万物简史 第106期:势不两立的科学(7)

Unfortunately, having had his insight, Smith was curiously uninterested in understanding why rocks were laid down in the way they were. I have left off puzzling about the origin of Strata and content myself with knowing that it is so, he recorded. Th

万物简史 第107期:势不两立的科学(8)

So by the early years of the nineteenth century, fossils had taken on a certain inescapable importance, which makes Wistar's failure to see the significance of his dinosaur bone all the more unfortunate. Suddenly, in any case, bones were turning up a

万物简史 第108期:势不两立的科学(9)

By this time, however, paleontological momentum had moved to England. In 1812, at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary Anningaged eleven, twelve, or thirteen, depending on whose account you readfound a strange fossilized

万物简史 第110期:势不两立的科学(11)

Aware that his finding would entirely upend what was understood about the past, and urged by his friend the Reverend William Bucklandhe of the gowns and experimental appetiteto proceed with caution, Mantell devoted three painstaking years to seeking

万物简史 第111期:势不两立的科学(12)

Mantell prepared a paper for delivery to the Royal Society. Unfortunately it emerged that another dinosaur had been found at a quarry in Oxfordshire and had just been formally describedby the Reverend Buckland, the very man who had urged him not to w

万物简史 第113期:势不两立的科学(14)

In the district of Sydenham in south London, at a place called Crystal Palace Park, there stands a strange and forgotten sight: the world's first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Not many people travel there these days, but once this was one of the mo

万物简史 第115期:势不两立的科学(16)

Owen swiftly distinguished himself with his powers of organization and deduction. At the same time he showed himself to be a peerless anatomist with instincts for reconstruction almost on a par with the great Cuvier in Paris. He become such an expert

万物简史 第116期:势不两立的科学(17)

Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperament. A photograph from his late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorian melodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyesa face to frighten babies. In

万物简史 第117期:势不两立的科学(18)

He did not hesitate to persecute those whom he disliked. Early in his career Owen used his influence at the Zoological Society to blackball a young man named Robert Grant whose only crime was to have shown promise as a fellow anatomist. Grant was ast

万物简史 第118期:势不两立的科学(19)

Capitalizing on Mantell's enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expunging Mantell's contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named years before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself. Mantell continued to

万物简史 第119期:势不两立的科学(20)

By this stage, however, Owen's transgressions were beginning to catch up with him. His undoing began when a committee of the Royal Societya committee of which he happened to be chairmandecided to award him its highest honor, the Royal Medal, for a pa

万物简史 第109期:势不两立的科学(10)

It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of paleontology than Mary Anning, but in fact there was one who came painfully close. His name was Gideon Algernon Mantell and he was a country doctor in Sussex. 在古生物学史上

万物简史 第121期:势不两立的科学(22)

Still, his altruism in general toward his fellow man did not deflect him from more personal rivalries. One of his last official acts was to lobby against a proposal to erect a statue in memory of Charles Darwin. In this he failedthough he did achieve

万物简史 第122期:势不两立的科学(23)

They began as mutual friends and admirers, even naming fossil species after each other, and spent a pleasant week together in 1868. However, something then went wrong between themnobody is quite sure whatand by the following year they had developed a

万物简史 第123期:势不两立的科学(24)

Cope was born more directly into privilegehis father was a rich Philadelphia businessmanand was by far the more adventurous of the two. In the summer of 1876 in Montana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little Big Ho

万物简史 第124期:势不两立的科学(25)

It also marked the start of a war between the two that became increasingly bitter, underhand, and often ridiculous. They sometimes stooped to one team's diggers throwing rocks at the other team's. Cope was caught at one point jimmying open crates tha

万物简史 第125期:势不两立的科学(26)

Of the two, Cope's scientific legacy was much the more substantial. In a breathtakingly industrious career, he wrote some 1,400 learned papers and described almost 1,300 new species of fossil (of all types, not just dinosaurs)more than double Marsh's

万物简史 第126期:势不两立的科学(27)

As for the other players in this drama, Owen died in 1892, a few years before Cope or Marsh. Buckland ended up by losing his mind and finished his days a gibbering wreck in a lunatic asylum in Clapham, not far from where Mantell had suffered his crip

万物简史 第127期:势不两立的科学(28)

Of course dinosaur hunting didn't end with the deaths of the great nineteenth-century fossil hunters. Indeed, to a surprising extent it had only just begun. In 1898, the year that fell between the deaths of Cope and Marsh, a trove greater by far than

万物简史 第129期:基本物质(1)

7 Elemental Matters 7 基本物质 Chemistry as an earnest and respectable science is often said to date from 1661, when Robert Boyle of Oxford published The Sceptical Chymistthe first work to distinguish between chemists and alchemistsbut it was a s