A few weeks ago, biologist Stephen Heard blogged about beauty in scientific writing. Among his examples, he cited an elegant explanation of quantum mechanics research and a playful description of a snake surveying a “disconsolate line” of frogs. More details can be found in Heard’s paper on the subject, which calls for scientists to strive not only for beauty, but whimsy and humour.
I’ve often found that the most enjoyable scientific papers are those written more than a century ago. Sometimes I come across them while researching an article that demands historical backstory, and sometimes I just go down a rabbit hole and find myself downloading half a dozen smudged-looking PDFs on early dental prosthetics. Reading these fusty manuscripts nearly always yields some amusement, whether because the authors use a quaint word, a pleasing turn of phase, or writing conventions that strike me as funny today.
For example (admittedly this sample is small, since I’m just looking at old papers that I happen to have in my library right now):
1. They write long, rambling, rickety sentences.
Take geologist John William Dawson’s description of fossil beds in Canada, published in 1859:
Near the upper part of the section, where the plants become more rare, and the rocks are more abundantly tinged with the red peroxide of iron, the beds are plentifully and often very grotesquely marked with ripple-furrows, shrinkage-cracks, and current-lines. In one or two beds there are surfaces covered with rounded projections resembling casts of rain-marks; and in proof that this is their true character, the surface being irregular, we have not only the rain-marks themselves, but the little rills formed by the gathering drops as they rolled along in this, one of the most ancient showers of which we have as yet any geological record.
With his liberal use of commas and semicolons and clauses, he sounds a bit like Dickens going off on one of his endless sentences about, say, muffins. (Such as this one from Chapter 2 of Nicholas Nickleby: “All this time, Sir Matthew Pupker and the two other members were relating to their separate circles what the intentions of government were, about taking up the bill; with a full account of what the government had said in a whisper the last time they dined with it, and how the government had been observed to wink when it said so; from which premises they were at no loss to draw the conclusion, that if the government had one object more at heart than another, that one object was the welfare and advantage of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company.”)
2. They use over-the-top words.
In a solemn 1870 summary of a certain Mr. J. Bailey Denton’s views on sewage systems:
After mentioning various instances in which there is infiltration of subsoil water into the sewers, doing mischief in a variety of ways, the author called attention to the evil of indiscriminately admitting a largely disproportionate quantity of water into the sewers, without any power to regulate the time and extent of dilution.
That’s right, admitting a largely disproportionate quantity of water into sewers is evil. Pure evil.
3. They get so excited that they use italics.
In 1892, a gentleman named William Brewster observed a bird called a northern shrike attacking a meadow mouse in Massachusetts. After tussling with its prey, he wrote, “[t]he Shrike now looked up and seeing me jumped on the mouse with both feet and flew off bearing it in its claws.” I can just see Brewster as this is happening, standing in the meadow, mouth agape: “Can you believe this? That bird carried off that mouse in its freaking claws.”
4. They get so excited that they use exclamation points.
This is especially funny when the exclamation point comes at the end of a long, rambling, rickety sentence. Here’s botanist William Carruthers getting all wound up about a fossil which he believed to be a type of algae: “I have already shown that the large tubes cannot be called pleurenchymatous cells, and now I have to show that the ‘double series of spiral fibres’ are not inside the large tubes, but are independent structures external to them!”
Damn straight, Carruthers!
5. They admit when they don’t know what the hell is going on.
When philosopher Pierre Gassendi tried to capture observations of Mercury passing in front of the Sun in 1631, he was beset by doubts:
[T]hrown into confusion, I began to think that an ordinary spot would hardly pass over that full distance in an entire day. And I was undecided indeed… I wondered if perhaps I could not have been wrong in some way about the distance measured earlier.
And in an 1887 ornithology report, Joseph L. Goodale described his befuddlement when attempting to identify a dead bird in a marsh: “I must confess that upon picking it up I was completely at a loss to know what it was.” No shame in that, sir.
