Metamorphosis, page 5
Maria tried to align herself with powerful painters and engravers. One of them had been an apprentice to her father’s father, and taught her half brother, Matthäus Merian the Younger. He included her in a list of German painters, remarking that she specialized in flower decoration, fruits and birds, alongside the excrement of worms, flies and spiders, and all such creatures, in all possible permutations. She began regularly teaching painting to a company of maidens in her home. Soon she published a book of flowers, Blumenbuch, after her grandfather’s Florilegium.
But aside from the paintings, there were always the insects. The beetles and the flies and the ringlet summer-birds and gnats. As Kim Todd describes, she made room for them all in small jars and boxes, among her paintbrushes and etching knives, boiling kartoffeln, and hidden fantasies. There, in the many-windowed home, she performed small experiments, trying to see if heat could enliven a pupa, if she could pry open a caterpillar, discovering faint traces of wings. However crafty she was becoming with the paintbrush, she was not as dexterous with the surgeon’s knife: When she cut a silkworm open, a colored, watery matter came out, oozing like a punctured boil with pus.
Ten years after Johanna, her first daughter, Maria was once again with child and wondered: If she pricked her belly, would it ooze? Or might it already be inside her, perfection in miniature, all assembled from the origin of the world…? She did not know the answer to these questions. But she knew well, men didn’t trust women, to say nothing of women who played with insects. And so she stayed at home, counting the days until Dorothea came, quietly feeding her caterpillars.
Footnote
i Merian referred to butterflies as “summer-birds.”
6.
EX OVO OMNIA?
Outside the Milk Market of Nuremberg, the ground beneath people’s feet was beginning to shake. From London to Paris to Rome to Titiopolis, men observing nature began to wonder whether all the ancient wisdom they’d inherited was nothing but a ruse. Curiously, it was a seemingly innocuous question that was responsible: How to make a fly?
The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher claimed he had the answer. “Collect a number of fly cadavers and crush them slightly,” he wrote in his whale of a book from 1665 about everything from tidal waves to dragon’s teeth. “Put them on a brass plate and sprinkle the macerate with honey-water. Then expose the plate, as chemists do, to the low heat of ashes or of sand over coals, or even of horse dung; and you will see, under the magnifying power of the microscope, otherwise invisible worms, which then become winged, perceptible little flies, and increase in size to full-fledged specimens.”
Kircher was a flamboyant fellow. An adventurer and polymath, he was brought to Rome from Germany shortly after Galileo’s trial so that the Jesuits could tout a heavyweight of their own. Accepting the testimony of travelers and peddlers at face value, Kircher became famous for his cabinet of curiosities, the Kircherianum. Guests could enjoy drinks from a mechanically spewing crustacean while admiring mermaid bones alongside a brick from the Tower of Babel. Named professor of mathematics and Oriental languages at the Collegio Romano, Kircher spent much of his time trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, which he hoped would uncover the language given to Adam, thereby prying open the secrets of God. He studied antidotes and electromagnetism, bioluminescence and demons, fossils and armadillos (the progeny of a turtle and a porcupine, he thought). He rejected the widely held belief in the existence of giants, based on the argument that had Noah and his family been giants, they would have sunk the Ark. Athanasius Kircher was somewhat short, and his eyes were suspicious. René Descartes said of him that he was “more charlatan than scholar.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was even more dismissive: “He understands nothing.”
But there was a problem. The man who’d been lowered into the mouth of Mount Vesuvius to investigate volcanoes, who defended the existence of both dragons and races of subterranean men; the man who’d invented the world’s first pop-up book, the magic lantern, and allegedly a “cat organ” (just press the keys, hitting down on a row of cat’s tails, making them meow in pain in different registers); he who would show up in the novels of Umberto Ecco, seeming more outlandish than the fictional characters around him—what that man said about how to make a fly actually worked.
Kircher’s rival Francesco Redi would never believe it. Physician to the grand duke of Tuscany and keeper of the Royal Pharmacy, Redi scorned the notion that inanimate matter could be impregnated by spirit, that if the stars were aligned, one could create life by cooking alchemical elements in water. Never mind that Redi’s patrons were the Medici, who had sold their own antidotes before they went into the more lucrative business of lending money. Two hundred years before the word was invented, he considered himself a true scientist, besides a courtier and a poet.
