If you love science, history, and words, it’s not every day that you find a book that addresses all of those interests, and it’s even rarer to find one that’s also engagingly written and great fun to read. I was lucky enough to have just such a book recommended to me recently: The Mountains of Saint Francis: Discovering the Geologic Events That Shaped Our Earth by Walter Alvarez (find in library). And now I’ll pay it forward by recommending the book to you.

You may be familiar with Alvarez (a geologist at the University of California, Berkeley) because of his key role in the discovery of the impact that ended the Cretaceous period and caused a mass extinction, which he wrote about in T. rex and the Crater of Doom  (find in library). He has become interested in Big History, a new discipline that studies and presents history as an integrated whole, from the Big Bang to now. This interest is evident in The Mountains of St. Francis, which I enjoyed greatly. It’s a beautifully constructed book, combining personal history, the history of geology, European history, and the history of the Earth in a gradually unfolding story that reaches further and further back into geological time. The story is focused on central Italy; it starts on one of the seven hills of Rome and ends up encompassing the fascinating and complex story of the building of the Apennines.

While it’s not specifically about geological lingo, it inevitably contains a good bit of it; this includes the lovely Italian terms for some of the rocks of central Italy, for example, Scaglia rossa (a pinkish limestone tinted by iron oxides). Geologists call the limestone quarried near Assisi the Scaglia, meaning scale, because the rock can be shaped by flaking off small chips or scales; rossa means red. (Speaking of limestone, I live in limestone country on a different continent, so I was pleased to see the shout-out to limestone for its importance in making Earth habitable.) Each term is explained when it appears, and there’s a glossary in the back (as well as a good index), so the reader is never lost in a sea of beautiful but unfamiliar words.

I was particular intrigued with the word ignimbrite, which is the name given to rocks that solidify out of a pyroclastic flow or ash flow. (They’re also called ash-flow tuffs.) As you may recall, pyroclastic flows are among the most terrifying and deadly of volcanic phenomena; these clouds of vaporized rock and ash roll swiftly down the sides of an explosively erupting volcano, scorching all in their path. I’ve always kind of liked the French term for them, nuée ardente, which translates as glowing cloud or burning cloud. Thus, it seemed appropriate to me that the Latin roots of ignimbrite are ignis (for fire; we see this in ignite and igneous as well) and nimbus (as in cumulonimbus). These rocks originate in a cloud of fire.

Interestingly, however, other sources give the Latin root words as ignis and imber, which is a rain shower or rain cloud. (You may know the Latin word imber from its use in the name Mare Imbrium, which is generally translated as Sea of Rains or Sea of Showers.) I suppose it also makes sense that the rocks produced by a “cloud of fire” might be named for the shower that eventually comes out of the cloud. I looked up the 1935 paper in which Peter Marshall, a New Zealand geologist, evidently first proposed the term ignimbrite; luckily, the paper was available online, but in it he didn’t explain his thinking when he coined the word. So I will leave it there. If there are any geologists, historians of science, or etymologists who are reading this and can share any stories about the origins of this word, please leave a comment.

I knew about the hippocampus in the brain, but until I started reading The Darwinian Tourist: Viewing the World Through Evolutionary Eyes, by Christopher Wills (find in library), I didn’t know that seahorses are in the genus Hippocampus. One of the things I’m enjoying about Wills’s excellent book is that he usually lists the scientific names of the living things that appear in the illustrations. The pygmy seahorse Hippocampus bargibanti, a tiny warty creature, shows up on page 17.¹ (The warts help them blend in with the bulbous sea fan [similar to a coral] on which they live.)

The hippocampus in the brain is a structure that’s involved in forming new memories and in spatial navigation. (Actually, it’s a pair of structures, one on each side.) I knew the Greek root hippos (horse), but it had never before occurred to me to wonder if the horse had anything to do with the hippocampus. In fact, it does. In shape the hippocampus resembles the seahorse, and the scientific name Hippocampus is linked to the seahorse’s resemblance to the terrestrial horse.

