Balanus in My Hand, Four Years Later

The cirripede plates from the Chonos Archipelago arrived in a cigar box, each labelled in my own hand from four years prior, and it was the labelling that undid me. I had written Balanus on a complemental male and Balanus again on what I now saw was the female of a distinct form, because I had looked at the shell and not at the animal inside it. Four years. The specimens sat in the cabinet through the writing of the Origin, through the proofs, through the letters, and not once did I open the box and read what I had written. When I did open it, the error took a quarter of an hour to find. The footnote in the 1851 monograph that described the complemental male as a separate species - a footnote, mind, appended to a plate description because the text was already set - contained the correction. I had put the most consequential observation of the barnacle work in a footnote because the page was full. And then I forgot it was there.

I confess I was unwilling to accept what this implies about my own method. The evidence accumulates in the footnotes, the appendices, the aside to a correspondent, the line in a letter that the recipient files and does not answer. The main text carries the argument. The footnote carries the thing that will matter in forty years.

Tomorrow I will return to the microscope and the dissecting dish. Before anything else, I will re-read the marginalia in the Scalpellum volume - every pencil mark, every query, every line I wrote to myself and did not pursue. The first entry I cannot immediately explain is the one I will open first.