The Faber Book of Science (27 page)
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Authors: John Carey
This day relenting God
   Hath placed within my hand
A wondrous thing; and God
   Be praised. At His command,
Seeking His secret deeds
   With tears and toiling breath,
I find thy cunning seeds,
   O million-murdering Death.
I know this little thing
   A myriad men will save.
O Death, where is thy sting?
   Thy victory, O Grave?
About the same time the two subsequent sonnetelles of
In
Exile
were added â also on separate slips for tentative arrangements; and I did not like to change them further when they were published 13 years later. The three final sonnetelles of
In
Exile
had been written previously and the poem was now finished, though I did not know it then.
Ross's optimism was premature, though it seemed justified for a time. With the introduction of modern insecticides, notably DDT, at the end of the Second World War, malarial mosquitoes were almost wiped out in many parts of the world. But genes giving resistance to insecticides spread through the mosquito population, and malaria is a major killer disease once more.
Source: Ronald Ross,
Memoirs,
London, John Murray, 1923.
Hugh MacDiarmid is the pseudonym of the poet Christopher Murray Grieve (1892–1978), founder of the National Party of Scotland. His poem ‘Two Scottish Boys’, with its four epigraphs, argues that poets need to be more like scientists. The two ‘boys’ he compares are the Celtic twilight poet William Sharp (1855–1905), who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Fiona Macleod’, and the physician and tropical medicine expert Sir Patrick Manson (1844–1922), nicknamed ‘Mosquito Manson’, who (see p. 204) first suggested to Ronald Ross that the mosquito was host to the malaria parasite. ‘Bunyan’s quag’ (line 4) is the Slough of Despond in
The
Pilgrim’s
Progress
;
Sainte-Beuve (line 21) was a nineteenth-century French critic, and the French quotation is from an essay he published in 1857 about Flaubert’s novel
Madame
Bovary.
Scottish
Boys
Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus, but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.
Thomas Carlyle
For the very essence of poetry is truth, and as soon as a word’s not true it’s not poetry, though it may wear the cast clothes of it.
George MacDonald
Poetry never goes back on you. Learn as many pieces as you can. Go over them again and again till the words come of themselves, and then you have a joy forever which cannot be stolen or broken or lost. This is much better than diamond rings on every finger… The thing you cannot get a pigeon-hole for is the finger-point showing the way to discovery.
Sir Patrick Manson
Science is the Differential Calculus of the mind. Art the Integral Calculus; they may be beautiful when apart, but are greatest only when combined.
Sir Ronald Ross
There were two Scottish boys, one roamed seashore and hill
Drunk with the beauty of many a lovely scene,
And finally lost in nature’s glory as in a fog,
Tossing him into chaos, like Bunyan’s quag in the Valley of the Shadow.
The other having shot a lean and ferocious cat
On his father’s farm, was profoundly interested
In a tapeworm he found when he investigated
Its internal machinery in the seclusion of his attic room,
– A ‘prologue to the omen coming on’!
For while the first yielded nothing but high-falutin nonsense,
Spiritual masturbation of the worst description,
From the second down the crowded years I saw
Heroism, power for and practice of illimitable good emerge,
Great practical imagination and God-like thoroughness,
And mighty works of knowledge, tireless labours,
Consummate skill, high magnanimity, and undying Fame,
A great campaign against unbroken servility,
Ceaseless mediocrity and traditional immobility,
To the end that European reason may sink back no more
Into the immemorial embraces of the supernatural …
Sainte-Beuve was right – the qualities we most need
(Most of all in sentimental Scotland) are indeed
‘Science,
esprit
d’observation,
maturité,
force,
Un
peu
de
dureté,’
and poets who, like Gustave Flaubert,
(That son and brother of distinguished doctors) wield
Their pens as these their scalpels, and that their work
Should everywhere remind us of anatomists and physiologists.
Poet and therefore scientist the latter, while the former,
No scientist, was needs a worthless poet too.
