Head Over Heels

https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4574320
Image: John Allan

In his 1703 Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, Martin Martin describes an alarming tradition concerning a beetling rock formation in St. Kilda:

In the face of the rock, south from the town, is the famous stone, known by the name of the mistress-stone; it resembles a door exactly; and is in the very front of this rock, which is twenty or thirty fathom [120-180 feet, 37-55 meters] perpendicular in height, the figure of it being discernible about the distance of a mile; upon the lintel of this door, every bachelor-wooer is by an ancient custom obliged in honour to give a specimen of his affection for the love of his mistress, and it is thus; he is to stand on his left foot, having the one half of his sole over the rock, and then he draws the right foot further out to the left, and in this posture bowing, he puts both his fists further out to the right foot; and then after he has performed this, he has acquired no small reputation, being always after it accounted worthy of the finest mistress in the world: they firmly believe that this achievement is always attended with the desired success.

“This being the custom of the place, one of the inhabitants very gravely desired me to let him know the time limited by me for trying of this piece of gallantry before I design’d to leave the place, that he might attend me,” he added. “I told him this performance would have a quite contrary effect upon me, by robbing me both of my life and mistress at the same moment.”

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With All Speed

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Talbot_-_The_Footman.jpg

The earliest photograph of a human figure on paper is “The Footman” by William Henry Fox Talbot, from 1840. Footmen came in several varieties; an early breed that quickly went extinct was the running footman, who would advance as a herald before his master’s carriage and also deliver urgent dispatches. In What the Butler Saw, E.S. Turner gives some amazing examples:

  • As the table was being laid for dinner in his castle at Thirlstane, the Duke of Lauderdale was informed that there was a shortage of plate, so he sent a running footman over the Lammermuir Hills to his other castle at Lethington, near Haddington, 15 miles away. The man returned with the additional plate in time for dinner.
  • In his Recollections of 1826, the writer John O’Keeffe remembers a running footman he saw in his youth in Ireland: “He looked so agile, and seemed all air like a Mercury; he never minded roads but took the short cut and, by the help of his pole, absolutely seemed to fly over hedge, ditch and small river. His use was to carry a message, letter or dispatch; or on a journey to run before and prepare the inn, or baiting-place, for his family or master who came the regular road in coach-and-two, or coach-and-four or coach-and-six; his qualifications were fidelity, strength and agility.”
  • One evening the Earl of Home sent a running footman from his Berwickshire castle to Edinburgh on important business. On going downstairs the following morning he found the man asleep in the hall. He was about to chastise him when the man told him he’d already been there and back, a distance of 35 miles each way. (If we allow 12 hours for this that’s 6 mph, allowing for a few breaks to eat and rest. That seems accurate — Turner says that a footman running before his master’s coach “was prepared to cover sixty miles and more in a day, at an average of six to seven miles an hour.”)

“In London the fourth Duke of Queensberry (‘Old Q’) continued to employ running footmen until his death in 1810. He would try out applicants in Piccadilly, lending them his livery for the occasion, and then stand watch in hand on his balcony to time their performance. There is a story that he said to one candidate: ‘You will do very well for me.’ The reply was, ‘And your livery will do very well for me,’ with which the runner bolted.”

| History · Society · Technology

The Open Christmas Letter

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Image: Flickr

In December 1914, as the first Christmas of World War I approached, 101 British women suffragists sent a holiday message “To the Women of Germany and Austria.”

“Some of us wish to send you a word at this sad Christmastide,” it ran. “The Christmas message sounds like mockery to a world at war, but those of us who wished, and still wish, for peace may surely offer a solemn greeting to such of you who feel as we do.”

Though our sons are sent to slay each other, and our hearts are torn by the cruelty of this fate, yet through pain supreme we will be true to our common womanhood. We will let not bitterness enter into this tragedy, made sacred by the life-blood of our best, nor mar with hate the heroism of their sacrifice. Though much has been done on all sides you will, as deeply as ourselves, deplore — shall we not steadily refuse to give credence to those false tales so free told us, each of the other?

We hope it may lessen your anxiety to learn we are doing our utmost to soften the lot of your civilians and war prisoners within our shores, even as we rely on your goodness of heart to do the same for ours in Germany and Austria.

The following spring they received a reply:

If English women alleviated misery and distress at this time, relieved anxiety, and gave help irrespective of nationality, let them accept the warmest thanks of German women and the true assurance that they are and were prepared to do likewise. In war time we are united by the same unspeakable suffering of all nations taking part in the war. Women of all nations have the same love of justice, civilization and beauty, which are all destroyed by war. Women of all nations have the same hatred for barbarity, cruelty and destruction, which accompany every war.

Women, creators and guardians of life, must loathe war, which destroys life. Through the smoke of battle and thunder of cannon of hostile peoples, through death, terror, destruction, and unending pain and anxiety, there glows like the dawn of a coming better day the deep community of feeling of many women of all nations.