6. They write charming descriptions.
Here’s French scientist Jean-Henri Fabre rhapsodizing about the emperor moth in his book The Life of the Caterpillar:
Who does not know the magnificent Moth, the largest in Europe, clad in maroon velvet with a necktie of white fur? The wings, with their sprinkling of grey and brown, crossed by a faint zig-zag and edged with smoky white, have in the centre a round patch, a great eye with a black pupil and a variegated iris containing successive black, white, chestnut and purple arcs.
No less remarkable is the caterpillar, in colour an undecided yellow. On the top of thinly-scattered tubercles, crowned with a palisade of black hairs, are set beads of turquoise blue. His stout brown cocoon, so curious with its exit-shaft shaped like an eel-trap, is usually fastened to the bark at the base of old almond-trees.
I never would have thought to use the phrase “an undecided yellow,” but it’s kind of lovely. And was there ever anything more adorable than a “stout brown cocoon”?
7. They’re really mean to each other.
Two of the scientists that I mentioned earlier, Dawson and Carruthers, brawled in the literature over the identity of a tree-like fossil. First, Dawson mocked Carruthers in The American Naturalist for thinking the fossil was a seaweed: “[I]f Mr. Carruthers has made such a blunder as that attributed to him, this can only be excused by defective observation or imperfect specimens.”
In his miffed response, published in the Monthly Microscopical Journal, Carruthers wrote: “Unwilling to continue a discussion after this fashion… I addressed to [Dawson] a letter, containing at length my interpretation of the structure and affinities of this fossil, with the view of preventing the republication of obvious error. I regret that my effort was futile.” (Is it just me, or are there shades of Pride and Prejudice here? Perhaps the gentlemen harbored an unspoken attraction. “You are the last scientist in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to collaborate with!”)
Carruthers went on to say that “Dr. Dawson has obviously been misled,” noted snidely that “[a]n intelligent or educated observer would at a glance see the true nature of these smaller structures”, and concluded, “If Dr. Dawson knew anything whatever about a vegetable cell, and the formation of the spiral fibre in its interior, he would not have written such nonsense as the first sentence in his footnote.”
These days, the most one can expect to see in the literature are mealy half-insults such as “More data are needed to substantiate So-and-so’s statement.” Sigh.
Not all the examples above qualify as beautiful. But — as our esteemed colleagues Dawson and Carruthers might have put it — I found them excessively diverting, and indeed, were I to come across such specimens of style in a scientific journal today, I should be most entertained, and would feel compelled to tweet such sentences far and wide, if not for the unfortunate fact that they would likely exceed the character limit that so effectively holds all writers in a vise of conciseness.
Image credit
BrAt82 | Shutterstock
I love these quotes. But yet nowadays, when I am in an editor role, I would homogenize and standardize such artistic expressions because that is what we are supposed to do. This makes me think that we should forget about such strict controls in technical and scientific writing.
One element of the act of writing that we seem these days to have forgotten is that it is intended to be read. A permanent mid-career detour into technical writing has certainly cleaned up my florid prose; but I’m grateful beyond words that what I put into circulation professionally rarely carries my name. I have to confess that this essay explains quite clearly why I am a regular reader of LWON.
Perhaps the most striking, and strikingly beautiful, thing about all these examples is that they can be easily understood on first reading. For all their unfamiliar structure they are perfectly clear. Contrast that with the convoluted and cumbersome prose that modern science has adopted – presumably because its writers think that it makes them seem more learned.
Whilst perusing the description of that resplendant moth, it occurred to me that, in an era withoout video or coloured photography, the modern style of terse description would provide nothing to impart the gporiousness of such a creature if previously unviewed by the reader.
These people were writing for a tiny coterie of European and American gentlemen like themselves. Today we write, or we should, for a international readership most of which cannot deal with the long sentences nor understand the florid vocabulary. The scientists I know in Central America, and my postgrads in Japan, would get nothing from writing of this kind. Even after a day or more spent translating, they’d still be confused and uncomprehending.