Source:
The
Complete
Poems
of
Hugh
MacDiarmid
1920–76,
London, Martin Brian & O’Keeffe, 1978.
The son of semi-literate peasant farmers in France’s Massif Central,
Jean-Henri
Fabre (1823–1915) spent his early years on his grandparents’ remote small-holding, since his parents could not afford to feed him. Starting his education at the village primary school, run by the local barber, he won a bursary to secondary school in Avignon, and became a schoolmaster in Ajaccio, Corsica, where he began to study plants and insects. He was almost entirely self-taught, receiving his only natural history lesson from a biologist who happened to be visiting Corsica and showed him how to dissect a snail.
Back in Avignon, teaching in the grammar school, Fabre made expeditions into the surrounding countryside and would sit motionless for hours watching insects, to the puzzlement of the yokels, who took him for a half-wit. When he was almost 50 years old he gave up schoolmastering and retired to the small village of Sérignan, near Orange. Here in his ‘hermit’s retreat’, living on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine, he observed insects on a tract of stony ground in front of his house, and also in the surrounding plain, with its scrub of wild thyme and lavender, and on the slopes of Mont Ventoux.
His accounts of the creatures he studied – wasps, bees, dung beetles, gnats, spiders, scorpions – grew into the ten-volume
Souvenirs
entomologiques.
Picturesque and informal, and enlivened by allusions to his eight children, the family dog, and other minor characters, these essays established Fabre’s greatness as both poet and scientist. To Victor Hugo he was ‘the insect’s Homer’; to Charles Darwin, an ‘incomparable observer’. A strain of callousness, even cruelty, in his writing, accentuated by his tendency to describe his insects as if they were people, and contrasting curiously with his humour and charm, enhances its dramatic quality.
A turning point in Fabre’s life came when he read a monograph on parasitic wasps by Léon Dufour, which noted how a species of burrowing wasp (
Cerceris
bupr
esticida
)‚
common in the Landes, placed the bodies of a particular kind of beetle (
Buprestis
bifasciata
)
in its burrow for its grubs to feed on when they hatched out. Dufour could not make out why the dead beetles did not decay before the wasp-eggs hatched, and he assumed that the mother wasp must inject them with a preservative. The Sérignan region with its sandy soil was favourable for observing burrowing wasps, and Fabre first
directed his attention to a species (
Cerceris
major
)
closely related to Dufour’s, which preyed on large weevils. He found that the weevils left in the wasp’s burrow as food were not dead, but paralysed by the mother wasp, which stung them with great accuracy in their thoracic ganglia, and was thus able to leave living food for her grubs. Pricking weevils in the same spot with a fine steel pen dipped in ammonia, Fabre found that he, like the wasp, could induce instant paralysis. Later experiments on other paralysed wasp-victims revealed that they were not only alive but conscious enough to eat, taking drops of sugar solution from the end of a straw.
In the first of the pieces that follow Fabre investigates the
food-arrangements
of a third species of burrowing wasp, the yellow-winged Sphex (
Sphex
flavipennis
),
which preys on crickets. The second piece shows him in less gruesome mood, surprised by moths. In the third, his imagination works on the least promising material, stone.
There can be no doubt that the Sphex uses her greatest skill when immolating a cricket; it is therefore very important to explain the method by which the victim is sacrificed. Taught by my numerous attempts to observe the war tactics of the Cerceris, I immediately used on the Sphex the plan already successful with the former,
i.e.
taking away the prey and replacing it by a living specimen. This exchange is all the easier because the Sphex leaves her victim while she goes down her burrow, and the audacious tameness, which actually allows her to take from your fingertips, or even off your hand, the cricket stolen from her and now offered, conduces most happily to a successful result of the experiment by allowing the details of the drama to be closely observed.
It is easy enough to find living crickets; one has only to lift the first stone, and you find them, crouched and sheltering from the sun. These are the young ones of the current year, with only rudimentary wings, and which, not having the industry of the perfect insect, do not yet know how to dig deep retreats where they would be beyond the investigations of the Sphex. In a few moments I find as many crickets as I could wish, and all my preparations are made. I establish myself on the flat ground in the midst of the Sphex colony and wait.
