Sublime

What the student needed above all was the chance to learn to think for himself. So he ought to pursue the line of investigation that interested him most, just as, conversely, a professor ought to be perfectly free to devote his own efforts however he chose. One term, a course of twenty-one lectures was offered on sharks alone, a favorite topic of t

It’s 20 May 2008 off the coast of the Bahamas. I am a trainee shark wrangler and currently have over a hundred of them circling me as I float on the ocean bed watching my mentor feed, study and inspect each one. His name was Jeremiah Sullivan and, fortunately for me, he was one of the world’s leading shark experts.

Pister collected all the Owens pupfish left at Fish Slough, with the intention of moving them to a nearby spring. They fit into two buckets. “I distinctly remember being scared to death,” he would later write. “I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species.” Pist

He was coauthor of a textbook, Principles of Zoology, his first American work, which went through sixteen editions