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Nature’s Patterns
This page intentionally left blank
Nature’s
Patterns
A Tapestry in Three Parts

Philip Ball
Nature’s Patterns is a trilogy composed of
Shapes, Flow, and Branches

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
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With offices in
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Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
# Philip Ball 2009
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc

ISBN 978–0–19–923796–8

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Shapes

T
HERE is beauty to be found in regularity: the same element
repeating again and again, typically with geometric order.
There is no better example than the honeycomb, a miracle of
hexagonal perfection. This sort of pattern is a lattice. On a leopard’s
pelt, the lattice melts but a pattern remains: spots spaced at more or
less equal distances but no longer in neat rows. There is a comparable
order in stripes and concentric bands: a succession rather strictly
enforced on the angelfish, but more loosely applied in the meandering,
merging stripes of the zebra or of sand ripples. The means by which
these natural patterns are constructed may tell us something about
how the far more complicated forms of animals and plants are created
by a progressive division and subdivision of space, orchestrated by
nothing more than simple physical forces.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Preface and acknowledgements ix

1: The Shapes of Things 1

Pattern and Form

2: Lessons of the Beehive 33

Building with Bubbles

3: Making Waves 103

Stripes in a Test Tube

4: Written on the Body 151

Hiding, Warning, and Mimicking

5: Rhythms of the Wild 200

Crystal Communities

6: How Does Your Garden Grow? 226

The Mathematics of a Daisy

7: Unfolding the Embryo 257

The Formation of Body Plans

Appendices 287

Bibliography 295

Index 303
This page intentionally left blank
Preface and
acknowledgements

A
FTER my 1999 book The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation
in Nature went out of print, I’d often be contacted by would-be
readers asking where they could get hold of a copy. That was
how I discovered that copies were changing hands in the used-book
market for considerably more than the original cover price. While that
was gratifying in its way, I would far rather see the material accessible to
anyone who wanted it. So I approached Latha Menon at Oxford Uni-
versity Press to ask about a reprinting. But Latha had something more
substantial in mind, and that is how this new trilogy came into being.
Quite rightly, Latha perceived that the original Tapestry was neither
conceived nor packaged to the best advantage of the material. I hope
this format does it more justice.
The suggestion of partitioning the material between three volumes
sounded challenging at first, but once I saw how it might be done,
I realized that this offered a structure that could bring more thematic
organization to the topic. Each volume is self-contained and does not
depend on one having read the others, although there is inevitably
some cross-referencing. Anyone who has seen The Self-Made Tapestry
will find some familiar things here, but also plenty that is new. In
adding that material, I have benefited from the great generosity of
many scientists who have given images, reprints and suggestions.
I am particularly grateful to Sean Carroll, Iain Couzin, and Andrea
Rinaldo for critical readings of some of the new text. Latha set me
more work than I’d perhaps anticipated, but I remain deeply indebted
to her for her vision of what these books might become, and her
encouragement in making that happen.
Philip Ball
London, October 2007
This page intentionally left blank
The Shapes of Things
Pattern and Form
1

A
on Earth, the aliens approach the first thing they see
R RIV IN G
and utter the familiar words: ‘take me to your leader’ (Fig. 1.1).
Like many jokes, this one offers a damning critique. It under-
mines the venerable and serious scientific quest to find life on other
worlds, exploding the question of ‘how would we know if we found it?’
by answering that we tend to imagine it will look like us.
Now, let me assure you that astrobiologists (as scientists who study
aliens are called nowadays) are not really that foolish. They do not
imagine for a moment that when we touch down on another inhabited
world, we will be greeted by envoys who look like Leonard Nimoy.
Indeed, if there is life in those parts of our own solar system that
seem at all habitable (such as the subsurface seas of Jupiter’s icy
moon Europa), it is most unlikely to warrant the description ‘intelli-
gent’. And we may have to look hard and long to find it, precisely
because we don’t know what we’re looking for. Yet even if we know it
is not going to be Dr Spock, we have trouble shaking the conviction that
it will look something like the forms of life we have seen before.

Fig. 1.1: Do we inevitably expect life to ‘look’ like us?

2 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

Even if it did, that already makes the challenge of identifying extra-

terrestrial life bad enough. Take a look at life on Earth today, and you’ll
see such a bewildering variety of shape and form that you could be
forgiven for imagining anything is possible (Fig. 1.2). But scientists have
a rather more sophisticated view of life (although they still cannot agree

Fig. 1.2: Living organisms on Earth come in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. (Photos: a,
carolsgalaxy; b, Keenan Pepper; c, Sarah Nichols; d, twoblueday; e, Ed Schipul; f, Doug Bowman.)
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 3

on a universal definition of it), which gives them hope of distinguishing

it from its inorganic context. They recognize some attributes of living
systems that go beyond mere physical appearance, such as the fact that
life tends to destroy the chemical equilibrium of its environment. I’ll
explain later what I mean by that, but let’s say for now that it’s rather
like watching a film in which all you can see are balls being juggled: you
know that there is something out of frame that is keeping them in
motion. It’s true that some geological and astrophysical processes
that don’t involve life at all can also induce this disequilibrium—but
nonetheless, searching for disequilibrium as a potential fingerprint of
life seems a lot better than looking around for a loitering humanoid
alien to whom you can say ‘Take me to your leader’.
Nevertheless, old habits die hard. Meteorite ALH84001 is a potato-
shaped lump of Mars that was blasted from the Red Planet a few billion
years ago in an asteroid or meteorite impact and subsequently found its
way through space to Earth. It was discovered in 1984 in the snows of
Antarctica. Scientists who made a detailed study of this cosmic intruder
claimed in 1996 that it contains a ‘possible relic’ of Martian life. In support
of that claim, an image was broadcast around the world that seemed to
show worms crawling across the mineral surface (Fig. 1.3). These ‘worms’

Fig. 1.3: These microscopic structures found in Martian meteorite ALH84001 have been interpreted as
evidence of ancient bacterial life. Might they be the fossilized remnants of tiny organisms? (Photo: NASA.)
4 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

were mineral too, and so tiny that they could only be seen in the electron
microscope; but the suggestion was that they could be the fossilized
remains of Martian bacteria that once infested this chunk of stone.
The researchers who investigated ALH84001 admitted that this con-
clusion was tentative, and they didn’t make it lightly. These wormy
forms were by no means the sole evidence—and after all, the scientists
acknowledged, they were much smaller than earthly bacteria tend to
be. All the same, these structures didn’t look like inorganic forms: it was
hard to explain them as microscopic rock features formed by physical
forces alone. And so the researchers stuck out their necks and used
shape, pattern, form—what scientists tend to call morphology—as the
partial basis for inferring a possible signature of life.
That doesn’t seem an unreasonable thing to do, does it? Surely, after all,
we can distinguish a crystal from a living creature, an insect from a rock?
Well, you might think so. But take a look at Fig. 1.4. At the top are the
shells of marine creatures called diatoms (which we will meet again
shortly). Below are microscopic mineral formations created in a test

Fig. 1.4: Can we tell

apart inorganic
structures formed by
chemistry alone and
those wrought by
biology? The shapes in a
are the shells of marine
micro-organisms called
diatoms; but while those
in b have a similar
complexity that seems
also to speak of the
agency of living
organisms, they are the
product of a purely
chemical process.
(Photos: a, Rex Lowe,
Bowling Green State
University, Ohio. b,
Geoffrey Ozin, University
of Toronto.)
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 5

Fig. 1.5: Chemistry alone can also produce microscopic surface

patterns rather similar to those seen in meteorite ALH84001 (Fig. 1.3).
(Photo: Geoffrey Ozin, University of Toronto.)

tube, entirely without the agency of life. Would you trust yourself to say
which is a ‘living’ form, and which is not? Now look at Fig. 1.5, in which
the microscopic patterns are a product of much the same chemical
process that made those in 1.4b. Does this remind you of anything?
What is it that encourages us to typecast some forms as those made
by life, and others as the products of the non-living world? A tree, a
rabbit, a spider have rather little in common when considered as mere
shapes—and yet we don’t hesitate to see them as examples of living
morphology. Why? Perhaps we sense a kind of purpose, of design, in
these forms? They are ‘complex’, certainly, but what does that mean?
They may have some regularity or symmetry—the bilateral symmetry
of the animals, the repeated branching of the tree—but that can’t be all
there is to it, for surely it is often in a high degree of regularity and
symmetry, in the onset of crystallinity, that we might imagine we
discern life’s absence. Even if we can’t say exactly what living form is,
we’d like to think we know it when we see it. But do we?
In the late 1990s, a group of NASA researchers decided this was a
problem that, like many others, is best left to a computer. They believed
that artificial intelligence would be more likely than we are to distin-
guish the living from the non-living, and so they hoped to ‘train’ com-
puters to recognize life from morphology alone, using all the examples
6 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

they could muster from our own planet. The machine would sense
and assimilate the subtle characteristics of living form, and would
then look for these signatures on missions to Mars or other potentially
life-supporting worlds. They intended this to be another of the compu-
tationally intensive projects like that which analyses radio signals for
signs of extraterrestrial intelligence,* in which volunteers’ home com-
puters analyse the data—in this case, running the computationally
intensive learning process—during spare time. This distributed system
would feed its output into the central brain of the operation, a com-
puter that the NASA researchers proposed to call the D’Arcy Machine.
Now that seems truly ironic, for the name is inspired by the man who,
to my mind, did more than anyone else to undermine the notion that life
has characteristic forms that distinguish it from non-living systems. This
man was the Scottish zoologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose
classic book On Growth and Form, first published in 1917, provides the
first formal analysis of pattern and form in nature. Thompson’s book was
deeply erudite, beautifully written, and like nothing that had gone before.
It was also several decades ahead of its time—and this, coupled with its
undoubted idiosyncrasy, has meant that On Growth and Form never
sparked the emergence of ‘morphology’ as a scientific discipline. For a
long time, no one really knew what to make of Thompson’s tome.
On Growth and Form presents a challenge to the naive view that non-
living systems can produce only ‘simple’, often classically geometric,
shapes and forms—the prismatic shapes of crystals, say, or the sterile
ellipses of planetary orbits. Physics apparently teaches us that the basic
laws of nature are simple and symmetrical, and so it seems natural to
expect that their manifestations will share that characteristic. By the
same token, we tend to imagine that life is a complicated and infinitely
plastic influence, generating complex shapes that geometry struggles to
encompass or describe.
D’Arcy Thompson argued that, on the contrary, life’s forms may often
echo those of the inorganic world, and both of them may be rather simple,
or conversely, delightfully subtle and complex. Many of them, moreover,
have an undeniable beauty, whether that be the elegant, Platonic beauty
that we seem to perceive in symmetry and regularity or the dynamic,
organic beauty of living nature. The ambitions of the D’Arcy Machine
notwithstanding, life leaves no characteristic signature in natural form.

*This project, called SETI@Home, is an example of so-called distributed computing.

 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 7

What makes Thompson’s book especially appealing is that there is

nothing at all recondite about the things he discusses. These forms are
ones we see all around us: the spirals of snail shells or in a sunflower
head, the baroque whorls of flowing water, the lacework of clouds, the
stripes of a zebra, the orderly perfection of a honeycomb. In these three
books I shall consider many other examples which Thompson barely
touched on, if at all, such as the designs of a butterfly wing, the
undulations of sand dunes, the branching of trees and rivers. Science
now possesses the tools and concepts to unravel the processes that
create these things, and it has vindicated Thompson’s approach of
searching for universal physical causes of pattern and order, offering
us a glimpse of a kind of natural harmony that pervades and structures
the whole world.
The puzzle of how these structures arise has solutions that are both
surprising and inspiring, and that foil our intuitions about how com-
plex form and pattern are made. Many of the most striking examples
that we encounter around us are evidently the products of human
hands and minds—they are patterns shaped with intelligence and
purpose, constructed by design. Brickwork tiling schemes, the hori-
zon-spanning stepped terraces of Asian rice fields, the monotonous
regularities of the built environment, the delicate traceries of micro-
electronic circuitry (Fig. 1.6)—all bear the mark of their human makers.
The unconscious message that we take away from all this artifice is that
patterning the world, shaping it into forms that please us or do useful
things, is hard work. It requires dedicated effort and skill. Each piece of
the picture must be painstakingly put into place, whether by us or, in
the wider world, by the forces of nature: the sparrow building its nest,
the individual plants weaving together into a hedgerow. This, we have
come to believe, is the way to create any complex form.
So when the natural philosophers of ages past found complexity in
nature, it is scarcely surprising that many of them decided they were
gazing on God’s handiwork and artistry. Most famously, the English
pastor William Paley argued in his book Natural Theology that the
contrivances found in the living world, in the forms of animals and
plants, are so exquisite that they cannot but be the products of a
guiding intelligence. The shabby tatters of this idea survive today in
the Intelligent Design movement, but Paley’s argument was in its time
much more defensible and indeed more coherent than that. For it was
not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that Darwin’s theory of
8 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

