The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox

  The second, and more serious, charge of plagiarism seems more a matter of simple fact than of judgment. By current standards, Poe and his confrères would either be in jail or paying off a hefty fine. But, in 1840, copyright laws either lacked teeth or didn’t exist at all—and Poe’s actions, though indefensible, may not technically have been illegal.

  The details bear accounting, for the import of my story hinges upon them. The Conchologist’s First Book begins with a two-page “Preface,” and I have no reason to doubt Poe’s claim that he wrote this part all by himself. A four-page “Introduction” then follows—and now the trouble begins. Poe expropriated much of this text from the fourth edition (1836) of a British work by Captain Thomas Brown, the Conchologist’s Text Book. Some biographers have claimed that Poe’s entire “Introduction” is a paraphrase, if not a direct copy, of Brown. (F. T. Zumbach, for example, writes that Poe “copied from Brown almost word for word.”) In fact, by my own comparison between the two books, only three of Poe’s paragraphs (about one-fourth of the text) show extensive “borrowings.” (Poe wins no exoneration thereby, for plagiarism, like pregnancy, does not increase in severity by degrees: beyond a point of definition, you either did or you didn’t—and Poe surely did.)

  The plot thickens with the next section of twelve plates. The first four, illustrating the parts of shells, are lifted in toto from Brown. No fuss, no pretenses, no excuses—just plain stolen. The subsequent eight plates, illustrating the genera of shells in taxonomic order, follow Brown in the more interesting pattern of back to front—that is, Brown’s last plate becomes Poe’s first (with considerable rearrangement, reorientation, and switching around of individual figures), and we then move up through Poe, and down in Brown, until Poe’s last plate largely reproduces Brown’s first.

  Others have caught the pattern and even suggested that Poe and Wyatt were now consciously trying to hide their plagiarism. The actual reason is different and more interesting. (What could Poe and Wyatt be trying to hide anyway, after copying the first four plates exactly?) Brown’s book follows the pedagogical scheme of the great French naturalist Lamarck, who always presented his discussions in the conventional order of a “chain of being,” but from the top down, rather than the usual direction of bottom up. That is, Lamarck began with people and ended with amoebae, rather than the conventional vice versa. Brown followed Lamarck and therefore started with the most “advanced” mollusks, but Poe and Wyatt obeyed the usual convention and began with the most “primitive”—hence the reversed order of plates.

  Charges of plagiarism surfaced in an 1847 article from the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia. Poe’s response has often been quoted, but never taken seriously. I believe, however, that (despite some morbid self-pitying and exculpatory nonsense), Poe actually made a basically fair statement—and that the details of his defense can help us to solve all the puzzles of this old and troubling case. In particular, we can begin to understand why Poe, despite his utter ignorance of natural history, got the nod as Wyatt’s reconfigurer; and, more important and surprising, why Poe (despite the indubitable plagiarism that no one should try to excuse) actually made a quite respectable and original contribution to the science, or at least to the teaching, of malacology (the study of clams, snails, and their allies)—the key point that requires the importation of a funny little fact from the history of science, an item that the literary critics never uncovered, thus explaining their failure to understand Poe’s honorable role (and their consequent embarrassment at his evident culpabili-ties). Poe wrote to a friend about the charge of plagiarism:What you tell me about the accusation of plagiarism made by the “Phil. Sat. Ev. Post” surprises me. It is the first I heard of it. . . . Please let me know as many particulars as you can remember—for I must see into the charge—Who edits the paper? Who publishes it? Etc. etc.—about what time was the accusation made? I assure you that it is totally false. In 1840 [Poe is a year off here] I published a book with this title—The Conchologist’s First Book. . . . This, I presume, is the work referred to. I wrote it, in conjunction with Professor Thomas Wyatt, and Professor McMurtrie of Ph[iladelphi]a—my name being put to the work, as best known and most likely to aid its circulation. I wrote the Preface and Introduction, and translated from Cuvier the accounts of animals etc. All school-books are necessarily made in a similar way. The very title page acknowledges that the animals are given “according to Cuvier.” This charge is infamous and I shall prosecute for it, as soon as I settle my accounts with the Mirror.

  Now note the four points that Poe here advances in explanation and excuse: first, that the work was composed by a committee, even though the title page bore Poe’s name alone; second, that he wrote the preface and introduction; third, that he also “translated from Cuvier the accounts of the animals”; and fourth, that “all school-books are necessarily made in a similar way,” presumably meaning that “borrowings” from previous work may be regarded as de rigueur (as Poe then adds that the title page explicitly announces a description of the creatures “according to Cuvier”).

  I will not defend the extent of “borrowing” in point four—surely, beyond any permissible range, either then or now, and well into a realm that can only be called plagiarism (Poe’s consortium never mentions the name of their chief source, poor Captain Brown). Neither can I entirely agree with the latter claim of point two—for Poe expropriated at least a quarter of the “Introduction” from Brown (although I believe he did write the “Preface” entirely by himself, all two pages thereof).

