Ptak Science Books

"Writing of the Insane", 1876: Very Early Art Brute Images?

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1712

This book--The Writing of the Insane, by George Mackenzie Brown, 1876-- seems remarkable to me for the attention paid to the creative products of the insane. I am not sure when the first of these efforts occurred, but it seems to my experience that 1876 is an early production date for such an undertaking. It also seems to be a very early identification of the "special talents" of some of the observed individuals, including in the text of the book two remarkable (and remarkably "modern" looking) pieces of what today might be considered Art Brut/Outsider Art.

The author is George Mackenzie Bacon (1836-1883), a doctor who took classes at Guys Hosptial and who had membership in the College of Surgeons in 1858.¹ Bacon was the author of Primary Cancer of the Brain (1865) as well as an editing contributor of at least a dozen annual reports of the Committee of Visitors of the Cambridgeshire, Isle of Ely and Borough of Cambridge Pauper Lunatic Asylum (from 1869-1883 ro so). He definitely made improvements to the conditions of the inmates when he worked at Cambridegshire County Asylum (also known as Fulbourn Hospital, 1858-1992), where he provided those living there with more personal living space and patient-built work areas. This was certainly an interesting approach to take for the mentally ill, especially given the time and place.

But in his (scant) published works it seems that the Writing of the Insane must be his masterwork for at least being among the earliest books to serve as an archaeology of deeply-different and illustrated thought:

And this remarkable effort:

[Source and full text, here.]

This is certainly not a "celebration" of talent, but there are moments of recognition of such in the Writing of the Insane, which at the very least is a very early expose of the topic.  One of the earliest books written by someone who was admittedly "insane" (and this is very different from the many books written by insane, or brilliant, or misunderstood, or "complex", or "different" author) came to us in 1846 by Green Grimes. thirty years before the Bacon work.  In  A Treatise on the Most Important Subject in the World: Simply to Say, Insanity...² Grimes recounted his life at the Tennessee Hospital for the Insane, about which the blog Canton Asylum for Insane Indians writes:  “There are other Medical books which treat on Insanity, but comparatively few to the population, and none written by an Insane man,”

Notes:

1. There is scant personal information on Bacon available online. This data comes from the British Medical Journal, 3 March 1883, in an obituary on Bacon. 

2. The full title is pretty full: A treatise on the most important subject in the world: simply to say, insanity: The only work of the kind in the United States, or, perhaps, in the known world, founded on general observation and truth. There are other medical books which treat on insanity, but comparatively few on the population, and none written by an insane man. This contains a short history of the author's case, giving the general causes which produced the disease on him individually, manner of treatment and termination. Giving the only treatment by which a cure may be effected, the manner of detecting the disease, and the duties of sane parents towards the insane offspring of their bodies; with some general remarks upon idiotism, the jurisprudence of insanity, suicide, &c   

The American Journal of Insanity simply states that the 94-page book is "very curious".

On the Cowboy as the "New Indian", 1876/7

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1711 

[This is another in a series of posts prompted by a re-reading of Larry McMurtry's novel, Lonesome Dove.  This particular addition was prompted by McMurtry's character Capt. Angus McCrae coming to a realization that he and his partner, Capt Woodrow Call, at the pinnacle of their careers, were just another bit of landscape to be passed by; Texas Ranger/cowboy/adventurer becoming the "New Indian".]

Judge James Hall said early on (in 1835) that the frontiersman would only be clearing the way for another kind of pioneer who would settle down and farm the land properly, and make the beginnings of American civilization in the west. Thomas Jefferson saw the same future for “our semi-barbarous citizens”—the frontiersman—as did the explorer and botanist J.R.Poinsett, who said simply that “the frontiersman is doomed.”

McCrae was very well aware of his own role in the paradoxical march of civilization on the frontier. He was the first of his type to see these new lands (on the cattle drive north from Texas to Montana); opening them meant that he would make them safe for other colonizers—farmers and bankers who would have a far more acquisitive sense of land and ownership than he or his partner Call would ever have. As the concept of private property grew greater, as more capital was invested, and as the land became more irretrievably “settled,” then the two Rangers would pose as much a threat to the monied land interests as the Indians had once posed to the earliest settlers. He knew that he was the first step in making the economics of the region as frictionless as possible, and that at some point, and pretty soon, he and all those like him would represent the friction in the cost of doing business.

