For Tocqueville, such religious zeal was an inevitable reaction to the materialism of the young republic. “I would be surprised,” he predicted, “if, in a nation preoccupied solely with its well-being, mysticism did not make some progress before long.”

Mysticism and religion in general continue to prosper in America. Global opinion surveys consistently show that many more Americans identify religion as an important force in their lives than do their counterparts elsewhere in the developed world. Cross the border into Canada and the self-reported significance of religion drops in half. One recent poll indicated that Dutch respondents were eight times more likely than Americans to report that they do not believe in God. The steady decline of religious belief in Western Europe has led some commentators, ranging from academics to the religious right, to label the region “post-Christian.”

Why has the United States remained distinctive in the intensity of its religious commitments? Following Tocqueville, some experts hold that the single-minded pursuit of material wealth in the U.S. creates an emotional emptiness that draws people to religious faith. Others note that the U.S. never had an official state religion so embedded in everyday experience that citizens felt free to ignore it, as has been the case in much of Western Europe. A few scholars have suggested that America remains a hothouse for spirituality because constitutional protections make religion the single most unregulated zone of our otherwise bureaucratized, legalistic society. The vitality of contemporary American religion can also be traced to high levels of immigration from countries where faith still matters.

The energy of American religion is inseparable from its diversity. As a nation that welcomed religious dissenters, the U.S. has long been known for the variety of sects that flourished here, a circumstance that famously prompted another Frenchman, the late-eighteenth-century diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, to complain that America had thirty-two religions but only one kind of sauce. Of course, Americans have more choices of food than in Talleyrand’s time, but the choices of religion have certainly multiplied as well.

Among the most controversial expressions of contemporary American spirituality are the New Age and Neopagan movements, the subject of new books by Sabina Magliocco and Sarah M. Pike. Magliocco, a cultural anthropologist at California State University in Northridge, offers a detailed look at efforts to revive pre-Christian forms of spirituality, which its practitioners adopt as an antidote to what they see as Christianity’s moral rigidity and disregard for the natural environment. Although Magliocco provides background information on the history of pagan revivals in Europe and America, her account is primarily an ethnographic study of Neopaganism in the San Francisco Bay area.

Pike, a professor of religious studies at California State University in Chico, approaches Neopaganism and the related New Age movement more comparatively.

Talleyrand once complained that America had thirty-two religions but only one sauce.

Hers, in contrast with Magliocco’s, is a view from the mountain, a search for broad patterns and common themes. Yet she, too, offers enough portraits of individuals to give her account a human face.

Groups that flee conventional understandings and institutions are predictably touchy about labels. Many Neopagans, for instance, resent the tag “neo” because they see themselves as reviving a religion that has always been part of human experience. They prefer to call themselves “pagans.” They also voice a bewildering array of more specific identities—as druids, Wiccans, witches, practitioners of “the Craft,” or worshipers of “the Goddess.” Some are organized into recognizable denominations—the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn is a prominent example. The majority take a more fluid approach, aligning themselves with one coven, or group, while regularly sampling the ritual activities of others. They draw on an equally diverse set of cultural traditions: Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Greco-Roman, Nordic, and occasionally African or Native American.

The New Age movement is even trickier to define and label. I studied New Agers in the mid-1990s, and at that time they tended to refer to their spiritual interests as “metaphysical,” mentioning the term “New Age” only for ironic effect. But the label has stuck, and it is better than most of the alternatives. Pike identifies the movement’s common denominator as a commitment to the “transformation of both self and society.” New Age practices include astrology, channeling (direct communication with spirits), work with one’s “inner child,” shamanism, vision questing, and a laundry list of unconventional healing techniques. Some scholars have labeled the New Age an “audience cult,” rather than a kind of religion in the conventional sense, because of its diffuse, networklike quality.

