Volume 33, Number 3 · February 27, 1986
A Triumph of Historical Excavation
By Stephen Jay Gould
The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists
by Martin J.S. Rudwick
University of Chicago Press, 494 pp., $39.95
To begin the second act of Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, Lady Jane enters a bare set, seats herself before her cello, and in two verses bemoans the changes of increasing age. In the first, or conventional, account, she laments what she has lost with the years, but in the second (speaking mostly of weight) she reports a steady increase: 'There will be too much of me in the coming by and by!' The humor of this song plays upon our onesided notion that anything old must become battered, worn, and increasingly bereft of information.
Review, 5959 words
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