CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 1 review)
NATURAL AND UNNATURAL Published 50 years ago and no longer apparently in print, this is a really admirable short book that it would be pleasant to see reissued, perhaps with some updating of the fourth and final section. To such extent as it has a single theme, the theme is life on the planet earth. However what makes the book more readable than many writings on natural history is that the author switches his focus in a way that offers variety without sacrificing coherence. Mermaids and Mastodons is not just, or even mainly, about mermaids and mastodons. It is not even entirely about animals, because one chapter that I found particularly informative is concerned with a tree, and not an uncommon tree either but the ginkgo biloba or duck's foot tree or maidenhair tree, a very ancient survivor it seems, and, almost unbelievably, one whose survival has been mainly mankind's achievement. O si sic omnes. I particularly like the first section (from which the book gets part of its title), because it could be an excellent, if slightly surreptitious, way of introducing children to the environmental issues that come into closer focus as the book goes along. This first section is about mythical animals, and I hope it is not ungallant to include mermaids in this group description. Carrington's presentation is clear and attractive, and his explanations are a model of balance and rationality. Myths are of different kinds, and Carrington seems well read in the sources for the plainly legendary creatures like the phoenix or the various varieties of dragon. Mermaids are a rather different issue, and I was very pleased indeed that Carrington is not satisfied with the common equation with manatees and dugongs - pleasant creatures indeed but hardly what Horace calls in Carrington's own line from him quoted at the top `ending as a fish below, but above a beauteous woman'. Krakens, sea-serpents and the like are dealt with methodically (and very interestingly), and I was slightly saddened by his outright dismissal of my own favourite, the Loch Ness Monster. This is my own equivalent of Santa as the creature I would like to believe in. I probably just have to be brave about it as I can't seriously refute Carrington, but for anyone who wishes to probe the issue deeper there is an excellent and grown-up volume The Loch Ness Story by the BBC journalist Nicholas Witchell (of which I have also offered a review on this site) that throws poor Nessie a possible lifeline. The book moves on to prehistoric animals, these undoubtedly real except for the occasional hoaxes, and this is, naturally, where we meet the mastodons. Animal `living fossils' (like the tree mentioned above) are then dealt with in a knowledgeable, clear and absorbing account, in which Australia features prominently as it must but whose native fauna share the space with at least one creature I had never heard of. Finally Carrington relates three cases of creatures hunted to extinction. He chooses the quagga, the passenger pigeon and the sea-cow, and as so often when I hear such stories I was filled with sick impotent rage that the species I belong to can treat the beasts and fowls that have as much right as we do to the planet with such obscene callousness. In the 19th century the skies of north America used to be darkened with the huge flocks of passenger pigeons: at 1 p.m. on 1 September 1914 a lone hen bird Martha dropped dead from her roost in Cincinnati zoo, marking the exact moment of the extinction of her kind. That story is told graphically, but with taste and restraint as is characteristic of the author's manner. There is only one oddity in the writing, and it is that when he gives non-English quotations he disdains for some reason to translate them. They are probably not all that important, but in a spirit of helpfulness perhaps a reviewer should say that the opening line of Horace is just a standard description of a mermaid: the snippet from Pliny attributes to Greeks a common saying that Africa always brings us something new; the paragraph in French at the start of `A Worm That Wouldn't Turn' says that when ancient life-forms survive into the present the methodologies of the zoologist and of the palaeontologist come into conflict; and shortly afterwards the snatch of Latin means `which is marked by having many feet along its sides'. I liked the dry and understated refutation of the idea that the chirotherium walked by crossing its feet: the statement that `In any investigation it is surely the most flagrant form of cheating to invent a process that will explain the facts and then assume its existence for that reason' is a well-expressed and well-aimed rap over the knuckles for some whom he leaves nameless; and the Scottish mermaid with the auburn tresses made me think of her as the genie with the light brown hair. This is a book well worth recommending to anyone not already an expert in the subject-matter. Any age-group ought to benefit, and I only wish that when my children were still children I had known about this book and introduced them to it at that time. July 30, 2008