Other than its head, the seahorse doesn’t resemble a horse at all. The source of the other half of the name Hippocampus, the Greek root kampos, is generally translated as sea monster. In Greek mythology, the Hippokampoi were large creatures with the front end of a horse and the back end of a fish; they provided transportation for the Nereids and pulled Poseidon’s chariot. However, kampos may be related to kampe, or caterpillar, so you could also imagine seahorses as a horse/caterpillar cross, although that’s not quite as appealing a notion.

You also see the root hippo in hippopotamus, or river horse. An 18th century anatomist, evidently in a state of confusion, referred to the hippocampus as the hippopotamus, and this confusion persisted for some time afterward. I don’t know why the thought of a hippopotamus in the brain is funnier than the thought of a seahorse in the brain, but it is.

1 Unfortunately, Wills gives its name as Hippocampus bargobanti; let’s hope that will be fixed in the Kindle edition and future paper editions.^↩

In honor of the recent birth of my second grandchild, I thought I’d look at some words related to newborns. Here are a few with interesting stories.

• Fontanelle: A fontanelle is a gap in the skull of a newborn where the bones haven’t yet grown together. A newborn’s head features several fontanelles in various locations, but the big, roughly diamond-shaped one on top (AKA the soft spot) is the most noticeable. Unnerving as it can be when new parents feel this one, or notice that sometimes it pulses gently, it’s a perfectly normal (and quite tough) anatomical feature that allows the skull to flex during birth and then deform to accommodate the rapidly growing brain after birth. By the time a child is two, the fontanelles have generally all closed. Fontanelle was originally used to mean the hollow between two muscles (I assume this refers to the indentation that appears on the skin covering the muscles), which resembles the low spot from which an underground spring issues. That explains why it comes from the Old French word fontenele, which refers to a small spring or fountain (it’s the diminutive of fontaine, or spring).

• Meconium: AKA baby’s first poop. Before a newborn’s digestive system gets to work on milk, it must process the things that went in before birth, which include amniotic fluid, bile, and mucus. The result is meconium, a dark green substance that is notoriously sticky and tarry, and that most babies excrete for their first day or so on the outside. It’s a lot harder to clean up than normal baby poop, which makes those first few diaper changes more challenging than most of the ones that come after. Meconium is derived from the Greek word for opium, or poppy-juice, mekonion, because the dark green color of the two substances is similar. (Do stories of newborn always get around to poop eventually?)

• Lanugo: Another component of meconium is called lanugo, which is a fine down that covers an unborn baby’s body. The word lanugo is derived from the Latin word for down or wool, lana, which we also see in lanolin, the name for the greasy stuff that comes from sheep’s wool. A baby typically sheds its lanugo several weeks before birth, and the fine down is released into the amniotic fluid, which the baby drinks. (I know, ewww, but we all did it.)

I recently finished an editing assignment that had to do with the bones and musculature of the hand. The bones of the fingers (and the toes, as it turns out) are collectively called the phalanges. They’re individually identified by which finger or toe they belong to and by their position. The proximal phalanx is the first one out from the center of the body (or more immediately, from the hand or the foot), the intermediate phalanx is the next one out, and the distal phalanx is the bone at the end of the finger or toe. The thumb and the big toe have only proximal and distal phalanges. I did not know that my little toes have three bones each.

Note that the singular of phalanges is phalanx. You may be familiar with this as an army formation used by the ancient Greeks in which several rows of soldiers stand close-packed side by side—just like the close-packed rows of finger bones and toe bones do, hence their name.

The word proximal is related to proximity, which both come from the Latin root proximus, meaning nearest or next. In anatomy, it’s used to describe something that is closer to the center of the body or some other point of origin, such as where a muscle attaches. Distal was formed from distant plus the suffix –al to describe something that’s furthest away from wherever the zero point is.

Distal was modeled after other anatomical terms: proximal, obviously, but also ventral and dorsal, among others. Your dorsal side is your back side; in Latin, dorsum means back. In the square dance step do-si-do, partners briefly dance back to back, which is what the original French term dos-à-dos means. The phrase was weathered down to do-si-do by English speakers.