  When we read this preface, armed with basic knowledge about the history of molluscan taxonomy, the more complex and favorable story begins to emerge. This short statement emphasizes a single point: that The Conchologist’s First Book intends to do something different by describing both the shell and the soft parts of each creature together. The claim seems awfully trivial, I admit, and Poe does press his point only by the obtuse route of stressing an expansion in terminology, from the traditional “conchology” (literally the study of shells, as retained in the title) to “malacology” (or the study of the entire organism—for the animals within the hard shells consist almost entirely of soft parts, and the phylum’s official name, Mollusca, derives from the Greek word for “soft,” as in our cognates mollify or mollycoddle). In any case, Poe devotes his preface to this claim for expansion—and literary critics have never granted the argument even a whiff of positive consideration. Poe writes:The common work upon this subject, however, will appear to every person of science very essentially defective, inasmuch as the relations of the animal and shell, with their dependence upon each other, is a radically important consideration in the examination of either. . . . There is no good reason why a book upon Conchology (using the common term) may not be malacological as far as it proceeds.

  Poe then reinforces his intent by describing the new book’s “ruling feature”—“that of giving an anatomical account of each animal, together with a description of the shell which it inhabits.” (Incidentally, a biography of Poe published in 1992 misses this point by failing to recognize the conceptual reform behind Poe’s focus upon disciplinary names [malacology versus conchology]. The author writes that “Poe’s boring, pedantic and hair-splitting Preface was absolutely guaranteed to torment and discourage even the most passionately interested schoolboy.”)

  But, in fact, although Poe’s words now seem cryptic in the absence of a context that his contemporaries would have recognized, and that Poe fails to make explicit, his claims represent no mere airing of dry and inconsequential verbiage, but rather address the primary debate that had engaged generations of experts in the taxonomy and teaching of molluscan biology: Shall these creatures be ordered and classified by the shells alone, or should the soft anatomies within be considered as well (or even preferentially)?

  Traditional classifications had used the shells alone (hence the description of the subject as “conchology”), but always apologetically. The great master, Linnaeus himself, had explicitly
stated that a classification based on soft parts would be more “natural,” but that he had utilized shells alone for the primary practical reason that collectors only retained these hard coverings, and that many genera, known only from empty shells collected at the shore, could not be defined from soft anatomy in any case. When Lamarck, in the next generation, presented the first major expansion and improvement in molluscan taxonomy since Linnaeus’s efforts, he added many names and distinctions, but still based his system on the shells, not the soft parts.

  To provide some sense of the salience and frustration of this issue among students of shells, consider this statement from the best popular book on the subject in English, Elements of Conchology, written by Emmanuel Mendes da Costa (a member of England’s small community of Sephardic Jews) in the maximally auspicious year for contemplating change, 1776:This naturally leads me to the discussion of a subject of great debate among naturalists, which is, whether the methodical system or arrangement of testaceous animals should be formed from the animals themselves, or from their habitations or shells. The former method seems most scientifical; but the latter, from the shells, is universally followed, for many reasons: The vast number of species hitherto discovered, and the numerous collections made, exhibit only the shells or habitations, the animals themselves being scarcely known or described. Of the shells we daily discover, few are fished up living; and the greater number are found on shores, dead and empty. . . . How is it possible then to arrange a numerous set of animals by characters or parts [that is, by the soft anatomy], we can with difficulty, if ever, get acquainted with, in the far greater number of the species we collect or discover?

  Thus, as Wyatt, Poe, and friends planned The Conchologist’s First Book, they decided to introduce a substantial reform by describing the soft parts of each animal along with the shell. However, they had to face the serious problem that all works in English, both technical and popular, treated mollusks by the traditional method of discussing the shells alone. Wyatt’s original and expensive version described only the shells, as did Brown’s volume, the source of Poe’s plagiarism. As an example, a popular work on mollusks, published in 1834 by Mary Roberts, begins by separating the study of animal and shell, and by defending a treatment based upon shells and ignoring the animals entirely: “The elegant science of Conchology, my friend, comprises the knowledge, arrangement, and description of testaceous animals; a science, according to Linnaeus which has for its basis the internal form and character of the shell, and is totally independent of the animal enclosed within the calcareous covering.” And Thomas Brown added, in 1836, “It is upon the exclusive shape of the shell, not the animal inhabitant, that the Linnaean arrangement of Conchology is formed.”

  But Wyatt persisted in his desire for innovation, heeding the following lament written by Mendes da Costa in 1776:I am well aware of the arguments alleged against it [that is, the classification by shells that Da Costa actually used in his book], viz. that, as long as we study only the very shells, those empty habitations, those spoils or remains only of the animals, the present sole objects of our researches and collections, we consider these beings but partially, or with a side view. There is more to be required. The animals that inhabit them should certainly guide us in our methodical arrangements.

