A Garden of Marvels Page 4

  It wasn’t only the errors in Natural History or the pseudo-Aristotle’s De Plantis that held back progress in botany, but how deeply the scholars of the medieval era revered these works. Anyone with an interest in understanding plants simply turned to the ancients who, it was accepted, had already provided the definitive information. No one had yet conceived the idea of experimentation as a method for discovering facts or for testing the validity of a hypothetical truth. Alchemists, physicians, and farmers experimented, but only in the sense of trying alternative means to achieve an end. In addition, medieval scholars were imbued with Plato’s belief that in the divine mind there exists an ideal form, the “universal form,” of every creature and thing. The lamb or the orange tree that we see on Earth is only a shadow, a simulacrum of the ideal animal and ideal tree. If a student wanted to understand an orange tree, he would not be advised to examine a real—and therefore defective—specimen, but instead to reason his way to knowledge. This philosophy, as embraced and interpreted by the medieval Catholic Church and then the late-medieval universities, bred a mind-set disinclined to making close observations. As a result, an understanding of how plants functioned progressed not at all from the third century B.C. to the seventeenth century, and vegetable lambs continued to bloom and bob in the landscape.*

  three

  Through a Glass, However Darkly

  If there was a science course in the seventh grade at Pimlico Junior High School in Baltimore, I have no memory of it. Of course, few of my memories of that year had to do with anything academic. I was a quiet, slight, prepubescent twelve-year-old fresh from a small elementary school in a white neighborhood plunked into a redbrick factory of a building, designed for 1,500 but jammed with 3,000, most of whom were from poor, black neighborhoods. I was too callow to appreciate it at the time, but the explosive racial anger that would burn a good portion of the city the next year, in April 1968, smoldered within the school walls. I did understand that school was effectively segregated, with the minority white students separated in nearly all-white classes. It seems too grotesque to be true, but my recollection is that white students were in the “A” track while the majority of black students were in either the “B” or the “Basic” track.

  Lunch in the cafeteria was a twenty-minute foray into a general tumult that from time to time would erupt in a melee. I tried not to drink anything at lunch, the better to avoid a trip later to the bathroom where older girls cut classes, jived, and smoked. I dreaded the bell at the end of a period because it meant venturing again into the torrent of kids that rushed and roared down the hallways. Teachers, too, were on the move. They didn’t have their own classrooms but rolled their books and materials on a cart onto the elevator and from room to room. Adults were posted at major hallway intersections to direct the flow, temporarily halting one seething river to allow another to pass. Who knew what turbulence would otherwise result at the junction? The windowless staircases, however, were unmonitored, and there the human traffic would back up. Jammed together, a girl (and this was one of the few race-neutral phenomena at the school) was subject to being stuck from behind by a boy wielding a sprung safety pin. When it happened to me, I would twist around to try to confront my tormentor, but no gleeful or malign expression gave away the single culprit among the many bodies around me. The only thing to do was to wriggle to try to make oneself a more elusive target until the logjam broke. The best strategy, I learned, was to hug the wall when going up the stairs.

  At the end of the school year, half the students were sent by class, younger grades first, to the auditorium for an assembly. We gathered in ever-growing numbers in the spacious foyer outside the multiple sets of doors, doors that someone had yet to, or forgotten to, unlock. At first, we talked and laughed—it was the end of the day and nearly the beginning of summer—but the foyer soon filled, and the air grew warm and fuggy and voices grew louder and impatient. Then a group of bigger, older boys, arriving late, began for sport to push rhythmically against the crowd in front of them, which was hemmed in by three walls. Everyone shuffled forward and then struggled to step back, as we were compressed again and again. There were shouts of protest; girls screamed. With my face pressed against the back of the boy in front of me, I could see nothing but plaid. The corner of someone’s notebook gouged my shoulder. At one surge, my feet lost contact with the floor. I dropped my books to grab my neighbors’ arms; I was terrified I’d slip down and be trampled. I don’t recall how this drama, this mini-riot, ended, but I know I lost my shoes as well as my books. My parents, firm believers in public education, lost their nerve, and managed, with tuition help from my grandparents, to get me into an independent school for the next year.

  I found my academic feet at the Park School, a progressive institution on eighty acres in Baltimore County where the chief education goals were “development of the individual” and support for “outlets for creative expression.” At the time, there were about fifty students per grade, but this was enough to produce a full-length opera (written by the music teacher) each year and several plays. An art teacher directed a crew of student set painters for these productions in a barn on the campus. A newspaper, an alternative newspaper, and a literary magazine flourished, as did drama and film clubs. I fell in love with American and English literature, especially poetry, found a mentor, and became convinced I was destined to be a modern Wordsworth. (One of my efforts of this era was titled “Imitations of Immorality,” based on my naïve belief that the stories told by certain classmates about their weekend escapades were mere braggadocio.) I read and wrote poetry in all my spare moments, as well as moments that my parents and teachers did not consider mine to spare.

