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BOOKS IN BRIEF: NONFICTION
By Michael Scott Moore
The title of Stephen Jay Gould's 22nd book on natural science borrows
a phrase his grandfather scribbled in an English primer after he arrived
at Ellis Island: ''I have landed. Sept. 11, 1901.'' Last year Gould, an
evolutionary biologist at Harvard, ended an unbroken run of 300 columns
in Natural History magazine; ''I Have Landed'' would have been a simple
collection of his final essays if the World Trade Center had not collapsed
on the centennial of his grandfather's arrival; the weird coincidence of
dates inspired a handful of shorter pieces tacked onto the end about Americanism,
evil and the New York skyline. Gould's mind likes to scurry into every
corner of high and low culture. He investigates Gilbert and Sullivan, myths
of the Alamo, forgotten female naturalists and Vladimir Nabokov's second
career as a lepidopterist. But he always returns to the theme of Darwinism.
For Gould, the theory of evolution offers a vision of an ancient and continuous
''tree of life,'' linking all creatures, and he applies this idea of continuity
to his own catholic interests. The Nabokov essay, for example, starts
with a bland debate over how the novelist's butterfly collecting and classifying
might have informed (or detracted from) his fiction; but the piece ends
with a fierce argument against the wall between literature and science
-- a wall that Gould, who died last month, spent a career trying to topple.
Michael Scott Moore
I HAVE LANDED
The End of a Beginning
in Natural History.
By Stephen Jay Gould.
Harmony, $25.95.