“No man is an island entire of itself; every man / is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”
So wrote John Donne in his oft-quoted Meditation XVII. Theodore Fleming, we can assume has, at least at some point in the past, likely read Donne’s famous meditation, and perhaps was even thinking about it as he examined the discoveries he made in his eleven-year-long study of cactus pollination and pollinators near Sonora, Mexico.
To Professor Fleming’s remarkable explanations of these discoveries, The University of Arizona Press has added the inspired illustrations of Kim Kanoa Duffek, and published them as No Species Is an Island; Bats, Cacti, and Secrets of the Sonoran Desert
While it is unrecorded if Donne ever visited the Sonoran desert – of for that matter ever saw a cactus – it is well within reason to think that he would have approved of Fleming’s expansion upon his original theme.