Unlike Neopagans, who look for spiritual meaning in ancient traditions, New Agers tend to focus more intently on the future. They are also more individualistic and less inclined to accept the personal compromises needed to maintain a stable group. That tendency has led to accusations that the New Age movement attracts self-indulgent consumerists whose primary focus is on themselves. New Age excesses have provided fertile ground for satire, the most memorable of which may be the cartoonist Gary Trudeau’s send-ups of channeling, which enlivened Doonesbury in the late 1980s.

In fact, Neopagans must be counted among the fiercest critics of the New Age. Neopagan Web sites frequently include jokes that lampoon the financial motives of New Age gurus and therapists: Q. What is the difference between a New Age event and a pagan event? A. About $500. Yet on the evidence put forward by both Magliocco and Pike, the two movements, in their theological flexibility, organizational looseness, and resistance to authority, have much in common.

Studying Neopagans and New Agers is not as easy as you might expect. Many Neopagans, for instance, are secretive about esoteric ritual knowledge. Fieldworkers documenting Neopagan beliefs and practices must devote years to building strong personal relations with their research subjects. They may also have to accept restrictions on what they can record and publish. That is part of the dilemma posed by Magliocco’s account. Pursuing her anthropological study required, to some degree, that she “go native”: in her case, undergo ritual initiation in the Coven Trismegiston, a group based in Berkeley, California, and take an oath of silence about the ritual’s content. She participated in a range of group events thereafter for several years and, indeed, found a spiritual home in Neopagan worship. Thus it is important to note that there are legitimate questions about her objectivity. To her credit, however, she is open about her attachments and willing to comment dispassionately on aspects of Neopaganism that perplex or amuse her.

The challenge of research into New Age practices and beliefs is more or less the opposite: the movement’s antipathy to organizations complicates efforts to develop a coherent picture of its devotees’ views or even to figure out who its devotees are. Pike does an admirable job of weaving together multiple strands of New Age practice into a single pattern, but the coherence she thus establishes inevitably frays a bit at the edges.

Both movements have deep roots in American culture and history. For much of the nineteenth century, the nation was awash in religious experiments, many influenced by European occultism. Spiritualists regularly communicated with the dead in middle-class drawing rooms. Educated nonconformists reinvented religious and family life in utopian communities such as Amana, Brook Farm, Koreshan, and Oneida. Charismatic visionaries proclaimed new theologies loosely based on biblical revelation—one of which, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, today ranks among the world’s fastest-growing religions. And, inseparable from spiritual innovation, was the rise of novel therapies: chiropractic, faith cures, homeopathy, magnetism, vegetarianism, and New Thought, the latter emphasizing the power of positive thinking.

As Pike observes, some of this ferment was linked to progressive politics. Abolitionists, freethinkers, and suffra-gettes found spiritual innovation compatible with their quest for social reform. Even less overtly political forays into spirituality and healing were based on an underlying conviction that people should meet their own needs rather than surrender control to clergymen or doctors. Women were especially prominent in these experiments, apparently because they were able to assume leadership roles denied them in mainline churches. The lure of self-empowerment lives on in the contemporary movements documented by Magliocco and Pike.

So what do followers of New Age and Neopagan religions actually do? How do they worship or express their spirituality? According to Pike, New Agers are likely to gather in homes or conference centers to meditate, listen to someone

	Unlike Heaven’s Gate, most New Age groups show little lasting interest in charismatic gurus.

“channel” a wise spirit, share ideas about approaches to healing, or try out techniques to get in touch with their spiritual core or “true self.” The prevailing atmosphere may be solemn or playful, but it always has an improvisational quality. Participants are often strangers to one another, and their expectations of what should take place may vary considerably. Skillful facilitators learn to balance their own goals and those of audience members by encouraging give-and-take. Because New Agers resist dogma, almost any statement of belief requires the disclaimer, “This is my personal reality, but it may not be yours.”

