JF Ptak Science Books

Daily Dose from Dr. Odd: Outsider Logico-Economics and Free Steel Money

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   Daily Dose from Dr. Odd series

 

I have rather deep well of sublimely different publications, some of which strain the merits of acceptable thought and the boundaries of logic; and some are filled with their own outsider logic, occasionally acting as a Black Hole of interpretation.  Some of these publications have incredible titles that obscure some good thinking in its pages; sometimes the title is bland or discerning but hide a text that is anything but that and sometimes nonsensical or outre. And sometimes the works have incredible titles with contents to match. Such is the case with Frank Freemont Frazee's Russians You are Crazy about the Atomic Bomb and Secrecy; Americans, You are Crazy about the Atomic Bomb and Gold Money; Americans you are Crazy about this Bomb for Commercial use also about a Gold Standard Money System.  This work is certianly upper-drawer for publications with difficult titles. 

And as it turns out, the content does not disappoint, if by "disappoint" we mean "confuse"--I'm still uncertain about what the man was saying in his Fabius, New York publication.  But after much talk of god and Henry Ford and bimetalism and fire and "cost and storage" and Moses and barter and "epitomes and repetition with inflation" and the like, it looks like the author presents a monetary system based on anti-atomic-bomb fear and freedom from major enterprises, along with steel dollars, which "would be a sound valuable dollar, because made of enough rust-proof sttel to be worth a hundred cents internally".  He terms it "free steel...to be acutally produced competitively new dollars necessarily made of steel", though by "free" he means "competitively produced and accepted by us and our government as money, freely and without limit", which really doesn't have anything to do with "free".  And so it goes, on and on. 

Beautiful Techno-Art & Invention: Circular Adding Machines, 1850-1900

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Standard Corpse, Inc. & Deadpunk: Shaving, Cooling, Lifting, Electroplating, and Diapering the Dead

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1975  

The idea of creating an economy from a previously dead clientelle--the very after-market dead person--is relatively new. Once a middle class or lower working class with disposable income was created, celebrating the care of the dead was a paying option opened to the millions of families who were not the fastidious and celebratory wealthy.  Once the notion of having other people take care of the dearly departed became a part of the popular ritual of dealing with the dead, an entire new industry was born--spawning other related and associated industries for supplying the dead-care-givers with amenities and notions and necessities of a previously unthunk and unthinkable nature.  For example, the idea of needing to shave a corpse became an issue after it became fashionable to allow several days or more to pass between death and burial.  Beards and hair grow in death, so the people caring for the body and its display now were ordained an issue of economy in nultiple shavings of a corpse.  Now that may or may not have been an issue, but it was certainly presented as a possibility by the incredibly-named "Razorless Post- Mortem Shave Co."

• See also some of the other, associated posts on this blog like Incontestable Oddness: Inflatable Puffy Shirts for the Dead & Coffins with Retractable Legs and  A Monumentally Bad Idea: Screw Coffins, and others (just search "dead" and there will be a number of other posts).

 

{Many thanks to reader Max W for providing the information for the correct information for the citation of the above image--the magazine is Casket & Sunnyside for January 1912, and there are ample references to it in Charles Addams and Jessica Mitford.] The worry for the consideration of the cost of a shave (15 cents) for a dead person seems quite an inescapable weirdness and luxury. The weirdness of the name of the company nearly obscures it common nature--it isn't exactly the Acme Corpse Company, but it is close to it, and it addresses just one small bit of minuatiae of deadness in the vast sea of Dead, Inc.

The sellers of the razorless post-mortem shave equipment didn't receive a patent for their process--nor did anyone else, for that matter, at least so far as I can determine. 

Here are some further examples of Dead, Inc/DeadPunk patented death appliances:

Post-mortem skull examination facilitator:

Postmortem Underwear for the prevention of dead leakage and deodorization:

A Telephone Call From TomorrowLand and the Idea of Weighing Antique Surprise

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1973 

This ad appeared only 59 years ago--that's four generations in dog years, two human generations (or one for the more later-in-life crew, which is appealing as I knew a man whose grandfather was born in the 18th century), and 15 generations in managing data and communications. Perhaps more.  It is difficult to imagine the intense surprise that attended this ad showing a practical and popular adaptation of a communications breakthrough. 

