The Camels are Coming

This is a story that I have told in two books in the past eight years: once for adults in Australia's Pioneers, Heroes & Fools,and then again for younger readers in Australian Backyard Explorer.

Because this is background to an exposé on blatant plagiarism, let me point out that the first book was short-listed for an award, the second book won several awards. The plagiarist will get her only award, The Gong, in a day or so.

The issue at hand: how Harry the Camel shot John Horrocks.

Much of the text below is drawn from one or the other of those works.  I have the permission of the copyright owner (me) to reproduce it here. (For people who were wondering, it wasn't hard to get in touch with me: I was so furious, I was beside myself, so I just turned around. Others will find it almost as easy to get in touch: I spell my name an odd way.)

Anyhow,  revenons à nos moutons — or camels, any way. Here's a verse penned by my mate and alter ego, Duncan Bain:


The camel has a hare-lip,
And a back that is bimodal
And it has a nasty temper
Because it cannot yodel.
It should not be confused with
The one-hump dromedary
Whose Australian distribution
Is from Broome to Bomaderry

With that mnemonic to aid us, we should be able to recall that the camel in Australia is Camelus dromedarius, the dromedary. Only about twenty of the two-humped Bactrian camels of the colder deserts were ever brought to Australia, and the present stock of about half a million are all dromedaries. Now the dromedaries are accounted a feral pest, but in the 19th century, they served Australian exploration remarkably well. Ernest Giles, one of the best of the desert explorers in Australia, wrote:

"My first and second expeditions were conducted entirely with horses; in all my after journeys I had the services of camels, those wonderful ships of the desert, without whose aid the travels and adventures which are subsequently recorded could not possibly have been achieved, nor should I now be alive, as Byron says, to write so poor a tale, this lowly lay of mine."

— Ernest Giles, Australia Twice Traversed.

Giles made his five journeys in the period 1872 to 1876, and it is worth keeping 1876 in mind for a moment. In 1922, Bessie Threadgill, Tinline Scholar at the University of Adelaide, wrote a fine history of land exploration in South Australia in the period 1856 to 1880. Like most professional historians, she wrote mainly from written sources, but she must have had access either to some of the old explorers, or to those who had known them.

That being so, her asides and chapter endings are a good indication of the realities of mapping a parched landscape. At the end of chapter VI, she writes "In 1870 camels for Australian exploration were exotics, worth travelling many miles to see, and not always recognized when seen. In 1876, they were more indispensable than damper, bully beef or blackfellow."

Perhaps we can allow that non-PC term to stand for now. It was normal usage in her time and at least it reveals an important truth about explorers that we will come back to later. For now, the key issue is that camels counted for more even than experienced guides or basic food, because camels could travel long distances without water, and carry tremendous loads, but Threadgill seems to have brushed past the earliest and rather ill-fated instances of camel exploration in Australia.


The first camels reached Australia in 1840, but of the nine that were sent out from the Canary Islands, only one, a camel named Harry, was still alive in 1846, by which time he was in the possession of John Ainsworth Horrocks, an Englishman who had come to seek his fortune in Australia as a squatter, somebody who moved out into the wilderness, took the best land, and hoped to keep it when civilisation and land allocation caught up.

John Horrocks, his brother Eustace, and their faithful butler, John Green, reached South Australia in March 1839. They were accompanied by other family servants, four merino rams and some sheepdogs, stores and equipment, and they landed at Holdfast Bay on John's 21st birthday.

The boys came of a wealthy cotton-mill-owning family — their grandfather was an influential Member of Parliament, and had installed the first all-metal power looms, and made a fortune out of muslin. So without too much trouble, their father had paid for them to acquire 1000 acres of land in the new colony of South Australia, but the land surveys were in a mess and Edward John Eyre had reported excellent land near the Hutt River (where the town of Clare stands today), so John Horrocks and Green went, looked, and decided to take a chance. Horrocks remained behind, sheltering in a hollow tree while Green went and fetched his brother, stores and stock, and servants.

They established Hope Farm and a village called Penwortham, after the ancestral home in Lancashire, and by 1842, there were 24 people, 3200 sheep, 26 cattle and four horses there, but no camels as yet. Soon, Horrocks began ranging further afield, seeking yet greener pastures.

Writing in 1914, a historian quotes an unnamed source who described Horrocks as "a young man of splendid physique". Tall, handsome in a dashing Byronic manner, Horrocks named his favourite greyhound Gulnare after a slave-girl in Byron's The Corsair, and he also endowed a plain that he passed with the same name, thus commemorating his hound's faithful efforts in that vicinity in catching and killing emus for him to eat in 1841.