A huntress comes, conveys her cricket to the mouth of her hole and goes down alone. The cricket is speedily replaced by one of mine, but placed at some distance from the hole. The Sphex returns, looks
round, and hurries to seize her too distant prey. I am all attention. Nothing on earth would induce me to give up my part in the drama which I am about to witness. The frightened cricket springs away. The Sphex follows closely, reaches it, darts upon it. Then there is a struggle in the dust when sometimes conqueror, sometimes conquered is uppermost or undermost. Success, equal for a moment, finally crowns the aggressor. In spite of vigorous kicks, in spite of bites from its pincer-like jaws, the cricket is felled and stretched on its back.
The murderess soon makes her arrangements. She places herself body to body with her adversary, but in a reverse position, seizes one of the bands at the end of the cricket’s abdomen and masters with her forefeet the convulsive efforts of its great hind-thighs. At the same moment her intermediate feet squeeze the panting sides of the vanquished cricket, and her hind ones press like two levers on its face, causing the articulation of the neck to gape open. The Sphex then curves her abdomen vertically, so as to offer a convex surface impossible for the mandibles of the cricket to seize, and one beholds, not without emotion, the poisoned lancet plunge once into the victim’s neck, next into the jointing of the two front segments of the thorax, and then again towards the abdomen. In less time than it takes to tell, the murder is committed, and the Sphex, after setting her disordered toilette to rights, prepares to carry off her victim, its limbs still quivering in the death-throes. Let us reflect a moment on the admirable tactics of which I have given a faint sketch. The prey is armed with redoubtable mandibles, capable of disembowelling the aggressor if they can seize her, and a pair of strong feet, actual clubs, furnished with a double row of sharp spines, which can be used alternatively to enable the cricket to bound far away from an enemy or to overturn one by brutal kicks. Accordingly, note what precautions on the part of the Sphex before using her dart. The victim, lying on its back, cannot escape by using its hind levers, for want of anything to spring from, as of course it would were it attacked in its normal position. Its spiny legs, mastered by the fore-feet of the Sphex, cannot be used as offensive weapons, and its mandibles, held at a distance by the wasp’s hind-feet, open threateningly but can seize nothing. But it is not enough for the Sphex to render it impossible for her victim to hurt her: she must hold it so firmly garrotted that no movement can turn the sting from the points where the drop of poison must be instilled, and probably it is in order to hinder any motion of the abdomen that
one of the end segments is grasped. If a fertile imagination had had free play to invent a plan of attack it could not have devised anything better, and it is questionable whether the athletes of the classic palestra [wrestling-ground] when grappling an adversary would have assumed attitudes more scientifically calculated.
I have just said that the dart is plunged several times into the victim’s body, once under the neck, then behind the prothorax, lastly near the top of the abdomen. It is in this triple blow that the infallibility, the infused science of instinct, appear in all their magnificence. First let us recall the chief conclusions to which the preceding study of the Cerceris have led us. The victims of Hymenoptera [the group of insects to which wasps belong] whose larva live on prey are not corpses, in spite of entire immobility. There is merely total or partial paralysis, and more or less annihilation of animal life, but vegetative life – that of the nutritive organs – lasts a long while yet, and preserves from decomposition the prey which the larvæ are not to devour for a considerable time. To produce this paralysis the predatory
Hymenoptera
use just those methods which the advanced science of our day might suggest to the experimental physiologist – namely, wounding, by means of a poisoned dart, those nervous centres which animate the organs of locomotion. We know too that the various centres or ganglia of the nervous chain in articulate animals act to a certain degree independently, so that injury to one only causes, at all events immediately, paralysis of the corresponding segment, and this in proportion as the ganglia are more widely separated and distant from each other. If, on the contrary, they are soldered together, injury to the common centre causes paralysis of all the segments where its ramifications spread. This is the case with Buprestids and Weevils, which the Cerceris paralyses by a single sting, directed at the common mass of the nerve centres in the thorax. But open a cricket, and what do we find to animate the three pairs of feet? We find what the Sphex knew long before the anatomist, three nerve centres far apart. Thence the fine logic of the three stabs. Proud science! humble thyself.
