Stephen Jay Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams, 1st Ed., 1st Printing, 1998

Hardcover

Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms by Stephen Jay Gould, published by Harmony Books, New York, 1998, 9-1/4 in. x 6-1/2 in., 422 pages. Hardcover in excellent condition with dust jacket in excellent condition.

Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998) is the eighth volume of collected essays by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The essays were culled from his monthly column "The View of Life" in Natural History magazine, to which Gould contributed for 27 years. Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms is the newest collection of best-selling scientist Stephen Jay Gould's popular essays from Natural History magazine (the longest-running series of scientific essays in history). It is also the first of the final three such collections, since Dr. Gould has announced that the series will end with the turn of the millennium.

 In this collection, Gould consciously and unconventionally formulates a humanistic natural history, a consideration of how humans have learned to study and understand nature, rather than a history of nature itself. With his customary brilliance, Gould examines the puzzles and paradoxes great and small that build nature's and humanity's diversity and order. In affecting short biographies, he depicts how scholars grapple with problems of science and philosophy as he illuminates the interaction of the outer world with the unique human ability to struggle to understand the whys and wherefores of existence.

Reviews

Gould's incomparable style, by turns colloquial, humorous, ironic and insightful, allows readers to revel in his unabashed and contagious enthusiasm. -- The New York Times Book Review, Jacqueline Boone

Amazon.com Review

One of this century's most thoughtful and prolific naturalists, Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould looks at the human twists on science in his eighth series of essays taken from Natural History magazine. As only he can, Gould finds questions where others have never looked, and answers where others have been blinded--by their professional rivalries, by their unacknowledged privilege in society, by the dominant world-view at their particular juncture in history. "All great science," he says in the title essay, "indeed all fruitful thinking, must occur in a social and intellectual context--and contexts are just as likely to promote insight as to constrain thought." Gould's gift is being able to identify context, and see patterns in diverse fields or people or moments in history in a way that Darwin saw patterns in living species. This book is less about clams, worms, and Leonardo than about some evolutionary dead ends in human intellectual history. With a little patience, his extravagant prose will edify rather than trip you, and his digressions will delight rather than distract. --Lauran Cole Warner

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As in his previous collections of essays from Natural History magazine (Dinosaur in a Haystack, 1996, etc.), here again Gould artfully transports readers through the complex and enchanting realms of the natural world. This time, though, he peers less at nature than at scientists' attempts to understand and explain its wonders. Ranging far and wide through the history of science, Gould's sketches in "humanistic natural history" examine the "grand false starts in the history of natural science"for he contends that nothing is as "informative and instructive as a truly juicy mistake." In an essay on the Russian paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky, for example, Gould applauds his subject's meticulously detailed observations on the fossils of horses and his consequent development of an evolutionary history of the horse as an animal of European descent. Yet, Gould points out, Kovalevsky was mistaken, for horses had evolved in America and migrated to Europe. Another famous "mistake" Gould explores is Emmanuel Mendes da Costas's taxonomy of earth and stones according to Linnaeus's taxonomy of organic life. As usual, Gould proceeds to his conclusions by indirection; he opens his essay on Mendes da Costa, for instance, by disclosing how Linnaeus compared the shape and function of a clam to female sexual anatomy. Gould's elegant prose transmits the excitement and wide-eyed wonder of a scientist who never ceases to be amazed and amused at what he finds. 30 b&w illustrations.

Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The latest essay collection in Gould's popular and influential series covers various topics in biology and the history of science. As always, his writing can be ironic, humorous, critical, forceful, and even evangelical but always wholly literate and brimming with enthusiasm.

Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American

The art of the essay is not much practiced now, but Gould is a master of it: the beguiling subject, the juicy feast of facts and thoughts related to the subject, and the surprising connections made between the subject and other topics--all rendered in smoothly polished prose.

From Kirkus Reviews

In the latest selection from this self-described ``essay-machine,'' Gould gathers together sundry Natural History columns, mingling natural history knowhow with his characteristic humanist outlook. Gould (Zoology & Geology/Harvard, Questioning the Millennium, 1997, etc.) takes his main cue here less from great scientists' successes than from their all-too-human blunders. Opening with a masterful appreciation of da Vinci's remarkable observations about erosion and fossilized clams and their lesser-known context of his entirely medieval world-view. Gould displays a deep appreciation not only for the natural world but also for the mind's attempts to understand it, even at the risk of error. ``Nothing can be quite so informative and illuminating as a truly juicy error, he observes in his discussion of the unsung 18th-century naturalist Mendes da Costa's attempted application of the hierarchical Linnean nomenclature to rocks. Equally juicy errors addressed elsewhere include astronomer Percival Lowell's ``canals'' of Mars and the way Lowell's ideas about extraterrestrial life resurfaced in the 1996 debate over bacterial evidence in a Martian meteorite; Russian Vladimir Kovalevsky's groundbreaking classification of the horses ancestry along Darwinian evolutionary lines; and Victorian physiologist Walter H. Gaskell's nuttily wrong ``inversion theory'' about vertebrates and invertebrates, which actually enjoys a kind of resonance on the genetic level. Some errors deserve only castigation (or correction), such as the loss of the dodo both as a species and a scientific specimen (only fragments remain in museums). Gould also assays topics ranging from the coexistence of hominid species in human evolution to a gruesome root-headed parasite. However out-of-left- field the subject, he still manages to charm us with characteristically energetic, down-to-earth lucidity. Gently iconoclastic, always illuminating essays from the science writer whose prose can bring to life not only theories but even the fossils themselves. (30 b&w illustrations) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

 About the Author Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was an internationally renowned and influential evolutionary biologist, a best-selling author equally respected by academic and general interest readers, and certainly one of the most influential and most acclaimed science essayists of the 20th century. Gould was the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology at Harvard University, the curator for Invertebrate Paleontology in the University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the Vincent Astor Visiting Professor of Biology at New York University. He published over twenty books, received the National Book and National Book Critics Circle Awards, and a MacArthur Prize Fellow, and continues to influence critical scientific thinking and evolutionary theory well into the 21st century.

Note to Buyers: I am selling my entire expansive geological reference library assembled over a 40-year period, including every one of my Stephen Jay Gould hardcover books, many of them signed by the author.   These are relatively rare First Edition, First Printings, not latter printings or reprints, all with original dust jackets.  Also on auction is my complete geological reference library, composed of original mid- to late 1800s to early 1900s New Jersey Geological Survey (NJGS) Annual Reports and Special Reports, USGS Professional Papers and Bulletins related to Atlantic Coastal Plain geology, stratigraphy, and paleontology, and long out-of-print New Jersey Geological Survey groundwater reference reports published by the NJGS from a time when they issued print versions of the State’s most important geological studies (so please see my other auctions or search for "Stephen Jay Gould" or “Geology" or under my eBay account "Rockman58").   FYI, I am also selling my entire Queen and ELO record (LPs and 45s) collection, sheet music, history of the bands, and concert our programs and also the rare Star Trek TOS TV and movie memorabilia collection.

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