Walcott (1850–1927), my other Caroline hero, may not be so well known, but he ranks as a giant within my profession of paleontology. Charles Doolittle Walcott was the world’s greatest expert on rocks and fossils of the Cambrian period—the crucial time, beginning some 550 million years ago, when modern multicellular life first arose in a geological whoosh (a few million years) called the “Cambrian explosion.” Walcott, a master administrator, was also the most powerful man in American science during his prime. In 1907, he moved from head of the United States Geological Survey to secretary (their name for boss) of the Smithsonian Institution, where he died with his boots on in 1927. He persuaded Andrew Carnegie to found the Carnegie Institute of Washington and encouraged Woodrow Wilson to establish the National Research Council. He was an intimate of every president from Teddy Roosevelt to Calvin Coolidge. In 1920, at age seventy, he made the following entry in the yearly summation at the end of his diary:
I am now Secretary of Smithsonian Institution, President National Academy of Sciences, Vice Chairman National Research Council, Chairman Executive Committee Carnegie Institute of Washington, Chairman National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics…. Too much but it is difficult to get out when once thoroughly immersed in the work of any organization.
As a deeply traditional and conservative doer and thinker, Walcott suffered the unkind fate of many people who hold immense power in their times, but do not pass innovative ideas along to posterity—erasure from explicit memory, despite endurance of unrecognized influence. Few outside the profession of paleontology may remember Walcott’s name today, but no scientist has exceeded his power and prestige.
Since discoveries tend to outlive personalities, Walcott’s name has survived best in attachment to his most enduring single accomplishment—his remarkable find, lucky in Pasteur’s sense of fortune favoring the prepared mind, of the world’s most important fossils, the animals of the Burgess Shale (see my book, Wonderful Life). In 1909, high in the Canadian Rockies, Walcott discovered the closest object to a holy grail in paleontology—a fauna blessed with complete representation, thanks to the rare preservation of soft anatomy, from the most crucial of all times, right after the Cambrian explosion.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Walcott then proceeded to misinterpret these magnificent fossils in the deepest possible way. He managed to shoehorn every single Burgess species into a modern group, calling some worms, others arthropods, still others jellyfish. The Burgess animals became a small group of simple, primitive precursors for later, successful lineages. Under such an interpretation, life began in primordial simplicity and moved inexorably, predictably onward to more and better.
Walcott’s reading, originally published in 1911 and 1912, went virtually unchallenged for more than half a century. But during the past twenty years, an elegant and comprehensive recollection and restudy by Harry Whittington and his students has entirely reversed Walcott’s interpretation. Burgess diversity—in range of anatomical designs, not number of species—exceeded the scope of all organisms living today. The history of life is therefore a story of decimation and limited survival (with enormous success to a few of the victors, insects for example), not a tale of steady progress and expansion. Moreover, we have no evidence that survivors prevailed for any conventional cause rooted in anatomical superiority or ecological adaptation. We must entertain the strong suspicion that this early decimation worked more as a grand-scale lottery than a race with victory to the swift and powerful. If so, then any rerun of life’s tape would yield an entirely different set of survivors. Since Pikaia, the first recorded member of our own lineage (Chordata), lived as a rare component of the Burgess fauna, most replays would not include the survival of our ancestry—and we would be wiped out of history. Conscious life on earth is this tenuous, this accidental.
I regard this reinterpretation of the Burgess Shale as the most important paleontological conclusion of my lifetime. If you accept my judgment on the importance of the Burgess Shale, then Charles Doolittle Walcott must join the roster of great scientists who achieved both power in their own time and immortality later. Whatever his interpretation, no one can take away his discovery.
But why did Walcott so thoroughly misinterpret his most important fossils? I suggested two basic reasons in a long chapter of my recent book, Wonderful Life. First, and however mundane the point, Walcott was so insanely busy with administrative tasks that he never had time for adequate study of the Burgess animals. His papers of 1911 and 1912 were only meant as preliminary accounts, but he never wrote the main act. (He had zealously—and jealously—guarded the Burgess fossils for a grand retirement project, but died in office at age seventy-seven.) Even if Walcott had been intellectually inclined to let the Burgess fossils tell him their amazingly unconventional story, he never found time for a proper conversation. Testimonies to Walcott’s lifestyle abound in the Smithsonian archives, but I found no document more poignant than the following statement submitted to his bank:
I enclose herewith the affidavit that you wish. I used to sign my name Chas. D. Walcott. I now use only the initials, as I find it takes too much time to add in the extra letters when there is a large number of papers or letters to be signed.
