Thoughts that Continue to Nourish

 On a recent news story on the radio, a man declard that "smelling pumpkin spice is like smelling fall."  While that may be true in the U.S. today, a more traditional indication of fall's arrival has been the first small burst of cooler weather.  And an even more reliable indication that we are into autumn has been the changing color of leaves.

It was leaves that became the namesake of this website "Wisdom in Leaves" -- because the  English word "leaves" can also refer to the pages of books, in which we sometimes hope to find wisdom. The initial article published on this website (a decade ago) still speaks to our desires to learn from both Nature and the thoughts in writing of other  human beings.

~ ~ ~

In June of 1877, a British family -- elderly grandfather, his wife, their grown son, baby grandson, and a nursemaid -- had all traveled on an outing to the ancient site of Stonehenge.  It was the sort of outing a Victorian family of the latter 1800's would do to enjoy being outdoors in the warmer Spring weather.

However, while this family was at the ancient site of Stonehenge, consisting of a ring of immense standing stones constructed maybe four thousand years ago, the elderly grandfather got permission from the guard to do something probably no tourist before had requested -- to dig into the ground around some of the stones.  As odd as that request was, the guard could hardly refuse it.  For, after all, that bearded grandfather was none other than Charles Darwin.

What Darwin was looking for in the ground was, of all things... earthworms!  Charles Darwin's interest in earthworms had begun forty years earlier, and it would continue to the very end of his life, becoming the subject of his very last book.

It was in fact Charles Darwin who made the first detailed discoveries about how earthworms are one of the major aerators and one of the primary fertilizers of soil.  Darwin wrote of earthworms:  "It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures."

When the story of Darwin's discovery about evolution is told, the animals most often mentioned are those giant tortoises and unearthly-looking iguanas of the Galapagos Islands.  And so I enjoy reading about how he devoted such interest and care to the small, unappreciated worms right beneath our feet.  I have a mental image of the bearded old man on his knees, gently browsing through the leaves in order to uncover the living creatures before they escaped into their burrows.  Also, browsing through the leaves in order to find insight.

This rarely-told story of Darwin and the worms symbolizes in a way what I would like to accomplish with my writing on this on-line periodical.  I would like to take time to browse through aspects of Nature.  I would like to pause to look at Nature thoughtfully as a way of gaining a humble perspective on the world we live in and what we humans are.

I would like to get at the nexus of Nature and spirituality, drawing also on the best thought of our religious traditions.  And so, I would also like to turn over other kinds of leaves -- the pages of books.  I want to leaf through my favorite books so that I might re-read those quotations that most nurture my spirit.  Nature and books, earth and human thoughts.  Weaving the two together in a variety of ways.

~~~

What experiences of Nature, or what words about Nature in a book, most touch your mind and heart?

Gift about Life on a Deathbed

What would you want to be given as a gift if you were not likely to live much longer?  Of course, if in pain, medicine to alleviate that suffering would be welcome.  But in this instance, the bedridden man -- Charles Darwin -- had learned to live with a chronic illness through most of his adult life (even during his most fruitful years of scientific research and writing).  So, what turned out to be a welcome gift was a book to read.  And the book was on Darwin's favorite subject:  Nature.

Aristotle,
in an
old Latin translation

The gift, from William Ogle, was his new translation of a work by Aristotle titled The Parts of Animals.  That ancient Greek scientist's collection of observations about animals would have been of particular interest to Darwin.  Even though Aristotle's way of doing science was not grounded in the experimental methods of modern science, Aristotle's collection of investigations about animals had been part of the corpus of Western education for centuries.  Aristotle recognized the temptation researchers might have of not investigating animals they might consider useless, ugly, or even disgusting.  Therefore, in the book Darwin had received, Aristotle cautioned:

"For this reason we should not be childishly disgusted at the examination of the less valuable animals.
For in all natural things there is something marvelous."

Those words would have gone straight to Darwin's heart because they mirrored his own endless fascination with Nature's intricacies (something Darwin had commented on in the eloquent closing passage of his own book Origin of Species).

Thanks to the rapid growth of the railway system in England during the 19th century, frequent correspondence by mail had become a mainstay of life among many Brits, and Darwin had throughout his career relied upon a network of correspondents (some of whom became good friends) in order to ground his scientific studies.  Darwin always wrote cordially, expressing his appreciation.  And now, he did so again, expressing how even near the end of his own life he was grateful for the new perspective the gift of a book had provided.  Darwin wrote to Ogle, who had sent him the book:

"From quotations I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was.  Linnaeus and Cuvier

 [two pivotal 18th-century biologists] have been my two gods... 

but they were mere school-boys to old Aristotle."

William Ogle, upon receiving Darwin's letter with its complimentary remark about Aristotle, wrote back, saying:

"Thank you for your kind and eulogistic letter re [Aristotle's book].
It gave me much pleasure.  I am glad also to have added a third person to your gods."

Darwin died only three days after Ogle sent off his letter.  But Ogle's, Darwin's, and Aristotle's lives had all become tied together through a chain of correspondence.  And also through a mutual fascination with the forms of animal life in which Aristotle had found "something marvelous."

