Metamorphosis, p.30
Metamorphosis, page 30
Thanks to my gracious agents, Sarah Chalfant and Rebecca Nagel. To my kind editors, T. J. Kelleher at Basic Books in America and Georgina Laycock at John Murray in England. To Gillian Sutliff and Annie Chatham, and Dana Henricks, for her eagle-eyed, humor-filled copyediting. A special thanks to Lorin Stein, whose wisdom and kindness made all the difference, and to my friend Doron Weber, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for believing in me, yet a second time.
Above all, thanks to my family. My loving mother, Dorothy, my funny sister, Danna, my loyal brother, Mishy, my late father and compass, David. Thank you, Yaeli, the mother of this book and the mother of our children, for being exactly who you are, and accepting my transformations. Thanks, Shaizee, Abie, and Sol, my greatest teachers of all—for your laughter and tears and mischief. We have one ride in this life, one gilgul—that’s all. I can’t believe I get to share mine with you.
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Preface: Toads get a bad rap as disgusting and ugly, a test that kissing princesses must endure to find true love. But leave it to Orwell to see their striking beauty. His wonderful description quoted in the text comes from an essay he wrote in 1946 called “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” in which presentiments of 1984, like a toad in April, are beginning to stir. It concludes with the words: “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.” As it happens, he chose an apt example. After spadefoot toads lay their eggs in ponds made by spring rains in the desert, the tadpoles that hatch in spacious ponds eat algae until they develop into juveniles and bury themselves in the sand. But the ones that just happen to be born into cramped ponds turn out differently, developing wide-opening jaws. To survive they eat each other, so that they can grow more quickly before the shallow pond dries up. Both forms of toad have the exact same genes, but only big ponds make gentle burrowers. Little ponds, alas, first produce cannibals.
Because we are constantly changing, when we make dramatic choices in life, like having children, we can’t really know how they’ll impact our future selves. In her book Transformative Experience (Oxford University Press, 2015), the philosopher L. A. Paul argues beautifully that such choices should be viewed as discoveries about the intrinsic nature of experience.
The Ovid quote “How many creatures walking on this earth / Have their first being in another form?” comes from the preface to his classic Metamorphoses, in the plural, which was written in the year 8 of the Common Era, contains fifteen books and 11,995 lines, and inspires every page of this book.
Part One: “Where Do We Come From?”
1. “Surinam”: A beautifully written popular biography of Maria Sibylla Merian is Kim Todd’s Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), which served as one of the main inspirations and sources of materials for the sections on Merian in Part 1, and from which quotes of Merian in English come, unless otherwise indicated. Further sources include the more recent and scholarly book by Kay Etheridge, The Flowering of Ecology: Maria Sibylla Merian’s Caterpillar Book, with translations from the original German texts by Michael Ritterson (Brill, 2021), as well as her earlier essay “Maria Sibylla Merian: The First Ecologist?,” in Women and Science: Figures and Representations—17th Century to Present, edited by V. Molinari and D. Andreolle (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Also, Kurt Wettengl’s Maria Sibylla Merian, Artist and Naturalist (G. Hatje, 1998), as well as Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Harvard, 1995), and specifically William T. Stern, “The Plants, the Insects and Other Animals of Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium,” in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (Pion Limited, 1980). For younger readers there are two illustrated children’s books, both award winners: Maria Sibylla Merian: Artist, Scientist, Adventurer, by Sarah B. Pomeroy and Jeyaraney Kathirithamby (Getty Publication, 2018), and Joyce Sidman’s The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers, 2018). On the colonial history of Surinam, see Cornelis Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (University of Florida Press, 1971), as well as James Rodway, Guiana: British, Dutch, and French (T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), and the fascinating Narrative of the Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, by John Gabriel Stedman (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). For early adventures in Surinam, see Garcilaso de la Vega and others, Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, 1539, 1540, 1639 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1859), and Mark Herman, Searching for El Dorado (Doubleday, 2003). On Sir Walter Raleigh, see Stephen J. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (Yale, 1973). On nature in Suriname, see Natural History and Ecology of Suriname, edited by Bart De Dijn (LM Publishers, 2018). The first book of Suriname history written by a Surinamese man is Anton de Kom’s excellent We Slaves of Suriname (Polity, 2022).