  In this period of my self-directed apprenticeship, I came to believe that learning science and mathematics was antithetical, and possibly detrimental, to my literary aims. Also, it was hard work, and I didn’t have the natural facility for it that some of my classmates did. Rather than struggle for mediocrity, I pursued the humanities and avoided math and science as best I could. I took five years of French and four of Russian, five years of history, every literature course offered, and then tutorials when I’d taken all the courses. I managed to get through the requisite year of geometry and two years of algebra by sitting in the front row and nodding sagely, as if I found the proof chalked on the blackboard entirely self-evident. Luckily for me, at Park comprehension of mathematical concepts (the only evidence of which was my nodding) was deemed as important as actually getting the correct answers on tests. Only two years of upper-school science were required, so after taking Earth science in eighth grade, I took biology and chemistry, and quit the field before my measure was truly taken.

  My difficulties with science were more than conceptual. The science teachers, who were not Platonists, assumed that in order to learn the subject matter students had to do more than read and listen; they had to do experiments. Labs required a certain level of dexterity, and I was (and am) hopelessly antidextrous. I’m not clumsy on a grand scale. I don’t stumble over my own feet or trip over thresholds, bang my head on the car door frame or my shins on the coffee table. But when it comes to fine motor abilities, I live on the flat and lonely end of the bell curve. All I can do is look longingly up the slope at the ordinary folk who can paint window trim, butter layers of phyllo dough, and braid their daughters’ hair neatly. As for the musicians, craftsmen, and visual artists who live on the plain over the far side of the hill, I am awestruck. Such control and coordination of hand, eye, and mind are inconceivable to me. No more can I imagine how a fish feels when it “breathes” water through its gills. I’m beyond all thumbs; my digits feel as though they belong to some other person. It’s as if I’m the substitute teacher to a class of ten: My students may do what I ask of them, but in a maddeningly quarter-hearted sort of way. They comply, but only just enough to avoid being sent to the principal’s office.

  I first became aware of my deficiency when I was ten. My fourth-grade teacher was Miss Sosner, she of the
flowered dresses and coordinating pastel cardigans and the Snow White looks. I adored her, not only for the perfection of her person, but because when she found me surreptitiously reading a library book, half on my lap and half inside the metal book box beneath my desk, she merely told me to put it away. (My third-grade teacher had regularly confiscated my books. Fortunately, the library had plenty more.) With Miss Sosner as our guide, our class was to put aside childish printing and learn to write in grown-up cursive, and I was eager to make this transition. Several afternoons each week, Miss Sosner passed out sheets of a slightly aqua-tinted paper printed with rows of solid and dotted lines. After demonstrating on the blackboard the technique for making the letter of the day and how to link it to other letters, we would practice, making line after line of letters and words. I recall finding this hard going, and probably had an inkling that I wasn’t shining in the subject. Still, I was mortified when one afternoon, my heroine stooped low in front of my desk and quietly told me that it would be fine if I were to stick with printing for the rest of the year. No other child was so excused, and I understood that I was a hopeless case.

  I never did master cursive (although I have a lovely recurring dream in which I effortlessly pen an elaborate, eighteenth-century script adorned with filigrees and swooping furbelows.) I soon realized my ineptitude had other ramifications. I couldn’t weave a lanyard without kinks, knit at all, frost a cake without getting crumbs in the frosting, or make a “bridge” while shuffling cards. In my hands, a zipper inevitably snagged the jacket lining, and I resigned myself to wiggling into and out of outerwear left permanently half zipped. Later, I discovered that I couldn’t paint my fingernails without also painting my fingers or apply eyeliner so that both eyes matched. I used only clear lip gloss. All of which is to say that in high school chemistry, when it came time to use a pipette to titrate a fluid, I was in trouble. Where one drop was needed, two or three escaped, and I missed the equilibrium point. How did others reliably add water to a flask so that the meniscus just touched the milliliter line? Mine was always just a tick above or below. Measuring a powder onto a delicate balance with what seemed like a toothpick left me two steps behind in experiments. Even connecting the spike of the gas outlet to the base of the Bunsen burner with a rubber hose was a bit of a challenge.

  In biology, my fingers rebelled at cutting a slice of onion thin enough to look at under a microscope. In fact, the microscope turned out to be an instrument of torture. I struggled with an early assignment to investigate the protozoa that live in pond water. Preparing a slide, which involved using a pin to position a coverslip (a little glass square about as corporeal as a whisper) on top of a bead of water without trapping any air bubbles beneath it, was an accomplishment. I then looked through the eyepiece and searched for something alive, slowly pushing the slide back and forth with my left hand while—in theory—simultaneously turning the focus knob with my right. For a person who really and truly cannot pat her head and rub her tummy at the same time, this was an excruciating exercise. It turned out that everything under the microscope was upside down and reversed, and I couldn’t manage to move the slide smoothly in what felt like the wrong direction. When a tiny creature did come into view, my refractory hand couldn’t stop the slide quickly enough, so I shot right past my prey, then struggled to find it again. In addition, I discovered that to a paramecium the narrow layer of water beneath the coverslip is a deep sea. When it swam up or down, it grew blurry and then quickly disappeared from sight. In desperate pursuit, I turned the focus knob so far I drilled the objective lens into the slide, cracking the coverslip, a major laboratory faux pas. When I finished the course, I was relieved to think I would never put my hands on the device again.

