Liaisons of Life
From Hornworts to Hippos, How the Unassuming Microbe Has Driven Evolution
Chapter One
BEATRIX versus the BOTANISTS
Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the
prepared mind.
—LOUIS PASTEUR, 1854
Had Beatrix Potter been allowed to follow her vocation,
Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle might never
have been born. Instead of writing and illustrating stories
loved by children all over the globe, she would have
been writing groundbreaking articles for scientific journals.
Beatrix's ambitions were thwarted not only because
she was a young woman attempting to contribute to a
profession almost entirely dominated by Victorian men,
but also because she was a symbiologist—a proponent of
the dissident theory that some organisms were composed
of not one but two different beings. Her story has
become a legend of youthful scientific inquiry stifled by
pomposity and prejudice, and of a heresy that was later
vindicated.
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