Green Laurels

Abstract

THE author enjoyed his book, coining happy and striking phrases and suggesting interpretations of great characters. Goethe is “the father of the German romantic movement in poetry and science” and the Nordic interprets himself as “everything upstanding, gifted, pure, great and superior”. Darwin is a “kindly English gentleman known by his good works”, whose twenty years' record of silence is unsurpassed. Wallace was the greatest of professional collectors, because “he thought as he collected”, but he was an “humanitarian before he was a scientist … a virtue only in a Romantic”; “disgraceful wrangles... never between these two”. The old ideas were ancestors of theirs; “they built upon the sunken piers of obsolete wisdom”. It is to sketch these “piers of nature's unfolding in the mind of man” that pleasures the author, not a history of biology and an orderly sequence of discovered facts. Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Galen and Pliny held the field until sixteenth-century Gesner published his “Historia Animalium” with Diirer's illustrations. In this man is seen the universality of science, for, from his Swiss home, he corresponded among others with Belon, whose picture of the bones of man and bird founded comparative anatomy, Rondelet (fish-lover), Aldrovandi (traveller), and Turner.

Green Laurels:

the Lives and Achievements of the Great Naturalists. By Donald Culross Peattie. Pp. 38 + 429 plates. (London, Bombay and Sydney: George G. Harrap and Co., Ltd., 1937). 12s. 6d. net.