Housecatto Hoolock

THE ROAD TO MAN (431 pp.)--Herbert Wendt, translated from the German by Helen Sebba--Doubleday ($5.95).

The Noah of modern times is the natural scientist. As the human deluge threatens to drown the lesser species, he cries his warning: Man is a part of nature; destroy nature and you destroy man. His ark is the archive in which he stores the species and records their curious lore; in recent years, many a neo-Noah has splashed a bright coat of paint on his scholarly scow and invited the general public along for the ride. Germany's Herbert Wendt (In Search of Adam) is a skillful skipper for this sort of trip, and he brings his passengers home with their intellectual pockets full of odd and fascinating information about almost everything from the housecat to the hoolock.

Items:

> The grasshopper's ear is in its knee.

> A chameleon, when blinded, loses the power of changing color; when refused sex, the male dies of disappointment.

> Dogs probably developed only recently the art of barking, which is essentially an attempt to imitate human speech.

> Spiders are devoted mothers.

> Ninety percent of all plants live in the ocean; 90% of all multicellular animals are insects.

> The tiny hummingbird can fly more than 1,000 miles across open ocean.

> Seaweed, which grows to a height of 900 ft., is the world's biggest vegetable.

> The processionary caterpillar plays a lifelong game of follow-the-leader, and if the head of the first caterpillar is introduced to the tail of the last, the entire procession goes round and round until all the caterpillars die of starvation.

> Barracudas herd schools of fish, much as man herds cattle, and slaughter them at their own convenience.

Like many popular zoologists, the author is sometimes tempted to play the Barnum of biology, and then he runs an occupational risk: to demonstrate that nature is not merely a catalogue of forms, he is tempted to set it up as a sideshow of freaks. Naturalist Wendt is preserved from this pitfall by his almost religious feeling for the mystery of life and its stupendous labor of evolution--a feeling perhaps most plainly and profoundly expressed by Spinoza: "The more man understands individual objects, the more he understands God.''

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