At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Fossil Lepadidae was not a huge seller, but it did no worse than another book published in 1851—a strange, mystically rambling parable on whale hunting, called simply The Whale. This was a timely book since whales everywhere were being hunted to extinction, but the critics and buying public failed to warm to it, or even understand it. It was too dense and puzzling, too packed with introspection and hard facts. A month later the book came out in America with a different title: Moby-Dick. It did no better there. The book’s failure was a surprise because the author, thirty-two-year-old Herman Melville, had enjoyed great success with two earlier tales of adventure at sea, Typee and Omoo. Moby-Dick, however, never took off in his lifetime. Nor did anything else he wrote.

The most adventurous of all sacrificed homely comforts and often years of their lives to explore distant corners of the world. They became—a new word, coined in 1834—scientists.

So by

midcentury it was becoming increasingly evident that Earth possessed not just a lot of history but also what would come to be known as prehistory,

though that word wouldn’t be coined until 1871. It is telling that these ideas were so radical that there w...