It was signed by 155 women of Germany and Austria.

| History · Society

A for Effort

During World War I, an anonymous American businessman who felt that “moral education of children is the fundamental need of the nation” offered $5,000 for “a children’s morality code that can be accepted as official — something prepared by the best brains of the educational profession.”

The contest ran for a year, from 1916 to 1917, and the winner was announced in American Magazine: William J. Hutchins had formulated 10 “laws of right living”:

  1. The welfare of our country depends upon those who try to be physically fit for their daily work.
  2. Those who best control themselves can best serve their country.
  3. Self-conceit is silly, but self-reliance is necessary to boys and girls who would be strong and useful.
  4. Our country grows great and good as her citizens are able more fully to trust each other.
  5. Clean play increases and trains one’s strength, and helps one to be more useful to one’s country.
  6. The shirker or the willing idler lives upon the labor of others, burdens others with the work which he ought to do himself. He harms his fellow citizens, and so harms his country.
  7. The welfare of our country depends upon those who have learned to do in the right way the things that ought to be done.
  8. One man alone could not build a city or a great railroad. One man alone would find it hard to build a house or a bridge. That I may have bread, men have sowed and reaped, men have made plows and threshers, men have built mills and mined coal, men have made stoves and kept stores. As we learn better how to work together, the welfare of our country is advanced.
  9. In America those who are of different races, colors and conditions must live together. We are of many different sorts, but we are one great people. Every unkindness hurts the common life, every kindness helps the common life.
  10. If our America is to become ever greater and better, her citizens must be loyal, devotedly faithful, in every relation of life.

I don’t know how widely this was actually used. The anonymous “Donor” followed up by offering a $20,000 prize for the best method of character instruction in American public schools, but I can’t tell whether that was ever awarded.

| Society

Lodging a Complaint

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dolphind.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Among the most compelling anecdotes suggesting that dolphins have concepts of ‘wrong’ behavior is Thomas White’s description of how a human snorkeler observing Atlantic spotted dolphins off the Bahamas went outside the bounds of the norms of behavior expected by the dolphins of human observers at that site. The swimmer approached a calf engaged in learning to fish with its mother, a no-no in the rules of engagement between swimmers and these dolphins built up over years. When this happened, the mother then swam not to the hapless trespasser but to the leader of the group of swimmers, whom she could identify, and tail-slapped, her displeasure apparently directed at the leader who had not controlled the behavior of those being led.

— Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, 2015

| Science & Math · Society

Silent Speech

In the “language of flowers,” a meaning is assigned to every flower in a bouquet, so that it’s possible to send a message to your beloved without saying a word. The trouble is that different dictionaries give different meanings. In Collier’s Cyclopedia of 1882, they get very specific:

American starwort: Cheerfulness in old age.
Apple (blossom): Fame speaks him great and good.
Balsam, red: Touch me not.
Bay leaf: I change but in death.
Bud of white rose: Heart ignorant of love.
Butterfly weed: Let me go.
Camellia japonica, red: Unpretending excellence.
Camomile: Energy in adversity.
Cape jasmine: I’m too happy.
Carnation, deep red: Alas! for my poor heart.
Chinese chrysanthemum: Cheerfulness under adversity.
Cistus, gum: I shall die tomorrow.
Citron: Ill-natured beauty.
Convolvulus: Worth sustained by judicious and tender affection.
Corchorus: Impatient of absence.
Damask rose: Brilliant complexion.
Geranium, lemon: Unexpected meeting.
Geranium, nutmeg: Expected meeting.
Helmet-flower: Knight-errantry.
Hemlock: You will be my death. [!]
Hundred-leaved rose: Dignity of mind.
Japan rose: Beauty is your only attraction.
Laurestina: I die if neglected.
Locust tree (green): Affection beyond the grave. [!]
Meadow saffron: My best days are past.
Mistletoe: I surmount difficulties.
Mourning bride: Unfortunate attachment. I have lost all.
Mulberry tree (black): I shall not survive you.
Persimmon: Bury me amid nature’s beauties.
Poppy, scarlet: Fantastic extravagance.
Rose, Christmas: Tranquilize my anxiety.
Rose, daily: Thy smile I aspire to.
Scarlet lychnis: Sunbeaming eyes.
Sorrel, wild: Wit ill-timed.
Spindle tree: Your charms are engraven on my heart.
Straw, broken: Rupture of a contract.
Tiger flower: For once may pride befriend me.
Virginian spiderwort: Momentary happiness.
Zinnia: Thoughts of absent friends.

