It's been years since Timothy Sellers, then a budding naturalist, licked a slug. Now he writes pop songs about scientists who were less absurd about their empiricism. Thirteen of them appear on ''26 Scientists: Volume 1, Anning to Malthus,'' a CD that Mr. Sellers and his Los-Angeles-based band, Artichoke, recently released.

That's Mary Anning, the 18th-century Briton who assembled fossils to support her family and who first discovered the ichthyosaur. As in Artichoke's other songs, the one about Malthus mixes biographical detail (''Thomas Robert Malthus/the second son of eight kids/grew up with a stutter'') with intellectual history (''with the revolution/came a lot of high hopes/Malthus took a good look/uh-oh uh-oh) and the primordial rock chords of G, D and C (''la la la la la/la la la la la/la la la la la'').

For the full article, go here.