The New Age movement has given rise to a handful of groups whose followers respond to every twitch and whim of a charismatic guru. Heaven’s Gate, a cult with New Age antecedents, self-destructed in 1997 in a tragic mass suicide. But the centrifugal tendency of the movement is so pronounced that the shelf life of charismatic leaders tends to be brief. New Agers see themselves as individuals embarked on a spiritual journey, and they are disinclined to stop for long at any one place along the way.

Neopagan spirituality, as Magliocco explains, “involves training the imagination to perceive the links connecting the elements in the universe.” The connections follow natural laws that fold space, time, natural phenomena, human beings, and spirits into a unitary system. The laws of mutual causality are put to work in elaborate group rituals, many held outdoors, that summon the energy of gods, goddesses, fairies, and the Earth itself.

Neopagan rituals mark the transitions from season to season throughout the year, as well as milestones in the lives of individuals—birth, maturation, marriage, death. They may also focus healing energies on group members facing personal crises. In Magliocco’s own case, her coven held an improvised ritual that, according to her fellow participants, helped secure her a university teaching post. Whether the spirits invoked are Celtic, Roman, or simply the Goddess, the rituals promote group catharsis and even ecstasy. In field notes reproduced in Magliocco’s book, the author describes her own visionary trances, which made her feel “alive, aflame, part of the dance.”

Such a focus on the group rather than the individual in Neopaganism is inextricably bound up in what Magliocco calls an “oppositional identity.” Neopagans see themselves as actively resisting the excesses of a monotheistic, patriarchal, nature-hating culture that has launched humanity on a path to self-destruction. The radical wing of Neopaganism is represented by a group that calls itself Reclaiming, an ecofeminist collective dedicated to social activism and opposed to nuclear power, logging in the Pacific Northwest, and the expansion of global capitalism.

Magliocco suggests that her research subjects, most of whom come from European-American backgrounds, have embraced Neopaganism as a new subcultural identity, preferable, in their view, to their own traditional ethnic backgrounds, which have lost vitality. Along with that shift in self-perception comes a self-dramatizing concern with the powerful forces allegedly arrayed against pagan practices today—an identification, no doubt, with the violent witch hunts that punctuated the history of Europe and colonial America, the so-called “Burning Times.” Yet even though Neopagans are occasionally—and mistakenly—confused with Satanists in the popular imagination, neither Magliocco nor Pike presents compelling evidence that Neopagans are more likely to suffer discrimination than are members of other minority religions.

Neopagans regularly mine published works of folklore and anthropology for inspiration as they try to recover pre-Christian ritual knowledge. Early twentieth-century efforts to reconstruct pagan practices mostly drew on a patchwork of folkloric accounts, many detailing magical beliefs and practices that had survived for centuries in Europe’s isolated peasant communities. Today Neopagans range more widely, blending ideas from theoretical disciplines—including psychology and religious studies—with oddments of folklore, some of such dubious accuracy that they are dismissed as “fakelore” by skeptics.

Many of Magliocco’s Bay Area research subjects are highly educated professionals whose conversations about religion remind one of graduate-school seminars. When I studied anthropology in the 1970s, experienced fieldworkers groused that their native informants were rarely able to explain beliefs and practices with anything more satisfying than the throwaway line, “We do it because it’s customary.” Today’s Neopagan “natives,” in contrast, are likely to cite Carl Jung or Jacques Lacan, and interpret one of their ceremonies as “symbolic praxis mediating the binary opposition of male and female.” Nothing is more discomfiting to social scientists than having their own writings thrown back at them by research subjects, which may be a reason why sustained ethnographic fieldwork among Neopagans and New Agers is still relatively rare.

The inclination to borrow liberally from many traditions has sparked complaints that New Agers and Neopagans are hijacking the religions of the world’s indigenous peoples, particularly those of the American Indians. Critics within both movements have tried to underscore the hurtful impact of imitating another community’s most sacred rituals. New Agers who perform faux sweat-lodge or medicine-wheel ceremonies in their backyards increasingly face criticism from their politically sensitive peers. The desire to avoid disapproval may account for the New Agers’ inclination, apparently growing, to leave Native American traditions alone and instead to comb the early religions of Europe for inspiration.

