Nature’s Revenge and Other Essays

Man's proudest boast is that he has conquered nature. In “Nature's Revenge” (1912) the zoologist Oka Asajirō asks what nature does with the conquered, and answers with a sequence of facts, from the microbes that follow crowded cities to the price of forest clearing, that reads like a bill being presented.

The other six essays keep the same dry, clear, sometimes mischievous voice. Every textbook says children should be taught to love the beauty of nature; Oka wonders whether the nature-lover has looked at what the insects are doing. “In Heaven there is no deceit,” the old song says, and Oka collects the natural world's frauds. He asks what good and evil, private property and the ideal group life look like among animals, and follows the evolution of the human brain through the fossil record and the fish tank.

Seven complete essays in a new translation from the Japanese: Nature's Revenge; The So-Called Beauty of Nature and Love of Nature; Deceit in the Natural World; Good and Evil in the Animal Kingdom; Private Property among Animals; The Ideal Group Life; and The Evolution of the Brain. With a translator's note, endnotes and source information. Oka's science is that of his time and is kept as he wrote it.