~~~

Are there any animals you find particularly fascinating?  Which ones?

(All of the quotations are taken from the "Aristotle" entry by James G. Lennox in

Evolution:  The First Four Billion Years, ed. Michael Ruse, et al., © 2009.  p. 427.)
(The images are in the public domain.)

Undisturbing Bedtime Reading

Among writers' names, theirs are two of the most famous to people in the U.S. -- Mark Twain and Charles Darwin.  But how differently they are thought of:  Twain as the grandfatherly humorist; Darwin as the trouble-causing scientist.  When I was in elementary school, my grandmother was displeased that my school was named after the horror-story writer Edgar Allan Poe, but quite pleased when I moved to an elementary school named after the grandfatherly Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens).  And we all know that any proposal to name a school after Charles Darwin would evoke controversy.

The writers Twain and Darwin are also known for different genres of writing --  fiction and nonfiction.  Different also are the ways that Nature is a part of their writings.  Twain, even when writing about his experiences as a young man on the Mississippi, turned them into tall tales about the adventures of people.  In contrast, even Darwin's reminiscences of his journey on the Beagle are strengthened by his scientist's eye for observation of Nature by itself, apart from people.

Despite their many differences, their lives as writers intersected (even if indirectly) in an entertaining incident related by Mark Twain in one of his public presentations.  Twain tells first how he felt flattered when the president of Harvard College, Charles Eliot, who had visited Darwin, told Twain:

"Do you know that there is one room in Darwin's house,
his bedroom, where the housemaid
is never allowed to touch two things?
One is a plant he is growing
and studying while it grows....
The other some books that lie on the night table
at the head of his bed. They are your books,
Mr. Clemens, and Mr. Darwin reads them every night
to lull him to sleep."

What a compliment Twain felt it was to know, as he put it, that "a brain teeming with bugs and squirming things like Darwin's" was reading the American humorists' books.

But Twain's inflated ego was punctured by a subsequent event that Twain also relates.  He tells how, after Darwin died, Twain was visited by the Rev. Joseph Twichell, who he describes as "my oldest friend -- and dearest enemy on occasion."  Twichell had been reading Darwin's Life and Letters, and opened it to show Twain a passage apparently explaining more fully why Twain's books were on that night table.   As Twain tells it:

"Twichell ... said, 'Here, look at this letter from Mr. Darwin to Sir Joseph Hooker.'
What Darwin said -- I give the idea and not the very words -- was this:
I do not know whether I ought to have devoted my whole life to these drudgeries
in natural history and the other sciences [because]
while I may have gained in one way I have lost in another.
Once I had a fine perception and appreciation of high literature,
but in me that quality is atrophied.  'That was the reason,' said Mr. Twichell,
'he was reading your books.' "

It looks as if in this case, it was Darwin who had the last laugh.  Or did he?  It was Twain who was able to tell of the incidents, and thereby laugh at himself.

~ ~ ~

Do you have bedtime reading that helps you let go of the cares of the day?  What is it?

