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includes: natural history (Illuminations, Crossing Over, and the nine essay collections); history of science/science studies (The Mismeasure of Man, An Urchin in the Storm, Finders Keepers, Questioning the Millennium, Rocks of Ages); evolutionary theory (Ontogeny and Phylogeny, The Book of Life, Full House, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory); paleontology/geology (Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle; Wonderful Life). In developing the more elaborate taxonomic system for classifying Gould’s scientific and scholarly writings a number of specialists were consulted, including paleontologist Donald Prothero from Occidental College, historian of science Frank Sulloway from UC Berkeley, science historian and Natural History magazine editor Richard Milner, and, of course, Gould himself, who was patient through my numerous taxonomic queries.

17. Stephen Jay Gould, “Entropic Homogeneity Isn’t Why No One Hits .400 Anymore,” Discover (August 1986): 60–66. Gould, “Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars” in Charles J. Rubin et al., eds., Junk Food (New York: The Dial Press/James Wade, 1980), pp. 178–79. Gould, “Mickey Mouse Meets Konrad Lorenz,” Natural History (May 1997): 30–36.

18. See, for example, the prologue to Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin (New York: W. W Norton, 1977), describing the essays: “They range broadly from planetary and geological to social and political history, but they are united (in my mind at least) by the common thread of evolutionary theory—Darwin’s version. I am a tradesman, not a poly-math; what I know of planets and politics lies at their intersection with biological evolution” (pp. 13–14). He repeats the line in the prefaces to The Panda’s Thumb (New York: W W Norton, 1980, p. 12) and Dinosaur in a Haystack (New York: W W Norton, 1995), p. ix.

19. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, pp. xiii-xiv.

20. Stephen Jay Gould, “The Streak of Streaks,” The New York Review of Books 35 (1988): 8–12. The comparison of Gould’s essay streak to DiMaggio’s hitting streak was made by former major league baseball player Bruce Bochte in an introduction of Gould for a talk at the Academy of Natural Sciences in San Francisco, recounted by Gould in Eight Little Piggies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), p. 11.

21. Gould’s first essay in Natural History was preceded in March 1973 with a stand-alone article on “The Misnamed, Mistreated, and Misunderstood Irish Elk.” He explains the origin of the column in the preface to The Lying Stones of Marrakech (New York: Harmony, 2000): “In the fall of 1973, I received a call from Alan Ternes, editor of Natural History magazine. He asked me if I would like to write columns on a monthly basis, and he told me that folks actually get paid for such activities. (Until that day, I had published only in technical journals.) The idea intrigued me, and I said that I’d try three or four. Now, 290 monthly essays later (with never a deadline missed), I look only a little way forward to the last item of this extended series—to be written, as number 300 exactly, for the millennial issue of January 2001” (p. 1).

22. Gould even commented on this trend in a parenthetical note in the prologue to The Flamingo’s Smile (New York: W W Norton, 1985): “. . . my volumes have become progressively longer for an unchanging number of essays—a trend more regular than my mapped decline of batting averages from essay 14, and a warning signal of impending trouble if continued past a limit reached, I think, by this collection” (p. 15). Trouble or not, the length stretched by another thousand words per essay by the mid-1990s.

23. Alcock, “Unpunctuated Equilibrium,” pp. 322–23.

24. The Marx reference comes from Gould, “The Horn of Triton,” Natural History (December 1989): 18. Not included in the count of biblical references were passages from essays devoted entirely to biblical exegesis, which include: “Fall in the House of Usher” (November 1991); “The Pre-Adamite in a Nutshell” (November 1999); “The First Day of the Rest of Our Life (April 2000); and “The Narthex of San Marco and the Pan-genetic Paradigm” (July/August