The electromagnetic telegraph, which is arguably the first electrically-powered iteration of the internet, was in the works from the 1820's until it was nailed by Samuel Morse in 1837.  It was 40 years to the development of the Bell telephone (another dramatic example of an invention/technological idea/breakthrough that was "in the wind", a popular undiagnosed monumental meme, some decades in the making in the hands of Bell anbd Reiss and Meucci and Gray and even Edison). Two more decades (just past the turn of the century) until more-widespread wireless telegraphy, another two decades after that (1920's) for poular radio, and another two decades after that (post WWII/1950's) for popular television broadcating. 120 years between the patented invention of the Morse telegraph to 50 million Americans with televisions in 1955. 

The "telephone" of 2013 is as removed as the telephone of 1955 as the telephone of 1955 was removed from the electromagnetic telegraph--we're not meeting half-way in the meeting of improbable impossible worlds, of worlds of the future unimagined in the past.  That is what comes to mind when I see this add for the speaking telephone in 1954--the astounding, astonishing, speaking telephone, the phone that allowed you to not have the receiver to the ear, tht allowed you to do free-hand work and communicate at the same time.  It was an ambitious improvement, and as soon as the phone appeared, it became a standard of necessity if that necessity was within budget. 

It is the weight of surprise that is so abundant looking at pictures like this, giving us the opportunity to imagine the surprise elements of another time. It may well be that the new 1954 user of the speakerphone would have looked at the first telephone systems of 1894 as we look on that 1954 telephone today.  Probably not so, though, probably it was much more imaginable to have forseen the 1954 possibilities in 1894 than for 1954 to have seen in the same amount of time to 2013:  the technological pieces necessary for part of that imagination had not yet been invented, the science ahead of the scifi. 

The other part of this surprise element is that 1954 is well within living memory, and that this combinaiton of technology and physics and mathematics has grown so incredibly from the speakerphone to the massive changes in 2013--it is as surprising to imagine this as to imagine the same scenario for what ahppened a year before in biology:  it is difficult to grasp the  sweeping changes in that field from the identification of DNA in 1953  and how far those fields have come since. 

I think that if one could quantify this sort of "surprise" that the greatest amount of "Surprise Integers" (or whatever) ever recorded would have taken place within these past 50 or 60 years. Which makes me wonder--will people 59 years hence see the pictures of our fabulous accomplishments in 2013 as quaint reminders of how much things changed between 2013 and 2072?  Will those "Surprise Integers" be as great for that period of time as the ("our") preceding period with concomitant revolutions in thought?  My guess is "yes"--its just hard to imagine. 

An Early and Unsatisfying Projection of an Electron, 1920

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

People have been thinking along the lines of "electrons" for a long time, though the word is of relatively recent origin (1874), coined by the wonderfully-named Johnstone Stoney (1826-1911) after deducing that ther must be some type of electrical bit that vibrates within the atom that would generate light.  J.J. Thomson (1856-1940) stated later in 1897 in his paper "Cathode Rays" that evidence points to the fact that there must exist particles that are less massive than the hydrogen atom--he called these objects "corpuscles" but he was referring to what we now know as "electrons". The gorgeous "oil drop" experiment of 1910 by R.A.Millikan (1868-1953) determined the charge of the electron, and in the next year--1911--Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937, and one of the 20th century's greatest Kiwis) proposed the structure of the nuclear atom.  Then the major development of Louis de Broglie's (1892-1960) particle/wave duality, and so on into our near-present.  But in between the beautiful work of Millikan and Rutherford came this little beast, a very unsatisfyingly-assumed image of an atom and its swirling electrons. The image appeared in the December 1920 issue of Illustrated World and just seems so unfair to the cause of beauty that I thought to share it.   

The Marcel Duchamp of 18th Century France: Jean-Jacques Lequeu

JF Ptak Science Books 

 

Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757-1825), a French architect of fabulously distanced sight, produced this breathtaking image in 1792.  The Tomb of Lars Porsena, King of Etruria (the great Etruscan king, d. ca. 500 BCE ), is just one of hundreds of works by Lequeu, a re-discovered architectural genius who worked during the same era as other visionary architects such as Etienne Boullee (1728-1799), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806), Louis-Jean Desprez (1743-1803), Francois Barbier (1768-1826), Charles Bernard (1765-1818), Francois-Joseph Belanger (1747-1818), and others, though these guys are the most famous.  As a matter of fact, I think, almost all of these architects were re-discovered—Boullee, perhaps the most famous of the lot, was found again not in his buildings but in his visionary drawings that he deposited with the National Library.  But Lequeu—found again in the same way--it seems had to be rescued from an even greater obscurity than the others.  He tried to expose a unity that he saw in the world, some secret sort of unity, that he saw all around him, and which was unseen by everyone else in creation—at least until the 20th century.