He kept an open house, feeding all those who called in for a supper, lodging and breakfast, and acquiring staff from odd sources. One of them, an indigent sculptor called Theakston, he acquired from a debtors' prison, but Horrocks remained slightly aloof, eating at a barrel specially set up for him each night with a clean cloth and a silver fork and spoon.

This was the man who set off in late July of 1846, with Theakston as his second-in-command, a cook called Garlick, and a 'black boy' (that usually means an Aborigine) named Jimmy Moorhouse. They were accompanied by the soon-to-be-famous artist and lithographer, S. T. Gill, who came along at no salary, to record the expedition, in the hope of being able to sell some of his works on his return. There was also a camel driver named Kilroy, and, of course, a camel, in this case named Harry, the only survivor of nine camels imported from Tenerife by Henry Phillips. Horrocks paid Phillips six cows, to the value of 90 pounds. It was not a good bargain, for Harry was not the best-natured of animals.

While John Horrocks modelled himself on Lord Byron in some respects, he was a deeply religious man, and perhaps Harry heard his master citing Isaiah 40:6 and took it too literally, but whatever the reason, Harry bit people and other animals. He also bit holes in four sacks and engaged in other annoying practices, but mainly he bit people and animals. No sooner had the expedition set out than Harry bit the cook on the head, badly enough to need dressing and sticking plaster. In his journal, Horrocks notes that the camel " . . . had in the morning taken one of the goats in his mouth across the loins, and would have broken his back if Jimmy had not speedily run to its rescue."

The goats themselves were something of a problem. The explorers had taken goats as a source of meat in preference to sheep, because goats would be harder to steal, as Horrocks explains in his journal: " . . . as they give tongue immediately they are caught, so the natives could not take any beast without being heard." All the same, on the night of July 31, the goats fled the camp, apparently having scented a wild dog, and had to be gathered in from a mile away, but once the adventurers learned to tether the leading goat, the flock stayed with the camp.

They had other tricks to play, though. For starters, all but one of them went lame, and they leapt on the tent, ripping it in places, but there must have been more that was left unmentioned, because Horrocks records killing a goat, " . . . the one that has given us so much trouble, and which Jimmy was delighted to see slaughtered, having in his hatred to the animal promised Garlick, the tent-keeper, a pint of ale if he would kill it next."

Horrocks is seen here carrying the gun with which he was shot, and a stick for beating Harry.

But to return to our camels, the party pushed on into dry country, leaving their horses behind, but accompanied by the surly camel, carrying 356 pounds weight. Horrocks, Kilroy and Gill were on foot near a Lake that Horrocks had named Lake Gill (it is now Lake Dutton) when misfortune struck. The account that follows was dictated by Horrocks:

". . . Bernard Kilroy, who was walking ahead of the party, stopped, saying he saw a beautiful bird, which he recommended me to shoot to add to the collection.

"My gun was loaded with slugs in one barrel and ball in the other, I stopped the camel to get at the shot belt, which I could not get without his laying down.

"Whilst Mr. Gill was unfastening it I was screwing the ramrod into the wadding over the slugs close alongside of the camel. At this moment the camel gave a lurch to one side, and caught his pack in the cock of my gun, which discharged the barrel I was unloading, the contents of which first took off the middle fingers of my  right hand between the second and third joints, and entered my left cheek by my lower jaw, knocking out a row of teeth from my upper jaw."

They were, he goes on to say, 65 miles from the depot where the horses were, and they had just five gallons of water remaining. Kilroy headed back to Theakston and the horses, leaving Gill to mind the invalid. Gill did that and more: he took down dictation from the wounded man, and even created pictures of the area, with himself seen lying on the ground outside the invalid's tent, while a slightly sheepish Harry is to be seen in the background. He also wrote his account of the events:

"The right-hand barrel, with the ramrod in it, went off, taking the middle finger of Mr,. H.'s right hand and lodged the charge in his left cheek. He instantly fell back bleeding copiously. We succeeded in staunching the blood with our handkerchiefs, and after cutting off a part of the finger which hung slightly on, managed to dress it with such stuff as we had brought in case of spear wounds, treating the face in the same way; we laid him down, and fixed the tent; after getting him in, Kilroy started back to the Depot the same evening, leaving me in charge of Mr. H. until relief arrived. Soon after Kilroy left, Mr. H. rallied sufficiently to speak, and convinced me that his brain was not affected. We had, of course, a wretched night of it."