Dorsal can also refer to the side of a particular organ or structure that is closer to the back, in humans and other animals. Note that in a quadruped or a fish, the dorsal side of something, or a dorsal structure, is going to be at the top, not the rear (think dorsal fin). This is why the upper surfaces of the hands and feet are called the dorsal surfaces. (I’ll try to remember to use this the next time I drop something on my foot.)

Your ventral side is your front side, or the side where your belly is. The Latin word for belly is venter, which made it into French and Spanish as ventre and vientre, respectively. The Frence phrase ventre à terre is sometimes used in English. This idiom translates literally as belly to the ground, and if you’re traveling ventre à terre, you’re going very fast indeed.

Before Eadward Muybridge’s freeze-frame snapshots of running horses, an artistic convention for indicating that a horse was galloping flat out was to show the animal with its front legs reaching out in front of it and its hind legs stretched out behind it, as if the horse was in mid-leap; this left its belly closer to the ground: ventre à terre. Muybridge, of course, showed how a horse really gallops.

It’s possible that my dreams will be haunted by armies of fingers, but I’m hoping for square dancing or even galloping horses instead.

Woolly worm season is upon us. The other day I spotted one of these fuzzy caterpillars behind my car, and I moved it to avoid backing over it. Woolly worms were one of the many surprises that awaited me when I moved to Indiana. The first one I ever saw was hitching a ride on a letter I was pulling out of the mailbox; it surprised me considerably, not least because I’d never seen anything like it in the desert where I came from, and certainly not in the mailbox.

What it was doing there I’ll never know, but it was probably looking for a peaceful dark place to spend the winter. The woolly worm is the larva of the Isabella tiger moth, Pyrrharctia isabella. It’s also called the banded woolly bear. The second generation of each year overwinters as caterpillars, generating their own antifreeze to protect themselves from damage due to freezing, and pupates in the spring, becoming a nondescript pale orange moth.

The caterpillar, on the other hand, has a distinctive pattern of coloration, appearing a coppery orange in the middle and black at the ends. The width of the central band varies, and folk wisdom says that it indicates how severe the coming winter will be. However, this is no more than a charming folktale, autumn’s counterpart to Groundhog Day. The width of the stripe varies with the age of the caterpillar and how well it has eaten.

Many of the tiger moths have fuzzy caterpillars. These moths belong to a family called Arctiidae, although some taxonomists have proposed rearranging the family tree so that they belong to the subfamily Arctiinae in the family Erebidae. Either way, the family or subfamily takes its name from the Greek word arktos, or bear, because the caterpillars are collectively known as woolly bears.

We also see this Greek root in the word arctic, which comes from arktikos, meaning of the bears. The bears here are the northern constellations that today go by the Latin names Ursa Major and Ursa Minor; they contain the Big and Little Dippers. There’s also a star called Arcturus; the name can be translated as the Guardian of the Bears, and evidently was given to the star for its position in the sky not too far from the starry Ursae. It’s just another example of the wide range of some Greek roots.

Learn more:

• If you look closely, the Isabella tiger moth is not really all that nondescript.
• The National Geographic has a gallery of photos from woolly worm festivals.

Sometimes it seems like everything is named for a resemblance to something else. This is a story of the similarity-based links among two flowers, three birds, and a cetacean. Oh, yes: and an amphibian.

I recently read a short story in which a New England matron establishes a garden club in her town because she’s the local expert in delphiniums and lilies. By the magic of associative thinking, the constellation of Delphinus, the dolphin, sprang readily to my mind when I saw the word delphinium. What, I wondered, could possibly link the two? (Delphinus itself, a small constellation in the summer sky, is shaped like an elongated diamond; like most other constellations, it requires a good deal of imagination to see the thing it’s named for.)

The flower, as it turns out, is called delphinium, after the Latin word for dolphin, because the nectary (where the nectar comes from) sticks out behind the flower and is somewhat curved, resembling the sleek curvy front end of a dolphin. The back side of the flower, in other words, looks like the front side of the dolphin. Multiple flowers appear on a single stalk, each with a more or less extravagant projection behind it.