Fig. 1.6: Most of the

complex patterns that
we create are the
products of
painstaking labour,
each element of the
pattern having been
put in position ‘by
hand.’ Here I show a
wall pattern from a
Korean palace (a), a
paddy field in China
(b), an apartment
block in Benidorm (c)
and circuitry on a
microprocessor chip
(d). (Photos: a, Craig
Nagy; b, McKay
Savage; c, Ross
Goodman; d, Digital
Equipment
Corporation.)
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 9

evolution by random mutation and natural selection furnished an

explanation of how apparent ‘design’ might arise in nature without a
designer.
Contrary to the usual perception, Darwinism did not wholly answer
Paley, for the reverend also considered that the principles of astronomy
show signs of God’s wisdom, for example in the physical layout of the
solar system and the stability, simplicity and ponderous pace of plan-
etary orbits. His arguments here are not terribly convincing, although it
has to be acknowledged that modern cosmology is now even more of a
happy hunting ground for those who hope to discern evidence of God’s
design. But Paley could have availed himself of many suggestive ex-
amples of ‘design’ in nature that did not come from the living world,
and it is rather surprising that he did not. Anyone looking at the world
with Paley’s convictions about a Divine Architect would surely have to
conclude that He possesses an irrepressible urge to create beauty for
beauty’s sake. Why else, for instance, is the snowflake—a mere ice
crystal—wrought with such extravagance? Why are clouds dashed and
dotted across the sky in orderly ranks? And can it be mere coincidence
that we see the same forms and patterns again and again in places that
apparently have nothing in common, not even the characteristic of
being alive? Why should river networks resemble our veins and arteries,
or whirlpools look like galaxies, if these are not the motifs chosen by
God?
It is unfair, I know, to create a new argument for Paley only with the
intention of demolishing it. But that is not really my aim. To my mind,
the fact that these patterns can arise, and that they share certain
elements, quite without any need for a Great Patterner, is much more
remarkable and exciting than the notion that they are merely the
products of a cosmic artisan weaving nature’s tapestry. For that is just
what happens. We would not expect to be able to make patterns such as
those in Fig. 1.6 by, say, letting dyes spontaneously unmix into labyrin-
thine patterns, or trusting soil and pebbles to arrange themselves into
terraces ready to take water and seed. But equivalent things really do
happen, and in that way nature weaves its own designs. And what is
more, we find that some of nature’s patterns recur in quite different
situations, as though this tapestry is woven from an archetypal design
book, its themes echoing one another in different parts of the fabric. We
shall see that nature’s artistry is spontaneous, but is not arbitrary.
10 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

The boundaries of evolution

The quixotic flavour of On Growth and Form stems not only from the
fact that Thompson was attempting to explain many things for which
he lacked the right instruments. He was also taking a stand against what
he considered to be a stifling orthodoxy imposed by those who, at the
beginning of the twentieth century, sought explanations for form and
pattern in the living world. For although Darwinism obviated the need
for Paley’s natural theology, it seemed at times in danger of conducting
the same conjuring trick by another name. Instead of proclaiming
‘God’s work’ in response to every example of apparent design in nature,
there was a tendency to exclaim ‘evolution’s work!’ instead.
Darwin argued that, given enough time, small random changes in the
forms of organisms could carry them towards those shapes that were
best adapted to the demands that their environment made on them,
because the struggle for survival weeded out those changes that made
survival harder while conferring a reproductive advantage on those
individuals who, by sheer luck, acquired a beneficial mutation.
This means that, in biology, it is natural to expect that form follows
function: that the shape and structure of a biological entity (which
could be a molecule, a limb, an organism, even a whole colony) is
that which best equips the associated organism for survival. Biologists
are still divided about whether the selective pressure that dictates such
forms acts primarily at the level of the individual genes responsible for
that characteristic, or of the whole organism. But either way, the impli-
cation is that form is naturally selected from a palette of possibilities. A
form that confers evolutionary advantage tends to stick.
This is an extraordinarily powerful idea, and no serious biologist
doubts that it is basically correct in explaining how organisms evolve
and adapt over time. But as an explanation for the forms of life, it is not
entirely satisfying—not because it is wrong, but because it says nothing
about proximate mechanism, about causes that operate not over evo-
lutionary time but in the here and now, in the shaping of each individ-
ual organism. There is a tendency to imagine that science boasts an
answer to every question about the material world, but the truth is that
many questions can be given several different kinds of answer. It is like
asking how a car gets from London to Edinburgh. One answer might be
‘You get in, switch on the engine, and drive up the M1.’ That is not so
much an explanation as a narrative, and Darwinian evolution is a bit
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 11

like that—it provides a narrative that rationalizes how we got to where

we are today. (As a result, it says rather little about where we might go in
the future.) A chemical engineer might offer a different scenario: the car
got to Edinburgh because the chemical energy of the petrol was con-
verted to kinetic energy of the vehicle, along with a fair amount of heat
and acoustic energy. That is a correct answer too, but is perhaps a little
vague and abstract for some tastes. Why did the car’s wheels go round?
To answer this we must go instead to the mechanical engineer, who
explains how they are connected to the engine via a crankshaft . . . and
before long you are getting into an account of the mechanics of the
internal combustion engine.
So what, we might ask, are the mechanics that create biological form?
The standard answer, from what D’Arcy Thompson might have called
the adaptionists, is that we must reason a posteriori, seeking to under-
stand what we observe in terms of its functional efficiency and thus its
adaptive value. He had no objection to this in principle, but com-
plained that the Darwinists don’t follow through with that conviction:
they are happy to assume that a particular form must be the most
efficient one, and do not bother (or do not know how) to demonstrate
that this is so. For that reason, Thompson said, the Darwinian morph-
ologist is apt to forget about the mechanics altogether, and to become
obsessed with comparing this or that feature of different organisms
without thinking how their shape is determined by their mechanical
function in the organism as a whole. He argued that it was absurd to
think, as comparative anatomists did, that individual bones are separ-
ately moulded by evolutionary forces, when what matters is how the
skeleton as a whole functions as an efficient mechanical structure—
something that can be understood using the same principles as those
used by engineers to design bridges.
But this was simply an accusation that Darwinian morphologists
were apt to lose the plot. The bulk of On Growth and Form was devoted
to a much more fundamental challenge to the Darwinists’ ‘principle of
heredity’. Thompson’s contemporary zoologists would not have
objected (at least, one hopes not) to the idea of invoking physics and
mechanics to explain biological form, using them to rationalize it in
terms of efficiency and thus adaptive advantage. But this assumes that
there is a shape or structure that can be identified as the ‘best’ within a
particular environment, and that biology can always find a way of
making it. Taken to the naive extreme, this view holds that everything
12 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

is possible: that nature has at its disposal an infinite palette, and that it
dabbles at random with the options, occasionally (oh, so rarely!) hitting
on a winning formula with which it then tinkers to make minor vari-
ations on a theme. The torpedo-and-fins theme works for fish, say, and
the four-legs-and-muscle design is just the ticket for land predators.
Given the diversity of living forms evident today (Fig. 1.2), which is
after all only a fraction of that which has been exhibited over geological
time, this assumption of an infinite palette is understandable. But as
D’Arcy Thompson reminded his readers, ‘Cell and tissue, shell and
bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is in
obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved,
moulded and conformed.’ Evolution operates within physical con-
straints which insist that not everything really is possible. Are the zebra’s
stripes really the ‘best’ form of camouflage, or just the best that nature
can come up with given the limitations imposed by physical law?
That might seem a minor quibble, since if the whole of nature
operates within the same constraints then all we’re apparently saying
is that Darwinian evolution is a matter of finding the most advanta-
geous forms out of those available. But by insisting on those limits,
D’Arcy Thompson brought to the fore the issue of exactly how such
forms come about through the action of physical forces. It wasn’t just a
question of ensuring that evolutionary biology obeys physical and
chemical laws; he felt that these laws play a direct, causative role in
determining shape and form in biology. Thus he insisted that there
were many forms in the natural world that one could, and indeed
should, explain not by arguing that evolution has shaped the material
that way, but as a direct consequence of the conditions of growth or the
forces in the environment.
What, he felt, could be more unnecessary than invoking millions of
years of selective fine-tuning to explain the curving shape of a horn or
shell when one could invoke a mathematically simple growth law,
based on proximate, physical causes, to account for it? The sabre-like
sweep of an ibex horn need not have been selected from a presumed
gallery of bizarre and ornate alternative horn shapes. We can assume
merely that the horn grows at a progressively slower rate from one side
of the circumference to the other, whereupon, hey presto, you have an
arc. In this case, then, an evolutionary argument is redundant, or at best
ancillary, because the forms of horns are inevitable. Either a horn grows
at the same rate all around its circumference, in which case it becomes
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 13

a straight cone, or there is an imbalance from one side to the other,

giving a curved cone. It just did not make sense to invoke other shapes:
nature’s palette contains just these two. Even the more elaborate spiral
form of a ram’s horn (Fig. 1.7) comes simply from ramping up the
asymmetry of growth rates, causing the horn’s tip to swing through
several complete revolutions. By the same token, biological forms such
as the shapes of amoeba can no more be regarded as ‘selected for’ than
can the spherical form of a water droplet; rather, they are dictated by
physical and chemical forces.
With Darwinism in its first flush, banishing to the dustbin of pseudo-
science the teleology of Paley, it is easy to see how Thompson’s ideas,
with their apparent exhortation of biological predestination governed
by physical law, looked dangerously close to heresy. Thompson was
conscious of that, admitting that On Growth and Form sometimes
‘undoubtedly runs counter to conventional Darwinism.’ Where that
was so, he said, ‘I do not rub this in, but leave the reader to draw the
obvious morals for himself.’
They did, and often unfavourably. At the University College of Dun-
dee in Scotland, Thompson felt marginalized and neglected, and found
himself in his sixth decade without having published anything of note.
When he dared suggest, as he did in 1894 at the meeting of the British

Fig. 1.7: Many animal horns, such as that of this Dall’s sheep, have
spiral shapes that can be explained with a simple growth law.
(Photo: Brian Uhreen.)
14 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

Association for the Advancement of Science, that there were ‘some

difficulties with Darwinism’, he was met with the response that, as he
put it, ‘there were no difficulties in Darwinism . . . to any sensible man in
those days.’ Nonetheless, in the 1910s he began to draw his ideas
together in what he intended to be a ‘little book’. When it appeared in
1917 it was anything but that; yet the formidable On Growth and Form
met with a largely positive reception, and it secured Thompson’s repu-
tation at last. But plans for a revised edition in the 1920s descended into
farce as Thompson failed repeatedly to meet his publishers’ deadlines,
and the second edition, an immense tome that had to be split in two,
did not appear until 1942. In some ways that delay served him poorly,
for the book remained an emphatically Victorian piece of scholarship.
It is illuminating to contrast it with the physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s
groundbreaking book What is Life?, published in 1944—an altogether
more forward-looking work that some regard as presaging the science
of molecular genetics and the notion of biology as an information
science. Thompson’s wartime edition, in contrast, gave the impression
that little had changed in the three decades separating it from its
predecessor.
And it is true that some of On Growth and Form has aged poorly,
while some is plainly wrong. All the same, the book’s central message
remains relevant, and in its breadth, audacity and ambition it continues
to inspire in generations of scientists (and others too) a sense of awe
and wonder about the natural world. Not the least of its virtues is that it
is so exquisitely written; the English biologist Peter Medawar has called
it ‘beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of
science that have been recorded in the English tongue’. On Growth and
Form provided the first glimpse of the landscape that we shall explore
in this series. Today we can see the geography considerably more
clearly, for we have the tools to map it and to interpret what we see.
But we are latecomers; D’Arcy Thompson was the pioneer.

The genetic black box

D’Arcy Thompson’s thesis, then, was that biology cannot afford to neglect
physics, and in particular that branch of it that deals with the mechanics
of matter. (He was far less concerned with chemistry, the other pillar of
the physical sciences, seemingly because he did not consider it to be
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 15

sufficiently mathematical. Today there is much in the field of chemistry

that would have served him well, as we shall see.) His complaint was
against the dogma of selective forces as the omnipotent answer to bio-
logical questions. For him, this did not address the question of cause, but
merely relocated it. A physicist, on the other hand, ‘finds ‘‘causes’’ in what
he has learned to recognize as fundamental properties . . . or unchanging
laws, of matter and of energy’.
Thompson seemed to consider that this neglect of physics in biology
produced an almost vitalistic streak in his contemporary Darwinists.
‘The zoologist or morphologist’, he wrote,

has been slow. . . to invoke the aid of the physical or mathematical sciences; and
the reasons for this difference lie deep, and are partly rooted in old tradition and
partly in the diverse minds and temperaments of men. To treat the living body as
a mechanism was repugnant, and seemed even ludicrous, to Pascal; and Goethe,
lover of nature as he was, ruled mathematics out of place in natural history. Even
now the zoologist has scarce began to dream of defining in mathematical
language even the simplest organic forms. When he meets with a simple geo-
metrical construction, for instance in the honeycomb, he would fain refer it to
psychical instinct, or to skill an ingenuity, rather than to the operation of
physical forces or mathematical laws; when he sees in snail, or nautilus, or tiny
foraminiferal or radiolarian shell a close approach to sphere or spiral, he is prone
of old habit to believe that after all it is something more than a spiral or a sphere,
and that in this ‘something more’ there lies what neither mathematics nor
physics can explain. In short, he is deeply reluctant to compare the living with
the dead, or to explain by geometry or by mechanics the things which have their
part in the mystery of life. Moreover he is little inclined to feel the need of such
explanations, or of such extension of his field of thought.

