![]() ![]() ![]() (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.) Art from Conchology, or, The Natural History of Shells, 1893. That miracle - evolutionary, cultural, aesthetic - is what Cynthia Barnett explores in The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans ( public library). Sea-shells encode not only the fundaments of beauty but the logarithmic spiral of life itself, housing some of this planet’s most vulnerable species with an evolutionary history stretching further back than that of any organism alive today - each a miniature cathedral of non-Euclidean geometry, each a portable cosmos of wonder, swirling nature’s art and nature’s science into a single miracle. ![]() “To lay the logarithmic spiral on / sea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,” Howard Nemerov wrote in an exqusite poem, “the same necessity / ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise / without kinship - that is the beautiful / in Nature as in art.” ![]()
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