Free Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms by Stephen Jay Gould

hat, gloves, and coat with tails.
    I looked at one of the Beadles in all his antiquated splendor, and I saw that he held both hands clasped behind his back. So I moseyed around to his other side (no hurrying) to find out what he might be holding—and I noted a cellular phone in his gloved hands. Technology and tradition. The old and elegant; the new and functional. The Fighting Temeraire and the steam tug. Art and science. The prophetAmos said, “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?”

3
    SEEING EYE TO EYE, THROUGH A GLASS CLEARLY
    W E LAUGH AT THE STUFFINESS OF V ICTORIAN PRONOUNCEMENTS , AS TYPIFIED by the quintessential quotation from the woman who gave her name to the age—the Queen’s reaction to an imitation of herself by her groom-in-waiting (as stated in the regal first person plural): “We are not amused.” Yet we (that is, all of us poor slobs today, not her majesty alone)must also admire the unquestioned confidence, in matters both moral and material, of our Victorian forebears, especially from the ambivalent perspective of our own unsure and fragmented modernity.
    In a popular book of the mid-1850s, Shirley Hibberd (an androgynous name, but male in this case, as for most publically eminent Victorians), praised the acme that his age had achieved, not only in largeraffairs of state, but in the domestic tranquillity of homes as well:
    Our rooms sparkle with the products of art, and our gardens with the curiosities of nature. Our conversation shapes itself to ennobling themes, and our pleasures take a tone from our improving moral sentiments, and acquire a poetic grace that reflects again upon both head and heart.
    Hibberd argues for an intimate tie betweenhappy homes and triumphant governments, for “our domestic life is a guarantee of our national greatness.” But how shall such purity and edification be achieved on the home front? Hibberd appeals to the concept of taste:
    A Home of Taste is a tasteful home, wherein everything is a reflection of refined thoughts and chaste desires . . . In such a home Beauty presides over the education of the sentiments,and while the intellect is ripened by the many means which exist for the acquisition of knowledge, the moral nature is refined by those silent appeals of Nature and of Art, which are the foundations of Taste.
    Since Hibberd was a nature writer by profession, and since I am quoting from his most famous work, titled Rustic Adornments , readers will not be surprised by his primary prescription fordomestic improvement: the enhancement of good taste by cultivated displays of living things. “The Rustic Adornments of the household,” Hibberd asserts, “embrace the highest of its attractions apart from the love which lights the walls within.” Hibberd could not have been more sanguine about the beneficial moral effects of an interest in natural objects: “It would be an anomaly to find a studentof nature addicted to the vices that cast so many dark shadows on our social life; nor do I remember among the sad annals of criminal history, one instance of a naturalist who became a criminal, or of a single gardener who has been hanged.” (So much for the Bird Man of Alcatraz!) Moreover, an interest in nature defines both our tranquillity and our prosperity—no strife or ignobility please, we’reBritish!
    It is because we are truly a domestic people, dearly attached to our land of green pastures, and shrubby hedgerows, and grey old woods, that we remain calm amid the strife that besets the states around us, proud of our ancient liberties, our progressing intelligence, and our ever-expanding material resources.
    But nature has always been “out there” for our edification on her turf.The greatest advance of his age, Hibberd argued, lay in the invention of devices—rustic adornments—that allowed home-dwellers, even of modest means in highly urban settings, to cultivate nature within domestic walls. Hibberd’s book contains successive chapters on all