Fathers of Biology, and of Children

Describing an often overlooked characteristic of 19th-century biologists, Joseph Kastner writes:  "Naturalists who never laid eyes on each other became intimate friends by virtue of the long and faithful letters they wrote to each other, year in and year out...."  Early British biologists' use of correspondence for research accelerated after the 1840 creation of the Penny Post within England, which set a fixed rate for a letter regardless of the distance it had to travel.  No biologist took greater advantage of the postal service for gathering scientific data than Charles Darwin, who penned over 14,000 letters.  But there is more than science in those early biologists' letters. There are also matters of the heart.

from Hooker's
Himalayan Journals

Appreciating the poignancy of some letters requires knowing about the state of 19th-century medicine.  Because there were virtually no vaccinations nor oral or injected antibiotics, a child was twenty-five times more likely to die before reaching early adolescence than is a child in Britain today.  Despite 19th-century biologists' accelerating knowledge about the natural world, they were not exempt from that statistic.

After the death of Darwin's beloved daughter Annie at the age of ten, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who helped Darwin study plant species, offered his condolences to Darwin.  Several years later, only an hour after Hooker's daughter died, Hooker was writing to Darwin to tell of his own grief.  Darwin wrote back at once.

Thomas Henry Huxley
   

The leading British advocate for Darwin's theory of evolution for natural selection, Thomas Henry Huxley, also lost a child.  After Huxley's son Noel died at the age of three, Darwin drew upon his own experience of grief with Annie to reassure Huxley that grief could soften with time, writing, "I was indeed grieved to receive your news this morning....  I know well how intolerable is the bitterness of such grief.  Yet believe me, that time, and time alone, acts wonderfully....  I cannot think of one child without tears rising in my eyes; but the grief is become tenderer and I can even call up the smile of our lost darling...."

statue of
Jean Henri Fabre

Such personal expressions of grief and condolence, sometimes traveling in envelopes as part of scientific study, also crossed the English Channel.  The most difficult of emotions were sometimes even revealed in the pages of scientific books.  The eminent French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre closed his first volume on insects with a dedication to the memory of his own son, who had died when Fabre was working on the book. Charles Darwin, despite scientific disagreements,  wrote a cordial letter to Fabre, saying,  "Permit me to add, that when I read the last sentence in your book, I sympathised deeply with you."

I am struck by the tenderness and cordiality of these condolences mingled among the scientific facts.  I cannot begin to comprehend all the research of these early naturalists. But I can hope that some of my emails and "snail-mail" notes might express a similar warmth.

~~~

How do you think we today might make our correspondence spiritually supportive?

(The Kastner quote is from A Species of Eternity by Joseph Kastner, © 1977,

and is taken from The Naturalist's Path by Cathy Johnson, © 1991.  p. ix.)

(The Darwin quotes are taken from Annie's Box by Randal Keynes, © 2001.  pp. 221 & 285.)

Are Libraries Natural?

In the U.S. and many high-tech nations today, we possess so many gadgets that we are inclined to think of an "invention" as being an electronic device or a piece of machinery.  What intrigues me are those human inventions that cannot be shipped to our homes in a delivery truck, not even a very large one.  Such as the invention of church-state separation.  And national parks open to the public (a U.S. first).  Among such non-shippable great inventions, I would list free public libraries.

Of course, any person's private collection of books is sometimes referred to as their "library." But we more often employ that word for a large, shared collection of books, particularly one in a building dedicated to that purpose.  Following that meaning of the word, we can identify libraries even in the ancient world.  Such as the fabled Library of Alexandria, which existed in Egypt from the 3rd century B.C.E through most of the 4th century C.E.  But that research library existed for only an intellectual elite who could read, and they could not take its scrolls home.

Library building in Peterborough,
New Hampshire built in 1893

The truly free, publicly-funded  library as we know it today was an invention of people of the United States.  It depended upon a prior intangible invention:  the idea of a democratic, educated public.  Probably the oldest free public library of the kind we know today (rather than being a subscription library) was opened in 1833 in Peterborough, New Hampshire.  Only sixteen years later, that state legislated funding for such public libraries. Other states followed suit in setting up libraries, including the Boston library in 1848 (thus allowing for jokes about books being "banned in Boston").

With the rapid rise of the Internet, many have predicted the demise of libraries.  With people now being able to read and download electronic books to their computers at home, what use is there for physical library-buildings with all those antiquated hard-copy books -- or so it has been asked.

Anyone who has recently visited libraries in a large city, however, may have observed how libraries have changed with the Internet, finding new ways to serve people.  I have seen librarians coach people, many of whom do not have Internet connections at home, in how to research on the computers set up in libraries.  Invisible wifi signals now fill the air along with the faint scent of paper books.  (One library I have been in even boasts that its wifi signal can, for convenience, be picked up in the parking lot.)  And the 2008 recession increased library use as people who had lost jobs or homes relied upon libraries for job-research or for an air-conditioned respite from the weather.

Traveling burro-library in Colombia

Almost paralleling that ancient Library of Alexandria, which included a museum and a research center teaching dissection, some of our contemporary libraries have rotating museum-like displays, as well as rooms for classes on such things as computer programs or English as a second language. (Sorry, no classes on dissection.) And those displays and classes are not just for the elite.  Maybe in that sense libraries are not "natural,"  but they are evolving, and are far from being extinct.

~~~

In what tangible or intangible ways have you benefited from libraries?

(The photo of the burro-library is by Acción Visual/Diana Arias,

 and is used under a  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)