An Echidna Bibliography, part 1 of 2

Echidna-related references

This is a list of the works that I (at the very least) looked at and found interesting, and/or thought readers would find interesting, while I was writing two works on echidnas, one for adults who know their science, and one for general and younger readers. Two dated publications got me started, the works of Calaby and Whitley, both listed here. The rest of the sources came from me following my nose, and here, I bring C & W up to date.

Why are the references on the web? Well, in June 2022, I realised that this list was 15% of the general work and 8% of the serious work, a bit of an overload, so I wanted to cut this portion out. On the other hand readers might really want to track some of the references down, so I decided to put them up on the web as a PDF, and also as two blog entries, of which this is the first. While I feel no intimations of mortality, I am approaching advanced middle age, and I want this list to be available after I tumble off my perch.

Each of the sources will be identified in the book(s) when I find a publisher or publishers. I will keep you posted on any progress there.

You can find part 2 here. You can find the PDF version here.

Mainstream sources

Abensperg-Traun, M. and De Boer, E.S. The foraging ecology of a termite- and ant-eating specialist, the echidna Tachyglossus aculeatus. Journal of Zoology, London 226 (1992): 243–257.

Abensperg-Traun. M. Blindness and survival in free-ranging echidnas, Tachyglossus aculeatus. Australian Mammalogy 17 (1994): 11 7– 119.

Abensperg-Traun, M.; Dickman, C.R. and De Boer, E.S. Patch use and prey defence in a mammalian myrmecophage, the echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) a test of foraging efficiency in captive and free-ranging animals. Journal of Zoology, London 225 (1991): 481–493.

Abensperg-Traun, M. Food preference of the echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus in the wheatbelt of Western Australia. Australian Mammalogy 11 (1988): 117 – 123.

Abensperg-Traun, M. Survival strategies of the echidna Tachyglossus aculeatus. Biological Conservation 58 (1991): 317–328.

Abensperg-Traun. A study of home range, movements and shelter use in adult and juvenile echidnas, Tachyglossus aculeatus, in Western Australian wheatbelt reserves. Australian Mammalogy 14 (1991): 13–21.

Akerman K. and Willing T. An ancient rock painting of a marsupial lion, Thylacaleo carnifex, from the Kimberley, Western Australia. Antiquity 83 (2009).

Akerman K. Interaction between humans and megafauna depicted in Australian rock art’ Antiquity 83 (2009).

Alam, Shayer Mahmood Ibney; Stephen D. Sarre; Dianne Gleeson; Arthur Georges and Tariq Ezaz. Did Lizards Follow Unique Pathways in Sex Chromosome Evolution? Genes, 9 (2018), 239;.

Alexander, W. B., Alexander Collie, Journal and proceedings of the Royal Society of Western Australia. 1 (1916), 139; 3 (1918), 37.

Allison, T. and Goff, W.R. Electrophysiological studies of the echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus III.– sensory and interhemispheric evoked responses, Archives Italiennes de Biologie 110 (1972): 195–216.

Allison, T. and Van Twyver, H. Electrophysiological studies of the echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus II.– dormancy and hibernation. Arch. ital. Biol. 110 (1972): 185–94.

Allison, T.; Van Twyver, H. and Goff, W.R. Electrophysiological studies of the echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus I.–waking and sleep. Archives Italiennes de Biologie 110 (1972): 145–84.

Anonymous, A Visit to Australia and Its Gold Regions. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1853.

Anonymous. ‘The Platypus, Caution to Bathers’. Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, 18 March 1869, 2.

Anonymous. ‘The Acclimatisation Dinner’, Argus, 16 October 1861, 5.

Anonymous. London Letter. Science, VII (176) (1886), 546.

Anonymous. Proceedings of the Section of Biology. Science, IV (84) (1884), 261.

Anonymous. Selected publications involving Riversleigh fossils and their significance. Riversleigh Notes No. 5: 4 unnumbered pages. 1989

Anonymous. Selected publications involving Riversleigh fossils and their significance. Additions to the list published in Riversleigh Notes Issue 5, April 1989. Riversleigh Notes No 7: 3, 1989.

Archer, M.; Godthelp, H.; Hand, S.J. and Megirian, D. Fossil mammals of Riversleigh, northwestern Queensland: Preliminary overview of biostratigraphy, correlation and environmental change. Australian Zoologist 25 (1989): 29–65.

Archer, M.; Hand. S. and Godthelp, H. Ghosts from green gardens. Preliminary hypotheses about changes in Australia’s rainforest mammals through time based on evidence from Riversleigh. Riversleigh Notes No 7: 4–7, 1989.

Archer, M. Mammals eggstraordinaire. Natural History 103 (1994): 48–49.

Ashwell, Ken W. S., Development of the Olfactory Pathways in Platypus and Echidna. Brain Behavior and Evolution, 79 (2012) 45 – 56.

Ashwell, Ken W.S.; Craig D. Hardman and Peter Giere. Distinct Development of Peripheral Trigeminal Pathways in the Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) and Short-Beaked Echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus). Brain Behavior and Evolution, 79 (2012) 113 – 127.

Aubrey, John. Brief Lives. London: Folio Society, 1975.

Augee, M. L., and E. H. M. Ealey. 1968. Torpor in the Echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus. Journal of Mammalogy, 49 (1968), 446-454.

Augee, M.L. and Gooden, B.A. Evidence for electroreception from field studies of the echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus. Pp. 211–215 in Augee, M.L. (ed.) Platypus and echidnas. Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales: Mosman, N.S.W., 1992.

Augee, M.L. and Gooden, B.A. Monotreme hibernation — some afterthoughts. Pp. 174 - 176 in Augee, M.L. (ed.) Platypus and echidnas. Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales: Mosman, N.S.W., 1992.

Augee, Michael; Brett Gooden & Anne Musser. Echidna: extraordinary egg-laying mammal. Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing, 2006.

Australian Geographic. ‘Have you ever seen an echidna’s penis?’. 28 April, 2022, https://www.facebook.com/ausgeo/posts/10158869200833339 (worth reading for the comments).

Balter, Michael. 2014. ‘Dinosaur metabolism neither hot nor cold, but just right’. Science, New Series, 344 (6189) (13 June 2014), 1216-1217.

Banfield, J.F. Tick bites in man. Medical Journal of Australia 53rd year, 2(13) (1966): 660 – 1.

Banks, Banks Papers, 1768 — 1771. Held at the State Library of NSW.

Banks, Joseph, The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks, 1768-1771. Prepared from the manuscript The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph.

Barker, J. M.; C. E. Cooper, P. C. Withers, and S. C. Nicol.. Reexamining echidna physiology: the big picture for Tachyglossus aculeatus acanthion. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology 89 (2016): 169–181.

Barrington George, The history of New South Wales, including Botany Bay, Port Jackson, Parramatta, Sydney, and all its dependancies, from the original discovery of the island: with the customs and manners of the natives: and an account of the English colony from its foundation to the present time. London: M. Jones, 1802.

Barrow L.; Parr C. L. and Kohen J. L. Biogeography and diversity of ants in Purnululu (Bungle Bungle) National Park and Conservation Reserve, Western Australia. Australian Journal of Zoology 54 (2006): 123–136.

Baudin, Voyage de Découvertes aux Terres Australes. Paris: De l’Imprimerie Impériale, 1807, Vol.1., 1807.

Bednarik, Robert G. Megafauna Depictions in Australian Rock Art. Rock Art Research 30 (2) (2013), 197 – 215.

Bennett, George, Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australasia, London, John Van Voorst, 1860.

Beveridge, I. Echidnotaenia tachyglossi (Johnston) gen. et comb. nov. (Anoplocephalata: Linstowiidae) from the monotreme Tachyglossus aculeatus Shaw in Australia. Journal of Helminthology 54 (1980): 129–134.

Beveridge, I. The genus Linstowia Zschokke, 1899 (Cestoda: Anoplocephalidae) in Australian mammals with the description of a new species, L. macrouri. Systematic Parasitology 5 (1983): 291–304.

Bick, Y.A.E. and Jackson, W.D. A mammalian X–O sex–chromosome system in the monotreme Tachyglossus aculeatus determined from leucocyte cultures – and testicular preparations. American Naturalist 101 (1967): 79–86.

Bick, Y.A.E. and W.D. Jackson. Karyotype of the monotremes Ornithorhynchus anatinus (platypus) and Tachyglossus aculeatus (echidna). Nature 1967, 214 (1967): 600–601.

Bick, Y.A.E.; Murtagh, C. and Sharman, G.B. The chromosomes of an egg-laying mammal Tachyglossus aculeatus (the echidna). Cytobios 7 (1973): 233–43.

Binetruy, Florian; Stéphane Garnier; Nathalie Boulanger; Émilie Talagrand-Reboul; Etienne Loire; Bruno Faivre; Valérie Noël; Marie Buysse and Olivier Duron. A novel Borrelia species, intermediate between Lyme disease and relapsing fever groups, in neotropical passerine-associated ticks. Nature Scientific Reports, published online 30 June 2020.

Bourliere, F. The Lesueur pictures of Australian mammals 1801–1803. Wildlife Australia 22 (1985): 8–11.

Branagan, David. Richard Owen in the Antipodean context [A review]. Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales 125 (1992): 95–102.

