Word: snails
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Which is what it was. And so is The Medusa and the Snail (Viking; 175 pages; $8.95), a collection of 29 more Thomas essays to be published this month. If anything, the new book is better than its predecessor. Thomas' prose seems firmer, his conclusions surer, his voice more resonant. He ranges farther and farther away from the laboratory, and devotes his attention to larger chunks of society as well as to bacteria and viruses. Taken together, his two books form an extended paean to this, the best of all possible worlds...
...able to reproduce; its offspring swim off and become normal adult jellyfish. The slug also produces larvae, but these are rather quickly trapped and subsumed by the new jellyfish. Aha, one would think, the jellyfish are getting back at the slugs for prior mutilations. No such thing. "Soon the snails," Thomas writes, "undigested and insatiable, begin to eat, browsing away first at the radial canals, then the borders of the rim, finally the tentacles, until the jellyfish becomes reduced in substance by being eaten, while the snail grows correspondingly in size." At the end, the jellyfish are once again tiny...
...including the number of inmates per toilet. In Virginia, a federal judge overruled a school-board ban on the publication of a high school poll on birth control; in New Mexico, a judge ruled that Mexican American children must have bilingual education. To save a three-inch fish, the snail darter, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped a $116 million hydroelectric project in Tennessee...
...consider why Bellotti has shown such signs of hesitancy to investigate the case. Bellotti says that he cannot investigate the case of a former client, yet refuses to appoint a special prosecutor. In the meantime, the blue ribbon commission formed to investigate the affair crawls along at a snail's pace and the statute of limitations harbors more and more potential white-collar criminals...
...other projects conflict with the Endangered Species Act, which protects birds, fish and animals that are threatened with extinction. Congress directed the agency to decide within four months whether work can proceed on the $120 million Tellico dam in Tennessee, despite its threat to survival of the three-inch snail darter...