By Harry W. Greene. With photographs by Michael Fogden and Patricia Fogden. University of California Press. Filled with a planet's wealth of snakes, informed by Greene's lifetime of study in evolutionary biology and herpetology, illustrated gorgeously with photographs by Michael Fogden and Patricia Fogden, it gives vivid concreteness to that beleaguered abstraction, biological diversity. Rejoice and be fascinated, because these things exist.
Snakes are a hard sell, of course, but that only makes the enterprise more worthy.
Not everyone is ready, or able, to rejoice because the earth harbors 2,700 species of serpent, many of them venomous. By this measure, snakes are less dangerous than automobiles but considerably more so than butterflies. The connection between humans and snakes has long been an intricate one, freighted with mythic acknowledgement of the weird beauty and potent aura of snakes as well as by pragmatic wariness of their capacity to cause hurt. Snakes run the metaphorical gamut in aboriginal and modern lore.'' The special merit of his book is that while he shares this awareness that the idea of the snake carries a certain magical power, he probes beyond the idea to its particulars, to its empirical foundation, delivering a great trove of fact and hypothesis about the ecology and evolution of those 2,700 species. Greene, who is the curator of herpetology in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been entangled with snakes since boyhood times in Texas, and at one level ''Snakes'' is a meditation on his own lifelong obsession.