The Island of the Colorblind

1

Most of the statues of Easter Island do not, in fact, face the sea; they face away from the sea, toward what used to be the exalted houses of the island. Nor are the statues eyeless – on the contrary, they originally had startling, brilliant eyes made of white coral, with irises of red volcanic tuff or obsidian; this was only discovered in 1978. But my children’s encyclopedia adhered to the myth of the blind, eyeless giants staring hopelessly out to sea – a myth which seems to have had its origin, through many tellings and retellings, in some of the early explorers’ accounts, and in the paintings of William Hodges, who travelled to Easter Island with Captain Cook in the 1770s.

2

Humboldt first described the enormous dragon tree, very briefly, in a postscript to a letter written in June 1799 from Teneriffe:

In his Personal Narrative, written some years later, he devoted three paragraphs to the tree, and speculated about its origin:

Later still, in his ‘Physiognomy of Plants’ (collected, with other essays, in Views of Nature ) he devoted nine entire pages to ‘The Colossal Dragon-Tree of Orotava,’ his original observations now expanded to a whole essay of rich and spreading associations and speculations:

He suggests an age of about six thousand years for the tree, which would make it ‘coeval with the builders of the Pyramids…and place its birth…in an epoch when the Southern Cross was still visible in Northern Germany.’ But despite its vast age, the tree still bore, he remarks, ‘the blossom and fruit of perpetual youth.’

Humboldt’s Personal Narrative was a great favorite of Darwin’s. ‘I will never be easy,’ he wrote to his sister Caroline, ‘till I see the peak of Teneriffe and the great Dragon tree.’ He looked forward eagerly to visiting Teneriffe, and was bitterly disappointed when he was not permitted to land there, because of a quarantine. He did, however, take the Personal Narrative with him on the Beagle (along with Lyell’s Principles of Geology ), and when he was able to retrace some of Humboldt’s travels in South America, his enthusiasm knew no bounds. ‘I formerly admired Humboldt,’ he wrote. ‘Now I almost adore him.’

3

Remarkable specializations and evolutions may occur not only on islands, but in every sort of special and cut-off environment. Thus a unique stingless jellyfish was recently discovered in an enclosed saltwater lake in the interior of Eil Malk, one of the islands of Palau, as Nancy Barbour describes:

4

‘I had been lying on a sunny bank,’ Darwin wrote of his travels in Australia, ‘reflecting on the strange character of the animals of this country as compared to the rest of the World.’ He was thinking here of marsupials as opposed to placental animals; they were so different, he felt, that

Then his attention was caught by a giant ant-lion in its conical pitfall, flicking up jets of sand, making little avalanches, so that small ants slid into its pit, exactly like ant-lions he had seen in Europe:

5

Frances Futterman also describes her vision in very positive terms:

6

The caption on this postcard of Darwin suggested that he had ‘discovered’ his theory of coral atolls here in Majuro; though in fact he conceived it before he had ever seen an atoll. He never actually visited Majuro, nor any of the Marshalls or the Carolines (though he did go to Tahiti). He does, however, make brief reference in Coral Reefs to Pohnpei (as Pouynipete, or Senyavine) and even mentions Pingelap (by its then-usual name, Macaskill).

7

Ebeye can be seen, perhaps, as a sort of end-point, an end-point characterized not only by desperate overcrowding and disease but by loss of cultural identity and coherence, and its replacement by an alien and frenzied consumerism, a cash economy. The ambiguous processes of colonization showed their potential right from the start – thus Cook, visiting Tahiti in 1769, only two years after its ‘discovery,’ could not help wondering, in his journals, whether the arrival of the white man might spell doom for all the Pacific cultures:

8

A pioneer in the use of streptomycin, Bill Peck came to Micronesia in 1958 as an official observer of the atomic tests in the Marshalls. He was one of the first to record the great incidence of thyroid cancer, leukemia, miscarriage, etc., in the wake of the tests, but was not allowed to publish his observations at the time. In A Tidy Universe of Islands, he gives a vivid description of the fallout on Rongelap after the detonation of the atomic bomb Bravo in Bikini:

9

Obesity, sometimes accompanied by diabetes, affects an overwhelming majority of Pacific peoples. It was suggested by James Neel in the early 1960s that this might be due to a so-called ‘thrifty’ gene, which might have evolved to allow the storage of fat through periods of famine. Such a gene would be highly adaptive, he posited, in peoples living in a subsistence economy, where there might be erratic periods of feast and famine, but could prove lethally maladaptive if there was a shift to a steady high-fat diet, as has happened throughout Oceania since the Second World War. In Nauru, after less than a generation of Westernization, two-thirds of the islanders are obese, and a third have diabetes; similar figures have been observed on many other islands. That it is a particular conjunction of genetic disposition and lifestyle which is so dangerous is shown by the contrasting fates of the Pima Indians. Those living in Arizona, on a steady high-fat diet, have the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the world, while the genetically similar Pima Indians of Mexico, living on subsistence farming and ranching, remain lean and healthy.

10

A similar feeling of kinship may occur for a deaf traveller, who has crossed the sea or the world, if he lights upon other deaf people on his arrival. In 1814, the deaf French educator Laurent Clerc came to visit a deaf school in London, and this was described by a contemporary:

And it was similar when I went with Lowell Handler, a friend with Tourette’s syndrome, to a remote Mennonite community in northern Alberta where a genetic form of Tourette’s had become remarkably common. At first a bit tense, and on his best behavior, Lowell was able to suppress his tics; but after a few minutes he let out a loud Tourettic shriek. Everyone turned to look at him, as always happens. But then everybody smiled – they understood – and some even answered Lowell with their own tics and noises. Surrounded by other Touretters, his Tourettic brethren, Lowell felt, in many ways, that he had ‘come home’ at last – he dubbed the village ‘Tourettesville,’ and mused about marrying a beautiful Mennonite woman with Tourette’s, and living there happily ever after.

11

R.L. Stevenson writes about pigs in his memoir of Polynesia, In the South Seas:

12

It was striking how green everything was in Pingelap, not only the foliage of trees, but their fruits as well – breadfruit and pandanus are both green, as were many varieties of bananas on the island. The brightly colored red and yellow fruits – papaya, mango, guava – are not native to these islands, but were only introduced by the Europeans in the 1820s.

J.D. Mollon, a preeminent researcher on the mechanisms of color vision, notes that Old World monkeys ‘are particularly attracted to orange or yellow fruit (as opposed to birds, which go predominantly for red or purple fruit).’ Most mammals (indeed, most vertebrates) have evolved a system of dichromatic vision, based on the correlation of short- and medium-wavelength information, which helps them to recognize their environments, their foods, their friends and enemies, and to live in a world of color, albeit of a very limited and muted type. Only certain primates have evolved full trichromatic vision, and this is what enables them to detect yellow and orange fruits against a dappled green background; Mollon suggests that the coloration of these fruits may indeed have coevolved with such a trichromatic system in monkeys. Trichromatic vision enables them too to recognize the most delicate facial shades of emotional and biological states, and to use these (as monkeys do, no less than humans) to signal aggression or sexual display.

Achromatopes, or rod-monochromats (as they are also called), lack even the primordial dichromatic system, considered to have developed far back in the Paleozoic. If ‘human dichromats,’ in Mollon’s words, ‘have especial difficulty in detecting colored fruit against dappled foliage that varies randomly in luminosity,’ one would expect that monochromats would be even more profoundly disabled, scarcely able to survive in a world geared, at the least, for dichromats. But it is here that adaptation and compensation can play a crucial part. This quite different mode of perception is well brought out by Frances Futter-man, who writes:

13

Darwin’s colleague and, later, editor, John Judd, relates how Lyell, the strongest proponent of the submerged volcano theory, ‘was so overcome with delight’ when the young Darwin told him of his own subsidence theory, ‘that he danced about and threw himself into the wildest contortions.’ But he went on to warn Darwin: ‘Do not flatter yourself that you will be believed till you are growing bald like me, with hard work and vexation at the incredulity of the world.’

14

The coconut palm, which Stevenson called ‘that giraffe of vegetables…so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign,’ was the most precious possession of the Polynesians and Micronesians, who brought it with them to every new island they colonized. Melville describes this in Otnoo:

The blessings it confers are incalculable. Year after year, the islander reposes beneath its shade, both eating and drinking of its fruit. He thatches his hut with its boughs and weaves them into baskets to carry his food. He cools himself with a fan platted from the young leaflets and shields his head from the sun by a bonnet of the leaves. Sometimes he clothes himself with the cloth-like substance which wraps round the base of the stalks. The larger nuts, thinned and polished, furnish him with a beautiful goblet; the smaller ones, with bowls for his pipes. The dry husks kindle his fires. Their fibers are twisted into fishing lines and cords for his canoes. He heals his wounds with a balsam compounded from the juice of the nut and with the oil extracted from its meat embalms the bodies of the dead.

The noble trunk itself is far from being valueless. Sawed into posts, it upholds the islander’s dwelling. Converted into charcoal, it cooks his food…He impels his canoe through the water with a paddle of the same wood and goes to battle with clubs and spears of the same hard material…

Thus, the man who but drops one of these nuts into the ground may be said to confer a greater and more certain benefit upon himself and posterity than many a life’s toil in less genial climes.

15

The sort of divergence which has made Pingelapese a distinct dialect of Pohnpeian has occurred many times throughout the scattered islands of Micronesia. It is not always clear at what point the line between dialect and language has been crossed, as E.J. Kahn brings out, in A Reporter in Micronesia:

‘Some Micronesians,’ he goes on, ‘have become remarkably versatile linguists.’

One cannot but be reminded of how animals and plants diverge from the original stock, first into varieties, and then into species – a speciation intensely heightened by the unique conditions on islands, and so most dramatic in the contiguous islands of an archipelago. Cultural and linguistic evolution, of course, normally proceeds much faster than Darwinian, for we directly pass whatever we acquire to the next generation; we pass our ‘mnemes,’ as Richard Semon would say, and not our genes.