Magliocco and Pike are well aware that Neopagans and New Agers still constitute a religious minority in contemporary America. Accurate information on the size of either movement is scarce. Magliocco estimates that about 700,000 North Americans practice Neopaganism, a number that appears to be growing steadily. New Agers are harder to count, given the transitory nature of their loyalties. Pike cites journalistic estimates of roughly 12 million practitioners, a figure that should be regarded with caution.

Whatever the correct number, one has to acknowledge the movements’ cumulative impact on American values. Thirty years ago, who would have thought that yoga would be taught at Girl Scout camps, or that highly educated professionals would become regular consumers of herbal medicines and fringe healing techniques? Who imagined that one First Lady, Nancy Reagan, would routinely consult an astrologer, and another, Hilary Rodham Clinton, would seek the counsel of Jean Houston, a psychologist with impeccable New Age credentials? Whether one welcomes or deplores the spread of unorthodox spiritual practices, there is little question that New Age and Neopaganism practices have subtly reshaped public life in the U.S.

For anyone who wants to take the measure of alternative spirituality in America, these books are excellent places to start. Pike’s is the more concise and readable of the two, Magliocco’s the more fine-grained and theoretically ambitious. Both balance sympathetic portraits of individual practitioners with frank reflections on the movements’ inconsistencies, internal squabbles, and areas of moral blindness. One comes away from both books with renewed appreciation for the restless creativity of Americans, who today, as in Tocqueville’s time, seem unable to settle for middling piety or garden-variety contentment.

Michael F. Brown is a professor of anthropology at Williams College and the author of The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age (Harvard University Press, 1997) and, more recently, Who Owns Native Culture? (Harvard University Press, 2003).

By Laurence A. Marschall

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Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry by Scott Huler, Crown Publishers, 2004; $23.00

THE REMARKABLE LIFE of Sir Francis Beaufort (1774–1857), one of the generation of polymaths who ushered in a golden age of natural history in Victorian England, seems the perfect subject for a modern biographer. Beaufort began his adventures at sea at age fourteen, captained a Royal Navy ship by age twenty-two, and for more than twenty years seldom seemed to step onto dry land. In 1817 he wrote a best-selling travel book—illustrated with his own meticulous drawings—about the little-known southern coast of Turkey, where a grievous wound sustained during a brawl with the locals ended his seafaring career. In the succeeding three decades he served as chief of the admiralty’s Hydrographic Office, consolidating Britain’s rule of the seas by fostering the scientific observation of the oceans and the exploration of remote shores. Beaufort was on friendly terms with Captain William Bligh, of Bounty fame, and with Captain Robert Fitzroy of the Beagle, as he was with most of the scientific luminaries of the age. It was Beaufort, in fact, who suggested to the young Charles Darwin that he sail with the Beagle as its onboard naturalist.

Yet Scott Huler’s book is not exactly a biography of Beaufort, who has already been well served by historians and biographers. Rather, it is more of an extended essay on what Huler, a journalist by trade, learned while tracking down the story of the admiral’s most lasting accomplishment: a twelve-step numbering system for gauging the strength of winds. The Beaufort scale, of course, has become a part of the standard operating lingo for meteorologists and sailors. Huler, who first noticed it twenty years ago in a dictionary, was immediately smitten by its economy, its matter-of-fact utility, and its almost poetic imagery and cadence: “0: calm smoke rises vertically”; “6: strong breeze; large branches in motion; telegraph wires whistle; umbrellas used with difficulty”; “9: strong gale; slight structural damage occurs; chimney pots and slates removed.” Like Beaufort, who filled dozens of pocket notebooks with daily observations of anything that struck his fancy, Huler began to fill notebooks with odd facts and observations about the wind and about the origins and evolution of the Beaufort scale.

