religious purpose (the Textbook was published by SPCK) is unimportant. What counts is that he wrote about each organism with an affectionate eye, as though seeing it for the first time: the precise quality which a textbook serves to annul.
* In 2005 the US National Marine Fisheries Service finally traced an identical Hawaiian ‘Boing’ to male minke whales marking their territory and attracting mates.
* Yet there is still dissent. Dr Glebb Udintsev at the Moscow Institute of the Physics of the Earth consistently refuses to believe in plate tectonic theory, specifically rejecting the idea of subduction. His view is that the Earth is slowly expanding. This would indeed explain many tectonic phenomena, though much seismic data would have to be ignored or tendentiously interpreted. Unfortunately, it is not entirely easy to disprove the expanding Earth theory since any rate of change would be infinitesimally slow, too much so to be revealed by bouncing and timing radar signals off the Moon, for example.
II
âNothing is more tedious than a landscape without namesâ
Immediately to the north of Hawaii, scattered across the Murray Fracture Zone, lie the Musicians Seamounts. They stretch for maybe 200 miles, from Strauss in the north to Mendelssohn in the south. There is a Bach Ridge and a Beethoven Ridge. There is also Mozart, a considerable mountain rising from the abyssal plain 5 kilometres below to within 900 metres of the surface. Mount Mozart, while a fairly minor affair by suboceanic standards, is therefore slightly taller than Mount Fuji, although of nowhere near such classic proportions.
The presence of this random clutch of composers engloutis in the middle of Pacific wastes is a reminder of how much of the physical world belongs in its taxonomy, description and name to the Western nations. It is also a reminder that in a sense things do not exist until they are named. Before that, everything partakes of a state of undifferentiated chaos which is never a neutral matter to human beings but carries a degree of menace. To name something is to take control of it. It could be argued that the Old Testament story of Genesis was less a matter of creation than of naming, of God taking control of chaos. Whereas before, the pre-Universe consisted of a kind of primordial babble, God-grammarian sorted out its constituent parts and uttered some solid nouns â dualities, mainly: crude oppositions such as light/dark, heaven/earth, sea/land. How he had entertained himself before this basic act of intelligence is open to speculation, but if he was anything like the humans he created (and according to Scripture he was) he was bored, repelled and finally menaced by a universe which was still a state rather than an infinite collection of objects. Ever since, Homo has felt the same and travellers have gone about the globe as adventurers, conquerors, sightseers, nomads and scientists, naming its parts and often bestowing on them their own proper names as well as those of theirfriends and sponsors. In his short story âColombaâ (1840) Prosper Mériméeâs English heroine, Lydia Nevil, takes pleasure in learning the names of places on the Corsican coast as she passes in a schooner, for ânothing is more tedious than a landscape without namesâ. Many a sea captain found his spirits insupportably lowered by a coast such as that of Africa, when whole days might go by without sight of a single named feature. It would presumably have made little difference knowing the local tribespeople had their own names for the hills and capes and rivers. Being illiterate, they would have been ineligible to bestow valid names because unable to write them on a map. Only cartography can remove names from merely local usage and bring places into international being.
The desire to tame a threatening landscape by subjecting it to the control of language can be seen in the old Greek name for the notoriously treacherous Black Sea:
* In 2005 the US National Marine Fisheries Service finally traced an identical Hawaiian ‘Boing’ to male minke whales marking their territory and attracting mates.
* Yet there is still dissent. Dr Glebb Udintsev at the Moscow Institute of the Physics of the Earth consistently refuses to believe in plate tectonic theory, specifically rejecting the idea of subduction. His view is that the Earth is slowly expanding. This would indeed explain many tectonic phenomena, though much seismic data would have to be ignored or tendentiously interpreted. Unfortunately, it is not entirely easy to disprove the expanding Earth theory since any rate of change would be infinitesimally slow, too much so to be revealed by bouncing and timing radar signals off the Moon, for example.
II
âNothing is more tedious than a landscape without namesâ
Immediately to the north of Hawaii, scattered across the Murray Fracture Zone, lie the Musicians Seamounts. They stretch for maybe 200 miles, from Strauss in the north to Mendelssohn in the south. There is a Bach Ridge and a Beethoven Ridge. There is also Mozart, a considerable mountain rising from the abyssal plain 5 kilometres below to within 900 metres of the surface. Mount Mozart, while a fairly minor affair by suboceanic standards, is therefore slightly taller than Mount Fuji, although of nowhere near such classic proportions.
The presence of this random clutch of composers engloutis in the middle of Pacific wastes is a reminder of how much of the physical world belongs in its taxonomy, description and name to the Western nations. It is also a reminder that in a sense things do not exist until they are named. Before that, everything partakes of a state of undifferentiated chaos which is never a neutral matter to human beings but carries a degree of menace. To name something is to take control of it. It could be argued that the Old Testament story of Genesis was less a matter of creation than of naming, of God taking control of chaos. Whereas before, the pre-Universe consisted of a kind of primordial babble, God-grammarian sorted out its constituent parts and uttered some solid nouns â dualities, mainly: crude oppositions such as light/dark, heaven/earth, sea/land. How he had entertained himself before this basic act of intelligence is open to speculation, but if he was anything like the humans he created (and according to Scripture he was) he was bored, repelled and finally menaced by a universe which was still a state rather than an infinite collection of objects. Ever since, Homo has felt the same and travellers have gone about the globe as adventurers, conquerors, sightseers, nomads and scientists, naming its parts and often bestowing on them their own proper names as well as those of theirfriends and sponsors. In his short story âColombaâ (1840) Prosper Mériméeâs English heroine, Lydia Nevil, takes pleasure in learning the names of places on the Corsican coast as she passes in a schooner, for ânothing is more tedious than a landscape without namesâ. Many a sea captain found his spirits insupportably lowered by a coast such as that of Africa, when whole days might go by without sight of a single named feature. It would presumably have made little difference knowing the local tribespeople had their own names for the hills and capes and rivers. Being illiterate, they would have been ineligible to bestow valid names because unable to write them on a map. Only cartography can remove names from merely local usage and bring places into international being.
The desire to tame a threatening landscape by subjecting it to the control of language can be seen in the old Greek name for the notoriously treacherous Black Sea:
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