16

There are two kerosene generators on Pingelap: one for lighting the administration building and dispensary and three or four other buildings, and one for running the island’s videotape recorders. But the first has been out of action for years, and nobody has made much effort to repair or replace it – candles or kerosene lamps are more reliable. The other dynamo, however, is carefully tended, because the viewing of action films from the States exerts a compulsive force.

17

William Dampier was the first European to describe breadfruit, which he saw in Guam in 1688:

18

Many holothurians have very sharp, microscopic spicules in their body walls; these spicules take all sorts of shapes – one sees buttons, granules, ellipsoids, bars, racquets, wheel forms with spokes, and anchors. If the spicules (especially the anchor-shaped ones, which are as perfect and sharp as any boat anchor) are not dissolved or destroyed (many hours, or even days, of boiling may be needed), they may lodge in the gut lining of the unfortunate eater, causing serious but invisible bleeding. This has been used to murderous effect for many centuries in China, where trepang is regarded as a great delicacy.

19

Irene Maumenee Hussels and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins have taken samples of blood from the entire population of Pingelap and from many Pingelapese in Pohnpei and Mokil. Using DNA analysis, they hope it will be possible to locate the genetic abnormality which causes the maskun. If this is achieved, it will then be possible to identify carriers of the disease – but this, Maumenee Hussels points out, will raise complex ethical and cultural questions. It may be, for example, that such identification would militate against chances of marriage or employment for the thirty percent of the population that carries the gene.

20

In 1970 Maumenee Hussels and Morton came to Pingelap with a team of geneticists from the University of Hawaii. They came on the MS Microglory, bringing sophisticated equipment, including an elec-troretinogram for measuring the retina’s response to flashes of light. The retinas of those with the maskun, they found, showed normal responses from the rods, but no response whatever from the cones – but it was not until 1994 that Donald Miller and David Williams at the University of Rochester described the first direct observation of retinal cones in living subjects. Since then, they have used techniques from astronomy, adaptive optics, to allow routine imaging of the moving eye. This equipment has not yet been used to examine any congenital achromatopes, but it would be interesting to do so, to see whether the absence or defect of cones can be visualized directly.

21

‘Cannibalism,’ wrote Stevenson, ‘is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the Marquesas to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii.…All Melanesia appears tainted…[but] in Micronesia, in the Marshalls, with which my acquaintance is no more than that of a tourist…I could find no trace at all.’

But Stevenson never visited the Carolines, and O’Connell does claim to have witnessed cannibalism on one of Pingelap’s sister atolls, Pakin (which he calls Wellington Island):

22

The legendary history of Pingelap is told in the Liamweiwet, an epic or saga which had been transmitted to each generation for centuries as a recitation or chant. In the 1960s, only the nahnmwarki knew all 161 verses; and if Jane Hurd had not transcribed these, this epic history would now be lost.

But an anthropologist, however sympathetic, tends to treat an indigenous chant or rite as an object, and may not be able to fully enter its inwardness, its spirit, the perspective of those who actually sing it. An anthropologist sees cultures, one wants to say, as a physician sees patients. The penetration, the sharing, of different consciousnesses and cultures needs skills beyond those of the historian or the scientist; it needs artistic and poetic powers of a special kind. Auden, for instance, identified with Iceland (his first name, Wystan, was Icelandic; and an early book was his Letters from Iceland ) – but it is his linguistic and poetic powers which make his version of the Elder Edda, the great saga of Iceland, such an uncanny recreation of the original.

And it is this which gives unique value to the work of Bill Peck, a physician and poet who has spent the last thirty-five years living and working in Micronesia. As a young doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service, he was shocked by his first experience in Micronesia as an official observer of the atomic tests, and appalled by the treatment of the islanders. Later, as commissioner of health for the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (as Micronesia was called), he attracted energetic and romantic physicians (including John Steele and later Greg Dever) to help him develop new health services (now the Micronesian Health Service) and train native nurses to be physician’s aides.

Living in Chuuk in the early 1970s, he became increasingly conscious of the ancient traditions and myths of the Chuukese, and had a ‘conversion experience’ when he met Chief Kintoki Joseph of Udot. He spent several weeks with the chief, listening, recording. This, he says, was

This encounter opened a new dedication for Bill – to record and preserve, to recreate for posterity, the songs and myths of Chuuk and of all the Micronesian cultures (though only a fraction of his work has been published, in his Chuukese Testament and I Speak the Beginning, as well as a handful of articles and poems). His is a voice, a scientific and poetic transparency, as remarkable as any in Micronesia. In Rota, where he has retired to live and write (and where I met him), he is an honorary citizen, the only non-Chamorro ever accorded this honor. ‘Here I am,’ he said as I finally left him, ‘an old doctor, an old poet, in my eighty-third year, translating, preserving the old legends for the future – trying to give back to these people some of the gifts they have given me.’

23

There may be as many as thirty thousand of these tiny biolumi-nescent creatures in a cubic foot of seawater, and many observers have attested to the extraordinary brilliance of seas filled with Noctiluca. Charles Frederick Holder, in his 1887 Living Lights: A Popular Account of Phosphorescent Animals and Vegetables, relates how M. de Tessan described the phosphorescent waves as ‘appearing like the vivid flashes of lightning,’ giving enough illumination to read by:

Holder continues his account of these ‘living asteroids’:

Humboldt also described this phenomenon, in his Views of Nature:

24

Although O’Connell’s story sounds more like a fantasy, it tallies with Melville’s experiences a decade later and William Mariner’s several decades before. Thus Finau Ulukalala II, the most powerful chief in Tonga, took a great liking to Mariner, a young English sailor who had survived the massacre of half of his crewmates in 1806. The chief appointed one of his wives as Mariner’s ‘mother’ and teacher, had him indoctrinated in the ways of the tribe, and then adopted him into his own household, giving him the name of his deceased son. Similarly, when Melville jumped ship in the Marquesas in 1842 and wound up in the valley of the Typee, the most powerful chief in the valley, Mehevi, adopted him, and gave him his daughter Pe’ue (Fayaway) as teacher and lover.

Melville’s story, while it charmed readers, was generally seen as romantic fiction, although Melville himself always insisted on its veracity – a century later anthropologists were able to confirm his story, which had been indelibly recorded in the oral history of the remaining Typee. It was easier for O’Connell to obtain credence for his story, for he arrived back in the United States tattooed from top to toe; indeed, he went on to tell his story all over the country, billed as ‘the Tattooed Irishman.’

25

The way in which human populations have met ‘mysterious ends on over a dozen Polynesian islands’ has been investigated by M.I. Weisler, particularly in relation to Pitcairn and Henderson, which are among the world’s most remote and isolated islands. Both of these were colonized from the parent island, Mangareva, around 1000 A.D.

Henderson, a coral atoll with little soil and no permanent fresh water, could not support more than fifty people, but Pitcairn, a volcanic island, was able to support several hundred. At first, when these two populations remained in touch with each other and with the parent colony on Mangareva, and the populations did not exceed their resources, they were able to maintain a social and ecological balance. But expanding populations, hypothesizes Weisler, deforested Mangareva and Pitcairn and drove the seabirds and tortoises on Henderson to near-extinction. Mangareva’s population survived, but ‘descended into an orgy of war and cannibalism,’ in Jared Diamond’s words, and fell out of contact with Henderson and Pitcairn around 1450. Without the physical and cultural contact of Mangareva, these populations were now doomed, shrank into themselves, and finally vanished around 1600. Diamond speculates on what may have occurred in these last, pathetic years:

If they managed to avoid all these gruesome fates, Diamond stresses, the islanders ‘would have run up against the problem that fifty people are too few to constitute a viable population.’ Even a society of several hundred ‘is insufficient to propel human culture indefinitely,’ if it is isolated; even if it survives physically, it will become stagnant and un-creative, regressed and culturally ‘inbred.’

When I collected stamps as a boy, I was especially pleased by the stamps of Pitcairn, and the idea that this remote island was populated by only seventy people, all descendants of the Bounty mutineers. But of course, the Pitcairners now have access to the larger world, with modern communications and frequent ship and air traffic.

26

Darwin marvelled at the survival of these fragile atolls:

27

Cook learned of many instances of accidental migrations, often due to the strong westward trade winds. Landing at Atiu, he found three survivors who had been cast ashore from Tahiti, seven hundred miles away. They had set out in a party of twenty, expecting to make a brief journey from Tahiti to Raiatea, a few miles away, but had been blown off course. Similar unintentional voyages, he thought, might explain ‘how the South Seas, may have been peopled; especially those [Islands] that lie remote from any inhabited continent, or from each other.’

28

I thought of Montaigne’s words in relation to Knut that day:

29

Like Knut, Frances Futterman has acquired an enormous catalog of information about color, its physical and neurological basis, its meaning and value for other people. She is curious about (and finds that other achromatopes are intrigued by) its meaning and value, and I was especially struck by this when I visited her office in Berkeley, which was filled with bookshelves containing the hundreds of volumes she has collected. Many of these she acquired during her years of special education and rehabilitation teaching with the blind and partially sighted – others deal with scotopic or night vision. Thus on one wall, I saw titles like The World of Night: The Fascinating Drama of Nature as Enacted between Dusk and Dawn; Nature by Night; The Coral Reef by Night; After the Sun Goes Down: The Story of Animals at Night; The Shadow Book (a photographic-esthetic study); Images from the Dark; Night Eyes; Black Is Beautiful (black-and-white landscape photos) – books about the world she loves and knows.

On the other wall there were several shelves of books about color, that strange phenomenon which she can never perceive and never really know, but about which she is endlessly curious. Some of these were scientific studies on the physics of color or the physiology of vision; others dealt with linguistic aspects of color – The 750 Commonest Color Metaphors in Daily Life; Seeing Red and Tickled Pink: Color Terms in Everyday Language. There were books on the esthetics and philosophy of color, ranging from anthropological treatises to Wittgenstein on color. Others, she told me, had been collected simply for their colorful titles [Color Me Beautiful: Discover Your Natural Beauty through the Colors That Make You Look Great and Feel Fabulous ). There was a variety of books for younger ages, with titles like Hello Yellow, Ant and Bee and Rainbow: A Story about Colors, and her favorite, Hailstones and Halibut Bones: Adventures in Color. She often recommends these for achroma-topic children, so that they can ‘learn’ the colors of common objects, and the emotional ‘valence’ of different colors – necessary knowledge in a chromatopic world.