Gill painted himself waiting outside the tent, Horrocks inside, Harry behind.

Kilroy arrived back after four days, with Theakston and two horses. Loading Horrocks on a horse and placing a tarpaulin over his legs to keep him on, they set off, Theakston riding the other horse and Gill and Kilroy taking turns to drive the camel. A week later, they got Horrocks back to Penwortham, where Green dressed his wounds, but gangrene had set in, and Horrocks died, even after an operation on the gangrenous finger — by then, the infection had spread too far.

It was agreed by all that Harry the camel must die for his part in the death of his master (Horrocks had recommended that it be done, but only in order that the good name of camels should be no further besmirched by Harry and his antics). When the first bullet did not kill him, Harry turned and bit the head of Jimmy Moorhouse who was holding him, but the second bullet settled his fate. It seems a pity that Australians call somebody "game as Ned Kelly", and not "game as Harry the camel" — perhaps if Harry had risen to the moment and bitten or shot the man with the gun, we might do so more willingly.

With the elimination of Harry, Australia was free of camels for a few more years, but it was an idea waiting to burst out again. In 1860, camels were imported from India for the Burke and Wills expedition, by 1866, Sir Thomas Elder had established a camel stud at Beltana in the dry north of South Australia, and within a few years, Ernest Giles proved just how effective the animals could be. Soon 'Afghans' (mainly from an area that is now part of Pakistan) were flooding into Australia and running huge trains of camels across the dry inland.

* * * * *

The pictures are both by S. T. Gill, and were scanned from copyright-free sources.

* * * * *

It is necessary to explain that, because we may have eliminated Harry, but we haven't eliminated plagiarists. In my next post, I will be doing my bit to eliminate one of those, and also the institution she works for, which has shamefully failed to acknowledge her misappropriation of my intellectual property.

Batteries included

Some more bits from my quotations collection:The world changed in a curious way in 1800, when Alessandro Volta wrote to Sir Joseph Banks about his piles. Voltaic piles were batteries, though. Once the pile was common, people could discover electrolysis, chemistry got a leg-up, and in time, teenagers would be able to share boom-tish and doof-doof with their fellow passengers on train and bus.You can't win them all.  Mind you, the fellow on the right was a bigger loser than most.

Sixty or more pieces of ... silver, applied each to a piece of tin or zinc ... and as many strata of cardboard, soaked in salt solution, interposed between every pair of metal discs, and always in the same order, constitutes my new instrument.

 . . . an apparatus having resemblance in its effects . . . to an electric battery . . .

— Alessandro Volta, in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, 1800.

Having a few pet plants which slugs and snails are particularly fond of as food, I have devised the following simple and efficacious mode of protecting them against their and my enemies ; and as this plan may be useful to some of your readers, I herewith send you a description of my galvanic circle. Procure a flat ring of zinc, large enough to encircle the plant; make a slit in the ring after the manner of a keyring, so that it can be put round the stem of the plant and then rest upon the ground.

Now twist a copper wire into a ring very nearly of the same circumference as the flat zinc ring, and putting it round the plant, let it rest upon the zinc, as in the illustration. No slug or snail will cross that magic circle; they can drag their slimy way upon the zinc well enough, but let them but touch the copper at the same time and they will receive a galvanic shock sufficient to induce them at once to recoil from the barrier.

— Septimus Piesse in Scientific American May 2, 1863, p. 276.

For the sake of portability, many forms of Leclanché cell have been constructed in which there is no free liquid present. In most of these there is a paste containing manganese dioxide surrounding a carbon rod. This is in contact with a layer of sawdust, or in some cases, plaster of Paris, saturated with sal-ammoniac. The whole is contained in a zinc case which forms the negative electrode.

— J. Duncan and S. G. Starling, A Text Book of Physics, Macmillan, 1918, p. 912.

. . . the magnetic needle was moved from its position by the help of the galvanic apparatus when the galvanic apparatus was closed, but not when open . . .

— Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851

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), quoted in R. A. Gregory, Discovery (1916), p. 241-2.

Electric relay

The quantity of electricity requisite to deflect a magnetic needle is so inconsiderable, that if the current of a moderately-sized pair of plates were sent into one end of a wire, and only one-hundredth part of it came out at the other end, it would still be sufficient.

