Eight Little Piggies (23 page)

How could a man committed to this view of life ever interpret his own most precious discovery as the maximally varied source of a grand lottery that just happened to include human ancestors among the lucky survivors? Walcott had to view the Burgess animals as a limited array of primitive precursors for a history of life that would progress and diverge predictably.

As I was writing
Wonderful Life
, learning more and more about Walcott and coming to understand his extraordinary energy and influence, I developed a strong urge, following the game of intellectual genealogy, to establish personal contact with him. Darwin died too long ago for any hope of a shortest link with the deceased—via one intermediary who knew the hero personally. But Walcott died in 1927, and someone who interacted with him as a colleague (not merely as a child who once shook his hand) might still be living. I thus longed to “touch” Walcott as I prepared his biography. (I do not know why we wish to add this personal dimension to a scholarly endeavor; some would even consider such a quest either foolishly trivial or actually harmful in its potential for prejudicial intrusion into hopes for objectivity. But I am content that fellowship can thus reach across time.)

All my attempts failed. I tried my colleague Bill Schevill, who collected at the Burgess quarry with Percy Raymond in 1930. No luck. I anticipated success with G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the world’s greatest ecologist, who died in 1991 in his late eighties. In 1931, Hutchinson had written an important article on the anatomy and mode of life for two key Burgess creatures. But he had begun his work in 1929 and had never met Walcott. I moved my quest to the back burner and proceeded to other things.

Then, out of the blue on February 9, 1990, I received a three-page letter from T. H. Clark, Logan Professor of Paleontology Emeritus at McGill University. I knew of Clark by reputation of course, for all geologists respect his classic textbook (written with my colleague Colin Stearn) on
The Geological Evolution of North America
. But I did not know that he is ninety-seven years old (and still professionally active, with a technical paper now in press in the
Journal of Paleontology
), and I was quite unprepared to encounter one of life’s frequent (and most pleasant) ironies—to quest hard for something and fail, and then to have it drop into your lap by pure good fortune, without the slightest effort. Clark began:

So far, so good. Sweet reminiscences of a favorite place, and bright vindication for my profession, not large, but numbering a healthy few thousand, and full of vibrant debate, as Clark continues to work on the way to his centenary. Percy Raymond, by the way, was a great expert on trilobites who taught at Harvard from the office I now occupy. Raymond made an important collection of Burgess Shale fossils in 1930. Harry Whittington, genius of the contemporary Burgess revision, was Raymond’s successor, and lived in the same office just before me. Thus, my own interest in the Burgess Shale is, at least in part, dynastic. But I was still unprepared for the joy of Clark’s last paragraph:

Clark’s letter came with a note from his research associate Ingrid Birker, stating that, since the publication of my book, “we have been inundated with requests from all sorts of local biologists, geologists, historians, and students of natural science to see the Burgess Shale material…. So we have decided to give a small presentation at the end of March using Clark’s photos from 1924 and a selection of specimens. If the fates allow this will be a delightful occasion to hear someone who has indeed had a wonderful life and can still share the enthusiasm and humor of it. You are most welcome to join our little conversazione.”

Some invitations for travel engender considerable mulling; a few, like a child’s first invitation to a circus or a ballgame, need not be made twice. I went to Montreal on March 28, to meet Dr. Clark—and to touch Charles Doolittle Walcott.

Call me a foolish romantic, but we paleontologists take connection seriously; nothing but fragile continuity, by the thinnest genealogical lines, brings the reward of persistence. Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured—never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history. The tangible establishment of an intellectual genealogy may be only symbolic, but symbols count, and my handshake with Clark (combined with a memory of his with Walcott) will be my personal metaphor for the deeper genetic connections that make life possible and paleontology practical.

Photograph of C. D. Walcott (left) and Percy Raymond taken in camp by T. H. Clark in 1924.
Courtesy of Redpath Museum: McGill University
.

Clark recalls that when they met in 1924 he gave Walcott a reprint of his first paper—on strata of the Beekmantown Formation in Quebec. He then took a photo of Walcott and Percy Raymond—the younger man, now toothless, slumped, and pear-shaped (much like my demeanor in the field), but Walcott, at age seventy-four, erect as could be, with military bearing. Now, sixty-six years later, after the longest professorial tenure in the history of McGill University (for Clark started there in 1924 and remains on the rolls as Logan Professor of Paleontology Emeritus), T. H. Clark gave me copies of his latest reprints, and I reciprocated in kind. We need such continuity in a crazy world that wrenches and uproots our bearings, often on a monthly or yearly schedule (see Essay 16).

