The Signature of All Things

She read Lamarck once more, and carefully. Lamarck had surmised that biological transmutation occurred because of overuse or disuse of a particular body part. For instance, he claimed, giraffes had such long necks because certain individual giraffes across history had stretched themselves up so high, in order to eat from treetops, that they had caused their necks to actually grow, within their own lifetimes. Then they had passed on that trait—neck elongation—to their young. Conversely, penguins had such ineffective wings because they had stopped using them. The wings had withered through neglect, and this trait—a pair of stumped and flightless appendages—had been passed along to penguin young, thus shaping the species.
    It was a provocative theory, but it did not entirely make sense to Alma. By Lamarck’s reasoning, she reckoned, there should be far more transmutation occurring on earth than there actually was. By this logic, Alma surmised, the Jewish people, after centuries of practicing circumcision, should long ago have started producing boys who were born without foreskins. Men who shaved their faces for their entire lives should produce sons who never grew beards. Women who curled their hair daily should produce daughters born with curls. Clearly none of this had occurred.
    Yet things changed —Alma was certain of it. It was not only Alma who believed this, either. Nearly everyone in the scientific world was discussing the possibility that species could shift from one thing into another—not before one’s eyes, perhaps, but over long periods of time. It was extraordinary, the theories and battles that had begun to rage over the subject. Only recently, the word scientist had been coined, by the polymath William Whewell. Many scholars had objected to this blunt new term, as it sounded so sinisterly similar to that awful word atheist ; why not simply continue to call themselves natural philosophers ? Was that designation not more godly, more pure? But divisions were being drawn now between the realm of nature and the realm of philosophy. Ministers who doubled as botanists or geologists were becoming increasingly rare, as far too many challenges to biblical truths were stirred up through investigation of the natural world. It used to be that God was revealed in the wonders of nature; now God wasbeing challenged by those same wonders. Scholars were now required to choose one side or the other.
    As old certainties quaked and trembled upon ever-eroding ground, Alma Whittaker—alone at White Acre—indulged in her own dangerous thoughts. She pondered Thomas Malthus, with his theories about population growth, disease, cataclysm, famine, and extinction. She pondered John William Draper’s brilliant new photographs of the moon. She pondered Louis Agassiz’s theory that the world had once seen an Ice Age. She took a long walk one day to the museum at Sansom Street to see the fully reconstructed bones of a giant mastodon, which caused her to think once again about the ancientness of this planet—and, indeed, of all the planets. She reconsidered algae and mosses, and how one might have turned into the other. She focused again on Dicranum , wondering anew how this particular moss genus could exist in so many minutely diverse forms; what had shaped it into all these hundreds upon hundreds of silhouettes and configurations?
    In late 1850, George Hawkes brought forth Ambrose’s orchid book into the world—a lavish and expensive publication called The Orchids of Guatemala and Mexico . All who encountered the book declared Ambrose Pike to be the finest botanical artist of the age. All the most prominent gardens wanted to commission Mr. Pike to document their own collections, but Ambrose Pike was gone—lost on the other side of the world, growing vanilla, far out of reach. Alma felt guilt and shame over this, but she did not know what to do about it. She spent time with the book every day. The beauty of Ambrose’s work brought her pain, but she could not stay away from it, either. She arranged for George Hawkes to send a copy of the book to Ambrose in Tahiti, but she never heard whether the volume had arrived. She arranged that Ambrose’s mother—the formidable Mrs. Constance Pike—should receive all the earnings from the book. This led to some polite exchanges of letters between Alma and her mother-in-law. Mrs. Pike, most unfortunately, believed that her son had run away from his new wife in order to pursue