Two Cultures?

CP Snow famously lamented the division of Western culture into separate worlds of Science and Humanities, to which Vladimir Nabokov (novelist and lepidopterist) replied: “I would have compared myself to a Colossus of Rhodes bestriding the gulf between the thermodynamics of Snow and the Lawrentonmania of Leavis, had that gulf not been a mere dimple of a ditch that a small frog could straddle.” Judith Hawley’s 2-volume compilation Literature and Science, 1660-1834 (reviewed be Peter D. Smith in the TLS ) bears this out, at least for the period that the volumes cover. Of the many specific examples given by the reviewer that there was no cultural divide (partly because “literature” had not narrowed down to poetry and fiction, nor had science narrowed down to the “hard sciences”), this is the most delightful: In 1791, Erasmus Darwin produced The Botanic Garden , a poetic introduction to botany: “In this 4000-line poem, Darwin explores geology, meteorology, as well as the Linnaean ‘sexual system’ of classifying plants.” Nor was Darwin the first explore the latter connection: “Thomas Stretser’s two erotic texts of 1732, Frutex Vulvaria and Arbor V itae, wittily exploit botanical metaphors to describe human genitalia.”