All scientists, Einstein not excepted, are children of Tantalus, frustrated by the failure to grasp that which seems within reach. He approached but never captured that grail. In later life, he aimed to weld everything else into a single parsimonious system, space with time and motion, gravity with electromagnetism and cosmology. In an early letter to his friend Marcel Grossmann, he said, 'It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things.' He was referring to his successful alignment of the microscopic physics of capillaries with the macroscopic, universe-wide physics of gravity. That vision was perhaps his greatest strength. Natural history was validated as a real science.Įinstein, the architect of grand unification in physics, was Ionian to the core. The animals and plants I loved so dearly reentered the stage as lead players in a grand drama. By inwardly manipulating time and space, I found I could climb the steps in biological organization from microscopic particles in cells to the forests that clothe mountain slopes. My thoughts, embryonically those of a modern biologist, traveled along a chain of causal events, from mutations that alter genes to evolution that multiplies species, to species that assemble into faunas and floras. I was enthralled, couldn't stop thinking about the implications evolution has for classification and for the rest of biology. A tumbler fell somewhere in my mind, and a door opened to a new world.

By giving a theoretical structure to natural history, it vastly expanded the Linnaean enterprise. The thin volume in the plain blue cover was one of the New Synthesis works, uniting the nineteenth-century Darwinian theory of evolution and modern genetics. It is, in other words, a conceptual world made for the mind of an eighteen-year-old. It is like the army: men (plus women, nowadays) into squads, squads into platoons, platoons into companies, and in the final aggregate, the armed services headed by the joint chiefs of staff. Then on to higher classification, where similar genera are grouped into families, families into orders, and so on up to phyla and finally, at the very summit, the six kingdoms-plants, animals, fungi, protists, monerans, and archaea. Next, you label each species with a two-part Latinized name, such as Corvus ossifragus for the fish crow, where Corvus stands for the genus-all the species of crows- and ossifragus for the fish crow in particular. Examples of such groups are all the crows and all the oaks. Then you sort species resembling one another into groups, the genera. You start by separating specimens of plants and animals into species. My intellectual world was framed by Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who invented modern biological classification.

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