Strange that this was written nearly a century ago, for I have a feeling
that I’ve met this ‘morphologist’ and spent some time in frustrated
debate with him. He has a point: life’s mechanisms are seldom simple,
and (contrary to common belief) biology does not always do things by
the most economical means imaginable, but can become encumbered
with the legacy of history, on which physics must remain silent. More-
over, physicists can be as arrogant as biologists are stubborn. But a
tradition that has rendered ‘theoretical biology’ almost a term of abuse
does not seem likely to be very productive of theories that explain
(rather than describe) its subject.
Of course, today’s biologists have a more sophisticated answer to
questions of form than the magic word ‘adaptation’. They call on gen-
etics, the ‘microscopic’ basis of Darwinism. It is tempting to imagine,
16 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

from what has been said and written about genes, that they are where all
biological questions end. One hears about genes responsible for this
or that illness or trait or feature—for cancer, for intelligence, for the
development of flies’ wings or of blue eyes. The climate of the culture in
molecular biology (if not the expressed belief of all its practitioners) is
that, by understanding the roles of genes and the mutual interactions of
the protein molecules they encode, we will understand life.
That attitude underpinned the Human Genome Project, the inter-
national effort to map out every one of the 30,000 or so genes in the 23
chromosome pairs of the human cell. The first draft of this map was
completed in 2000 (most of the holes have been filled in subsequently),
and to judge from some of the hyperbole it elicited, you would think
that it has provided us with a complete instruction manual for the
human body. But it does not do that at all. The Human Genome Project
has created a bank of genetic data that is sure to be of immense medical
value, and which contains a great deal of information about how our
cells work. But for biological questions that have a genetic component
(and not all of them do), the respective genes are just the beginning of
an answer. Most of these genes encode the chemical structures, and
thus the chemical functions, of proteins. The issue is how the produc-
tion (or absence) of a particular protein affects the network of biochem-
ical processes in the cell, and how this gives rise to the particular
physiological consequences that we are studying. Identifying the gene
‘responsible’ for this or that trait is like discovering which door we need
to go through in order to enter this network and find out where it leads.
(And most answers can be accessed through several doors.)
Elucidating precisely how genes work is the really hard part of the
matter, which is why so much of genetics operates at the ‘black box’
level: we know that the presence or lack of a gene in the genome is
linked to a certain manifestation at the level of the whole organism, but
we do not know why. In the same way, our computers are blank boxes
(available in a range of colours more tasteful than black) that we know
will respond in certain ways when poked, even though most of us have
not the faintest idea of why this happens.
But in any event, organisms are not just genes and the proteins made
from them. There is all kinds of other stuff in the cell: sugars, fatty acids,
hormones, small inorganic molecules like oxygen and nitric oxide,
salts, and minerals such as those in bone and tooth. None of these
substances is encoded in genes (that is, in the structure of our DNA),
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 17

and you would never guess, by looking at the genome, that they were
required at all, let alone what roles they play. And yet these substances
tend to be highly organized and orchestrated in their interactions and
their structures at the level of the cell (and at larger scales too). Where
does that structure come from? Proteins often play a role in building it,
but so too do physical forces, such as surface tension, electrical attrac-
tion, fluid viscosity. Gene-hunting tells us nothing about such things.
In short, questions in biology of a ‘how?’ nature need more than
genetics—and frequently more than a reductionist approach. If nature
is at all economical (and there is good reason to suppose that is often
the case, though not invariably so), we can expect that she will choose
to create at least some complex forms not by laborious piece-by-piece
construction but by harnessing some of the organizational and pattern-
forming phenomena we see in the non-living world. Evolution, via
genetics, can exploit, tame and tune such phenomena; but it does not
necessarily generate them. If this is so, we can expect to see similarities
in the forms and patterns of living and purely inorganic systems, and to
be able to explain them both in the same manner.
I should add a cautionary note. It is true that biology has been
somewhat resistant to the idea that crude, general physical principles
might sometimes be capable on their own of explaining aspects of
biological form. To biologists, this seems too risky and uncontrollable,
like driving a car with no hands on the wheel and hoping that friction
and air resistance will somehow conspire to guide the vehicle along the
winding road. But one can go too far to the other extreme. It is popular
in some circles to denounce the so-called reductionist science of mo-
lecular biology and imply instead that the universe is somehow imbued
with a creative potential that operates in a ‘holistic’ way. The fad for the
notion of ‘complexity’, which shows that sophisticated forms and pat-
terns may emerge spontaneously from a miasma of interactions, may
sometimes veer towards a kind of neo-vitalism in the way that it
invokes a cosmic creativity. Worst of all is the tendency to make moral
distinctions, so that ‘holistic science’ becomes good and ‘reductionist
science’ meretricious. While I applaud a perspective that broadens the
horizons of ‘black-box’ biology and argues for a role of spontaneous
pattern formation in the living world, there is no getting away from the
fact that most of biology, particularly at the molecular level, is hid-
eously complicated. In distinction from complex, this means that the
details really do matter: leave out one part of the chain of events, and
18 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

the whole thing grinds to a halt. In such cases, one gains rather than
loses understanding by turning up the magnifying power of the micro-
scope. Until we get reductionistic about, say, the body’s immune re-
sponse, we won’t know much about it, let alone develop the potential to
tackle pathological dysfunctions such as AIDS. A reductionist view
won’t necessarily provide an explanation of how it works, but without
it we might not know quite what needs to be explained. Reductionism
can be aesthetically unattractive, I know, but it is wonderfully useful.

What is pattern and what is form?

These concepts are, after all, my topics, and yet I am afraid that I cannot
offer a rigorous definition of either, nor make a rigid distinction be-
tween them. If it makes you feel any better, remember that neither can
scientists offer a rigorous definition of life. (They have tried often
enough, but the very attempt is ill-advised, for the word is colloquial
rather than scientific. You might as well try to define the word ‘love’.)
What is clear is that ‘pattern’ is a supremely plastic word, and evi-
dently it implies quite different things to, say, a psychologist and to a
wallpaper designer. My definition, such as it is, is much closer to the
latter than the former. The best I can do is to say that a pattern is a form
in which particular features recur recognizably and regularly, if not
identically or symmetrically. And while I shall occasionally mention
patterns of a temporal nature—events that repeat more or less regu-
larly, such as the beating of a heart—on the whole I shall be talking in
spatial terms, and so the image of a pattern on wallpaper or a carpet is a
useful one to bear in mind. In those cases, however, the repeating units
are generally identical. My concept of pattern will not necessarily be so
demanding. The repeating elements may be similar but not identical,
and they will repeat in a way that could be called regular without
following a perfect symmetry. Yes, I know it’s vague—but I believe we
usually know such patterns when we see them. One such is made up
from the ripples of sand on a wave-lapped beach or in a windswept
desert (Fig. 1.8). No two of these ripples are identical, and they are not
positioned at exactly repeating intervals. But we can see at once that
there are elementary units (ripples) that recur throughout space. We see
the pattern. Indeed, we are remarkably good at seeing the pattern,
which, because it is not mathematically perfect, is typically harder for
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 19

Fig. 1.8: Ripples in sand clearly constitute a repetitive pattern even though no two parts of the pattern
elements are identical. (Photo: Nick Lancaster, Desert Research Institute, Nevada.)

a machine to recognize. It has become a cliché to say that the human

brain is a pattern-recognizing instrument while the electronic com-
puter is a data-crunching instrument; but like most clichés, it has
taken hold for good reason. Sand ripples are a relatively simple pattern,
but I think we can discern something pattern-like too even in rather
irregular structures, such as the peaks and valleys of a mountain range
or the skeleton of a tree in winter.
Patterns, then, are created from groups of features. Form is a more
individual affair. I would define it loosely as the characteristic shape of a
class of objects. Just as our brains allow us to organize a field of similar
shapes into a pattern, so they are adept at somehow discerning common-
alities of form between diverse objects—although we find it equally hard
to explain exactly why. Objects with the same form need not be identical,
or even similar in size; they simply have to share certain features that we
can recognize as typical, even stereotypical. The shells of sea creatures are
like this: those of organisms of the same species tend to be identifiably
akin even to the untrained eye. The same is true of flowers and of the
shapes of mineral crystals. You might say that the ‘form’ of these objects is
a rather Platonic concept—that which remains after we have averaged
away all the slight variations between individuals.
Patterns, then are typically extended in space—they go on and on—
while forms are bounded and finite. But take this as a guideline, not a rule.
20 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

Despite our talent for spotting generic or familial similarities of

pattern and form, it is not always easy to be sure that two things that
look alike really do belong to the same class. To some extent, making
those assessments can never be a precise science, simply because the
issue may depend on what we’re looking for. It is reasonable to say that
a human and a chimpanzee share the same form when we are con-
trasting them with that of an octopus, but we can also identify chimp
characteristics that differ systematically from those of humans—the
ratio of arm length to leg length, say. Other comparisons are even less
tangible. How can we meaningfully assess the similarities between two
amorphous objects such as clouds, for instance? Yet we shall see that
some apparently ‘shapeless’ patterns and forms have mathematically
precise characteristics that do allow us to make an objective judgement
about their potential kinship. Such tools are sometimes indispensable if
we are looking for scientific criteria to compare different structures or
to evaluate the predictions of theories of pattern formation.
I will often talk about patterns and forms being ‘ordered’ and ‘regu-
lar’, or ‘disordered’ and ‘amorphous’. These, too, are generally rather
qualitative terms, without precise definitions. When I say that a check-
erboard is a very ordered pattern while a handful of coins thrown onto a
tabletop is disordered (Fig. 1.9), I imagine you will know what I mean.
But how might I sharpen that statement? One obvious way is to think
about symmetry. A square grid is symmetrical in various ways. Tech-
nically, it possesses symmetry operations, which are manipulations that
leave it looking unchanged. That is the case, for example, if you rotate it
by 90 degrees in any direction, and also if you move the whole grid up,
down or sideways by a distance equal to the width of a whole number of
square cells (provided that we don’t worry about the edges, or about the
colour of checkerboard squares). You can also stick a mirror along
various directions so that the reflection looks just like the original
board (Fig. 1.10). These symmetry operations are called rotations,
translations and reflections; there are other kinds, too.
You can probably appreciate that symmetry is thus related to order.
But the relationship between the two is not simple. Our intuition might
suggest to us, for example, that the shape shown in Fig. 1.11a is more
symmetrical than that in Fig. 1.11b. But, mathematically, they both
have precisely the same degree of symmetry. And yet it might be
meaningful to suggest that 1.11a is more ordered than 1.11b, even if it
is hard to find a way to define that mathematically. Order implies
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 21

Fig. 1.9: A checkerboard represents an orderly array of elements (a),

while a pile of coins is disordered (b). (Photo: b, Ejdzej and Iric
Zakwitnij.)

perhaps a certain logic to the construction. Formally speaking, an oak

tree has no symmetry: there is no symmetry operation, other than
simply doing nothing (the so-called identity operation), that will leave
the shape unchanged in the sense of being superimposed perfectly on
the original. But is an oak tree wholly disorganized and disorderly?
22 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

Fig. 1.10: A mirror reflection of a checkerboard reproduces the original pattern exactly, in such
a way that the two can be superimposed.

I would think not. The logic of the structure, you might say, is that as
you pass upwards from the trunk, it branches repeatedly at a roughly
constant angle (and the limb’s width decreases at each branch point).
The very fact that we confuse ‘symmetrical’ with ‘highly ordered’
indicates the limited utility of symmetry as a measure of order. Is either
of the shapes in Fig. 1.11 more symmetrical than a circle? Most people
would say they are (this is a popular audience test in lectures on
symmetry), but in fact the circle has the highest possible degree of
symmetry for a two-dimensional (flat) object. There are an infinite
number of rotation angles and reflection planes that leave it looking
unchanged. A very high degree of symmetry can thus seem to us to be
featureless and bland—quite the opposite of what we might expect
intuitively.
Think, for example, of a soap bubble: to all intents and purposes it is a
perfectly spherical film of liquid. Like a circle, the bubble is highly
symmetrical: you can turn it this way and that, and it still looks the
same. And yet now think about zooming in on the bubble until we can
make out individual atoms and molecules, both in the liquid wall and
the gas it encloses. Now there doesn’t seem to be any symmetry at all:
everything is in random disorder as molecules whiz here and there. The
uniformity and high symmetry becomes apparent only by considering
the average features of these systems. With randomness and uniformity
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 23

Fig. 1.11: Which of these two shapes is the most symmetrical? In

mathematical terms, they both have precisely the same degree of
symmetry.

alike, one part of the system is equivalent to any other, and things look
the same (on average) in every direction. The perfect spherical sym-
metry of the bubble is a consequence of the average uniformity of the
gas inside it, which means that the pressure it exerts on the bubble wall
is equal in all directions.
The problem of creating patterns and forms that we tend to recognize
as such is therefore not one of how to generate the symmetry that they
often possess but of how to reduce the perfect symmetry that total
randomness engenders (when considered on average), to give rise to
the lower symmetry of the pattern. How do the water molecules moving
at random in the atmosphere coalesce into a six-petalled snowflake?
Patterns like this are the result of symmetry breaking.
The symmetry of a uniform gas can be broken by applying a force
that changes the disposition of its molecules. Gravity will do that: in a
gravitational field the gas is denser where the field is stronger (closer to
the ground). Thus the Earth’s atmosphere has a density that increases
steadily towards ground level. The gas is then no longer uniform, and
you can gauge your altitude by measuring the air density. Here the
symmetry of the force dictates the symmetry of the distribution of
matter that it produces: gravity acts downwards, and it is only in the
downward direction that symmetry is broken. Within horizontal planes
above the ground (more properly, within concentric spherical shells
around the Earth), the atmosphere has a constant density. (Rather, it
would have if the Earth were a perfect sphere and there were no winds
or weather.) We might intuitively expect that this will always be so: that
the final symmetry of a system will be dictated by that of the symmetry-
breaking force that destroys an initially uniform state. In other words,
24 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

we might expect that matter will rearrange itself only in the direction in
which it is pushed or pulled, so that a pattern mimics the ‘shape’ of the
force that generates it. Within this picture, if you want to pile up sand
into mounds arranged in a square, checkerboard array, you will have to
apply a force with this ‘square’ symmetry.
But the central surprise of the science of pattern formation is that this
is not always so: the symmetry of a pattern formed by a symmetry-
breaking force does not always reflect the symmetry of that force. Of the
many examples that I shall describe throughout this book, one will
serve here to illustrate what I mean, and why this seems at first sight
to be astonishing. If you heat (very carefully—it is not an easy experi-
ment in practice) a shallow pan of oil, it will develop roughly hexagonal
circulation cells once the rate of heating exceeds a certain threshold
(Fig. 1.12). The oil is initially uniform, and the symmetry-breaking force
(the temperature difference between the top and bottom of the oil)
does not vary horizontally. So there seems to be nothing that could
make one bit of the oil behave differently from a bit slightly to its right
or left. Yet suddenly this uniformity is lost, being replaced by a pattern
with hexagonal symmetry. Where has this sixfold pattern come from?