Lequeu started out in a staid and brilliant way, a successful architect in his own right, and student of Scoufflot, designing ancient-inspiration buildings for the super rich.  But along came the Revolution and away went his career—he wound up a surveyor and a cartographer until his retirement in 1815, after which he enters social and historical oblivion, until he finally dies in total obscurity ten years later (or so, the date is unclear).  His post-revolutionary vision was as phenomenal as his success in selling his ideas were dismal.  Well, this is really a cheap shot—his imagination was shockingly large, enormous, his designs fantastic and beautiful, and completely unexpected, and they seemed to grow larger/loftier and more interesting as time wore away at him.

I think that as Lequeu was cleaved away, cell by cell falling through the floorboards of his single rented room, he reached further into time and deeper into space than almost any architect of that hundred-year period.   I also think that he was very well aware of his genius being seen as pure eccentricity—his dozen or so self portraits are among the most bizarre that I’ve ever seen (before 1900).

The odd thing in all of this is that in this brilliance there is still a reluctance to leave the Baroque, and this at a time when just about everyone else---beginning around 1750—was abandoning it.  So much of the work of the other visionaries mentioned earlier freed themselves of the Baroque—not entirely true, not true at all, for the unique creations of Lequeu, who (as in the Tomb of Lars Porsena) included more than a few bits of the practice even in his most incredible works. 

Somehow Lequeu saw the Lars Porsena tomb as a 650-foot tall (!!) structure, with impossible insight and filigree.  Extraordinary. (In the upper corners of the drawing of the tomb Lequeu included a design for a coin and also the plan of the structure.  The original tomb of Lars Porsena, according to Pliny the elder in his Natural History, XXXVI, 19, 91ff, was a 15 meter high rectangular base with 90 meter sides--completely destroyed in the wars in the first century. 

Perhaps his most sensational creation (and one which was devoid of all Baroque influence, as it turns out) was his Meeting Place at Bellevue.  It is almost impossible to believe that it is am 18th century creation—it is as harmonious (armonia) as it is asymmetrical.  It looks deeply 20th century, and looked as far into the future as it was deeply unknown.

 

A Census of "Prefer" in "Bartleby the Scrivener"

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I wonder if Bartleby is more a "structure of words" than was famously said of Molly Bloom?

The question just came up from Patti about what Bartleby's classic rejoinder was in Herman Melville's  (1819–1891) classic noirish "Bartleby, the Scrivener..." (1853)--was it "I would prefer not to" or "I prefer not to"?    

Instantly I thought the former, but then, well, I wasn't sure if it wasn't the later.

This is one of those instances that shows how magnificent the internet is:  I was able to conduct a quick census of Bartleby's own spoken variations on this phrase in like ten minutes.  And the results are conclusive but a little complicated.   

As  pure stand-alone phrases, "I would prefer not to" and "I prefer not" are used three times each.  However, there are variations on this theme, each used only one time by Bartleby:  "I would prefer not", "I prefer not to", "I would prefer not to go", "I would prefer not to make any change", "I would prefer not to be a little unreasonable", "I would prefer to be left alone", "I would prefer not to take a clerkship", "I would prefer to be doing something else", "I would prefer not to make any change at all", and then "I prefer to give no answer" and the fatal "I prefer not to dine". 

So.  When comparing the use of "would" in the "not" and "not to" and all of the other extensions on the theme, "would" does come out on top, in general, 12 times to 6. 

I have no preference for either phrase.

Breaking Bad in Half: a Book to Exhaust and Maim the Reader

JF Ptak Science Books

"Sometimes a book is just entirely bad, and sometimes it is entirely nothing. It is impossible for a book to be both very bad and very nothing. Impossible.  Except for this book, whose badness is exceeded only by its nothingness, and vice versa". --Oscar Wilde

And so into this black hole of imaged Wildeian description we go, into a very real-ish book.