To counter Kircher and his magic, Redi devised a series of impressively controlled experiments. What he showed, having cut up a host of ox, deer, buffalo, rabbit, tuna, lion, swordfish, eel, lamb, and snake meat, was that when he placed the putrefied meat in carefully sealed flasks and waited, he failed to find flies and maggots. These appeared only when the flasks were left uncovered. Redi refused to break with Aristotle altogether. He wasn’t prepared absolutely to deny, for example, that wasps and beetles and other insects might be produced by rotting wood, in the knobby growths known as tree galls. But while professing his love to the ancient “princes of philosophy,” he clarified that he did not wish to bind himself “to swear that all they have said or written is true.” Insects were certainly generated by sex—he’d seen it with his own eyes. The reason Kircher (and Aristotle, and all the rest) thought flies appeared spontaneously from putrid flesh was that they hadn’t observed carefully enough. “No animal of any kind is ever bred in dead flesh unless there is a previous egg-deposit,” Redi proclaimed, thinking that he’d put spontaneous generation to rest.
Thanks to an earnest Dane who’d arrived in Rome and become his friend, Redi had an impressive ally in his experimental method. Niels Stensen, “Steno,” as he was known in Latin, was the son of a goldsmith. He’d traveled to Amsterdam and as a mere apprentice made a name for himself by discovering the duct that brings saliva to the mouth (Steno’s duct). He’d moved from there to Leiden, home to one of Europe’s most radical medical schools, where the dry texts of the ancients were being replaced by live dissections in an amphitheater—the theories of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen challenged by a new mechanistic spirit taking hold. When Steno graduated, he traveled to Paris, where King Louis XIV had recently endowed a new Académie des Sciences. The man who had convinced the French monarch that a national home for science was necessary was Melchisédech Thévenot, inventor of the spirit level. Thévenot was also the author of the popular book The Art of Swimming, an orientalist, traveler, bibliophile, and ex-diplomat and spy. It was at his home—his personal académie—that Steno delivered a lecture on the anatomy of the brain. And it was at Thévenot’s suggestion that Steno traveled to Rome with a message for the city’s men of science: The problem to crack now was generation.
Times were changing. In England, a group of natural philosophers calling themselves the “Invisible College” had received a charter from King Charles II for a Royal Society with the motto Nullius in verba (Take nobody’s word for it), expressing the fellows’ determination to question even established authorities and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts—as determined by experiment. In Florence, students of Galileo founded the Accademia del Cimento with financial support from the two richest men in Italy, under Dante’s banner Provando e riprovando (Test and test again). Science was becoming institutionalized and morphing into a new kind of pursuit. Little more than a century before, the influential Swiss physician and alchemist known as Paracelsus had provided instructions for creating a tiny human being: Allow human semen to putrefy for four weeks in a warm sealed container, feed this thing human blood, and after forty weeks you’d have a miniature infant. For the experimenters in the new academies of science, this was no longer good enough.
Not that the new academies rejected all written authorities. John Wilkins, one of the founding members of the Royal Society, aimed to reconstruct the universal language humans and animals had all understood in the Garden of Eden, before man (and especially woman) had lapsed. After the Fall, human beings had lost the knowledge of creation that allowed Adam, in his innocence and plenitude, to name all creatures “according to their natures”; recovering that lost language would help science properly see the world. Others suggested that even before language, signing with hands captured the essence of reality; a Londoner by the name of John Bulwer invented the word chirologia (from the Greek chiro—hand, and logos, language) to describe the natural language of the hand, becoming an early proponent of education for the deaf and dumb. Rather than being incapable of learning because they couldn’t hear or speak, deaf and dumb people communicated in the most natural of languages of the animate body—the eyes. In fact, because the eyes were sensitive to the tiniest nuance, humans had developed all kinds of distortions of the body in order to inhibit others from reading their true body language. Bulwer himself wrote a book on the matter in 1650 called Anthropometamorphosis. It’s subtitle was: Man Transform’d, or the Artificial Changeling. Historically presented, in the mad and cruel Gallantry, foolish Bravery, ridiculous Beauty, filthy Fineness, and loathesome Loveliness of most Nations, fashioning & altering their Bodies from the Mould intended by Nature.
