of the history of science, Eiseley, writes, “It was the amateur who laid the foundations of the science today. The whole philosophy of modern biology was established by such a ‘dabbler’ as Charles Darwin, who never at any time held a professional position in the field.” Of the amateur: “his was the sunrise of science, and it was a sunrise it becomes us ill to forget.”
Darwin had some formal education in biology at Cambridge, but no degree in the subject. He was an amateur naturalist. After graduation, he was in line to enter a course of preparation for the clergy when, instead, he shipped out on the Beagle, being allowed to go along as the ship’s “naturalist.” William “Strata” Smith was a self-educated surveyor who, in 1801, produced the first geological map, this of the entire country of England! At the time, he was scorned by those in powerful positions, but he is now recognized as one of the founders of modern geology. The Austrian monk and amateur botanist Gregor Mendel worked out the basics of genetic inheritance with peas in his monastery garden. Jane Goodall headed for Gombe in central Africa without a college education, and her later work with chimpanzees would capture the attention of millions. Physics and mathematics were the avocations of the young Albert Einstein, who wrote his most important papers while he worked as a mere clerk in a Swiss patent office. “Never lose a holy curiosity,” he said, and he didn’t.
Examples could be multiplied, but consider the case of Joseph Wood Krutch. He was a renowned drama critic, who, for his very serious avocation, studied and wrote a great deal about the plant life of the desert southwest. About such interest, he said:
This is an age of specialists, and I am by nature and as well by habit an amateur. This is a dangerous thing to confess, because specialists are likely to turn up their noses. “What you really mean is,” they say, ”a dilettante—a sort of dabbler of the arts and sciences. You may have a smattering of this or that, but you can’t be a real authority on anything at all”, and I am afraid they are at least partly right. But not long ago, my publisher asked me for a sentence or two to put on a book jacket which would explain what he called my “claim to fame.” And the best I could come up with was this: I think I know more about plant life than any other drama critic and more about the theater than any botanist!
Isn’t it rather grand that he could say that? In addition to highlighting the value of broad knowledge, it becomes still more meaningful if you know that he uses the word amateur in the original or root sense of “a lover.” Our English word comes from the French, which in turn comes from the Latin, amator, “to love.” That is, an amateur is one who does something, not as part of a salaried position and for the monetary reward, but because the activity itself is the reward. She or he is in love with the subject.
Jack Horner has long been a professional paleontologist and educator. He concludes his book Dinosaur Lives by referencing an earlier time: “On a more personal note, for many years I was an amateur collector. If certain aspects of my life had gone differently, I’d still be traipsing through the badlands of Montana searching for dinosaur fossils, motivated by nothing more than the desire to witness something I hadn’t seen before—to be surprised—which, come to think of it, is the same thing that motivates me today.”
An amateur in natural history, then, is not necessarily one with extremely limited knowledge; the main characteristic possessed is that of having a love for this wondrous world of nature, and love will lead to knowledge in one degree or another. Should we not grant that all of us are called to be amateurs in something, and should we not all have in common this interest in the wider world on which we depend for absolutely everything, including life itself? May we never lose that loving sensitivity to the planet we call home.
For it can be lost. A character in an H. G. Wells novel confessed, “There was a time when my little soul shone and was uplifted by the starry enigma of the sky. That has now disappeared. I go out and look at the stars now in the same way that I look at wallpaper.”
Again, this definition: A naturalist is one who studies nature for the purpose of greater understanding; who seeks to help or enhance, not harm, the world’s natural processes, and who loves the natural world. All of that hinges on a prior condition, i.e., that a naturalist has a conscious relationship with nature. In 1845, Thoreau wrote those wonderful words, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
All human beings, in common with all other living things, are enmeshed, or embedded in the natural world, are utterly dependent upon the whole, and exist only as a part of it. Most of the time, we are oblivious to that. We are like the whaler in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, who “out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him down to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales . . .”
Therefore, children have to be taught that bread is grain in another form, that milk doesn’t come from bottles, that meat doesn’t just appear in the refrigerator, and that behind the grocery store there is a complex and fertile world that brings all of these products into being. We live, most of the time, in controlled environments that make it all too easy for us to forget about the sustenance of what used to be called Mother Earth. In many parts of the world, the raw earth is now seldom underfoot. We have, in fact, become largely an asphalt animal, existing in environments that insulate us from the environment. For most of us, our waking and working hours are spent in buildings designed to shield us from all external factors. Encapsulated therein and bathed in artificial light, we are seldom conscious even of whether the world has rolled into darkness. The forces of nature are mollified by central heating and air conditioning so that we seldom experience even the weather, except as a minor inconvenience when a drizzle spoils the picnic or a snowfall moves us to shovel the sidewalk. Artificiality encompasses us to the extent that it is the real world no longer seems real.
None of us wants to go back to the cave, but any thinking person must surely grant that the comforts of modern life have had effects, not all of which are positive. We are the first people in history to live so thoughtless of the elemental forces that sustain us.
From time immemorial, the eternal rhythms of night and day have reminded people of their total dependence upon the source of heat and light. Each second, the sun burns some 637 million tons of hydrogen in the fusion reaction to create 632 million tons of helium and, in the process, floods space with radiant energy. It is the equivalent of a million ten-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding every second. It has raged thus for some 5 billion years, and it likely will do so for still another 5 billion years.
Ancient peoples, of course, had no idea of the details supplied by modern physics, but they knew that light was life. Therefore, most of them viewed the sun as a god and worshipped the golden orb in the heavens. As in the words of W.H. Auden, people of old saw all of nature as being full of meaning and message,
And heard inside each mortal thing
Its holy emanations sing.
Now, insulated and distanced from nature, we no longer hear it speaking, for music is nothing if the audience is deaf. In the Victorian novel Middlemarch, George Eliot described herself and all of us most of the time, when she wrote: “If we had a keen vision and feeling . . . it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-padded with stupidity.” In Picasso’s great painting, Guernica, the sun in the heavens has been replaced by an electric bulb, and one suspects the message is not salutary.
Part of the problem is the frenetic pace of life for most of us in the Western world. The sculptor Rodin said that slowness is beauty. We have, judging from much evidence, another outlook. Signs shout, “Why Wait? Get It Now: Pay Only a Dollar Down! Cars Washed: Two Minutes.” In our grocery stores, the old slow, three-minute oatmeal has gone farther back on the shelf, unable to compete with