Brandl, E. J. Australian Aboriginal paintings in western and central Arnhem Land. Australian Aboriginal Studies No. 52. (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies), 1973.

Brattstrom, B.H. Social behaviour of the echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus: an energetic and evolutionary perspective. Australian Zoologist 20 (1978): 255–56.

Brattstrom, Bayard H. Social and Maintenance Behavior of the Echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus. Journal of Mammalogy, 54(1973), 50-70.

Broom, R. Note on the period of gestation in echidna. Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales 10 (1895): 576–577.

Brunner, H. and Coman, B.J. The identification of mammalian hair. Melbourne: Inkata Press, 1974.

Brunner, H. and Wallis, L.R. Roles of predator scat analysis in Australian mammal research. Victorian Naturalist 103 (1986): 79-87.

Buchmann, O. L. K. and J. Rhodes. Instrumental learning in echidnas. Australian Zoologist 20 (1978):131–145.

Burke, Darren; Cherice Cieplucha; John Cass;·Fiona Russell and Gary Fry. Win-shift and win-stay learning in the short-beaked echidna

Burton, Adrian. The echidna enigma. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 14 (3) (April 2016), 172.

Calaby, J. H. Calaby’s Monotreme Literature.

Caldwell, W. H., The Embryology of Monotremata and Marsupialia. Part I. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 178, (1887) 463 – 486.

Camens, A. B. Were early tertiary monotremes really all aquatic? Inferring paleobiology and phylogeny from a depauperate fossil record. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107 (2010).

Carpenter, William, and Abbot, Gorham D. Scripture Natural History: Containing a Descriptive Account of the Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Insects, Reptiles Serpents, Plants, Trees, Minerals, Gems, and Precious Stones Mentioned in the Bible. Boston:, Lincoln, Edmands & Co., 1833.

Carrick, F.N. and Hughes, R.L. Reproduction in male monotremes. Australian Zoologist 20 (1978): 211–31.

Chaloupka, G. and Murray, P. (1986). Dreamtime or reality? reply to Lewis. Archaeology in Oceania 21: 145-l47

Chessell, Gwen, Alexander Collie: colonial surgeon, naturalist and explorer, Crawley, W.A.: UWA Press, 2008.

Collie, Alexander. On some particulars connected with the Natural History of the Kangaroo. The Zoological Journal, 5, 238–241.

Collignon, Peter J.; Gary D Lum and Jennifer MB Robson. Does Lyme disease exist in Australia? Med J Aust 2016; 205 (9): 413-417.

Collins, David. An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol 1. London: Cadell and Davies, 1798.

Collins, David. An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol 2. London: Cadell and Davies, 1802.

Coman, B.J. Helminth parasites of the dingo and feral dog in Victoria with some notes on the diet of the host. Australian Veterinary Journal 48 (1972): 456–461.

Comettant, Oscar, In the Land of Kangaroos and Gold Mines, translated by Judith Armstrong. Adelaide: Rigby, 1980, originally published as Au Pays des Kangourous et des Mines d’or. Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1890.

Coote, Anne. “Pray Write Me a List of Species... That Will Pay Me Best”, The Business and Culture of Natural History Collecting in South Wales. History Australia 11(2014) 80 – 100.

Corbett, L.K. Dingoes, feral dogs and crossbreeds in Victoria. Australian Mammalogy 1 (1974): 303 – 04.

Dakin, W. J. General description of the Coral Islands forming the Houtman Abrolhos Group. The Journal of the Linnean Society, Vol XXXIV, 1919, 127 – 180.

Dampier, William, A Voyage to New Holland and the Adjacent Islands, 1699-1700. London: James Knapton, 1703.

Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, London: John Murray, 1875.

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. London: John Murray, 1859.

Darwin, Erasmus. Zoonomia. London: J. Johnson, 1796.

Dawson, Terence John. Monotremes and Marsupials: the Other Animals. London: Edward Arnold, 1983.

Debenham, John J.; Robert Johnson; Larry Vogelnest; David N. Phalen; Richard Whittington and Jan Šlapeta. Year-long presence of Eimeria echidnae and absence of Eimeria tachyglossi in captive short-beaked echidnas (Tachyglossus aculeatus). The Journal of Parasitology, 98 (30) 543 – 549.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853.

Domrow, R. New records and species of Austromalayan laelapid mites. Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales 88 (1963): 199–220.

Doran, G. A. The lingual musculature of the echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus. Anatomischer Anzeiger. 133 (1973): 468–76.

Dyce, A. L. An observation of mosquitoes biting an echidna. Journal of the Entomological Society of Queensland 3: 83, 1964

Eldridge, David John, Dig this: a tiny echidna moves 8 trailer-loads of soil a year, helping tackle climate change. The Conversation, 5 March 2021, https://theconversation.com/dig-this-a-tiny-echidna-moves-8-trailer-loads-of-soil-a-year-helping-tackle-climate-change-155947

Embling, Thomas. ‘The Acclimatisation Dinner’, Argus, 21 October 1861, 7.

Fedak, M.A. and Seeherman, H.J. Reappraisal of energetics of locomotion shows identical cost in bipeds and quadrupeds including ostrich and horse. Nature 282 (1979): 713 – 16.

Fenelon J. C.; McElrea C.; Shaw G.; Evans A.R.; Pyne M.; Johnston S.D. and Renfree M.B. The Unique Penile Morphology of the Short-Beaked Echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus. Sexual Development, pp. 10 DOI: 10.1159/000515145.

Fenner, P. J.; Williamson, J.A. and Myers, D. Platypus envenomation – a painful learning experience. Medical Journal of Australia 157 (1992): 829–832.

Field, Barron, Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales. London: John Murray, 1825.

Flannery T. F. and C. P. Groves. A revision of the genus Zaglossus with description of new species and subspecies. Mammalia 62 (1998): 367–396.

Flannery, Tim, and Luigi Boitani. Europe: A Natural History. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2018.

Flannery, Timothy F.; Michael Archer; Thomas H. Rich and Robert Jones. A new family of monotremes from the Cretaceous of Australia. Nature 377 (1995), 417 – 419.

Flannery, Timothy F.; Thomas H. Rich; Patricia Vickers-Rich; Tim Ziegler; E. Grace Veatch and Kristofer M. Helgen. A review of monotreme (Monotremata) evolution. Alcheringa: 2022, Ahead-Of-Print, 1-18, https://doi.org/10.1080/03115518.2022.2025900.

Folger, Tim. ‘A platypus in Patagonia’. Discover, 14 (1993), 66.

Ford, Sir Edward. Some Early Australian Medical Publications. Medical History, 16 (1972), 205 – 225.

Gardiner, B.G. Tetrapod classification. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London 74 (1982): 207–32.

Gates, G.R. Vision in the monotreme echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus), Australian Zoologist 20 (1978): 147–69.

Geiser, Fritz; Clare Stawski; Chris B. Wacker and Julia Nowack. Phoenix from the Ashes: Fire, Torpor and the evolution of mammalian endothermy. Frontiers in Physiology, published 2 November 2017.

Geoffroy, Étienne. [Collection of articles extracted from Annales des sciences naturelles], France?: s.n. 1829.

Giles, Ernest, Australia Twice Traversed The Romance of Exploration, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1889.

Gould, John, Gould’s Australia: selections from Mammals of Australia, vols I, II and III. South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1984.

Grady, John M.; Brian J. Enquist; Eva Dettweiler-Robinson; Natalie A. Wright and Felisa A. Smith. 2014. ‘Evidence for mesothermy in dinosaurs. Science, New Series, 344 (2014 no. 6189), 1268-1272.

Graves, J.A.M. and Watson, J.M. Mammalian sex chromosomes – evolution of organization and function. Chromosoma 101 (1991): 63–68.

Graves, J.A.M. How Australian mammals contributed to our understanding of sex determination and sex chromosomes. Australian Journal of Zoology, 64(2016):267-276.

Graves, J.A.M. Organisation and evolution of the mammalian genome: comparative cytology and gene mapping in marsupials and monotremes. Pp. 327–329 in Graves, J.A.M. Hope, R.M. and Cooper, D.W. (eds) Mammals from pouches and eggs: genetics, breeding and evolution of marsupials and monotremes. Australian Journal of Zoology 37(2–4). CSIRO: Melbourne, 1990.

Graves, J.A.M. Did sex drive mammal evolution? How one species can become two. The Conversation, 26 July 2016, https://theconversation.com/did-sex-drive-mammal-evolution-how-one-species-can-become-two-62535

Graves, J.A.M. Sex chromosome function in marsupials and monotremes. Pp. 409–410 in Graves, J.A.M. Hope, R.M. and Cooper, D.W. (eds) Mammals from pouches and eggs: genetics, breeding and evolution of marsupials and monotremes. Australian Journal of Zoology 37(2–4). CSIRO: Melbourne, 1990.

Graves, J.A.M. The evolution of mammalian sex chromosomes and dosage compensation: clues from marsupials and monotremes. Trends in Genetics 3 (1987): 252–256.

Green, R.H. The ectoparasitic mites of Tasmanian vertebrate animals. Records of the Queen Victoria Museum, Launceston No 98: 1–25, 1989.

Green, R.H. The fauna of Tasmania: mammals. Potoroo Publishing: Launceston, Tasmania, 1993.

Gregory, J.E.; Iggo, A.; McIntyre, A.K. and Proske, U. Responses of electroreceptors in the snout of the echidna. Journal of Physiology 414 (1989): 521–538.

Griffiths, M.; Kristo, F.; Green, B.; Fogerty, A.C. and Newgrain, K. Observations on free-living lactating echidnas, Tachyglossus aculeatus and sucklings. Australian Mammalogy 11 (1988): 135–143.

Griffiths, M. Tachyglossidae. Pp 407–435 in Walton, D.W. and Richardson, B.J. (eds) Fauna of Australia Vol. IB Mammalia. Australian Government Publishing Service: Canberra, 1989.

Griffiths, M. The biology of the monotremes. Academic Press: New York, 1978.

Griffiths, M.; Wells, R.T.; Barrie, D.J. Observations on the skulls of fossil and extant echidnas. Australian Mammalogy. 14 (1991): 87–101

Griffiths, M.E. The life of the echidna. Australian Natural History 17 (1972), 222–2.

Griffiths, Mervyn; P.J.M. Greenslade, L.; Miller and J.A. Kerle, The diet of the spiny anteater Tachyglossus aculeatus acanthion in tropical habitats in the Northern Territory. The Beagle, Records of the Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Sciences. 1990, 7.

Groves CP. Order Monotremata. In: Wilson D. E., Reeder D. R. (eds) Mammal species of the world: a taxonomic and geographic reference, Third edition. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Gruber, J. W. Does the platypus lay eggs? The history of an event in science. Archives of Natural History 18 (1991): 51–123.

Gruber, J.W. What is it? The echidna comes to England. Archives of Natural History 11 (1982): 1–15.

Haacke, W. On the marsupial ovum, the mammary pouch and the male milk gland in Echidna hystrix. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 38 (1885): 72–74,

Harris, G. P. Description of two new species of Didelphis from Van Diemen’s land; communicated by Sir Joseph Banks, read April 21, 1807. London: R. Taylor, 1808.

Hawke, Tahneal; Gilad Bino and Richard T. Kingsford. A silent demise: Historical insights into population changes of the iconic platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus). Global Ecology and Conservation, (20), October 2019, e00720.

Hawkesworth. John. An account of the voyages undertaken by the order of His present Majesty, for making discoveries in the southern hemisphere… Dublin: Printed for A. Leathley, 1773.

Heckenberg, Kerry. Thomas Mitchell and the Wellington Caves: The Relationship among Science, Religion, and Aesthetics in Early-Nineteenth-Century Australia. Victorian Literature and Culture, 33(1) (2005), 203 – 218.

Helgen, Kristofer M; Roberto Portela Miguez; Kohen, James; Helgen, Lauren. Twentieth century occurrence of the Long-Beaked Echidna Zaglossus bruijnii in the Kimberley region of Australia. ZooKeys; 255, (2012): 103-132.

Higashiyama, Hiroki; Daisuke Koyabu; Tatsuya Hirasawa; Ingmar Werneburg; Shigeru Kuratani; and Hiroki Kurihara. Mammalian face as an evolutionary novelty. PNAS, October 29, 2021, 118 (44) e2111876118 | https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2111876118

Hill, J. P. (James Peter), The early development of the marsupialia, with special reference to the native cat (Dasyurus viverrinus). Reprinted from The Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, 56(1910).

Hill, J.P. & de Beer, G.R. The development of the Monotremata. VII. The development and structure of the egg-tooth and caruncle in the monotremes and on the occurrence of vestiges of the egg-tooth and caruncle in marsupials. Transactions of the Zoological Society of London 26 (1949): 503–544,

Hill, J.P. & Gatenby, J.B. The corpus luteum of the Monotremata. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 47 (1926): 715–763,

Hill, J.P. (1910). Contributions to the embryology of the Marsupialia. IV. The early development of the Marsupialia with special reference to the native cat (Dasyurus viverrinus). Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 56: 1–134.

Hill, J.P. Contributions to the embryology of the Marsupialia. IV. The early development of the Marsupialia with special reference to the native cat (Dasyurus viverrinus). Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 56 (1910): 1–134,

Hill, J.P. The development of the Monotremata. II. The structure of the egg-shell. Transactions of the Zoological Society of London 21 (1933): 443–476.

Hobbins, Peter. A Spur to Atavism: Placing Platypus Poison. Journal of the History of Biology , 48(4) (Winter 2015) 499-537.

Home, E. A description of the anatomy of the Ornithorhynchus paradoxus. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 1802: 67–84.

Home, E. Description of the anatomy of the Ornithorhynchus hystrix. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 1802: 348–364.

Home, Everard An Account of some Peculiarities in the anatomical structure of the Wombat, with Observations on the female Organs of Generation. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, 98 (1808).

You can find part 2 here.

Planning for failure in order to succeed, 2

 The phrase "it seemed like a good idea at the time" seems to have no obvious source, but it is widely known. Britons regard it as a catch phrase of the Royal Marines, in north America, it is something heard from rednecks after a non-fatal attempt at breaking into the Darwin Awards. In Australia, it is known colloquially as "the streaker's defence", but streaking was far from my mind when I used the phrase on a street corner in Le Havre, one wet, miserable, cold and windy Thursday morning in early May. April in Paris may be grand, but May in Le Havre can lack a certain something.

It wasn't my fault we were there. Knowing the train timetable, and that the target museum would not open until 2.30, we had headed in a leisurely manner for the Gare Saint Lazare to get the train from Paris. We wandered around, deciding where we would go for a coffee and a paper, as our train was still two hours away, and then I made my mistake. I asked one of the staff in my best French where to get the train to Le Havre.

Never tell me the French lack efficiency. With a speed that amazed me, she rushed us along the open area and onto a train that was about to depart, assuring me in fluent English that we could buy tickets on the train, as indeed we could. We felt powerless to resist, and so we arrived, coffeeless and paperless in Le Havre, at the mouth of the Seine, some three hours before the town's natural history museum opened.

Le Havre is shabby and unattractive at that time of year. Brave, wet-suited souls sail little yachts in a basin, mother-henned away from the tidal outfall by three young men in inflatable runabouts, but most of the shops are closed, and workers are busy cleaning off the winter accumulation of seagull guano from the buildings that will, come summer, welcome the hordes of British tourists who land there from ferries. In early May, the streets of Le Havre are slippery with washed-down fish-rancid guano, and water dripping from buildings should never be trusted.

And we had three hours to kill in this unprepossessing and dingy town in unprepossessing and dingy weather. We stood on the corner as I spoke the standard phrase of mild regret, and then I looked up and saw with delight that we were on the corner of Rue La Pérouse and Rue Lesueur, outside a small bar that would be an ideal location for a soapish sitcom about the travails of tourists in a foreign land, or a remake of Irma La Douce. I was as much taken by the street names as I was by the prospect of warmth, though the thought of a coffee and a beer attracted me as well.

We entered, were made welcome, and quizzed by our host and his customers as to where we were from. I have just recently learned that the bar is in the centre of the town's small red light district, which may explain why we were slightly exotic specimens to them and why they seemed slightly raffish to us, but no matter. I explained that we were Australians, seeking two navigateurs français who had once left Le Havre and sailed to Australia. They were, I said gesturing dramatically at the street signs outside, La Pérouse and Lesueur. I was, I told them, researching some background for a historical account of the people who mapped Australia.

I like the French. They all reassure me that they speak English, just as soon as I speak French to them. Perhaps this is because, while we speak that accursed English tongue, we are from a small and interesting country that is neither Britain nor the USA. Perhaps they are just nice people. Working in relays we exchanged franglais comments on sundry matters, while we refuelled on coffee, tea and beer. 

If they knew that Lapérouse had actually departed on his last voyage from Brest, not Le Havre, they were too polite to say so, and I had to discover it later. In the end they directed us to a cheerful eatery and bade us fond adieus, though I am still uncertain why one of them said "auf wiedersehen" as we left. Perhaps he was confusing Austrians and Australians. Or maybe he was testing us.

We ate at the recommended place, found the Natural History Museum, admired Lesueur's specimens, but found little trace of Laperouse, then we walked back along his chilly damp street (which was at least guano-free), and caught a train back up the Seine valley. It was only later, as I dug further into the lives of my two navigateurs that I realised that each of them might, at various times in his life, have said "it seemed like a good idea at the time." Then it struck me that most pioneers would probably say that when they looked back on their actions.

Planning for failure in order to succeed, 1

Things go wrong. Murphy's Law prevails, or else Sod's Law does, or whichever law you prefer that predicts that failure is not only imminent but inevitable. In an operation with a hundred steps, or a thousand, or a million, sooner or later, one of them will be outside the safe limits. In some cases, that can lead to a cascade of disaster.

After the event, it is often easy, to pinpoint where an accident began, and while that can be mildly amusing, there is a more serious task, looking at the cases where the slip did not lead to a cascade of disaster. Human endeavour, human greed, human ambition and human hubris make it easy for things to go wrong, but human forethought can prevent much of it.

It is a curious thing that so many management and self-improvement books train their readers to prepare for success. It would be far more useful to train them to recognise the seeds of failure, the nature of folly, and the origins of truly awful copper-bottomed Grand Guignol folly. Most grand successes begin with grand schemes, but so do most grand failures.

Grand schemes fail for many reasons. Many times, the hopes and ambitions of the proponents flopped because the schemes were just too grand altogether, and the planners were not prepared for the unexpected. Perhaps they underestimated a hostile environment or an enemy's strength and ingenuity in a time of war, or the amount of background research needed.

Fame is all too often the spur that sets somebody on the path to a fall. Either fame or the pursuit of it, or its precursors, ambition and pride is prominent in the causal chain. Many historic failures happened because people played office politics and fought the enemy within, rather than the enemy without. If the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) had devoted less of its time to internecine squabbles with the Special Operations Executive (also British) in World War II, both bodies might have achieved more and lost fewer agents (and we will gloss over the problems both sides had with de Gaulle's Free French, who were nominally on the same side).

Hand-in-hand with the pursuit of fame comes the pursuit of lucre, because most people realise that being disgustingly rich can make one famous. The Spanish Armada might have fared differently if either Drake or Howard spent a little longer looting separated Spanish ships, or if Medina Sidonia had seen what the English captains were doing, and sacrificed a rich-looking ship or two, in order to delay them.

In some cases, people could not communicate their needs fast enough, or there was some other breakdown in communications, or they were not given the materials or funds and resources they needed to do the job. Related to this are the failures where the players lacked an essential piece of information but pushed ahead anyhow — or had the information, but ignored it.

Then there were the structural failures, where operations were expanding too fast, and everybody fell into a spiral of reorganisation, or people found themselves in an group or society which became ossified by tradition and bureaucracy, or in a situation where the leadership gave way to panic, or a mob took over.

At other times, the authorities, driven by activists, went too far in the opposite direction, over-reacting and causing even greater problems. Other structural failures involved actual structures, mainly dams, cathedrals and bridges, falling down because they were not built properly.

True, some of the world's great failures were simple bad luck, but more came about because people were either ungifted amateurs or plain stupid or both. Of course, when you start to examine some of the most terrible failures, you begin to realise that there were flaws all over the place, so that identifying a single cause of failure is either pointless or impossible. It is more a matter of wonder that anything does go right in this world, that success is so common.

My favourite success is one in which I was involved, but can take no credit for it. A perceptive and clever supervisor sent me out to talk to the 'old hands' after I took over a politically sensitive operation. I was told to talk to these people, tap into their experience, find out what had gone wrong and been fixed, what had nearly gone wrong, and what might have gone wrong, but hadn't.

Thanks to a bunch of committed people, and for the price of a few beers and coffees, I tapped into perhaps half a century of hard work, experience and wisdom on dealing with vomit, bomb threats, theft, hysteria, locks that would not budge, flood, fire, conspiracy and more, and I gathered in neat solutions for most of them and work-arounds for the rest. When something did go wrong, it was close enough to one of the scenarios that was in our Compendium of Disaster Great and Small, and we narrowly avoided the cascade to disaster.

In many factories where safety and risk are key issues, the company will keep a "black book". This lists past problems, their causes and their solutions, all carefully recorded. In a few companies, young engineers are encouraged to try to second-guess where failures may happen. Undergraduates in engineering and architecture are commonly given course work on classic past failures, which should mean they avoid repeating old mistakes, but what of future disasters?

The failures I hate are those like Union Carbide's poison spill at Bhopal in India, where nobody had the good sense of my boss. No young engineers were sent out to look at similar factories, ranging from oil refineries to cement works to other insecticide plants, to get a sense for what might go, wrong, and how it could be fixed. Just one valve in the right place at Union Carbide's plant, and thousands of lives might have been saved.

Somebody might have thought of a better pathway that did not use toxic methyl isocyanate to make the pesticide, or somebody might have questioned the wisdom of a process where the toxic intermediate product was stored, rather than being converted immediately.

My favourite failures are the ones where people ought to have known what they were doing, and ought to have known that what they were doing was not a good idea, but they went ahead and did it anyhow. And even when it turns out that their preferred site for their proposed swimming resort was in a malarial swamp with poison trees, deadly snakes, rabid bats and voracious crocodiles, they will still smile ruefully and tell you that it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Fang the fauna

This is a verse collection with a back-story.

This work had its origins in a creative writing workshop that I was engaged in, probably in 1986. We were discussing commercial tendencies, and with an eye on the looming 1988 Bicentennial, I invented a fictional work, which I dubbed:

Gastromania Australiana, or
The Bicentennial Rhyming Cookbook.

That deliberate stalking-horse, that epitome of crude commercialism fed the debate and gave us a good laugh before we moved on, but that night, a few rough verses crept out, and a week later, I shared them with the workshop. We had another laugh, and again moved on. At home, the scribbles went into the bottom drawer, but in the summer of 1986-87, I had a thought.

As a classically-trained biologist, I knew how to illustrate with stipple, and I would sit in boring bureaucratic meetings, as pompous oafs droned on, wasting time. To keep myself sane, I drew stippled doodles, usually trying to create a nicely shaded sphere, but somehow, as I drew, each of them acquired textures, eyes and appendages, like this one on the right.

More importantly, I saw that the clowns all watched intently as my doodles emerged, gaining character, and slack-jawed, they forgot to drone. An intelligent colleague, a real artist, saw this, and sat opposite me, drawing scenes. We found that by each of us settling between two twits, we could mute four of them, leaving the intelligent people to deal with issues uninterrupted.

I ended up with lots of drawings, and some of them matched my verses, so in mid-1987, a limited but illustrated edition (one copy) of Gastromania Australiana emerged. For reasons that I won’t go into, that single copy was instrumental to my being awarded a post, managing a large creative staff, but the single copy was filed on my shelves and forgotten.

Early in 2022, I noted on Facebook that finding a mosquito in your tea was less bad than finding a fly in your soup, a friend called Nisaba asked if I swallowed the mossie, I said that I had not, and mentioned that I had once written some verses on eating mosquitoes, and having, as I approach advanced middle age, sorted most of my backburner books, I turned to the verses again.

I revisited, revised, refurbished, rewrote them and augmented, adding verses and new illustrations, so now here it is, with a more catchy title. Thanks fellow writers in the workshop, thanks boring drones, thanks Nisaba, thanks Rotring and Artline who supply my pens, thanks to family and friends who have giggled.

Now here's a taste of seriously bad taste, within the meaning of the act.

First, a small calming foreword for the PC brigade: 

Friends who know my email address can request almost the entire thing, as a 17-page 2 meg PDF. I'm not at all sure that this one is commercial, but it would make a great stocking-stuffer, and that's how I plan to pitch it in a few weeks, once I have ironed out a couple of scansion issues.

Behind the Easter bunny.

 I am currently working on what I refer to as my four last songs, the five books I want to get out of the way before hanging up my pen.

Of course, when I talk about stopping writing, my friends react like the Canterbury Pilgrims did, on their first day out:

Nonetheless, I forge ahead. Now about the Easter egg, one of the works is The Bruces’ Dictionary of Phrase & Fable: which is subtitled the origins of mythology and a mythology of origins.

From this, I have drawn the entry on the Rabbit:

A small and over-sexed mammal. They are rare in some areas as the female rabbits prefer to mate with roosters, which is the origin of the ‘Easter Bunny’ legend. To achieve this result, a rabbit must first associate with hens, to acquire a suitable smell, after which they move in with the rooster, but it does not last, for a fowl and his bunny are soon parted.

Another of the works being finalised is a selection of verse called Let's Fang the Fauna, and given the style, I considered using the pen-name Ogden Gnash, but I decided I wanted people to know who was doing it to them. Anyhow, here's a rabbit-related sample:

The finest perfumes in the land
Will make some noses runny;
The dinner that the hawk has planned
Is bad news for the bunny.

Many rabbits have the luck
To not become our meat
For almost every doe and buck
Has lucky rabbits’ feet.

The rabbit, served in various ways,
Has culinary merits.
Eat rabbits for a hundred days,
Then take a dose of ferrets.

By the way, there's an Easter egg buried here...

Happy Easter!

Oh yes, there will be more on this in the next entry. Here's a link.

Statistics

I'm picking a few bits out of my next book but three, Science is Like That.

Lord Rutherford is supposed to have said “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment”. Yet statistical analysis reveals the underlying truths in complex situations, the sort of messes that true physicists used to shy away from. It spoils the story a bit, but Rutherford once sat in on Horace Lamb’s lectures on mathematical statistics to improve his analysis of alpha particle deflections, a task which demanded some serious statistical work.

Once upon a time, simple patterns were solved by simple analysis, with simple mathematics revealing the laws that lay beneath the patterns. By the 19th century, nothing was quite so simple any more. The patterns were more complicated, and even physics needed statistics to help deal with the large masses of data. Most medical and biological research, all social science research and many other areas of modern scientific enquiry can only work by using statistics.

While modern statistics owe more to Karl Pearson, R. A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane, the first steps were taken by Adolphe Quételet, and then carried forward by Florence Nightingale. Quételet was a brilliant mathematician, who learned about probability from Pierre-Simon de Laplace while studying in Paris, before he returned to his native Belgium to run a new observatory there. While the observatory was being built, Quételet began exploring the ideas of ‘social physics’ and ‘moral statistics’.