This would be the end of the story, except that the delphinium is also called the larkspur, because that nectary projecting out the back side also resembles the projecting structure called a spur on a lark’s foot. (Technically, larkspur is used to refer to flowers in the genus Delphinium and also to some in the genus Consolida, We will leave Consolida for another day.)

This brings us to the other flower, the columbine (genus Aquilegia), which is named for not one but (possibly) two birds. These lovely airy blooms that dance in the spring breezes have inspired a number of imaginative comparisons. Aquilegia may come from aquila, the Latin word for eagle, because the flowers resemble the claw of an eagle. (Coincidentally, the constellation of Aquila appears not too far from Delphinus in the sky.) An alternative explanation is that Aquilegia comes from the Latin word for water bearer, because each part of the distinctive flower looks like an amphora, or water jug; amphorae typically had a pointed end that could be placed in soft earth to hold the jug upright.

The second bird this flower is named for is the dove, columba in Latin, because the flower as a whole is thought to resemble a group of doves. If the eagle story is true, this flower is named for both the warlike eagle and the peaceful dove.

At this point in my research, I became aware of a dim memory stirring in the back of my mind: Don’t some churches have something called a columbarium? They do, and it’s not where they keep the doves. It’s a place for the proper storage of funeral urns containing the ashes of the dead. However, the urns are stored in an arrangement of compartments that is similar to that used in a dovecote.

Oh yes: the amphibian. The columbine and the delphinium are both members of the Ranunculaceae family. The family takes its name from the ranunculus, which in turn takes its name from the Latin for little frog. The resemblance here is not visual; like frogs, ranunculus like to live near water.

It’s easy to talk about science or its history in the abstract, especially when you’re thinking about long stretches of time, and to lose sight of what it means to actually do science. So I thought I’d share a video that shows scientists out doing field work.

In “Sundrops and Hawk Moths,” episode 4 of the series Plants Are Cool, Too!, host Chris Martine of Bucknell University talks with Krissa Skogen of the Chicago Botanic Garden. Skogen studies native pollinators (pollinators other than honeybees, basically), and the video shows her at work at the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. She’s looking at the interaction between the hawk moth and some primrose species at White Sands.

It’s a cool video. I’d never seen anyone unroll a moth’s proboscis and collect pollen from it, and I didn’t know that you could gather the scent from a single flower and compare it with the scent from other flowers. One of the interesting things about the moths is that they cover much greater distances than bees and don’t have any kind of a home to return to. The most evocative line in the whole video was the one about moths spreading the genes of these plants around. Not to mention that White Sands is a magical setting. Enjoy!

My son, Patrick Alexander, Postdoctoral Curator at the NMSU Department of Biology Herbarium, helped with the production of this film.

The wine harvest is nearing its end, so this seems like a good time to look at the different species of grapes that are used for wine. When I first began to take a serious interest in wine, the differences between varieties and species were very fuzzy to me. I’m still sorting out the varieties, most of which come with fascinating but confusing historical baggage involving different names depending on the place and time.

Species are easier. For starters, all types of wine grapes fall within the genus Vitis, named for the Latin word for grape vine. Within that genus, most wine grapes are varieties of Vitis vinifera, although grapes from this species are also eaten fresh or dried. This species first arose in central Europe, southwestern Asia, and the lands around the Mediterranean. Because yeast occurs naturally on the grape skins, they would ferment if left to themselves. It’s not clear when humans first discovered and exploited the products of fermentation, but they’ve been playing around with grape fermentation for a very long time.

Vinifera translates roughly from Latin as wine-bearing. Note that -fer (meaning carry or bear) is all over the place in other words: transfer (carry across), refer (carry back), Lucifer and phosphor (light-bearer; both used to be names for the morning star), and metaphor (carry over, in the sense of carrying meaning).