Frances is also hugely knowledgeable about specialized sunglasses for visually impaired people, and had advised us on which type to bring to Pingelap. ‘She has collated a huge amount of practical information on all kinds of aids for achromatopic people,’ Knut remarked, ‘and although she repeatedly refers to herself as a nonscientific person, I regard her as a genuine investigator in the real meaning of the term.’

30

This is very much what happened with Virgil, a man virtually blind from birth whom Bob and I had worked with (his case history, ‘To See and Not See,’ is given in An Anthropologist on Mars ). When it was suggested that Virgil’s sight might be restored by surgery, he could not help being intrigued and excited by the prospect of seeing. But after the operation, which was seen, medically, as ‘successful,’ the reality, for Virgil, was bewildering. He had built up his world entirely from nonvisual information, and the sudden introduction of visual stimuli threw him into a state of shock and confusion. He was overwhelmed by new sensations, visual sensations, but he could make no sense of them, he could not give them any order or meaning. The ‘gift’ of sight disturbed him profoundly, disturbed a mode of being, habits and strategies he had had for fifty years; and, increasingly, he would shut his eyes, or sit in the darkness, to shut out this frightening perceptual assault, and regain the equilibrium which had been taken from him with the surgery.

On the other hand, I recently received a fascinating letter from a deaf man who received a cochlear implant in middle age. Though he experienced many difficulties and confusions, analogous to those of Virgil (and though the use of cochlear implants can often be fraught with problems), he can now enjoy melodies and harmonies, which before he could neither perceive nor imagine.

31

Traditionally, very few of the islanders who enter medical schools have got their degrees, and Greg Dever has worked to develop a curriculum relevant to the resources and needs of the Pacific – he was very proud of his first class, of which two-thirds of the entering students had been graduated, including the first women physicians from Pohnpei.

32

Kahn notes that ‘the major credit for smallpox is usually ceded to Spain, for leprosy to Germany, for dysentery to England, for venereal disease to the U.S., and for tuberculosis to Japan.’ Leprosy was, indeed, widespread throughout the Pacific: there was, until fairly recently, a leper colony on Pingelap; and for many years, a large leper colony on Guam; and, of course, there was the infamous leper colony of the Hawaiian Islands, on Molokai, which Jack London wrote about in ‘The Sheriff of Kona’ and ‘Koolau the Leper.’

33

Melville includes a footnote on this term in Omoo:

34

Our Western diseases have had a disastrous effect on the native populations of the Pacific – scarcely less disastrous than those of military conquest, commercial exploitation, and religion. Jack London, visiting the valley of Typee sixty-five years after Melville, found the splendid physical perfection of which Melville spoke almost entirely destroyed:

Wondering what had befallen the Typee, London speaks of both immunity and evolution:

35

Both Joakim and Valentine displayed in a high degree what the naturalist E.O. Wilson calls ‘biophilia.’ He defines this as an ‘inborn affinity human beings have for other forms of life’ – an affinity which can extend itself to an ecological feeling, a feeling for habitat. Howard Gardner, well known for his theory of multiple intelligences (mathematico-logical, visuo-spatial, kinaesthetic, social, etc.) is now inclined to recognize such a ‘biological’ intelligence as a distinctive one. Though such an intelligence may be enormously developed in a Darwin or a Wallace, it is present to varying degrees in us all. Others besides naturalists may be richly endowed with it and may express it in their vocations or avocations: gardeners, foresters, farmers, and hor-ticulturalists; fishermen, horsemen, cattlemen, animal trainers, birdwatchers. Many artists express this in their work – D. H. Lawrence, to my mind, is miraculous here and seems to know directly, by a sort of connaturality what it is like to be a snake or mountain lion; to be able to enter the souls of other animals. Biophilia may run in families (one thinks of the Hookers, the Tradescants, the Forsters, the Bartrams, etc., where both father and son were passionate botanists); and it may be unusually common in people with Tourette’s syndrome or autism. One has to wonder whether it may not have – as linguistic competence and musical intelligence have – a clear neurological basis, which may be more richly developed by experience and education, but is none the less innate.

36

Stevenson remarked on the ‘attractive power’ of the Pacific islands in In the South Seas:

37

Two-thirds of Krakatau Island, originally six miles long and clothed in tropical rain forest, disappeared in the huge eruption of 1883, but a remnant of the southern volcano was left standing, along with two close neighbors, Sertung and Panjang. All of these were covered by a thirty-foot blanket of hot ash, so that ‘not a plant, not a blade of grass, not a fly, survived,’ in Ian Thornton’s account. Three years later, ferns were the first plants to recolonize the island. These were followed by casuarinas, birds which had migrated from Australia, and a monitor lizard.

38

Biologically, as well as geologically, continental islands (such as, for instance, New Zealand, Madagascar, or New Guinea) are entirely different from oceanic ones. For continental islands are broken-off pieces of the main and (at least initially) may have all the species of the parent continent. Once broken off, of course, they become as isolated as any other island, and their isolation (and altered conditions) may promote the most extravagant speciation, as with the unique primates of Madagascar or the flightless birds of New Zealand.

There are also diseases endemic to islands, diseases which have emerged or persisted because of their isolation, and are thus analogous to an island’s endemic flora and fauna. This too was recognized more than a century ago, by the great German epidemiologist Hirsch. The study of such diseases, he thought, would constitute a ‘geographical and historical pathology’ and such a science, he wrote, ‘in an ideally complete form, would furnish a medical history of mankind.’

39

More than forty varieties of banana are grown on Pohnpei, and some of these seem to be unique to the island. The banana has a remarkable tendency to somatic mutation, to ‘sports’ – some of these are disadvantageous, but others may lead to plants which are more disease resistant, or fruit which is more delectable in one way or another; and this has stimulated cultivation of some five hundred varieties worldwide.

The major banana sports are regarded as species (and given binomial, Linnaean names), the minor sports as varieties only (which bear only local names). But the difference, as Darwin remarks, is only one of degree: ‘Species and variations,’ he writes in the Origin, ‘blend into each other by an insensible series; and a series impresses the mind with the idea of an actual passage.’ In time, many varieties will diverge sufficiently to become distinct species.

The importation of bananas onto islands, as it happens, has also shown us something of the rate of evolution in sympatric species. Thus, as H.W. Menard notes, ‘Five new species of banana moths have evolved in Hawaii since the Polynesians introduced the banana to Hawaii only about one thousand years ago.’ For islands are forcing grounds for evolutionary change, whether of plants or animals, insects or microbes; under the special conditions of island life, the slow processes of mutation and specialization may be amplified and accelerated to a spectacular degree.

J.B.S. Haldane once proposed a way of quantifying the rate of change of any variable – a bird’s beak, an ammonite’s whorl – as it evolved, suggesting that a change of one percent per million years be called a ‘darwin.’ Evolution generally proceeded, he thought, in ‘millidarwins,’ and he imagined (as Darwin himself did) that with this infinitesimal rate evolution could never actually be seen. But we are now finding (as Jonathan Weiner recounts in The Beak of the Finch ) that evolution can occur at a very much faster rate when selection pressures are high. This has been studied by Peter and Rosemary Grant, with the very finch populations Darwin himself observed, on the small Galapagos island of Daphne Major. Following a catastrophic drought, the finch population showed clear evolutionary changes (in beak and body size) in a matter of months, an ‘evolutionary rate,’ Weiner calculates, of 25,000 darwins.

One does not need to deal only with rare and catastrophic circumstances to see evolution in action. A beautiful example has recently been observed by Martin Cody and Jacob Overton with the seeds of some daisies, which are blown by the wind to small islets off the Pacific coast of Canada. A fluffball or pappus holds the seed aloft, and its size determines, other things being equal, how far the seed is liable to be carried. Once the plants have settled on an island, their pappi become shorter, so they are less liable to be dispersed. These changes, like those of finches, have been observed within the span of a year or two.

But the most astounding example of very rapid, massive evolution relates to the more than three hundred species of cichlid fish unique to Lake Victoria. DNA studies (by Axel Meyer) have indicated that these species diverged very recently in evolutionary terms, and there is now strong geologic evidence that the lake itself is only 12,000 years old. While Darwin’s Galapagos finches evolved perhaps twenty different species over four million years, the cichlids of Lake Victoria have shown a rate of speciation more than five thousand times greater.

40

Jack London, in Uaitape, found Bora-Borans dancing ‘with strange phosphorescent flowers in their hair that pulsed and dimmed and glowed in the moonlight.’

41

Paul Theroux has called sakau (known on many islands as kava) ‘the most benign drug in the world.’ Its benignness was also stressed by Cook when he encountered it on his first visit to Tahiti (a related variety of pepper in New Zealand is now named captaincookia in his honor). Though it was described by naturalists on Cook’s first voyage, credit for its ‘discovery’ is usually given to the Forsters, the botanical father and son who accompanied Cook on his second voyage, and the plant has since been known by the name they gave it, Piper methysticum Forst.

We had all been struck, when we arrived in Pohnpei, by the extraordinary slowness of drivers and pedestrians in Kolonia, but put this down to unhurriedness, a sense of leisure, ‘island time.’ But some of this slowness was clearly physiological, a sakau-induced psychomotor retardation. Sakau use and abuse is widespread here, although the effects of this are generally not dangerous. Dr. G.A. Holland mentions having seen only one sakau-related accident in his many years of practice in Micronesia; this was an elderly man who stumbled while returning home from a sakau party, fell, and broke his neck.

