Free Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler

indeed come upon those ants, far from home, high up the stalk of some tall blade of grass, for instance. Their mandibles will be clamped onto the blade and they’ll be quite dead, a long, thin, curved pink candlestick-like protrusion growing out from their head. And that’s the fungus, getting set to shed spores. No, no,” Eisner laughed, delighted. “That’s all true. Just goes to show: nature is incredible. No way—
no way
—this could all have been created in just six days.” (That was great: every bit as wonderstruck as Wilson, Eisner had derived exactly the opposite evolutionary conclusion from the likes of the stink ant.) “In fact,” he continued, “wait a second, I think—yeah—my wife, Maria, and I photographed one of those a while back down in Florida. You got a fax?”
    I gave him the number.
    â€œJust a second,” he said, and rang off.
    And sure enough, a few moments later, a photo of a dead
Camponotus floridanus
, his forehead gloriously rampant, came coursing up from out of my machine.

Camponotus floridanus
with
Cordyceps
fungus as photographed by Tom and Maria Eisner
( illustration credit 1.6 )

PART II
 
Cerebral Growth

Centaur recently excavated near Volos, Greece
( illustration credit 2.1 )
    A fter an earlier, abridged version of the foregoing essay appeared in the September 1994 issue of
Harper’s
, the magazine got some wonderful letters. One fellow from Chicago saw fit to alert the editors to a possible fraud, noting that “The weight of five solid lead walls, eight inches thick, twenty feet high and two hundred feet long calculates out at 9,154,000 pounds. If each person on [Griffith’s] eight-month expedition to the Tripsicum Plateau in South America carried fifty pounds of lead (plus sensors, etc.), that equates to 190,280 assistants.”
    To which the only proper response would have to have been: “So? Still doesn’t prove it couldn’t’ve happened.”
    Other correspondents, meanwhile, offered observations and clippings about parallel sorts of enterprises to David Wilson’s. For example, I was sent an article about an exhibition of “The Centaur Excavations at Volos,” accordingto which three centaur skeletons with bones dating to “1300 B.C. plus or minus three hundred years” were unearthed in 1980 “at Argos Orestiko, eight kilometers northeast of Volos, Greece.” One of these skeletons forms the centerpiece of the exhibit, still embedded in a slab of Greek sandstone displayed under glass along a long wooden flatbed table: eerie the way the horse’s spinal column courses seamlessly into the arched vertebrae of the human torso. Looking closely, you can even make out the rusted barb of the arrow that pierced the monster’s human heart. The show’s curator, William Willers, an artist and biology professor at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh, is quoted as explaining how “Such centaurs roamed the Thessalian woods until they met men’s arrows and spears, then fled into the hills, where cold and hunger did the rest.”
    (But
is
there even a University of Wisconsin in
Oshkosh
?)
    Other letters reminded me, for example, of Donald Evans’s epic project, an enchantingly evocative and spectacularly executed philately of an entirely imaginary alternative world. The American artist (b. 1945) collated hundreds of these sublime (and exceedingly rare, if not downright unique) postage stamps, from such countries as the Isle des Sourds, Antiqua, Domino, Amis and Amants, Lo Stato di Mangiane, My Bonnie, Nadorp, Pasta, and the Republica de Banana, before his own untimely passing in 1977 as the result of a fire in his Amsterdam flat. Others mentioned Charles Simonds, the urban archeologist who first began uncovering (or discovering, or deploying—it was never quite clear) the exquisitediminutive ruins left behind by various wandering tribes of “Little