Endnote on a New Beginning

Dr. Johnson, invoking the sexism of the ages to disparage an incipient form of eighteenth-century feminism, compared a woman preacher to a dog walking on its hind legs. The marvel, he stated, consisted not in doing it well but rather in doing it at all. At the dawn of a new millennium, we might repeat this cynical judgment and praise this magazine, at its centennial, merely for its continuity through a time of maximal peril and change. Indeed, in simply staying the course, Natural History has achieved something quite self-referentially wonderful, for our magazine has displayed the defining criterion for success in its central subject of evolutionary biology: the unbroken continuity of genealogical persistence. Human institutions, however, unlike their morally neutral analogues in factual nature, also demand judgment in conceptual, aesthetic, and ethical terms. And here, on these distinctively human grounds, Natural History may truly celebrate the inception of its second century in transcending Dr. Johnson's image by doing its appointed task so very well and with such uncompromising integrity.

Sometimes we win a less taxing form of integrity by allying ourselves to a just principle and then sticking to it through thick and thin, pain and loss. But the more complex mode that has been the hallmark of this magazine for 100 years seeks to craft a dynamic midground between simplistic endpoints that can only spell destruction at their extremes. Should Natural History promote an idealized concept of pure "wilderness" without human presence, or should a magazine published in a great city always stress the importance of intelligent human use? Should Natural History be written as a "house organ" for the committed or as glossy fluff, striving for the goods of proselytization by using the bads of commercial blandishment and the frantically empty prose of sound bites and simplicities?

Natural History found the golden mean for both these contrasts--and many others. Art can be nature's true partner, as Frederick Law Olmsted showed us in Central Park and as this magazine learned in regarding a human presence as intrinsic to nature's current evolutionary state. And Natural History can span the full intellectual depth and aesthetic beauty of evolution by relying mainly on active scientists with a lifelong feel for their subject and a passionate commitment that inspired their professional choice--not primarily on writers who, despite exemplary skills in conveying the work of others, must miss a hundred subtleties of truly divine minutiae.

As I read previous anniversary issues to prepare these thoughts, I realized that Natural History did not drift into these balances passively; rather, this optimal place has been discovered by change, experiment, and historical struggle. Issue Number 1 of The American Museum Journal (April 1900) reported Museum business to the cognoscenti without any sense of intellectual excitement and with certainty about the superiority of those who observed over those on display, as in this report about some Far Eastern folk: "As with most barbarous peoples, conduct is restricted by many superstitious conventionalities, such as the supposed shocking impropriety of a man's ever seeing his mother-in-law's face."

In the semicentennial issue of 1950, and for entirely understandable reasons in the wake of World War II, the Museum's curators exaggerated nature's potential role as the source of ethical solutions for an erring humanity that had embraced cities and technological destruction, and now needed a correction. None other than former president Herbert Hoover advocated, in our pages, "the primaeval joy ... of getting back to nature--for recreation and to wash one's soul of the complexities of modern life." One curator predicted that by the year 2000, our global population of 3 billion would be eating yeast steak and algal butter. Meanwhile, the same Mr. Hoover feared no technological competition from other lands, because, as a consequence of cultural background, not intrinsic limitation, the "peoples of Asia ... imitate and fumble with [machines]." I have great faith in our capacity to correct and overcome the inevitable fallibilities of human judgment and therefore do not fear permanent harm from such transient misbalancing of the relative worth between natural and cultural life.

Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum. This doxology ("as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end") purports to describe a form of divine immanence but should also apply to nature--for we need her shrinking presence more than ever--in a universe that at least enjoys geological expanse if not true eternity. Saecula saeculorum refers literally, in one meaning, to "centuries of centuries." And so, as this great magazine begins its second saeculum, may we continue to keep its subject healthy and in vibrant partnership with our cultures right on through times that only a geologist can comprehend.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning