In the Wake of On the Track

This post compiles and presents several contemporary reviews of Bernard Heuvelmans’ first two English-language cryptozoological books, On the Track of Unknown Animals and In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, mostly because I've never seen them utilized anywhere else before. Surveying contemporary reviews contextualizes not only Heuvelmans' claims, but the standing of cryptozoology in the later 20th century. I'll update this if I come across any more substantive reviews, and will do a separate post for French-language reviews down the line.

On the Track of Unknown Animals
Reviews used:
Maurice Burton (1958) in The Illustrated London News - thanks to Tyler Greenfield for sharing this one
Raymond Holden (1959) in The New York Times
David Johnson (1959) in Science
George Gaylord Simpson (1959) in Natural History - thanks to Rich for sharing this one
Carlos Isaac Reed (1959) in American Scientist
Robert Hayman (1960) in Nature

I’ve located, with some aid, six reviews of On the Track from various publications, both peer-reviewed and general audience, and by those not necessarily trained in zoology alongside the most significant mammalogists of their time. As these authors become progressively more qualified and experienced in zoology, their opinions sour more and more - Raymond Holden, a poet and novelist occasionally dabbling in narratives of scientific discoveries, and Carlos Isaac Reed, a physiologist best known for studies on the effects of light therapy, write quite positively, as does Maurice Burton, a close friend and occasional collaborator of Heuvelmans, while mammalogists David Johnson, Robert Hayman and George Gaylord Simpson are much more critical.

Holden, Reed and Burton offer brief reviews, composed mostly of a summary of the first section of the book, which criticizes Cuvier's dictum and proclaims the potential for novel zoological forms, entirely new or once extinct. Heuvelmans' arguments are, as summarized by Johnson, that "some real species were first heard of through reports at which leading scientists scoffed, and some supposedly extinct types of animals have recently been discovered alive; therefore, it follows that any animal tale may be true, and that any type of animal may still survive, because how can one have absolute proof to the contrary?". Hayman offers the more grounded stance of "The many important zoological discoveries of the past hundred years or more are, in his view, only an indication of many more yet to come, rather than a natural consequence of the rapid opening up of so many of the wilder places of the Earth during that period", while Simpson labels Heuvelmans as "generalizing from the plainly exceptional case"; "because the unusual sometimes happens it is to be expected...the improbable is probable or certain merely because it is not impossible". Simpson writes that this subject "is a matter of judging probabilities. A negative cannot be proved in the full sense of the word. There is some probability that there are little men on the far side of the moon, but the probability is infinitesimally small. For numerous reasons that can hardly be discussed here, the probability that there are living dinosaurs is only a little larger". 

Accordingly, Johnson writes that he was "disappointed to find that Heuvelmans was interested in only the superficial and sensational aspects" when "much field investigation of ethnozoology, much library research on the history of science, and much psychological analysis of human gullibility could be carried on here". Thankfully, that is exactly what's happening today.

All authors note that there are thousands of new animals discovered annually, but, said here by Simpson, "the vast majority of new animals now being described and still to be made known are insects" and "most of the "new" animals are not particularly novel - they are so closely related to forms already known that to the nonspecialist they seem almost identical". Simpson does erroneously state that "among the less varied groups of animals, such as the birds and mammals...the rate of discovery has slowed down greatly and is approaching zero", repeating Cuvier's dictum, but novel terrestrial vertebrate forms are likely scarce (but not zero, we're not approaching that anytime soon it seems). Regardless of the numbers or estimations, zoologists are open to the idea of novel forms, living fossils and other peculiarities because, as Simpson says, "in 999 cases out of 1,000 [zoologists] are the ones who discover them"; Johnson agrees. Zoologists do occasionally pursue the sorts of unknown animals Heuvelmans writes about, and when they do, Simpson writes "they have either found the animals forthwith or have, until now, never found them. There is some probability that they do quickly find the real ones". 

As such, it's certainly disappointing to see Heuvelmans' anti-academic stance presented so uncritically by Reed, Holden and Burton, especially since the other authors all criticize it. Hayman writes "the author allows his antipathy to the professional zoologist to colour all his views and warp his judgement...the bias against the professional leads Dr. Heuvelmans to turn for support for his views to writers about whose reliability and status there can be widely differing opinions". Simpson describes the anti-academic stance as "silly", a "straw man that he attacks throughout the book with all the fervor of a Quioxte tilting at windmills", especially considering that his main focus, Georges Cuvier "died in 1832 and is not exactly the official spokesman for modern zoology"; this all "can hardly be overlooked, because it permeates the book". 