It was remarked even in the last century that sakau was incompatible with alcohol, but in recent years, its use has been much less restrained by tradition, and some younger Pohnpeians have taken to drinking it with beer, which can produce drastic changes in blood pressure and even sudden death. Chronic sakau drinkers, moreover, may develop a hard, scaly skin; we saw many older Pohnpeians with ichthyosis, or ‘fish’ skin.

42

John Updike, in In the Beauty of the Lilies, re-reverses the foreground⁄background reversal of Joyce’s image, and writes of a ‘humid blue-black sky and its clusters of unreachable stars.’

43

I had not heard of these effects normally occurring after sakau. But I had had a low-level visual migraine for the last three days; I had been seeing squiggles and patterns since landing in Pingelap, and the sakau seemed to have exacerbated this. Knut told me that he sometimes had attacks of migraine too, and I wondered whether a direct stimulation of the color areas in the brain, as may occur in a visual migraine, could evoke color even in someone with no normal experience of it. Someone had once asked him if he saw migraine phosphenes in color – but he had replied, ‘I would not know how to answer.’

44

There was, I had been told, a cluster of houses near the Edwards’ on Pingelap, all of which belonged to achromatopic families – but it was unclear whether these families had clustered together because they were related (as virtually everyone on Pingelap is) or because they all shared the maskun.

45

A vast epidemic of viral sleepy-sickness, encephalitis lethargica, starting in Europe in the winter of 1916-17, swept through the world in the following years, coming to an end in the mid-1920s. Many patients seemed to recover from the acute illness entirely, only to fall victim, years or decades later, to strange (and sometimes progressive) post-encephalitic syndromes. There were thousands of such patients before the 1940s, and every neurologist at the time had a vivid idea of these syndromes. But by the 1960s, there were only a few hundred of these patients left – most very disabled and forgotten in chronic hospitals; and neurologists training at this time were scarcely aware of them. In 1967, when L-DOPA became available for treating parkinsonism, there were only, to my knowledge, two ‘colonies’ or communities of post-encephalitic patients left in the world (at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx and the Highlands Hospital in London).

46

Zimmerman’s brief report, in fact, was written up for the U.S. Navy, but not available generally; its existence was virtually unknown for almost a decade. It was not until the late 1950s that his paper was recognized as the first to report on the Guam disease.

47

Hirano’s visit to Guam is still vivid for him thirty-five years later – the long and complex journey there, his delight in the island, the patients he saw, the autopsies he performed, the microscopic sections he prepared. He presented his findings at the 1961 annual meeting of the American Association of Neuropathologists – the same meeting at which, three years later, Steele, Olszewski, and Richardson presented their findings on progressive supranuclear palsy, another equally strange ‘new’ disease. Hirano was struck at the time by the fact that ‘the histological and cytological features were essentially similar in the two,’ and concluded, in his remarks as a discussant of their paper, that:

48

It was Freycinet’s impression that though the cycads had always been common on Guam, they had not been eaten ‘until the Spanish taught the natives how to separate its substance from the poisonous juice it contained.’ But this is a matter which has to be questioned, for in many other cultures the use of cycads and the knowledge of how to prepare and detoxify them go back to prehistoric times, as David Jones remarks in Cycads of the World:

49

Cycads, properly speaking, do not have fruits, for fruits come from flowers, and cycads have no flowers. But it is natural to speak of ‘fruits,’ for the seeds are enclosed in a brightly colored, luscious outer tunic (or sarcotesta), which resembles a greengage or plum.

50

Raymond Fosberg spent his entire professional life studying tropical plants and islands. ‘From a childhood fascination with islands,’ he remarked in a 1985 commencement address at the University of Guam:

During the Second World War, he worked in the tropical jungles of Colombia in search of cinchona bark to provide quinine for combat troops in malarial areas and helped to export nine thousand tons of the bark. After the war, he devoted himself to the islands of Micronesia, cataloguing minutely their plant life and studying the effects of human development and the introduction of alien species upon the vulnerable habitats of islands with their native flora and fauna.

51

Botanists now recognize more than two hundred cycad species and eleven genera – the newest genus, Chigua, was discovered in Colombia in 1990 by Dennis Stevenson of the New York Botanical Garden.

52

Cycas revoluta is sometimes called the sago palm (or king sago), and C. circinalis the false sago palm (or queen sago). The word ‘sago’ is itself a generic one, referring to an edible starchy material obtained from any plant source. Sago proper, so to speak (such as English children in my generation were brought up on), is obtained from the trunks of various palms (especially Metroxylon ), but it also occurs in the stems of cycads, even though they are botanically quite different. The male trunks of C. revoluta contain about fifty percent starch, the female ones about half this. There is also a good deal of starch in their seeds – and the seeds, of course, are replenishable, whereas harvesting of the trunk kills the entire plant.

Similar considerations apply to ‘arrowroot,’ which, properly speaking, is obtained from the rootstock of the arrowroot, Maranta, but is also extracted from other plants, including the cycad Zamia. The Seminole Indians in Florida had long made use of the Zamia (or koonti) which grew wild there, and in the 1880s a substantial industry was set up, producing twenty tons or more of ‘Florida arrowroot’ annually, for use in infant foods, biscuits, chocolates, and spaghetti. The industry closed down in the 1920s, after overharvesting the cycad almost to extinction.

53

The consumption of this sake prepared from C. revoluta, David Jones remarks,

It would go well, one feels, with a meal of puffer fish, or fugu.

54

Georg Rumpf (known to posterity as Rumphius), already a passionate naturalist and botanist in his twenties, enlisted with the Dutch East India Company and set sail for Batavia and the Moluccas in 1652. In the following decade he travelled widely in Southeast Asia, spending much time on the Malabar coast of India, where in 1658 he documented a new plant – this was the first cycad ever described, and the one which Linnaeus, a century later, was to call Cycas circinalis, and to take as the cardinal ‘type’ of all cycads. A few years later, Rumphius was appointed assistant to the Dutch governor of Ambon, in the Moluccas, where he embarked on his magnum opus, the Herbarium Amboinensis, describing 1,200 species of plants peculiar to Southeast Asia.

Though stricken by blindness in 1670, he continued his work, helped now by sighted assistants. H.C.D. de Wit, in a 1952 address on Rumphius at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam (on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Rumphius’ death) described in detail his labors on the Herbarium, which were to take forty years and were punctuated by a relentless series of travails, including the death of his wife and daughter:

Both women were killed by collapsing walls.

Rumphius returned to work on his manuscript, but in 1687 a calamitous fire burned the town of Amboina to the ground, destroying his library and all his manuscripts. Still undaunted, and aided by his remarkable abilities and determination, he began rewriting the Herbarium, and the original copy of the first six books finally started on its way to Amsterdam in 1692, only to be lost when the ship carrying it was sunk. (Fortunately, the governor-general of Batavia, Cam-phuys, had taken the precaution of having Rumphius’ manuscript copied before shipping it on to Holland.) Rumphius continued working on the last six volumes, but suffered another setback when sixty-one colored plates were stolen from his office in Batavia in 1695. Rumphius himself died in 1702, some months after completing the Herbarium – but his great work was not published until the middle of the century. The final work, despite all these mishaps, contains nearly 1,700 pages of text and 700 plates, including half a dozen magnificent plates of cycads.

55

Sidney Parkinson, the artist who voyaged on the Endeavour with Cook, described the plants they encountered:

Cycas circinalis does not occur in Australia, and the cycad which Cook’s crew encountered there, David Jones suggests, was probably the native C. media.

56

Lathyrism is a form of paralysis long endemic in parts of India, where it is associated with eating the chickling or grass pea, Lathyrus sativus; a little lathyrus does no harm, but sometimes it is the only food available – and then the hideous choice is to be paralyzed or starve.

It was similar, in some ways, with the ‘jake paralysis’ which paralyzed tens of thousands of Americans during Prohibition. Driven to seek some source of alcohol, these unfortunates turned to a readily available extract of Jamaica ginger (or ‘jake’), not knowing it contained large quantities of a poison (later found to be a toxic organophospho-rus compound) which could lead to paralysis. (My own research, as a student, was an attempt to elucidate its mechanism of action, using chickens as experimental animals.)

The Minamata Bay paralysis first became apparent in the mid-1950s, in Japanese fishing villages surrounding the bay. Those affected would first become unsteady, tremulous, and suffer various sensory disturbances, going on (in the worst cases) to become deaf, blind, and demented. There was a high incidence of birth defects, and domestic animals and seabirds seemed affected too. The local fish fell under suspicion, and it was found that when they were fed to cats, they indeed produced the same progressive and fatal neurological disease. Fishing was banned in Minamata Bay in 1957, and with this the disease disappeared. The precise cause was still a mystery, and it was only the following year that it was observed by Douglas McAlpine that the clinical features of the disease were virtually identical to those of methyl mercury poisoning (of which there had been isolated cases in England in the late 1930s). It took several more years to trace the toxin back to its source (Kurland, among others, played a part here): a factory on the bay was discharging mercuric chloride (which is moderately toxic) into the water, and this was converted by microorganisms in the lake to methyl mercury (which is intensely toxic). This in turn was consumed by other microorganisms, starting a long ascent through the food chain, before ending up in fish, and people.

57

That lytico or bodig can remain almost stationary for years in this way is utterly unlike the relentless progression of classic Parkinson’s disease or ALS, but such an apparent halting of the disease process was sometimes seen in post-encephalitic parkinsonism or amyotrophy. Thus one patient I have seen, Selma B., immediately following the encephalitic epidemic in 1917, developed a mild parkinsonism on one side of her body, which has remained essentially unchanged for more than seventy-five years. Another man, Ralph G., developed a gross, polio-like wasting of one arm as part of a post-encephalitic syndrome – but this has neither advanced nor spread in fifty years. (This is one reason why Gajdusek regards post-encephalitic syndromes not as active disease processes but as hypersensitivity reactions.) And yet such arrests are the exception, and lytico-bodig, in the vast majority of cases, is relentlessly progressive.

