Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (10 page)

Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even
the most “obvious,” “accurate,” and “natural” style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement. To end with a parody on a familiar text, we only learned the “natural” way to see marine life when the invention
of aquariums permitted us to see through glass clearly, and to examine a brave old world face to face.

II

BIOGR
A
PHI
E
S
IN
EVOL
U
TION

THE CLAM STRIPPED BARE BY HER NATURALISTS, EVEN

I
N
B
ENJAMIN
B
RITTEN
’
S OPERATIC SETTING OF
H
ENRY
J
AMES
’
S
T
URN OF
the Screw
, the boy Miles sings a little ditty to his governess during their Latin lesson:

Britten embodies all the fear and mystery of James’s eerie story in setting this doggerel as
a searing and plaintive lament that then cycles throughout the opera, emerging at the very end, but this time intoned by the Governess as Miles lies dead on the stage. Britten’s device works well because Miles’s text is so insipid (yet at the same time so expressive of his fears about personal evil). The English doggerel scans properly, rhymes, and makes sense, but the pedagogic joke lies in the
fact that each of the four English lines (made of several words) can be fully translated by the single Latin word
malo
(the first person singular of the verb
malle
, to prefer; the ablative of the noun
malus
, an apple tree; etc.).

Miles’s poem, in fact, belongs to a venerable genre of crutches devised to make children love their Latin—obviously an ancient problem for teachers to overcome. Latin
versions of various children’s classics—
Winnie Ille Pu
most prominent among them—represent our most conspicuous modern effort toward the same end.

But children of the generation just before mine often encountered a much more pungent spur to their diligent study—namely, sex. Several men of my father’s generation have told me that they applied themselves earnestly to the ancient tongue because
some neighborhood kid always had access to his parents’ copy of Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis
—that great late-nineteenth-century compendium of case studies in every conceivable kind of sexual peculiarity (so graphically expressed that even Mr. Justice Stewart would recognize the genre). The main text had long before been translated into English—but, following Krafft-Ebing’s own expressed
wishes, all the juicy case studies remained only in Latin!

I missed all the fun. I never learned the kiddie mnemonics because I only studied Latin in graduate school. And I never relished the sexual prod because Krafft-Ebing’s case studies had made their way into English before my prurient years. Thus I greatly enjoyed a little belated amusement last week when I finally got some ribald pleasure
out of all that graduate-school effort. But I wasn’t reading Krafft-Ebing. I was studying the 1771 treatise on mollusks,
Fundamenta testaceologiae
(never translated from its Latin original), by none other than Carolus Linnaeus.

Yes, we are discussing clams—though Linnaeus seems to be talking about the sexual anatomy of women. Linnaeus’s treatise begins in the stolidly conventional mode of most
taxonomies. He states that he will classify mollusks by their shells (so often prized by naturalists), rather than the animals within (biologically better, but rarely collected). He then makes a primary division into
Cochleae
(basically snails, with a few other single-shelled creatures thrown in, including scaphopods and even an errant worm tube or two), and
Conchae
(basically clams, or bivalves,
but also housing multivalved mollusks like chitons and a few creatures that don’t belong at all by genealogy, including brachiopods and barnacles).

He then, still in conventional fashion, provides a list of technical terms for the parts of shells—and he begins his compendium for clams with one of the most remarkable paragraphs in the history of systematics. He regards the hinge between the two
valves
(cardo)
as a defining character, and he then writes:
Protuberantiae insigniores extra cardinem vocantur Nates
—or “the notable protuberances above the hinge are called buttocks.” He then names all the adjacent parts for every prominent feature of sexual anatomy in human females—
ut metaphora continuetur
(“so that the metaphor may be continued”). Clams have a
hymen
(the flexible ligament connecting
the two valves at top),
vulva, labia
, and
pubes
culminating in a
mons veneris
(various features at the top of the shell behind the umbos—our modern term for Linnaeus’s buttocks); and, in front of the umbos, an
anus.

Linnaeus’s forced rationale for these terms can best be grasped from the picture he presents in illustration—for a species that he named
Venus dione
, no doubt as a fitting illustration
for his terminology. The picture, with my added labels, shows the full crudity of Linnaeus’s supposed joke—for his terms record a complex analogy (not overly far-fetched, one must admit, in purely visual appearance) between a clamshell viewed from the top and the standard sleazy pose of pornography: a woman with legs widely spread and sexual parts viewed straight on, with buttocks surrounding
two areas of external genitalia and anus.

Linnaeus was socially conservative and rather prudish. He did not, for example, allow his four daughters to study French, for fear that they would then learn the liberal values of that enlightened land. But his taxonomic systems and his writings reveal the sexual focus that so often accompanies personalities of such overwhelming vigor and force. Linnaeus
based his most celebrated work, his new classification of plants, on what he called the “sexual system” (see the final section of essays in my previous book,
Dinosaur in a Haystack
). This scheme tends to be dry and functional, and not at all salacious—for the sexual system defines most orders by the numbers and sizes of stamens and pistils, the male and female organs of flowers. Basically, you
just have to count—and Linnaeus’s system became all the rage for ease of application, not for titillation. But Linnaeus did follow out the metaphorical implications of his definitions. He referred to fertilization as an act of marriage, and he designated stamens and pistils as husbands and wives. Flower petals turn into bridal beds, and infertile stamens become eunuchs, guarding the wife (pistil)
for other fertile stamens. Linnaeus wrote, in an essay of 1729:

But these botanical images rank as sweet Arcadian romances
compared with the overt salaciousness of his terminology for the parts of clams. Consequently, Linnaeus took a great deal of contemporary flak about his names for the top side of clamshells.