  Where, then, could Wyatt find the data on soft anatomy to integrate with the familiar and conventional descriptions of shells? Now, and finally, we can understand and appreciate Poe’s vital, indeed necessary, role in an admittedly dubious, and undoubtedly plagiarized, enterprise that, nonetheless, achieved something worthy, original, and heretofore unrecognized by Poe’s literary admirers and critics. As stated above, no English publication could provide the required information. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, French science, centered at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, the professional home of both Lamarck and Cuvier, led the world in taxonomy and natural history. Adequate information about the soft anatomy of mollusks could only be found in the primary and technical literature, written in French!

  Now Poe may not have known a mollusk from a martini, but he was certainly fluent in French—probably the only member of Wyatt’s circle with sufficient expertise in this essential ingredient of any effort to link the shells and soft parts of mollusks in a popular English presentation. Poe’s actress mother had died when Poe was only two, and he had been raised in the home of an intermittently wealthy Richmond businessman, John Allan (from whom Poe took his middle name, although he was never formally adopted). Poe lived in England and Scotland for five crucial years (1815–1820), where he received a classical education in rigorous schools, including a thorough grounding in French.

  In other words, and in conclusion, I think that Poe did exactly what he said—and that no one else in Wyatt’s crowd could have consummated this important project. Poe translated the descriptions of molluscan soft parts from Cuvier’s French and then united this information with the traditional accounts of shells. Thus, The Conchologist’s First Book presented an important, and widely desired, educational reform by linking, for the first time in a popular English book, the shells of mollusks with the bodies housed within and responsible for the elegant constructions—an innovation well meriting a reprint or two! And Edgar Allan Poe played a crucial role, absolutely essential (given Wyatt’s limited contacts and resources) for the successful completion of this reform. Thus, Poe served science well because he possessed the humanist’s skill of fluency in French. E pluribus, a better unum. Borrow one of the fox’s skills, and advance the cause of the hedgehog.

  9

  The False Path of Reductionism and the Consilience of Equal Regard

  A CLASSICAL PROGRAM OF HUMANE REDUCTIONISM: A BEST TRY AT A LOGICAL IMPOSSIBILITY

  HUMAN SAGAS AND PRIMAL TALES OFTEN DEPICT OUR DEEPEST EMOTIONS and most practical needs as polar opposites that either dwell in tension within us or vie for domination as personified beings of the outside world (superheroes and villains of modern comic books as pop versions of ancient gods and devils, for example): kill for personal gain or sacrifice for national salvation; dance till death (shop till you drop), or study to blindness. As a scientist and natural historian, I especially feel the strong personal pull of opposition between an irreducible fascination (amounting to love) for every little detail of natural variety, and a great yearning (amounting to thrill) at the prospect that one common mode of explanation, one governing principle, might just make sense of all the glorious diversity. Why else would a natural historian feel compelled to write books about these irreconcilable feelings, anchoring the efforts in the obvious academic “excuse” (and quite reasonable context) for a legitimate historical and philosophical disquisition: the relationship between science and the humanities. If the yearning were not so strong and pervasive, and the range of honorable solutions not so broad, I doubt that my close colleague E. O. Wilson could write a book on the same subject (Consilience, Knopf, 1998), yet reach such an opposite conclusion within our common conviction that (to quote Wilson again, as on page 3) “the greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities.”

  Clearly, no sensible person will advocate a pure extreme—that is, either the conceptual version of “one size fits all,” the discovery of the single mantra, the Om of God’s name, the abracadabra of existence (releasing the djinn of infinite wishes); or the anarchic alternative that each natural item inhabits its own ineffable space of gorgeously unique solitude, without even a gossamer thread of connection to any other, no sense of any order or coordination at all, not a conceptual higher or lower, or even a geometric nearer or farther away. We all want to enjoy the differences, yet find some meaningful order in the totality. In this primal sense, everyone appreciates both the fox’s flexible range and the hedgehog’s steady effectiveness.

  But the social traditions and conventional intellectual formulations of modern Western science have favored an emphasis upon searches for unification through reduct
ion to a limited number of highly generalized and interconnecting principles regulating fewer forces and smaller constituent particles, even leading to a bit of intended self-parody in talk about searches for a “final theory” or for the truly foundational acronym of TOE, or “theory of everything.” I have already quoted the classical scientific assertion of this faith—Galileo’s famous statement that the “grand book” of the universe “is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures.” But perhaps the most scientifically interested and savvy of Victorian poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, made the same point even more powerfully, if from his own magisterium of metaphor:One God, one law, one element.

  And one far-off divine event,

  To which the whole creation moves.

  (from the epilogue of his most famous poem, In Memoriam).