It didn’t take long for this to happen;  in the grand scheme of the development of the West the frontiersman's shadow was almost instantly filled by that of the cowboy, with barely 75 years filling the time between the beginning of the Lewis & Clark Expedition and the end of the great cattle drives. The hungry frontier pulled the adventurers away and concentrated its efforts on its greatest foe—the worker. The Atlantic Monthly charged in 1877 that America was at risk from a new type of “Indian”—the “savage” working class. It made that statement—in an unsigned article—soon after the dangerous railroad strike of 1877, stating that these classes needed to be attacked and re-educated to understand the new culture of incorporating America. McMurtry's self-medicating character McCrae understood the theory if not the extended history of the word “savage”—that it would be passed from one class to the next of any group that threatened to disturb the orderly march of culture and economic civilization, and that each preceding class of civilizer would, in turn, become the savage. “Savage” would pass from the Indian, to the unruly cowboy, and then on to the settlers of each successive (economic) frontier, as the competition turned from space to wages.

In a book that Call and McCrae could (but were extremely unlikely to) have  read, The History of the United States, by George Bancroft (1866), it was said that the Indian was killed by civilization because he could not change “his habits.” Writing at the same time and for the same readers, Francis Parkman told his readers that the Indian is savage, but that the Indian is also part of a savage environment, though “he and his forest will perish forever” because he will be unable to learn the ways of civilization. Or, in the words of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who would let nothing get in the way of westward expansion—“civilization or extinction.”

Is this the Only use of the word “Rabdologia” in the History of Advertising?

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1710

Well, probably. The ad is by UNIVAC—fives years old at this point—and the lace-cuffed image pushing the virtues of the world's first commercial computer is that of John Napier's abacus, which he wrote about in 1617. The ivory calculating bones/rods method had been seen before in the history of the maths and calculation, but not published, and the idea employed in the elegant calculating device were very old, but Napier seems to have gotten to publish it first. (His work on logarithms is of tremendous importance, far more so than the abacus.)

The word “rabdologia” belongs to the title of Napier's significant book (where the title is the abstract): Rabdologia, or, The art of numbring by rods : whereby the tedious operations of multiplication, and division, and of extraction of roots, both square and cubick, are avoided, being for the most part performed by addition and subtraction : with many examples for the practice of the same ...

And I just want to say that since this ad was UNIVAC and it appeared in the November 1956 issue of the early computer journal, Computers and Automation, that the illustration got the “bones” correct. That is, the calculated product is correct.

The way these rods worked is as follows: in the illustration, the number rod on the extreme left (ranging from 2 to 9) is the multiplier; and the numbers at the top of the other rods represented the multiplicand. So we see that the lace-cuff is multiplying the number “76” (at the top of the two rods to the right) by, say, 7. Simply start writing the answer as follows: take the “2” from the 6 rod for your ending number; then add the numbers on the diagonal directly to the left of the two (4+9=13) and take the 3 and place it next to the two in the tens column, and carry the 1 to the next function, which would be 4+1=5. So the answer: 532.  The bones could do more than this, of course, but for right now I'd just like to point out that the ad folks got this right--plus its nice to see a bunch of numbers used in public display that actually mean something.  [See the Wolfram site for a nice explanation of how the bones work.)

John Napier's work in logarithms (published three years earlier in 1614) is the work for all time; the Rabdologia however would have been instantly appreciated by people like his father, who was master of the mint of Scotland. That said, I've read here and there that Napier considered his most significant published work to be his  A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593), in which he practiced a theo-chronometry based in the Book of Revelation that among other things in its 300-pages  predicted that the world would come to an end in 1688. Or 1700.  He evidently considered himself a Theologian first and foremost, and what bothered him most was Pope Clement VIII, who he considered to tbe the anti-Christ--and so complications arose.  Win two, lose one. 

 [I've just uploaded Tompkin's classic/first textbook on the digital computer (High Speed Computing), 1950, to the books for sale section of this blog, here.]

