The Lagoon - How Aristotle Invented Science

Zusatztext 45748368 Informationen zum Autor Armand Marie Leroi is a professor of evolutionary development biology at Imperial College London. He is the author of Mutants: On the Form! Variety and Errors of the Human Body! which has been published in eleven languages and won The Guardian ’s First Book Award in 2003. He is one of the UK’s most prominent science media figures. THE LAGOON LESBOS (MYTILENE) Among the isles of Greece there is a certain island,  insula nobilis et amoena , which Aristotle knew well. It lies on the Asian side, between the Troad and the Mysian coast, and far into its bosom, by the little town of Pyrrha, runs a broad and sheltered lagoon. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Aristotle as a biologis t (1913) AT ERATO I THERE IS A bookshop in old Athens. It is the loveliest I know. It lies in an alley near the Agora, next to a shop that sells canaries and quails from cages strung on the façade. Wide louvres admit shafts of light that fall upon Japanese woodblock prints propped on a painter’s easel. Beyond, in the gloom, there are crates of lithographs and piles of topographical maps. Terracotta tiles and plaster busts of ancient philosophers and playwrights do duty as bookends. The scent is of warm, old paper and Turkish tobacco. The stillness is disturbed only by the muted trills of the songbirds next door. I have returned so often, and the scene is so constant, that it is hard to remember when, exactly, I first walked into George Papadatos’ bookshop. But I do recall that it was the drachma’s last spring, when Greece was still poor and cheap and you landed at Ellinikon where the clacking flight boards listed Istanbul, Damascus, Beirut and Belgrade and you still felt as if you’d travelled east. George – lank grey hair, a bookman’s paunch – sat at his desk reading an old French political tract. Years ago, he told me, he had taught at Toronto – ‘But in Greece, they still had poets.’ He returned and named his store for the lyric muse. Scanning his shelves, I saw Andrew Lang’s  Odyssey  and three volumes of Jowett’s  Plato.  They were the sort of books that might have belonged to an Englishman, a schoolmaster perhaps, who had retired to Athens, lived on his pension, and died there with some epigram of Callimachus on his lips. Whoever he was, he also left, in a row of Clarendon blue, the complete  Works of Aristotle Translated into English , edited by J. S. Smith and W. D. Ross and published between 1910 and 1952. Ancient philosophy had never held much interest for me; I am a scientist. But I was idling and in no hurry to leave the calm of the shop. Besides, the title of the fourth volume in the series had caught my eye:  Historia animalium. * I opened it and read about shells. Again, in regard to the shells themselves, the testaceans present differences when compared to one another. Some are smooth-shelled, like the solen, the mussel and some clams, viz. those that are nicknamed ‘milk-shells’, while others are rough-shelled, such as the pool-oyster or edible oyster, the pinna and certain species of cockles, and the trumpet shells; and of these some are ribbed, such as the scallop and a certain kind of clam or cockle, and some are devoid of ribs, as the pinna and another species of clam. The shell, for me it is always  the  shell, had sat in the sunlight of a bathroom windowsill, buried in sedimentary layers of my father’s shaving talc, seemingly for ever. My parents must have picked it up somewhere along the Italian littoral, though whether in Venice, Naples, Sorrento or Capri neither could recall. A summer souvenir, then, of when they were still young and newly married; but indifferent to such associations I coveted the thing for itself: the chocolate flames of its helical whorls, the deep orange of its mouth, the milk of its unreachable ...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Armand Marie Leroi
• Editore: Viking USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Copertina rigida
• Pubblicazione: 25.09.2014
• EAN: 9780670026746
• ISBN: 978-0-670-02674-6
• Dimensioni: 160 mm x 237 mm x 40 mm
• Categoria: Scienze naturali, medicina, informatica, tecnica