I Have Landed by Stephen Jay Gould Read Free Book Online

enthusiasm throughout life, and regret that political realities had precluded even more work on butterflies (Zimmer, page 216):
    But I also intend to collect butterflies in Peru or Iran before I pupate. . . . Had the Revolution not happened the way it happened, I would have enjoyed a landed gentleman’s leisure, no doubt, but I also think that my entomological occupations would have been more engrossing and energetic and that I would have gone on long collecting trips to Asia. I would have had a private museum.
    Nabokov published more than a dozen technical papers on the taxonomy and natural history of butterflies, mostly during his six years of full employment as Research Fellow (and unofficial curator) in Lepidoptery at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, where he occupied an office three floors above the laboratory that has been my principal scientific home for thirty years. (I arrived twenty years after Nabokov’s departure and never had the pleasure of meeting him, although my knowledge of his former presence has always made this venerable institution, built by Louis Agassiz in 1859 and later tenanted by several of the foremost natural historians in America, seem even more special.)
    Nabokov worked for Harvard, at a modest yearly salary of about one thousand dollars, between 1942 and 1948, when he accepted a teaching post in literatureat Cornell University. He was a respected and recognized professional in his chosen field of entomological systematics. The reasons often given for attributing to Nabokov either an amateur, or even only a dilettante’s, status arise from simple ignorance of accepted definitions for professionalism in this field.
    First, many leading experts in various groups of organisms have always been “amateurs” in the admirable and literal (as opposed to the opposite and pejorative) sense that their love for the subject has inspired their unparalleled knowledge, and that they do not receive adequate (or any) pay for their work. (Taxonomy is not as expensive, or as laboratory-driven, as many scientific fields. Careful and dedicated local observation from childhood, combined with diligence in reading and study, can supply all the needed tools for full expertise.)
    Second, poorly remunerated and inadequately titled (but full-time) employment has, unfortunately, always been
de rigueur
in this field. The fact that Nabokov worked for little pay, and with the vague title Research Fellow, rather than a professorial (or even a curatorial) appointment, does not imply nonprofessional status. When I took my position at the same museum in 1968, several heads of collections, recognized as world’s experts with copious publications, worked as “volunteers” for the symbolic “dollar a year” that gave them official status on the Harvard payroll.
    Third, and most important, I do not argue that all duly employed taxonomists can claim enduring expertise and righteous status. Every field includes some clunkers and nitwits, even in high positions! I am not, myself, a professional entomologist (I work on snails among the Mollusca), and therefore cannot judge Nabokov’s credentials on this crucial and final point. But leading taxonomic experts in the large and complex group of “blues” among the butterflies testify to the excellence of his work, and grant him the ultimate accolade of honor within the profession by praising his “good eye” for recognizing the (often subtle) distinctions that mark species and other natural groups of organisms (see the bibliography to this essay for two articles by leading butterfly taxonomists: Remington; and Johnson, Whitaker, and Balint). In fact, as many scholars have stated, before Nabokov achieved a conventional form of literary success with the publication of
Lolita
, he could have been identified (by conventional criteria of money earned and time spent) as a professional lepidopterist and