You Could Look It Up (7 page)

But we can get an idea of the magnitude of the task by searching a few major library catalogs. The General Catalogue of the British Library, one of the world's great collections, lists 38,904 titles that contain the word
dictionary
;
3
the Catalogue Général of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France contains 42,162 works with
dictionnaire
in their
titles; the Deutsche National Bibliothek in Leipzig features 41,892 titles with the word
Wörterbuch
; the Rossiiskaia Gosudarstvennaia Biblioteka in Moscow has 16,124 titles with
словарь
(
slovar'
); Spain's Biblioteca Nacional de España has 12,563 titles with
diccionario
; the Italian Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze has 7,760 titles with the word
dizionario
. The figures are similar for
encyclopaedia
(18,482 in the British Library),
encyclopédie
(24,273 titles in the Bibliothèque Nationale), and
Enzyklopädie
(8,549 in the Deutsche National Bibliothek).

In WorldCat, the combined electronic catalogs of 71,000 libraries from 112 countries, a search for
dictionary
comes up with 311,602 books, 35,756 separately cataloged articles, 15,051 Internet resources, 2,637 computer programs, 1,859 periodicals, 824 sound recordings, 659 visual materials, 239 maps, 238 musical scores, 154 archival records, and 19 “updated resources,” for a total of 369,071 titles and editions. Throw in the words for
dictionary
in the other major European languages, and the total swells to 727,930. Another 259,724 records for
encyclopedia
in the major European languages brings the total number of dictionaries and encyclopedias to nearly a million. If it were possible to broaden the search further—covering every library; including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Russian, and other languages whose speakers number in the hundreds of millions; and searching not only for dictionaries and encyclopedias, but also atlases, thesauruses, legal references, and so on—the number would be much higher.

So the answer is certainly in the millions, and a little time browsing library catalogs reveals just how various these books are. The Library of Congress, for instance, holds fifty-two dictionaries of metallurgy, as well as an
Encyclopedia of R.F.D. Cancels
(281 pages on the postmarks used on Rural Free Deliveries), an
Encyclopedia of Knots and Fancy Rope Work
, and a
Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Kingdom of Poland
. In the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is
Le Dictionnaire du rire: 4 000 histoires drôles
(The dictionary of the joke: 4,000 funny stories). German railway dictionaries number in the dozens. Robert O. Campbell's
Barriers: An Encyclopedia of United States Barbed Fence Patents
covers both the history of wire fencing and the patents on different varieties of barbed wire in 460 pages.

Pick any area of human endeavor—for that matter, pick almost any noun—and there will be at least one reference book about it. Cocker spaniel aficionados will want to get their hands on John F. Gordon's
Spaniel Owner's Encyclopaedia
(1967), while those who love tools can consult Mark Duginske's
Tools: A Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia
(2001). Even sewage treatment is covered in Clinton Bogert's
Glossary: Water and Sewage Control Engineering
(1950), Fritz Meinck's
Dictionary of Water and Sewage Engineering
(1963), W. Bischofsberger's
Lexikon der Abwassertechnik
(1974), the Swedish Tekniska Nomenklaturcentralen's
Avfallsordlista: Nordiska termer med motsvarighteter på engelska, franska och tyska samt defioniter på svenska och engelska
(1977), Hu Mingcao's
Ying Han shui ran kopng zhi ci hui
(1986), Shan Peihua's
Shui wu ran ming ci ci dian
(1987), Günay Kocasoy's
Kati atik termileri açiklamali sözlügü
(in Turkish, English, German, and French, 1994), Carmen Campbell's
Vocabulaire de la production d'eau potable et du traitement des eaux usées
(French and English, 1997), Krzysztof Czekierda's
Slownik gospodarki wodnosciekowej
(English and Polish, 2011), and dozens of others.

CHAPTER
3

The HISTORY OF NATURE

Science in Antiquity

Our word
science
comes from Latin
scientia
, which is in turn derived from the verb
scio
‘I know’. When it first showed up in the modern languages, it had the same broad range of meaning as Latin
scientia
, knowledge of any sort. As late as the nineteenth century, the word covered not only geology and astronomy but also poetry and history. No word corresponded perfectly to our modern sense of science. When people in the Renaissance wanted to refer to biology, chemistry, and physics, they used terms like “natural philosophy” and “natural history.”

But lexical history is not the same as conceptual history, and long before there was a word for what we call science, people were energetically collecting information about the natural world—animal, vegetable, mineral, and beyond. Eventually it was necessary to collect new discoveries in a manageable compass. “Scientific” reference books have been with us for more than two millennia, and they have only grown in importance in our technological age. This chapter has at its heart two ancient works of natural history, one Greek, one Roman.

We know more about Theophrastus than we do about most ancient Greek authors. He was born around 371
B.C.E.
in Eresos, Lesbos. As a young man he headed to Athens, which was then at the height of its intellectual powers and the center of the philosophical world.
Theophrastus missed his chance to meet Socrates, who swallowed the hemlock in 399
B.C.E.
, but he did study at the Academy, where Plato was one of his teachers and Aristotle a friend and mentor.

Theophrastus went on to write widely. He was probably the author of an influential book on character types (the braggart, the flatterer, the ironist), another on metaphysics, and yet another on geology. One book, lost now and known only through a later paraphrase, explained the senses. His most important reference work, written in Greek as
Περ
φυτ
ν
στορ
α
(
Peri phytôn historia
), is better known by its Latin title,
Historia plantarum
(
The History of Plants
), though
A Treatise on Plants
captures the spirit better. It earned him the title “the father of botany.” Greeks had written about plants before him, including his friend Aristotle. But in the words of one botanical historian, “no one before him had recorded a philosophic thought or suggestion about the plant world separately considered.”
1
Robert Sharples goes further: “he so far surpassed his predecessors that the history of the subject in the west can be said effectively to begin with him.”
2

Like Aristotle, Theophrastus begins with first principles, including a philosophical attempt to distinguish the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms. What seems like an easy problem quickly becomes entangled in philosophical complexity: it is easier to define plants in terms of what they are not than what they are. Many seeming plants differ enough from the familiar ones to leave us unsure what to do with them—things like fungi, lichens, and algae. Theophrastus lumped them all in with the plants—not the way modern taxonomy proceeds, but defensible in his day.

Theophrastus’ greatest advance on previous botanical writers was the way he organized his material. Every science has to wrestle with classifying all the specimens that come under its purview, determining which qualities are what Aristotle called “essential,” and which merely “accidental”; it is only fitting that one of Aristotle’s schoolmates should be engaged in the effort. The key to a useful taxonomy consists of identifying the features that let us group like with like. For the geologist, which features—color, texture, hardness—make this rock like or unlike that rock? Should the meteorologist treat all the dark clouds as similar in kind, or all the fluffy clouds, or all the high clouds? The problems are
especially challenging in the life sciences. Charles Darwin utterly rewrote plant and animal taxonomy by showing how variety in the natural world emerged from descent with variation, and modern scientists are able to use genetic analysis to confirm evolutionary descent. We can now put every living species into its proper kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. But without genetic tests, we run the risk of being misled by apparent similarities. If, for instance, we start by dividing animals into flying and nonflying, we end up with one group including most birds, many insects, flying fish, and flying squirrels, while chickens, ostriches, most fishes, and most squirrels are in the other group—somehow unsatisfying, because it also feels natural to keep the feathered animals together, all the fishes together, and so on. Flying, it seems, is an Aristotelian accident: most birds fly and most mammals do not, but the power of flight is not essential to being either bird or mammal.