58

I was sorry to see that Darwin, who seems to love and admire every form of life, speaks (in The Voyage of the Beagle ) of ‘the slimy disgusting Holothuriae…which the Chinese gourmands are so fond of.’ Indeed, they are not loved. Safford refers to seeing them ‘creep about like huge brown slugs.’ Jack London, in The Cruise of the Snark, speaks of them as ‘monstrous sea-slugs’ which ‘ooze’ and ‘writhe’ beneath his feet – the only negative note for him as he skims (‘in a chromatic ecstasy’) above the Pacific reef.

59

In his history of Pacific exploration, J.C. Beaglehole speaks of three phases – the Spanish explorations of the sixteenth century, ‘animated by a mingled zeal for religion and gold’; the Dutch voyages of the seventeenth, undertaken for commercial reasons; and the final English and French ones, devoted expressly to the acquisition of knowledge – but he sees a spirit of curiosity and wonder, no less than conquest, as animating all the explorations. Certainly this was true of Antonio Pigafetta, a gentleman-volunteer who joined Magellan, ‘desirous of seeing the wonderful things of the ocean,’ and wrote the best history of the voyage. And it was true of the Dutch voyages, which took naturalists to never before explored parts of the world – thus Rumphius and Rheede, going to the Dutch East Indies in the seventeenth century, made major contributions to biological knowledge (and, specifically, provided the first descriptions and illustrations of cycads and other plants hitherto unknown in Europe). And it was especially true of Dampier and Cook, who were, in a sense, precursors of the great nineteenth-century naturalist-explorers.

But Magellan’s reputation has not fared as well. His discovery of Guam, especially, took place under very adverse circumstances. His men were starving and sick with scurvy, reduced to eating rats and the hides which kept the rigging from chafing; they had been at sea for ninety-eight days before they finally sighted land on March 6, 1521. When they anchored in Umatac Bay and went ashore, the inhabitants stole their skiff and various odds and ends. Magellan, normally temperate, overreacted in a monstrous way, taking a large party of men ashore, burning forty or fifty houses, and killing seven Chamorros. He christened Guam (and Rota) the Ladrones, the Isles of Thieves, and treated their inhabitants with cruelty and contempt. Magellan’s own death came soon afterward, at the hands of a crowd of infuriated natives he had provoked in the Philippines. And yet Magellan should not be judged entirely by his actions in the final months of his life. For his conduct up to this point had been both moderate and masterly, in his handling of sick, angry, impatient, and sometimes mutinous crews; in his brilliant discovery of the Strait of Magellan – and in his usually respectful feeling for the indigenous peoples he encountered. And yet, as with all the early Spanish and Portuguese explorers, a sort of zealous violence was built in – Beaglehole calls this ‘a sort of Christian arrogance,’ and feels it overcame Magellan at the end.

This arrogance seems to have been wholly absent from the admirable Pigafetta, who (though himself wounded at the time of Magellan’s death) described the entire voyage – its natural wonders, the peoples they visited, the desperation of the crew, and Magellan’s own character, with its heroism, its candor, its mystical depths, its fatal flaws – with the sympathy of a naturalist, a psychologist, and a historian.

60

A frightful picture of leprosy on Guam is to be found in Arago’s description of the Freycinet voyage:

61

The rarity of Safford’s understanding and sympathy is brought out by comparison with the almost contemporary account of Antoine- Alfred Marche. The Chamorros, Marche reported,

…do not engage in any serious work…The indigenes today are intelligent but very lazy, proud, and dishonest, incapable of gratitude, and, like their ancestors, without any moral sense…All that is frivolous…attracts them…without limit or decency…One finds a few individuals who have learned how to benefit from our civilization, but they are the few.

62

The little village of Umatac is strangely peaceful, a backwater now – though there is a memorial to Magellan just outside town, remembering that momentous day in the spring of 1521 when he landed at Guam. For Julia Steele, a journalist and historian (and John’s daughter), the village is symbolic of that moment of first contact:

63

Though Lake Fena is the largest above-ground reservoir on Guam, most of the fresh water is provided by an exceptionally large water lens which floats above the saltwater aquifer underlying the northern end of the island. Fena is a manmade lake whose waters add to this supply. It is rumored that the lake was built as a ‘quenching facility’ to stop a chain reaction should an accident occur in the surrounding nuclear storage area.

64

In hindsight, John feels, it is far from clear whether these few non-Chamorro immigrants had true lytico-bodig or classic ALS or parkinsonism. But some of their offspring, half Chamorro, have gone on to develop lytico-bodig. And though Kurland could not pursue the genetic hypothesis with the technology of the 1950s, he and his colleague W.C. Wiederholt are now looking at the children of the Californian Chamorros, to see if lytico-bodig appears in any of them.

65

Kuru, a fatal neurological disease which had been endemic in the area for a century or more, could be transmitted, Gajdusek found, by the ritual practice of eating the brains of the dead. The disease agent was a newly discovered form of virus, a so-called slow virus which could remain latent in the tissues for years before giving rise to actual symptoms. The elucidation of kuru might not have been accomplished, one feels, had Gajdusek not combined a very sharp and sophisticated medical curiosity with a deep and sympathetic knowledge of the cultural beliefs and traditions of the indigenous tribes in the region. Such a combination of medical, biological, and ethological passions has underlain almost all of his work and has driven him to investigate geographical isolates throughout the world – not only the kuru and lytico-bodig in New Guinea, but the endemic goitrous cretinism, the cysticercosis with epidemic epilepsy, and the pseudohermaphroditism there; the muscular dystrophy in New Britain; the congenital orthopedic deformities in the New Hebrides; the Viliuisk encephalitis in Siberia; the hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome in Korea; the genetic diseases of Australian aborigines; and dozens of others (during his 1972 expedition on the research vessel Alpha Helix, he paid a brief visit to Pingelap). Besides his hundreds of technical articles, Gajdusek has kept immensely detailed journals for the last forty years, which combine the hard science of his investigations with vivid evocations of places and people, and form a unique record of the life-work of one of the most extraordinary physician-naturalists of our time.

66

A very full discussion of the ecological disaster in Guam has recently been provided by David Quammen in his book The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. He describes how the native bird populations, which had been numerous and varied in 1960, were brought to the verge of extinction little more than twenty years later. No one at the time had any idea what was causing this:

It was only in 1986 that Guam’s ‘ecological murder mystery’ was solved and the bird-eating tree snake, Boiga irregularis, was proved to be the culprit. There had been a spreading explosion of these snakes, starting in the southern savannahs in the 1950s, reaching the northern forests by 1980, correlating precisely with the wave of bird extinctions. It was estimated in the mid-eighties that there were now thirteen thousand snakes to the square mile, three million on the whole island. Having consumed all the birds by this time, the snakes turned to other prey – skinks, geckos, other lizards, and even small mammals – and these too have shown catastrophic declines. Going with this there has been a vast increase in the numbers of orb-weaving spiders (I saw their intricate webs everywhere), probably due to the decline of the lizards. Thus the inauguration of what ecologists call a trophic cascade, the accelerating imbalance of a previously balanced ecosystem.

67

Lynn Raulerson had told me of something even rarer, an immense tassel fern, Lycopodium phlegmaria, which used to be common in the forest, but had now almost vanished, because most specimens had been poached for cultivation as house plants. Both this and the great ribbon fern are also to be found in Australia, and Chamberlain, while cycad hunting there, was fascinated by these and wrote of them in his 1919 book The Living Cycads:

68

It is sometimes said (the term goes back to Charcot) that patients with Parkinson’s disease have a ‘reptilian’ stare. This is not just a picturesque (or pejorative) metaphor; normal access to the motor functions, which gives mammals their delicate motor flexibility, is impaired in parkinsonism; this leads to alternations of extreme immobility with sudden, almost explosive motion, which are reminiscent of some reptiles.

Parkinson himself was a paleontologist, as well as a physician, and his 1804 book, Organic Remains of a Former World, is one of the great pioneer texts of paleontology. One wonders whether he may have partly regarded parkinsonism as an atavism, a reversion, the uncovering, through disease, of an ancestral, ‘antediluvian’ mode of function dating from the ancient past.

Whether or not this is so of parkinsonism is arguable, but one can certainly see reversion to, or disclosure of, a variety of primitive behaviors in post-encephalitic syndromes on occasion, and in a rare condition, branchial myoclonus, arising from lesions in the brain stem. Here there occur rhythmic movements of the palate, middle-ear muscles, and certain muscles in the neck – an odd and unintelligible pattern, until one realizes that these are the only vestiges of the gill arches, the branchial musculature, in man. Branchial myoclonus is, in effect, a gill movement in man, a revelation of the fact that we still carry our fishy ancestors, our evolutionary precursors, within us.

69

About five years ago, John became intrigued by the number of lytico-bodig patients with gaze palsies. His colleague Terry Cox, a neuro-ophthalmologist, confirmed this with further eye examinations and found that half of these patients also showed strange tortuous tracks in the retina (these cannot easily be seen with an ordinary ophthalmoscope, but only with indirect ophthalmoscopy – and thus would escape notice on a routine eye exam). The tracks seem to affect just the upper layer of retinal pigment, and to cause no symptoms.

‘This retinal pigmentary epitheliopathy,’ John said, ‘is confined to the Chamorros – it has never been observed in a Caucasian immigrant, or in Filipinos, who have lived here since the 1940s. It’s rare in anyone under fifty – the youngest person we’ve seen with it was born in 1957. It’s present in twenty percent of Chamorros over the age of fifty; but in fifty percent of those with lytico-bodig. We have been following patients who showed RPE in the early 1980s, and more than two-thirds of them have gone on to develop lytico-bodig within ten years.

‘The condition doesn’t seem to be progressive; it’s more like the scar of some trauma to the eye many decades ago. We wonder if it could be a marker for the lytico-bodig, something which came on at the same time as the disease – even though we are only picking it up now. We are checking now to see if there are any similar findings in patients with PSP or post-encephalitic parkinsonism.