He saw that there were many predictable sets of data. Crimes, suicides and marriages all involved individual free choice, but they happened at predictable rates in different age groups, giving him the starting point for his ‘moral statistics’.

Sad condition of the human race! We can tell beforehand how many will stain their hands with the blood of their fellow-creatures, how many will be forgers, how many poisoners, almost as one can foretell the number of births and deaths.
—Adolphe Quételet, Treatise on Man, 1835.

Florence Nightingale makes an excellent case study, because while we usually know her as a nurse who gained fame during the Crimean War, the Lady of the Lamp, few people are aware that after this middle-aged spinster returned to London in 1857, she used statistics to argue for better nursing.

First, she prepared a pamphlet, based on the report of a Royal Commission, about the Crimean war campaign, where Britain and France had fought Russia. Nightingale wanted to rally public support for nursing reforms.

The pamphlet showed where the problems lay, and her Mortality in the British Army, featured the first use of pictorial charts to present data, those charts with tiny wheat bags, or oil barrels or human figures lined up like so many paper dolls. She hammered away again in 1858 in her Report on the Crimea:

It is not denied that a large part of the British force perished from causes not the unavoidable or necessary results of war…(10,053 men, or sixty percent per annum, perished in seven months, from disease alone, upon an average strength of 28,939. This mortality exceeds that of the Great Plague)…The question arises, must what has here occurred occur again?

In 1858, Nightingale was elected to the newly formed Statistical Society and turned her attention to hospital statistics on disease and mortality in Britain. You could never, she said, discover trends unless figures were recorded in the same way. She prepared a plan, published in 1859, for uniform hospital statistics. Her aim was to compare the death rates for each disease in different hospitals, which could not be done without a standardised recording system.

Others could also be counted as part-founders of statistics. John Graunt published his Observations on the Bills of Mortality of the City of London in 1662. This work has sometimes been attributed to Sir William Petty, but George Udny Yule showed by statistical analysis (how else?) that the sentence length in Observations did not match known samples of Petty’s writing. Yule turns up again in chapter 5 (but you may have to buy the book to find out about that).

Graunt’s figures became the basis of the first life insurance tables, but he also revealed that for a small fee, a death from “French-pox” (syphilis) could be listed as “consumption” saving the family of the deceased much embarrassment, while hiding a medical truth. Before the 19th century, statistics were just numbers describing the state of a nation, and this is what Mark Twain had in mind when he spoke of “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”.

After 1860, statistics began to take on a whole new meaning, with a statistic becoming a summary figure for a large number of measurements, a way of getting a handle on complex data. To experienced eyes, the mean and standard deviation of a set of measures is a quick summary, though lay people may still say statistics cannot be trusted.

The simple fact is that figures don’t lie, but liars can figure. “Statistics” always need to be looked at carefully, but the use of statistics in science is fully justified. Statistical analysis can reveal such things as Burt’s fraudulent work on twins and inherited intelligence (chapter 9 of the book), or Mendel probably massaging his data, where he faked his data. Statistics can also reveal amazing patterns, laws and truths.

Statistics would end up being the glue which tied together evolution and genetics in the 1920s, helping biologists to understand what was going on in large populations. In time, ecology would absorb pattern analysis as a powerful tool, just as numerical methods would find a place in biological taxonomy and classification. Tied in with this were tests of significance in  sets of results, tests which provide an estimate of how likely numbers are to mean something.

It took statistics, wielded by epidemiologists, to prove what people suspected in the 19th century, that tobacco causes lung cancer and other diseases. You can trust statistics, if they are properly used. Mind you, in the data set <1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 10>, the mean is 3, the median is 2, and the mode is 1—and the average statistician won’t tell you about that!

Most modern scientific advances owe a great deal to statistical analysis, often in the form of correlation coefficients. Now if I can claim any special professional expertise aside from story-telling, it is to be found in the application of statistics, and in particular to the honest and dishonest uses of such statistics. I used statistical analysis to catch my frauds.

But that's another story...

Leibniz’ different base

This is a selection from a new book, Science is Like That, which is yet to find a publisher.

I’ll teach you differences.
—William Shakespeare, King Lear, I, iv, 90.

They say Gottfried Leibniz taught himself Latin when he was eight, and by fourteen, he could read Greek as well. We may as well believe this as not: these legends of precocity in scientific greats are as tenacious as any urban myth. It matters little if Leibniz taught himself Basque while hanging upside down like a bat at the age of two: what really counts is what he did later on.

The son of a professor of moral philosophy, Leibniz was interested in the mathematical side of philosophy. In his lifetime, he introduced the use of the dot to indicate multiplication, popularised the decimal point, the equals sign, the colon for division and ratio, and the use of numerical superscripts for exponents (like x² and x³) in algebra. We also owe the elongated sigma for summation in calculus, and the way we use the letter d in differential calculus (as in dy/dx) is his idea also.

He and Newton argued over who invented calculus, but whatever else Newton did, he never designed a calculating machine as Leibniz did. Only Blaise Pascal had done so before Leibniz, and Charles Babbage did so later. Leibniz’ design was used in building the first totalisator (also called a tote or pari-mutuel, a machine used to manage betting on horse races), because it could multiply and divide.

Leibniz wanted to create a united Europe, even before Germany was a single nation, and long before anybody dreamed of the European Union. In the end, he was librarian to the court of Hanover, but when the Elector of Hanover went off from there to England to take up his new throne as King George I in 1714, Leibniz was left in Germany, presumably because of his disputes with Newton.

Whatever the reason, he was definitely left behind, and he died a couple of years later, leaving a ‘sleeper’ in the form of a letter written to the French Academy of Sciences in 1701, in which he outlined the binary number system which is used by all modern computers.

I enclose an attempt to devise a numerical system that may prove to be entirely new. Briefly, here is what it is…By using a binary system based on the number 2 instead of the decimal system based on the number 10, I am able to write all of the numbers in terms of 0 and 1. I have done this not for mere practical reasons, but rather to allow new discoveries to be made…This system can lead to new information that would be difficult to obtain in any other way…

Talking of bases, there is a conundrum that depends on readers understanding the significance of the apparently erroneous sum: 6x9=42. (This will only make serious sense to people who have read the works of Douglas Adams, especially The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its successors.)

Something over two decades ago, I observed on an Internet list that the relationship 6x9=42 is true if the calculations are performed in base-13 notation. A list member, known only as Merlyn, noted that there is a pattern to be observed. If we take “six times x = forty-two,” and vary the value of the base, we find a number of values of x which satisfy the statement, and these form a pattern when we examine both x and the base used. Six times x equals forty two is true when x is:

5 and the base for the calculation is 7;

7 and the base for the calculation is 10;

9 and the base for the calculation is 13;

11 and the base for the calculation is 16;

13 and the base for the calculation is 19;

15 and the base for the calculation is 22;

17 and the base for the calculation is 25;

19 and the base for the calculation is 28;

21 and the base for the calculation is 31;

23 and the base for the calculation is 34;

25 and the base for the calculation is 37;

27 and the base for the calculation is 40;

29 and the base for the calculation is 43…

The pattern continues beyond that, and it is an elegant pattern. Explaining it requires finding a formula for each of x and the nominated base in terms of its order n, in the pattern. These days, most computing is based on binary (base 2) or hexadecimal (base 16) numbers, but we didn’t start out that way, because we have 10 digits on our hands (old sawmillers excepted, sometimes).

Was Ramanujan wrong, or wrongly reported?

 Most recreational mathematicians know the story of Godfrey Hardy’s taxi. In brief, Hardy called on his sick colleague, Srinivasa Ramanujan. In the course of making conversation, Hardy mentioned the number of his taxi-cab, his favourite form of transport. It had, said Hardy, a rather dull number, 1729. “No, Hardy! No, Hardy!” replied Ramanujan, “It is a very interesting number - it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”

Ramanujan was referring here to the fact that 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed. The two mathematicians then went on to discuss the fourth powers equivalent, but that has no part here. There is a solution, by the way, with 133 and 134 being the numbers on one side: the rest I leave to you, once you have my methodology, set out below. So Hardy is mainly remembered by mathematicians as the person who played straight man to Ramanujan.

There was more, as we shall see, but first, a small diversion: 1729 is one of a special group of numbers called Carmichael numbers, which are important in number theory. It is highly likely that Hardy was trying to find out if Ramanujan had discovered these numbers in his intuitive way, and got an answer from left field instead. As I am about to reveal, though, this was wrong, and given Ramanujan’s brilliance, it is far more likely that he was misquoted

It has been known for thirty years or so that there is an infinite number of Carmichael numbers, but is there an infinite number of them with factors in arithmetic progression? That description fits 1729 (7 x 13 x 19), but that may be just happenstance. On the other hand, I read recently that 91 is expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways: 91 = 3³ + 4³ = (-5)³ + 6³. 

At 0600 this morning, it was dark, I had fetched the newspaper, and was trying to remember the target number, and the cubes that composed it. Then I recalled that it was 91, which my mind had filed as interesting, because it is ¹/₁₉ of 1729, being 7x13.

That did it. I got up, fired up Excel, and set to work. But before I continue, what are Carmichael numbers? Mathematicians will understand when I note that there is insufficient space in the margin of the page to offer it in full…

OK, I won’t be mean to those interested but less familiar with the trivia. Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) is  remembered today mainly for his “Last Theorem”, which took more than 300 years to prove. In the margin of his copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica, Fermat wrote:

“To divide a cube into two other cubes, a fourth power or in general any power whatever into two powers of the same denomination above the second is impossible, and I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it.”