(The incident and quotations are taken from What about Darwin?,
edited by Thomas F. Glick, © 2010, pp. 439-441. [emphasis added])

The Cute, the Cuddly, and the Colossal

nine-banded armadillo

Contemporary psychologists have been able to figure out why human beings are drawn affectionately to certain animals.  The secret lies primarily in our emotions being easily captured by the round, big-eyed face of a baby, an instinct that has helped the human race protect its fragile offspring and thus endure.  This instinct is also revealed in our hearts' being easily tugged by paintings of big-eyed children, and by dogs bred to look more baby-faced.  That human instinct cannot explain, however, the seeming proclivity of Texans and other southerners to find armadillos cute. Those animals, with their long pointed noises and tiny eyes, have heads the very opposite of human babies.  There is a bit of a mystery here.  Behind armadillos also lies a story about how Darwin unraveled what was once called the "mystery of mysteries."  Namely, how new species evolve.

depction of
ancient armadillo (Glyptodon)

When Charles Darwin was on his groundbreaking trip on the Beagle around South America, he stopped many times to travel inland, studying the life-forms in that foreign land.  Darwin had a keen scientific eye for the similarities and dissimilarities between various species, both living and extinct.  Scientists at that time had been trying to piece together the puzzle of the fossil remains of some colossal species that no longer existed.  Darwin found the fossilized armor-plate of an extinct nine-foot cousin of today's armadillos (which in the U.S. are about one-and-a-half feet long).

Even though most of us today might be repulsed by the idea of eating an armadillo (either because of its possible taste or its cuteness), Darwin and his companions dined on a species of armadillo.  The preparation of that meal would have helped Darwin see the similarities and dissimilarities between the armor-like coverings of existing and extinct species of armadillos.  As he explained later in his autobiographical reflections:  "During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the Pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armour like that on the existing armadillos...."

The relationships between the complex skeletons of existing and colossal extinct species (such as sloths) was challenging even to scientists.  Here is where the simpler armor of armadillos was something Darwin could take advantage of in Origin of Species, writing that a "relationship is manifest, even to the uneducated eye, in the gigantic pieces of armour like those of the [extinct] armadillo found in several parts of la Plata."

Now that Darwin and evolutionary biologists have done so much work on the background of these creatures, we are left with trying to understand ourselves:  Why are people so easily fascinated by armadillos, even finding them cute?  With their hard covering, they do not fit into the category of "soft, cute, and cuddly," which would latch in with our mammalian tactile affection.  Some of our delight in armadillos seems to come from their very oddness.  Also, when one is spotted in the wild, there can be the excitement and fun of trying to chase the small animal as it scurries in the underbrush.  We are just lucky those colossal nine- footers are no longer around!

~~~

Have you ever seen an armadillo or other peculiar-looking animal in the wild?  When?

(The Darwin quotes are, respectively, from

 The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow, © 1958.  p. 118.

and from The Origin of Species [1959] by Charles Darwin.  Chap. 10.)

(The photo of a contemporary armadillo is by Jerry Segraves.

The artwork of extinct armadillo by Pavel Riha is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

A Dog Named Polly

Neither Charles Darwin nor his dog Polly made it to the cemetery of the St. Mary's churchyard, which was where Darwin had wanted to be buried.  St. Mary's was a centuries-old flint-stone church in the village where he had lived most of his life.  But Charles Darwin did not get his way because people outside his family intervened, convincing his family that his scientific legacy called for his being buried in Westminster Abbey, where scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton, and poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer had been laid to rest centuries before.

With Darwin's burial at Westminster, it was not just a scientist who was laid to rest, but also a veteran dog-lover.  When Charles's future wife Emma was being courted by Charles, one thing that attracted her was the kindness he demonstrated toward dogs and other animals.  During the course of his lifetime, Charles had a dozen different dogs.

Charles's daughter
 Henrietta
with Polly

The last of those dogs, and Charles's favorite, was Polly, a terrier.  She had originally been given to one of Darwin's daughters, Henrietta, but when Henrietta married and moved away, her dog remained behind with the family. Polly would usually accompany Charles on his daily walks on a sandy path around the grounds of the home.  And when he spent hours in his study doing scientific research or recuperating from illness, Polly would often be found nearby, resting on her dog-bed.  Charles's son Francis recalled that his father "was delightfully tender to Polly, and never showed any impatience at the attention she required."

drawing of Polly from
"The Expression of the Emotions"

As with other animals Charles encountered, Polly also became an object for Darwin's scientific observation. (Even Charles and Emma's children could not escape his scientific interest in human and animal behavior.) Darwin's aim was to find similarities between not only the anatomy of humans and animals but also between their bodily behavior and facial expressions -- similarities that would be additional evidence of common ancestry. That decades-long project of Darwin reached its apex in one of the later books of his career, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.  That book contained a drawing of Polly, poised, pointing, with one front paw in the air.  The engraving was titled, "Small dog watching a cat on a table."

Polly, the pet who had become most deeply engraved in the affections of Charles Darwin's heart, died less than a month after he passed away.  Polly was buried under the apple tree near the Darwin home.  Being a dog, she would not really have been a candidate for burial in the graveyard of St. Mary's church, the place where Darwin also did not manage to be buried. And yet, then as now, pets were free of the complexities regarding cemetery plots, burial permissions, death certificates, and wills that can make human life complicated.  Nevertheless, Polly, being a pet, had helped Darwin make the case for his theory of evolution.  By including examples of the behavior of dogs, he had taken advantage of the similarities many readers had already observed between themselves and their pets -- animals with which they also had an emotional kinship.