  Recently, however, in an attempt to experience the world of the early botanists, I met up with microscopes again. The University of Notre Dame has a collection of antique and antique-replica microscopes from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and Professor Phillip Sloan, now emeritus, was kind enough to let me use them (under his careful supervision). One of the earliest ones I tried was an English tripod instrument. Its barrel was composed of two pasteboard tubes, one covered in red vellum and the other in green, both intricately tooled with gold leaf. The green tube was slightly smaller so it slid in and out of the red one for gross focus. The larger tube had a wooden eyepiece to look through. The microscope had no light source, so I used it, as it was meant to be used, like a telescope, and pointed it out a window at the bright sky. I had plucked a leaf on my way, and held it on the wooden platform, which had a dime-sized hole in it, near the objective lens at the far end of the smaller barrel. For fine focus, the smaller barrel had a large wooden screw on it, which I turned. Mostly what I saw was green murk, but Dr. Sloan assured me that fault lay in the instruments of the time, not my hands.

  An early English tripod microscope.

  It didn’t surprise me, therefore, to learn that while Galileo’s 1609 telescope had been an instant hit and was copied widely, his microscope of the same year, much like the one I had tried, was greeted with little enthusiasm. Not only did early users have to cope with an image that started off “dark and gloomy” and dimmed with every passing cloud, but the view was distorted by the poor quality of glass. Even when they managed to get a specimen in focus, the image had blue and red fringes and blurred edges due to the chromatic and spherical aberrations of the lenses.

  Telescopes, moreover, had a practical value, especially as a marine spyglass. Sailors could see the ruffled water over a sandbar in time to change course or spot a merchant ship they hoped to pirate. Astronomy had rapidly become a popular interest of men of good education. In 1665, Samuel Pepys (pronounced Peeps), a Royal Navy administrator and enthusiast of natural philosophy whose diaries would bring him posthumous fame, bought a twelve-foot telescope to look at the moon and Jupiter from his house. He already had a “pocket perspective,” an early form of binocular, that he brought to church to use, surreptitiously, for “the great pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women.” But a microscope neither saved your life nor made you a fortune nor served your erotic interests.

  Besides, when you looked through a telescope, the unknown became more comprehensible and even familiar. The speck on the horizon became a ship; the landscape of the splotchy moon turned out to look something like Earth’s with mountains and valleys. Look into a microscope, however, and the opposite occurred. The familiar became unfamiliar. Red blood looked gray. A green leaf turned into pond scum. The more powerful the lens, the more the view might mystify. Magnify enough and a specimen lost all connection with the known world, becoming only lines and circles and squiggles and empty spaces. Look at a specimen through two different microscopes or by the light of a candle instead of the light from a window, and the object transformed. As Robert Hooke noted in frustration, it was “exceedingly difficult . . . to distinguish between a prominancy and a depression, between a shadow and a black stain, or a reflection and a whiteness.” The surface of a fly’s eye might look like a lattice drilled with holes or a solid surface covered in golden nails. What truth, if any truth, was in a microscope?

  Gradually, microscopes’ optics improved. European lens grinders used mathematics to design the shape of lenses, rather than relying on trial and error. Glass manufacture improved and lenses became thinner, which allowed more light to pass up the tube to the eye, brightening the view. Adding a third lens, called a field lens, between the objective lens at the bottom of the tube and the ocular lens at the top, widened the narrow vista. Pepys bought an expensive microscope in London in 1664—“a curious bauble,” he called it, an indication of how rare still it was—but had trouble using his new toy. The wonders of the very small remained hidden from all but a handful of specialists.

  One of the earliest to master it would be the scientific genius Robert Hooke. No one would have put money on the thirteen-year-old Robert to become one of the stars of Enlightenment science. His father had been an An
glican curate on the Isle of Wight and a royalist sympathizer during the civil war that started in 1642. At his death in 1648, the year before Charles I was beheaded and the Puritan Commonwealth declared, all he was able to leave for his thirteen-year-old son was a paltry £40, a chest, and a collection of books. How exactly the boy made his way from his island home to the prestigious Westminster School in London and into the care of its celebrated headmaster, Dr. Richard Busby, is unclear. Possibly a family friend had a connection with the royalist Busby. (How Busby kept his position under the Commonwealth is another small mystery.) In any case, Robert understood that whatever gentle wave had washed him to the quiet shores of Westminster, he would have to work like a demon to maintain his purchase there. The slender, pale boy with protuberant gray eyes and curly brown hair immediately impressed Busby by memorizing the first six books of Euclid in a week. The headmaster recognized not only the boy’s mathematical gifts, but also his artistic talent and manual ingenuity. Knowing that the ecclesiastical career his charge had once expected was foreclosed and that he would need to earn his way, Busby steered him toward the study of mechanics. Perhaps the boy might make his living as a scientific-instrument maker. Maybe he could be a technical assistant cum secretary cum children’s tutor to one of the wealthy Englishmen who were just then taking up tinkering in home laboratories.