Descartes' Bones Read online

  The plaques can still be seen in the church today; Descartes’ gives a fusty lineup of Latin platitudes extolling his immortal accomplishments. But exactly what lies beneath the plaque bearing his name is a matter of contention. When the porphyry box was opened, the members of the academy who peered into its ancient recesses were confused and dismayed at what they found—as well as at what they did not find. Something was wrong. Things were not as they had been led to believe.

  Eventually the learned gentlemen set about doing what, as good, modern scientists, they were trained to do: analyze information, sound old theories, and construct new hypotheses. The bones of Descartes were about to leave history and enter science. Or, to reference another modern construct—a literary one—that was just being invented, they were about to become the subject of a detective story.

  The Misplaced Head

  Stockholm, April 6, 1821

  Monsieur,

  I have the honor of making to you a somewhat curious communication. In a meeting of your Academy of Sciences, where I was present during my sojourn in Paris, I heard the report made by members of the Academy who had been present at the transport of the bones of Descartes, I believe from the Church of Ste.-Geneviève to another place. It was announced that there were parts of the skeleton missing, and, if I am not mistaken, that the head was missing.

  F THE SAGA OF DESCARTES’ BONES CAN SERVE AS a metaphor for modernity then it is doubly symbolic that during their peregrinations the head somehow got separated from the body and was to become, as it wound its way through the centuries, a source of mystery for various thinkers, artists, and scientists. For what does Descartes stand for today if not the cerebral over the material—the head over the body? Who bequeathed to us the mind-body problem?

  In the seventeenth century it was considered normal for thinkers to cover a fairly astonishing range of subjects in depth—all of reality, more or less. A Descartes or Hobbes or Leibniz might devote one major work to light and optics, another to geology, another to God, another to free will, another to the movement of the tides, another to that of the planets. As the 1700s went by such grandeur became less and less possible. A botanical treatise written in 1542 listed five hundred known plant varieties. By the end of the 1600s the catalog included ten thousand; in 1824 the Swiss botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle indexed fifty thousand plants. Specialization was by this time the only way to advance knowledge. Descartes and other natural explorers of his day believed that nature was a puzzle that just the right sequence of discoveries would unravel, leading to astounding changes that they could not even imagine. Of course, they were right about the astounding changes, but they were naïve in their appreciation of the puzzle’s complexity.

  By the 1800s, there was much greater awareness of the complexity. The task of understanding the universe was in the process of being divided into different fields, and there was sometimes a geographic slant to the specialization. It so happened that the country in which Descartes had chosen to die was particularly rich in mineral deposits, making it a center of the newly emerging field of chemistry. Swedish chemists discovered a good portion of the sixty-eight elements known by the late nineteenth century, including oxygen, the elemental element, as it were (though since Carl Wilhelm Scheele’s discovery of oxygen in 1773 was beaten out for publication by Joseph Priestley, credit is often given to both men).

  The greatest of these chemists—and one of the most prominent figures in the history of science—was Jöns Jacob Berzelius, the man who in 1821 sat down to compose the idiosyncratic letter whose opening is quoted above. He started life in rural Sweden, threshing hempseed and sleeping in the potato storage, launched himself in a career in medicine, but discovered that he loved experimentation and analysis more than healing. He found work at the School of Surgery in Stockholm under a revered professor of medicine and pharmacology named Anders Sparrman, lived in the house of a mine owner, and roomed with a physician who operated a spa where people went for its healing mineral waters—surrounding himself, in other words, with chemicals and chemistry. The young Berzelius was perennially short of cash and made a deal whereby in lieu of paying for his meals he would create new mineral water mixtures—seltzers, bitters, alkalines, “liver water”—for the spa goers’ pleasure.

  Under Sparrman, Berzelius did some things—discovering the odd element—that today might merit a Nobel Prize, but when Sparrman retired Berzelius was passed over as his replacement. He was about to resign himself to a career as a country doctor but the young man who had been given Sparrman’s position died suddenly and Berzelius was granted one of the few jobs in chemistry that then existed in the world. He was a bluff, florid man with a capacity for enormous energy, and he went at his work with herculean intensity. One of the hurdles the field had to clear was determining the atomic weights of each element, which was necessary in order to know how elements could be combined with one another to form new compounds. In a feat of intellectual and physical labor that has become legendary among chemists, Berzelius set about fixing the weights of all the elements then known. He typically worked from six-thirty in the morning to ten at night; at one point he was nearly blinded in an explosion. The rewards were sweet. After fixing the combinations of silver chloride and sulfuric acid and barium hydroxide, he noted that “it is impossible to describe the bliss. . . . But to this end two years of ceaseless work had been given.” He published his results in what quickly became the standard textbook of chemistry. Meanwhile, hampered and annoyed, as others had been, by the chaotic terminology and symbols that various scientists had devised for the elements and their combinations—some looked like hieroglyphs or a child’s drawings—he invented what he thought was a clearer system, using letters from the beginning of the Latin terms for each element. He thus gave the periodic table—and the landscape of chemistry—the look that it has today.

