Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms by Stephen Jay Gould
Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
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[1633–1685]—a solid name indeed for poetic utterances of such unexampled propriety.)
The author of this book, Emmanuel Mendes da Costa, was a SephardicJew of Portuguese origin. He was born in London in 1717 and died there, in his lodgings on the Strand, in 1791. Although Mendes da Costa became one of England’s most respected naturalists on the undefmable borderline between amateur and professional status; although he maintained voluminous correspondence (much apparently preserved in the British Museum) with many of Europe’s greatest naturalistsand with most major players in the widespread network of British amateurs, his name has almost entirely disappeared from the historical record—except for two lovely books that frequently appear on the antiquarian market: the 1776 treatise on conchology, and his 1757 work, titled The Natural History of Fossils (I base this essay largely on these two works). I may well have missed some secondarysources, 1 but I was unable to find anything about Mendes da Costa’s life and works beyond a column entry in the British Dictionary of National Biography , a few bits and pieces in early-nineteenth-century volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine , and, fortunately, about fifty pages of his fascinating letters reproduced in volume four of an 1822 series by John Nichols titled Illustrations of the LiteraryHistory of the Eighteenth Century Consisting of Authentic Memoirs and Original Letters of Eminent Persons.
I regard this erasure of Mendes da Costa as most unfortunate for at least two reasons: because he must have led a fascinating life, and because his history illustrates several social and scientific issues of general importance, including the role of amateurs in natural history, and the statusof Jews in eighteenth-century England. I shall focus this essay on another theme in the category of general messages well displayed: Mendes da Costa’s role as a leading collector at the crux of a defining transition in natural history. For he practiced at both ends of the passage from primary concern for weird specimens and star items (the biggest, the most colorful)—the summum bonum of the seventeenth-centurybaroque age, as embodied in the tradition of constructing natural-history collections as Wunderkammern , or chambers of curiosities—to the eighteenth-century passion for order in the classical world of the Enlightenment. Linnaeus’s new system acted as a prerequisite for Darwin’s revised explanation of causes. But the older love of oddity continued to fan public enthusiasm (and still does so, quiteappropriately, today).
Mendes da Costa was an ordinary man in the midst of this great transition. And ordinary people often record patterns of history with maximal fidelity and interest—for Mendes da Costa made no attempt to innovate on a grand scale, and he therefore becomes a standard for his age. In Linnaeus we grasp the thrust of change. By studying Mendes da Costa, we can best understandthe fixed beliefs, the impact of novelty introduced by innovators, and, particularly, the intellectual impediments that his age posed to better comprehension of the natural world. We must learn to view these impediments with proper sympathy—not in the old style of condescension for an intellectual childhood to compare with our stunning maturity, but as a set of consistent and powerful beliefs, wellsuited to the culture of another time, and held by reasonable people with raw intellects at least as good as ours. If we can achieve such fairness and equipoise, the history of science will become the greatest of all scholarly adventures—and also the most utilitarian, for the foibles of the past can only help us to grasp our own equally constraining present prejudices.
So ordinary, and yet sodifferent! Partly for reasons of self-definition, but mostly from the contumely of others, Jews have lived apart within most Western nations, often with cruel restrictions attached (see chapter 13). Emmanuel
The author of this book, Emmanuel Mendes da Costa, was a SephardicJew of Portuguese origin. He was born in London in 1717 and died there, in his lodgings on the Strand, in 1791. Although Mendes da Costa became one of England’s most respected naturalists on the undefmable borderline between amateur and professional status; although he maintained voluminous correspondence (much apparently preserved in the British Museum) with many of Europe’s greatest naturalistsand with most major players in the widespread network of British amateurs, his name has almost entirely disappeared from the historical record—except for two lovely books that frequently appear on the antiquarian market: the 1776 treatise on conchology, and his 1757 work, titled The Natural History of Fossils (I base this essay largely on these two works). I may well have missed some secondarysources, 1 but I was unable to find anything about Mendes da Costa’s life and works beyond a column entry in the British Dictionary of National Biography , a few bits and pieces in early-nineteenth-century volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine , and, fortunately, about fifty pages of his fascinating letters reproduced in volume four of an 1822 series by John Nichols titled Illustrations of the LiteraryHistory of the Eighteenth Century Consisting of Authentic Memoirs and Original Letters of Eminent Persons.
I regard this erasure of Mendes da Costa as most unfortunate for at least two reasons: because he must have led a fascinating life, and because his history illustrates several social and scientific issues of general importance, including the role of amateurs in natural history, and the statusof Jews in eighteenth-century England. I shall focus this essay on another theme in the category of general messages well displayed: Mendes da Costa’s role as a leading collector at the crux of a defining transition in natural history. For he practiced at both ends of the passage from primary concern for weird specimens and star items (the biggest, the most colorful)—the summum bonum of the seventeenth-centurybaroque age, as embodied in the tradition of constructing natural-history collections as Wunderkammern , or chambers of curiosities—to the eighteenth-century passion for order in the classical world of the Enlightenment. Linnaeus’s new system acted as a prerequisite for Darwin’s revised explanation of causes. But the older love of oddity continued to fan public enthusiasm (and still does so, quiteappropriately, today).
Mendes da Costa was an ordinary man in the midst of this great transition. And ordinary people often record patterns of history with maximal fidelity and interest—for Mendes da Costa made no attempt to innovate on a grand scale, and he therefore becomes a standard for his age. In Linnaeus we grasp the thrust of change. By studying Mendes da Costa, we can best understandthe fixed beliefs, the impact of novelty introduced by innovators, and, particularly, the intellectual impediments that his age posed to better comprehension of the natural world. We must learn to view these impediments with proper sympathy—not in the old style of condescension for an intellectual childhood to compare with our stunning maturity, but as a set of consistent and powerful beliefs, wellsuited to the culture of another time, and held by reasonable people with raw intellects at least as good as ours. If we can achieve such fairness and equipoise, the history of science will become the greatest of all scholarly adventures—and also the most utilitarian, for the foibles of the past can only help us to grasp our own equally constraining present prejudices.
So ordinary, and yet sodifferent! Partly for reasons of self-definition, but mostly from the contumely of others, Jews have lived apart within most Western nations, often with cruel restrictions attached (see chapter 13). Emmanuel
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