2. “Cicada”: There are a number of wonderful books about cicadas, including the quaintly dated Insect Singers: A Natural History of the Cicadas, by J. G. Myers, from 1929, as well as Shaun Tan’s 2019 illustrated work of fiction Cicada, about a hardworking but underappreciated cicada toiling away in an office. Quotes from the ancients, including Antipater, appear in F. C. Clark, “Song of the Cicada,” American Naturalist 9, no. 2 (1875): 70–74. On our current knowledge about cicadas in Suriname, see Allen F. Sanborn, “The Cicadas (Hemiptera: Cicadidae) of Suriname Including the Description of Two New Species, Five New Combinations, and Three New Records,” Zootaxa 4881, no. 3 (2020). For an early mathematical model of synchronized cicada emergence, see Frank C. Hoppensteadt and Joseph B. Keller, “Synchronization of Periodical Cicada Emergences,” Science 194, no. 4262 (1976): 335–337, and for a more recent study of the evolution of periodical emergences see Y. Tanaka, J. Yoshimura, C. Simon, J. Cooley, and K. Tainaka, “The Allee Effect in the Selection for Prime-Numbered Cycles in Periodical Cicadas,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 22 (2009): 8975–8979. A particularly charming encounter between Sir David Attenborough and a horny North American male Magicicada can be found in this YouTube video from his BBC film Life in the Undergrowth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjLiWy2nT7U.
3. “Aristotle”: A freshly informative, though somewhat whiggish, book rehabilitating Aristotle as an important father of science, and biology in particular, is The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science (Viking, 2014) by Armand Marie Leroi. Contrast his account to the one produced by Ernst Mayr in his massive The Growth of Biological Thought (Harvard, 1982), and D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Aristotle as a Biologist, which was the title of his Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford in 1913 and was published in 2018 by Forgotten Books; the latter two see Aristotle as a major stumbling block for the development of the modern scientific method. For a fuller explanation of Aristotle on metamorphosis and insects, read Stuart Reynolds, “Cooking Up the Perfect Insect: Aristotle’s Transformational Idea About the Complete Metamorphosis of Insects,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 374 (2019). A scholarly explanation for why the belief in spontaneous generation lasted as long as it did can be found in Daryn Lehoux, Creatures Born of Mud and Slime: The Wonder and Complexity of Spontaneous Generation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). Quotes from Aristotle’s Generation of Animals are from the Loeb Classical Library Edition (1942), translated by Al Peck. All Ovid quotes come from his Metamorphoses (Penguin Classics, 2004), translated by David Raeburn. When it comes to Aristotle’s notion of perfection, later commentators would use it for a moral purpose: applying a threefold division of the sciences into rational sciences (logic); real sciences (mathematics, natural sciences, metaphysics); and practical sciences (ethics and politics). The Dominican thinker Albertus Magnus of Cologne argued that by studying them in order, a person could reach the telos of perfectio of a fully realized human being. The purpose of ethics, on this hierarchical ordering of knowledge, is to perfect the human being. I wonder how many politicians today would agree!