Crickets sacrificed by Sphex flavipennis are no more dead, in spite of all appearances, than are Weevils struck by a Cerceris. If one closely observes a cricket stretched on its back a week or even a fortnight or more after the murder, one sees the abdomen heave strongly at long intervals. Very often one can notice a quiver of the palpi and marked movements in the antennæ and the bands of the abdomen, which
separate and then come suddenly together. By putting such crickets into glass tubes I have kept them perfectly fresh for six weeks. Consequently, the Sphex larvæ, which live less than a fortnight before enclosing themselves in their cocoons, are sure of fresh food as long as they care to feast.
The chase is over; the three or four crickets needed to store a cell are heaped methodically on their backs, their heads at the far end, their feet toward the entrance. An egg is laid on each. Then the burrow has to be closed. The sand from the excavation lying heaped before the cell door is promptly swept backward into the passage. From time to time fair-sized bits of gravel are chosen singly, the Sphex scratching in the fragments with her forefeet, and carrying them in her jaws to consolidate the pulverized mass. If none suitable are at hand, she goes to look for them in the neighbourhood, apparently choosing with such scrupulous care as a mason would show in selecting the best stones for a building. Vegetable remains and tiny bits of dead leaf are also employed. In a moment every outward sign of the subterranean dwelling is gone, and if one has not been careful to mark its position, it is impossible for the most attentive eye to find it again. This done, a new burrow is made, provisioned and walled up as soon as the Sphex has eggs to house. Having finished laying, she returns to a careless and vagabond life until the first cold weather ends her well-filled existence …
*
The egg of Sphex flavipennis is white, elongated, and cylindrical, slightly curved, and measuring three to four millimetres in length. Instead of being laid fortuitously on any part of the victim, it is invariably placed on one spot, across the cricket’s breast – a little on one side, between the first and second pairs of feet. The eggs of the white bordered, and of the Languedocian Sphex occupy a like position … This chosen spot must possess some highly important peculiarity for the security of the young larva, as I have never known it vary.
Hatching takes place at the end of two or three days. A most delicate covering splits, and one sees a feeble maggot, transparent as crystal, somewhat attenuated and even compressed in front, slightly swelled out behind, and adorned on either side by a narrow white band formed by the chief trachea. The feeble creature occupies the same position as the egg; its head is, as it were, engrafted on the same spot where the front end of the egg was fixed, and the remainder of its body
rests on the victim without adhering to it. Its transparency allows us readily to perceive rapid fluctuations within its body, undulations following one another with mathematical regularity, and which, beginning in the middle of the body, are impelled, some forward and some backward. These are due to the digestive canal, which imbibes long draughts of the juices drawn from the sides of the victim.
Let us pause a moment before a spectacle so calculated to arrest attention. The prey is laid on its back, motionless. The grub is a lost grub if torn from the spot whence it draws nourishment. Should it fall, all is over, for weak as it is, and without means of locomotion, how would it again find the spot where it should quench its thirst? The merest trifle would enable the victim to get rid of the animalcule gnawing at its entrails, yet the gigantic prey gives itself up without the least sign of protestation. I am well aware that it is paralysed, and has lost the use of its feet from the sting of its assassin, but at this early stage it preserves more or less power of movement and sensation in parts unaffected by the dart. The abdomen palpitates, the mandibles open and shut, the abdominal styles and the antennæ oscillate. What would happen if the grub fixed on one of the spots yet sensitive near the mandibles, or even on the stomach, which, being tenderer and more succulent, would naturally suggest itself as fittest for the first mouthful of the feeble grub? Bitten on the quick parts, the cricket would display at least some shuddering of the skin, which would detach and throw off the minute larva, for which probably all would be over, since it would risk falling into the formidable, pincer-like jaws.