Fig. 1.12: When a liquid is heated uniformly from below, like a pan of water placed on the stove, it
will spontaneously develop a pattern of circulating convection cells. In a well-controlled situation the
cells are regular hexagons, made visible here by metal flakes suspended in the liquid. (Photo:
Manuel Velarde, Universidad Complutense, Madrid.)
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 25

Here one is apparently getting ‘order for free’—getting order out

without putting order in—although, as I say, it is more correct to say
that symmetry is being lost rather than order gained. How is it that
symmetry can be spontaneously broken? How can the symmetry of the
effect differ from that of the cause? And why is symmetry so often
broken in similar ways in apparently very different systems? That is to
say, why are some patterns universal? These are the central questions of
pattern formation, and are profound enough to last us throughout the
three volumes of this series.

Why use maths?

I do not plan to say any more than this about symmetry per se, because
there are many splendid books that deal with this endlessly fascinating
topic, of which Hermann Weyl’s Symmetry is a classic and Fearful
Symmetry by Ian Stewart and Martin Golubitsky is one of the most
lucid and up to date.
Neither do I propose to say a great deal more about mathematics
more generally—which, without wishing to patronize, will surely come
as a relief to some readers. There is, however, no escaping the fact that
mathematics is the natural language of pattern and form. That may
seem disappointing to those who never quite made friends with this
universal tool of science—for patterns can be things of tremendous
beauty, whereas mathematics can often appear to be a cold, unroman-
tic and, well, calculated practice. D’Arcy Thompson admitted that ‘The
introduction of mathematical concepts into natural science has
seemed to many men no mere stumbling-block, but a very parting of
the ways.’ But mathematics has its beauty, too, and part of that lies in
the way it distils from the apparently complex an essence of pellucid
simplicity. That is why maths enables us to get to the heart of pattern
and form—to describe it at the most fundamental level, to reveal its
Platonic core. This is more than a mere convenience; it may show us
what truly needs explaining, rather than being distracted by the
ephemeral or incidental. To explain how the form of a shell arises,
there is no point in trying to account for every tiny bump and groove,
since these will probably be different from one shell to the next. We
should instead focus on the mathematical form of the ‘ideal’ shell.
Mathematics and geometry can describe what everyday words can-
not. What is the shape of a circle? If we want to avoid tautology, we
26 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

Fig. 1.13: What shape is a pebble?

would seem to be stumped: it’s no good saying it is ‘round all over’,

since the same is true of an egg. But, geometrically, we can say that it is
‘a line in a flat plane that is everywhere an equal distance from a single
point’. Not only does this help us to express exactly and without ambi-
guity what a circle is, but it tells us how we might construct one. To
draw a line equidistant from a fixed point, you can knock a nail into a
wooden board and use it to anchor a piece of string tied at the other end
around a pen. The geometrical description contains within it a pre-
scription for ‘growing’ the object. That may seem obvious enough for a
circle, but what about the shape of a pebble? Does it even mean
anything to talk about a ‘pebble shape’, given that no two are alike
(Fig. 1.13)? I would guess that you will have an immediate picture of
what such a shape is like; and rather wonderfully, a team of physicists
found in 2006 how to describe this shape mathematically.* This means
that a theory of pebble formation by erosion ought to produce, from

*OK, you asked for it. According to Doug Durian and colleagues at the University of
Pennsylvania, a pebble is a three-dimensional rounded object whose surface has a near
gaussian distribution of curvature. This isn’t as fearsome as it sounds. The curvature at any
point on a surface is just what you might imagine it to be—a measure of how strongly
curved it is. Technically, it is proportional to the inverse of the radius of a circle that fits the
surface just at that point. A flat surface has zero curvature—the radius of the circle is
infinite. If you measure the curvature at various points on a pebble surface and plot them
on a histogram, the plot has approximately a bell-curve shape, called a gaussian distribu-
tion. This distribution is the crucial thing: it is the geometrical way of expressing the ‘typical’
shape, a kind of average if you will. No two pebbles will have the same curvatures at every
point, or even at most points, on their surfaces, but they can still have the same overall
distribution of curvatures.
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 27

Fig. 1.14: The logarithmic spiral (a) is common in nature, as seen

most elegantly in the cross-section of a Nautilus shell (b). (Photo: Scott
Camazine, Pennsylvania State University.)

any initial rock shape, a form that converges on the Platonic pebble.
The mathematical shape supplies a criterion for evaluating theories of
how pebbles are made.
D’Arcy Thompson was very much preoccupied by one geometric
form in particular: the so-called logarithmic spiral (Fig. 1.14a), which
appears on a slate plaque commemorating the house in St Andrews,
near Dundee, where he lived. This form was first expressed as a math-
ematical equation by René Descartes in 1638: the equation has a very
simple and concise form, but will mean little to the non-mathematician.
Crudely speaking, the spiral widens as one moves along the curve from
the centre (unlike, say, the spiral made by a flat coil of rope, where the
distance between each successive loop of the coil remains the same).
Thompson noted that this spiral often appears in nature, in particular
in the shape of animal horns and the cross-sectional outline of mollusc
shells like that of the marine Nautilus* (Fig. 1.14b). Its ubiquity, he said, is
not at all surprising once one recognizes that the logarithmic spiral has an
important characteristic: its shape does not alter as it grows. Thus, a large
Nautilus shell looks just like a small one magnified. That is just what is
needed to house an organism that is steadily getting bigger in all direc-
tions. The Nautilus mollusc itself dwells in a series of chambers of in-
creasing size, making a new one each time it has outgrown the last.

*The Nautilus has become something of the ‘poster animal’ of mathematical nature, but the
poor creature itself gets short shrift: all we tend to see is its beautiful, empty shell. The
animal is something of an oddity: a relative of squids and octopi, and highly mobile in the
deep ocean by virtue of its ability to suck in water and expel it as a jet.
28 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

It requires nothing more of each successive chamber than that it be

proportionately bigger. Given that each chamber is built on the rim of
the previous one, this criterion could be met by a conical shell, and indeed
some molluscs do make such shells. But the Nautilus grows one part of
the edge more quickly than the other, which makes the cone curl into a
spiral: ‘the Nautilus shell’, said Thompson, ‘is but a cone rolled up’.
Thus, the mathematical grace of the Nautilus shell does not require any
geometric foresight from the mollusc, and neither does it imply that a
logarithmic spiral is somehow encoded in its genes. Like the animal horns
we saw earlier, the form follows in the most straightforward manner from
the mode of its growth—the need to retain a constant shape which
increases steadily in scale. It is fruitless, then, to argue about why the
logarithmic spiral is somehow superior to others in evolutionary terms—
it is simply a consequence of the mathematics of growth.
This perspective can be extended to spiral forms considerably more
complex than that of the Nautilus shell. D’Arcy Thompson realized that
other shells too have a shape that can be generated by the logarithmic
spiralling of a particular rim shape, later called the ‘generating curve’.
He said:
The surface of any shell may be generated by the revolution about a fixed axis of
a closed curve, which, remaining always geometrically similar to itself, increases
its dimensions continually. . . The scale of the figure increases in geometric
progression [that is, being multiplied by a constant factor on each growth step]
while the angle of rotation increases in arithmetical [that is, at a constant rate].

The process is shown in Fig. 1.15a, and the forms it can produce have been
explored in computer modelling by Deborah Fowler and Przemyslaw
Prusinkiewicz at the University of Regina in Canada (Fig. 1.15b). Thomp-
son noted that the shape of the generating curve ‘is seldom open to easy
mathematical expressions’, but the way the shell is created by sweeping
this boundary in a spiral around a fixed axis is mathematically well
defined, and can be seen to be a consequence of a simple growth law.
Thompson admitted that in general it was no easy thing to find math-
ematical expressions that describe the organic forms of nature, and on
the whole he was right. But as this example illustrates, that is not really the
right way to proceed. Equations describing the surfaces of the shells in
Fig. 1.15b would indeed be cumbersome, and probably not very illumin-
ating. It is far more instructive to look for the algorithm that generates the
form—for a mathematical description of how to grow it. An algorithm is a
series of steps conducted in succession. In this case, it could read:
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 29

Generating curve Logarithmic

helico-spiral

Shell
surface Shell axis

b
Fig. 1.15: A shell surface can be constructed by sweeping a two-
dimensional ‘generating curve’ through a logarithmic spiral (a). This
procedure will create many different types of shell surface (b),
depending on the generating curve. Here some of these artificial
shells have been given surface pigmentation patterns for added
realism. (Image b: Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, University of Calgary.)

Step 1: Choose your generating curve.

Step 2: Move the generating curve along a logarithmic spiral, while letting it grow
bigger at a steady rate and, optionally, at the same time descending a vertical
axis.
Step 3: As you go, deposit material around the edge of the generating curve.

Complex shapes and patterns of the sort I consider in this book are
often most easily described not in terms of ‘what goes where’ but by a
generating algorithm. Once we have identified an algorithm that makes
30 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

the right shape, we can ask which physical processes might produce
such an algorithm. If the algorithm gives the right shape, that doesn’t
necessarily mean it corresponds to anything that happens in the real
world—but at least it could do.

Model making

When scientists construct an algorithm like this, they have an example

of what they often call a ‘model’ of the system they are studying. They
will say ‘Here is my model of shell growth’, and will outline the sequence
of steps in the process. This is perhaps a rather unfamiliar and technical
use of a word that, in everyday parlance, has a somewhat different (but
related) connotation. We tend to think of a model as a small-scale
replica of a real object (the definition remains apt for fashion models).
For scientists, however, a model is a simplified, abstract description of
what they think is going on in a particular phenomenon. The model is
basically a series of assumptions about what is involved in the process,
which the scientist proceeds to translate from qualitative to mathemat-
ical terms, before performing calculations to see if the model predicts an
outcome anything like that actually observed.
The key here is the word ‘simplified’. A model does not generally take
exhaustive account of everything that might be happening in the pro-
cess. A good model includes only those aspects thought to be essential
in producing the basic phenomenon. The details may be added later,
once the basic process is understood. There are various reasons why
scientists prefer to simplify their models. Sometimes they just don’t
know everything that might be happening in the system being stud-
ied—this is almost invariably the case when the system is alive, for
example. Or it may be that some factors are clearly going to have only a
minor influence, so that their inclusion just makes the equations harder
to solve without altering the solutions very much. If you want to
calculate the speed of a cannon-ball falling from the Tower of Pisa,
you needn’t worry too much about including a mathematical descrip-
tion of air resistance; but if you’re looking instead at small ball-bearings
falling through treacle, the fluid’s resistance to the motion is crucial.
A lot of engineering is conducted in this spirit: keep what matters,
forget the rest (at least in the first instance). There is a third reason for
leaving things out of a model, however: we might know, or at least
 THE SHAPES OF THINGS j 31

suspect, that they are probably important, but we simply do not know
how to include them, or how to solve the equations if we do. So we
might then look for reasonable approximations that we do know how to
solve, accepting that what the model predicts might not match very well
with what we observe. Scientists interested in fluid flow, for example
(the topic of Book II), commonly find themselves in this situation,
making big approximations and having to live with the consequences.
The point is that scientific descriptions of phenomena do not fully
capture reality, nor do they aim or claim to. They are models. This is not
a shortcoming of science but a strength, since it allows scientists to
make useful predictions without getting bogged down by intractable
details. Much of the scientist’s art lies in working out what to include
and what to exclude in a model.
There are very many natural phenomena (one could make a case for
this being true of them all) for which there is not a single, unique model
that is ‘right’. This is more than a matter of models differing by the
choice of what to put in and leave out. Rather, some phenomena can be
tackled successfully from more than one entirely different theoretical
perspective. For example, one can write down equations that describe
traffic flow on a road rather as though it was a liquid flowing down a
pipe. Or you can write a computer programme that takes account of the
behaviour of each individual and discrete vehicle, acting out the flow
rather like a computer game. Both models can show some predictive
value—both are valid models. This is true of several of the phenomena
that I shall discuss in this book, and it means that it can be rather hard
to decide the relative merits of a particular model. If two seemingly
different models both capture aspects of the real system under study,
which is best? There may be no right answer—perhaps one model is
best for one purpose, and another for understanding some other as-
pect. That is a reminder that science is about finding good enough
approximations to reality to give us some understanding of it, and not
about capturing an absolute ‘truth’.
Some models are expressed in terms of mathematical equations, for
example describing the forces at play (such as Newton’s inverse-square
law of gravity). If the modeller is lucky, it may even be possible to solve
such a model with pen and paper (which was all theorists had at their
disposal until half a century ago). If the calculations are too hard, they can
be made on a computer. But other systems might not be so amenable:
you know how the components interact, but not how to describe that
32 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

interaction with equations you can solve. In such cases, one can conduct
a simulation of the system on a computer, such as that described above
for traffic. The predicted behaviour emerges not by solving any maths but
by running the simulation and seeing what happens.
Perhaps the strongest point that I want to make about models in the
present context is that they can often generate the complex patterns
seen in nature from remarkably few ingredients, which are themselves
of striking simplicity. What does that tell us? On one level it simply
means that growth and form need not be mysterious—we do not have
to resign ourselves to thinking that the shape of a flower will be for ever
beyond our abilities to explain, or even that an explanation (at some
level) will require years of dedicated research on plant genetics. On the
other hand, it carries at least an implication that there exist universal
patterns and forms that remain insensitive to the fine details of a
particular system. Bear this idea in mind as we peruse the gallery of
extraordinary and often beautiful patterns and forms in these three
books: we will see that nature, like any artist, has themes and prefer-
ences for the images it creates. For nature, at least, we can sometimes
understand why this is.

