The sharp-eyed lynx, outfoxed by nature

Natural History, June, 1998 by Stephen Jay Gould

We can be terribly fooled if we equate apparent sight with necessary physical reality. The great Galileo, the finest scientist of his or any other time, knew that Saturn--Stelluti's personal emblem--must be a triple star because he had so observed the farthest planet with good eyes and the best telescope of his day, but through a mind harboring no category for rings around a celestial sphere. Stelluti knew that fossil wood must grow from earths of the mineral kingdom because he made good observations with his eyes and then ran an accurate sequence backward through his mind.

And thus, nature outfoxed the two Lynxes at a crucial moment of their careers--because both men concluded that sight alone should suffice, when genuine solutions demanded insight into mental structures and strictures as well.

As a final irony, the emblem of Stelluti and Galileo's own society--the lynx itself--had been chosen as an exemplar of this richer, dual pathway. Federico Cesi had named his academy for a wild and wily cat, long honored in legend for possessing the sharpest sight among animals. But Cesi had chosen well and subtly, and for a conscious, explicit reason. The acuity of the lynx arose from two paired and complementary virtues--sharpness of vision and depth of insight, the outside and the inside, the eye and the mind.

Cesi had taken the emblem for his new society from the title page of Giambattista della Porta's Natural Magic (1589 edition), where the same picture of a lynx stands below the motto aspicit et inspicit--literally read as "he looks at and he looks into," but metaphorically expressing the twinned ideals of observation and exPerimentation. Thus, the future fifth Lynx, the living vestige of the old way, had epitomized the richer path gained by combining insight with, if you will, "exsight," or observation. Cesi had stated this ideal in a document of 1616, written to codify the rules and goals of the Lynxes:

In order to read this great, true, and

universal book of the world, it is necessary

to visit all its parts, and to engage in both

observation and experiment in order to

reach, by these two good means, an acute

and profound contemplation, by first

representing things as they are and as they

vary, and then by determining how we can

change and vary them.

If we decide to embrace the entire universe as our source of knowledge and insight--to use, in other words, the full range of scales revealed by Galileo's two great instruments, the telescope and the microscope (both, by the way, named by his fellow Lynxes)--we had better use all the tools of sensation and mentality that a few billion years of evolution have granted to our feeble bodies. The symbol of the lynx, who sees most acutely from the outside but who also understands most deeply from the inside, remains our best guide. Stelluti himself expressed this richness, this duality, in a wonderfully poetic manner by extolling the lynx in his second major book, his translations of the Latin poet Persius, published in 1630. Cesi had selected the lynx for the animal's legendary acuity of vision, but Stelluti added: