Blindfolded Chess Players, Dropped Cats, and Channels that aren't Canals (1894)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Okay, here's another entry in an occasional series on antiquarian sci journal issues with multiple interesting bits in them. The example today is a slender (23pp) but crammed (1500 words per page) weekly issue of the venerable journal Nature (volume 51,  22 November 1894)--it initially raised my interest for a two-pager Francis Galton paper on synesthesia and super-abilities entitled  "Psychology of Mental Arithmeticians and Blindfold Chessplayers".  This irresistible paper shared space with a famous paper by another great 19th c polymath, Etienne Marey,  "Photographs of a Tumbling Cat", being a full page (four strips) of "chronophotography" of a cat being dropped upside-down showing the progress of how the cat rights itself in a short distance to landing on its feet. Marey (along with Edweard Muybridge) helped create and establish the motion picture--this paper came a dozen years or so after his groundbreaking work appeared in the 1880 and 1882 volumes of the Comptes Rendus...de l'Academie des Sciences (Paris). 

• [Source: this image is from an already-scanned version from an issue of the Comptes rendus but is identical to the top half of the Nature image.]

This Nature issue isn't done yet! There's also the article "Schiaparelli on Mars" (pp 87-90) including a full page of about 2000 words on "The Canals or Channels",  though the editor  points out in a footnote that "canale" in the original Italian version should be translated as "channel" or "strait", and not canal, a sentiment that didn't have enough impact in preventing the avalanche of the Martians-on-the-loose syndrome that was building steam. This was also right about the time that astronomers as a whole began to doubt the existence of Martian seas (first brought into the conversation by Secchi in 1858). 

Anyway, there it is, a wonderful Victorian super-issue of beautiful Nature. (Oh yes, there's also two book reviews of works on (Hamilton and Taits) quaternions.  

The full text is available at Hathi Trust:  https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c2754927&view=2up&seq=112