Volume 48, Number 15 · October 4, 2001
The Man Who Set the Clock Back
By Stephen Jay Gould
The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology
by Simon Winchester
HarperCollins, 329 pp., $26.00
Large committees of the world's finest zoologists have collaborated to write the great compendia of life's taxonomic order, phylum by phylum in volume upon volume—as in the Cambridge Natural History of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or the French Traité de Zoologie of the mid-twentieth century. The American zoologist Libbie Henrietta Hyman (1888–1969), working alone, produced her six-volume work The Invertebrates by reading every primary text in its original language and preparing the drawings herself. She achieved as much (or more) than any of these committees in nearly thirty years between her first volume, on Protozoa, and her last, on Pulmonata (land snails), before Parkinson's disease and the accumulated infirmities of old age forced her utterly ungentle passage—for I have never known a tougher or more passionately committed person—into that good night.
Review, 6328 words
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