Second, and more importantly, I do not think that Walcott was inclined to free and open conversation with the Burgess fossils. I don’t accuse him of biases stronger than those of most scientists; I merely say that we all live within our own constraining world of concepts, and that the historical record grants us insight into the scope and power of Walcott’s preconceptions. Walcott, from the depths of his traditionalism, was fiercely committed to a view of life’s history as predictably progressive and culminating in the ordained appearance of human intelligence. As a Christian evolutionist, he believed that God had established the law of natural selection expressly to produce this intended result in the long run. At the height of controversy with fundamentalism in the days of Bryan and the Scopes trial, Walcott rejected the usual view (held by both scientists and theologians then and now) that science and religion occupy separate intellectual spheres demanding equal respect. He held instead that science must validate a “correct” view of divine guidance through the immensity of geological time in order to avoid accusations of atheism. Walcott therefore authored an appeal, signed and published in 1923, a year before Scopes was indicted in Tennessee. Endorsed by “a number of conservative scientific men and clergymen” (including Herbert Hoover and Henry Fairfield Osborn of my introduction), this statement held, in part:
It is a sublime conception of God which is furnished by science, and one wholly consonant with the highest ideals of religion, when it represents Him as revealing Himself through countless ages in the development of the earth as an abode for man and in the age-long inbreathing of life into its constituent matter, culminating in man with his spiritual nature and all his God-like power.
How could a man committed to this view of life ever interpret his own most precious discovery as the maximally varied source of a grand lottery that just happened to include human ancestors among the lucky survivors? Walcott had to view the Burgess animals as a limited array of primitive precursors for a history of life that would progress and diverge predictably.
As I was writing Wonderful Life, learning more and more about Walcott and coming to understand his extraordinary energy and influence, I developed a strong urge, following the game of intellectual genealogy, to establish personal contact with him. Darwin died too long ago for any hope of a shortest link with the deceased—via one intermediary who knew the hero personally. But Walcott died in 1927, and someone who interacted with him as a colleague (not merely as a child who once shook his hand) might still be living. I thus longed to “touch” Walcott as I prepared his biography. (I do not know why we wish to add this personal dimension to a scholarly endeavor; some would even consider such a quest either foolishly trivial or actually harmful in its potential for prejudicial intrusion into hopes for objectivity. But I am content
that fellowship can thus reach across time.)
All my attempts failed. I tried my colleague Bill Schevill, who collected at the Burgess quarry with Percy Raymond in 1930. No luck. I anticipated success with G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the world’s greatest ecologist, who died in 1991 in his late eighties. In 1931, Hutchinson had written an important article on the anatomy and mode of life for two key Burgess creatures. But he had begun his work in 1929 and had never met Walcott. I moved my quest to the back burner and proceeded to other things.
Then, out of the blue on February 9, 1990, I received a three-page letter from T. H. Clark, Logan Professor of Paleontology Emeritus at McGill University. I knew of Clark by reputation of course, for all geologists respect his classic textbook (written with my colleague Colin Stearn) on The Geological Evolution of North America. But I did not know that he is ninety-seven years old (and still professionally active, with a technical paper now in press in the Journal of Paleontology), and I was quite unprepared to encounter one of life’s frequent (and most pleasant) ironies—to quest hard for something and fail, and then to have it drop into your lap by pure good fortune, without the slightest effort. Clark began:
Dear Professor Gould:
I have just finished reading your latest book—Wonderful Life—much to my pleasure and edification…. We have in the Redpath Museum [of McGill University] two lots of Burgess Shale fossils…. The second lot consists of nearly fifty specimens…collected by myself, in 1924, when I was second in command of the Harvard Summer School located in the southern Canadian Rockies under Dr. Percy Raymond.
Note: I entered Harvard in 1913, approaching Dr. Raymond to introduce myself as a fledgling freshman who wanted nothing less than a degree in invertebrate paleontology and was greeted with this apparent pessimistic reception and advice and the words, “Very well. But I warn you that if you continue in such foolishness you’ll be the last paleontologist alive by the time you retire. There’s no future in it….”
In 1924 Raymond asked me to take charge of the Harvard Summer School, headquarters at Banff, while he had complete tooth removal. We ended the six weeks tour at Field [Canadian Pacific Railway town near the Burgess Shale]. Henry Stetson and I hired horses and crossed over the Kicking Horse Pass to climb to Walcott’s Quarry, staying there two whole days and collecting what I thought was a wonderful lot.
So far, so good. Sweet reminiscences of a favorite place, and bright vindication for my profession, not large, but numbering a healthy few thousand, and full of vibrant debate, as Clark continues to work on the way to his centenary. Percy Raymond, by the way, was a great expert on trilobites who taught at Harvard from the office I now occupy. Raymond made an important collection of Burgess Shale fossils in 1930. Harry Whittington, genius of the contemporary Burgess revision, was Raymond’s successor, and lived in the same office just before me. Thus, my own interest in the Burgess Shale is, at least in part, dynastic. But I was still unprepared for the joy of Clark’s last paragraph:
I have an incident to record which may interest you. During the 1924 trip we were visited by Dr. Walcott and his wife who spent all afternoon with us. Walcott and Raymond stayed together while Mrs. Walcott cruised around camp criticizing everything down to the tent pegs…. with apologies for causing you to lose so much time reading these notes.
