Imprisoned during the French Revolution, zoologist Pierre André Latreille found a beetle on the floor of his dungeon. He pointed out to the prison doctor that it was the rare Necrobia ruficollis, described by Johan Christian Fabricius in 1775. Impressed, the doctor sent it to a local naturalist, who knew Latreille’s work and managed to secure the release of Latreille and a cellmate.
All the other inmates were executed within a month.
I seem to be on a Sherlock Holmes kick lately. A few oddities about Dr. Watson:
At its annual dinner, the Sherlock Holmes literary society the Baker Street Irregulars always toasts the second Mrs. Watson. This was the toast in 2002:
Watson had a second wife
But, did he lead a double life?
He had two wounds; he had two names
(One was John, the other James).
He often claimed he dined alone
Yet quaffed whole bottlesful of Beaune.
He’d disappear for days on end
Accompanying his clever friend,
Then lame excuses where he’d been
Were published in Strand Magazine.
And so to the spouse of this pain in the ass
We raise a toast and lift our glass.
(From Roger Johnson and Jean Upton, The Sherlock Holmes Miscellany, 2012.)
Mr. and Mrs. Emory Harrison of Jonesboro, Tenn., had 13 children, all boys, making the largest all-male American family in 1955.
Amazingly, they made this crowded life seem pretty easy. Emory told the St. Petersburg Times that they spent only $12 to $15 a week on food, since they could grow most of what they needed on their 70-acre farm. And he boasted that he’d spent less than $50 on medical bills in 22 years of married life.
The Harrisons found immortality in algebra textbooks, which are forever asking the odds of this outcome. If both genders are equally likely, the chance is 1 in 8,192.
A tiny detail, but I thought it was interesting: Scottish writer Henry Drummond believed that sub-Saharan Africa was so well networked with footpaths that an explorer could walk from Zanzibar westward “never in fact leaving a beaten track” until “his faithful foot-wide guide lands him on the Atlantic seaboard.” From his Tropical Africa of 1888:
Now it may be a surprise to the unenlightened to learn that probably no explorer in forcing his passage through Africa has ever, for more than a few days at a time, been off some beaten track. Probably no country in the world, civilized or uncivilized, is better supplied with paths than this unmapped continent. Every village is connected to some other village, every tribe with the next tribe, every state with its neighbour, and therefore with all the rest. The explorer’s business is simply to select from the network of tracks, keep a general direction, and hold on his way.
This is repeated in J.W. Gregory’s The Story of the Road (1931) and in M.G. Lay’s Ways of the World (1992). Gregory admits only afterward that this may have been true in Nyasaland, the district that Drummond had visited, but it’s hardly the case elsewhere. “One evening, after the porters had suffered one of many repeated disappointments at not finding a human path, I removed their gloom, as they sat around the camp fires, by translating to them the passage from Henry Drummond. Their laughter showed that they concluded that the reports of European travellers, like those they told themselves on their return to the coast, were not always to be taken literally.”
apolactize
v. “to spurne with the heele” (from Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionarie of 1623)
tripudiary
adj. pertaining to dancing
Any stranger behind the scenes at Her Majesty’s Theatre on the opening night of Adeline Genée and the Imperial Russian Ballet would have been amazed (stated The Melbourne Age on Monday) at a little incident that was enacted just before Mlle. Genée made her entrance from the wings. Mr. Hugh Ward approached the great dancer, and, raising his foot, kicked her on the leg. The astonishment would have increased on it being noticed that Mlle. Genée, far from being incensed at this apparent liberty, was greatly pleased at it, and rippled with laughter. Mlle. Genée explained the incident in this way. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘while I am not exactly over-superstitious, there are still some little things I pay regard to, and one of them is that before I make my first appearance anywhere I must be given a ‘good luck kick’ prior to making my entrance. I mentioned this jokingly to Mr. Ward when I arrived in Sydney, and he said it would give him the greatest pleasure to present me with the lucky kick on the opening night of the season. So he has come all the way from Sydney to do so.’