Living Aloft, 1920

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D.G. Lloyds certainly had an interesting--if not unique--vision of non-stop or uninterrupted cross-country aerial service, writing about Non-Stop Landing of the Future (Illustrated World, May 1920.)  And for Lloyds the future was soon, or tomorrow, because, frankly, the technology was there, if not the will.  Or the inclination.  Or the presence of a logic for creating such a service.

It seems to me that after floating along for days at 75 mph (or thereabouts?) that, after finally getting across the country, a traveler might want to simply disembark.  But this behemoth envisioned by Lloyds wouldn't have to actually stop--it was outfitted, designed to release/accept passengers while in flight.  Now of course take-offs and landings are the most dangerous parts of flying, and perhaps this is what Lloyds was trying to replace.  But to me it looks like he replaced one significant danger with, well, several other significant dangers. 

Look:  it just seems to me that any time you have a giant airplane synchronizing flying with an enormous dirigible to transfer exceptionally heavy cargo at an altitude of one mile that there is some substantial room for pilot(s) error.(s) and other freak whatevers.  Also, the issue of using dozens of men with shepherd hooks to grab a multi-ton object suspended from a moving platform to another moving platform seems to me, well problematic.  But it does make for a pretty picture.

The Doolittle Report on the State of Indians in U.S. Reservations, 1867

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1708

[This is one in a series of posts prompted by my current reading of Larry McMurtry's novel, Lonesome Dove.]

The Indian of the Plains had few options in the 1860s and 1870s. The buffalo were gone and hunting lands were being taken over by white settlers. With this dissipation of their food source came displacement resulting in inadequate food supply and (in many cases) starvation. The government offered reservation systems, but these in general flawed results of flawed and hurried thinking. In one attempt to determine the efficacy of the government's response to the growing crisis in caring for the removed Indian population, a committee under the titular leadership of  Senator James Rood Doolittle of Wisconsin (Republican turned Democrat, 1815-1897), created in January 1867 a report (The Condition of the Tribes, Report of the Joint Committee...) containing a wealth of information about the state of Indians on the reservations, drawing on the results of a questionnaire completed by 27 high-ranking respondents in Indian affairs, including eleven army officers, thirteen agents or superintendents, one teacher, one missionary, and one physician. It does not paint a pretty picture, even coming at the hands of a Congressional investigation.

Flying Tanks, 1930's-Style

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There wasn't much pretty in the physical outcome of this thinking--to construct "flying" tanks for quick maneuvers into battle situations--but I think that I like the thinking in it, especially as it seems that the aircraft-end of the tank was re-usable. Still, there was the whole "landing" part of the operation, which meant that (at this time, anyway) the tanks had to be placed and not parachuted to the ground, which also means that the armor would be relatively removed from the field of battle.  But this would be better than driving the things there, or hauling them all on a train  for quick transport.

[Source:  Popular Mechanics, vol 65, 1936.]

Also I guess I'm partial to the design of the tank--which I'm guessing was a fixed-position mobile canon--because it seems so strikingly modern. (Except for the tread and wheels part, which is the place where battles are won and lost, at least according to Heinz Guderian.)  But I like the design, which at first glance reminded me of the great T-34, the Russian workhorse of WWII, sort of, at least for its low-profile sensibility, but really more like the contemporary   The Russian Chyorny Oryol ("Black Eagle").  It really looks a lot more like the STUG assault gun, here:

[Source: combatreform.org, here; a truly excellent site.]

 

A Short Note on Clerk Maxwell's Reading

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We shall find that it is the peculiar function of physical science to lead  us . . . to the confines of the incomprehensible. —J. C. M., 1860

What is done by what I call myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me.—Comment made by Maxwell to the Reverend Professor F.J.E. Hort in 1879 when terminally ill.

[Both quotes found in Fred Seitz's article in  the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,  March 2001, "James Clerk Maxwell, (1833-1879), Member APS 1875".

