A Garden of Marvels Read online

  Marian Fournier’s The Fabric of Life: Microscopy in the Seventeenth Century explores the contributions of each of the important microscopists: Hooke, Malpighi, Grew, Leeuwenhoek, and Jan Swammerdam (who is best known for his pioneering anatomy of insects and for discovering red blood cells). The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope is an eye-opening discussion of the significance of the instrument in the Enlightenment.

  I had the good fortune to come across the collection of antique and replica microscopes at the University of Notre Dame, and Dr. Phillip Sloan helped me look through a number of early replicas. The experience gave me an even greater respect for the early microscopists: The tiny field of vision, the distortions, the imprecise focusing mechanisms, the awkward devices for holding specimens, and the lack of modern illumination would have been overwhelming obstacles to me. If South Bend is not in your travel plans, the catalog of the collection has photographs of the instruments.

  Jardine’s biography of Hooke is excellent, especially the discussions of his personality. (I buy her argument that Hooke was not as obnoxious as other biographers believe.) Stephen Inwood, in his superb Forgotten Genius: The Biography of Robert Hooke, details the mind-boggling breadth of Hooke’s scientific investigations and accomplishments. “England’s Leonardo: Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and the Art of Experiment in Restoration England,” by Allan Chapman, provides another view of Hooke, the scientist.

  For this and following sections, I relied on a number of sources on science, religion, and the Royal Society in the seventeenth century. The literature on the scientific revolution is extensive. Notable, for my purposes, are Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society; The University of Cambridge: A New History; The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution, 1625–1688; Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700; and The Emergence of Science in Western Europe (chapter 4). Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Pepys’ Diary and the New Science gives an excellent flavor of what experimental science meant, if not to the average man, then to an educated and very curious layman.

  The Persecuted Professor

  The essays in the first volume of Howard B. Adelmann’s magisterial, five-volume edition of Malpighi’s correspondence are my primary source of biographical information about the scientist. Adelmann is also highly informative about the history of Bologna, medicine, and Italian universities in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In addition, I consulted Marcello Malpighi, Anatomist and Physician, edited by Domenico Meli, and found chapter 9 of Dr. Meli’s Mechanism, Experiment, Disease and “Mechanistic Pathology and Therapy in the Medical Assayer of Marcello Malpighi” especially helpful.

  As Giovanni Ferrari points out in “Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna,” the teaching of human anatomy originated in Bologna at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Although the anatomy lesson in Malpighi’s era with its attending masqueraders was riotous by our standards, the event had actually become much more decorous and orderly than in previous centuries. In earlier times, students crowded around the table and jostled each other, trying to get their hands on the cadaver.

  Malpighi’s life improved in his later years, as his renown spread across Europe and the value of microscopy became increasingly obvious. (Sadly, the reputation of the university, once a preeminent center of learning, declined precipitously as Enlightenment science passed it by.) He continued anatomizing every living being he came across, providing the first understanding of the anatomy of uncounted species. The College of Doctors of Medicine finally inducted Malpighi into its ranks in 1690. (Professor Sbaraglia did not attend the ceremony.) The following year, the new installed Pope Innocent XII asked Malpighi to become his personal physician, and Malpighi, despite serious kidney disease, agreed. Three years later, at the age of sixty-six, he died of a stroke. His body, at his request, was autopsied, no doubt by men who had known him in life.

  Inside a Plant

  Unlike Malpighi, Grew wrote few letters and left few (figurative) bones for biographers to gnaw on. After his tenure as curator, he stepped into Oldenburg’s shoes as secretary of the Society after the diplomat’s death in 1677. In November 1679, he declined to continue in the job (leaving it to Hooke), and returned to the practice of medicine. According to William R. LeFanu, in “The Versatile Nehemiah Grew,” Grew and his half brother, Henry Sampson, were admitted to the College of Physicians as Honorary Fellows, “a new rank intended to regularize the position of country physicians or holders of foreign degrees.” Grew continued to contribute papers to the Royal Society on distilling seawater, skin ridges, the anthropology of the Indians of New England (based on questionnaires), snow, and a hummingbird. If you’ve ever taken a bath with Epsom salt to relieve muscle soreness, you should think of Grew: He was granted a patent for the product in 1698. (Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate, which, by the way, works by releasing magnesium ions that are absorbed by the skin and travel to the brain, where they interfere with pain receptors.) Toward the end of his life, Grew published a philosophical work that purported to prove the necessity of accepting Christian revelation. A kind and gentle man and a devoted physician, he died while making his medical rounds on March 25, 1712.

