Read Eight Little Piggies Online
Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
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*
This reference, at the very end of the essay, elicited a firestorm of correspondence. I love nothing more than a brouhaha about a really tiny and tangential item in my essays. I knew this one was coming! Here I am, writing about the deepest issues of life and death, and what do I get? A horde of letters on Pinza’s final note, most telling me that he ended on the third above the tonic, and some accusing me of gross musical stupidity (the only form of ignorance that I probably do not possess). But, as I said, I knew it was coming and should have been on my guard, for all parties in this controversy are right. The main rendition does end on the third, but the line reappears several times and often ends on the tonic. I never liked that ending on the third (awkward, and even the great Pinza didn’t always make it right on pitch). Moreover,
tonic
, with its multiple meanings, works so much better in a literary sense for the last line of the essay. In any case, I did ponder the issue, and I made a deliberate decision, perhaps not for the best. But thanks to everyone for writing. Details are all that matters: God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don’t struggle to get them right.
*
After this article first appeared in
Natural History
, Bryan Clarke wrote me a letter with the following interesting information on both frustration and hope:
The story is more depressing than you know. I wrote to the French
Service de l’Economie Rurale
before
Euglandina
was introduced, asking them not to do so. They replied saying that they had not yet decided the matter, but would let me know. Of course they didn’t. A similar correspondence took place between Jack Burch at Michigan and the USDA about introducing the Uglies into Hawaii. It got very heated.
There are some little rays of hope. First, it seems that
Euglandina
has not yet reached Huahine, Raiatea or Tahaa, where
Partula
are still, it is said, surviving. I’m going this summer to check. There
may
still be
Partula
on Bora Bora. Second, the French are proposing to set up a snail conservation and study centre on Moorea (shutting the stable door…), and we are looking at ways of making ‘cages’ in the woods. There is also a faint hope of a refuge inside the crater of Mehetia (an extinct volcano about 60 miles SE of Tahiti).
*
The name Septuagint derives from the legend that seventy-two translators (close to the Latin
septuaginta
, or “seventy”)—six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel—worked in separate rooms and made their own translations. When they compared their results, all were identical. If the linguistic mishmash seems odd—Jews translating The Hebrew Bible into Greek in Egypt—remember that Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and established the Ptolemies as a Greek ruling family.
*
I received Charles Darwin’s personal card from an anthropological colleague who found it in his museum, amidst some items that Darwin had collected. He most kindly sent it to me with the following note: “I assume that Mr. Darwin meant to leave this card for you; you must have been out when he called.” The Walcott card belonged to his wife, the formidable Mary Vaux Walcott (note T. H. Clark’s description later in this essay). In the original version of this piece, I missed the little squiggle of an
s
at the end of the title—Mrs. rather than Mr.—and attributed the card to C. D. Walcott himself. (Having companions in error is no excuse, but the editor of
Natural History
told me that several levels of editors and compositors had scrutinized the article and its illustrations, and no one had noticed the misattribution.)
Attentive readers, of course, noted my error; the resulting correspondence was fascinating and, I suppose, predictable. Most mentioned the error gently, acknowledging the easy confusion if names of husbands and wives be distinguished only by a tiny wavy line at the end of a superscript. A few angry feminists accused me of just one more lamentable example in ignoring women, to the point of making them invisible. My response here must be quite contrary: I had, of course, not forgotten the old custom, particularly among wives of social rank, for submerging individuality by self-identification as Mrs. plus a husband’s full name. But, as this custom is now happily passing away, thanks in large part to increasing sensitivity produced by feminist critiques, I simply hadn’t been alert enough to remember and suspect. When I saw “Charles Doolittle Walcott,” I assumed the man himself and didn’t scrutinize the preceding title. My error, in other words, arose from the successes of feminism and not as a rearguard action against the proper acknowledgment of women.
This change to correct attribution does not compromise the essay which, after all, began with an anecdote about honoring Laura Ingalls Wilder through purchasing replicas of her daughter’s calling card.
*
I originally thought that this paragraph contained three errors—and said so in the original version, with a snide (if unstated) implication that Barrington, perhaps, deserved his reputation as dilettante. But Joseph B. Russell wrote to inform me that Salzburg was, in 1756 (before Austria existed), subject to the Duchy of Bavaria, and that Saltzbourg is an acceptable Anglicization. Mozart was, however, born on January 27, not January 17. This may be a simple error of transcription or typesetting—or, perhaps, Barrington got confused by some aspect of the approximately ten-day difference imposed by the Gregorian calendric reform, then so recently accepted in England (see Essay 12 on this point). In any case, my respect for Barrington, evident throughout the essay, increases again.