Now on with the spreadsheet and how I saved myself a lot of what we Australians call hard yakka. One way to solve knotty problems is to try all the possibilities and these are Diophantine solutions, named after the author of the book that Fermat scribbled his note in.

I once wrote in one of my books that Diophantus would have killed to get his hands on a computer and a spreadsheet program, and I meant it. I am still trying to find a way of using a spreadsheet to test Collatz' conjecture.

In cell A2, I entered the value -20, then I selected that column down to row 89, and used FILL – SERIES to integers down to 67. Next, in cell B2, I inserted this formula: =A2*A2*A2. This, of course, returns the value (-8000), being the cube of -20.

Next, I used COPY – DOWN, or CTRL-D, to fill column B with cubes. Then I was ready to laboriously typed in the first row: C2 (=B2+B3); D2 (=B2+B4); E2 (=B2+B5) and so on, all the way to column AQ. Then I could highlight rows 2 to 89 and columns C to AQ and fill those cells with COPY – DOWN, or CTRL-D.

As you can see, I now had more sums-of-two-cubes values than I could poke a stick at, and a few of my “hits” are marked with colour. I highlighted all of the values, copied them and did an unformatted paste into a Word file. This gave me tab delimited rows, so I had to get rid of the tabs. In Word, CTRL-h gives FIND AND REPLACE, and if you are smart-lazy like me, you either know, or need to know two codes to use. A tab marker is ^t, and a carriage return (end of paragraph) is ^p.

So in no time at all, I had 1845 values that could be sorted into numerical order and searched. After getting through less than a page, I muttered something that a passing kookaburra misheard as beggar this for a game of soldiers. The actual words are now lost to the mists of time, so we shall move on.

I highlighted the whole column (CTRL-A) and copied it (CTRL-C). Then back to the spreadsheet, open a new worksheet, click on A1 and paste (CTRL-V). Now I have all of my values in order, but no great desire to eyeball them, as I had had no breakfast, and no mug of tea, either. Time for smart-lazy again. In cell B2, I added this formula: =IF(A1=A2, "hit","").

 

As you can see, there was no need to scrutinise all the values, but look on the right, where there are some trebles. Now ignoring zero, which can be obtained in an infinite number of ways: x³ + (-x)³, where x is any integer, the first treble is well below Ramanujan’s 1729. You can get both 728 and -728 in three ways.

Here they are: 728 = (-10)³ + 12³ = 6³ + 8³ = (-1)³ + 9³

Numerology is a trap, a snare and a delusion, but the difference between 1729 and 728 is 1001 (7x11x13), while 91 is 7x13 and 1729 is, as noted above, 7, 13 and 19. You can see why people get drawn in, even if I don’t mention that only in base-13 notation is it true that 6x9=42!

He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.
—James Joyce, Ulysses, 21.

I think I’ll stop there.

Collatz’ conjecture

 Number crunchers know that the word conjecture is always a warning that by the pricking of my sums, something evil this way comes. Conjectures are unsolved problems, and in fact, Paul Erdös, a noted Hungarian mathematician, was reported to have said of Collatz’ conjecture, “Mathematics may not be ready for such problems.” Others called it “dangerous” and “a quagmire”.

When it comes to mathematical challenges, the Four-colour map problem, Fermat’s last theorem and squaring the circle, are far too difficult to even consider on a bus, but the Collatz conjecture is nice and simple to play with. It was put forward by Lothar Collatz, who waited two years after receiving his doctorate, before offering this puzzle. Pro tip: always get your higher degree nailed to the wall before you make waves!

Choose any positive integer n to begin a series. For each following term, if the previous term is even, the next term is one half of the previous term. On the other hand, if the term is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. Collatz’ conjecture is that no matter what the value of n, the sequence will always reach 1. Here are five sample strings:

1, 4, 2, 1;

2, 7, 22, 11, 34, 17, 52, 26, 13, 40, 20, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1;

3, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1;

4, 2, 1;

5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1.

The sequences generated are sometimes called the hailstone sequence or hailstone numbers, because the values usually go through multiple ascents and descents, like hailstones in a cloud.

If you are working through the numbers on your bus ride, can you see what the next number is that you need to test? From what you can see above, you can rule out 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17 and lots more…

The Hungarian-born mathematician Paul Erdös (1913–1996), is considered to hold the world record for the number of papers he wrote in collaboration with other mathematicians. Erdös numbers are whimsical numbers given to mathematicians. Erdös himself has the Erdös number 0, and any person who has collaborated with Erdös on a paper has an Erdös number of 1, while a mathematician who has collaborated with a direct collaborator is given an Erdös number of 2, and so on.

Once in a thousand years

This is from my book for bright young people, Playwiths.

Consider the number of years between events described as “once in a thousand years”, such as floods. To the layperson, this immediately raises the question: how can the authorities access data, covering several thousand years? The answer is that they can’t, but they have what is usually referred to as the Poisson distribution to fall back on, and to understand that, we need to consider an old tale of Prussian cavalrymen who were kicked in the head by their horses.

Just in case you know any French, the Poisson distribution has nothing to do with handing out fishes. It was developed by (and named after) Siméon-Denis Poisson. It describes the probability of clusters in random events, given nothing more than the average occurrence of such events. (If you have no French, their word for fish is poisson, leading to dreadful puns about one man's meat being another man's poisson, but that is irrelevant.

This on the right is not irrelevant, but it is, instead, an elephant, which is a horse of a different colour, as we say in the writing trade. Now let's get back to the horses...

Poisson died in 1840, before the Prussians were kicked. Ladislaus Bortkiewicz published a book in 1898 in which he tried out the distribution of head kicks in each of the 14 corps of Prussian cavalry over a 20-year period, to see if it matched Poisson’s predictions.

Basically, the Poisson distribution works like this: given a sample average (or better, a population average), you can predict the probability of clusters of, say, breast cancer cases in a workplace, the number of calls to a call centre in a given minute, power failures on a grid, some types of traffic accident, the number of typographical errors on a page and the failure of light bulbs. And given some flood data for a few inundations, the Poisson distribution can predict about how often there would be a flood of a certain level.

Let us consider the Prussian data: there were several cases where a significant number of kicks had happened, and many more where no kicks had happened, so Bortkiewicz got hold of the data for 200 corps-years. In 109 cases, there were no injuries, but there were 65 instances of one injury, 22 cases of two, three cases of three head-kicks and one unfortunate corps, in one year, had four instances, a total of 122 cases. That meant the probability of a case in any given corps in any given year was about 6/10, or if you want precision, 0.61.

Bortkiewicz triumphantly showed that the known distribution was an almost perfect fit to the theoretical prediction. After that, people everywhere took up Poisson’s idea enthusiastically.

This story was popular, because most of the world liked the idea of Prussian cavalry being kicked in the head, but the main point was to say that there would be variation, and a high “score” did not necessarily imply carelessness or anything else. Ask anybody who has done some basic statistics, and they will all know about the Prussian head-kicks. It’s the example that is always mentioned.

What is less-mentioned is that you can calculate the flood height that, based on prior data, would happen once in a thousand years. This figure would be approximate, and the estimates would be refined after each flood, and they would be slightly invalidated if the risk is increasing rather than steady, but it’s better than nothing if you need a predictor.

I actually began looking into this issue, revisiting it after several decades, because somebody was questioning the science behind climate change and global warming, and as a throw-away line, poked fun at councils in Australia which have maps showing the limits of one-in-a-thousand-year floods. How, the idiot asked, could anybody know what has happened in the past?

Those who know my historical interests will not be surprised to learn that I point to 1859 as the year when scientists in unrelated disciplines began to be unable to understand one another. The public had started to feel lost around science a few years earlier, but after the 1860s, a great deal of science was either counter-intuitive or it relied on obscure methods. One way and another, science all got progressively more complicated.

Counter-intuitive science is in some ways the worst source of dissent and confusion, but if we know that mathematicians have a clever wrinkle that lets them estimate what a one-in-a-thousand-year flood would be like, we can accept that. The science that flies in the face of uninformed ‘common sense’, and the science that causes fears to arise, these are the sorts of science that cause trouble.

Even if the ancient Greeks knew that the world was a sphere, peasant minds were happy to say that the world they saw was clearly flat. In the same way, other equally simple and fearful peasant-quality minds attack the idea of evolution, misrepresenting what evolution is, even as they deny it. 

Climate is another case: the modern peasants who watch the weather on TV thinks they understand climate, but that, in fact, is a very different kettle of poissons.

A question of class

This is another selection from Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, my social history of science in the year 1859. Find out more here. We are looking at Britain as it was in 1859.

* * * * *

In London, May, June and July were once the months when Parliament met, and this determined ‘the season’ which ended on 12 August, the first day of grouse shooting. The well off, even those not involved in politics, came to London in the season for races at Ascot, operas, balls, parties, viewings of the Royal Academy and other social events.

Every member of society had obligations, but the obligations of some were less onerous than the demands society made of others. In an age before labour-saving devices though, the rich had a duty to hire labour.

