Biology

All living organisms are made of cells. Some, like bacteria, consist of just single cells; others, like humans, contain trillions of individual cells. The term ‘cell’ was first used in this context by the remarkable Robert Hooke in his beautifully illustrated masterpiece Micrographica: or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (1665). Hooke had been observing a thin slice of cork under his newly developed microscope. These cells were ‘[the] first microscopical pores I ever saw, and perhaps, that were ever seen, for I had not met with any Writer or Person, that had made any mention of them before this.’ He then showed why:

Against The Grain celebrates two iconoclastic Australian historians: Manning Clark and Brian Fitzpatrick. Comprising papers from a 2006 conference organised by two of their daughters, both distinguished academics, Against the Grain offers critical thoughts and reminiscences of family members, friends, colleagues, students and academic successors of the two men.

To earn some money as a student in the late 1980s, I did a short stint at CSIRO Marine Laboratories in Perth, identifying deep-sea fish. I spent a couple of weeks up to my armpits in pale, preserved and squashed fish, which were extremely hard to identify, partly because of their misshapen form and lack of colour, but also because many of the species were entirely new to science. Some looked like old, flattened doughnuts and clearly lived on the seabed. Others were compressed sideways and had light-emitting organs on their sides, strange plate-like structures or razor-sharp serrations along their bellies, and were clearly more adapted to a mid-water mode of existence. But without exception, these fish were drab and dead as dead can be. I can only imagine what they must have been like when alive in their natural environment.

Exactly one hundred years before this new edition of The Evolution Revolution, by Australian palaeontologists Ken McNamara and John Long, the Rationalist Press Association promoted the first English version of The Evolution of Man (1907), by the great German biologist Ernst Haeckel. In his preface, Haeckel’s translator, Joseph McCabe, pointed out that, since the first German printing in 1874, only fifteen years after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), ‘fresh facts have come to light in each decade, always enforcing the truth of man’s evolution’. Thus, ‘evolution is not a laboriously reached conclusion, but a guiding truth in biological literature today’ and, as such, ‘is accepted by influential clerics ... and by almost every biologist and anthropologist of distinction in Europe’.

According to my dictionary, a handbook is ‘a short manual or guide-book’. Somebody ought to inform the ornithological world of this, because ‘handbook’ has come to be applied to huge, multi-volume compendia about the bird faunas of particular regions. These books aim to present clearly and concisely all available knowledge about each species, drawing together observations and data from innumerable scientific journals, books, museum specimens, and field notes of scientists and bird watchers. Inevitably, they are massive compilations, running to thousands of pages. They certainly cannot be carried easily. However, they have developed a tradition of fine scholarship and precise writing and illustration, building on the high standards set by the first such work, the four-volume Handbook of British Birds (Witherby et al. 1938–41). Their contribution to bird research and conservation has been immense.