The map is not the territory

Models are maps of reality: they include only the features one wants to
study, and leave out everything else. Maps have a fascination of their
own, but they are as nothing compared to the real thing—to a walk in
the woods and mountains. That is why I recommend that you try to
create some of these patterns for yourself, with the recipes given in the
appendices. I hope you will discover that the most exciting, the most
profound experience of them is to be found through direct encounter.
This is not so hard to arrange, for these self-made patterns are every-
where, in the vegetable patch, in the coffee cup, on mountain tops, and
in the city streets. I hope you enjoy them.
Lessons of the Beehive
Building with Bubbles
2

A
PH OTOG RAPH of Ernst Haeckel doing field research on Lanzarote
in 1866 shows the archetypal German Romantic: here are the
abundant waves of glossy hair, the full beard, and the distant
gaze of the dreamer. This image is furthered in a letter that Haeckel, a
professor of zoology at the University of Jena, wrote to his parents from
the Spanish island early the next year, in which he describes a jellyfish
called a siphonophore:

Imagine a delicate, slender flowering whose leaves and brightly coloured flowers
are transparent like glass, and which meanders through the water with the most
graceful and sprightly movements, and you have an idea of these delightful,
beautiful and delicate examples of animal finery.

The impact that this ‘finery’ had on Haeckel is revealed in dazzling

abundance in the portfolio Art Forms in Nature which he published in
ten instalments over five years, beginning in 1899. It looks at first glance
like the original coffee-table book, a collection of one hundred glorious
plates drawn by Haeckel himself, in which he depicts the profusion of
wonderful forms found among living things. Here are antelopes and
birds, turtles and crabs, lichens and pine cones—but also, and in
greater numbers, organisms that most people never knew existed,
and still don’t. There are the delicate fronded forms of Medusae jelly-
fish—the siphonophores and their relatives (Fig. 2.1)—and all kinds of
strange corals and snails and sea creatures that look like the most
extravagant inventions of a Surrealist. Most strikingly, there are forms
that do not look like living organisms at all: one might imagine they are
elaborate, ornamented shields and plates, futuristic spacecraft covered
in spines, bizarre crown-like headgear, demented pavilions (Fig. 2.2).
There are no clues here to the scale of these objects, nothing to show that
the remarkable spiny cages and domes are in fact the ‘shells’ of single-
celled organisms visible only under the microscope. They are called
34 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

Fig. 2.1: Medusae jellyfish drawn by Ernst Haeckel.

radiolarians, and Haeckel’s study of these creatures under the supervision

of the physiologist Johannes Müller in Berlin in the 1850s led to his 1862
Monograph on Radiolarians, which helped to gain him the post at Jena.
‘When I visited the ocean for the first time twenty-five years ago’, he wrote
in 1879 in a book on jellyfish,
 LESSONS OF THE BEEHIVE j 35

Fig. 2.2: Some of the radiolarians depicted by Haeckel look like the products of a baroque
imagination.

and, in August 1854, was introduced to the inexhaustible, wonderful world of

marine life by my unforgettable master Johannes Müller on Heligoland, nothing
exerted such a powerful force of attraction on me amongst the myriad animal
forms, of which I had not seen living specimens until then, as the medusae.
Never will I forget the delight with which I, as a twenty-year-old student, first
observed Tiara and Irene, Chrysaora and Cyanae, and attempted to render with
my paintbrush their splendid forms and colours.

Marine biology, more or less unfettered by gravity, seems to luxuriate

in these baroque forms, and it is not hard to see how a young man, an
36 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

admirer of Goethe and enthused with the spirit of Romanticism, and a

gifted artist to boot who had even considered a career as a painter,
might, after gazing at them for countless hours, be moved to conclude
that even the most basic living matter has an ‘artistic soul’. We can
understand why he might feel compelled to communicate this natural
artistry to a wide audience with such ornate and mesmerizing draw-
ings. But Ernst Haeckel was not the kind of person to let it rest at that. In
many ways he is the closest thing to a German D’Arcy Thompson—a
synthetist, a man who sought to find common threads running through
the profusion of nature’s tapestry. In other ways, however, he could not
be more different. Thompson was the embodiment of Scottish ration-
alism, an engineer at heart who looked for proximal, mechanical ex-
planations of natural forms. Haeckel was close to being a mystic,
finding within the traceries of a radiolarian evidence of a creative,
organizing force that pervaded nature, and hanging on these tiny min-
eralized skeletons a thesis about aesthetics, sociology, and religion.
We need to look at Art Forms in Nature with this in mind. For it is not a
casually assembled cabinet of curiosities, but a tract with an agenda.
Haeckel has selected carefully what he shows us, and how. These are
not images to massage the senses (although they certainly do that); they
are, in Haeckel’s mind, raw data marshalled to convince us of his over-
arching theory about form, symmetry and beauty in the world.
Haeckel was a Darwinist—indeed, Darwin himself credited Haeckel as
being instrumental to the spread of his theory of evolution in Germany—
but his creed was not exactly orthodox. He was convinced that organisms
evolve by degrees and thereby diversify in a branching phylogenetic tree,
achieving forms of ever-increasing complexity. But he did not feel that
natural selection was necessarily the mechanism; indeed, his insistence
that the environment helps to shape an organism sounds surprisingly
close to Lamarckism, the notion of inheritance of acquired character-
istics. And Haeckel’s evolutionary theory did not trust wholly to the
randomness and contingency of Darwin’s idea, for he discerned some-
thing more deterministic at the root of it all. Influenced by Hegel’s view of
history as spiritual destiny, Haeckel implied that there was an organizing
force that shaped nature all the way from protoplasm (primordial living
matter) to humankind. Indeed, he felt that even our mental and spiritual
states are direct products of evolution: somewhere along this great chain
of being we acquired a soul. Our appreciation of beauty and our capacity
for mathematical abstraction both emerged from this tendency of nature
 LESSONS OF THE BEEHIVE j 37

to organize itself into ever more complex forms, based on symmetry and
pattern. Thus Haeckel held a somewhat Platonic view of beauty, which is
not in the eye of the beholder but is the result of the way we are condi-
tioned by the objective forms of the natural world. In his bestselling
Riddle of the Universe (1899), Haeckel asserted that there is a fundamental
unity between organic and inorganic matter, not simply because (as
some chemists had argued already) they are made of the same basic
stuff but because the drive towards organization, and thus towards life,
is inherent in all matter. When in 1888 the Austrian botanist Friedrich
Reinitzer discovered the first liquid crystal—a compound whose mol-
ecules became spontaneously aligned with one another in the liquid
state, rather like logs floating on a river—Haeckel was delighted. Here,
he believed, was evidence of simple matter exhibiting nature’s organizing
principle, and in his last and perhaps strangest book, Crystal Souls:
Studies on Inorganic Life (1917), he argued that liquid crystals are a
genuine kind of life.
This all amounts to a rather peculiar distortion of Darwin’s grand
idea. But Riddle of the Universe is disturbing not just because of its
teleology. It also shows abundant evidence of the darker side of Teut-
onic Romanticism. The Cambridge evolutionary biologist Simon Con-
way Morris says of the book,

Vastly popular, endlessly reprinted and translated, it nevertheless ‘appealed to a

pseudo-educated mind . . . without much sophistication who had sought an au-
thoritative yet simple account of modern science and a comprehensible view of
the world’. Behind the bearded sage and devotee of the little town of Jena, was an
intolerant mind wedded to racism and antisemitism . . . His farrago of ideas . . .
found a warm reception with the Nazis. Just how much Hitler knew of Haeckel’s
actual work is not clear, but the influence of his philosophy is obvious.

The role of Haeckel’s faux-Darwinian ideas, and of the so-called Monist

league that he founded in 1906,* in the emergence of European fascism
has been explored by the American historian Daniel Gasman. It makes
the eugenic enthusiasms of the early British Darwinists seem mild in
comparison, and serves as a warning about the dangers of turning
science into ideology.

*Monism was the idea that all life stems from matter alone, denying the dualism of body
and spirit. Haeckel pursued this idea throughout his career, leading him to be regarded as
anti-religious and atheistic. The link between Monism and Nazi ideology is still debated; at
the very least, one must say that the equation is not simple.
38 j NATURE’S PATTERNS: SHAPES

From nature into art

The gorgeous plates in Art Forms in Nature were thus intended not as
mere demonstrations that ‘nature is beautiful’ but as data supporting
Haeckel’s contention that the emergence of spontaneous form, sym-
metry, and order in the living world was an inevitable process. This
should make us look at the pictures with a more critical eye. When
Haeckel wants to show us nature’s organizing force at work, we must
start to wonder if he is doing a little organizing of his own. Do the fronds
and globular chambers of medusae really have such perfect forms and
symmetries, as though they are the engineered products of an archi-
tect’s blueprint? His cofferfish are Platonic creatures with polygonal
scales, and Haeckel has plucked off some of those scales and served
them up as abstract geometrical designs. The heads of his bats have the
uncanny bilateral symmetry of Rorschach blots. The fossil sea creatures
called cystids look here like elaborate caskets fashioned by silversmiths,
unreal in their precision. Haeckel was a wonderful draughtsman, but
was he really drawing what he was seeing, or what he felt he should be
seeing—the idealized form that he intuited behind the debased, mun-
dane reality?
First and foremost, Haeckel’s illustrations have a decorative quality of
a now familiar stamp. The fronds of his discomedusae (Fig. 2.3) resem-
ble nothing so much as the leaves and stems of a William Morris floral
print, while the swirling exuberance of their trailers make us think of
the artistic movement that was very much in sway when Haeckel was
making these drawings: Art Nouveau and its German equivalent, Ju-
gendstil. That is no coincidence, for Haeckel was both influenced by
this movement and influenced it in turn. His jellyfish images were used
as ceiling decorations in his house, the Villa Medusa (Fig. 2.4), where
they were perfectly in keeping with the Art Nouveau furnishings.
Haeckel’s pictures influenced artists such as Hermann Obrist and
Louis Comfort Tiffany, and their impact was acknowledged most expli-
citly in the work of the French architect and designer René Binet, who
wrote to Haeckel in 1899 while working on the entrance gate to the
Paris World Exposition of 1900:

About six years ago I began to study the numerous volumes written about the
Challenger Expedition [see below] in the library of the Paris museum and, thanks
to your work, I was able to amass a considerable amount of microscopic
 LESSONS OF THE BEEHIVE j 39

Fig. 2.3: Haeckel’s discomedusae seem to owe a clear debt to the arabesque Art Nouveau style.

documentation: radiolarians, bryozoans, hydroids etc. . . . , which I examined

with the utmost care from an artistic standpoint: in the interest of architecture
and of ornamentation. At present, I am busy realizing the monumental entrance
gate for the exhibition in the year 1900 and everything about it, from the general
composition to the smallest details, has been inspired by your studies.
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 SECULAR CHANGE OF THE AGONIC LINE IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC
BETWEEN 1500 AND 1900.
[From the United States Coast Survey Report, 1880, No. 84.]

A knowledge of the variation of the needle came Variation of the

more slowly to be known to the mariners of the needle.
Mediterranean. It had been observed by Peregrini
as early as 1269, but that knowledge of it which rendered it greatly
serviceable in voyages does not seem to be plainly indicated in any
of the charts of these transition centuries, till we find it laid down on
the maps of Andrea Bianco in 1436.
 LAPIS POLARES MAGNES.
[From Hirth's Bilderbuch, vol. iii.]