In 1776, a good year for reform, an obscure English naturalist, who lived a shadowy and troubled life (as we shall see), lit into the great master for his licentious malfeasance. In the preface to his
Elements
of Conchology: or, An Introduction to the Knowledge of Shells
, the author wrote:

Late in the book, as the author reaches his chapter on clams, his fury has not abated. This time he advances the explicit argument that Linnaeus’s terminology makes natural history appear hostile to females, thus discouraging intellectual women from pursuing one of the few areas then relatively open to study by all people:

(I originally assumed that the author’s heroic couplet must represent a quotation from Alexander Pope, but my trusty
Bartlett’s
tells me that the lines belong to an obscure character named Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon [1633–1685]—a solid name indeed for poetic utterances of such unexampled propriety.)

The author of this book, Emmanuel Mendes da Costa, was a Sephardic
Jew of Portuguese origin. He was born in London in 1717 and died there, in his lodgings on the Strand, in 1791. Although Mendes da Costa became one of England’s most respected naturalists on the undefmable borderline between amateur and professional status; although he maintained voluminous correspondence (much apparently preserved in the British Museum) with many of Europe’s greatest naturalists
and with most major players in the widespread network of British amateurs, his name has almost entirely disappeared from the historical record—except for two lovely books that frequently appear on the antiquarian market: the 1776 treatise on conchology, and his 1757 work, titled
The Natural History of Fossils
(I base this essay largely on these two works). I may well have missed some secondary
sources,
¹
but I was unable to find anything about Mendes da Costa’s life and works beyond a column entry in the British
Dictionary of National Biography
, a few bits and pieces in early-nineteenth-century volumes of
The Gentleman’s Magazine
, and, fortunately, about fifty pages of his fascinating letters reproduced in volume four of an 1822 series by John Nichols titled
Illustrations of the Literary
History of the Eighteenth Century Consisting of Authentic Memoirs and Original Letters of Eminent Persons.

I regard this erasure of Mendes da Costa as most unfortunate for at least two reasons: because he must have led a fascinating life, and because his history illustrates several social and scientific issues of general importance, including the role of amateurs in natural history, and the status
of Jews in eighteenth-century England. I shall focus this essay on another theme in the category of general messages well displayed: Mendes da Costa’s role as a leading collector at the crux of a defining transition in natural history. For he practiced at both ends of the passage from primary concern for weird specimens and star items (the biggest, the most colorful)—the
summum bonum
of the seventeenth-century
baroque age, as embodied in the tradition of constructing natural-history collections as
Wunderkammern
, or chambers of curiosities—to the eighteenth-century passion for order in the classical world of the Enlightenment. Linnaeus’s new system acted as a prerequisite for Darwin’s revised explanation of causes. But the older love of oddity continued to fan public enthusiasm (and still does so, quite
appropriately, today).

Mendes da Costa was an ordinary man in the midst of this great transition. And ordinary people often record patterns of history with maximal fidelity and interest—for Mendes da Costa made no attempt to innovate on a grand scale, and he therefore becomes a standard for his age. In Linnaeus we grasp the thrust of change. By studying Mendes da Costa, we can best understand
the fixed beliefs, the impact of novelty introduced by innovators, and, particularly, the intellectual impediments that his age posed to better comprehension of the natural world. We must learn to view these impediments with proper sympathy—not in the old style of condescension for an intellectual childhood to compare with our stunning maturity, but as a set of consistent and powerful beliefs, well
suited to the culture of another time, and held by reasonable people with raw intellects at least as good as ours. If we can achieve such fairness and equipoise, the history of science will become the greatest of all scholarly adventures—and also the most utilitarian, for the foibles of the past can only help us to grasp our own equally constraining present prejudices.

So ordinary, and yet so
different! Partly for reasons of self-definition, but mostly from the contumely of others, Jews have lived apart within most Western nations, often with cruel restrictions attached (see chapter 13). Emmanuel Mendes da Costa grew up in Britain at an interesting time, probably more favorable than most, for his people.

Jews had dwelled in England from the Norman Conquest until their expulsion under
Edward I in 1290. After banishment from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal in 1497, Sephardic Jews (named from the Hebrew word for Spain) dispersed widely, but still could not settle in England. Some small communities of
conversos
or
Marranos
(officially converted Jews, but many still practicing their old religion secretly) lived in England from time to time, but when Shakespeare wrote the
The Merchant
of Venice
, and created the anti-Semitic character of Shylock, no openly practicing Jews inhabited England. A new group of
Marranos
began to enter Britain from Rouen in the 1630s. This community, hoping for more toleration from Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate than from the previous monarchy, petitioned for the right to practice their religion openly—and their plea received favorable action in 1656.
The restored monarchy of 1660 did not rescind the permission, and a few Jews therefore continued their tenuous tenancy. They could not, for example, engage in retail trade in London until 1822, and could not sit in Parliament until 1858 (Disraeli was a Christian convert).