The Island of the Colorblind

By this time other interests were competing with botany. Stopes wrote a letter to The Times supporting women’s suffrage, and became increasingly conscious of how much sexually, as well as politically and professionally, women needed to be liberated. From 1914 on, though there was an overlap with palaeobotany for a few years, Stopes’s work dealt essentially with human love and sexuality. She was the first to write about sexual intercourse in a matter-of-fact way, doing so with the same lucidity and accuracy she had in her description of the fertilization of cycad ovules – but also with a tenderness which was like a foretaste of D.H. Lawrence. Her books Married Love (1918), Letter to Working Mothers (1919), and Radiant Motherhood (1920) were immensely popular at the time; no one else spoke with quite her accent or authority.

Later Stopes met Margaret Sanger, the great American pioneer of birth control, and she became its chief advocate in England. Contraception, Its Theory, History and Practice was published in 1923, and this led to the setting up of Marie Stopes clinics in London and elsewhere. Her voice, her message, had little appeal after the Second World War, and her name, once instantly recognized by all, faded into virtual oblivion. And yet, even in old age, her paleobotanical interests never deserted her; coal balls, she often said, were really her first love.

75

The Copernican revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its revelation of the immensity of space, dealt a profound blow to man’s sense of being at the center of the universe; this was voiced by no one more poignantly than Pascal: ‘The whole visible world is but an imperceptible speck,’ he lamented; man was now ‘lost in this remote corner of Nature,’ closed into ‘the tiny cell where he lodges.’ And Kepler spoke of a ‘hidden and secret horror,’ a sense of being ‘lost’ in the infinity of space.

The eighteenth century, with its close attention to rocks and fossils and geologic processes, was to radically alter man’s sense of time as well (as Rossi, Gould, and McPhee, in particular, have emphasized). Evolutionary time, geologic time, deep time, was not a concept which came naturally or easily to the human mind, and once conceived, aroused fear and resistance.

There was great comfort in the feeling that the earth was made for man and its history coeval with his, that the past was to be measured on a human scale, no more than a few score of generations back to the first man, Adam. But now the biblical chronology of the earth was vastly extended, into a period of eons. Thus while Archbishop Ussher had calculated that the world was created in 4004 B.C., when Buffon introduced his secular view of nature – with man appearing only in the latest of seven epochs – he suggested an unprecedented age of 75,000 years for the earth. Privately, he increased this time scale by forty – the original figure in his manuscripts was three million years – and he did this (as Rossi notes) because he felt that the larger figure would be incomprehensible to his contemporaries, would give them too fearful a sense of the ‘dark abyss’ of time. Less than fifty years later, Playfair was to write of how, gazing at an ancient geologic unconformity, ‘the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.’

When Kant, in 1755, published his Theory of the Heavens, his vision of evolving and emerging nebulae, he envisaged that ‘millions of years and centuries’ had been required to arrive at the present state, and saw creation as being eternal and immanent. With this, in Buffon’s words, ‘the hand of God’ was eliminated from cosmology, and the age of the universe enormously extended. ‘Men in Hooke’s time had a past of six thousand years,’ as Rossi writes, but ‘those of Kant’s times were conscious of a past of millions of years.’

Yet Kant’s millions were still very theoretical, not yet firmly grounded in geology, in any concrete knowledge of the earth. The sense of a vast geologic time filled with terrestrial events, was not to come until the next century, when Lyell, in his Principles of Geology, was able to bring into one vision both the immensity and the slowness of geologic change, forcing into consciousness a sense of older and older strata stretching back hundreds of millions of years.

Lyell’s first volume was published in 1830, and Darwin took it with him on the Beagle. Lyell’s vision of deep time was a prerequisite for Darwin’s vision too, for the almost glacially slow processes of evolution from the animals of the Cambrian to the present day required, Darwin estimated, at least 300 million years.