Much of his research, as one might expect, was done in library stacks and government archives, where Huler found, unsurprisingly, that Beaufort’s wind scale was not the first of its kind. Daniel Defoe, in a 1704 book called The Storm, had organized winds into categories, as had Robert Hooke in the 1600s and Tycho Brahe in the late 1500s. In 1759 John Smeaton, a British engineer, defined a hierarchy of winds on the basis of how fast they turned a windmill. In about 1790 Alexander Dalrymple, one of Beaufort’s predecessors in the Hydrographic Office, devised a table combining Smeaton’s scale for windmills with the descriptions used in ships’ journals to record the force of the wind.

Although it’s doubtful that Beaufort ever saw that table (it appeared in a text, Practical Navigation, that was never published), Dalrymple’s work anticipated Beaufort’s first scale, with its descriptive phrases based on the number of sails a standard three-masted vessel could keep aloft in a particular wind. That scale was widely adopted and bears Beaufort’s name, largely because of his preeminence at a time when Britain ruled the waves.

What makes Huler’s book exceptional, however, is his absorbing account of how he tried to empathize with Beaufort, to find out what kind of person would devise and use such a scale. Huler took a boat to Montevideo, Uruguay, toting the young oceanographer’s 1806 sketches and charts of the harbor, to relive some of Beaufort’s experiences. He sailed on board a three-masted bark, the Europa, to feel the wind the way it must have felt to a nineteenth-century seaman. He interviewed historians, weathercasters, even poets and musicians who had been inspired by Beaufort’s scheme.

What did he learn from it all? That the numbers are not what give the Beaufort scale its lasting value. After all, modern anemometers can read off wind speeds to as many decimal places as there are numbers on an LCD display. The true value is the message implicit in its lucid prose, inspiring us to observe nature with the wide-eyed empathy of a curious naturalist. Look beyond the numbers, Huler tells us; look to the meaning, not just the ranking, of the wind.

¡Tequila! A Natural and Cultural History by Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata and Gary Paul Nabhan University of Arizona Press, 2004; $29.95 cloth, $14.95 paper

AGAVE, a genus of hardy succulent plants that dot the landscape from the Grand Canyon to Guatemala, derives its scientific name from the Greek word agauç- (“illustrious” or “noble”). Yet centuries before Europeans first encountered the plant, during the conquest of Mexico, the indigenous hunter-gatherers of the region had already come to admire its virtues. Trimming its forbidding fright wig of spiny leaves, they discovered a sweet, nutritious bulb of plant material, called a bola, at the base of the stem. The native Mexicans roasted the ball, which resembles a giant pineapple, for several days among slow-burning coals. The roasted bola could also be left to ferment, yielding a mildly alcoholic drink known as mescal crudo.

The most familiar modern descendant of the drink is tequila, a colorless liquor distilled from roasted, fermented blue agaves, often given a little extra kick by adding sugar to the mash. For more than a century the plant has been cultivated principally in the Mexican state of Jalisco, with production centered around a town a few dozen miles northwest of Guadalajara. Tequila—for that is the name of the town—has become synonymous with the purest, strongest form of the drink.

Many millions of agave plants grow today in Jalisco’s volcanic soil, and much of the tequila produced there each year is exported to the United States and Europe, where it frequent-ly winds up in such festive drinks as the margarita.

The worldwide popularity of te-quila is a quite recent phenomenon. For many years the crystal fluid, sometimes distilled to more than 100 proof, was reckoned as nothing but a cheap high for boozing cowboys. But in the past few decades, as globalization has brought Tex-Mex and other spicy foods to palates accustomed to more timid fare, tequila has gained legitimacy and even sophistication. To slake the growing thirst for the stuff, traditional agricultural practices have become industrialized, turning family farms into giant conglomerates.