— Edward Davy, (1806-1885), inventor of the electrical relay.

Few of our readers have heard of the name of Edward Davy in connection with the history of the telegraph . . . nothing has been published of his labours. Yet it is certain that, in those days, he had a clearer grasp of the requirements and capabilities of an electric telegraph than, probably, Cooke and Wheatstone themselves . . .

— J. J. Fahie, The Electrician, July 7, 1883.

On writing science verse

Sorry for the silence, but I have been playing Writer's Twister, a game that involves simultaneously having my nose to the grindstone, my shoulder to the wheel, my back to the wall and my ear to the ground.  I m doing end-touches on two books and working on the Big New Project, of which I may say something later this month.

On the right, you can see a dead wombat, keeping its ear to the ground.

Like the wombat, I am aware that I am inexorably approaching my use-by date.  Unlike the wombat, there are no intimations of mortality, and indeed, all the signs are good, but  it is simple mathematics.

So I have decided to gather some of my better stuff from around the web and put it in a place that will last. These items will be linked by the tag treasure chest.

This one was written to help young people trying to write verse for the first time.  You can't teach  people how to write verse, but you can teach them a few trade tricks.  In writing verse, there is art, which involves inspiration, and there is craft, which involves work.  This was originally called Literary Lapses, and its URL was (and for now, still is) http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/scifun/literary.htm

Clerihews

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

This is a clerihew. They are amusing "potted biographies" of people, and they were invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. They do not need to have a rhythm (a metre, if you are pedantic), but they must have a rhyme, and they must say something about the person involved who has to be historical.

Limericks have to have a perfect metre and astounding rhymes, here among the clerihews, the aim is to be historically correct in an odd sort of way, and to get a weird rhyme. Relevance rates highly in clerihews, but truth is not required. Here are two more examples:

Sir Christopher Wren
Said: "I am going to dine with some men.
If anybody calls,
Say I'm designing St Paul's."

* * * * * * *

Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium

Now it is time for you to try your hand. Here are some names to get started on. Most should be accessible to most people, and some are drawn from areas other than science, so feel free to pick and choose. They will all be found, somewhere on the web.

Julius Caesar    
Mary Anning    
Bill Gates    
Robert Koch    
Catherine the Great
James Joyce    
Louis Pasteur    
Richard Nixon    
Burke and Wills    
Marie Curie
Sir Francis Crick    
Sir Isaac Newton    
Sir Joseph Banks    
The young Torricelli    
Annie Jump Cannon
Macfarlane Burnet    
Jakob Bernoulli    
Pablo Picasso    
Kiri Te Kanawa    
Claude van Damme
Gus Nossal    
Dame Nellie Melba    
Arnold Schwarzenegger    
Enrico Fermi    
William Gates

Limericks

Unlike clerihews, limericks do need metre.  They need to scan.

When you start out, you need some help, so here are some ideas, a few lines to work with. In five lines, the limerick writer mist introduce somebody, explain where they are or what they are doing (second line), explain what happened to the person or thing in line three, what the reaction was in line four, and finish the whole thing off in line five. Read a few sample limericks to get the feel of it first.

Limericks have a special form. There are five lines, with lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyming, and lines 3 and 4 are rhyming. Good limericks use different words at the end of each line. They also need the right rhythm, or metre:

d'DAH-dah d'DAH-dah d'DAH (dah)
d'DAH-dah d'DAH-dah d'DAH (dah)
   d'DAH-dah d'DAH
   d'DAH-dah d'DAH
d'DAH-dah d'DAH-dah d'DAH

Here is a prime example:

There WAS an old MAN from DarJEEling
Who TRAVelled from LONdon to EALing
   It SAID on the DOOR
   Please don't SPIT on the FLOOR
So he CAREfully SPAT on the CEILing

Notice how we can sneak in the odd syllable here and there.
Now you are ready to begin:

First lines:
There was a young man from Palm Beach (reach, beseech, teach, leech, leach, peach, preach)
There was a young man from Dee Why
There was a young fellow called Smith (myth, pith, kith, with (?))

Third lines
As the camels walked in,
As the rainforests fell
For the rest of his life
The Impressionist school
As his feet turned to lead
As the keyboard went green

It is actually better to have a good word play in mind for the fifth line, or a good idea about your third and fourth lines. Here are some lines 3 and 4:

Third and fourth lines
Though he feared they had germs,
He ate all the worms

His large flock of wrens
That he passed off as hens

They found the canary
Was rather too hairy

If the horse had a chance
It would normally dance

He said "Thanks very much,
But I cannot speak Dutch,

Fifth lines with word plays:
And made cider inside her inside. (an old one!!)
A Norse of a different colour

The people cried "Cafe au lait" ( or Olé)

I came up with this line after seeing a car with OLE in its number-plate -- so the moral is: always keep your eyes skinned, as limericks can come from anywhere!