4. “Imposters”: Readers will be glad to know that not all butterfly-ant relations are deceitful: Apharitis cilissa, a butterfly endemic to Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Israel, lays its eggs near ant colonies, and its larvae, just like those of the large blue, are tended to by ants. Unlike the large blue, Apharitis is a mutualist: Its larvae exude a sweet liquid that nourishes the ant larvae. The large blue, for its part, remains on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and has been studied extensively in order to assist conservation and preservation efforts. Had scientists known earlier about its unique life cycle, perhaps intervention may have helped—an argument for Maria Sibylla Merian’s ecological approach. On early attempts to understand why its numbers were dwindling, and early attempts at conservation, see J. A. Thomas, “Why Did the Large Blue Become Extinct in Britain?,” Oryx 15, no. 3 (1980): 243–247, and Rare Species Conservation: Case Studies of European Butterflies (Blackwell Scientific Publication, 1991). On the ways in which the large blue pinpoints specific species of ant to parasitize, read Magdalena Witek et al., “Host and Specificity of Large Blue Butterflies Phengaris (Maculinia) (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae) Inhabiting Humid Grasslands in East-central Europe,” European Journal of Entomology 105, no. 5 (2008): 871–877, and on manipulating chemical cues for purposes of conservation see R. M. Guillem, “Using Chemo-taxonomy of Host Ants to Help Conserve the Large Blue Butterfly,” Biological Conservation 148 (2012): 39–43. On its amazing acoustical trickery, see F. Barbero, J. A. Thomas, S. Bonelli, E. Balletto, and K. Schonrogge, “Queen Ants Make Distinctive Sounds That Are Mimicked by a Butterfly Social Parasite,” Science 323, no. 5915 (2009): 782–785. Finally, on the “queen effect,” see J. A. Thomas and J. C. Wardlaw, “The Effect of Queen Ants on the Survival of Maculinae arion Larvae in Myrmica Ant Nests,” Oecologia 85, no. 1 (1990): 87–91. An amazing YouTube video showing the entire life cycle of large blues, including their host ants and wasp predators, can be seen in the BBC film Life in the Undergrowth, once again with the tireless and charming Sir David Attenborough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCo2uCLXvhk.
Great biographies have been written about Catherine the Great, of which Robert K. Massie’s Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House, 2012); and Virginia Rounding’s Catherine the Great (Hutchinson, 2006) served me well, alongside The Memoirs of Catherine the Great, translated by Markus Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom (Modern Library Classics, 2006). The quip about Catherine’s musical abilities comes from Sophy Roberts, The Lost Pianos of Siberia (Penguin, 2020). Two recent television shows help spark the imagination: the HBO historical series Catherine the Great, starring Helen Mirren, which focuses on her later years, and the fictionalized, satirical The Great, from Hulu Originals, starring Elle Fanning, concentrating in its first season on Sophie/Catherine’s path to the throne. Both are recommended!
5. “The Transfiguration of Jesus to Christ”: Maria Sibylla Merian left very little after her in writing. It is very difficult to glean personal details from her scientific notebooks, or from the eighteen letters that survive, mainly technical and dry. This makes trying to get into her head and conjure her voice all the more of a challenge; exercising some literary freedom, I did my best to stay loyal to known facts. In particular, I was helped by the brilliant translation by Michael Ritterson of Merian’s Raupen book, and the notes that went into producing it, in Kay Etheridge, The Flowering of Ecology. Also useful was Elisabeth Rucker’s “The Life and Personality of Maria Sibylla Merian,” in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (Pion Limited, 1980), as well as Kim Todd’s wonderful book. Besides the sources mentioned under the “Surinam” chapter, I have consulted Merian’s original printed works, and their translations, six books in all, two published posthumously. Particularly helpful were the scientific notebooks, housed in the library of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad and reprinted as Maria Sibylla Merian and Wolfgang Dietrich Beer, Maria Sibylla Merian: Shmetterlinge, Käfer und andere Insekten. Leningrader Studienbuch [Books of Notes and Studies] (Reich, 1976). After paying a visit to Nuremberg, to the Graff home, which miraculously survived the Allied bombing of the city in World War II, as well as to St. Sebald’s Church, the Albrecht Dürer house, and the flower and cherry-tree garden beneath the old imperial castle where Sibylla Merian would collect eggs and caterpillars and butterflies, I looked at her wills and legal actions at the Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt am Main and the Gemeentearchief Amsterdam, and at the eighteen letters (scattered in various collections at the British Library, University of Erlangen, Fondation Custodia in Paris, Stadtbibliothek Nuremberg, and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg). I have also “read” extensively in the period, to try to catch words and phrases and ways of expression. Secondary literature that was especially helpful for this section includes Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1979); Eric Jorink, Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715 (Brill, 2010); and Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2004).