It was no new thing then when Columbus, as he sailed westward,

marked the variation, proceeding from the northeast more and more
westerly; but it was a revelation when he came to a position where
the magnetic north and the north star stood in conjunction, as they
did on this 13th of September, 1492.
As he still moved westerly the magnetic line was
found to move farther and farther away from the Columbus's
misconception of
pole as it had before the 13th approached it. To an the line of no
observer of Columbus's quick perceptions, there variation.
was a ready guess to possess his mind. This
inference was that this line of no variation was a Sebastian Cabot's
meridian line, and that divergences from it east observations of its
help in
and west might have a regularity which would be
found to furnish a method of ascertaining longitude
far easier and surer than tables or water clocks. We determining
longitude.
know that four years later he tried to sail his ship
on observations of this kind. The same idea seems to have occurred
to Sebastian Cabot, when a little afterwards he approached and
passed in a higher latitude, what he supposed to be the meridian of
no variation. Humboldt is inclined to believe that the possibility of
such a method of ascertaining longitude was that uncommunicable
secret, which Sebastian Cabot many years later hinted at on his
death-bed.
The claim was made near a century later by Livio Sanuto in his
Geographia, published at Venice, in 1588, that Sebastian Cabot had
been the first to observe this variation, and had explained it to
Edward VI., and that he had on a chart placed the line of no
variation at a point one hundred and ten miles west of the island of
Flores in the Azores.
These observations of Columbus and Cabot were
not wholly accepted during the sixteenth century. Various views.
Robert Hues, in 1592, a hundred years later, tells
us that Medina, the Spanish grand pilot, was not disinclined to
believe that mariners saw more in it than really existed and that they
found it a convenient way to excuse their own blunders. Nonius was
credited with saying that it simply meant that worn-out magnets
were used, which had lost their power to point correctly to the pole.
Others had contended that it was through insufficient application of
the loadstone to the iron that it was so devious in its work.
 PART OF MERCATOR'S POLAR REGIONS, 1569.
[From R. Mercator's Atlas of 1595.]

What was thought possible by the early navigators

possessed the minds of all seamen in varying Better
understood.
experiments for two centuries and a half. Though
not reaching such satisfactory results as were hoped for, the
expectation did not prove so chimerical as was sometimes imagined
when it was discovered that the lines of variation were neither
parallel, nor straight, nor constant. The line of no variation which
Columbus found near the Azores has moved westward with erratic
inclinations, until to-day it is not far from a straight line from
Carolina to Guiana. Science, beginning with its crude efforts at the
hands of Alonzo de Santa Cruz, in 1530, has so mapped the surface
of the globe with observations of its multifarious freaks of variation,
and the changes are so slow, that a magnetic chart is not a bad
guide to-day for ascertaining the longitude in any latitude for a few
years neighboring to the date of its records. So science has come
round in some measure to the dreams of Columbus and Cabot.
But this was not the only development which came
from this ominous day in the mid Atlantic in that Columbus
remarks on
September of 1492. The fancy of Columbus was changes of
easily excited, and notions of a change of climate, temperature and
and even aberrations of the stars were easily aberrations of
stars.
imagined by him amid the strange phenomena of
that untracked waste.
While Columbus was suspecting that the north star was somewhat
willfully shifting from the magnetic pole, now to a distance of 5° and
then of 10°, the calculations of modern astronomers have gauged
the polar distance existing in 1492 at 3° 28´, as against the 1° 20´
of to-day. The confusion of Columbus was very like his confounding
an old world with a new, inasmuch as he supposed it was the pole
star and not the needle which was shifting.
He argued from what he saw, or thought he saw,
that the line of no variation marked the beginning Imagines a
protuberance on
of a protuberance of the earth, up which he the earth.
ascended as he sailed westerly, and that this was
the reason of the cooler weather which he experienced. He never
got over some notions of this kind, and believed he found
confirmation of them in his later voyages.
Even as early as the reign of Edward III. of
England, Nicholas of Lynn, a voyager to the The magnetic
pole.
northern seas, is thought to have definitely fixed
the magnetic pole in the Arctic regions, transmitting his views to
Cnoyen, the master of the later Mercator, in respect to the four
circumpolar islands, which in the sixteenth century made so constant
a surrounding of the northern pole.
The next day (September 14), after these magnetic
observations, a water wagtail was seen from the 1492. September
14.
"Nina,"—a bird which Columbus thought
unaccustomed to fly over twenty-five leagues from
land, and the ships were now, according to their September 15.
reckoning, not far from two hundred leagues from the Canaries. On
Saturday, they saw a distant bolt of fire fall into the
sea. On Sunday, they had a drizzling rain, followed September 16.
by pleasant weather, which reminded Columbus of
the nightingales, gladdening the climate of Sargasso Sea.
Andalusia in April. They found around the ships
much green floatage of weeds, which led them to think some islands
must be near. Navarrete thinks there was some truth in this,
inasmuch as the charts of the early part of this century represent
breakers as having been seen in 1802, near the spot where
Columbus can be computed to have been at this time. Columbus
was in fact within that extensive prairie of floating seaweed which is
known as the Sargasso Sea, whose principal longitudinal axis is
found in modern times to lie along the parallel of 41° 30´, and the
best calculations which can be made from the rather uncertain data
of Columbus's journal seem to point to about the same position.
There is nothing in all these accounts, as we have them abridged by
Las Casas, to indicate any great surprise, and certainly nothing of
the overwhelming fear which, the Historie tells us, the sailors
experienced when they found their ships among these floating
masses of weeds, raising apprehension of a perpetual entanglement
in their swashing folds.
The next day (September 17) the currents became
favorable, and the weeds still floated about them. 1492. September
17.
The variation of the needle now became so great
that the seamen were dismayed, as the journal
says, and the observation being repeated September 18.
Columbus practiced another deceit and made it appear that there
had been really no variation, but only a shifting of the polar star!
The weeds were now judged to be river weeds, and a live crab was
found among them,—a sure sign of near land, as Columbus
believed, or affected to believe. They killed a tunny and saw others.
They again observed a water wagtail, "which does not sleep at sea."
Each ship pushed on for the advance, for it was thought the goal
was near. The next day the "Pinta" shot ahead and saw great flocks
of birds towards the west. Columbus conceived that the sea was
growing fresher. Heavy clouds hung on the northern horizon, a sure
sign of land, it was supposed.
On the next day two pelicans came on board, and
Columbus records that these birds are not 1492. September
19.
accustomed to go twenty leagues from land. So he
sounded with a line of two hundred fathoms to be sure he was not
approaching land; but no bottom was found. A drizzling rain also
betokened land, which they could not stop to find, but would search
for on their return, as the journal says. The pilots now compared
their reckonings. Columbus said they were 400 leagues, while the
"Pinta's" record showed 420, and the "Nina's" 440.
On September 20, other pelicans came on board;
and the ships were again among the weeds. 1492. September
20.
Columbus was determined to ascertain if these
indicated shoal water and sounded, but could not
reach bottom. The men caught a bird with feet like September
Changes his
22.

a gull; but they were convinced it was a river bird. course.

Then singing land-birds, as was fancied, hovered
about as it darkened, but they disappeared before Head wind.
morning. Then a pelican was observed flying to the
southwest, and as "these birds sleep on shore, and September 25.
go to sea in the morning," the men encouraged
themselves with the belief that they could not be far from land. The
next day a whale could but be another indication of land; and the
weeds covered the sea all about. On Saturday, they steered west by
northwest, and got clear of the weeds. This change of course so far
to the north, which had begun on the previous day, was occasioned
by a head wind, and Columbus says that he welcomed it, because it
had the effect of convincing the sailors that westerly winds to return
by were not impossible. On Sunday (September 23), they found the
wind still varying; but they made more westering than before,—
weeds, crabs, and birds still about them. Now there was smooth
water, which again depressed the seamen; then the sea arose,
mysteriously, for there was no wind to cause it. They still kept their
course westerly and continued it till the night of September 25.
Columbus at this time conferred with Pinzon, as to
a chart which they carried, which showed some Appearances of
land.
islands, near where they now supposed the ships
to be. That they had not seen land, they believed
was either due to currents which had carried them Again
course.
changes his

too far north, or else their reckoning was not

correct. At sunset Pinzon hailed the Admiral, and
September 26.
said he saw land, claiming the reward. The two
crews were confident that such was the case, and
1492. September
under the lead of their commanders they all 27.
kneeled and repeated the Gloria in Excelsis. The
land appeared to lie southwest, and everybody saw September 30.
the apparition. Columbus changed the fleet's
course to reach it; and as the vessels went on, in
October 1.
the smooth sea, the men had the heart, under
their expectation, to bathe in its amber glories. On
October 3.
Wednesday, they were undeceived, and found that
the clouds had played them a trick. On the 27th
their course lay more directly west. So they went October 6.
on, and still remarked upon all the birds they saw
and weed-drift which they pierced. Some of the October 7.
fowl they thought to be such as were common at
the Cape de Verde Islands, and were not supposed Shifts his course
to follow some
to go far to sea. On the 30th September, they still birds.
observed the needles of their compasses to vary,
but the journal records that it was the pole star which moved, and
not the needle. On October 1, Columbus says they were 707 leagues
from Ferro; but he had made his crew believe they were only 584.
As they went on, little new for the next few days is recorded in the
journal; but on October 3, they thought they saw among the weeds
something like fruits. By the 6th, Pinzon began to urge a
southwesterly course, in order to find the islands, which the signs
seemed to indicate in that direction. Still the Admiral would not
swerve from his purpose, and kept his course westerly. On Sunday,
the "Nina" fired a bombard and hoisted a flag as a signal that she
saw land, but it proved a delusion. Observing towards evening a
flock of birds flying to the southwest, the Admiral yielded to Pinzon's
belief, and shifted his course to follow the birds. He records as a
further reason for it that it was by following the flight of birds that
the Portuguese had been so successful in discovering islands in other
seas.
Columbus now found himself two hundred miles
and more farther than the three thousand miles Cipango.
west of Spain, where he supposed Cipango to lie,
and he was 25-1/2° north of the equator, according to his astrolabe.
The true distance of Cipango or Japan was sixty-eight hundred miles
still farther, or beyond both North America and the Pacific. How
much beyond that island, in its supposed geographical position,
Columbus expected to find the Asiatic main we can only conjecture
from the restorations which modern scholars have made of
Toscanelli's map, which makes the island about 10° east of Asia, and
from Behaim's globe, which makes it 20°. It should be borne in mind
that the knowledge of its position came from Marco Polo, and he
does not distinctly say how far it was from the Asiatic coast. In a
general way, as to these distances from Spain to China, Toscanelli
and Behaim agreed, and there is no reason to believe that the views
of Columbus were in any noteworthy degree different.
In the trial, years afterwards, when the Fiscal
contested the rights of Diego Colon, it was put in Relations of
Pinzon to the
evidence by one Vallejo, a seaman, that Pinzon was change of course.
induced to urge the direction to be changed to the
southwest, because he had in the preceding evening observed a
flight of parrots in that direction, which could have only been
seeking land. It was the main purpose of the evidence in this part of
the trial to show that Pinzon had all along forced Columbus forward
against his will.
How pregnant this change of course in the vessels of Columbus was
has not escaped the observation of Humboldt and many others. A
day or two further on his westerly way, and the Gulf Stream would,
perhaps, insensibly have borne the little fleet up the Atlantic coast of
the future United States, so that the banner of Castile might have
been planted at Carolina.
On the 7th of October, Columbus was pretty nearly
in latitude 25° 50',—that of one of the Bahama October 7.
Islands. Just where he was by longitude there is
much more doubt, probably between 65° and 66°. October 8-10.
On the next day the land birds flying along the
course of the ships seemed to confirm their hopes. On the 10th the
journal records that the men began to lose patience; but the Admiral
reassured them by reminding them of the profits in store for them,
and of the folly of seeking to return, when they had already gone so
far.
It is possible that, in this entry, Columbus conceals
the story which later came out in the recital of Story of a mutiny.
Oviedo, with more detail than in the Historie and
Las Casas, that the rebellion of his crew was threatening enough to
oblige him to promise to turn back if land was not discovered in
three days. Most commentators, however, are inclined to think that
this story of a mutinous revolt was merely engrafted from hearsay or
other source by Oviedo upon the more genuine recital, and that the
conspiracy to throw the Admiral into the sea has no substantial basis
in contemporary report. Irving, who has a dramatic tendency
throughout his whole account of the voyage to heighten his recital
with touches of the imagination, nevertheless allows this, and thinks
that Oviedo was misled by listening to a pilot, who was a personal
enemy of the Admiral.
The elucidations of the voyage which were drawn out in the famous
suit of Diego with the Crown in 1513 and 1515, afford no ground for
any belief in this story of the mutiny and the concession of
Columbus to it.
It is not, however, difficult to conceive the recurrent fears of his men
and the incessant anxiety of Columbus to quiet them. From what
Peter Martyr tells us,—and he may have got it directly from
Columbus's lips,—the task was not an easy one to preserve
subordination and to instill confidence. He represents that Columbus
was forced to resort in turn to argument, persuasion, and
enticements, and to picture the misfortunes of the royal displeasure.
The next day, notwithstanding a heavier sea than
they had before encountered, certain signs sufficed 1492. October 11.
to lift them out of their despondency. These were
floating logs, or pieces of wood, one of them apparently carved by
hand, bits of cane, a green rush, a stalk of rose berries, and other
drifting tokens.
Their southwesterly course had now brought them
down to about the twenty-fourth parallel, when 1492. October 11.
Steer west.
after sunset on the 11th they shifted their course
to due west, while the crew of the Admiral's ship
Columbus sees a
united, with more fervor than usual, in the Salve light.
Regina. At about ten o'clock Columbus, peering
into the night, thought he saw—if we may believe him—a moving
light, and pointing out the direction to Pero Gutierrez, this
companion saw it too; but another, Rodrigo Sanchez, situated
apparently on another part of the vessel, was not able to see it. It
was not brought to the attention of any others. The Admiral says
that the light seemed to be moving up and down, and he claimed to
have got other glimpses of its glimmer at a later moment. He
ordered the Salve to be chanted, and directed a vigilant watch to be
set on the forecastle. To sharpen their vision he promised a silken
jacket, beside the income of ten thousand maravedis which the King
and Queen had offered to the fortunate man who should first descry
the coveted land.
This light has been the occasion of much comment, and nothing will
ever, it is likely, be settled about it, further than that the Admiral,
with an inconsiderate rivalry of a common sailor who later saw the
actual land, and with an ungenerous assurance ill-befitting a
commander, pocketed a reward which belonged to another. If
Oviedo, with his prejudices, is to be believed, Columbus was not
even the first who claimed to have seen this dubious light. There is a
common story that the poor sailor, who was defrauded, later turned
Mohammedan, and went to live among that juster people. There is a
sort of retributive justice in the fact that the pension of the Crown
was made a charge upon the shambles of Seville, and thence
Columbus received it till he died.
Whether the light is to be considered a reality or a fiction will
depend much on the theory each may hold regarding the position of
the landfall. When Columbus claimed to have discovered it, he was
twelve or fourteen leagues away from the island where, four hours
later, land was indubitably found. Was the light on a canoe? Was it
on some small, outlying island, as has been suggested? Was it a
torch carried from hut to hut, as Herrera avers? Was it on either of
the other vessels? Was it on the low island on which, the next
morning, he landed? There was no elevation on that island sufficient
to show even a strong light at a distance of ten leagues. Was it a
fancy or a a deceit? No one can say. It is very difficult for Navarrete,
and even for Irving, to rest satisfied with what, after all, may have
been only an illusion of a fevered mind, making a record of the
incident in the excitement of a wonderful hour, when his intelligence
was not as circumspect as it might have been.
 THE LANDFALL OF COLUMBUS, 1492. [After Ruge.].