— Adelaide Register, June 25, 1913
In Book 11 of the Odyssey, Odysseus encounters his mother in Hades and asks her seven questions. She answers all seven, but strangely in reverse order:
A – What killed you?
B – A long sickness?
C – Or Artemis with her arrows?
D – How is my father?
E – How is my son?
F – Are my possessions safe?
G – Has my wife been faithful?
G – Your wife has been faithful.
F – Your possessions are safe.
E – Your son is thriving.
D – Your father is alive but in poor condition.
C – Artemis did not kill me with her arrows.
B – Nor did a sickness kill me.
A – But my longing for you killed me.
This reversal is called chiasmus, and it appears throughout oral literature. Apart from its aesthetic effect, it’s thought that it may have helped ancient poets to remember long passages and to recall the structure of a complex story. Of the Iliad, classicist Cedric Whitman writes, “Not only are certain whole books of the poem arranged in self-reversing, or balancing, designs, but the poem as a whole is, in a way, an enormous hysteron proteron, in which books balance books and scenes balance scenes by similarity or antithesis, with the most amazing virtuosity.”
Some of these patterns are wrought on such a huge scale that it’s hard to believe that a listening audience could even recognize them. Why then offer them? Whitman gives two reasons. One, a poet might perform a feat of virtuosity for its own sake, even if the audience overlooks it. And two, “The human mind is a strange organ, and one which perceives many things without conscious or articulate knowledge of them, and responds to them with emotions necessarily and appropriately vague.”
(Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, 1958; and Steve Reece, “The Three Circuits of the Suitors: A Ring Composition in Odyssey 17-22,” Oral Tradition, 10:1 [1995], 207-229.)
In 1884, as engineers sawed brownstone out of a quarry near Manchester, Conn., amateur paleontologist Charles Owen realized that one block contained the hind part of a skeleton. He alerted professor Othniel Charles Marsh, who managed to acquire the block, but the corresponding stone containing the skeleton’s fore part had already been carted off for use in a new highway bridge.
In the ensuing years the identity of that bridge was forgotten, but in 1967, as a new highway was being constructed, Yale paleontologist John Ostrom saw an opportunity. He surveyed 60 bridges in the Manchester area and identified one 40-foot span over Hop Creek as the likeliest candidate. Then, in 1969, as that bridge was replaced, he and his colleagues examined more than 300 likely blocks at the site.
They found two 500-pound blocks that showed distinct fossil markings, and in New Haven Ostrom determined that one of the visible bones matched a thigh bone that Marsh had recovered 85 years earlier. The complete skeleton had belonged to a member of Ammosaurus, a genus that roamed the northeastern United States 200 million years ago.
(Thanks, Glenn.)
Colombian activist César López came up with a striking new peace symbol in 2003 — the escopetarra, a guitar fashioned from a gun.
The word combines the Spanish escopeta (shotgun) and guitarra (guitar). López made the first from a Winchester rifle and a Stratocaster; he’s since built four more and given them to various Latin American artists and cities and to the United Nations, which displayed it at a disarmament conference.
López told the BBC that he got the idea when he saw a soldier carrying his weapon like a guitar. “From there sprang the idea of joining the worst invention of mankind can be joined with the most beautiful,” he said. “Some of the AK-47s have the barrels marked with each of the victims. So we mark the barrels with the songs we play.”
This is pleasing: The first library card catalogs were made using playing cards. During the French Revolution the government created a new system of public libraries, and in order to inventory the books they created the “French Cataloging Code of 1791,” in which bibliographic data was written on playing cards, which were sturdy, uniform, and plentiful. A photo is here.
In The Card Catalog, its affectionate tribute to this now outmoded tool, the Library of Congress notes that 1.2 million cards representing more than 3 million volumes were recorded using this system within 3 years. “Although the ambitious cataloging project did not result in the formation of a national catalog, it did demonstrate the potential of utilizing a uniform format.” (Also: “Deuces and aces were reserved for the longest titles, as those cards had the most space on which to write.”)
“The true delight is in the finding out, rather than in the knowing.” — Isaac Asimov