T. H. Clark on horseback in 1924.
Courtesy of Redpath Museum: McGill University
.

I thought that my day in Montreal would be sweet and memorable, but I had not anticipated the greatest pleasure of all—intellectual challenge. I thought that Clark would give an anecdotal talk, seated before his fossils, telling us tales of C. D. Walcott’s passion for photography, Mary Walcott’s love of wildflowers, the great days of railroads and pack trains, and the heroic age of fossil collecting.

No such thing: We met in the Redpath Museum, a wonderful Victorian building opened in 1882. The lecture hall is an architectural gem, built like a Renaissance dissecting theater à la Vesalius (but ornamented throughout with Victorian filigree). The lecturer therefore stands on the floor at the bottom of a pit, with seats for spectators rising sharply in several concentric, semicircular tiers. T. H. Clark, I soon realized, had not come for a pleasant chat. His Burgess fossils were laid out on a table in the middle of the pit, but Clark stood at the end of the table and spoke for forty minutes without notes on the life and works of Charles Doolittle Walcott—a beautiful presentation chock full of information and organized, as all good talks must be, around a distinctive and integrative point of view. (How I wish that academics would grasp this most basic requirement of all successful public speaking or any intellectual discourse at all!)

As I listened to Clark, something slowly dawned upon me, and my simple pleasure at being in Montreal to “touch” Walcott blossomed into the deepest possible delight. Clark was not merely presenting a chronological account of Walcott’s life and works. Rather, he had read my book carefully, had studied my chapter on Walcott, and
did not like it
(in the best sense of treating the same factual material from an entirely different perspective). In the gentlest, kindest possible way, Clark had organized his talk to defend the living hero of his professional youth, a man he once met, from my “modernist” historiographical approach.

Wonderful Life
has been a source of great satisfaction for me. I wrote the book with real passion, for the work of my colleagues (described therein) is so elegant and so important. The book has done well in the overt sense that publishers cherish: it paid leisurely and friendly visits to the best-seller lists of three countries, and got its share of rave reviews (and some real first-class stinkers for contrast). But nothing gave me nearly so much pleasure as the thought that my views had so engaged a man who knew Walcott, that he chose, at age 97, to prepare and deliver his first public talk in many years to set the record straight from his point of view.

T. H. Clark lecturing in 1990.
Courtesy of Redpath Museum: McGill University
.

Scientists of my generation, and back at least to anyone who began a career after World War II, tend to be cynical about science as a public institution (however idealistically we may think or act in any personal quest for knowledge and discovery). After all, we have grown up with Hiroshima, the perjured testimony of tobacco company statisticians, the rush for biotech profits in the corporate world, and, above all, the debasement of our own world by measurement of all accomplishment in grant dollars. But I have met several older scientists who not only mouthed—as we all can do—the ideals of science as objective and truth-directed by a quiet but overwhelming moral force (with scientists as humble and privileged participants in this inexorable process), but who also actually seemed to believe and live by this lovely vision. (The vision strikes me as so false—as a statistical statement about norms of science, not as an accessible position for admirable individuals—that I confess to great trouble in comprehension. But I cannot deny the power and beauty of the image, nor do I fail to appreciate its salutary role as an impetus to productive work and psychic benevolence, whatever its truth value).

From my own point of view, I had treated Walcott with fairness and abiding respect (I will even confess to a feeling of awe when I contemplate his accomplishments). I had tried to ferret out his biases and prejudices, but these, to me, mark his humanity, not his failing as a scientist. (Moreover, a key part of the Burgess drama—Walcott’s great and interesting error of the shoehorn—must be explicated, for basic reasons of historical truth, in terms of his constraining biases). But from the standpoint of Clark’s generation, and from the heart of his beautiful vision, such talk can only degrade the work of a great scientist—for science gathers information in objective respect for nature’s factuality, and Walcott was a great and hyperproductive empiricist.