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

laughed and then fell silent for a few moments, perhaps marveling at the sheer passion of his forebears. “But Spallanzani was great,” he resumed, “had all kinds of great intuitions. Some of his work refuting the idea of spontaneous generation was a good half of the way toward Pasteur. He bred eels. He was into bats: poured wax in their ears to see if that would affect their navigational abilities …”
    At this point the coincidences were becoming just too bizarre. I mentioned Wilson’s museum (Eisner had never heard of it) and in particular its exhibit about Bernard Maston, the
deprong mori
, and Donald Griffith—“That’s Griff
in
,” Eisner interrupted, “with an
i-n
, not a
t-h.
” I know, I said, I know. “Funny about Griffin,” Eisner continued. “He’s a great scientist too, and a dear friend of mine. In fact, years ago, as a graduate student at Harvard, I inherited my first lab from him. There was still this wonderful weird grid of holes drilled into the walls, holes which had once held the anchors onto which he’d attached the maze of wires crisscrossing the room which formed the basis for his original research proving that bats could navigate in the dark. That lab had a marveloushistory. Immediately before Griffin it had been occupied by the Alfred Kinsey who did such terrific groundbreaking work on reproduction among the cynipid wasps—that is, before he abandoned the field entirely to concentrate on human sexuality instead.”
    I read Eisner some passages from the
deprong mori
brochure and he laughed and seemed to love them. “That’s wonderful,” he said, not the least bit miffed. “That’s exactly what it’s like when you’re out there in the field and you’re first encountering some of those marvelously strange natural adaptations. At first all you’ve got is a few disconnected pieces of raw observation, the sheerest glimpses, but you let your mind go, fantasizing the possible connections, projecting the most fanciful life cycles. In a way it’s my favorite part of being a scientist—later on, sure, you have to batten things down, contrive more rigorous hypotheses and the experiments through which to check them out, everything all clean and careful. But that first take—those first fantasies. Those are the best.”
    I decided to try the stink ant out on Eisner. Wait until you hear this, I told him, this one is even funnier. Where-upon I proceeded to read him the first few paragraphs of this very piece right off my computer screen. He listened attentively, audibly harumphing his concurrence every few sentences. “Yup,” he said. “Yup … yup.” When I’d finished, he said, “So, where’s the joke? All of that stuff is basically true.”
    I was struck almost speechless. Really? I stammered.
    â€œOh, absolutely. I mean, I don’t know the names exactly—they’re not precisely my field, so I’m a littlerusty on those ants. But let’s see:
Megaloponera foetens
, you say? I don’t think
Megaloponera
exists, but there is a genus that used to go by the name
Megaponera
, although—it gets a little complicated—lately I’m told it’s been folded into another category called
Pachycondyla.
And there is an African ant called
Pachycondyla analis. ‘Foetens’
is smelly, but
‘analis’
—well, let’s just say that’s even more smelly. And I believe that that ant does stridulate—it’s not a cry exactly, but it does produce this faint chirping sound. As for whether
Pachycondyla
ingests the spore that way, I’m not sure. But there are several other species that do, some of them right here in the United States. For instance, down in Florida there’s an ant,
Camponotus floridanus
, which inhales or anyway somehow takes in spores of the
Cordyceps
fungus, and occasionally you will