The prose is just as one would expect - energetic, quirky, familiar and humorous. The trick is to write about them in a way that makes them comprehensible without crushing nature's mystique.īryson provides a lesson in how it should be done. Rather as Richard Dawkins has argued, Bryson insists that the results of scientific study can be wondrous and very often are so. We may be living in societies less ready to believe in magic, miracles or afterlives, but the sublime remains. But, unlike Keats, he doesn't believe that this is at all necessary. Robbing nature of its mystery is what he thinks most science books do best. Science, John Keats sulked, "will clip an Angel's wings, / Conquer all mysteries by rule and line." Bryson turns this on its head by blaming the messenger rather than the message. Just like the alchemists of old, scientists have a regrettable tendency to "vaile their secrets with mistie speech". Even books written by leading scientists, he complains, are too often clogged up with impenetrable jargon. Reading them is a chore rather than a voyage of discovery. The anaemic, lifeless prose of standard science textbooks, he argues, smothers at birth our innate curiosity about the natural world.
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