Of Pigeons and Concubines

By Otto Friedrich

THE DISCOVERERS by Daniel J. Boorstin; Random House; $25

Did you know that the hour was actually invented around A.D. 1330?

Or that Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was rejected by an editor who urged him instead to write a book about pigeons? ("Everyone is interested in pigeons," said this expert. "The book would be reviewed by every journal in the kingdom.")

Or that the Chou Emperor who ruled China in 1090 had one empress, three consorts, nine spouses, 27 concubines and 81 assistant concubines, whose rotation of duty was exactly scheduled over the course of each fortnight so that the women of highest rank occupied the imperial bed on the nights closest to the full moon?

Historian Daniel Boorstin, a Rhodes scholar with degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge as well as both Harvard and Yale, and the Librarian of Congress since 1975, knows all those recondite facts and more. Many more. He also knows how to put them to good use. Having gambled in the 1950s that he could retell the whole American experience in his three-volume The Americans, a wager that eventually won him a Pulitzer Prize, Boorstin is now attempting an even riskier gamble: that he can find a new way to retell the whole history of the world in 745 pages.

Boorstin boldly announces, at the launching of The Discoverers, that he plans to ignore all the obvious territory: politics, finance, culture, "the waging of wars, the rise and fall of empires." That leaves him free to concentrate on one thematic concept: "mankind's need to know--to know what is out there." The exploration starts with a basic aspect of history, time itself. Who first thought of measuring the year, or dividing it into months and weeks? The Romans decreed a week of eight days and a day of twelve hours, but the day itself was measured solely by the length of sunlight, so the units of time varied in different places and seasons. Not until medieval monks conceived an obligation to pray at fixed hours of the night did their need spur the invention of a mechanical clock that worked in the dark.

Only when time could be precisely measured could space be systematically explored. From the 14th century clock came the 15th century navigational instruments that could guide mariners across an uncharted ocean. Yet history is only occasionally that logical, as Boorstin delights in pointing out, for much of it derives from blunders and accidents. Bartholomeu Dias' maps all showed that there was no ocean route around Africa. It was only after he had been driven off course by a storm in February of 1488 that he found he had somehow rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and that there was a cape to be rounded.

Boorstin clearly relishes such tales, not only about notable discoverers like Columbus and Magellan but also about the half-forgotten Cheng Ho, a Chinese eunuch who set forth in the 15th century with a gigantic fleet of more than 300 vessels and nearly 40,000 men. Exploring as far as Zanzibar, Cheng Ho brought back to the imperial zoo its first giraffe, which the Chinese were convinced was a unicorn, whose horn was said to provide the most powerful of aphrodisiacs.

The great navigators sail through only a few chapters of Boorstin's saga. More adventurers simply look out into the night skies. A canon named Copernicus offers what he calls a "strange" hypothesis of a solar system to "dispel the mists of paradox." Galileo builds a telescope and sees for the first time the moons of Jupiter. Still other Renaissance explorers look inward to study the human body, using as their atlas the newly rediscovered anatomical studies of Galen (circa 130-200). The only trouble is that human dissections were forbidden in ancient Rome, so Galen based his work on the anatomy of the pig. The mists of paradox continue to swirl.

Just as The Discoverers seems in danger of turning into another popular history of science, Boorstin uses the invention of the printing press as a device to introduce a completely different array of heroes, the explorers of social relations. King Eumenes II of Pergamum, deprived of Egyptian papyrus, invents parchment in the 2nd century B.C.; nearly three centuries later Ts'ai Lun presents the Emperor of China with the first known sheet of paper, made of mulberry and waste fishnets; Marco Polo is amazed to find Kublai Khan using paper as money; Gutenberg labors over a Bible, which is finally published not by Gutenberg but by the creditors who have seized his new press. We are entering modern times.

But history still must discover itself, which partly means defining itself. In 1815, when the conventional wisdom still asserts that the story of mankind began with the creation of Adam in about 4000 B.C., a young Danish numismatist named Christian Thomsen gets a job sorting out bundles of junk that his public-spirited countrymen have sent to the newly created Royal Commission for the Preservation of Danish Antiquities. Partly as a housekeeping device, he begins separating stone objects from those of iron and those of bronze; thus are invented the three ages of prehistory, and the idea of prehistory itself. This continuing process of redefinition keeps changing reality. The Renaissance is not the Renaissance until Jules Michelet names it that in 1855.

Boorstin is an expert storyteller, but where do his splendid stories finally lead? At many points in his long chronicle, certain perceptions glow like fireflies--for example, that the invention of printing not only diffused ideas but perpetuated error. But although his book appears at the beginning to have the structure of a cathedral, history refuses to conform to his designs. The demands of onrushing chronology continually conflict with every attempt to impose a conceptual order. The section on medicine, for example, simply breaks off at the 18th century, as though Pasteur or Semmelweis were of only passing interest. In attempting to cram in everything from ethnography to atomic particles, Boorstin ends by giving the impression of a man trying to repack a suitcase that inexplicably burst open while he was running after a departing bus in the rain.

--By Otto Friedrich

Excerpt

"The lion, king of the beasts, comes first, and with three salient facts: he uses his tail to rub out his footprints so hunters cannot follow him; he sleeps with his eyes open; and the newborn cub remains dead for three days until the father lion breathes life into it. So, too, Christ remained awake and ready for Resurrection. The remaining animals carry a heavy baggage of morals. None is more vivid than the 'ant-lion,' offspring of the unnatural union of a lion and an ant, who is doomed to starve because the nature of the ant will not permit it to eat meat, and the nature of the lion keeps it from eating plants. So, too, none can survive who serve both God and the Devil." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.