“How charmingly a young gentleman can speak to a young lady, and with what eloquent silence in this delightful language. How delicately she can respond, the beautiful little flowers telling her tale in perfumed words; what a delicate story the myrtle or the rose tells!” But I think only florists could do this articulately.

| Society

A Legal Fiction

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Image: Flickr

Sometimes it’s easier to reach a just legal result by reconceiving facts than by rewriting a rule. A classic example is Mostyn v. Fabrigas, decided by the King’s Bench Court in 1774. Fabrigas was a resident of Minorca, a Mediterranean island which was then occupied and controlled by England. He was imprisoned by Mostyn, the governor of the island. Fabrigas wanted to sue him, but no suit could be brought against Mostyn in Minorca without the approval of the governor. So Fabrigas sued him instead in the Court of Common Pleas in London for trespass and false imprisonment, winning a jury verdict of £3,000. Mostyn appealed, claiming correctly that the trial court had jurisdiction only in cases brought by residents of London, and Lord Mansfield, resoundingly, declared that Minorca was part of London for purposes of this action. The assault had occurred “at Minorca, to wit at London, in the parish of St. Mary-le-Bow, in the Ward of Cheap.”

That’s from University of Virginia scholar Frederick Schauer’s “Legal Fictions Revisited,” in Maksymilian Del Mar and William Twining’s Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice (2015). He adds this wonderful footnote:

There is a story, probably apocryphal, that, in 1939, the renowned and beloved deer which graze on the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, were at risk of being requisitioned during the wartime food shortage by the Ministry of Food. In order to prevent such an occurrence, it is said, influential Magdalen graduates in the government arranged to have the deer reclassified as vegetables and thus be spared from the slaughterhouse. More recently, it is reported that Magdalen’s noisy swinging door has been informally classified as a musical instrument in order to bring it within the prohibition on playing musical instruments at certain hours.

| Oddities · Society

Supply and Demand

It is interesting to note that there are considerable manufactures of things the direct desire for which seldom or never asserts itself at all. There are immense tracts and Bibles produced, for instance, which are paid for by persons who do not desire to use them but to give them away to other persons whose desire for them is not in any way an effective factor in the proceeding. And there are numbers of expensive things made expressly to be bought for ‘presents,’ and which no sane person is ever expected to buy for himself.

— Philip H. Wicksteed, The Alphabet of Economic Science, 1888

| Society

The Trust Game

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University of Iowa economist Joyce Berg devised this test of social expectation. Two players are each given $10. The two are anonymous to one another and may not communicate. The first player, known as the trustor, is given the option to transfer any part of her $10 to the second player, who is known as the trustee. Whatever she sends will be tripled; if she sends $5 the trustee will receive $15. The trustee then has the option to return any portion of what she’s received. The game is played only once, so the two players have no opportunity to communicate through repeated play.

What should they do? If the two trust one another perfectly, then both stand to double their money — the trustor will give all $10 to the trustee, who now has $40. If she returns half of that, then each player has $20.

The trouble is that rational players, who seek to maximize their personal gains, won’t behave this way. If the trustor gives the trustee $10, she can just keep all of it, walking away with $40 and leaving the trustor with nothing. Realizing this, the trustor should send nothing at all, keeping at least the $10 she was given. This is the rational expectation.

But in actual experiment, Berg found that fully 30 of 32 trustors sent money, and they sent an average of $5.16. This is surprising. “From a rational choice perspective,” she wrote, “subjects who sent money must have believed their expected return would be positive; but given the noncooperative prediction, why would they believe this?”

(Joyce Berg, John Dickhaut, and Kevin McCabe, “Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History,” Games and Economic Behavior 10 [1995], 122-142.)

| Science & Math · Society

The Silent Trade

The 15th-century Venetian navigator Alvise Cadamosto describes a curious convention by which the Mauritanian Azanaghi traded salt with the merchants of Mali:

All those who have the salt pile it in rows, each marking his own. Having made these piles, the whole caravan retires half a day’s journey. Then there comes another race of blacks who do not wish to be seen or to speak. They arrive in large boats, from which it appears that they come from islands, and disembark. Seeing the salt, they place a large quantity of gold opposite each pile, and then turn back, leaving salt and gold. When they have gone, the Negroes who own the salt return: if they are satisfied with the quantity of gold, they leave the salt and retire with the gold. Then the blacks of the gold return, and remove those piles which are without gold. By the other piles of salt they place more gold, if it pleases them, or else they leave the salt. In this way, by long and ancient custom, they carry on their trade without seeing or speaking to each other.

In this way different cultures can trade safely without speaking the same language. It’s called the “silent trade”; Herodotus describes a similar practice between Carthage and West Africa, and it’s been reported also in Siberia, Lapland, Timor, Sumatra, India, Sri Lanka, and New Guinea.

Why didn’t the Malians simply take the salt? Presumably because trade was more valuable to them in the long run. I wonder how such a custom gets started in the first place, though.

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