I found a novel tonight, bought long ago and long ago mostly lost.  It was written by a doctor who worked in the District Hospital in Lima, Ohio, and written in 1934.  The Lima Hospital was the largest poured concrete structure in the world when it was built in 1915, and stayed so until the Pentagon was completed.  The hospital was established for the criminally insane, had 14"-thick walls, and reinforced steel bars laid into the walls that went "right down to bedrock". 

It was somewhere in there that this doctor wrote something that was really so toweringly bad that it escapes comprehension. I own the carbon copy of the unpublished work, which is typed on 14x8.5" sheets of paper, front and back, running 94 pages. It is a very crowded affair, with 90 lines of single-space typed lines, making the work about 115,000 words long. 

There wasn't enough space evidently for paragraphs, which gives the work a kind of insistent, casket-cramped cruelty.  To read it takes your breath away for its dullness--the book moves so weirdly and at the same time so very slowly that it doesn't move at all even while moving.

A few months ago I found the seven-foot-long scroll of the book's plan--a work of crowded magnificence of nothing and confusion, being very orderly at the same time.  It went to a friend of mine who created artwork around it, and as it happens made a very noticeable appearance in a very significant yearly show in NYC last week. I was stunned to find that there was actually a text to go with the scroll-outline--it emerged from the warehouse this week, so perhaps this too will find a very celebrated life as art as well. Certainly the book would go nowhere on its own as a book, though it stood a chance at surviving on the grounds of its considerble design weirdness, which is of a complexified beauty.

In the meantime, before all of the letters slide themselves off the page from sheer boredom and before the thing is resurrected as a magnificent artistic effort, I'll share some ianges of the extra-ordinary book of reversed brilliant badness. I've also culled a few imaginary descriptions of the book from writers known and not:

Potboiler scribbler:

"He couldn't speak.  He could barely see. Blinded by the flames ignited inside his eyeballs from the novel in his lap.  The words were like molten lead, sucked off the page by his eyes, forming a vacuum in his brain.  It was a bad book".

The first-time published novelist's approach:

"He couldn't speak the words of the thoughts in his head, because they and all of his breath were stolen by the magic of the complete badness of the book in his lap".

Gertrude Stein:

"The book was bad and bad, and bad was the book. Even the badness of the bad was bad, a whole new insight into being bad. It was the bad book by which bad books are called bad".

Ernset Hemingway:

"He didn't read the book so much as he looked through it.  It was easy--there was nothing there. As bad as it was, it could get no worse. So he shot it, and poured a drink".

 You might wonder what this book is about.  Me too.

Strychnine for Weak Women, 1920

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

 
Women, weak women, women with iron-poor blood, were sought by the manufacturers of Nuxated Iron, a small-bottled mottled mess that promised to increase vigor and iron levels, mostly through miracle.  It turns out that, according to various early studies, there was a very small amount of iron in the concoction, as well as small amounts of strychnine.  An E.O. Barker, M.D., reported to JAMA in 1923 that a small boy he attended who had taken 32 of these Nuxated Iron tablets died from strychnine poisoning.  There was no benefit from the iron, evidently; I wonder what the long term effects of small dosage ingestion of strychnine led to?  ["Weak Women" ad for Nuxated Iron from Illustrated World, November 1920/]

The Crucible of Weight and the Overweighted State of 1920 Geology

JF Ptak Science Books     Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

Grazing the issues for 1920 in the Popular Mechanics-esque popular-techno-magazine, Illustrated World, I found this superb near-Dadaist photograph.  The image is for a free weighing station, where people could come and have their stuff weighed, and weighed for free.  This no doubt came into being to help protect consumers from being under-weighted and over-charged for their weighed goods like butter and whatever, where their good grocer might have had a thumb or more on the scale or even used a crooked/salted scale when selling their goods.  What someone would do at the point of being told that their stuff was overweighed, I don't know--I mean these are people walking around in the street with things in their pockets or bags....its not exactly "evidence" showing up at the weigh station (staffed by "a woman") saying that the half-pound blob roll in their hand was sold them as a pound on their word of the purchaser probably wouldn't stand up in court.  In any event, I like the idea of the story of the world being told from the viewpoint of the person weighing stuff for free, and the people who came to them, and the stuff brought to be weighed.  Maybe there were weighing-in groupies; maybe there were old people who would just kick up a rock or something and take it to the weigh station for a bit of conversation and complaint on the over-weighted state of geology.  Maybe between 12:00 and 1:00 the weighers weighed stuff out-back, sotto voce, for fun.