After putting his new friend Redi onto the problem of generation, Steno took up residence in Tuscany under the wing of the Medici grand duke. It was the spring of 1666, and it seemed to him that the question of where we come from had never been so urgent. Steno had read the bestseller by William Harvey, the “humorous but extremely precise” insomniac Englishman (as he’d one day be referred to), famous for showing how the heart pumps blood through the body. Like Aristotle, Harvey believed that insects arise by chance, rather than by sex. After all, they had neither internal organs, he claimed, nor “true” parents. But Harvey was adamant about correcting the great teacher on one particular matter. The frontispiece of his 1651 book Generation of Animals showed Zeus delivering all kinds of creatures from a giant egg, and his epigraph made the point clear. Whether in animals that give birth to live young or in those who lay eggs, the same truth holds: “Ex ovo omnia,” it said there—all things come from an egg.
Now, what Harvey meant by an egg was not the contribution of the female to reproduction, Aristotle’s second “semen” alongside the sperm of the male. Harvey’s egg was the actual early fetus, which to him looked like an egg without a shell. As Physician in Ordinary to Charles I before the English Civil War, Harvey accompanied the king on royal hunts and was allowed to dissect does that had recently mated. As he explained in his Generation of Animals, the act of copulation left no visible trace of semen, menstrual blood, or egg in the uterus. Even what was then called the female “testicle” (the ovaries) showed no change in size or shape. When the egg finally did show up in the uterus, it seemed to appear out of thin air. Harvey therefore had to go against two thousand years of received wisdom: Whatever the contributions of female and male to generation during sex, the egg was clearly not a direct result of two “semens” intermingling. Perhaps the sperm brought an immaterial “spirit” with it, like an odor or a spark of lightning. Perhaps it mysteriously awakened an egg in the womb, the way a thought is fomented in the brain. The female “testicle” clearly had nothing to do with it, but one thing was for sure: However it got there, whether in mammals, birds, or insects, life always came from an egg.
Steno was intrigued. Already in his lecture at Thévenot’s home he’d struck a blow against the great Descartes. The recently deceased French philosopher had distinguished man from other animals by pointing at a unique feature: a vibrating pineal gland in the middle of the brain. This, he claimed, was what gave humans their rational capacities. But dissecting the brain carefully, Steno showed that if humans had a unique soul, its origins had to come from somewhere else: The pineal gland could not possibly vibrate because it is as immobile as a rock. In a posthumous supplement to the French edition of his De Homine, Descartes tried and spectacularly failed to provide a mathematical description of how heat acted on “particles” to form a living body. (Following the ancients, Descartes believed such particles could come from either decaying matter, as in spontaneously generating insects, or from two semens—male and female—mixing together.) Everywhere, empiricism was winning out over rationalism, the new experimental anatomy over mechanical theories propped up by math. And the question of generation was on many minds.
Doing better wasn’t going to be easy, though. Having trained in hard-headed Leiden, Steno saw that even the careful surgeon Harvey seemed to be groping for answers. There had to be a more convincing explanation for the origin of eggs, but what was it? A year before the appearance of Redi’s own treatise debunking spontaneous generation, in March 1667, Steno published a short essay titled “Study of the dissection of a dogfish.” In this nine-page report, he dropped a bomb that would change our view about where we, and all other life-forms, come from. Finally, the different strands of “generation” were beginning to come undone.
What Steno wrote was this: “The testicles of women are analogous to the ovary”—funny sounding words to modern ears, but a giant revelation. He didn’t show this in a detailed drawing, nor did he perform any kind of experiment. But he declared that he’d seen it with his own eyes, and finally understood why it was important: Steno had dissected all kinds of animals—sheep and humans and lizards and birds and sharks. They were different creatures, but his claim now was that they were identical in the way that mattered most: Whether giving birth to live young, or laying eggs to hatch, all female creatures, including humans, had ovaries that carried eggs. And just like in birds, where those eggs come down through an oviduct, in viviparous creatures the eggs travel from the ovaries to the uterus. The meaning of this was nothing short of momentous: Women didn’t contribute “semen.” They contributed an egg. And all life on Earth came from it.
