Aristotle to Fabre

GREEN LAURELS--Donald Culross Peattie--Simon & Schuster ($3.75).

Today's man-in-the-subway thinks of himself as taking a much livelier interest in science than his grandfather-in-the-buggy ever did. And though pure scientists may snort at this "interest," it is a fact that modern readers like to read about science. Books-about-science by such popularizers as Eddington, Jeans, Russell, Sullivan and Wells are widely read, sometimes even become bestsellers. That books-about-scientists might also have a popular appeal was proved by Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters. Last week Author-Naturalist Donald Culross Peattie took a leaf from de Kruif's notebook, published a book on the Great Naturalists, from Aristotle to Fabre. Smart Publisher Schuster wrote the incoherently enthusiastic blurb himself, said he meant every word of it. Excerpt: "The sound of wings is in this book, the murmur of the forest, eons of time, undreamed by Moses, the wilderness itself, and continents arising from the sea. Here too are enchanted isles, luxuriant in tropical splendor, leaf-fringed legends, sylvan historians, cold pastorals, wild ecstasies, happy, happy boughs -- not simply remembered melodies from Keats, but living realities in the open book of the world around us, the world of green laurels."

Author Peattie has not been content merely to sketch the lives and achievements of his heroes; a consciously literary writer and a conscious naturalist, he plugs in many a purple passage, many a first-hand observation of Nature. Readers may be either awed, captivated or annoyed by his literary airs, but many a city-dweller who cannot tell the birds from the wild flowers will find his naturalistic enthusiasm contagious.

Bible of the medieval schoolmen was Aristotle; when herbalists began to list plants unmentioned by him, Aristotle's omniscience was first challenged. The first microscopists -- Malpighi, Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek--added their heretical testimony. With Buffon and Reaumur, 18th Century France temporarily captured the blue ribbon of Science. Then Sweden's Linnaeus revolutionized the study of nature by his field-trip to Lapland, gave the world the Linnaean system, the first great attempt to classify plants. The unconsidered Lamarck, with his theory of ''the inheritance of acquired characteristics," was the forerunner of the evolutionists.

Though the U. S. has been a fertile field of observation, Author Peattie lists few U. S. naturalists. John Bartram, Colonial farmer turned collector, roamed the whole Atlantic seaboard for his European customers. Alexander Wilson and Jean-Jacques Audubon were first-rate ornithologists. Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, "most widely celebrated unknown man in science," was a brilliant Jack-of-all-sciences. Germany's Goethe was an amateur naturalist whose scientific theories were often ridiculous but almost always fruitful. Author Peattie's biggest hero is an Englishman. Charles Darwin, whose five seasick years aboard H. M. S. Beagle gave him the material for the earthshaking Origin of Species, was "the archetype of the naturalist." Last on the list is Jean Henri Fabre, the patient Provenc,al peasant whose insect biographies are classics.

Some of Author Peattie's purple passages, like his description of the Galapagos Islands in terms of a prehuman world, or the debate on evolution between Huxley and the Bishop of Oxford, make exciting reading. Of Darwin as an old man: "When friends came, he. would swing his hand into theirs in a great arc, like a big hound giving its paw joyfully. His laugh had a peal in it, a chime of bells like an old-fashioned doorpull. In the evening he lay down and listened to novels, of which he asked only that the heroine be pretty and the ending happy."

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