6. “Ex Ovo Omnia?”: For centuries Kircher was derided as “the man who got everything wrong,” but he’s enjoying a reappraisal in recent years, not least for his prescience with regard to the connection between disease and microorganisms. See, for example, the volume that came out of the 2002 New York Institute conference declaring him to be “the coolest man who ever lived,” Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, edited by Paula Findlen (Routledge, 2004). Athanasius Kircher’s own whale of a book was called Mundus Subterraneus (Amsterdam: Waesberge, 1665); the quote comes from a translation by P. Gottdenker in “Francesco Redi and the Fly Experiments,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 53 (1979): 575–592. It seems clear that Redi was responding to the section in Kircher’s book which dealt with the generation of insects. Redi began his experiments either in the summer of 1666 or 1667, and his book Esperienze Intorno alla generazione degl’insetti (Experiments on the Generation of Insects) appeared in 1688; quotes taken from the English translation from 1909 from Open Court, as well as Redi’s earlier treatise on viper poison, Osservazioni intorno alle vipere, translated by P. K. Kneopfel as Francesco Redi on Vipers (Brill, 1988). The real name of the Swiss occultist, physician, alchemist, and philosopher Paracelsus was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, and he provided the recipe for a tiny human in his book Of the Nature of Things from 1537. As much as it might sound counterintuitive, he actually played a role moving away from bookish knowledge toward experiment: See Walter Pagels, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd revised edition (S. Karger, 1982). On John Wilkins’s natural language, see his An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language from 1668, and another super-interesting source by John Bulwer, besides his book Anthropometamorphosis, is his work on the natural language of the body called Pathomyatomia from 1649, which studies the actions of the muscles of the face to produce expressions. Information on Harvey, including the quote about his character, I gleaned from D’arcy Power’s 1897 biography, William Harvey: Masters of Medicine from T. Fisher Unwin. Extremely helpful to me in getting the big picture was Matthew Cobb’s excellent book Generation: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unraveled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth (Bloomsbury, 2006), as well as Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (Zone Books, 2001).
7. “An Ingenious Woman”: Merian noted that she first began observing moths and butterflies in 1660. Nearly twenty years of such study would have gone into her caterpillar book from 1679, whose short title was Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandelung. One book that she attests had a particular impact on her is Johannes Goedaert, Metamorphosis et Historia Naturalis Insectorum, 3 volumes (Jacobum Fiernsiuem, 1662–1668). Interestingly, compared to Goedaert, Merian used less overtly religious language, hinting that Nature on its own terms interested her more than God’s nature. Still, she was a woman of her times and would not have been untouched by the tradition of studying nature as a way to study God (“Therefore, seek herein, not mine but God’s glory alone, and glorify Him as creator of even the smallest and least of worms,” she writes in her introduction—though this surely was also insurance against those railing against wasting efforts on “lowly” creatures). Merian would not have been the only woman to paint flowers or insects in her day, and women in liberal Frankfurt and Nuremberg were afforded recognition and respect in the various trades, including still-art painting, natural history, and publishing. Indeed, idleness of any kind and by any gender was frowned upon in this Lutheran city. There was a large community of both men and women who engaged in the arts, literature, art collecting, and the pursuit of nature—see Sabina Leßman, “Susana Maria von Sandrart: Women Artists in 17th Century Nürnberg,” Woman’s Art Journal 14, no. 1 (1993); and Elizabeth Alice Honig, “The Art of Being ‘Artistic’: Dutch Women’s Creative Practices in the 17th Century,” Woman’s Art Journal 22, no. 2 (2001). Also very useful to me was a PhD dissertation by Tomomi Kinukawa of the University of Wisconsin at Madison titled Art Competes with Nature: Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) and the Culture of Natural History; as was Ad Stijnman, Engraving and Etching: 1400–2000 (Archetype Books, 2012), on the intricacies of etching, engraving, plate making, and painting. Still, women were not allowed to learn at the art academies, nor join the guilds, and would need to be enterprising about earning a living. See Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2003); and also Heide Wunder, She Is the Sun, He Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany, translated by Thomas Dunlap (Harvard, 1998). As her notes and writings attest, Merian had both ambition and business acumen. She hoped to gain the “notice of posterity,” and was pleased, she wrote, to “earn the praise and favor of great men.”
