Nuggets from "Defining the Wind"

pp. 145 - 146

"Nature, rightly questioned, never lies." That quotation entirely sums up a book, an era, a world, a way of living.

One hundred fifty years before [1859], people thought there were questions that simply could not be answered. Defoe, in The Storm [1704], had said people could simply never know why the wind blew -- in fact, too much questioning would finally throw Mother Nature herself into a rage: The answer "is not in Me, you must go Home and ask my Father." Now, whether it's nuclear weaponry, cloning, or the Human Genome Project, we often wonder whether we are learning things we should not know.

No such uncertainty then -- at that moment, Beaufort and the phalanx of freshly minted "scientists" knew: "Nature, rightly questioned, never lies." They feared knowing neither too little nor too much; it was all a matter of finding the questions, and the rest would come almost as obligation. They believed that if you were patient, thorough, and careful, you could eventually figure out everything.

pp. 176 - 177

A dictionary thus becomes a document, a living history, a portal into the world it means to describe. The Merriam-Webster 1934 Second New International, for example, includes color plates of the house flags of the major steamship lines -- it's a detail, a clue about what was important in 1934. I once bought an atlas printed in 1933 only because in every map showing the North Atlantic it included transatlantic cable lines; in maps of Europe it showed the tangle of cables running all over the North Sea and the Mediterranean. That's what was important then, and it's sweet to remember it now, when it would no more cross the mind of an atlas publisher to include uncountable transatlantic cables than it would to include mail routes. The atlas, a reference book, itself becomes an artifact instead of merely a guide to others.