You Could Look It Up (9 page)

Pliny’s introduction delimits his scope: the “sacred, eternal, immeasurable” is beyond our knowledge. “It is madness,” he wrote, “downright madness, to go out of that world, and to investigate what lies outside it just as if the whole of what is within it were already clearly known.”
7
But everything else—
everything
—was fair game. He started with the elements, understood to be four: earth, air, fire, and water. He also gave not only astronomical observations but inferences and precise measurements:

It is unquestionable that the moon’s horns are always turned away from the sun, and that when waxing she faces east and when
waning west; and that the moon shines 47½ minutes longer daily from the day after the new moon to full and 47½ minutes less daily to her wane, while within 14 degrees of the sun she is always invisible. This fact proves that the planets are of greater magnitude than the moon.
8

Pliny was especially drawn to questions that were not yet settled. “There has been a great deal of minute enquiry among the learned,” he observed, “as to the manner in which bees reproduce their species; for sexual intercourse among them has never been observed.” He was even acute enough to notice evidence of seemingly vanished species, at a time when extinction was barely considered even as a possibility: “There is one thing at which I cannot sufficiently wonder—that of some trees the very memory has perished, and even the names recorded by authors have passed out of knowledge.”
9

Unlike Theophrastus, who aspired to keep humankind out of his book, Pliny has a particular interest in the parts of the natural world with a bearing on human existence. In the historian and scholar Foster Stockwell’s account of Pliny, “nature serves humankind. Natural objects are invariably described in their relation to humans and not by themselves.”
10
Some of his most energetic and detailed investigation into botany, for instance, deals with the grapevine, because wine was central to the Roman economy. From an attempt to reckon the number of varieties of grapes, he goes on to discuss the quality of the wines made from them—“some kinds of wine are more agreeable than others”—and from there to a discussion of the effects of alcohol on the body (“Wine has the property of heating the parts of the body when it is drunk and of cooling them when poured on them outside”), and then to a meditation on drunkenness (“Think of the drinking matches! think of the vessels engraved with scenes of adultery, as though tippling were not enough by itself to give lessons in licentiousness!”).
11
There is even an account of the effects of temperature on already-fermented wine, a lesson that many liquor shops could stand to learn today.
12

How much made it into the
Historia naturalis
? The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon is not exaggerating when he calls it “that immense register, where Pliny has deposited the discoveries, the
arts, and the errors of mankind.”
13
Pliny claims to have covered twenty thousand “noteworthy facts” or “things of importance,” drawn from 473 authors and two thousand volumes—and a modern scholar calls this tally “a severe underestimate.”
14
His compilation is one of the longest works to survive intact from the ancient world. Critics have noted faults, particularly that Pliny is too credulous of his sources.
15
But the complaint is not entirely fair. The scientific method we take for granted was simply not a going concern in first-century Rome: no one was testing claims against reality. The job of a writer in antiquity was not to perform experiments but to weigh his sources, and here Pliny is exemplary. He was also unusually scrupulous about citing his sources, most of them Greek. He was genuinely interested in the claims of authority made by his sources, and he noticed that many facts related by “the most professedly reliable and modern writers” were actually copied verbatim from older writers.
16

Pliny is in fact more scrupulous in testing his claims than most of his predecessors and contemporaries. Having disavowed any intention to talk about the spiritual, for instance, he occasionally paused to reclaim some phenomena for the natural world. “The common occurrences that we call rainbows,” he says, “have nothing miraculous or portentous about them, for they do not reliably portend even rain or fine weather. The obvious explanation of them is that a ray of the sun striking a hollow cloud has its point repelled and is reflected back to the sun, and that the diversified colouring is due to the mixture of clouds, fires and air.” The science is imperfect; the principles of the refraction of light would not be understood for more than sixteen hundred years. But the claim that rainbows are simply “common occurrences” is a milestone in the scientific understanding of the world. And even when he was at his least skeptical, he made it possible for later natural historians to supplement and correct his work. In this sense, even the credulous aping of superstition can contribute to the advancement of knowledge, because compilation on Pliny’s grand scale made it easier to know which claims need to be tested and which refuted. He knew perfectly well that much remained to be done: his book was the beginning of a process, not the end. “Nor do we doubt,” he wrote in his preface, “that there are many things that have escaped us also; for we are but human, and beset with duties, and we pursue this sort of interest in our spare moments.”
17

His devotion to research eventually did him in. On August 20, 79
C.E.
, when Pliny was in command of a Roman fleet, the first in a series of earthquakes shook the Naples area. Pliny, ever the curious naturalist, felt obliged to investigate. On August 22, around noon, the earth shook again—this time accompanied by a formidable explosion. The top of Mount Vesuvius had blown off, and the emerging smoke took the form of a pine tree, with a vertical “trunk” and “branches” coming out at right angles. Pliny watched with his nephew from Misenum, far enough from Vesuvius to ensure his safety. But the scientific spirit made him long for a closer look. As soon as the volcano erupted, he did what few would have the courage to do: instead of running away, he sailed directly toward it. As stones and ash came raining down on the ships, the sailors were terrified, but Pliny—as certain as ever that all time not spent in study was wasted—continued calmly dictating his latest work to a secretary by his side. He died in the shower of ash, a martyr to his scientific curiosity.