Four hours after the light was seen, at two o'clock

in the morning, when the moon, near its third 1492, October 12,
land discovered.
quarter, was in the east, the "Pinta" keeping ahead,
one of her sailors, Rodrigo de Triana, descried the
land, two leagues away, and a gun communicated Guanahani.
the joyful intelligence to the other ships. The fleet took in sail, and
each vessel, under backed sheets, was pointed to the wind. Thus
they waited for daybreak. It was a proud moment of painful
suspense for Columbus; and brimming hopes, perhaps fears of
disappointment, must have accompanied that hour of wavering
enchantment. It was Friday, October 12, of the old chronology, and
the little fleet had been thirty-three days on its way from the
Canaries, and we must add ten days more, to complete the period
since they left Palos. The land before them was seen, as the day
dawned, to be a small island, "called in the Indian tongue"
Guanahani. Some naked natives were descried. The Admiral and the
commanders of the other vessels prepared to land. Columbus took
the royal standard and the others each a banner of the green cross,
which bore the initials of the sovereign with a cross between, a
crown surmounting every letter. Thus, with the emblems of their
power, and accompanied by Rodrigo de Escoveda and Rodrigo
Sanchez and some seamen, the boat rowed to the shore. They
immediately took formal possession of the land, and the notary
recorded it.

COLUMBUS'S ARMOR.
 BAHAMA ISLANDS.
ANTONIO HERRERA
1601
[From Major's Select Letters of Columbus, 2d Edition.]
 BAHAMA ISLANDS.
MODERN
[From Major's Select Letters of Columbus, 2d Edition.]

The words of the prayer usually given as uttered by

Columbus on taking possession of San Salvador, Columbus lands
and utters a
when he named the island, cannot be traced prayer.
farther back than a collection of Tablas
Chronologicas, got together at Valencia in 1689, by a Jesuit father,
Claudio Clemente. Harrisse finds no authority for the statement of
the French canonizers that Columbus established a form of prayer
which was long in vogue, for such occupations of new lands.
Las Casas, from whom we have the best account of the ceremonies
of the landing, does not mention it; but we find pictured in his pages
the grave impressiveness of the hour; the form of Columbus, with a
crimson robe over his armor, central and grand; and the humbleness
of his followers in their contrition for the hours of their faint-
heartedness.
Columbus now enters in his journal his impressions of the island and
its inhabitants. He says of the land that it bore green trees, was
watered by many streams, and produced divers
fruits. In another place he speaks of the island as The island
described.
flat, without lofty eminence, surrounded by reefs,
with a lake in the interior.
The courses and distances of his sailing both before and on leaving
the island, as well as this description, are the best means we have of
identifying the spot of this portentous landfall. The early maps may
help in a subsidiary way, but with little precision.
There is just enough uncertainty and contradiction
respecting the data and arguments applied in the Identification of
the landfall.
solution of this question, to render it probable that
men will never quite agree which of the Bahamas it was upon which
these startled and exultant Europeans first stepped. Though Las
Casas reports the journal of Columbus unabridged for a period after
the landfall, he unfortunately condenses it for some time previous.
There is apparently no chance of finding geographical conditions
that in every respect will agree with this record of Columbus, and we
must content ourselves with what offers the fewest disagreements.
An obvious method, if we could depend on Columbus's dead
reckoning, would be to see for what island the actual distance from
the Canaries would be nearest to his computed run; but currents
and errors of the eye necessarily throw this sort of computation out
of the question, and Capt. G. A. Fox, who has tried it, finds that Cat
Island is three hundred and seventeen, the Grand Turk six hundred
and twenty-four nautical miles, and the other supposable points at
intermediate distances out of the way as compared with his
computation of the distance run by Columbus, three thousand four
hundred and fifty-eight of such miles.
The reader will remember the Bahama group as a
range of islands, islets, and rocks, said to be some The Bahamas.
three thousand in number, running southeast from
a point part way up the Florida coast, and San Salvador, or
approaching at the other end the coast of Cat Island.
Hispaniola. In the latitude of the lower point of Florida, and five
degrees east of it, is the island of San Salvador or
Cat Island, which is the most northerly of those Other islands.
claimed to have been the landfall of Columbus.
Proceeding down the group, we encounter Methods of
Watling's, Samana, Acklin (with the Plana Cays), identification.
Mariguana, and the Grand Turk,—all of which have
their advocates. The three methods of Acklin Island.
identification which have been followed are, first, by plotting the
outward track; second, by plotting the track between the landfall
and Cuba, both forward and backward; third, by applying the
descriptions, particularly Columbus's, of the island first seen. In this
last test, Harrisse prefers to apply the description of Las Casas,
which is borrowed in part from that of the Historie, and he reconciles
Columbus's apparent discrepancy when he says in one place that the
island was "pretty large," and in another "small," by supposing that
he may have applied these opposite terms, the lesser to the Plana
Cays, as first seen, and the other to the Crooked Group, or Acklin
Island, lying just westerly, on which he may have landed. Harrisse is
the only one who makes this identification; and he finds some
confirmation in later maps, which show thereabout an island,
Triango or Triangulo, a name said by Las Casas to have been applied
to Guanahani at a later day. There is no known map earlier than
1540 bearing this alternative name of Triango.
San Salvador seems to have been the island
selected by the earliest of modern inquirers, in the San Salvador.
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it has
had the support of Irving and Humboldt in later times. Captain
Alexander Slidell Mackenzie of the United States navy worked out
the problem for Irving. It is much larger than any of the other
islands, and could hardly have been called by Columbus in any
alternative way a "small" island, while it does not answer Columbus's
description of being level, having on it an eminence of four hundred
feet, and no interior lagoon, as his Guanahani demands. The French
canonizers stand by the old traditions, and find it meet to say that
"the English Protestants not finding the name San Salvador fine
enough have substituted for it that of Cat, and in their
hydrographical atlases the Island of the Holy Saviour is nobly called
Cat Island."
The weight of modern testimony seems to favor
Watling's island, and it so far answers to Watling's Island.
Columbus's description that about one third of its
interior is water, corresponding to his "large lagoon." Muñoz first
suggested it in 1793; but the arguments in its favor were first spread
out by Captain Becher of the royal navy in 1856, and he seems to
have induced Oscar Peschel in 1858 to adopt the same views in his
history of the range of modern discovery. Major, the map custodian
of the British Museum, who had previously followed Navarrete in
favoring the Grand Turk, again addressed himself to the problem in
1870, and fell into line with the adherents of Watling's. No other
considerable advocacy of this island, if we except the testimony of
Gerard Stein in 1883, in a book on voyages of discovery, appeared
till Lieut. J. B. Murdoch, an officer of the American navy, made a
very careful examination of the subject in the Proceedings of the
United States Naval Institute in 1884, which is accepted by Charles
A. Schott in the Bulletin of the United States Coast Survey. Murdoch
was the first to plot in a backward way the track between Guanahani
and Cuba, and he finds more points of resemblance in Columbus's
description with Watling's than with any other. The latest adherent is
the eminent geographer, Clements R. Markham, in the bulletin of the
Italian Geographical Society in 1889. Perhaps no cartographical
argument has been so effective as that of Major in comparing
modern charts with the map of Herrera, in which the latter lays
Guanahani down.
An elaborate attempt to identify Samana as the
landfall was made by the late Capt. Gustavus Vasa Samana.
Fox, in an appendix to the Report of the United
States Coast Survey for 1880. Varnhagen, in 1864, Grand Turk
selected Mariguana, and defended his choice in a Island.
paper. This island fails to satisfy the physical conditions in being
without interior water. Such a qualification, however, belongs to the
Grand Turk Island, which was advocated first by Navarrete in 1826,
whose views have since been supported by George Gibbs, and for a
while by Major.
It is rather curious to note that Caleb Cushing, who undertook to
examine this question in the North American Review, under the
guidance of Navarrete's theory, tried the same backward method
which has been later applied to the problem, but with quite different
results from those reached by more recent investigators. He says,
"By setting out from Nipe [which is the point where Columbus struck
Cuba] and proceeding in a retrograde direction along his course, we
may surely trace his path, and shall be convinced that Guanahani is
no other than Turk's Island."
 CHAPTER X.
AMONG THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN
VOYAGE.
We learn that, after these ceremonies on the
shore, the natives began fearlessly to gather about The natives of
Guanahani.
the strangers. Columbus, by causing red caps,
strings of beads, and other trinkets to be distributed among them,
made an easy conquest of their friendship. Later the men swam out
to the ship to exchange their balls of thread, their javelins, and
parrots for whatever they could get in return.
The description which Columbus gives us in his journal of the
appearance and condition of these new people is the earliest, of
course, in our knowledge of them. His record is interesting for the
effect which the creatures had upon him, and for the statement of
their condition before the Spaniards had set an impress upon their
unfortunate race.
They struck Columbus as, on the whole, a very poor people, going
naked, and, judging from a single girl whom he saw, this nudity was
the practice of the women. They all seemed young, not over thirty,
well made, with fine shapes and faces. Their hair was coarse, and
combed short over the forehead; but hung long behind. The bodies
of many were differently colored with pigments of many hues,
though of some only the face, the eyes, or the nose were painted.
Columbus was satisfied that they had no knowledge of edged
weapons, because they grasped his sword by the blade and cut
themselves. Their javelins were sticks pointed with fishbones. When
he observed scars on their bodies, they managed to explain to him
that enemies, whom the Admiral supposed to come from the
continent, sometimes invaded their island, and that such wounds
were received in defending themselves. They appeared to him to
have no religion, which satisfied him that the task of converting
them to Christianity would not be difficult. They learned readily to
pronounce such words as were repeated to them.
On the next day after landing, Saturday, Columbus
describes again the throng that came to the shore, 1492. October 13.
and was struck with their broad foreheads. He
deemed it a natural coincidence, being in the Affinities of the
latitude of the Canaries, that the natives had the Lucayans.
complexion prevalent among the natives of those islands. In this he
anticipated the conclusions of the anthropologists, who have found
in the skulls preserved in caves both in the Bahamas and in the
Canaries, such striking similarities as have led to the supposition that
ocean currents may have borne across the sea some of the old
Guanche stock of the Canaries, itself very likely the remnant of the
people of the European river-drift.
Professor W. K. Brooks, of the Johns Hopkins University, who has
recently published in the Popular Science Monthly (November, 1889)
a study of the bones of the Lucayans as found in caves in the
Bahamas, reports that these relics indicate a muscular, heavy
people, about the size of the average European, with protuberant
square jaws, sloping eyes, and very round skulls, but artificially
flattened on the forehead,—a result singularly confirming Columbus's
description of broader heads than he had ever seen.
"The Ceboynas," says a recent writer on these
Indians, "gave us the hammock, and this one Hammocks.
Lucayan word is their only monument," for a
population larger than inhabits these islands to-day were in twelve
years swept from the surface of the earth by a system devised by
Columbus.
The Admiral also describes their canoes, made in a
wonderful manner of a single tree-trunk, and large Canoes.
enough to hold forty or forty-five men, though
some were so small as to carry a single person only. Their oars are
shaped like the wooden shovels with which bakers slip their loaves
into ovens. If a canoe upsets, it is righted as they swim.
Columbus was attracted by bits of gold dangling at
the nose of some among them. By signs he soon Gold among
them.
learned that a greater abundance of this metal
could be found on an island to the south; but they seemed unable to
direct him with any precision how to reach that island, or at least it
was not easy so to interpret any of their signs. "Poor wretches!"
exclaims Helps, "if they had possessed the slightest gift of prophecy,
they would have thrown these baubles into the deepest sea."
They pointed in all directions, but towards the east
as the way to other lands; and implied that those Columbus traffics
with them.
enemies who came from the northwest often
passed to the south after gold. He found that broken dishes and bits
of glass served as well for traffic with them as more valuable
articles, and balls of threads of cotton, grown on the island, seemed
their most merchantable commodity.
With this rude foretaste, Columbus determined to
push on for the richer Cipango. On the next day he 1492. October 14,
sails towards
coasted along the island in his boats, discovering Cipango.
two or three villages, where the inhabitants were
friendly. They seemed to think that the strangers had come from
heaven,—at least Columbus so interpreted their prostrations and
uplifted hands. Columbus, fearful of the reefs parallel to the shore,
kept outside of them, and as he moved along, saw a point of land
which a ditch might convert into an island. He thought this would
afford a good site for a fort, if there was need of one.
It was on this Sunday that Columbus, in what he
thought doubtless the spirit of the day in dealing 1492. October 14.
with heathens, gives us his first intimation of the
desirability of using force to make these poor Columbus
proposes to
creatures serve their new masters. On returning to enslave the
the ships and setting sail, he soon found that he natives.
was in an archipelago. He had seized some natives,
who were now on board. These repeated to him
the names of more than a hundred islands. He 1492. October 15.
describes those within sight as level, fertile, and
populous, and he determined to steer for what 1492. October 16.
seemed the largest. He stood off and on during the
night of the 14th, and by noon of the 15th he had reached this other
island, which he found at the easterly end to run five leagues north
and south, and to extend east and west a distance of ten leagues.
Lured by a still larger island farther west he pushed on, and skirting
the shore reached its western extremity. He cast anchor there at
sunset, and named the island Santa Maria de la Concepcion. The
natives on board told him that the people here wore gold bracelets.
Columbus thought this story might be a device of his prisoners to
obtain opportunities to escape. On the next day, he repeated the
forms of landing and taking possession. Two of the prisoners
contrived to escape. One of them jumped overboard and was
rescued by a native canoe. The Spaniards overtook the canoe, but
not till its occupants had escaped. A single man, coming off in
another canoe, was seized and taken on board; but Columbus
thought him a good messenger of amity, and loading him with
presents, "not worth four maravedis," he put him ashore. Columbus
watched the liberated savage, and judged from the wonder of the
crowds which surrounded him that his ruse of friendship had been
well played.
Another large island appeared westerly about nine
leagues, famous for its gold ornaments, as his Columbus sees a
large island.
prisoners again declared. It is significant that in his
journal, since he discovered the bits of gold at San Salvador,
Columbus has not a word to say of reclaiming the benighted
heathen; but he constantly repeats his hope "with the help of our
Lord," of finding gold. On the way thither he had picked up a second
single man in a canoe, who had apparently followed him from San
Salvador. He determined to bestow some favors upon him and let
him go, as he had done with the other.
This new island, which he reached October 16, and
called Fernandina, he found to be about twenty- 1492. October 16.
eight leagues long, with a safer shore than the
others. He anchored near a village, where the man whom he had set
free had already come, bringing good reports of the stranger, and so
the Spaniards got a kind reception. Great numbers of natives came
off in canoes, to whom the men gave trinkets and molasses. He took
on board some water, the natives assisting the crew. Getting an
impression that the island contained a mine of gold, he resolved to
follow the coast, and find Samaot, where the gold was said to be.
Columbus thought he saw some improvement in the natives over
those he had seen before, remarking upon the cotton cloth with
which they partly covered their persons. He was surprised to find
that distinct branches of the same tree bore different leaves. A single
tree, as he says, will show as many as five or six varieties, not done
by grafting, but a natural growth. He wondered at the brilliant fish,
and found no land creatures but parrots and lizards, though a boy of
the company told him that he had seen a snake. On Wednesday he
started to sail around the island. In a little haven, where they tarried
awhile, they first entered the native houses.
They found everything in them neat, with nets
extended between posts, which they called Hammocks.
hamacs,—a name soon adopted by sailors for
swinging-beds. The houses were shaped like tents, with high
chimneys, but not more than twelve or fifteen together. Dogs were
running about them, but they could not bark. Columbus endeavored
to buy a bit of gold, cut or stamped, which was hanging from a
man's nose; but the savage refused his offers.
 INDIAN BEDS.