  Immediately following this burst of effort Berzelius suffered a nervous breakdown. Friends suggested travel as a way to recuperate, and he set out for the two capital cities of science. He was an international celebrity now and was received into the scientific inner circles in London and Paris. In London, this was the Royal Society; in Paris, it was the Academy of Sciences. These institutions reflected the different approach to science as it evolved in the two countries. The English were freelancers, and the Royal Society was something of a gentleman’s club. But if the top-down approach of the French retarded the growth of industry in France, it had an important benefit for the development of Western history. As an offshoot of the government, the Academy of Sciences was able to function with an authority that the Royal Society did not. As Maurice Crosland, a historian of science at the University of Kent in Canterbury, notes, this authority in defining what science was started with the word itself. The Royal Society had an approach to knowledge that was holistic and at times playful, one that hearkened back to the seventeenth-century natural philosophers. In the early nineteenth century its members still tended to use the word science in the broad medieval sense, so that theology could still be regarded as “the queen of the sciences.” Crosland argues that it was the French Revolution that nudged the members of the Academy of Sciences to begin restricting the use of the word to a particular type of secular investigation of the natural world, so that while in English science came into its current usage only in the 1830s, the Académie des sciences showed in its name that the French had long before moved in this regard in the direction of modernity.

  The academy adopted an appropriately scientific approach to science, organizing itself into divisions, subdivisions, and sub-subdivisions, and in so doing helped define to this day the way knowledge is structured in university departments and research institutes. Astronomy, geography, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, botany, mechanics, agriculture—each branch had a department, and each department was tied to a school where that field was taught. Each held conferences, awarded prizes, funded research. When it was felt necessary, the members of the academy met to discuss whether t
o create a new subdivision, such as when the growing collections of fossils all over Europe led to the creation of a division of paleontology and then a subcategory of paleobotany.

  Dating back to the period before the Revolution, the academy also defined what science was not. When Franz Mesmer came to Paris, having been run out of Vienna after causing an uproar with his “animal magnetism”—a precursor to hypnosis—members of the academy met in 1784 to consider whether “mesmerism,” as it also became known, had any scientific basis. Mesmer’s technique used magnets, long gazes, and pressure on the hands and arms to cause changes in patients; he argued that there was an unknown fluid, or “tide,” within the human body that could be shifted in this way to bring about healing. All of Europe was in a frenzy over whether animal magnetism was real or not. The Faculty of Medicine and the Academy of Sciences decided to weigh in. The committee of review they put together was something of an all-star team of eighteenth-century science, including Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, whose name was soon to become attached to the signature device of the Revolution, and, as visiting authority on electricity and other currents, Benjamin Franklin. In an early instance of the use of placebo and the single-blind trial, the scientists told some people they were being magnetized when in fact they were not, while others were magnetized without their knowing it. Those who had been told they were being magnetized, even when there was no actual magnet used, reported positive results; those who were magnetized without their knowing it showed no results. The scientists concluded that the evidence did not support the idea of the movement of tidal fluids within the body. Rather it demonstrated the effects of “the imagination.” The academy deemed that mesmerism was not science—and from that moment it was not. Mesmer left Paris the next year. Mesmerism went on to have a lively career in nineteenth-century America, but it eventually went the way of the wooly mammoth and ultimately history would demote Franz Mesmer’s immortal status from imposing noun to ephemeral adjective.

  Berzelius arrived in Paris in 1818 as a guest of the academy. He was awed by Paris and the great houses where he was entertained and was fascinated both by the egalitarian nature of the salons (“In conversation there is no distinction between those of high station and other good folk. Titles such as Prince, Count etc. are never used in speech”) and by how highly evolved his field had become in the city (“I believe that there are here more than 100 laboratories devoted to research, and there are several dealers specializing in chemical glassware whose stock is a source of astonishment to a poor Stockholmer who, when he needs a simple retort, cannot obtain it in less than three months”). Salons may have displayed a democratic sensibility but the academy itself, the inner sanctum of European science, impressed Berzelius with its grandeur. The members even wore a specially designed costume, green with frilly gold trim (they were French, after all), which amounted to a scientific uniform. Berzelius’s trip was meant for recuperation, but he now felt rejuvenated enough to settle into a furious round of activity. With Claude-Louis Berthollet and Pierre-Louis Dulong, two of the great chemists of the day, he devised a way to further refine his calculation of the atomic weight of hydrogen. He met the discoverer of fatty acids and the discoverer of hydrogen peroxide, whom he admired (though the chemical had not yet evolved into a fashion statement), and he worked on a French translation of his book.