This note may restrict itself to a small population of readers of this blog, but I'm always fascinated to come upon notices of the reading habits and library book-borrowing practices of significant people.  For example Herman Melville's reading has been particularly studied, with scholars hunting books that had once belonged to him and then dispersed at auction (some going to the Brooklyn Public Library), and there are records of his borrowing practices at the library as well.  Thomas Jefferson's reading habits is a well-known and fascinating study (though he did little borrowing, per se, what with there being few borrowing  libraries for him to visit, and then of course his library was much larger than anything else remotely close to him).

The library of Leonard is also well known--over the years via my bookstore I've had a number of people (usually involved in a classical study program, or St. John's folks, etc) looking to try to reproduce Leonardo's library.   In general, though, the full classification of the library of working scientists is not in general a known thing. (An interesting tour of some of the 116 books that comprise the library as described in the Codex Atlanticus and written around 1509 [left].  can be found at Museo Galileo, here.)

This is the main reason why my interest was piqued when I read this biographical treatment of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)  in the 27 October 1881 issue of Nature magazine. It mentions the while the great Maxwell was not-yet-great, studying at the University of Edinburgh (which he attended from 1847-1850, when he was just sixteen), that he used the library there extensive, and that the library has "records" of that reading.  The article quotes P.G.Tait from an 1879 article in that same journal (Nature, volume XXI, p 317)  that during the years at Edinburgh "without keeping the regular course for a degree", Maxwell "carried home for study..such books as Fourier's Theorie de la Chaleur, Monge's Geometrque Descriptive, Newton's Optiks, Willis' Principles of Mechanisms, Cauchy's Calcul Differentiel, Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, and others of a very high order.  These were read through, not merely consulted." 

I'd like to see the whole list, though as yet I've not been able to find it, and I've not yet been able to find the right person to speak with at Edinburgh to determine whether there is a full list of Maxwell's borrowing habits, or not.  It would be an interesting thing to see.  After all, the man did basically invent modern physics, and it was his portrait among the very few that were displayed in Einstein's house at 112 Mercer Street.

The original article on Maxwell along with a very fine steel engraved portrait is offered for sale in our blog bookstore, here.]

 

The Great Cowboy Race of 1893

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1707

• [This post continues a series on the cowboy and the American West, prompted by a re-reading of Larry McMurtry's novel, Lonesome Dove.]

I’ve not seen this picture of the nine cowboys who starred and started the Great Cowboy Race of 1893¹.  They gathered with a frenzy on the little town of Chadron, Nebraska (population 2,000, which doubled in size as the event’s opening grew near) determined to announce the “best “ cowboy, the first to cross the finish line near the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and shake the hand of Buffalo Bill Cody (well on his way to becoming a shell of what used-to-be).  The contest was supposed to take two weeks and average 50-75 miles a day, which is a lot to ask of a team of horses (and the riders).  So there was the expected shenanigans, and the man who "won” evidently helped plan the secret route, and someone else rode a trains with his horses for a bit, and so on. 

The result doesn’t matter--it seems an overall sad story, these guys winging their way to the windy City, a race to oblivion. (Some of the cowboy contestants were already about half-faded away into Limbo judging from the photo touch up that had to be done of their faces.)  

Ironically these cowboys were racing to the cosmopolitan host of the World’s Fair in which the historian Frederick Jackson Turner read his paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," —a significant theoretical piece announcing why Americans are so different from Europeans, and also that the American frontier had clearly, absolutely, been broken and installed in the gauzy national psyche.  The fate of the Cowboy had already been determined 20 years before with the introduction of refrigerator cars, railroad expansion and barbed wire--all of which cut the West into smaller and smaller parcels, until they restricted the Cowboy to its own Reservation. A crooked race to Chicago seemed to crystalize the Cowboy's tenuous grasp on  existence, depicted finally by the new(ish) half-tone photo process of Stephen Henry Horgan, making a half-portrait of empty circles, the image disappearing more and more the closer we look at it..

 

 

 It was just a sorry show for the cowboy all the way around, and a story that doesn’t need to be told here.  I did just want to publish this picture.  There’s a long and good story here http://www.thelongridersguild.com/chadron2.htm about the entire affair. 

I include the list of the riders, mainly for the names of their horses:

Emmett Abbott riding Outlaw and Joe Bush.

Joe Campbell riding his one horse, Boom-de-aye.

Davy Douglas riding Wide Awake and Monte Cristo.

