This month's issue of The New Yorker features an article about a man who needs no introduction: Charles Darwin. Of course, these days it's a breath of fresh air to read anything about the man that isn't tinged with the sour taste of the scool board debates, so I plunged in eagerly.

The interesting thing about this article, though, is that it deals only nominally with Darwin's scientific achievements, and instead focuses on the man as an author. The writer Adam Gopnik describes the major plot arcs developed throughout The Origin of Species, and describes with obviously loving care the deliberate specificity with which Darwin builds to a climax as earth-shaking and original as any in fiction.

On to The Descent of Man, where Gopnik lauds Darwin's restraint in filling page after page with seemingly unconnected data- everything from the sizes of elephants' tusks to the mating rituals of birds-before dropping on us his infamous conclusion:

We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.