The eruption of Krakatoa--three very contemporary accounts from Nature, September-October 1883.
"The Java Upheaval", in: Nature, 6 September 1883, pp 443-4 in the weekly issue of pp 433-456. Also includes a half-page map of the area of the Krakatoa eruption, which occurred about two weeks earlier on 27 August. Original issue, removed from a larger bound volume. Very clean and fresh. 3 issues: $150
- "The most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history occurs on Krakatau (also called Krakatoa), a small, uninhabited volcanic island located west of Sumatra in Indonesia, on this day in 1883. Heard 3,000 miles away, the explosions threw five cubic miles of earth 50 miles into the air, created 120-foot tsunamis..."--Wikipedia
Also with:
- "Scientific Aspects of the Java Catastrophe", in Nature, 13 September 1883, pp 457-458 in the weekly issue of pp 457-480. Original issue, removed from a larger bound volume.
- "The Java Eruption" in Nature, 11 October 1883, page 577 in the issue of pp 561-584. Very nice copy, except that ther is a small half-inch x inch jagged piece missing in the bottom margin of p 579. Original issue, removed from a larger bound volume.
Also contained in this 6 September issue: Francis Galton's important paper in "visual kinsip" , "Arithmetic Notation of Kinship", a letter to the editor, p. 435. ("MANY writers have endeavoured to devise a simple method of describing the various forms of kinship, which, when expressed verbally, are cumbrous and puzzling in the highest degree. I suspect, however, that if we had always been as familiar with the binary system of arithmetic as we are with the decimal, that the facilities afforded by a numerical system of kinship would have been so obvious..." And from History of Anthropology blog: “Francis Galton was a major champion of the algebraic approach to representing genealogies, and solicited the help of the mathematician Alexander MacFarlane to that end— while Bronislaw Malinowski acidly criticized such abstract symbolism as a bloodless technique. These early attempts at mathematical systematicity foreshadow later 20th century computational analysis of kinship; Galton’s interest in binary systems in particular anticipates computer modeling of social and genetic networks. “-- (histanthro dot org)
Comments