Pliny himself was asphyxiated, but the
Historia naturalis
lived on. Most of the other great natural historians of antiquity (such as Theophrastus) had written in Greek, a language almost unknown in medieval Europe before the fifteenth century.
18
Even though most of his sources were Greek, Pliny’s decision to write in Latin made him one of the most widely read ancient “scientists” for more than a thousand years. Even after the Middle Ages, Pliny remained a vital presence. The
Historia naturalis
was put into print very shortly after Gutenberg’s invention of movable type: the first printed edition appeared in Venice in 1469, with another in 1476. This shows that there was real demand for a fifteen-hundred-year-old book at just the moment that modern scientific epistemology was developing. But in 1492, Niccolò Leoniceno, an Italian scholar and physician, published
De Plinii et aliorum in medicina erroribus
(On the medical mistakes of Pliny and others), which set off a debate among the scholars of Ferrara at the end of the fifteenth century. It took another two hundred years for most investigators to abandon Pliny as a serious primary source.

The volume of scientific information has increased by many orders of magnitude since Theophrastus and Pliny; the Roman’s twenty thousand “things of importance,” once a lifetime’s work, are now collected
in seconds in many scientific experiments. And reference books have worked to stay current with the increases in knowledge. We’ll see scientific and medical encyclopedias scattered throughout this book. But the principles established by these classical writers—one focusing on the morphological features of his plant specimens, the other examining the relationships between the natural and the human worlds—established the pattern that scientific encyclopedists are still following.

CHAPTER
3 ½

EASY AS ABC

The Rise (and Fall?) of Alphabetical Order

Samuel Johnson's first definition of
dictionary
is “A book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning.” But many early dictionaries were not alphabetical because there was not yet an alphabet.

Writing is more than five thousand years old. Mesopotamians were using their cuneiform script around 3300
B.C.E.
, and Egyptian hieroglyphs followed about a century later. But these systems were not alphabets. A symbol in either system could stand for an entire word, or sometimes a syllable, but not for a single sound. The Sumerians used around a thousand different cuneiform symbols, the Egyptians around five thousand hieroglyphs. Because there were so many, there was no order to them. The modern Chinese language works the same way: with nearly fifty thousand characters, no one could be expected to memorize them in any arbitrary order.

Reference books from the ancient world therefore cannot count on any obvious order.
Urra=hubullu
is, by some accounts, the oldest dictionary in the world. But it has no handy thumb tabs bearing the letters of the alphabet; instead it is organized thematically, and the divisions strike moderns as distinctly eccentric. Trees appear on tablet 3, but other plants on tablet 17; most animals are on tablets 13–14, but birds and fish show up on tablet 18.
1
It must have made sense to its original users, and it serves as a reminder that our familiar ways of looking at the universe are not the only ways.

Although both cuneiform and hieroglyphics eventually assumed some of the features of alphabets, most historians say the first true alphabet arose among the Semitic peoples of central Egypt around 2000
B.C.E.
It was adapted from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and we can still
make out increasingly stylized versions of the original forms in some of the letters. But the system took on a new logic: a symbol represented not a word, not a syllable, but an individual phoneme. By the time the system reached Phoenicia (modern Lebanon) around 1050
B.C.E.
, there was no longer any obvious resemblance between the letter forms and the pictures from which they evolved, and all pretense to being pictographic was abandoned. Symbols now represented not things but sounds. They had become an alphabet, achieving both economy and flexibility.

Phoenicians were the great traders of the ancient Mediterranean. Their ships could be found everywhere, and their alphabet came along for the ride. From the Phoenician alphabet came the Aramaic alphabet, which in turn spawned modern Hebrew and Arabic. Phoenician also produced the Greek alphabet, which gave birth to the Latin alphabet, which in turn is the basis of the Western European languages (as well as many languages outside Europe). The Cyrillic alphabet, too, came (much later) out of the Greek.

Some of the alphabet's advantages must have been immediately obvious—it is much easier to learn to read with an alphabet than with a logographic system. But one benefit came only much later—alphabetical order. The alphabet need not be in any particular order: there is no reason alpha should come before beta. We could arrange the letters as
QWERTY
or
FUTHORC
or
PYFGCRL
or
MARESIDOT
, but for a still-unknown reason we settled on
ABCDEFG
.

It was a long time before anyone used this order for practical purposes. Ancient Greeks and Romans had ordered alphabets, but they hardly ever used that order in reference books. Alphabetical order started to appear in reference books in Europe in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries,
2
but readers still needed to have it explained to them. In 1286, Johannes Balbus wrote in his
Catholicon
, “I will discuss
amo
before
bibo
because
a
is the first letter of
amo
and
b
is the first letter of
bibo
and
a
is before
b
in the alphabet.”
3
More than three hundred years later, in 1604, alphabetical order was still so alien to English readers that Robert Cawdrey had to explain its use. “If thou be desirous (gentle Reader) rightly and readily to vnderstand, and to profit by this Table,” he patiently advised, “then thou must learn the Alphabet, to wit, the order
of the Letters as they stand.” The reader should learn the alphabet “perfectly without booke”—by heart—“where euery Letter standeth: as (b) neere the beginning, (n) about the middest, and (t) towards the end.”
4
Shakespeare's contemporaries needed to be taught their ABCs.