  As it happened, Berzelius was in Paris when the third burial of Descartes’ bones took place. One of those who had been invited to the burial ceremony was Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, the leading astronomer of the day and one of the two permanent secretaries of the academy, who functioned as codirectors. Delambre had a passion not only for science but for its history. His devotion to the ideals of precision and accuracy resulted in an achievement that has shaped the world to this day. Nearly thirty years before—in the midst of the Revolution—he had opened up a whole front of modernity by directing the project that led to the creation of the metric system. Throughout the centuries of the Middle Ages European localities had devised hundreds of different units of weight and measurement, which varied from village to village, and even those with the same name varied, so that a pound of bread or a pint of beer meant different quantities in different places. This nonsystem maintained local traditions but inhibited trade—on a very practical level it kept Europe medieval. The new, modern idea was to give everyone in the world one system, which would be based not on custom or legend or ancient myth but on nature—to be precise, on the scientific calculation of a natural standard.

  The Revolution was a fitting milieu for such an idea to arise in, but it was also a dangerous one. A committee of the revolutionary government—the Commission on Weights and Measures—decided that the new base unit, the meter, should be related to the size of the globe, specifically that it should equal one ten-millionth of the meridian passing from the equator through Paris to the North Pole. Calculating this distance meant traversing a portion of it—basically the length of France—with sophisticated equipment for sighting and triangulating in order to obtain accurate measurements of individual stretches of the distance. This was the work that Delambre had undertaken as a younger man, and it was treacherous going. With a war on, he and his team of scientists and assistants—peering through scopes, adjusting sights, scribbling notes—appeared to the roving bands of revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries as spies, and Delambre had dodged bullets and suffered imprisonment in fulfilling his mission. It would be some time before the metric system would be generally adopted (the first countries to accept it, the Netherlands and Belgium, would adopt the system just two years after the 1819 reburial of Descartes’ bones, and France itself would not do so until 1840), but Delambre had long since achieved international fame for it in the scientific community in addition to his accomplishments in astronomy when he agreed to participate in what he thought would be a pro forma ceremony to rebury the bones of the founder of modernity.

  The old astronomer, then, duly oversaw the removal of a wooden casket from the porphyry sarcophagus in which Lenoir had placed the remains of Descartes, then marched in procession the few blocks up the hill from the garden of Lenoir’s former museum to the church, where, amid the stony medieval chill, the interior box was opened. What was found inside was remarkable enough that Delambre took notes and even included an account of the burial and contents of the coffin in his History of Astronomy, which he was just completing. “On an interior cask was attached a lead plaque,” he wrote, “on which, having cleaned it off, we could read a very simple inscription, carrying the name of Descartes, the date of his birth and that of his death.” Other than this, the officials were surprised to find only a few bones of recognizable shape; the rest was bone fragments and powder. The man who did the unpacking, Delambre added, “took some handfuls of powder to show us.” The assembly then watched as these meager remains were placed in the vault that had been opened to receive them and were sealed behind a heavy stone.

  Others who were about to become caught up in the puzzle of Descartes’ bones would use words like “religious” and “precious relics” to describe the remains, but Delambre’s interest was different. At seventy, he was an old-guard atheist from the heyday of the Revolution and the Enlightenment; he had no truck with religious or spiritual sentiment. His interest was in science and historical accuracy. The contents of the coffin that had been in Alexandre Lenoir’s keeping seemed to tell a different story from the one that had been presented to Delambre and others. If the bones had been buried properly they would surely have survived the 169 years since Descartes’ death in a better state of preservation. Were these Descartes’ bones at all? Had he and the others solemnly buried the wrong remains? If they were in fact Descartes’, how did they come to be in such a condition?

  But while Delambre’s interest was piqued, he didn’t pursue the matter further but only went back to his home and jotted down what he had witnessed. He did, however, discuss these observations with some of his fellow sc
ientists, either before or after a meeting of the academy. Several other of these men had also been at the reburial, and as they talked they came back again and again to the skull. A human skull would survive relatively intact even under somewhat adverse conditions. It seemed inconceivable that it would be reduced to powder. The only conclusion was that it had been separated from the rest of the body. Apparently one of the scientists had done some investigating, and he reported hearing a suspicion that the skull had never been among the remains in France—that it had never left Sweden.

  Berzelius, the Swede, was party to this learned gossip. He expressed indignation. If, somehow, one of his countrymen had separated the skull of the great Descartes from the rest of the bones—Berzelius didn’t shy from religious terminology and called it “certainly a precious relic”—then all Swedes should be reproached for such a “sacrilege.”

  And there the matter ended. What else was there to do but remark on the strange facts and then leave them to molder along with the remains? Delambre attended to his duties as permanent secretary of the academy. Berzelius—his period of recuperation over—returned home and took up new duties that mirrored those of Delambre, as the new secretary of the Swedish Academy of Science.