“Finding the words is another step in learning to see,” bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in her lyrical love letter to moss. And so it is: Description and observation entwine in the consecrating act of paying attention — the act that swings open the gates of perception and allows us to know the world as it really is, not as we have been conditioned to see it by our narrow frames of reference.
Our frames of reference broaden only as we enrich the vocabulary by which we describe, label, and classify what we see — in science, in art, in life.When Georgia O’Keeffe first arrived in the Southwest, she was arrested by its colors — so utterly novel, so rich and wild and ablaze with hues she had never seen before, that she could not describe them; she could only paint them, igniting the explosion of creativity that made her one of the world’s most influential artists. Long before they could vote, the women of the Harvard College Observatory pioneered a star classification system based on color, which scientists still use today. In her splendid essay on the color blue, Rebecca Solnit celebrated it as “the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not.” There is, of course, not one blue but many — perhaps as many as there are emotions. To name each one is to confer reality and validity upon its essence, to burrow deeper into its meaning.
That is what the pioneering German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner (September 25, 1749–June 30, 1817) set out to do two centuries ago, not through the contemplative lens of philosophy but through the observational lens of science.
Werner’s life is a supreme testament to how science works — how it unpeels reality layer by layer, syncopating missteps and leaps as theories are proffered and disproven to narrow down and pave the path to truth. While working as an inspector of mines and a professor of mineralogy, Werner developed a theory known as Neptunism — after the ancient Roman sea god — which held that rocks emerged from the crystallization of salts and other minerals in Earth’s primordial oceans. It was a radical counterpoint to creationist mythology and a stepping stone for later theories of evolution. Although Neptunism was later disproven and replaced by the theory that rocks originated from magmatic activity — a theory known as Plutonism, after Pluto, the ancient ruler of the underworld; alternatively, as Volcanism, after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and volcanos — Werner expounded his theory with enthusiasm so electric that he ignited a widespread passion for the study of geology and planted the seed for the understanding that Earth’s crust is composed of different strata layered over time.
In the final years of his life, by then one of the world’s most prominent geologists, Werner embarked upon a thoroughly different project — the development of a detailed nomenclature of colors. Born within weeks of his compatriot Goethe — who at the selfsame time was hard at work on his theory of color and emotion — Werner devised a classification system based on the colors of minerals that gave a whole new vocabulary of describing the natural world…
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