Old Joe Gillespie riding Billy Mack and Billy Schafer.

George Jones riding Romeo and George.

Charlie Smith riding Dynamite and Red Wing.

Rattlesnake Pete Stephens riding General Grant and Nick.

Doc Middleton riding Geronimo and Bay Jimmie.

John Berry riding Poison and Sandy

.

 

Q: How Long Did the Classic Cowboy Age Last? A: Not very.

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1706

The Cowboy West, from Ned Buntline to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett

I imagine that there have been significantly more people who have played cowboys in literature, on radio, in movies, on the stage and on television than ever cowboyed in the West. This doesn’t include children who have played at “Cowboys and Indians” over the past 150 years. The time of the classic cowboy-in-all-his-glory was short—maybe two generation. Probably less.  And there weren't that many people to fill in those positions in that short period of time. 

Certainly there are cowboys to this day, but the cowboy of our mind’s eye—that iconic cowboy of the expanding, post-Manifest Destiny West—was a victim of the great rush to land privatization in the 1880s-1890s: barbed wire and other fences took the cowboy's place. By 1895 there were more cowboys riding fences than herding cattle. As Faulkner wrote on the "last individual" in The Fable (page 204), “the cowboy was exterminated from the earth by a tide of men with wire-stretchers and pockets full of staples…”  Of course Faulkner also saw the cowboy set among horse dung and "oxidizing cans" of sardines and tomatoes--a gemeinschaft/gesellschaft thing.

There are only 40 or 50 years that separate cowboys Texas Jack and Ned Buntline from the Chandler/Marlowe and Hammett/Spade modern detective West of San Francisco and Los Angeels, which is an extraordinary thing.  There weren't cowboys stretching back forty years before Texas Jack, and there weren't forty years that they stretched into the future from him, either.  The distance in time that the cowboy existed, all things considered, was short--from the Reconstruction free-roaming Texas cattle of 1866 to the appearance of barbed wire in the early 1870's to the refrigerated railroad car of just about the same time to the endless farming non-frontier of the 1890's, the cowboy enjoyed probably one full decade of not being molested by the present; the future caught up with them in  a quick hurry. 

Nutmeg and the Roundabout Creation of New York City

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1705

This may be the earliest image of "New York" as it was--that is "New York" instead of "New Amsterdam".  From what looks like an extraordinarily bad trade (with 350-year-long hindsight), the Dutch and the English came to terms at the end of the second Dutch-English War (1665-1667)  one result of which traded the small island of Run in the Banda Islands for another small (but not nearly so small as Run) island in North America:  Manhattan.

Manhattan didn't have one thing that Run and the Bandas had, though, and that one thing was enormously valuable--nutmeg trees.  From the nutmeg tree came nutmeg and mace; nutmeg was a spice and a supposed medicinal, and traded for more than the price of gold, allowing its producers a phenomenal return on their investment.

The Bandas were in a remote place removed from remote places in Indonesia.  In the island group--which rose from great depths of the ocean--the total land mass was about 180 km^2. Not much, except if they were the only places on Earth producing a commodity in sensational demand. The Dutch kept control of the islands for a long time, and kept their trade in the spices an abject money-maker.  They secured their uncontested control of the island group at the end of that second Anglo-Dutch War with the Treaty of Breda, one section of which had the Brits returning Run to the Dutch in exchange for Manhattan, which was at the time still occupied by the Duke of York, who was the brother of Charles II and who would become James II.  And thus the island became "New York".

Due to various reasons--not the least of which was the Dutch murder and export of the un-murdered indigenous population of the Bandas, who were the people who actually best knew how to care and administer the nutmeg trees--the great trade in the spices continued with diminishing effect in the Napoleonic Wars, an unpretty story of much bloodshed and enslavement.

{Image: "Fort Hollandois de l'Ile de Banda. - Hollands Fort op t' Eiland Banda."Original engraving  by J.V. Schley and printed aorund 1750 (39.5x25 cm) for  Antoine Prévost's Histoire générale des Voyages published in Paris between 1746 and 1770.  The name of the structure was actually Fort Nassau.  The original engraving is available from our blog bookstore, here.]