‘The tracks have some resemblance to those made by the larvae of a botfly, but we don’t have any botflies on Guam. Maybe the tracks are made by the larvae of some other fly – perhaps one which transmitted a virus that caused the lytico-bodig. Or maybe it’s an effect of a toxin. We don’t yet know if it is unique to the lytico-bodig or not, or whether it is significant at all. But all these coincidences are tantalizing, and this is another thing that makes me think that the lytico-bodig could be caused by an organism, a virus – perhaps one transmitted by an otherwise unobjectionable parasite.’

70

The term ‘cynomolgus’ means, literally, ‘dog-milking.’ The Cy-nomolgi were an ancient human tribe in Libya. Why this name should be given to some macaques (which are also known as ‘crab-eating macaques’) is unclear, though John Clay suggests that a better translation might be ‘dog-suckling,’ as macaques may indeed suckle other animals.

71

There was one report in a Japanese journal in the 1920s regarding an unusually high incidence of bulbar palsy in Saipan, though it is unclear whether this could have been a manifestation of lytico. Of the fifteen cases of lytico-bodig in Saipan described by Gajdusek et al., all but two had been born before the First World War and the youngest had been born in 1929. In several cases, according to John, the parents of these patients had been born in Guam or Rota.

72

Research on cycad neurotoxicity, somewhat dormant since the 1960s, has again become very active in several places. Tom Mabry and Delia Brownson at the University of Texas at Austin are working on the relation between cycads and lytico-bodig, looking at the effect of the putative Guam neurotoxins on rat brain-cell preparations. And Alan Seawright at the (Australian) National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicity has been investigating the effects of MAM and BMAA in experimental animals.

73

Zhang and his colleagues, re-examining the geographic variation of lytico-bodig on Guam over a twenty-year period, have confirmed the very close correlation of local cycasin levels with the disease. But such ‘correlations,’ they point out, however close, do not necessarily imply a simple cause-and-effect relationship. Though there are rare forms of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and ALS with a simple Mendelian pattern, these are the exception and not the rule. Ordinary Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS, it seems, are complex disorders in which the actual expression of disease is contingent on a variety of genetic and environmental factors. Indeed we are now discovering, as Spencer points out, that such gene-environment interactions are involved in many other conditions. Thus a rare but terrible side effect of streptomycin – which was introduced for the treatment of tuberculosis, but caused a total and irremediable nerve deafness in some patients – has now been found to depend on the presence of a mitochondrial DNA defect that gives no hint of its existence unless streptomycin is given.

A variety of disorders, sometimes familial but lacking the usual Mendelian patterns of inheritance, may arise, similarly, from mutations in the mitochondrial DNA. This seems to be the case in a rare syndrome in which deafness is combined with diabetes, nephropathy, photomyoclonus, and cerebral degeneration (this syndrome, or a very similar one, was originally described in 1964 by Herrmann, Aguilar, and Sacks). Mitochondrial DNA is transmitted only maternally, and Wiederholt and others have wondered whether, in the critical period between 1670 and 1710, when the Chamorro males were virtually exterminated and the population reduced, in effect, to a few hundred females, such a mitochondrial mutation may have arisen and spread in the generations that followed, especially in certain families. Such a mutation may have sensitized those in whom it occurred so that otherwise benign environmental agents might, in them, set off the fatal degenerative processes of lytico-bodig.

74

Marie Stopes was born in London in 1880, showed insatiable curiosity and scientific gifts as an adolescent, and despite strong disapprobation (similar to that which delayed the entry of women into medicine at the time) was able to enter University College, where she obtained a Gold Medal and a first-class degree in botany. Her passion for paleobotany was already developing by this time, and after graduating she went to the Botanical Institute in Munich, where she was the only woman among five hundred students. Her research on cycad ovules earned her a Ph.D. in botany, the first ever given a woman.

In 1905 she received her doctorate in science from London University, making her the youngest D.Sc. in the country. The following year, while working on a massive two-volume Cretaceous Flora for the British Museum, she also published The Study of Plant Life for Toung People, a delightful book which showed her literary power and her insight into youthful imaginations, no less than her botanical expertise. She continued to publish many scientific papers, and in 1910 another popular book, Ancient Plants. Other writings, romantic novels and poems, were also stirring in her at this time, and in A Journal from Japan she gave poignant fictional form to her own painfully frustrated love for an eminent Japanese botanist.

By this time other interests were competing with botany. Stopes wrote a letter to The Times supporting women’s suffrage, and became increasingly conscious of how much sexually, as well as politically and professionally, women needed to be liberated. From 1914 on, though there was an overlap with palaeobotany for a few years, Stopes’s work dealt essentially with human love and sexuality. She was the first to write about sexual intercourse in a matter-of-fact way, doing so with the same lucidity and accuracy she had in her description of the fertilization of cycad ovules – but also with a tenderness which was like a foretaste of D.H. Lawrence. Her books Married Love (1918), Letter to Working Mothers (1919), and Radiant Motherhood (1920) were immensely popular at the time; no one else spoke with quite her accent or authority.

Later Stopes met Margaret Sanger, the great American pioneer of birth control, and she became its chief advocate in England. Contraception, Its Theory, History and Practice was published in 1923, and this led to the setting up of Marie Stopes clinics in London and elsewhere. Her voice, her message, had little appeal after the Second World War, and her name, once instantly recognized by all, faded into virtual oblivion. And yet, even in old age, her paleobotanical interests never deserted her; coal balls, she often said, were really her first love.

75

The Copernican revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its revelation of the immensity of space, dealt a profound blow to man’s sense of being at the center of the universe; this was voiced by no one more poignantly than Pascal: ‘The whole visible world is but an imperceptible speck,’ he lamented; man was now ‘lost in this remote corner of Nature,’ closed into ‘the tiny cell where he lodges.’ And Kepler spoke of a ‘hidden and secret horror,’ a sense of being ‘lost’ in the infinity of space.

The eighteenth century, with its close attention to rocks and fossils and geologic processes, was to radically alter man’s sense of time as well (as Rossi, Gould, and McPhee, in particular, have emphasized). Evolutionary time, geologic time, deep time, was not a concept which came naturally or easily to the human mind, and once conceived, aroused fear and resistance.

There was great comfort in the feeling that the earth was made for man and its history coeval with his, that the past was to be measured on a human scale, no more than a few score of generations back to the first man, Adam. But now the biblical chronology of the earth was vastly extended, into a period of eons. Thus while Archbishop Ussher had calculated that the world was created in 4004 B.C., when Buffon introduced his secular view of nature – with man appearing only in the latest of seven epochs – he suggested an unprecedented age of 75,000 years for the earth. Privately, he increased this time scale by forty – the original figure in his manuscripts was three million years – and he did this (as Rossi notes) because he felt that the larger figure would be incomprehensible to his contemporaries, would give them too fearful a sense of the ‘dark abyss’ of time. Less than fifty years later, Playfair was to write of how, gazing at an ancient geologic unconformity, ‘the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.’

When Kant, in 1755, published his Theory of the Heavens, his vision of evolving and emerging nebulae, he envisaged that ‘millions of years and centuries’ had been required to arrive at the present state, and saw creation as being eternal and immanent. With this, in Buffon’s words, ‘the hand of God’ was eliminated from cosmology, and the age of the universe enormously extended. ‘Men in Hooke’s time had a past of six thousand years,’ as Rossi writes, but ‘those of Kant’s times were conscious of a past of millions of years.’

Yet Kant’s millions were still very theoretical, not yet firmly grounded in geology, in any concrete knowledge of the earth. The sense of a vast geologic time filled with terrestrial events, was not to come until the next century, when Lyell, in his Principles of Geology, was able to bring into one vision both the immensity and the slowness of geologic change, forcing into consciousness a sense of older and older strata stretching back hundreds of millions of years.

Lyell’s first volume was published in 1830, and Darwin took it with him on the Beagle. Lyell’s vision of deep time was a prerequisite for Darwin’s vision too, for the almost glacially slow processes of evolution from the animals of the Cambrian to the present day required, Darwin estimated, at least 300 million years.

Stephen Jay Gould, writing about our concepts of time in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, starts by quoting Freud’s famous statement about mankind having had to endure from science ‘two great outrages upon its naive self-love’ – the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. To these, Freud added (‘in one of history’s least modest pronouncements,’ as Gould puts it) his own revolution, the Freudian one. But he omits from his list, Gould observes, one of the greatest steps, the discovery of deep time, the needed link between the Copernican and the Darwinian revolutions. Gould speaks of our difficulty even now in ‘biting the fourth Freudian bullet,’ having any real, organic sense (beneath the conceptual or metaphoric one) of the reality of deep time. And yet this revolution, he feels, may have been the deepest of them all.

It is deep time that makes possible the blind movement of evolution, the massing and honing of minute effects over eons. It is deep time that opens a new view of nature, which if it lacks the Divine fiat, the miraculous and providential, is no less sublime in its own way. ‘There is grandeur in this view of life,’ wrote Darwin, in the famous final sentence of the Origin,

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Karl Niklas speculates on this:

When I was in Australia I saw a forest of antarctic beech said to date back to the last Ice Age, and at twenty-four thousand years old to be the oldest organism on earth. It was called a single organism because all the trees were connected, and had spread by runners and offshoots into a continuous, if many trunked and many rooted, plant fabric. Recently a monstrous underground that of fungus, Armillaria bulbosa, has been found in Michigan, covering thirty acres and weighing in excess of one hundred tons. The subterranean filaments of the Michigan that are all genetically homogeneous, and it has therefore been called the largest organism on earth.

The whole concept of what constitutes an organism or an individual becomes blurred in such instances, in a way which hardly arises in the animal kingdom (except in special cases, such as that of the colonial coral polyps), and this question has been explored by Stephen Jay Gould in Dinosaur in a Haystack.

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Though they are sometimes similar in appearance, ferns, palms, and cycads are unrelated and come from quite different plant groups. Indeed many of their ‘common’ features have evolved quite independently. Darwin was fascinated by such examples of convergent evolution, in which natural selection, acting at different times, on different forms, in different circumstances, might reach analogous ways of solving the same problem.