In 1859, Isabella Mary Beeton, known today as “Mrs Beeton”, even listed how many servants a household should have, based on income. She had, that year, begun a series of 48-page monthly supplements to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, her husband’s journal, and in 1861, these were released as a single volume, Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. We will visit this in chapter 7.

Army officers, having purchased their commissions, were obliged to lead, and sailors and soldiers were obliged to submit to flogging. Still, the writing was on the wall for the lash as a naval punishment after an incident at Plymouth in July, on board HMS Caesar (then in dock) when a sailor was flogged in front of civilian workers. The outraged watchers protested and argued with some of the officers. Flogging was not abolished in the British army and navy until 1881, but it effectively ended in 1859, thanks largely to a crusading doctor.

When Mary Ann Evans published Adam Bede in 1859, she wrote as George Eliot, and was unprepared for the attention it would bring her. Well known and admired in her own circle of intellectuals, she now found herself publicly identified with George Eliot, the clever ‘male’ novelist. By the time Middlemarch came out in 1871–72, she was well respected, and admired, in both names, for her social conscience.

In chapter 16 of Middlemarch, her fictional characters debate Wakley’s view that coroners need medical training, so as not to be bamboozled or misled by inadequate medical men. Unlike the characters in Eliot’s  book, Thomas Wakley was a real person. As a young doctor he cared about the reform of the medical profession, and political reformer William Cobbett suggested that he establish a medical journal, which he did in 1832, calling it The Lancet.

In 1835, Wakley was elected to Parliament, and his maiden speech attacked the conviction of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, a group of unionists transported to New South Wales in 1834 on trumped-up charges for daring to organise to defend themselves. He was an all-round decent human being of liberal outlook who opposed slavery, the Corn Laws, the 1834 Poor Law and the Newspaper Stamp Act.

Wakley deserves most of the credit for the creation of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1843 and also the General Council of Medical Education and Registration in 1858, but his public fame rests mainly on his work as a coroner. He not only held the beliefs mentioned in Middlemarch, he put them into action.

No observer of coronial inquests today can hear a coroner’s blunt demolition of an evasive witness without recalling what happened when Wakley confronted a workhouse master. The man complained that an exhumed pauper’s body, while it had undoubtedly been scalded to death, had not been properly identified as Thomas Austin, the subject of the inquest. Said the worthy coroner: ‘If this is not the body of the man who was killed in your vat, pray, Sir, how many paupers have you boiled?’

To get his reform campaign moving, Wakley needed to be elected as a coroner. He narrowly lost his first attempt in East Middlesex in 1830, but won in West Middlesex in 1839. From time to time, Wakley reported details of notable coronial hearings in The Lancet, and that brings us to his inquest into the death of Fred White, a young soldier of the Queen’s Own Hussars who died in 1846.

The true cause of death, a flogging of 150 lashes, was covered up, but with a jury’s support, Wakley ordered the body exhumed so the original post mortem could be assessed. The evidence of military cruelty was there for all to see, and an end to flogging in the army came a step closer. The practice finally ceased after a man called Davies was flogged almost to death at Woolwich in September 1859; Wakley’s pursuit of the White case had laid the foundations.

Wakley and Dickens met in 1841, and Dickens once served on a jury under him. The two undoubtedly influenced each other, but Wakley’s essential humanity is seen best in an instance where he may have cut the odd coronial corner.

Thomas Glover was a Civil Surgeon at Scutari during the Crimean War, and either during that time or on his return, became addicted to chloroform and opium, both then readily available to doctors. In April, 1859, he died as a result of an excessive dose of chloroform, and his colleague Thomas Wakley, acting as coroner, brought in a verdict of accidental death. It did no harm. But there was harm enough around.

The birth of the tourist

This is drawn from Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, a social history of science in the year 1859. Find out more here.

Travelling from London to Rome took 21 weary days in 1843. It took just two-and-a-half days by 1860, and tourism had become a mass commodity. Just as new technology brought fast travel to the masses, so Thomas Cook brought the masses to fast travel. He augmented the technology with group excursions, travellers’ cheques, hotel coupons and round-trip tickets, teaching first a nation, then the world, to obey timetables.

Cook began simply, arranging for a temperance group of 485 people to go from Leicester to Loughborough in 1841 at a shilling a head, with a brass band, speeches and food thrown in. He built up slowly, then left his job in 1845 to run tours full time. By 1848, he was taking parties to Scotland and the Lake District, then running ‘specials’ to see the Great Exhibition in 1851, and private trains to London to see the Duke of Wellington lying in state before his funeral in 1852.

Mr Cook’s train with 28 carriages of paying customers ran across Brunel’s magnificent Saltash Bridge between Devon and Cornwall, when it opened in 1859. Ten years later, he was offering a 105-day tour of Egypt and Palestine, and one of his 1872 brochures is reported to have inspired Jules Verne to write Around the World in Eighty Days. Verne seems to be one of the few writers of his time who was sensitive to how the world was shrinking.

Cook offered a world tour lasting a more relaxed 222 days but Verne’s Phileas Fogg used timetables to find a faster way. In 1859, it might have been possible for a New Zealander to reach London comfortably, via Suez and Marseilles in eighty days, but getting around the world in that time was still a bit of a challenge.

Some travellers had more pressing reasons to travel than ‘merely’ seeing the world, motives like dodging spouses or obligations. The classifieds in London’s The Times of 3 January reveal that people could advertise for missing friends in Australia; a New York enquiry agency offered to provide information about traders or to collect debts. In London, Charles Frederick Field, a former Chief Inspector of the Detective Police of the Metropolis, offered London and Continental Private Inquiries, and access to his New York agent.

Just before Christmas 1859, the New York Times reported that a burglar named Hod Annis had been taken back to Boston. He had been arrested in Philadelphia, and managed to escape the clutches of the law, but he was undone when he telegraphed his mistress to send him money, and the authorities intercepted his requests. His travels had been in vain.

Up until 1859, travel books were written either by intrepid explorers to recoup their costs, or as guides for intending emigrants. With steamships making foreign travel more available, the need for guidebooks grew—Murray’s Guide to Madras and Bombay Presidencies for 1859 was the beginning of a long line of them. The author was Edward Eastwick and the ‘Murray’ who gets more credit than the author was John Murray, the publisher of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Eastwick advised his readers that on arriving at Madras (Chennai), the trick was ‘to get into a palankeen and be carried to the club, if a bachelor; or if travelling with ladies, to some friend’s house. There are, indeed, hotels which may be repaired to as a dernier ressort’.

Isabella Bird Bishop, who became the first woman member of the Royal Geographic Society in 1892, published her The Englishwoman in America in 1856. She was publishing still in 1900 having started when her clergyman father sent her to America to research American Christianity for him. A relative of William Wilberforce and cousin to John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1848 to 1862, she was well connected enough to get an introduction to John Murray, who accepted her first work, and she never looked back.

After the death of her parents, Bishop sailed for Melbourne in 1872, then visited New Zealand and Hawaii before crossing America and reaching New York at the end of 1873. There were more travels, and she circumnavigated the world three times, a record that few humans could have matched in the nineteenth century.

And it was all down to steam transport. Steamships were also used to take an England cricket team to North America in 1859, the first international tour involving any team sport. England won every match.

Sometimes, travel failed to broaden the mind. An American visitor to Berne had returned claiming that everything in Berne smelled of cheese. ‘Cheese is the Bernese otto of roses’, he grizzled, playing on the words of the then common use of ‘attar of roses’, an oil distilled from rose petals, and still used in many perfumes. Every city had its smells, but the odour of horse dung was common to all of them.

Oersted's experiment

 This is from a book I am about to start pitching:

Hans Oersted is remembered in the name of the unit of magnetic field strength, the oersted. He was also the person who coined the term ‘electromagnetic’. With that sort of introduction, it should not be hard to work out that it was Oersted who first observed the magnetic effect of an electric current. All the same, Oersted was trained in metaphysics (a branch of philosophy), rather than in physics.

Nonetheless, in 1806, he became professor of physics and chemistry at Copenhagen. As well as being the first to prepare metallic aluminium, Oersted is remembered for his discovery of electromagnetism, which he made during a lecture. His discovery of the electromagnetic effect was immediately translated into several languages, though not entirely reliably. The 1826 English source I found for his work contained a contradiction which was not in the 1820 French version I happened to have to hand, so my quotation below is a mix of the two versions.

If he had written in Latin, and we had all been forced to learn Latin, this problem would not have arisen, but even by the 1820s, Latin was no longer universally understood.

The first experiments…were set on foot in the classes for electricity, galvanism and magnetism, which were held by me in the winter just past. By these experiments it seemed…that the magnetic needle was moved from its position by the help of the galvanic apparatus…when the galvanic circuit was closed, but not when open, as certain very celebrated physicists in vain attempted several years ago…

A modern re-enactment of Oersted’s experiment. My choice of the aluminium ruler was deliberate.

You can see the way this worked in the illustration above, but as this is simple enough for the reader to try, let me note that the entire apparatus is one compass, one AA cell, a length of insulated wire and some sticky tape, plus an aluminium ruler which is optional, but it would have pleased Oersted. I bared one end of the wire, taped it to one end of the dry cell (this was sloppy practice but good enough) and bared the other end.