  Malpighi wrote in Latin and Italian; Grew wrote primarily in English. The Anatomy of Plants was reprinted in 1965 in facsimile, and it is a pleasure to look at the drawings, which vividly demonstrate how Grew perceived plant tissue to be a woven material. The introduction in the reprint by Conway Zirkle is helpful, as are the articles on Grew by Jeanne Bolam and Agnes Robertson Arber.

  Popular Medicine in Seventeenth Century England and Birken’s article in Medical History were sources for information on the options for Grew and other Nonconformist medical practitioners. For background on the educational opportunities (and lack thereof) for Nonconformists, see Evans, Twigg, and the biographies of Priestley noted below.

  PART II: ROOTS

  Restless Roots

  For discussions of the mechanical forces that keep trees upright, see Roland Ennos’s essay “Trees: Magnificent Structures,” on the Museum of Natural History’s website (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/plants-fungi/magnificent-trees/) and chapter 9 of Robert Kourik’s Roots Demystified.

  The Way of All Water

  The best sources on the Great Chain of Being are Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being and “The Great Chain of Being After Forty Years: An Appraisal,” by William Bynum.

  Most useful on Hales is Stephen Hales: Scientist and Philanthropist by D. G. C. Allan and Robert Schofield, which amplifies Clark-Kennedy’s Stephen Hales D.D., F.R.S.: An Eighteenth-Century Biography.

  How to Kill a Hickory

  Roots Demystified by Robert Kourik is not only informative about the physiology of roots, but also oriented to gardeners. Plant Roots: The Hidden Half is a collection of essays: comprehensive but technical. To fully appreciate roots, you have to appreciate soil. I recommend The Nature and Properties of Soil, a popular textbook by Brady and Weil.

  Our Fine Fungal Friends

  Roots Demystified and Plant Roots were resources, as well as the aforementioned textbooks. “A. B. Frank and Mycorrhizae: The Challenge to Evolutionary and Ecologic Theory,” by James Trappe, provides more detailed information about Frank’s remarkable contribution.

  Arsenic and Young Fronds

  Articles in the Washington Post recount the story of the contamination and remediation of Spring Valley. Articles by Rufus Chaney et al., Lena Q. Ma et al., Agely et al., and updates by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and the Environmental Protection Agency provide the scientific side of the story. On Alyssum, see Brooks and Radford, news articles in the Illinois Valley Daily View, minutes from the Oregon State Weed Board, a letter from the Nature Conservancy, and the report in Minerals Engineering Online. Textbooks and Epstein’s article explain transport in roots.

  The Once and Future Wheatr />
  My conversations with Loren Reiseberg, Professor of Botany at the University of British Columbia and Distinguished Professor of Biology at Indiana University, as supplemented by conversations with David Van Tassel, informed my account of the history of the sunflower. For additional information on the evolution of the sunflower, see The Sunflower by Charles Heiser Jr.

  PART III: LEAVES

  A Momentous Mint

  I turned to two biographies of Joseph Priestley: Schofield’s The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley and The Enlightened Joseph Priestley, and Jackson’s highly readable A World on Fire, which tells the story of Priestley, Lavoisier, and the discovery of oxygen. Priestley never accepted the majority of Lavoisier’s “new chemistry” based on measurements of mass.

