Read Online Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler - Free Book Online Page A

layers are just a filter …” 5
    He was quiet another few moments, and just as surely I could sense that the crack was closing up once again, the facade of ironylessness reasserting itself inviolate.
    I mentioned the stink ant.
    â€œSee,” he said, “that’s an example of the thing about layers. Because at one level, that display works as pure information, as just this incredibly interesting case study in symbiosis, one of those adaptations so curious and ingenious and wonderful that they almost lead you to question the principle of natural selection itself—could random mutation through geologic time be enough to account for that and so many similar splendors? Nature is more incredible than anything one can imagine.
    â€œBut at another level,” David continued, “we were drawn to that particular instance because it seemed so metaphorical. That’s another one of our mottoes here at the museum:
‘Ut Translatio Natura’
—Nature as Metaphor. I mean, there’ve been times in my own life when I felt exactly like that ant—impelled, as if possessed, to do things that defy all common sense. That ant is me. I couldn’t have summed up my own life better if I’d made him up all by myself.”
    â€œBut, David,” I wanted to say (and didn’t),
“you did make him up all by yourself!”
    S HORTLY AFTER , back home in my office, I was in a phone conversation about something entirely different with Tom Eisner, the eminent biologist up at Cornell. At one point, in passing, he told me about a trip he’d taken to Italy, many years ago, and how, while in Pavia, a colleaguehad given him a tour of the ancient university’s old museum. At one point, as they foraged among the back rooms, the colleague pulled out a glass jug containing some organs bobbing in a dusky fluid solution. “ ‘You’ll never guess what this is,’ my friend challenged me,” Eisner related, “and I didn’t even try.
‘Lazzaro Spallanzani’s cock and balls!’ 
” I’m not sure whether Eisner took my silence on the other end of the line for scandalized astonishment or tongue-tied ignorance, probably (more correctly) the latter. “Spallanzani was one of the great early modern naturalists,” he offered helpfully. “Eighteenth century. He was the first, for instance, to isolate spermatozoa in semen, did some wonderful experiments on gastric digestion (feeding bits of meat tied to string to various birds of prey, letting the string descend only so far, and then yanking the string back out with the meat completely liquified and gone, thereby proving that large portions of digestion take place in the stomach and not in the bowels, as had previously been assumed), all sorts of splendid things.
    â€œAnyway, my colleague recounted for me how during one of the sieges of Pavia—Pavia always seemed to be coming under siege in those days—Spallanzani realized that he was dying of some urinary-tract infection; he kept careful notes on the progress of the disease and authorized an autopsy after his death so that his colleagues could study the bladder and kidneys themselves. Only, his corpse fell into the hands of his sworn enemy and fiercest rival, I forget the guy’s name, an anatomist—in my own mind I always think of him as Scarpia, as in
Tosca.
So anyway, this Scarpia extracted not only Spallanzani’sbladder and kidneys but his entire reproductive apparatus as well, which he thereupon proceeded to display with considerable glee. Remember: this is Italy, and such public emasculation was just about the worst affront to a man’s honor that could be imagined. So that years later, after Scarpia died, Spallanzani’s old students got ahold of
his
corpse, decapitated it, and preserved the head in a jar of its own, which to this day rests on a shelf in the museum right nearby Spallanzani’s.”
    Eisner