As tequila flowed to the masses, a market for specialty formulas of the liquor took form. Market-savvy growers lavished care on the best agave plants, carefully controlling distillation, using only natural agave sugars in the fermentation, and aging the product under tightly controlled conditions. “Artisan” batches of the best tequila began to be sold in designer bottles, appealing to a coterie of tequila connoisseurs who savor the drink undiluted, in small shots. A true tequila aficionado (dubbed a “tequilleur” by the authors) can argue the merits of agaves from the Los Altos region versus those from the zona centro with the intensity of a scotch drinker defending the superiority of a particular brand of single malt. Buoyed by the market for mavens, boutique bottles of the finest tequila can run as high as a couple of thousand dollars. Some restaurants specialize in the stuff—I visited one in San Diego several years ago that offers literally hundreds of brands of fine tequila.

Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata and Gary Paul Nabhan, two respected experts on agave agriculture, have produced a scholarly yet entertaining guide to the history and husbandry of this phenomenal beverage. They devote an entire chapter to analyzing the problems associated with Jalisco’s single-crop agriculture, which have led to devastating agave blights. They provide a lengthy bibliography and an illustrated guide to the various agave cultivars, along with copious reference notes in the text. But they also give lucid accounts of traditional methods of cultivation, along with stories from the modern-day jimadores, harvesters who traditionally wield a jaivica, or axelike tool for trimming and uprooting agave bolas. For most readers, tequila may be better sipped than studied. But since a little tequila goes a long way, this book can provide an alternate, albeit less intoxicating, form of pleasure. (See also www.ianchadwick.com/tequila/links.html for more lore and links about tequila.)

The Geese of Beaver Bog by Bernd Heinrich, Ecco, 2004; $24.95

JUST BEFORE DAWN on September 2, 2002, a dozen Canada geese (Branta canadensis) landed on a beaver bog not far from the home of Bernd Heinrich, a biologist at the University of Vermont. To many suburbanites, such a landing would be no cause for joy: Canada geese have become so common on lawns and golf courses in the Northeast that people regard them not as elegant avatars of wildness, but as noisy, messy squatters. Heinrich, however, welcomed the birds, for among them was an old friend named Peep—a female that Heinrich adopted when she was just a few days old, and who had spent the summer of 1998 living with his family. Now on her own, Peep was stopping by on her way south, seemingly to pay her respects, and perhaps to show off the kids—a brood of goslings trailing in her wake—to the new grandparents.

Serving as a surrogate father to Peep, much less writing about the secret lives of geese, was probably the last thing on Heinrich’s mind when he first noticed the geese near his property. Highly regarded for his research on animal adaptation, Hein-rich has written a number of lucid popular books on the subject. But studies of geese, as anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with animal behavior knows, are dominated by the formidable figure of Konrad Lorenz, who devoted half a century to the greylag goose (Anser anser), and whose book King Solomon’s Ring is one of the past century’s most influential ethological texts.

Lorenz popularized the concept of imprinting, the learning process whereby animals, in a critical period during development, may form a parent bond with the first nurturing creature they encounter. (As it happened, famously, Lorenz himself sometimes became that parental figure.) Lorenz’s spiritual “descendants” thus include not only legions of his students, but also a flock of greylag geese at the Konrad Lorenz Research Station in Grünau, Austria.

Yet if Heinrich had no intention of following such a well-trampled research path in 1998, his two-year-old son Eliot persuaded him otherwise. An orphaned gosling, Heinrich soon realized, afforded a unique opportunity to observe family relations among wild birds. Peep flew south at the end of that summer but returned two years later with a mate (the Heinrichs named him Pop) to nest in the pond once more. In the next few years, because of his imprinted relationship with the goose, Heinrich was able to observe Peep at close range whenever she reappeared. When Peep moved on to other ganders and no longer frequented Beaver Bog (contrary to popular belief, geese do not mate for life), Heinrich was able to establish close relations with the female that became Pop’s new love interest. The new goose, Jane, allowed the scientist to stroke her back, lift her off her nest, and even inspect her eggs during incubation.