Heuvelmans certainly compiled a significant amount of information, a fact which all authors praise several times each, but the location of the best works and the utilization of all works is, at times, quite questionable. Johnson writes that "an impressive bibliography of technical books and papers is provided for each chapter, but the passages quoted from these sources are not the passages the original authors would consider most significant"; "the book's essential shallowness is evidenced...by many errors". Hayman states that "a more careful checking of the references would have avoided many of these" - he cites several omissions, misquotations, and errors, as do the other authors.

These errors are most apparent in another key argument in the book, one only mentioned by Reed - "primitive people who do not have a written language distort reports for many comprehensible reasons but they lack enough creative imagination to draw or describe animals unless they have actually seen something that looks like the result". Reed, unfortunately, offers only the lightest pushback of "this may not be accurate". This summary is a nice, succinct way of showing how grossly antiquated Heuvelmans' takes on folklore and folk knowledge were, especially for an otherwise quite progressive advocate. Heuvelmans was writing at a particularly awkward time, the end of World War II, when anthropology was seriously trying to purge itself of racist and ethnocentric perspectives, but right before incredibly relevant disciplines like ethnobiology were established in their modern forms - outdated anthropological takes deserve grace to some degree, but little it offered here as Heuvelmans utilized solely books from the mid 1800s to inform his viewpoint, and ones criticized regularly at the time, while omitting several relevant, recent anthropological works - he continues citing this exact same spattering of the books in his ISC papers! I intend to write more on this topic in the future. The scarceness of anthropological competence here extends to the reviewers as well, evident by the praising of Heuvelmans' creature-building by Hayman; "his ingenuity in linking legends, native stories or hunters' tales to produce a composite picture of some animal not yet recognized by science is praiseworthy". Burton defends this idea at length in the caption of the image accompanying his review.

Moving onto the evidencing of Heuvelmans' claims, Holden states that "Mr. Heuvelmans, a Belgian zoologist, has collected an amazing amount of material from both reliable and unreliable sources, but he is careful to let the reader know which source is which. He therefore does not deprive us of many fascinating fantasies that would have no place in a work of pure science", contrasting Johnson's "one must read carefully to find the author's disclaimers of tales that even he cannot profess to believe". Burton adds that "in no case does Heuvelmans make extravagant claims. He merely presents the evidence with appropriate and balanced comment" - this is far from the truth, especially with Heuvelmans' certainty; as Simpson says "to the pure romantic, most or all [unknowns]...are real and are, indeed, novel". Hayman chalks this up to "enthuiasm for the subject, allied to a fertile imagination", which has "resulted in a certain one-sidedness of approach, and many of his suggestions and conclusions, ingenious as they may be, lead to a feeling that the reverse of the medal has not been shown, or has been too briefly mentioned".

Simpson and Hayman use the chapter Apes In Green Hell, focused on DeLoys' ape, as an example of the flaws of this book. Heuvelmans correctly notes that DeLoys' photographs depict a spider monkey, and the only independent supporting anecdote, from Roger Courteville, is a fabrication. But through the suggestion that some witnesses are misidentifying apes as monkeys, and various primate folklore Bernard concludes that the presence of something like DeLoys' ape cannot be disputed "except by the disingenuous or blind". Hayman criticizes Fig. 81 (p. 314) and its context, where a sketch based on the DeLoys photo is depicted with a closed mouth, contrasting the actual image where "the jaw sags, resulting in an unnatural appearance". DeLoys' ape is cross-compared with a reconstruction of Homo erectus (then Pithecanthropus); "we are then told that if one disregards the many features in the Pithecanthropus face which cannot be inferred from the bones, and must therefore have been invented, the shape of the face is in the same in the two".

Heuvelmans' beliefs lead him to coin several invalid names for unknown animals, dubbed "anachronisms in 20th-century nomenclature" by Johnson, "based on animals that may not exist and lacking diagnoses, comparisons, type specimens, or type localities". Indeed, as Hayman points out, "the accusation that zoologists are more concerned with adding names to the literature on insufficient grounds comes ill from a writer who, in this book, proposes three new specific names and one generic name on the most tenuous of evidence while ignoring most of the established rules of taxonomic procedure".

