The charm of the
even queerer Robert Oakeshott DINOSAUR IN A HAYSTACK by Stephen Jay Gould Cape, £18.99, pp. 480 When and why was the column — or More accurately the puzzle strip — 'Believe it or Not' by Ripley, axed by the Sunday Express? From memory, it relied quite heavily on reports of prodigies of one kind and another, though with more two-headed chickens than young Mozarts. At boarding school in the 1940s I became rather an addict and can't believe I am the only one among Spectator readers in that age group. In the same genre, though at a somewhat more high-brow level, are various antholo- gies collected by the late Lieutenant Com- mander R. T. Gould. As others of my age group among Spectator readers will doubt- less again recall, this Gould (as opposed to the author of the book under review) was a fairly regular performer on the Brains Trust, also in the 1940s. His anthologies have attention-grabbing titles like Oddities and Enigmas, though I have to say that I was slightly disappointed with the contents of one of them that I lately borrowed from the London Library: slightly but not wholly. For example, for those who don't know it, I recommend his explanation of the Indian Rope Trick: the rope is really `jointed Wooden rods with a flexible cover'. But it's the detail, such as his `interlocking cone
joints', which make the explanation memo- rable.
Does anyone write, does any publisher publish, such anthologies these days? I'd be pleased to hear about them if the answer is `yes'. But whatever the answer to that, I can most strongly recommend, for those who have not yet come across them, the differ- ent — but still, I faicy, just adjacent anthologies of a rather different Gould. The author of Dinosaur in a Haystack is not a retired Lieutenant Commander RN. In fact he's neither ex-service nor indeed British. As many readers will surely know, he is a professor of both geology and zoology — the link is supplied by his sec- ondary school-nickname, `fossil face' — at Harvard, as well as being the Curator for Invertebrate Palaeontology in that universi- ty's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
If you haven't read Gould's Wonderful Life, his account of the quite astonishing fossils in the so-called Burgess Shale, and if yi:711 have any sort of curiosity about what
j SC f.11.,W1D•UP CASIRDIAM
are surely our queerest ancestors in the pre-mammalian evolutionary record, then there is a splendid intellectual and natural history treat waiting for you. That is a full book-length case study. Dinosaur in a Haystack is not that, but essentially an anthology of case studies. As the author tells us in the introduction, it is the seventh in a continuing series. The case studies, perhaps better the scientific essays, which make them up, originate in monthly pieces by Gould in the US periodical, Natural History. There are a total of 34, so they span his monthly output over roughly a three-year period. In one of the most excit- ing, which deals with the amphibious and terrestrial ancestors of the great warm- blooded whales, Gould allows himself to add a 'stop press' epilogue to his original piece. Of course, evenYor addicts like me, not all of Gould's pieces have a level of interest equal to the best. Nevertheless, Dinosaur in a Haystack is a true Box of Delights, to bor- row a Masefield title. There are far more that I would strongly recommend than I have space to mention. Among the top pieces for me is the one already noted, 'Hooking Leviathan by its Past', which explores the pre-maritime history of our ocean whales and sees off with splendid elegance what is evidently one of the most often repeated creationist objections to evolution.
The second in the collection resurrects from his normal obscurity the sixth-century abbot Dionysius Exiguus, who was in effect responsible for the consequential decision that our era should start from year 1 rather than year 0. I recommend it strongly, despite a failed attempt at a joke in its title and the risk that millennium buffs who read it may become millennium bores. Especially because of T. H. Huxley's verse eulogy to the poet — 'And lay him gently down among/The men of state, the men of song' — I found the piece on `Tennyson and Science' (The Tooth and Claw Centen- nial) a real delight. Finally, for me, there is a memorable highlight in the first essay, when Gould contrasts the beautiful mathe- matics of Gallileo's universe with the incommensurability of the earth's daily rotation and its annual passage round the sun. The latter necessarily prefigures fur- ther changes in our leap year arrangements if the earth survives for no more than about another 4,000 years. But then that contrast is a wonderful example of what the great biologist J. B. S. Haldane was point- ing to in the second of two of his most famous aphorisms which Gould rightly prizes. Almost everyone knows the first of those: about the Almighty's inordinate fondness for beetles. At least as good as a sign-off line is a sentence from a piece by the great man entitled Possible Worlds and published in 1927: My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.
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