~~~

Do you have a fond recollection of a particular dog?  What was the dog like?

(The quote by Charles Darwin's son Francis is from his "Reminiscences" in

 Selected Letters and Evolution of Origin of Species, ed. Francis Darwin, © 1892, 1958.  p. 74.)

(The drawing of Polly is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Green in Tooth and Claw

As my explorations of history become more detailed, I find our misconceptions about history most interesting.  Frequently, it seems to me, our misconceptions reveal as much about us as they reveal about the actual historical events.

Such is the case with the all so familiar phrase "red in tooth and claw."  Today it is often used to evoke a picture of a "Darwinian" world of a predatory "survival of the fittest."  So much so, that most people assume the phrase "red in tooth and claw" was inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution.  In fact, that blood-tipped phrase predates Origin of Species by nine years, having been penned by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his 1850 poem "In Memoriam."  Moreover, Tennyson's poetic lament was prompted not by the death of any dinosaurs, but by the death of one of Tennyson's closest human friends.

Regardless of the origins of the phrase, more significant is what it conveys about our perceptions of Nature -- especially as we try to relate Nature to our human spirituality.  Or as we aim to say whether we can discover a sacredness in the world of Nature.

Charles Darwin

A parallel misconception about history lies behind the phrase "survival of the fittest," which most people assume to have been introduced by Charles Darwin in Origin of Species.  In fact, what Darwin used in the first edition of his book was the phrase "struggle for existence," which does not sound as competitive.  Even that phrase was already in circulation -- but for describing human society.  In Britain during the first half of the 19th century, industrialization and migration to the cities had increased social strife.  Darwin employed that firsthand experience of a human "struggle for existence" in order to make his explanation for the evolution of other species of life more understandable.

(I do sometimes wonder what animals might think if they could know all the human projections we place upon them.)

bee covered with pollen
in hibiscus flower

Today, our vastly increasing knowledge from the science of ecology reveals how evolution has occurred not just through competition but also through all sorts of mutually beneficial relationships. True, there is an ambiguity in Nature, in that the death of the prey means life to the predator.  And it is also true that there is an element of chance in biological evolution (just as there is in human life). However, one teacher of biology tells me that because of all the ways birds and insects pollinate plants as they gather food, there are more cooperative relationships than there are competitive relationships in Nature.