Most of all, the geese just let him be there, pen in hand, and The Geese of Beaver Bog is the result. The book is really a selected diary of observations, unencumbered by references to Lorenz’s work, which Heinrich claims he didn’t read closely until his project was completed. Instead of explaining goose behavior (which he does only briefly, in an appendix), Heinrich aims to recreate the rhythms of bog life: frost sparkling on sedges in the morning light; red-winged blackbirds flitting in and out of the bushes and reeds; beavers surfacing in the pond; coyotes appearing furtively on shore. The intent, as in Heinrich’s earlier books, is to apprehend an animal from the “inside,” and so learn implicitly how it knows what it knows, why it does what it does. If geese were literate, they’d no doubt offer encouragement after reading Heinrich’s account. “Yes,” Peep might honk, “that’s how it was.”

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

N A T U R E . N E T

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Full Spectrum By Robert Anderson

THE ENGLISH ASTRONOMER William Herschel is best remembered for his hand-built telescopes and his discovery of Uranus in 1781. But to my mind the simple experiments he performed with glass prisms and thermometers in 1800, with which he detected what is now known as infrared light, were far more momentous. They gave science its first evidence that an entire world lay hidden beyond the limits of our visual perceptions.

If you’d like to duplicate Herschel’s experiment, go to the site devoted to the infrared universe, “Cool Cosmos” (coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu). An animated turning gear previews the menu items as soon as the home page opens. When the gear turns to “Cosmic Classroom,” click on “Infrared Light Lessons” and then on “The Herschel Experiment.” You can also visit the “Infrared Zoo” (in the “Cosmic Kids” section), where animals are viewed through a thermal infrared camera, and the difference between warm- and cold-blooded animals takes on a whole other dimension.

For a thorough guide to the electromagnetic spectrum, go to “Imagine the Universe” (imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov). Scroll down to the blue menu bar and click on “Imagine Science.” Thus informed about the potential of each wavelength for contributing to astronomy, you’ll be ready for the Web sites that focus on the telescopes that gather information from narrow slices of the spectrum in increasingly precise forms.

For example, the longest wavelengths in the universe are radio waves. At the Web site of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (www.nrao.edu), click on “General Public,” on the menu bar at the left, for an informational video. It tells you about radio telescopes around the globe. And if you’ve never heard the likes of sferics, tweeks, or whistlers, or listened to radio from Jupiter, tune in to a page on the site “Exploring the Electromagnetic Spectrum” (www.altair.org). Click on “Natural Radio” in the site map.

Also check out NASA’s “Chandra X-ray Observatory” (chandra.harvard.edu). To learn about supernovas, black holes, and other exotic X ray-generating objects, click on “Field Guide” under the “Public Information and Education” menu at the left. Kids can learn about X rays and their uses at a site developed by the University Hospitals of Cleveland (www.uhrad.com/kids.htm).

A hundred years after Herschel’s discovery of infrared light, the physicists Paul Villard and Ernest Rutherford completed the electromagnetic spectrum with the discovery of gamma rays—wavelengths so short that they can readily pass through metal or several feet of concrete. At the site “Milagro Gamma-Ray Observatory” (www.lanl.gov/milagro/everyone.shtml), visitors can view an instrument that “sees” what the universe brings to Earth in the form of radiation with about a trillion times the energy of visible light.

One band of wavelengths, the ultraviolet, or UV light, is particularly helpful at revealing earthly as well as cos-mic mysteries. Although invisible to us, UV is readily seen by birds and insects such as bees and butterflies. Many blossoms display distinct floral patterns in UV light that can attract pollinators. Bjørn Rørslett, a Norwegian aquatic ecologist and nature photographer, has created a wonderful Web site that lets you “see” flowers the way insects and birds might see them (www.naturfotograf.com/UV_flowers_list.html).

Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.

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Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2004