Vitis labrusca is a North American species that contains both varieties used for wine and varieties used in juice or jam (for example, the Concord is a V. labrusca variety).  Labrusca is the Latin word for a wild grape, and these grapes are noted for a particular earthy musky flavor. The wines they make are very grape-juicy, maybe not ultra-sophisticated but very appealing in their way. Catawba and Niagara are probably the varieties you’re mostly likely to see in wines.

Wines are also made from the North American grape Vitis aestivalis. Aestivales comes from the Latin word for summer, although it’s not clear why that name was given to this species. The cultivar Norton is thought to be the first American grape used in commercial wine production, and it’s still an important grape in Missouri and parts of the eastern US.

Vitis riparia, named from the Latin word for the riverbanks where it likes to grow, is important for wine because it is used as a root stock that provides V. vinifera grapes with genes for cold tolerance, disease resistance, and resistance to phylloxera. Another grape used as root stock is Vitis rupestris; rupestris is a botanical and zoological term that comes from Latin; it means essentially living on or near rocks and appears in other species names as well.

Phylloxera is historically one of the most notable grape pests; it swept through Europe in the late 19th century, inspiring viticulturists to use resistant root stocks and develop hybrids. In the name phylloxera, we once again encounter the Greek root phyllo (leaf), which also appear in chlorophyll and phyllosilicate. The -xera part of the name comes from a Greek word for dry; we also see it in xeroscaping (landscaping in dry areas with native desert plants) as well as xerography and Xerox (the company applied a “dry” process of photographic duplication that did not involve the use of a liquid developer). Phylloxera is a pest that sucks the sap from the roots and leaves of grape plants.

Of course, this simple picture is made tremendously more complex (and more rewarding) by the presence of so many varieties of wine grapes within the species V. vinifera, each suited to a particular climate and soil type, not to mention the existence of many hybrids. But getting into that would take a lifetime.

Learn more:

• Check out Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture, by Patrick McGovern (find in library).
• For more on the Norton grape, see The Wild Vine: A Forgotten Grape and the Untold Story of American Wine, by Todd Kliman (find in library).

I ran across the phrase renal calculus, another name for a kidney stone, and wondered whether it was related to the calculus you learn in a math class. It turns out that it is, and the link is limestone.

Calx is the Latin word for limestone; it comes from the Greek word khalix, or pebble. The diminutive form of calx in Latin, calculus, was originally used to refer to a pebble used for counting and simple calculations. The Latin word calculus thus forms the basis for the English word calculate. 

Calculus can be used in English to refer to any system of calculation using symbols, although it is used primarily for the indispensable mathematical tool developed by Leibniz and Newton in the 17th century to describe and study change. This was originally called the calculus of infinitesimals, later shortened to infinitesimal calculus; I think this is why you sometimes hear people talking about, for example, the history of the calculus instead of simply the history of calculus.

It’s obviously a short step from the pebbles used to reckon your accounts to the pebbles that cause such misery in the urinary system or in the gall bladder. Calculus is now used to refer to any type of accidental accretion in the body. Now that I think about it, I have vague recollections of puzzling over the thought of calculus on the teeth, perhaps when I was the target of a dental health campaign in grade school. Dental calculus is essentially hardened plaque, perhaps the first step on the road to gum disease. I will generously share all of what I remember learning about it: Brush! Floss!

The Latin root calx also made it into English in the name of the element calcium, which is a major constituent of limestone (and coincidentally is also found in some kidney stones). Renal, by the way, comes from the Latin word for kidney, ren.

Learn more:

• Why Do We Study Calculus? gives a brief history of calculus and its applications and explains why it’s worth learning
• Free online math courses at Open Culture
• French composer Marin Marais wrote “A Description of the Removal of a Stone” in 1725, which is thought to depict the horrors of an operation to remove a bladder stone (the first gallstone operation didn’t occur until later). This article lists the brief descriptions in the score, which are worth reading, but note that the article identifies the operation, apparently incorrectly, as a gallstone removal. 
• [Added October 23]: A friend sent links to an analysis and a performance of the Marais piece.