Even so basic a feature as wood, Niklas has stressed, has arisen independently in numerous different plant families, whenever there has been a need for a light, stiff material to support an erect tree form.

Thus tree horsetails, tree club mosses, cycads, pines, and oaks have all arrived at different mechanisms for wood formation, while tree ferns and palms, which have no true wood, have developed other ways of reinforcing themselves, using flexible but stringy stem tissue or outer roots to buttress their stems. Cycads produce a softer wood, which is not as strong, but they also reinforce their trunks with persistent leaf bases, which give them their armored appearance. Other groups, like the long-extinct Sphenophyllales, developed dense wood without ever assuming an arboreal form.

One also sees convergent evolution in the animal kingdom, with the separate evolution of eyes, for example, in many different phyla – in jellyfish, in worms, in Crustacea and insects, in scallops, and in cuttlefish and other cephalopods, as well as in vertebrates. All of these eyes are quite different in structure, as they are different in origin, and yet, they are all dependent on the operation of the same basic genes. The study of these PAX eye-coding genes, and other genes like the homeo-box genes, which determine the morphogenesis of bodies and organs, is revealing, more radically and deeply than anyone could have suspected, the fundamental unity of all life. Richard Dawkins has recently provided an excellent discussion of the development of eyes, in particular, in his book Climbing Mount Improbable.

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Sir Robert Schomburg described his great excitement on finding Victoria regia:

And in the Victoria regia tank, under its giant leaves, I was later to learn, resided a strange animal, a small medusa – Craspedacusta by name. This was found in 1880 and considered to be the first-ever freshwater jellyfish (though it was subsequently realized to be the medusoid form of a hydrozoan, Limnocodium ). For many years, Craspedacusta was found only in artificial environments – tanks in botanical gardens – but is has now been found in several lakes, including Lake Fena in Guam.

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A favorite book of mine, one of a delightful series (‘Britain in Pictures’) published during the Second World War, was British Botanists by John Gilmour. Gilmour gives a particularly vivid and moving portrait of Joseph Hooker as a grand botanical explorer and investigator, as the son of his renowned botanist father, William Jackson Hooker (who after his years teaching in Glasgow became the first director of Kew Gardens) – and above all, in his relationship with Darwin:

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Philip Henry Gosse, in his (anonymous) 1856 guide, Wanderings through the Conservatories at Kew, describes the cycads:

A year later, in his bizarre book Omphalos – published just two years before the Origin of Species – Gosse, who was both a brilliant naturalist and a religious fundamentalist, attempted to reconcile the existence of fossils (which seemed to testify to former ages) with his belief in a single, instantaneous act of Creation. In his theory of ‘Prochron-ism’ he suggested that the entire crust of the earth, complete with its cargo of fossil plants and animals, was created in an instant by God and had only the appearance of a past, but no real past going with it: thus there had never been any living forms corresponding to the fossils. In the same way that Adam had been created in an instant as a young man (never a child, never born, with no umbilical cord – though nonetheless with an umbilicus, an omphalos), he argued, so a cycad, full of leaf-scars, seemingly centuries old, might also be quite newly created.

Taking an imaginary tour of the earth, a single hour after the Creation, he invites the reader to look at a panorama of animals and plants:

This extraordinary notion – one cannot call it a hypothesis, for it cannot in principle be either proved or disproved – had the distinction of earning the derision of paleontologists and theologians alike.

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In his guide to Kew, Gosse includes a whimsical note on the Ci- botium there:

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One cannot look at the cycads in Kew or in the Hortus without a sense of their frailty too, the extinction which constantly threatens species which are special and rare. This came home to me especially in the Kirstenbosch Gardens in Capetown, where more than fifty species of the African cycad Encephalartos grow. Some of these are common, some are rare. One is unique, because it comes from a single (male) plant, E. woodii, discovered by Dr. Medley Wood in 1895. Though cuttings of the original have been cultivated (propagated asexually and thus clones of the original), no other trees of this species, male or female, have ever been found – and unless an unknown female exists somewhere, E. woodii will never pollinate or mate; it will be the last of its kind on earth.

Seeing the magnificent solitary specimen at Kirstenbosch, unla-belled and surrounded by an iron fence to discourage poachers, reminded me of the story of Ishi, the last of his tribe. I was seeing here a cycad Ishi, and it made me think of how, hundreds of millions of years ago, the numbers of tree lycopods, tree horsetails, seed ferns, once so great, must have diminished to a critical extent until there were only a hundred, only a dozen, only a single one left – and finally, one day, none at all; only the sad, compressed memory held in the coal.

(Another unique cycad, a female Ishi, Cycas multipinnata, has recently been found in a temple garden in China; no other specimens are known to exist. It is portrayed, with others, in a set of postage stamps issued in May 1996, commemorating cycad species native to China.)

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In the northern part of Guam, there is a tropical dry forest, dominated by cycads; in Rota the cycad forest is wetter, ‘mesic,’ though not true rain forest such as one sees on Pohnpei. The last few years have seen the destruction of Rota’s unique forests on a fearful scale, most especially with the building of Japanese golf courses. We encountered one such development as we were walking through the jungle – huge bulldozers tearing up the earth, mowing down an area of several hundred acres. There are now three golf courses on the island, and more are planned. Such clear-cutting of virgin forest causes an avalanche of acidic soil into the reef below, killing the coral which sustains the whole reef environment. And it may break up the jungle into areas too small to sustain themselves, so that within a few decades there will be a collapse of the entire ecosystem, flora and fauna alike.

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Chamberlain, in The Living Cycads, described how he estimated the age of a Dioon edule, which reaches maturity (in the wild) around the age of fifty, and then puts out a new crown of leaves every other year on average. By counting the number of leaf scales on the stem, and dividing by the number of leaves produced each year, he arrived at the age of the tree. He described one beautiful specimen which, by this criterion, was 970 years old, even though less than five feet in height. Indeed, Chamberlain wondered whether some cycads might approach the sequoias in age.

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The cones of cycads vary in character and shape and size: the vast cones of Lepidozamia peroffskyana and Encephalartos transvenosus may weigh more than a hundred pounds, and the cones of the smallest Za-mias no more than thirty milligrams. But all of them exhibit, in the arrangement of their cone scales, intricate geometric patterns similar to the corkscrew spirals or helices we see in pinecones, the leaf arrangement of cylindrical stems, or the whorling florets of sunflowers. The study of these patterns, this phyllotaxis, has intrigued botanists and mathematicians for centuries, not only because the spirals themselves are logarithmic, but because there are numbers of accessory helices (or parastichies) running in the opposite direction and these two sets of helices occur in a fixed ratio to one another. Thus in cycad cones, as in pinecones, we almost always see spirals in five and eight rows, and if we express as fractions the number of parastichies, we find a series of 2⁄1, 3⁄2, 5⁄3, 8⁄5, 13⁄8, 21⁄13, 34⁄21, and so on. This series, named after the thirteenth-century mathematician Fibonacci, corresponds to a continued fraction which converges to 1.618, the numerical equivalent of the Golden Section.

These patterns probably represent no more and no less than an optimum way of packing leaves or scales together while avoiding their superimposition (and not, as Goethe and others thought, some mystical archetype or ideal), but they are a delight to the eye and a stimulus to the mind. Phyllotaxis fascinated the Reverend J.S. Henslow (professor of botany at Cambridge, and Darwin’s teacher), who discussed and illustrated it in his Principles of Descriptive and Physiological Botany, and it is pondered at length in an eccentric (and very favorite) book, D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. It is said that Napier’s discovery of logarithms at the start of the seventeenth century was stimulated by a contemplation of the growth of horsetails, and the great botanist Nehemiah Grew, later in the century, observed that ‘from the contemplation of Plants, men might first be invited to Mathematical Enquiry.’

This sense of the mathematical determination (or constraints) of nature, especially of organic form and growth, divested of idealism or idiosyncrasy, is very strong now, especially with the development of chaos and complexity theory in the last few decades. Now that fractals are, so to speak, part of our consciousness, we see them everywhere – in mountains, in landscapes, in snowflakes, in migraines, but above all in the vegetable world – just as Napier, four centuries ago, saw logarithms in his garden, and Fibonacci, seven centuries ago, found the Golden Section all about him.

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The forms of plants exercised Goethe endlessly – we owe the very word ‘morphology’ to him. He had no sense of evolution, but rather of a sort of logical or morphological calculus whereby all higher plants might be derived from a simple primordial type, a hypothetical ancestral plant he called an Ur-pflanze. (This idea came to him, he recorded, while he was gazing at a palm in the Orto at Padua, and ‘Goethe’s palm,’ as it is now called, still grows there in a house of its own.) His hypothetical Ur-pflanze had leaves, which could metamorphose into petals and sepals, stamens, and anthers, all the complex parts of flowers. Had Goethe concerned himself with flowerless plants, I could not help feeling, he might have seized on Psilotum as his Ur-pflanze.

Alexander von Humboldt was a close friend of Goethe’s, and adopted his theory of metamorphosis in his own Physiognomy of Plants (indeed, he widens Goethe’s notion and hints at a cosmic, universal organizing power acting not only on plants but on the forms of rocks and minerals and on the forms of mountains and other natural features as well). The physiognomy of the vegetable kingdom, he argues, ‘is principally determined by sixteen forms of plants.’ One of these – a leafless branching form – to his mind, binds together plants as diverse as the Casuarinas (flowering plants), Ephedra (a primitive gymnosperm) and Equisetum (a horsetail). Humboldt was a superb practical botanist, and very well appreciated the botanical differences between these, but he was looking, as Goethe was, for a principle orthogonal to biology, to all particular sciences – a general principle of morphogenesis or morphological constraints.

The arborization of plants originates not in accordance with some primordial archetype, but as the simplest geometric way of maximizing the ratio of surface area to volume and thus the area available for photosynthesis. Similar economic considerations may apply to many biological forms, such as the branching dendrites of nerve cells or the arborizations of the respiratory ‘tree.’ Thus an ‘Ur’ – plant like Psilotum, lacking leaves or other complications, is an exemplar, a diagram of one of nature’s most basic structures.

