Sinuous rills
Lynn Cardiff
A World of Naturalists Joseph Kastner (John Murrary £7.95)
Joseph Kastner's World of Naturalists is the New World of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; his subject the American explorer-naturalists who first described its native species. And a very good subject it is too, all the better for being generally unfamiliar. It is unfortunate, therefore, that Mr Kastner (who, we learn from the dust-jacket, is an ex-editor of Life magazine) seems to have written his first chapter with the object of deterring as many readers as possible. 'The image of this encounter in the gardens of Coldengham persists across the years as if history had stopped, like a frame frozen in a movie, to emphasise a passing moment,' he writes on page three, referring to some perfectly insignificant social call from one botanist to another. The next page informs us that when we hear the name Linneaus, we 'summon up an archaic figure, master of a dusty discipline called nomenclature . . . But in the eighteenth century he stood as flesh-and-blood force'. And a couple of pages later we are warned that trying to follow the naturalists' progress is 'sometimes like trying to untangle the patterns that sandpipers leave as they double back and forth across each other on a wavewhipped beach'. But then the worst is over: Mr Kastner leaves the (wave-whipped) beach behind him, and settles into an honest narrative, enriched by many well-chosen quotations from naturalists' letters.
He is particularly good on the eighteenth-century landscape, and it is refreshing to read about the time when America represented, not urban decay, but the virgin wilderness, the inspiration of Coleridge's Xanadu, a land of plenty where the rivers sparkled with leaping fish, and the passenger pigeons flew in flocks so dense they darkened the sky and bent the trees they roosted on. (The last surviving passenger pigeon died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.) For the naturalists, it was often a land of terrors. The touch of the poison ivy brought one out in leprous blisters, and the bite of the ubiquitous rattlesnake produced dreams 'of horrid places and very often of rolling among old logs'. The Indians who stalked out of the forest were sometimes more savage than noble — John Bartram, out botanising, met one who 'pulled off my hat in a great passion and chewed it all round — I suppose to show me that they would eat me if I came in that country again'. The naturalists had to endure many frustrations. Alexander Garden once found a new species of rockfish but was not allowed to preserve it. 'I never had hut only one to examine,' he apologised to Linnaeus, 'and the company who permitted me to make out the description insisted on their having the pleasure of eating it'. Many of the painfully-collected specimens did not survive the long sea voyage to Europe. Rats and insects ate the dried plants, and sailors broke open the pickle jars to drink the alcohol within. So frequently, in the mideighteenth-century, did French pirate ships capture the transatlantic mails that naturalists developed the habit of addressing their parcels twice over — once to the patron in London for whom they were really intended, and once to Antoine de Jussieu at the Jardin du Roi, so that if theydid fall into French hands, they would at least be appreciatively received.
The object of all this frantic speciescollecting and sending was to fuel a running controversy, of which Mr Kastner gives an excellent account. Buffon had claimed (for no reason that anyone has ever been able to discover) that species degenerated in the New World —dogs lost their bark, men their virility and, in particular, 'All animals are smaller in North America than Europe.' Jefferson retaliated with a list of weights and measures of American bears, beavers, otters and martens — all much larger than their European counterparts. He followed up by presenting Buffon with a stuffed American moose. The man who captured it for him apologised that this particular moose happened to have rather small horns, but he thoughtfully provided some elk and deer antlers which, he said, 'could be fixed on'. Later, Charles Wilson Peale produced an even better trophy when he unearthed a mastodon skeleton and sent it off to Europe to astonish the sceptics. Jefferson died believing that living mastodons might still be found out in the West.
Thus far, Mr Kastner's narrative flows seamlessly, but when he comes to the more complex and specialised nineteenthcentury scene, his sandpiper tracks get muddled. No amount of chance encounters and frames frozen in movies will disguise the fact that the only common denominator between, say, Meriwether Lewis and S. F. Baird is that they were both Americans who happened to live in the same century. At this point, too, his book evinces a peculiar provincialism. I admit to feeling a naughty thrill at the idea of calling any American provincial, but at the period Mr Kastner is writing about, the centre of scientific development was still firmly in Europe, and the absence of any European background on post-Linnean notions of species may make it difficult to understand just what his naturalists were trying to achieve. Some of his choices also seem capricious. Why include Asa Gray, the top American botanist of the mid-century, and omit Louis Agassiz, his equally eminent contemporary and counterpart in zoology?
But on the whole Mr Kastner's omissions are few, and his 300-odd pages are more remarkable for what they cram in than what they leave out. One wishes that the English publishers (John Murray) could have Anglicised the spelling when they imported the book, but no doubt that would have doubled its price. (At least it has had the attention of a proof-reader, for which one must be grateful nowadays.) A more serious failing, for English readers, is the absence of any maps. Since much of the book is concerned with travels, it would have been nice to know where the people were going. The illustrations, on the other hand, are generously dispensed and one of them, William Bartram's extraordinary Redon-like watercolour of 'the seed vessel of the American lotus' (a title which gives nothing away), almost alone makes one want to own the book. But in any case, at £7.95 for a well-produced, well-illustrated glossy volume that enticingly introduces an attractive subject, A World of Naturalists must count as a book to be bought not borrowed.
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