I taped the dry cell to the ruler (or to the rule if you are a pedant), taped the compass to the ruler to stabilise it, and that was it. As you can see, a single dry cell was enough to bring about a noticeable swing. Incidentally, if you reverse the wire (and as a result, the current), the swing reverses, and the same reversal happens if the wire is under the compass.

One of the great continuing arguments in science relates to the need to justify research in advance, usually for the benefit of bean counters, weasels and other parasites, by showing what research is useful for. Even the most useless-looking piece of science can become useful, as Karl Pearson was to discover. Here, Lord Kelvin reflects upon Oersted’s researches:

Oersted would never have made his great discovery of the action of galvanic currents on magnets had he stopped in his researches to consider in what manner they could possibly be turned to practical account; and so we would not now be able to boast of the wonders done by the electric telegraphs. Indeed, no great law in Natural Philosophy has ever been discovered for its practical implications, but the instances are innumerable of investigations apparently quite useless in this narrow sense of the word which have led to the most valuable results.
—Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), 1846, quoted R. A. Gregory, Discovery (1916), 241.

Aside from Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta, the main players in the unravelling of Faraday’s electromagnetism include Georg Ohm, Hans Oersted, and James Clerk Maxwell, who brought us to the point where we could see light as an electromagnetic wave, much as Michael Faraday had expected, leading on to George FitzGerald, and then to Heinrich Hertz, Guglielmo Marconi and beyond.

There are also the users of electricity and magnetism, from Joseph Henry and Edward Davy, who both invented an electric relay, Charles Wheatstone, Alexander Graham Bell, and people like Joseph Swan, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla who made our modern uses of electricity possible.

There was far more to magnetism than compasses for navigation. After Oersted found that a variable current in a wire would make a compass needle deflect from its usual direction, André Marie Ampère (1775–1836), found that like currents attract, then he discovered the solenoid in 1826: this was a coil of insulated wire with a current passing through it, and it would be the basis of transformers, electric motors, relays and electromagnets. The most common and audible household use of the solenoid today is probably in the switching systems which commonly turn the water flow on and off in washing machines.

Ampère completed his work while believing incorrectly in two ‘magnetic fluids’, which he called a northern fluid, and a southern fluid. So long as he observed correctly, and so long as his theory allowed him to make sensible predictions to test, it mattered little. Then in 1831, Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, and soon after, invented the very first electric motors.

Following on from this in 1845, Faraday discovered what we now call the Faraday effect, where a magnetic field makes the plane of polarised light rotate. This later influenced James Clerk Maxwell to come up with the idea of electromagnetic radiation, which led to Hertz inventing radio. And it all came from one simple observation by Oersted, a lifetime earlier!

Science is like that…

And that, by the way, is my preferred name for the book.

Of timetables and tourism

I have been busy, cleaning up old books, so here's a bit of new stuff I have written for one of them. 

Despite what my publishers often assume, I am not really an historian. I do, however, write about historical matters, because like any good scientist, I am kin to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Kipling’s mongoose, who always had to “run and find out”. I want to know why things happened, and what made them happen as they did, and not differently. That is why I can argue that without the steam engine and the telegraph, Einstein may not have started the line of thought that led to special relativity.

It all began with a need to synchronise clocks, but nobody needed to do that until railways came in, and timetables were needed to make sure that up and down trains did not collide on the single tracks that were normal. (The single tracks between towns worked because train drivers would pull into sidings to let other trains pass. That is why they needed synchronised clocks and watches.)

Before long-distance railways, the only people who needed accurate times were those on ships who needed reliable time for navigation. The distance of a ship north or south of the equator, its latitude, was measured by taking sightings on certain stars, or on the sun, preferably at noon.

The harder task was finding your longitude, how far east or west you were. British sailors would set their chronometers by the standard time, as measured by the observatory at Greenwich. Using that as a basis, if the sun reached the highest point in the sky four minutes earlier than at Greenwich, you were one degree east of Greenwich, and if noon came four minutes later, you were one degree west of Greenwich.

Up until the 1850s, anybody with a telescope could set a ‘local noon’, but even in a small country like Britain, this system was no longer safe for the railways, and so Greenwich Mean Time was adopted in Britain.

An international convention in 1881 met to establish what we now know as the international date line as the prime meridian, but the convention had a majority of European members, and so the meridian through Greenwich became the standard for time-keeping, simply because it was closer to home for a majority of members. But if that meridian was the base line for timing, it still took more than 30 years for French and German geographers to accept the use of the Greenwich meridian as the base for all world mapping.

Einstein’s thinking about time arose from the needs of steam train drivers, but until the telegraph was available, synchronisation was hard. Without telegraphy, Einstein may not have pursued the deep problems of time and space.

Probably he would have got there, because trains and telegraphs were helpful precursors, rather than what scholars back then designated as sine qua non, a Latin tag meaning without which, nothing. There were many essential precursors like the invention of calculus, and probably a few enabling technologies.

In cities and towns, steam whistles, bells, flags and lights on towers indicated impending or recent arrivals and departures, summoning those to start walking who planned to meet (or be) passengers, and those seeking to send or collect goods or mail.

Timetables also fed tourism, the great leveller, that all too often pulls every culture down to the lowest common denominator, but which also opens the door to the acquisition of knowledge. Mass tourism corrupts, most of the time, causing hordes to rush from ticking Mona Lisa on their bucket list, to watching a “crocodile show” in Australia, or ogling the bare-breasted apsaras at Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat apsaras.

Along the way, though, one learns to drink rauchbier, or to put lemon in weissbier, to gain a degree of cultural perspective. Tourism also eliminates weak vessels, the ones who want to play with grizzly bears or lions, so it has its good points.

The idea of the Grand Tour began in the late 1600s, but as late as 1843, travelling from London to Rome took 21 weary days, though in 1860, steam ships and trains got you there in just two and a half days. In those earlier and slower days, when people went on the Grand Tour, they tried to tick as many boxes as possible, and after Pompeii was rediscovered in 1748, it went on the list of marvels to see. Seeing things like that helped educate people more widely.

The Mona Lisa crowd. This was as close as I wanted to go.

Just as the new technology brought fast travel to the masses, so Thomas Cook brought the masses to fast travel. He augmented the technology with group excursions, travellers’ cheques, hotel coupons and round-trip tickets, teaching first a nation, then the world, to obey timetables.

Cook began simply, arranging for a temperance group of 485 people to go from Leicester to Loughborough in 1841 at a shilling a head, with a brass band, speeches and food thrown in. He built up slowly, then left his job in 1845 to run tours full-time. By 1848, he was taking parties to Scotland and the Lake District, then ran ‘specials’ to see the Great Exhibition in 1851, and private trains to London to see the Duke of Wellington lying in state before his funeral in 1852.

Mr Cook’s train with 28 carriages of paying customers ran across Brunel’s magnificent Saltash Bridge when it opened in 1859. Ten years later, he was offering a 105-day tour of Egypt and Palestine, and one of his 1872 brochures is supposed to have inspired Jules Verne to write Around the World in Eighty Days.

Verne seems to be one of the few writers of his time who was sensitive to how the world was shrinking. Cook offered a tour lasting a more relaxed 222 days but Phileas Fogg used timetables to find a faster way. In 1859, a New Zealander could reach London in comfort in 80 days, via Suez and Marseilles, but getting around the world in that time was still a bit of a challenge.

Some had more pressing reasons to travel, like dodging spouses or obligations. The classifieds in The Times on January 3 reveal that people could advertise for missing friends in Australia, while a New York enquiry agency offered to provide information about traders or to collect debts. In London, Charles Frederick Field, a former Chief Inspector of the Detective Police of the Metropolis, offered London and Continental Private Inquiries, and access to his New York agent.

Before about 1859, travel books were written either by intrepid explorers to recoup their costs, or as guides for intending emigrants. Now steamships made foreign travel more available, and Murray’s Guide to Madras and Bombay Presidencies for 1859 was the beginning of a long line of guides. The author was Edward Eastwick and the “Murray” who usually gets more credit was John Murray, the publisher of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Eastwick advised his readers that on arriving at Madras (now Chennai), the trick was “to get into a palankeen and be carried to the club, if a bachelor; or if travelling with ladies, to some friend’s house. There are, indeed, hotels which may be repaired to as a dernier ressort.”

Isabella Bird Bishop published her The Englishwoman in America in 1856. She became the first woman member of the Royal Geographic Society in 1892 and publishing still in 1900. She started when her clergyman father sent her to America to do research on American Christianity for him. A relative of William Wilberforce and cousin to John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1848 to 1862, she was well-connected enough to get an introduction to John Murray, who accepted her first work– and she never looked back.

After the death of her parents, she sailed for Melbourne in 1872, then visited New Zealand and Hawaii before crossing America and reaching New York at the end of 1873. There were more travels, and she circumnavigated the world three times, a record that few humans could have matched in the 19th century — and it was all down to steam transport. Steamships also carried an England cricket team to North America in 1859, the first international tour involving any team sport. England won every match.

Sometimes, travel failed to broaden the mind. An American visitor to Berne had returned claiming that everything in Berne smelled of cheese. “Cheese is the Bernese otto of roses”, he grizzled, using the then common version of ‘attar of roses’, an oil distilled from rose petals and still used in many perfumes. Every city had its smells, but the odour of horse dung was common to all of them.

But that's another story.