  In fact, Priestley ultimately viewed himself as more of a theologian than a scientist. He moved his family to Birmingham in 1780, and although he continued to conduct experiments and defend the phlogiston theory, most of his publications were theological. His primary interest was in expounding the proposition that the early Catholic Church was corrupt and that the Reformation was incomplete. He got into serious trouble when he seemed to be calling for an overthrow of the Anglican Church. He wrote, “We [the Dissenters] are, as it were, laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantaneous explosion; in consequence of which that edifice . . . may be overturned.” For this, he became known as “Gunpowder Joe.” He expressed such sentiments not long after the deadly chaos of the French Revolution and the murders of the French royalty, nobility, and clergy, which made for notably impolitic timing. On the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, which the Birmingham Dissenters celebrated, rioters attacked the two local Dissenting churches and burned them. They then moved on to burn Dissenters’ homes, including Priestley’s. After a time, George III sent troops to Birmingham to contain the continuing mayhem, but there is no question that the government saw Priestley and his cohorts as a threat.

  Birmingham remained unsafe for Priestley, and he moved to Middlesex, where he lectured at a Dissenting academy until 1794. He became increasingly outspoken about his conviction that the new millennium would bring the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the established church. The French Revolution, in his view, had been a mere harbinger. Life in England became untenable for him: He was burned in effigy and featured in scathing political cartoons. In 1794, the Priestleys emigrated to Northumberland, Pennsylvania. The University of Pennsylvania invited him to teach chemistry, but he declined. He helped found the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia and an academy, formed a friendship with Thomas Jefferson, and managed to stir up political controversy again when his correspondence with a radical French printer was published. In 1804, illness and sorrow over the deaths of his son Henry and his beloved wife finally dampened his effervescent spirit. He was buried in Northumberland.

  Leaves Eat Air

  Geerdt Magiels’s From Sunlight to Insight is the most comprehensive, if awkwardly written, source of information on Ingen-Housz, and includes a number of his subject’s letters in translation. Howard Reed’s booklet, Jan Ingenhousz, Plant Physiologist, With a History of the Discovery of Photosynthesis, is also worth finding.

  After publication of Experiments upon Vegetables, Discovering Their great Power of purifying the Common Air in the Sun-shine, and of Injuring it in the Shade and at Night in 1779, Ingen-Housz continued to experiment and kept up a running debate with Senebier and others on whether plants really do produce bad air at night. While he was correct on this matter, he continued to believe that the “green matter” in vials was animal in nature since it had neither seeds nor roots. He engaged with Priestley, Senebier, Spallanzani, and others over the matter of who deserved credit for discovering the role of plants in “curing” air.

  Thanks to his pension, he could follow the scientific developments of the time, visiting with Réamur, the Herschels, Franklin, Coulomb, Guillotin (who did not invent the machine and actually opposed the death penalty), considering Cassini’s and Halley’s calculations of the distance between the sun and Earth, trying new experiments with seeds and soil, and reading about Lavoisier’s experiments. A pioneer in data-based assessments of natural phenomena, he ran tests to debunk some of the strange new medical treatments of the era. One of his targets was Franz Anton Mesmer, a German physician who had gained renown for allegedly curing patients by manipulating energy forces he believed flowed through the body, either with magnets or his own “magnetic effluvium.”

  After the French Revolution, he lived for the most part in England, where he was often a guest on the estates of noble families. Although of modest background, he came to see society through the eyes of a man intimate with Austrian and English nobility. Shortly after the second anniversary of the Revolution, he wrote to his friend Jacob van Breda that in England the “Dissenters had attempted to overthrow church and state.” Priestley, he reported, had nearly escaped a certain death, and all his writings and instruments were destroyed, “which was a terrible loss for everybody.” Nonetheless, Ingen-Housz wrote, “it was a pity that such a great scientist was so cursed by fanaticism.” He later wrote that Priestley is “full of pride and lust for fame.”

  The last years of Ingen-Housz’s life were difficult. The European nations had been in a constant state of war following the revolution of 1789 and the rise of Napoleon. In 1794, Austria lost its territory in the Netherlands. The Austrian government, pressed for funds for the continuing wars, cut Ingen-Housz’s pension. Meanwhile, the economic impact of the political tumult meant that he also lost his investments in various European bonds and enterprises. Plagued by kidney stones and other illnesses and unable to return to either the Netherlands or Austria, he died in September 1799, and was buried in Calne, England.

  He was preceded in death by Lavoisier, whose inherited wealth and his service to the government of Louis XVI as a tax collector sent him to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror in 1794.