I remain, yours sincerely,
T. H. Clark
Clark’s letter came with a note from his research associate Ingrid Birker, stating that, since the publication of my book, “we have been inundated with requests from all sorts of local biologists, geologists, historians, and students of natural science to see the Burgess Shale material…. So we have decided to give a small presentation at the end of March using Clark’s photos from 1924 and a selection of specimens. If the fates allow this will be a delightful occasion to hear someone who has indeed had a wonderful life and can still share the enthusiasm and humor of it. You are most welcome to join our little conversazione.”
Some invitations for travel engender considerable mulling; a few, like a child’s first invitation to a circus or a ballgame, need not be made twice. I went to Montreal on March 28, to meet Dr. Clark—and to touch Charles Doolittle Walcott.
Call me a foolish romantic, but we paleontologists take connection seriously; nothing but fragile continuity, by the thinnest genealogical lines, brings the reward of persistence. Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured—never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history. The tangible establishment of an intellectual genealogy may be only symbolic, but symbols count, and my handshake with Clark (combined with a memory of his with Walcott) will be my personal metaphor for the deeper genetic connections that make life possible and paleontology practical.
Photograph of C. D. Walcott (left) and Percy Raymond taken in camp by T. H. Clark in 1924. Courtesy of Redpath Museum: McGill University.
Clark recalls that when they met in 1924 he gave Walcott a reprint of his first paper—on strata of the Beekmantown Formation in Quebec. He then took a photo of Walcott and Percy Raymond—the younger man, now toothless, slumped, and pear-shaped (much like my demeanor in the field), but Walcott, at age seventy-four, erect as could be, with military bearing. Now, sixty-six years later, after the longest professorial tenure in the history of McGill University (for Clark started there in 1924 and remains on the rolls as Logan Professor of Paleontology Emeritus), T. H. Clark gave me copies of his latest reprints, and I reciprocated in kind. We need such continuity in a crazy world that wrenches and uproots our bearings, often on a monthly or yearly schedule (see Essay 16).
T. H. Clark on horseback in 1924. Courtesy of Redpath Museum: McGill University.
I thought that my day in Montreal would be sweet and memorable, but I had not anticipated the greatest pleasure of all—intellectual challenge. I thought that Clark would give an anecdotal talk, seated before his fossils, telling us tales of C. D. Walcott’s passion for photography, Mary Walcott’s love of wildflowers, the great days of railroads and pack trains, and the heroic age of fossil collecting.
No such thing: We met in the Redpath Museum, a wonderful Victorian building opened in 1882. The lecture hall is an architectural gem, built like a Renaissance dissecting theater à la Vesalius (but ornamented throughout with Victorian filigree). The lecturer therefore stands on the floor at the bottom of a pit, with seats for spectators rising sharply in several concentric, semicircular tiers. T. H. Clark, I soon realized, had not come for a pleasant chat. His Burgess fossils were laid out on a table in the middle of the pit, but Clark stood at the end of the table and spoke for forty minutes without notes on the life and works of Charles Doolittle Walcott—a beautiful presentation chock full of information and organized, as all good talks must be, around a distinctive and integrative point of view. (How I wish that academics would grasp this most basic requirement of all successful public speaking or any intellectual discourse at all!)
As I listened to Clark, something slowly dawned upon me, and my simple pleasure at being in Montreal to “touch” Walcott blossomed into the deepest possible delight. Clark was not merely presenting a chronological account of Walcott’s life and works. Rather, he had read my book carefully, had studied my chapter on Walcott, and did not like it (in the best sense of treating the same factual material from an entirely different perspective). In the gentlest, kindest possible way, Clark had organized his talk to defend the living hero of his professional youth, a man he once met, from my “modernist” historiographical approach.
Wonderful Life has been a source of great satisfaction for me. I wrote the book with real passion, for the work of my colleagues (described therein) is so elegant and so important. The book has done well in the overt sense that publishers cherish: it paid leisurely and friendly visits to the best-seller lists of three countries, and got its share of rave reviews (and some real first-class stinkers for contrast). But nothing gave me nearly so much pleasure as the thought that my views had so engaged a man who kne
w Walcott, that he chose, at age 97, to prepare and deliver his first public talk in many years to set the record straight from his point of view.
T. H. Clark lecturing in 1990. Courtesy of Redpath Museum: McGill University.
Scientists of my generation, and back at least to anyone who began a career after World War II, tend to be cynical about science as a public institution (however idealistically we may think or act in any personal quest for knowledge and discovery). After all, we have grown up with Hiroshima, the perjured testimony of tobacco company statisticians, the rush for biotech profits in the corporate world, and, above all, the debasement of our own world by measurement of all accomplishment in grant dollars. But I have met several older scientists who not only mouthed—as we all can do—the ideals of science as objective and truth-directed by a quiet but overwhelming moral force (with scientists as humble and privileged participants in this inexorable process), but who also actually seemed to believe and live by this lovely vision. (The vision strikes me as so false—as a statistical statement about norms of science, not as an accessible position for admirable individuals—that I confess to great trouble in comprehension. But I cannot deny the power and beauty of the image, nor do I fail to appreciate its salutary role as an impetus to productive work and psychic benevolence, whatever its truth value).