If Harvey had been puzzled about what an egg was, Steno suffered no confusion—although as a religious man he would have been appalled by the idea that God wasn’t necessary to bring about life. Soon he would convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism and leave science behind. Having been appointed vicar apostolic for the Nordic Missions, he became a leading figure in the Counter-Reformation, and was consecrated with the titillating title of titular bishop of Titiopolis. Adopting a life of extreme piety, Steno died a poor man in Germany in 1686, suffering and emaciated. Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1988.
And Harvey? We know today that he simply chose the wrong animal: Since male deer go into rut a month before females ovulate, there was no way he could have found an egg in a dissected uterus, nor see any changes yet in her “testicles.” It was therefore easy for him to fall in with the common Adamic wisdom, that woman had come from man, rendering her “testicles” vestigial and moot. For him, fertilization bordered on the mysterious: Semen acted without touch, eggs appeared like thoughts in the mind. How precisely such miracles happened he couldn’t say.
And yet Harvey also asked the question that had been on everyone’s mind since Aristotle: Whatever females and males bring with them, how does a life assume its particular form? Aristotle argued that living matter had a potential that was awakened by the male semen, providing an external cue that was automatic and as determined as the moving hands of a clock. That’s why when he cut open chick embryos at different stages, he always glimpsed the heart appearing on the third day, detected all the body parts after exactly ten days, and could see a coat of feathers by the twentieth. Why things developed in that order he called a chicken’s “final cause,” a term that simply meant that the goal of the chick embryo was to become a chick, and that it proceeded accordingly. But Harvey wanted to rid natural philosophy of this kind of argument—an explanation we now call teleological (from telos, or “purpose”)—which on closer inspection, since devoid of any mechanism, seems to explain nothing at all. To describe what happened after fertilization, he coined a new word—epigenesis—defining it as the addition of parts budding out of each other as the egg grows. A hardheaded thinker who had managed to acquit four women accused of witchcraft, Harvey knew that the heart and tissues and organs that mysteriously appeared had to come from somewhere, no magic involved. And so Harvey said the egg contained within it, already fully formed, a representation of the creature it would become. Thinking of genes, the historian Matthew Cobb writes that Harvey’s explanation was “both tantalizingly modern and infuriatingly vague.” Because how this happened, or how it could be observed and studied, Harvey had no clue at all.
Still, Harvey had great respect for Aristotle, adopting his idea of “imperfect” and “perfect” animals. The larvae and the adults of bees and beetles and butterflies and wasps weren’t two distinct stages of the same life-form, he wrote, but two distinct creatures that had both arisen spontaneously from decay. No epigenesis for them, no internal representation and gradual self-assembly. No, such creatures developed in a different way altogether: all at once, like a seal being stamped on wax. With his own eyes he’d seen wings beneath the pupal case just moments after it was created. To give this a name, Harvey took an old word, and contrasted it with his new word, epigenesis. Imperfect creatures aren’t made like the rest of us, he counseled.
Instead they undergo metamorphosis.
7.
AN INGENIOUS WOMAN
Back in the Milk Market of Nuremberg, word got out. Aware of her passion, friends sent Maria Sibylla Merian caterpillars as gifts, and the curious came by asking to see her insects. Meanwhile, she kept on drawing flowers. On occasion she joined the meetings of The Order of the Flowers on the Pegnitz, a group of men and a few women who loved nature, poetry, and the German language in equal parts. They took code names—Hedge Rose, Meadow Clover, Mayflower—went on walks, and read each other’s rhymes. It was pleasant. But Maria knew about the dangers of beauty. How men and women had ransomed their lives in Holland to put their hands on a tulip. And she began to notice, too, that whereas they had once been mere decorations to the flowers in her Blumenbuch book, insects were now commanding her full attention.