A Spanish soprano called Fay
Always sang in a can belto way
In the Coffee Cantata
When she was a starter
The people cried Café Olé!

(That one basically came to me during a walk of 200 metres, after I passed the car, to when I reached the bus stop I was headed for. Then all I had to do was tweak it.)

Other ideas for limericks:
Dig into a book, and look through the index for some interesting words. Check out your library, and see if you can find a Rhyming Dictionary -- it lists words by their rhymes.

Talking about the weather...

The Dark Knight's Tale

Knight on bear mountain

The knight rode up, in squeaking armour,

Fury writ upon his brow

And strange to say, he rode a lama—

A thief had nicked his favourite cow.

A knight whose thing was riding cattle?

I hear you ask, in rising fear.

Why yes, he did, but not in battle

The horse he'd sold to pay for beer.

His helm was sable, like his rage

And black was all the gear he wore

Save on his arm an off-white gage

But black was the stubble on his jaw.

He slapped his shield upon the bar,

It bore his motto "Ebon semper"

And made it clear, both near and far

He had a really nasty temper.

He kicked the spittoon over twice

And gave the crowd a dreadful fright

And then they saw, quite in a trice,

It was a dark and stormy knight.

Please send this to your friends, and spoil their New Year.

Curtiosity about arts, culture and science

Yet another set of unused epigraphs!

Piero della Francesca painted
himself in his Resurrection, in
which he is the guard with a goitre

The division of our culture is making us more obtuse than we need be: we can repair communications to some extent: but, as I have said before, we are not going to turn out men and women who understand as much of their world as Piero della Francesca did of his, or Pascal, or Goethe. With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of the imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant either of the endowments of applied science, of the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once seen, cannot be denied.

— C. P. Snow (1905 - 1980), The Two Cultures: a Second Look, 1963.

What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it.

— T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965

There is a likeness between the creative acts of the mind in art and in science. Yet, when a man uses the word science in such a sentence, it may be suspected that he does not mean what the headlines mean by science.

— Jacob Bronowski (1908 -  ), Science and Human Values, Julian Messner, 1956.

What is the insight with which the scientist tries to see into nature? Can it indeed be called either imaginative or creative? To the literary man the question may seem merely silly. He has been taught that science is a large collection of facts; and if this is true, then the only seeing which scientists need to do is, he supposes, seeing the facts.

— Jacob Bronowski (1908 -  ), Science and Human Values, Julian Messner, 1956.

. . if science were a copy of fact, then every theory would be either right or wrong, and would be so forever. There would be nothing left for us to say but that this is so or not so. No one who has read a page by a good critic or a speculative scientist can ever again think that this barren choice of yes or no is all that the mind offers.

— Jacob Bronowski (1908 -  ), Science and Human Values, Julian Messner, 1956.

There should be no honours for the artist; he has already, in the practice of his art, more than his share of the rewards of life; the honours are pre-empted for other trades, less agreeable and perhaps more useful.

— Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894), Letter to a Young Gentleman.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

— W. H. Auden (1907 - ), 'The Poet and the City', in The Dyer's Hand, Faber, 1963, p. 81.

Couldn't spot Piero above? Here
he is, and the goitre is the lump
in his throat.

At one time, the state of culture in Czechoslovakia was described, rather poignantly, as a 'Biafra of the spirit'. . . I simply do not believe that we have all lain down and died. I see far more than graves and tombstones around me. I see evidence of this in . . . expensive books on astronomy printed in a hundred thousand copies (they would hardly find that many readers in the USA) . . .

— Vaclav Havel, Czech playwright (and later president), 'Six asides about culture' in Living in Truth, Faber 1989, pp. 124-5.

 

Science is part of culture. Culture isn't only art and music and literature, it's also understanding what the world is made of and how it functions. People should know something about stars, matter and chemistry. People often say that they don't like chemistry but we deal with chemistry all the time. People don't know what heat is, they hardly know what water is./I'm always surprised how little people know about anything. I'm puzzled by it.

— Max Perutz, quoted in New Scientist 26 June 1993, 31.