Simpson clarifies that "I do not mean to say that all of Heuvelmans' conclusions are on such an absurd level or that he is completely credulous. He does dismiss a fake still more obvious than Courteville's and even remarks that the perpetrator, a former racing driver, "has no scientific standing"", but Johnson laments that this dismissal comes "only after the full flavor of the story has been extracted". 

He then concludes "by sheer force of numbers, Heuvelmans and the other romantics may well have predicted some discovery that will actually be made; if you buy most of the tickets in a lottery, you are likely to win on one. Their judgement of probabilities is certainly too sanguine, their interpretations of evidence vastly too charitable, and their whole attitude more enthusiastic than judicious. Nevertheless, they are highly entertaining, and no harm is done if they are not taken too seriously. The romance is delightful even when the science is shaky". I very much agree. 

In this vein, Hayman ends with "despite these numerous criticisms, I found this book, illustrated by many photographs and sketches, very readable and sometimes stimulating. One can part company with many of the author's conclusions without denying that he has produced a useful work".

Johnson follows with "as popular entertainment, much can be said about this book. It is obviously designed and written to appeal to uncritical and not-too-well-informed readers...science fiction writers should find here many points of departure for their flights into fantasy. The already great gullibility of the reading public will be increased by the book, and some amateur zoologist just might be so stimulated by it that he will go out and blunder onto a new kind of animal. As the author would say, it is "not impossible"". 

In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents 
Review used:
Isaac Asimov (1968) in The New York Times
Joel Hedgpeth (1968) in Science
John Tooze (1969) in Nature
Richard Fitter (1970) in Oryx 

Reviews of In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents are seemingly more scant, at least based on what I've found. Here, only Joel Hedgpeth is a marine biologist, while Richard Fitter was a naturalist best versed in botany and birds, John Tooze was a microbiologist, and Isaac Asimov, of course, was one of the great science fiction authors. Following this, there is little critical commentary in these reviews, despite the egregiousity of In the Wake compared to On the Track. 

The anti-academic sentiments come out in full swing, with "staidly reductionist biologists" "echoing Cuvier" mentioned in the first sentences of Hedgpeth and Fitter's reviews. Fitter writes that "there is none so skilled in procrastination and delay as the scientist who does not wish to believe an unpalatable fact, and the latter-day Cuviers have many lines of defence when they wish to ignore animals which have only been sighted (with a handful of notable exceptions) by non-scientists...Science is built on disbelief". This is contrasted with Heuvelmans, of course, who Asimov says "remains agreeably calm and rational throughout", and that he "does not hesitate to explain a sighting with an ordinary species (a whale shark, for instance, or a dead rorqual) when he can". 

Most authors are credulous. Hedgpeth writes that "the overwhelming evidence accumulated by Heuvelmans indicates that there is not just one elusive sea serpent, but several kinds of large creatures in the ocean still to be brought to the dissecting table", while Fitter writes "If one supposes for a moment that all sightings of sea serpents are actually either hoaxes or misidentifications of known animals or other phenomena...then an interesting subject for psychological research immediately suggests itself. Why should hoaxers or the hallucinated describe different kinds of imaginary animals with apparently real geographical distributions? Zoologists will rightly never be satiated until they have examined at least some portion of these unknown animals, but it would be equally unscientific to do more than suspend judgement on their possible existence, pending the arrival of physical evidence". 

Only Tooze offers direct pushback, finding it "hard to take seriously Heuvelmans's conclusion that there are nine different types of large marine animal which can be included in the general category of sea serpents"; "in the final chapter, "Disentangled and Classified at Last", the author destroyes the reader's confidence by grossly overstating his case". Heuvelmans' sea serpent categories are recognized as general, superficial, and unconvincing, with significant rationalizations made "lest readers begin to think the creature is all things to all observers". Tooze ends with "Heuvelmans would have better served his cause if, like the encyclopedia he quotes in his first chapter, he has contented himself with saying: "there is still a residuum sufficient to prevent modern zoologists from denying the possibility that some such creature may after all exist". Asimov, meanwhile, concludes with the more passive "are there at least seven different kinds [of sea serpent], each with the characteristics Heuvelmans describes? Well, I would like them caught and studied first, and at the rate we are expanding our programs of ocean exploration these large creatures ought to be encountered, captured and examined soon enough. Hesitantly, and temporarily, then, I disbelieve".