Writing in the margins

Natural History, Nov, 1998 by Stephen Jay Gould

Famed as the greatest of chemists, Lavoisier made seminal contributions to geology that have gone unheralded.

I once had a teacher with an idiosyncratic habit that distressed me forty years ago but now and finally, oh sweet revenge--can work for me to symbolize the general process of human creativity. I never knew a stingier woman, and though she taught history in a New York City junior high school, she might well have been the frugal New England farmer with the box marked "pieces of string not worth saving." Readers who attended New York City public schools in the early 1950s will remember those small yellow slips of paper, three by six inches at most, that served all purposes, from spot quizzes to "canvases" for art class. Well, Mrs. Z. would give us one sheet--only one--for any classroom exam, no matter how elaborate the required answers. She would always reply to any plea for advice about containment or, God forbid, an additional yellow sheet (comparable in her system of values to Oliver Twist's request for more soup) with a firm refusal followed by a cheery instruction expressed in her oddly lilting voice: "And if you run out of room, just write in the margins!"

Margins play an interesting role in the history of scholarship, primarily for their schizophrenic housing of the two most contradictory forms of intellectual activity. Secondary commentaries upon printed texts (often followed by several layers of commentaries upon the commentaries) received their official designation as "marginalia" to note their necessary position at the edges. The usual status of such discourse as derivative and trivial, stating more and more about less and less at each iteration, leads to the dictionary definition of marginalia as "nonessential items" (Webster's Third New International Dictionary) and inevitably recalls the famous lines of Jonathan Swift:

So, naturalists observe, a flea

Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;

And these have smaller still to bite 'em;

And so proceed ad infinitum.

Thus every poet, in Iris kind,

Is bit by him that comes behind.

But margins also serve the diametrically opposite purpose of receiving the first fruits and inklings of novel insights and radical revisions. When received wisdom has hogged all the central locations, where else can creative change begin? The curmudgeon and cynic in me regards Thoreau's Walden as the most overquoted (and underwhelming) American classic, but I happily succumb, for the first time, to cite his one-liner for a vibrant existence: "I love a broad margin to my life."

Literal margins, however, must usually be narrow--and some of the greatest insights in the history of human thought necessarily began in such ferociously cramped quarters. The famous story of Fermat's last theorem, no matter how familiar, cannot be resisted in this context: When the great mathematician Pierre Fermat died in 1665, his executors found the following comment in his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica, next to a discussion of the claim that no natural numbers x, y, and z exist such that [x.sup.n] [y.sup.n] = [z.sup.n], where n is a natural number greater than 2: "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it." Mathematicians finally proved Fermat's last theorem just a few years ago, to great subsequent fanfare and an outpouring of popular books. But we shall newer know if Fermat truly beat the best of the latest by 350 years or if (as my own betting money says, admittedly with no good evidence) he had a promising idea but never saw its disabling flaw in the midst of his excitement.

I devote this essay to the happier and opposite story of a great insight that a cramped margin did manage Oust barely) to contain and nurture, but which then grew to such originality and fruitfulness that I need a two-part essay to do the subject justice. Part I appears here, and Part 2 will be published in next month's issue. But this tale, for reasons that I do not fully understand, remains virtually unknown (and marginal in this frustrating sense) both to scientists and to historians alike, although the protagonist ranks as one of the half-dozen greatest scientists in Western history, and the subject stood at the forefront of innovation in his time. In any case, the movement of this insight from marginality in 1760 to centrality by 1810 marks the birth of modern geology and gives us a rare and precious opportunity to eavesdrop on a preeminent thinker operating in the most exciting and instructive of all times: at the labile beginning of the codification of a major piece of natural knowledge --a unique moment featuring a landscape crossed by a hundred roads, each running in the right general direction toward a genuine truth. Each road, however, reaches a slightly different Rome and our eventual reading of nature depends crucially upon the initial accidents and contingencies specifying the path actually taken.

In 1700, all major Western scholars believed that the earth had been created just a few thousand years earlier. By 1800, nearly all scientists accepted a great antiquity of unknown duration and a sequential history expressed in the strata of the earth's crust. These strata, roughly speaking, form a vertical pile, with the oldest layers on the bottom and the youngest on top. By mapping patterns of the exposure of these layers on the earth's surface, this sequential history can be inferred. By 1820, detailed geological maps had been published for parts of England and France, and general patterns had been established for the entirety of both nations. This discovery of "deep time," and the subsequent resolution of historical sequences by geological mapping, must be ranked among the sweetest triumphs of human understanding.