If only there was a sign for "no waiting" this photo would be complete.

The Micro-Biological Beauty of the Plans of Catacombs

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1971

[Plan of a portion of the principal storey in the Poggio Gajella]

The plans of underground cities, of catacombs and cemeteries, share a certain biological appeal in their design with the plans of Medieval cities, or at least they seem so to me.  Removed from their context and placed in an undifferentiated environment, the plans look very much like biological structures, and art.  As maps of cities of the dead it is somewhat ironic that their geological chrysalis seem to indicate a biological structure.

And sometimes the images aren't so reminiscent of micro-structures as they are macro-structures, as in the case above. If you squint just a little and look at the Poggio Gajella you can visualize a cross section of the upper torso of a body, including an open mouth, with nasal cavity, throat, digestive system, and even intestines and egress routes--a picture of a person in the city of the dead.

The images below illustrating this ragged point are by Seroux d'Agincourt, (1730-1814), and appear in his  Histoire de l'art par les monuments, depuis sa décadence au IVme siècle jusqu' à son renouvellement au XVIme (Paris, 1825). The images illustrate the article "catacombs" from  the Encyclopedia Britannica, in the great/standard 11th edition, from Project Gutenberg:

Speaking for an Oppressed Minority, 1944: the Japanese in America, WWII

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1970

This pamphlet, 70,000 American Refugees, Made in U.S.A., by Truman  B. Douglass¹, was a sympathetic appeal to the deeply grave situation legislated to 140,000 Americans. They were Americans of Japanese descent, many of them U.S. citizen, who by Executive Order 9066  were ordered to stand down from their lives for the sake of national security and be removed to distant and remote internment camps beginning in May 1942, mostly for the duration of the war.  There weren't that many appeals for the primacy of the rights of these people at this time--the war for the United States was newly begun via the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor some months before--and the understanding was to protect the security of the country via the segregation and housing of what were seen to be the potential enemies in the existing Japanese-American population.

[This pamphlet is available for sale at our blog bookstore, here.]

 Franklin Roosevelt’s  February 1942 Executive Order 9066 (issued 19 February 1942) to imprison more than 100,000 American (70,000 of whom were U.S. citizens, including children) for the duration of the war--it was the legal bombshell that gave the War Department the authority to authorize the removal of the Japanese  to theoretically prevent those people from engaging in sub rosa and fifth column activities asd wartime terrorists fighting for Imperial Japan.

Given that this pamphlet was in it third edition just a few months past its first appearance in October 1944 says that there was at least some interest in this political/moral anti-Executive Order 9066² position, though how much of that is from a popular groundswell of support it is not possible to say. I imagine that the print runs of this pamphlet were rather small given that there are only ten copies of all three editions in the collections of libraries worldwide.  And since there are many collections that should have this pamphlet but don't--copies are found in California State University Northridge, California State Irvine, Yale, Wisconsin Historical, Cornell, Berkeley, Davis, Huntington, according to WorldCat--and no copies seem to pop into the rare book market very often at all, I suspect that not many copies were printed per edition, which means that there was a repetitive demand for the pamphlet that exhausted small print runs, which means maybe there were 2000 copies printed...not exactly "groundswell" support for what was an unpopular position).  Third edition, October 1944 (following the first edition of August 1944).Full text available via the California Digital Library, here. (The Library of Congress evidently doesn't have any copies any more--my copy had been in their collection, and it seems as though the back-up copy is no longer there).

The story of the removal and control of the American Japanese population is complex and deep and has been addressed in many places in print and online (and even on this blog several times), and it is not my intent to address that issue in this post.  I want to highlight what must have been a largely high-minority and mostly lonely voice of consideration and caution. 

Notes:

1.  The printing and publication information for the pamphlet:  "The Citizens Committee for Resettlement, 6501 Wydown Blvd., St. Louis 5, Missouri, 25 cents. May also be ordered separately at cost indicated. Reduced price in quantities. Community Preparation for Resettlement of Japanese Americans, published by The Committee on Resettlement of Japanese Americans, The Federal Council of Churches".  Truman B. Douglass Grinnell, Iowa, 1901-1969, was instrumental in the forming of the United Church of Christ in 1957.