  The Vegetable Slug

  There are many books on the mechanics of photosynthesis, which is a fascinating subject that I relate only at its most simple level. I found in David Walker’s Energy, Plants, and Man a lovely balance of good writing, scientific clarity, and clever cartoons. For the history of oxygen on Earth and the significance of photosynthesis, try Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun and Nick Lane’s Oxygen.

  Once in a Blue-Green Moon

  The history of early Earth is, not surprisingly, the subject of much speculation and controversy. Nick Lane’s Life Ascending and Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet are highly readable, as is, again, Lane’s Oxygen.

  On the history of plant life through the Jurassic, I relied on Paleobotany, by Taylor et al.; Fossil Plants, by Kenrick and Davis; The Evolution of Plants, by Willis and McElwain; The Evolutionary Biology of Plants, by Niklas; and A Natural History of Conifers, by Farjon. See also Claire Humphreys et al., “Mutualistic Mycorrhiza-like Symbiosis . . .”

  The Tenacity of Trees

  I found stories of the conflicts over Leylandii in a number of British newspapers and journals. See “Leyland Cypress—X Cupressocyparis leylandii” at the Royal Forest Society website for the history of the hybrid.

  There are many claimants to the title of world’s oldest tree. The National Geographic Society is my source for the Swedish spruce.

  On the history and biology of trees, both Tudge’s The Tree and Wilson’s The Growing Tree are enlightening and good reads.

  Amazing Grass

  For background on Miscanthus, my sources include: Miscanthus for Renewable Energy Generation,” by Heaton et al.; “Pros and Cons of Miscanthus,” University of Illinois; “The Impact of Extensive Planting of Miscanthus . . .”; “Growth and Agronomy of Miscanthus x giganteus for Biomass Production,” by Anderson et al. The last has an excellent bibliography.

  For the evolutionary history of C4 grasses, see Kenrick and Davis,
Willis and McElwain, Niklas, and the article by Edwards et al. The story is not yet fully understood: see “Biologist Solves Mystery of Tropical Grasses’ Origin,” Brown University; “Study Rewrites the Evolutionary History of C4 Grasses,” University of Illinois; and Osborne and Beerling’s “Nature‘s Green Revolution: The Remarkable Evolutionary Rise of C4 Plants.”

  According to “A Novel Mechanism by which Silica Defends Grasses Against Herbivory,” by Hunt et al., the silica in Miscanthus discourages predators not only by making the leaves unpleasant to chew, but also by making them more difficult to digest.

  PART IV: FLOWERS

  Sex in the Garden

  The best sources of biographical information about Sebastien Vaillant are Jacques Rousseau’s article “Sebastien Vaillant: An Outstanding 18th Century Botanist” and the first chapter of Roger Williams’s Botanophilia in Eighteenth-Century France: The Spirit of Enlightenment.

  Who Needs Romeo?

  I relied on Gametes & Spores: Ideas about Sexual Reproduction 1750–1914, by John Farley, and was intrigued by Pinto-Correia’s somewhat eccentric The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation. Olby’s Origins of Mendelism and Roberts’s Plant Hybridization Before Mendel are also important on the history of ideas about plant sex and inheritance. For more about Amici and the pollen tube, see the entry for Amici on the Scuola Normale Superiore website.

  There is an excellent article by Claude Dolman about Spallanzani in The Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 2008, which highlights the incredible range of the Abbe’s scientific interests before and after his investigations of sex. Spallanzani’s two volumes of Dissertazioni di fisica animale e vegetabile were printed in 1780 and 1782, and appeared in French and English a few years later. In 1779, he spent a month in Switzerland, meeting with Senebier, H. B. de Saussure (the geologist father of the botanist), Bonnet, and other naturalists. During the next five years, when he wasn’t teaching at the University of Pavia he traveled extensively around Europe “observing and interrogating Nature” and collecting for the university’s Museum of Natural History. He gathered specimens of hundreds of species of fish, coral, sponges, and other marine fauna from the Mediterranean and Adriatic, discovered new species of fireflies, and offered experimental proof that torpedo fish are not, as was thought, attracted by magnets.