The History of Fishes

Halley's traumas were not yet quite over. The Royal Society had promised to publish the work, but now pulled out, citing financial embarrassment. The year before the society had backed a costly flop called The History of Fishes, and they now suspected that the market for a book on mathematical principles would be less than clamorous. Halley, whose means were not great, paid for the book's publication out of his own pocket. Newton, as was his custom, contributed nothing. To make matters worse, Halley at this time had just accepted a position as the society's clerk, and he was informed that the society could no longer afford to provide him with a promised salary of £50 per annum. He was to be paid instead in copies of The History of Fishes.

- from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, 49.

An acute epidemic disease

Incidentally, it is not absurd to class this ecological role of humankind in its relationship to other life forms as a disease. Ever since language allowed human cultural evolution to impinge upon age-old processes of biological evolution, humankind has been in a position to upset older balances of nature in quite the same fashion that disease upsets the natural balance within a host's body. ... Sooner or later, and always within a span of time that remained minuscule in comparison with the standards of biological evolution, humanity discovered new techniques allowing fresh exploitation of hitherto inaccessible resources, thereby renewing or intensifying damage to other forms of life. Looked at from the point of view of other organisms, humankind therefore resembles an acute epidemic disease, whose occasional lapses into less virulent forms of behavior have never yet sufficed to permit any really stable, chronic relationship to establish itself.

- Plagues and Peoples, William McNeill, 1976, pg. 22.

wolf-free islands off the coasts...

"Where attacks have been made on man by northern wolves, the animals have almost certainly been suffering from rabies, a disease which not infrequently affects them...

This behavior [i.e., healthy wolves refraining from attacking humans] is the more strange because wolves, although they normally eat carrion only when there is little alternative, readily unearth human corpses and devour them. This is well known from early records in countries such as Scotland, where cemeteries were removed to wolf-free islands off the coasts, and from reliable North American records. It is difficult to account for this behaviour in a predatory animal without entering realms of fantasy."

- from Richard Fiennes' fascinating The Order of Wolves (1976), pg. 19.