The pleasures of a well-dusted museum

STEPHEN JAY GOULD spent much of 1971 in Ireland, measuring the and antlers of Megaceros giganteus, the so called Irish elk. He measured them on walls in the manors of the Marquess of Bath and the Earl of Dunraven, and in the banqueting hall of Bunratty Castle, where mead crazed Americans may leave the giant deer with a cigar in its jaws and coffee cups dangling from its tines.

But the best skulls were mounted high above tall cabinets in the Natural History Museum in Dublin, beside Leinster House. "The specimens were terrific," records Gould, "but, oh my, the museum was a dingy place back then. Little light, less comfort, and dust absolutely everywhere." He found himself sitting, with his yardstick, on top of cabinets which seemed not to have been dusted since Leopold Bloom met Stephen Dedalus in night town."

He revisited the museum in autumn 1993 and found it uplifted from squalor to glory". The exhibits were unchanged, but their setting had been spring cleaned and magically restored. Light flooded down from the glass ceiling the wood glowed elaborate cast ironwork had been scraped and colourfully painted. "I could not have been more joyously surprised."

Gould describes the transformation in terms which should bring the ecotourists running. But also, typically, he uses it to make a wider point. Standing amid the stuffed mammals and birds and cases of Irish beetles and crabs, "I finally understood, viscerally, the coherent and admirable theory behind a classical Victorian `cabinet' museum of natural history."

As the world's most highly esteemed populariser of evolutionary biology, one might have expected Gould to favour the kind of museum be savages in an essay here called "Dinomania" one full of fibreglass models, flashing lights, recorded roars, and children rushing round in a fever, pressing buttons.

He is thoroughly in favour of well done theme parks, Jurassic and otherwise. But he wants museums to keep their intellectual dignity, their thoughtful rapport between visitor and object. They should excite wonder by presenting the sheer diversity of nature and the taxonomic sense that science makes of it. It was, he writes, "a decision not only scientifically right, buff also ethically sound and decidedly courageous" to preserve and restore Dublin's stunning" Victorian showcase, while indulging dinomania in a new building found the corner.

"Cabinet Museums Alive, Alive, Oh" lurks as a joyous surprise, indeed, among the 34 essays in this volume, a seventh collection from the monthly pieces he writes for America's Natural History magazine. Most of them, as usual, sneak up by way of striking illustration on some nugget of evolutionary thought.

It can disconcert the European reader to find Gould still spending so much energy on confounding America's creationists on behalf of his hero, Charles Darwin he locks horns with all the relish of an elk or stag horned beetle. Perhaps we underrate the subversive power of American obscurantism perhaps creationists are just a handy peg on which to hang an argument.

Gould's glee is unconfined when a new fossil turns up to show a "halfway" stage of adaptation, of the sort so inconveniently absent from the geological record. Whales, for example, have always been grist to the creationist mill. Where are the fossils to show them losing their legs in transition from land based mammal to an ocean going giant with a horizontal tail?

In Pakistan! he crows, where newly unearthed Ambulocetus natans has legs and enormous feet that could work for either walking or swimming. Once you know where to look, and once high interest spurs great attention, full satisfaction often follows in short order."

The satisfaction of "zinging" the creationists runs also through a fascinating tale about DNA extracted from fossil magnolia leaves, 20 million years old and still red with autumn colour. The amino acid sequences confirm the process of natural selection from an entirely fresh domain of evidence.

Much of Gould is easy, seductive chat about films, opera, books or baseball, all leading up to some trenchant point of biological principle or humanistic concern. But when it's called for, the essays exact due effort from the general reader I would not write these essays any differently if I intended them for my immediate colleagues alone." Thus flattered, we try harder.

Everyone," says Gould, "should know a vertebrate from an arthropod from a mollusc from an echinoderm" and perhaps be led to rediscover, in due course, the attractions of a peaceful, well dusted museum.