2. Transcription courtesy of the History Matters  project:

Transcript of Executive Order 9066: Resulting in the Relocation of Japanese (1942) Executive Order No. 9066 The President Executive Order Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas Whereas the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities as defined in Section 4, Act of April 20, 1918, 40 Stat. 533, as amended by the Act of November 30, 1940, 54 Stat. 1220, and the Act of August 21, 1941, 55 Stat. 655 (U.S.C., Title 50, Sec. 104); Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary, in the judgment of the Secretary of War or the said Military Commander, and until other arrangements are made, to accomplish the purpose of this order. The designation of military areas in any region or locality shall supersede designations of prohibited and restricted areas by the Attorney General under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, and shall supersede the responsibility and authority of the Attorney General under the said Proclamations in respect of such prohibited and restricted areas. I hereby further authorize and direct the Secretary of War and the said Military Commanders to take such other steps as he or the appropriate Military Commander may deem advisable to enforce compliance with the restrictions applicable to each Military area hereinabove authorized to be designated, including the use of Federal troops and other Federal Agencies, with authority to accept assistance of state and local agencies. I hereby further authorize and direct all Executive Departments, independent establishments and other Federal Agencies, to assist the Secretary of War or the said Military Commanders in carrying out this Executive Order, including the furnishing of medical aid, hospitalization, food, clothing, transportation, use of land, shelter, and other supplies, equipment, utilities, facilities, and services. This order shall not be construed as modifying or limiting in any way the authority heretofore granted under Executive Order No. 8972, dated December 12, 1941, nor shall it be construed as limiting or modifying the duty and responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with respect to the investigation of alleged acts of sabotage or the duty and responsibility of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, prescribing regulations for the conduct and control of alien enemies, except as such duty and responsibility is superseded by the designation of military areas hereunder. Franklin D. Roosevelt The White House, February 19, 1942.

How Old are (Some) Scientific Words? Many Not Very.

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post 

It is interesting to think about the newness of old things, particularly English words that we have in use every day.  In this case I'm referring to words in the sciences--and not necessarily the words coming in the 20th century following the explosion of modernity beginning in 1895.  It is surprising sometimes to realize the relative newness of some terms, like, for example, "scientist". The word "science" is very old and very old in English, but the word "scientist" is coined only in 1833. It is surprising to think of the modernity of some of the words when by their constant use they seem as though they must be ancient, but of course are not so.

Here's a quick lising of some interesting candidates, everyday words with a not-very-old lineage, their dates taken from first-usages identified by the Oxford English Dictionary:

Altimeter, 1847; Ampere, 1861; Aphasia, 1867; Bacterium, 1847; Biology, 1802; Cambrian , 1836; Centigrade, 1812; Chlorophyll, 1810; Chromosome, 1890; Claustrophobia, 1879; Cosmology, 1730; Cretacious, 1832; Diatom, 1854; Electron, 1891; Embryology; 1859; Ethnology, 1842; Gastritis, 1806; Gynaecology, 1847; Histology, 1847; Joule, 1882; Jurassic, 1833; Kleptomania, 1830; Morphology, 1830; Ohm, 1861; Palaeobotany, 1872; Palaeography, 1822; Palaeolithic, 1865; Palaeontology, 1838; Petrology, 1811; Pilocene, 1833; Scientist, 1833; Symbiosis, 1877; Synthesis, 1804; Taxonomy, 1828; Triassic , 1841; Voltmeter, 1882; Watt, 1882.

The Astronomy of the Great Flood

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This lovely if not very convincing argument was produced and directed by "a German engineer, Herr" (Enrst) Horgiger, of Munich.  He attempted to wed belief and mythology and astronomy, providing a worlds-in-collision explanation for the Flood.  From the caption to the drawing I do not know if it is The Flood of Noah, as it occurs in the book of Genesis in the Bible, or the flood of Apollodorus, or Hygenius, or of the Eridu Genesis (some 2000 years or so before Genesis) or the flood of Atrachasis (of about 1650 bce) or the flood of Gilgamesh (of about 1100 bce), or if it is the flood of Emhil, or Zeus, or Allah, or Yahweh, or the other 150+ great floods of mythology categorized by James Frazer in his astounding but unreadable books. But it is a flood, and his reason is that a wandering body in space came into temporary orbit around the Earth with a resulting gravitational soup that caused the waters to rise up after which the flood occurred and the orbiting sphere to break apart.