The ships continued their course about the island, 1492. October 19.
the weather not altogether favorable; but on
October 19 they veered away to another island to the west of
Fernandina, which Columbus named Isabella, after his Queen. This
he pronounced the most beautiful he had seen; and he remarks on
the interior region of it being higher than in the other islands, and
the source of streams. The breezes from the shore brought him
odors, and when he landed he became conscious that his botanical
knowledge did not aid him in selecting such dyestuffs, medicines,
and spices as would command high prices in Spain. He saw a
hideous reptile, and the canonizers, after their amusing fashion, tell
us that "to see and attack him were the same thing for Columbus,
for he considered it of importance to accustom Spanish intrepidity to
such warfare."
The reptile proved inoffensive. The signs of his
prisoners were interpreted to repeat here the To find gold
Columbus's main
welcome tale of gold. He understood them to refer object.
to a king decked with gold. "I do not, however," he
adds, "give much credit to these accounts, for I 1492. October 21.
understand the natives but imperfectly." "I am
proceeding solely in quest of gold and spices," he says again.
On Sunday they went ashore, and found a house
from which the occupants had recently departed. Cuba heard of.
The foliage was enchanting. Flocks of parrots
obscured the sky. Specimens were gathered of 1492. October 24.
wonderful trees. They killed a snake in a lake. They Isabella.
cajoled some timid natives with beads, and got their help in filling
their water cask. They heard of a very large island named Colba,
which had ships and sailors, as the natives were thought to say.
They had little doubt that these stories referred to Cipango. They
hoped the native king would bring them gold in the night; but this
not happening, and being cheered by the accounts of Colba, they
made up their minds that it would be a waste of time to search
longer for this backward king, and so resolved to run for the big
island.
Starting from Isabella at midnight on October 24,
and passing other smaller islands, they finally, on October 26.
Sunday, October 26, entered a river near the
easterly end of Cuba.
The track of Columbus from San Salvador to Cuba
has been as variously disputed as the landfall; Cuba.
indeed, the divergent views of the landfall
necessitate such later variations.
They landed within the river's mouth, and
discovered deserted houses, which from the Pearls.
implements within they supposed to be the houses of fishermen.
Columbus observed that the grass grew down to the water's edge;
and he reasoned therefrom that the sea could never be rough. He
now observed mountains, and likened them to those of Sicily. He
finally supposed his prisoners to affirm by their signs that the island
was too large for a canoe to sail round it in twenty days. There were
the old stories of gold; but the mention of pearls appears now for
the first time in the journal, which in this place, however, we have
only in Las Casas's abridgment.
When the natives pointed to the interior and said,
"Cubanacan," meaning, it is supposed, an inland Columbus
supposes himself
region, Columbus imagined it was a reference to at Mangi.
Kublai Khan; and the Cuban name of Mangon he
was very ready to associate with the Mangi of Mandeville.
As he still coasted westerly he found river and village, and made
more use of his prisoners than had before been possible. They seem
by this time to have settled into an acquiescent spirit. He wondered
in one place at statues which looked like women. He was not quite
sure whether the natives kept them for the love of the beautiful, or
for worship.
He found domesticated fowl; and saw a skull,
which he supposed was a cow's, which was Columbus
supposes himself
probably that of the sea-calf, a denizen of these on the coast of
waters. He thought the temperature cooler than in Cathay.
the other islands, and ascribed the change to the
mountains. He observed on one of these eminences a protuberance
that looked like a mosque. Such interpretation as the Spaniards
could make of their prisoners' signs convinced them that if they
sailed farther west they would find some potentate, and so they
pushed on. Bad weather, however, delayed them, and they again
opened communication with the natives. They could hear nothing of
gold, but saw a silver trinket; and learned, as they thought, that
news of their coming had been carried to the distant king. Columbus
felt convinced that the people of these regions were banded enemies
of the Great Khan, and that he had at last struck the continent of
Cathay, and was skirting the shores of the Zartun and Quinsay of
Marco Polo. Taking an observation, Columbus found himself to be in
21° north latitude, and as near as he could reckon, he was 1142
leagues west of Ferro. He really was 1105.
From Friday, November 2, to Monday, November 5,
two Spaniards, whom Columbus had sent into the 1492. November
2-5.
interior, accompanied by some Indians, had made
their way unmolested in their search for a king.
They had been entertained here and there with Cuba explored.
ceremony, and apparently worshiped as celestial
comers. The evidences of the early Spanish Tobacco.
voyagers give pretty constant testimony that the
whites were supposed to have come from the Potatoes.
skies. Columbus had given to his envoys samples
of cinnamon, pepper, and other spices, which were shown to the
people. In reply, his messengers learned that such things grew to
the southeast of them. Columbus later, in his first letter, speaks of
cinnamon as one of the spices which they found, but it turned out to
be the bark of a sort of laurel. Las Casas, in mentioning this
expedition, says that the Spaniards found the natives smoking small
tubes of dried leaves, filled with other leaves, which they called
tobacos. Sir Arthur Helps aptly remarks on this trivial discovery by
the Spaniards of a great financial resource of modern statesmen,
since tobacco has in the end proved more productive to the Spanish
crown than the gold which Columbus sought. The Spaniards found
no large villages; but they perceived great stores of fine cotton of a
long staple. They found the people eating what we must recognize
as potatoes. The absence of gold gave Columbus an opportunity to
wish more fervently than before for the conversion of some of these
people.
While this party was absent, Columbus found a
quiet beach, and careened his ships, one at a time. One-eyed and
dog-faced men.
In melting his tar, the wood which he used gave
out a powerful odor, and he pronounced it the mastic gum, which
Europe had always got from Chios. As this work
was going on, the Spaniards got from the natives, Cannibals.
as best they could, many intimations of larger
wealth and commerce to the southeast. Other strange stories were
told of men with one eye, and faces like dogs, and of cruel,
bloodthirsty man-eaters, who fought to appease their appetite on
the flesh of the slain.
It was not till the 12th of November that Columbus
left this hospitable haven, at daybreak, in search of 1492. November
12.
a place called Babeque, "where gold was collected
at night by torch-light upon the shore, and
afterward hammered into bars." He the more Babeque.
readily retraced his track, that the coast to the westward seemed to
trend northerly, and he dreaded a colder climate. He must leave for
another time the sight of men with tails, who inhabited a province in
that direction, as he was informed.
Again the historian recognizes how a chance turned the Spaniards
away from a greater goal. If Columbus had gone on westerly and
discovered the insular character of Cuba, he might have sought the
main of Mexico and Yucatan, and anticipated the wonders of the
conquest of Cortez. He never was undeceived in believing that Cuba
was the Asiatic main.
Columbus sailed back over his course with an
inordinate idea of the riches of the country which Columbus
captures some
he was leaving. He thought the people docile; that natives.
their simple belief in a God was easily to be
enlarged into the true faith, whereby Spain might gain vassals and
the church a people. He managed to entice on board, and took
away, six men, seven women, and three children, condoning the act
of kidnapping—the canonizers call it "retaining on board"—by a
purpose to teach them the Spanish language, and open a readier
avenue to their benighted souls. He allowed the men to have women
to share their durance, as such ways, he says, had proved useful on
the coast of Guinea.
The Admiral says in his first letter, referring to his captives, "that we
immediately understood each other, either by words or signs." This
was his message to expectant Europe. His journal is far from
conveying that impression.
The ships now steered east-by-south, passing
mountainous lands, which on November 14 he tried 1492. November
14.
to approach. After a while he discovered a harbor,
which he could enter, and found it filled with lofty wooded islands,
some pointed and some flat at the top. He was quite sure he had
now got among the islands which are made to swarm on the Asiatic
coast in the early accounts and maps. He now speaks of his practice
in all his landings to set up and leave a cross. He observed, also, a
promontory in the bay fit for a fortress, and caught a strange fish
resembling a hog. He was at this time embayed in the King's
Garden, as the archipelago is called.
Shortly after this, when they had been baffled in
their courses, Martin Alonso Pinzon, incited, as the Pinzon deserts.
record says, by his cupidity to find the stores of
gold to which some of his Indian captives had 1492. November
directed him, disregarded the Admiral's signals, 23.
and sailed away in the "Pinta." The flagship kept a light for him all
night, at the mast-head; but in the morning the caravel was out of
sight. The Admiral takes occasion in his journal to remark that this
was not the first act of Pinzon's insubordination. On Friday,
November 23, the vessels approached a headland, which the Indians
called Bohio.
The prisoners here began to manifest fear, for it
was a spot where the one-eyed people and the 1492. November
24.
cannibals dwelt; but on Saturday, November 24,
the ships were forced back into the gulf with the many islands,
where Columbus found a desirable roadstead, which he had not
before discovered.
On Sunday, exploring in a boat, he found in a stream "certain stones
which shone with spots of a golden hue; and recollecting that gold
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