Nature as a whole is strongly self-sustaining.  So much so that we might borrow the word "green" from the environmental movement to say that Nature is green in tooth and claw!

~~~

Where do you see relationships in the non-human realm of Nature?

(The drawing of Darwin is in the public domain

in the U.S. because it is over 70 years old.)

(The flower photograph, by Luc Viatour, is used under terms of GNU Free Documentation License.)

“Music, ‘Arabian nights,’ and Darwin”

It is sometimes the small, unexpected details that catch my eye when I am reading history or biography.  So it was when I was reading part of Gertrude Himmelfarb's book Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution.  I have read a number of books about the response to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.  But my attention was caught by what the British novelist George Eliot wrote in her diary on the evening of the very day Darwin's revolutionary book was published.  Describing how she had occupied herself that very evening, Eliot wrote:  "music, 'Arabian nights,' and Darwin."  What a combination of evening activities and reading before turning into bed!

George Eliot

George Eliot (a woman who wrote under that pseudonym) is most known for her somewhat psychological novels.  But she was also part of a movement of intellectuals who could no longer find credible the church's theological descriptions of the world.  To many such intellectuals, the church's theological concepts could no longer illuminate life.

When I was in college, I read an English translation made by George Eliot of Feuerbach's difficult book The Essence of Christianity, which was part of those 19th-century struggles. Feuerbach maintained that statements about God were actually just projections of human beings' own ideal image of themselves.

However, when I think of George Eliot's writings, what comes to mind are not those difficult religious struggles of the 19th century, but instead a coincidental conjunction I once experienced between Nature and Eliot's novel Silus Marner.

My high-school English class was reading together part of the novel in class.  Our English class was held in one of the wood, portable buildings that had been set up because the student body had grown larger than the main brick building.  Most students did not like having a class in one of those wood "shacks," but I did.  I liked the way the shacks (without air-conditioning) had windows on both sides of the classroom, thus allowing more air and sunlight to flow in.

On the particular day I remember, we were reading a passage in which the outcast Silus Marner experiences what seems to him a miracle.  While he is in a catatonic state, a small child with radiant golden hair crawls into his house through the open door, thus seeming to Silus to appear suddenly when he awakes.  He feels as if he has been graced with a gift from God upon seeing the child, which seemed to have a wonderful glow about it.

Although I knew the scene was contrived, the beauty of that scene seemed to stand out even more brightly to me because, as we read it, I was so aware of the sunlight right there at that moment, shining beautifully into our classroom.

~~~

Have you read a novel or story in which a scene was uncannily real to you?  Why?

(The painting of Eliot is in the public domain

because its copyright has expired.)

Nourishing Earth, Nourishing Thoughts

In June of 1877, a British family -- elderly grandfather, his wife, their grown son, baby grandson, and a nursemaid -- had all traveled on an outing to the ancient site of Stonehenge.  It was the sort of outing a Victorian family of the latter 1800's would do to enjoy being outdoors in the warmer Spring weather.

However, while this family was at the ancient site of Stonehenge, consisting of a ring of immense standing stones constructed maybe four thousand years ago, the elderly grandfather got permission from the guard to do something probably no tourist before had requested -- to dig into the ground around some of the stones.  As odd as that request was, the guard could hardly refuse it.  For, after all, that bearded grandfather was none other than Charles Darwin.

What Darwin was looking for in the ground was, of all things... earthworms!  Charles Darwin's interest in earthworms had begun forty years earlier, and it would continue to the very end of his life, becoming the subject of his very last book.

It was in fact Charles Darwin who made the first detailed discoveries about how earthworms are one of the major aerators and one of the primary fertilizers of soil.  Darwin wrote of earthworms:  "It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures."

When the story of Darwin's discovery about evolution is told, the animals most often mentioned are those giant tortoises and unearthly-looking iguanas of the Galapagos Islands.  And so I enjoy reading about how he devoted such interest and care to the small, unappreciated worms right beneath our feet.  I have a mental image of the bearded old man on his knees, gently browsing through the leaves in order to uncover the living creatures before they escaped into their burrows.  Also, browsing through the leaves in order to find insight.

This rarely-told story of Darwin and the worms symbolizes in a way what I would like to accomplish with my writing on this on-line periodical.  I would like to take time to browse through aspects of Nature.  I would like to pause to look at Nature thoughtfully as a way of gaining a humble perspective on the world we live in and what we humans are.

I would like to get at the nexus of Nature and spirituality, drawing also on the best thought of our religious traditions.  And so, I would also like to turn over other kinds of leaves -- the pages of books.  I want to leaf through my favorite books so that I might re-read those quotations that most nurture my spirit.  Nature and books, earth and human thoughts.  Weaving the two together in a variety of ways.

~~~

What experiences of Nature, or what words about Nature in a book, most touch your mind and heart?