Zoo in the head

Monday morning Penguin: a footnote

First Penguin edition, 1958.

This is another bit of unfinished business: some time back I posted Joe McLaren's cover for a collection of essays by John Berger, published as part of the Penguin Great Ideas series. I mentioned at the time that I thought it was based on Fifties Pelicans; on his flickr stream David Pearson - in overall charge of the Great Ideas covers - confirmed that McLaren was paying tribute to Victor Reinganum.

Reinganum didn't do a vast number of book jackets, though they did include the first editions of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Ballad of Peckham Rye. For Penguin he did Spark's Memento Mori and this book, a drily readable guide to basic geology and palaeontology.

The cover is beautiful, I think; but oh, how quickly science-writing ages: only a brief, non-committal reference to the plausibility of Continental drift; mention of Fred Hoyle, but not the Big Bang - you don't need carbon-dating to place this in the Fifties, which is just as well since carbon dating wasn't available yet. H. H. Swinnerton was a Victorian (born 1875, so 80 when this was first published in 1955), and it shows. His chapter on volcanoes is entitled "Pluto's Portals"; and he ends the book by posing the question "Whither is all this tending?" - "all this" being, broadly, science and technology - and coming up with the answer: "The end cannot be imagined, but so long as Nature continues to hold her child upon her knee he may go forward with hope and confidence." The modern reader may wonder whether Nature has despaired of her child's behaviour and is now trying to slap some manners into him.

This edition crops up pretty often, and you should be able to find a decent example for less than £3: I paid slightly over the odds (£3.70 incl. p&p) on eBay.

 

One cheer for imperialism

Recommended listening: The Origins of the Origin (BBC Radio 3, available until Sunday 15.2.09), a programme by Andrew Cunningham about Darwin's intellectual precursors in France - in particular, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire père and Lamarck, who both thought of evolution but got the mechanism wrong; and Cuvier, who realised that fossils imply extinction of species but didn't cotton on that new species might develop.

Much interesting information, much of it in amusing French accents, but I was struck by the comment that Cuvier's pre-eminence in comparative anatomy was largely down to the success of Napoleon's armies, who brought back specimens from across Europe. Similarly, Darwin accumulated his data on a survey expedition sponsored by the British admiralty as part of Britannia's continuing efforts to rule the waves. In each case, their theorising was based on a breadth of observation made possible by an expansionist state.

So one cheer for imperialism, which may enslave and impoverish subject peoples and leave the conquerors bitter and confused, but which advances and enlightens mankind.