Gould, whose name has become synonymous with evolutionary biology, once again collects 31 essays from his Natural History column. Gould completed his 300th column for the magazine on the doubly significant 2001 millennium and centennial of his family’s arrival at Ellis Island (thus the title, borrowed from his grandfather’s journal entry that day). Several of these essays explore the ambiguous relations of art, science and the natural world. Gould compels readers to see the natural world outside the frame of the familiar, to seek the quirky outside the canonical, to challenge our assumptions. This is evident when he gleefully reports on the Human Genome Project, showing our genetic stuff to be only twice what a roundworm needs “to manufacture its utter, if elegant, outward simplicity.”Gould is at the peak of his abilities in this latest menagerie of wonders.

Preface

Ⅰ. Pausing in Continuity

 1.I Have Landed

Ⅱ. Disciplinary Connections：Scientific Slouching Across a Misconceived Divide

 2. No Science Without Fancy，No Art Without Facts：The Lepidoptery of Vladimir Nabokov

 3. Jim Bowie’s Letter and Bill Buckner’s Legs

 4. The True Embodiment of Everything，That’s Excellent

 5. Art Meets Science in The Heart of the Andes：Church Paints，Humboldt Dies，Darwin Writes，and Nature Blinks in the Fateful Year of 1859

Ⅲ. Darwinian Prequels and Fallout

 6. The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx’s Funeral：Resolving，Evolution’s Oddest Coupling

 7. The Pre-Adamite in a Nutshell

 8. Freud’s Evolutionary Fantasy

Ⅳ. Essays in the Paleontology of Ideas

 9. The Jew and the Jewstone

 10. When Fossils Were Young

 11. Syphilis and the Shepherd of Atlantis

Ⅴ. Casting the Die：Six Evolutionary Epitomes

 DEFENDING EVOLUTION

 12. Darwin and the Munchkins of Kansas

 13. Darwin’s More Stately Mansion

 14. A Darwin for All Reasons

 EVOLUTION AND HUMAN NATURE

 15. When Less Is Truly More

 16. Darwin’s Cultural Degree

 17. The Without and Within of Smart Mice

Ⅵ. The Meaning and Drawing of Evolution

 DEFINING AND BEGINNING

 18. What Does the Dreaded“E”Word Mean Anyway？

 19. The First Day of the Rest of Our Life

 20. The Narthex of San Marco and the Pangenetic Paradigm

 PARSING AND PROCEEDING

 21. Linnaeus's Luck?

 22. Abscheulich! (Atrocious)

 23. Tales of a Feathered Tail

Ⅶ. Natural Worth

 24. An Evolutionary Perspective on the Concept of Native Plants

 25. Age-Old Fallacies of Thinking and Stinking

 26. The Geometer of Race

 27. The Great Physiologist of Heidelberg

Ⅷ. Triumph and Tragedy on the Exact Centennial of I Have Landed, September 11, 2001

 Introductory Statement

 28. The Good People of Halifax

 29. Apple Brown Betty

 30. The Woolworth Building

 31. September 11, '01

 Illustration Credits

Index