Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit.

ONCE upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter. They lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir-tree. Peter Rabbit disobeyed his mother's orders, sneaked into a farmer's yard and nearly ended up as rabbit pie. Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail were more prudent and stayed out of trouble. We are supposed to learn from this the virtue of prudence, but I am sure that later the adventurous Peter had a more distinguished career than his three siblings. Be that aas it may, John Gehl tells us about their inventor, Beatrix Potter: " In his book on symbiosis, biologist Tom Wakefield comments on the aborted scientific career of famous children's author Beatrix Potter:

Had Beatrix Potter been allowed to follow her vocation, Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle might never have been born. Instead of writing and illustrating stories loved by children all over the globe, she would have been writing groundbreaking articles for scientific journals. Beatrix's ambitions were thwarted not only because she was a young woman attempting to contribute to a profession almost entirely dominated by Victorian men, but also because she was a symbiologist -- a proponent of the dissident theory that some organisms were composed of not one but two different beings. Her story has become a legend of youthful scientific inquiry stifled by pomposity and prejudice, and of a heresy that was later vindicated.

Middle-class Victorian society was in awe of the apparent power and moral superiority of the scientific world-view. Keen to make her own contribution, Beatrix kept careful notes of everything she saw, and compared them with what other naturalists had observed. During her teens, she also made detailed studies with her microscope of various botanical specimens. She quickly discovered that one of her favorite subjects of study, the lichen, was the battleground of an increasingly heated scientific controversy. Lichens are the crusty green and gray covering of rocks and tree trunks... On a walk along a rocky coastline you might see only a handful of different wildflowers, but you could have walked past 80 or 90 different lichen species. In 1869 the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener startled the scientific world with a 'dual hypothesis' for the taxonomy of lichens. He proposed that all members of the group came into being via the liaison between a fungus and an alga. Most biologists treated Schwendener's ideas with contempt. They could not believe that even the most bizarre form of parasitic relationship could lead to a permanent merger between two organisms.

All the studies she made of the fine details of lichens, algae, and fungi drew Beatrix to share Schwendener's conclusion: lichens were made up of two completely different kinds of organism. Today it is clear that the only scenario more remarkable than the evolution of the lichen would be one in which this joint organism had not evolved; the metabolisms of algae and fungi complement each other perfectly. Neither Victorian prejudice nor the marginalizing of her favorite life-forms by twentieth-century evolutionists could prevent Beatrix's symbiotic manifesto from finally proving its scientific worth. Nature may, as Darwin seemed to imply, be red in tooth and claw, but it also, as Beatrix taught us, survives by being green-fingered.. [See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471399728/newsscancom/ref=nosim for Tom Wakeford's Liaisons Of Life: From Hornworts to Hippos, How the Unassuming Microbe Has Driven Evolution.

RH: I find it hard to enthuse about lichens. But rabbits! When we first came to Stanford they had burrows in our garden. Their heads would pop out and they looked and listened warily. Now they have all gone. Probably they had read about Peter Rabbit and feared that I would make a pie of them. But all WAISers know that I am incapable of such a crime against rabbitry, and I fear being hauled before the Hague Court which deals with such crimes.