As I said, it is a pretty picture, with a nice deep blue background that my scanner won't capture.

Source:  The Illustrated London News, 21 January 1925, "A New Theory of the Flood: How it Might Repeat Itself".

The Non-Anatomy of Tears, the "Excrementrious Humiditie of the Brayne"

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1969 

    

"Tears are the trails of plenty and of want, both of which are sometimes the same."--Not from Ambrose Bierce's Devils Dictionary.

 

"Let one rejoice in smiles, the other in tears;

Let the same labour or pain be the office of both...."-Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

 

"

O fools, O madmen, he exclaims, insana studia, insani labores, &c. Mad endeavours, mad actions, mad, mad, mad. O saeclum insipiens et infacetum, a giddy-headed age. Heraclitus the philosopher, out of a serious meditation of men's lives, fell a weeping, and with continual tears bewailed their misery, madness, and folly. Democritus on the other side, burst out a laughing, their whole life seemed to him so ridiculous, and he was so far carried with this ironical passion, that the citizens of Abdera took him to be mad, and sent therefore ambassadors to Hippocrates..."

 Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, page 224.

 

The image above is a detail from one of the sixteen engraved images found in Ame Bourdon's fabulous anatomy,  Nouvelles tables anatomiques (printed in Cambray and also in Pair by Laurens d'Houry in 1678). (A good description is found for this work, as well as the rest of the illustrations in their entirety, from the National Library of Medicine, the source for this diversion). 

I'm not sure why the subject here is crying; and I'm also feeling that I've never seen an example of a crying figure in any antiquarian anatomy book before this one.  I remember from another;project that eyelids and tears were of some considerable interest later on, finding no less than 25 books dedicated to the subject printed in the period 1825-1895 or thereabouts.  (That bit of research was undertaken doing some background on a 19th c aboriginal torture of staking a victim to the high desert ground and cutting their eyelids off so that the sun would cause blindness from constant exposure).  And I don't know when the eyelid is given its first anatomical drawing/consideration, displayed on its own and flattened out for inspection.  And it would be interesting to know when the first extended modern scientific appraisal of tears was made. On the offhand I thought that Burton in his absolutely magnificent and very difficult book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, might have something to say about it, but it doesn't--as a matter of point, it seems that the word 'tear/s" appears less than ten times through the whole work, which I find a little surprising. 

No matter.  I just wanted this to be a quick diversion to consider if Bourdon really did intend to include tears for his model, or if the engraver took a little liberty and added some emotional elements to the image.  It is certainly plausible, as human anatomical specimens had been presented in any number of different poses and posed with different items and in tremendously wide spectrum of emotion expression that crying would be but a small step to take for exhibition. There also seems to be perhaps no connection to any sort of physiology of crying--the subject just looks like someone with tears on their face, unassociated with any sort of muscle movement around the eyes, or glands or ducts or whatever. (Charles Darwin described a usual contraction of the muscles around the eyes when the subject cried, as he published in his Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)). The tears may just be Baroque ornamentation.

On the other hand, there may be a tenuous connection in the engraving to the tears and the sectioned brain. It wasn't too much earlier in the history of crying that it was thought that tears were a cathartic-purgative product of the brain, which is an idea that goes back to Hippocrates and his heirs and which held sway for more than a thousand years. 

As Tom Lutz writes in his wonder Crying, the Natural & Cultural History of Tears (W.W. Norton, 1999) the English physician Timothy Bright poetically described tears in 1586 as "the excrementious humiditie of the brayne" (page 73), which were the "brai's thinnest and most liquide exrement".  The idea of catharsis began to wane by the 17th century, and the four humours were identified more as a belief system than a medical reality, but the idea of the cathartic brain and its release of tears may have hung on to be included in Bordon. 

 But it does seem rare, crying does, in the annals of the history of anatomy--much less so in the history of art books that explore emotions and facial expression (like Chalres Le Brun (1616-1690) in his Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1698)). At the end of the day, these tears may well just have been a sly way of the engraver to exercise a little creativity.