with a deep rim, light green above and vivid crimson below, floating upon the water; while in keeping with this astonishing foliage, I beheld luxuriant flowers, each composed of numerous petals, which passed in alternate tints from pure white to rose and pink.

And in the
Victoria regia
tank, under its giant leaves, I was later to learn, resided a strange animal, a small medusa – 
Craspedacusta
by name. This was found in 1880 and considered to be the first-ever freshwater jellyfish (though it was subsequently realized to be the medusoid form of a hydrozoan,
Limnocodium
). For many years,
Craspedacusta
was found only in artificial environments – tanks in botanical gardens – but is has now been found in several lakes, including Lake Fena in Guam.

79
A favorite book of mine, one of a delightful series (‘Britain in Pictures’) published during the Second World War, was
British Botanists
by John Gilmour. Gilmour gives a particularly vivid and moving portrait of Joseph Hooker as a grand botanical explorer and investigator, as the son of his renowned botanist father, William Jackson Hooker (who after his years teaching in Glasgow became the first director of Kew Gardens) – and above all, in his relationship with Darwin:

‘You are the one living soul from whom I have constantly received sympathy’ Darwin wrote to him. From the time when [Hooker] slept with the proofs of the
Voyage of the Beagle
under his pillow so as to read them the moment he woke up, to the day when he helped to bear Darwin’s pall to its last resting place in the Abbey,
[he]
was Darwin’s closest and most frequent confidant. It was to Hooker that Darwin, in 1844, sent the first hint of his theory of natural selection and, fifteen years later, Hooker was his first convert. In 1858, when Darwin received one morning from Alfred Russel Wallace an essay setting out the identical theory of natural selection which he himself was about to publish, it was Hooker, overruling Darwin’s quixotic desire to resign his undoubted priority to Wallace, who arranged for the famous double communication of the theory to be read at the Linnaean Society. And at the centenary of Darwin’s birth in 1909, Hooker, then 92, his tall figure still full of vigour, was present at Cambridge to do homage to the friend he had helped so much.

But quite apart from his role in the history of Darwinism, Sir Joseph Hooker stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries as systematic botanist, plant geographer and explorer.

‘Few ever have known, or ever will know, plants as he knew them,’ wrote Professor Bower. His early years were spent at Glasgow, during his father’s professorship. The house, in which were accumulating the herbarium and library later to form the basis of the Kew collections, was near to the botanic garden, and he must have lived and breathed botany from morning to night. The intense love of plants acquired at Glasgow dominated his life.