Diagrams, the Display of Information, and Trees

JF Ptak Science Books (An earlier post, expanded)

I’m fond of images of trees, but mostly if they are forensic or employed to display relationships between ideas or data.  One of my favorites for the former is this great image from Peter Guillet’s  Timber Merchant's Guide. Also, a Table, Whereby, at One View, May Be Seen the Solid and Superficial Measure of Any Square or Unequal Hewed Logs or Plank...¹ (printed in Baltimore by J. Longrove in 1823).  Guillet was basically a tree dissector, a harvester of wood for the construction of naval ships.  His book shows how to make the best—the most efficient—use of various varieties of trees, displaying how to employ different sections of trees for different parts of a ship. The book must’ve been an indispensable handbook down at the mill.   At the every least, it certainly introduced a novel way of looking at trees.  

 

This tree² was a figure drawn by biologist and eminent Darwinian Ernst Haeckel³ (1834-1919), the branch spaces relating to intervals which were unrepresented in the fossil record. The image was perhaps the most popularly successful part of his two-volume double-wristbender—it was a difficult book, not well written or presented, with Charles Darwin himself finding it “impossible to read”.

 

The second tree, offered by Haeckel in hisThe Evolution of Man (1879):shows the general evolutionary progress of living things culminating in man, the hopeful and suspected end (or height, or crowning achievement) of the process of evolution.  Which is a little odd, come to think of it, to have there be nothing above man, not even a space for unimaginable improvement, not even a single unused branch to express the possibility of supra-human development. 

By far the most complex of the tree of life series is the tree ring of life, an exploding and explodably adaptable image generated by the Life Website which begins at the beginning, with "life" itself.⁴

 

The coal tree of life is a particularly confusing image. Even though this is a simple classification scheme, and a very-well designed graphic at that, the use of the tree describing the genealogy of coal by-products just seems, well, wrong. The use of the tree in defining a visual phylogenic interrelatedness of living things appears pretty much for the first time in the first edition of the Origin of Species in 1859, and it is the only diagram that appears in the book. (And by this I mean the use of the tree-scheme for scientific purposes:  the tree of life of course has been used for many, many centuries, the philosophical design woven into the fabrics and incised into the stone of many cultures.  It sort of appears in print in classification usage at least by the wily and polymathic Athansius Kircher, who used it to display the elements in a Kabbalistic Tree of Life some 350 years ago.)

The Verkaufsvereinigung fuer Teererzeugnisse (of Essen) used this idea in 1922, publishing the ad for their company in the Illusrtriete Zeitung (Leipzig). The great tree spring from a bed of coal (“kohle”) exhibiting the “stammbaum der nebenerzeugnisse” (roughly the “pedigree of our product”), with the trunk being gas, branching out into tar, coke and cyan and so on.  Even though it’s the lifeblood of the continuing industrial revolution, and even though we’re hundreds of years into a deep need with the products, the use of the tree just seems antithetical to it all on all levels of recognition, especially now.

Then of course there's the Darwin tree, an incredible diagram from his notebooks, prefaced with the extraordinary understatement, "I think". 

There will be more of these tree to come, shortly, including a tree of dermatological disease and some Kabbalisitc trees of life, but they'll have to wait for right now.

Notes:

1. The full title, as follows: Timber Merchants’ Guide. Also, a table, whereby, at one view, may be seen the solid and superficial measure of any square or unequal hewed logs or plank, from one to forty-seven inches. Also, plates representing the figures of the principal pieces of timber, used in building a seventy-four gun ship of the line, in standing trees.

 

Also, Guillet had some interesting ideas on the conservative use of forest lands (from Franklin Hough’s Report upon Forestry, a government document printed in 1876):

Individuals wishing to make the most of their woodlands will find it very profitable to cut their timber by sections, sparing to t very acre ten or twelve of the most promising size white oaks or pines, whichsoever the soil will produce best; range the order of their lands so as to cut a section every year. For example, say a man has 200 acres of woodland divided into sections of 10 acres each, then, by cutting one section every year, he would have young timber twenty years old, which makes excellent firewood, and I should say that in common lands wood of twenty years' growth would yield 15 or 20 cords of firewood per acre, besides fencing-timbor sufficient to always keep in good repair an inclosure of 200 acres. Then the 10 or 12 trees growing in reserve will, at the end of 80 or 100 years, furnish timber fit to make shipping or staves. Where land has become useless from long cultivation, a little trouble only is necessary to make it productive and profitable to the owner. By enclosing it for a few years and encouraging the growth of the most promising younj* trees, which will generally spring np spontaneously, all the advantages above described will be derived from it, which is certainly the best way that worn-out or sterile land can be disposed of. Such a course recommended to and adopted by individuals wonld not only be to their own private gain, but also of great public utility.1

2. “Monophyletischer Stambaum der Organismen”from 'Generelle Morphologie der Organismen' (1866).

3. Wiki biography of Haeckel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel

4. Explanation of the second diagram, as follows from Discover Life: "Phylogeny is the organizing principle of modern biological taxonomy, and a guiding principle of modern phylogeny is monophyly: a monophyletic group is considered to be one that contains an ancestral lineage and all of its descendants. Any such a group can be extracted from a phylogenetic tree with a single cut. The tree shown here provides a guide to the relationships among the major groups of the extant (living) organisms in the Tree of Life as we have presented them throughout this book. We do include three groups that are not believed to be monophyletic; these are designated with quotation marks.”   See also HERE for a different view of this diagram.