Read Online Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms by Stephen Jay Gould - Free Book Online Page B

of scientists bears respect and holds importance as well. I do accept that we would now know about evolution even if Darwin had never been born. But the discovery would then have been made by other people, perhaps in different lands, and surely with dissimilar interests and concerns—and these potential variations in style may be no less profound or portentous than the disparitybetween such artistic contemporaries as Verdi and Wagner.
    I do not deny that the accumulative character of scientific change—the best justification for a notion of progress in human history—establishes the major difference between art and science. I found a poignant reminder within a small item in the first issue of Scientific American. An advertisement for daguerreotypes on the last page includesthe following come-on: “Likenesses of deceased persons taken in any part of the city and vicinity.” I then remembered a book published a few years ago on daguerreotypes of dead children—often the only likeness that parents would retain of a lost son or daughter. (Daguerreotypes required long exposures, and young children could rarely be enticed to sit still for the requisite time—but the deaddo not move, and daguerreotypists therefore maintained a thriving business, however ghoulish by modern standards, in images of the deceased, particularly of children.)
    No example of scientific progress can be less subject to denial or more emotionally immediate than our ever-increasing ability to prevent the death of young people. Even the most wealthy and privileged parents of Turner and Brunel’stime expected to lose a high percentage of their children. As Brunel built his railways and Turner painted, Darwin’s geology teacher, Adam Sedgwick, wrote to a friend about the achievements of his young protégé, then sailing around the world on the Beagle , and therefore in constant medical danger, far from treatment in lands with unknown diseases: “[He] is doing admirable work in South America,and has already sent home a collection above all price . . . There was some risk of his turning out an idle man, but his character will now be fixed, and if God spares his life he will have a great name among the naturalists of Europe.” A concerned mentor would not need to fret so intensely today—a blessing from science to all of us.
    I previously quoted the beginning of Colonel Calverly’s recipefor a heavy dragoon, and will now close with the end:
    Beadle of Burlington—Richardson’s show —
    Mr. Micawber and Madame Tussaud!
    We know Mr. Micawber from David Copperfield , and Mme. Tussaud for her wax statues. “Richardson’s show” puzzled me until I found the following entry in my 1897 edition of Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary: John Richardson, 1767–1837, “the ‘penny showman’ from Marlowwork house who rose to become a well-to-do travelling manager.” But who, or what, is the Beadle of Burlington?
    I fell in love with Gilbert and Sullivan at age twelve, and have therefore been wondering about that Beadle for forty years (not always actively, to be sure!). Then, six months ago and to my utter delight, I ran right into the Beadle of Burlington when no subject could have been fartherfrom my mind. I was walking down an early-nineteenth-century shopping arcade, just off Piccadilly in London, on my way to a meeting at the Royal Institution, where Humphrey Davy had invented Turner’s new pigment. Lord George Cavendish founded the Burlington Arcade in 1819 “for the gratification of the public” and “to give employment to industrious females” in the shops. Lord George establishedfirm rules of conduct for people moving through the arcade—“no whistling, singing, hurrying, humming, or making merry.” Such decent standards have to be enforced—and so they have been, ever since 1819, by a two-man private security force, the Beadles of Burlington. Traditions must be maintained, of course, and the Beadles still wear their ancient garb of top