The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers

Author:Chris Lavers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

A great way off!

Having got thoroughly lost in Asia, let us return to the West and pick up the unicorn’s story where we left it.

In 1687 Isaac Newton published Principia Mathematica, and by 1700 his rationalist approach to understanding the universe was sweeping across Europe. The breathtaking scope of Newton’s achievements confirmed what many intellectuals had suspected for a long time: the Bible was not a reliable guide to the workings of the natural world and neither were the ideas of Aristotle. The ensuing Enlightenment-a catch-all term for the culture of rationalism that came to dominate scholastic thinking in the eighteenth century-was bad news for the unicorn. Speculations about a creature widely thought to be mythical had no place in an intellectual system rooted in reason. Worse, the French scientist Baron Georges Cuvier, the Newton of biology, reasoned that unicorns were anatomically all but impossible. In his vast experience of living and fossil animals he had encountered neither a symmetrical horn nor one that attached to a suture between two bones, let alone to the frontal suture of the skull from where a unicorn’s horn would have to grow. Cuvier was too smart and cautious to state that one-horned quadrupeds cannot exist-new categories of creatures might be discovered, animals are sometimes born with deformities, Indian rhinoceroses are unicorns of a sort, and he was a scientist-but the implication of his reasoning was clear: the time of scholars and explorers would be better spent on less trivial pursuits. In his Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe and on the Changes which they have Produced in the Animal Kingdom (1825) he makes the point bluntly:

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