(In more recent times, a specific analog of Goethe’s theory, which traces how all higher plants might be derived morphologically from primitive psilophytes, has been proposed by W. Zimmerman, in his theory of telomes. And a general analog to Goethe’s morphology may be found in some of the current theories of self-organization, complexity, and universal morphogenesis.)

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Such a feeling of transport to the distant past struck Safford when he saw the cycad forests of Guam: their ‘cylindrical, scarred trunks, and stiff, pinnated, glossy leaves,’ he wrote, suggested ‘ideal pictures of the forests of the Carboniferous age.’

A very similar feeling is described by John Mickel, writing of horsetails:

Even a walk in the streets of New York can evoke the Paleozoic: one of the commonest trees here (apparently well able to resist pollution) is the maidenhair tree, Ginkgo biloba, a unique survivor little changed from the ginkgophytes of the Permian. But the ginkgo exists now only in cultivation; it is no longer found in the wild.

Darwin, in the Origin, introduced the term ‘living fossil’ to describe primitive organisms which could be seen as relics from the past – members of groups once widespread but now greatly reduced and occurring only in very isolated and restricted environments (where ‘competition…will have been less severe than elsewhere’). Ginkgos, for example, were very widespread once – they were a dominant species of the Pacific Northwest before the great Spokane Flood fifteen million years ago – but are now restricted to a single species, found only in cultivation and in a small area of China. The most spectacular discovery of such a ‘living fossil’ in this century was that of a fish, the coelacanth Latimeria, in 1938; a more recent one, which shook the botanical world, was the discovery in 1994 of a gymnosperm long thought to be extinct, the Wollemi pine, in Australia. (I still hope, in some irrational, romantic part of myself, that a giant club moss or horsetail will turn up one day.)

But whereas ‘Latimeria chalumnae is a single species, only managing to survive in the special conditions off the Comoros, cycads (though no longer the dominant flora, as in the Mesozoic) still number more than two hundred species and still thrive in a wide variety of eco-climes, so they cannot really be called ‘living fossils.’

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The unexpected adaptation of crabs to coconut eating fascinated Darwin, who describes them in the Beagle:

(In fact, coconut crabs do climb tall palm trees, and cut off the coconuts with their massive claws.)

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It used to be held that cycads were wind-pollinated, like ferns and conifers, though early authors (including Chamberlain) had occasionally been struck by the presence of certain insects in or near the male cones at the time of pollination.

In 1980, Knut Norstog and Dennis Stevenson, working at the Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami, were struck by the failure of many introduced cycads there to produce fertile seeds, even though healthy male and female plants had been planted just a yard or two apart, whereas the native Zamia was quite fertile. They found that snout weevils would feed as larvae on the male Zamia cones, emerging as adults by boring through the microsporophylls, covered with pollen. Could this be the way in which the female cones were pollinated?

Stevenson and Norstog, along with other researchers (Karl Niklas, Priscilla Fawcett, and Andrew Vovides), have confirmed this hypothesis in great detail. They have observed that weevils feed and mate on the outside of the male cone and then enter it, continuing to feed not on the pollen, but on the bases of the microsporophylls. Their eggs are laid, and larvae hatched, inside the microsporophylls, and the adult weevils finally chew their way out through the tips of the sporophylls. Some of these weevils go to the female cones, which exude a special warmth and aroma when they are ready for pollination, but the weevils cannot feed here, since the female cones are toxic to the insects. Crawling into the female cone through narrow cracks, the weevils are divested of their pollen and, finding no reason to stay longer, they return to the male cones.

The cycad thus depends on the weevil for pollination, and the weevil on the cycad cones for warmth and shelter – neither can survive without the other. This intimate relationship of insects and cycads, this coevolution, is the most primitive pollination system known and probably goes right back to the Paleozoic, long before the evolution of flowering plants, with their insect-attracting scents and colors.

(A variety of insects can pollinate cycads, mostly beetles and weevils, though one species of Cycas is pollinated by a bee – giving the possibility, one likes to think, of a delicious cycad honey.)

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One cannot think of these beautiful adaptations without feeling how excellent cycads are, in their own way, and how meaningless it is to see them as ‘primitive’ or ‘lower’ plants, inferior in the scale of life to ‘higher’ flowering plants. We have this almost irresistible sense of a steady evolutionary advance or progress (culminating, of course, in nature’s ‘highest’ product – ourselves), but there is no evidence of any such tendency, any global progress or purpose, in nature itself. There is only, as Darwin himself insisted, adaptation to local conditions.

No one has written of our illusions about progress in nature with more wit and learning than Stephen Jay Gould, especially in his recent book, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. They lead us, he writes, to a false iconography of the world, so that we see the Age of Ferns succeeded by the Age of Gymnosperms, succeeded by the present Age of Flowering Plants, as if the earlier forms of life had ceased to exist. But while many early species have been replaced, others continue to survive as highly successful, adaptable life forms, as with ferns and gymnosperms, which occupy every niche from rain forest to desert. If anything, we are really, Gould insists, in the Age of Bacteria – and have been for the last three billion years.

One cannot look at a single lineage, whether of horses or hominids, and come to any conclusions about evolution or progress, as Gould shows. We must look at the total picture of life on earth, of every species, and then we will see that it is not progress which characterizes nature but rather infinite novelty and diversity, an infinity of different adaptations and forms, none to be seen as ‘higher’ or ‘lower.’

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Darwin was the first to argue that dispersal of seeds by sea water might be an important means of their distribution, and made experiments to explore their ability to float and survive salt water. Many seeds, he found, had first to dry but then might float for remarkably long periods: dried hazelnuts, for example, floated for ninety days and afterwards germinated when planted. Comparing these time periods with the rates of ocean currents, Darwin thought that thousand-mile ocean journeys might be common for many seeds, even if they had no special flotation layer (like cycad seeds). ‘Plants with large seeds or fruit,’ he concluded, ‘generally have restricted ranges, fand] could hardly be transported by any other means.’

Driftwood, he noted, might sometimes serve as a transport across the seas, and perhaps icebergs too. He speculated that the Azores had been ‘partly stocked by ice-borne seeds’ during the glacial epoch. But there is one form of oceanic transport, Lynn Raulerson suggests, which Darwin did not consider (though he would have been fascinated had it come to his attention), and this is transport by rafts of pumice, blown into the ocean by volcanic eruptions. These may float for years, providing transport not only for large seeds but for plants and animals as well. A vast pumice raft, stretching across the horizon, with coconut palms and other vegetation, was reportedly seen off Kosrae three years after Krakatau blew.

It is not enough, of course, for seeds to arrive; they must find conditions hospitable for colonization. ‘How small would be the chance of a seed falling on favourable soil and coming to maturity!’ Darwin exclaimed. The Northern Marianas – Pagan, Agrihan, Alamagan, Anata-han, Asuncion, Maug and Uracas – are doubtless visited by cycad seeds, but are too unstable, too actively volcanic, to allow them to survive and establish a viable colony.

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The history and naming of the oceanic cycads is a story at once picturesque and confused. Surely Pigafetta, sailing with Magellan, must have observed the cycads of Guam and Rota, but if he did, his descriptions are too vague for us to be certain. It needed a botanical or taxonomic eye to demarcate cycads in the first place, from the circumambient palms around them. It was not until the next century that such botanical skills appeared, and then they appeared, with a sort of synchronicity, in two men, Rheede and Rumphius, whose lives and interests ran parallel in many ways. Both were officers of the Dutch East Indies Company. It was Rumphius who first described a cycad, on the Malabar coast in 1658. It was Rheede, his younger contemporary, who was to become governor of Malabar and publish a Hortus Indicus Mal-abaricus in the 1680s (after Rumphius’ own manuscript for a Hortus Malabaricus was destroyed in a fire). Rumphius’ and Rheede’s cycads were taken to be the same, and both were called Cycas circinalis by Linnaeus. When the French botanist Louis du Petit-Thouars identified a cycad on the east coast of Africa in 1804, it was natural that he should call this C. circinalis too, though it would be recognized as a distinct species and renamed C. thouarsii a quarter of a century later.

In the past few years there has been an effort to reexamine the taxonomy of the Pacific cycads, a task made peculiarly complicated, as Ken Hill notes, by ‘the successive recolonization of areas by genetically distinct forms…facilitated by aquatic dispersal of the buoyant seeds.’

Most botanists now are disposed to confine the name C. circinalis to the tall Indian cycad (that originally figured in Rheede’s Hortus ), which grows inland and lacks buoyant seeds. This at least is Hill’s formulation; he sees the Western Pacific cycads as belonging to the C. rumphii complex, and the Marianas cycad, which he has named C. micronesica, as a unique species within this complex. David de Laubenfels, a cycad taxonomist at Syracuse, agrees that C. circinalis occurs only in India and Sri Lanka, but feels that Guam cycad belongs to an earlier-named species, C. celebica. Since, however, the Guam cycad has been called C. circinalis for two centuries, the likelihood is that it will continue to be called this, and that only botanists will insist on using its ‘correct’ name.

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Aboriginal forests, cycad forests, seem to excite feelings of awe and reverence, religious or mystical feelings, in every culture. Bruce Chatwin writes of Cycad Valley, in Australia, as ‘a place of immense importance’ on some aboriginal songlines and a sacred place to which some aboriginals make their final pilgrimage before death. Such a scene, of final meetings and dyings beneath the cycads (‘like magnified treeferns’), forms the ending of The Songlines.

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The term ‘deep time’ was originated by John McPhee, and in Basin and Range he writes of how those most constantly concerned with deep time – geologists – may assimilate a sense of this into their inmost intellectual and emotional being. He quotes one geologist as saying, ‘You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet’s time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.’

But even for those of us who are not professional geologists or paleontologists, seeing ferns, ginkgos, cycads, forms of life whose basic patterns have been conserved for eons, must also alter one’s inmost feelings, one’s unconscious, and produce a transformed and transcendent perspective.