A merry Christmas to all my readers

 To begin on a cheery note to expunge the sugar-frosted saccharine:

Gruesome enough?  You want more?  OK, here's something I just threw into the Facebook mix:

Carpe fortuna*

The finest perfumes in the land

Will make some noses runny;

The dinner that the hawk has planned

Is bad news for the bunny.

Fortune can be cool or hot,

When there's a chance, just grab it.

Your lucky rabbit's foot was not

So lucky for the rabbit.

* That's Latin for the lucky fish, I think. 

OK, enough grue.  A couple of years back, I offered an insight into Christmas in Australia, one that went to air about 20 years ago, but here's one in verse. If you are from the northern hemisphere, you may understand it better if you look at the link first.

Christmas breakfast 2010

Christmas breakfast

The Christmas morning track,

Has birds that whirl and screech;

It winds around the hill,

And plummets to the beach.

White Christmas doesn't suit us,

But summer Yule is neat,

When we go dressed for summer,

In sunhats and bare feet.

No snow, no sleet no gales,

water dragon

No dreadful raging blizzards —

We wish to wander bushland,

Filled full with birds and lizards.

With water dragons sunning

And goannas shyly hiding,

The butcherbirds in song

And kookaburras gliding.

We dabble in the shallows

And eat and drink our fill

If I could have my druthers,

I think we'd be there still.

Our Christmas skies are blue skies

kookaburra

They're never, ever, grey,

But walking up the bush track

It feels like Christmas day.

The Christmas morning track,

Brings simple things in reach

It winds around the hill,

But my heart's back on the beach.

* * * * * * *

As my favourite Australian carol, one that I quoted in that radio talk, has it:

The north wind is tossing the leaves,

Sydney, 8 am, a few years back

The red dust is over the town;

The sparrows are under the eaves,

And the grass in the paddock is brown.

If you Google the first line, you can find one rather awful version on Youtube.

Afterthought: or if you are lucky, you may hit upon this version, which my good friend, Robin Carroll-Mann found for me. Thanks, Robin!

Merry Christmas all, and if you are tucking into venison, please check its provenance.

Kids and lambs

I may have mentioned that I have just switched over to a new computer and Windows 8.1 — and this in the midst of checking page proofs of a new book, doing an index and stuff like that.  Life has been just a bit frantic.

Along the way, I found a file of lost verse, so for the first time since my Young Idiot's Guide to Opera, I will offer some rhymes.

I recall, one winter's day,
Our mothers sent us out to play
And we took off our hats and coats
To romp among the sheep and goats.

Our mothers had gone out to paint
The scene, but one fell in a faint.
The other mothers brought her round,
And that was when we children found

She thought it made us all look cheap
To frolic with the goats and sheep.
She wanted us, midst rocks and greenery
To blend in with the painters' scenery.

When faced with such artistic needs,
Obedient youngsters shape their deeds.
We children gave our solemn word
That we'd be scene but never herd.

Curtiosity about population

I have been up to my neck in work and also in taming a new computer, so here's something I prepared earlier.

But far more numerous was the herd

— John Dryden

Lemmings go over cliffs, we move to town.

— Lewis Thomas, The Fragile Species, Collier Macmillan, 1992, 100.

Populations, when unchecked, increase in a geometrical ratio.  Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.

— Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population Growth as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society.

Personally I come more and more to believe in decentralization and small-scale ownership of land and means of production.  The trouble is that, in an over-populated country like Britain, this is only partially feasible.  Mass production, coupled with mass regimentation, for export in exchange for food seems to be the ineluctable destiny of those who have made Malthus's nightmare come true.

— Aldous Huxley, letter to Harold Raymond (Chatto and Windus) from California, 1945, Letters of Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, 1969, p. 465.

Every moment dies a man,

  Every moment one is born

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892), The Vision of Sin, 1842.

Every moment dies a man,

  Every moment 1 1/16 is born

— Charles Babbage (1792 - 1871)

Until the 1940s, malaria was endemic in Ceylon . . . despite a high birth rate, for centuries the population has been stabilised and enervated by the mosquito. . . the population doubled in thirty years, with resultant problems of unemployment, inadequate social services, food shortages.

— Arthur C. Clarke, The View from Serendip, Gollancz, 1978, pp. 127-128.

The primary requirement for a stable human ecosystem is stabilization of human numbers.  This is something much more than the conventional aim of family planning, which is that every family should have the children they want, when they want them.  It means that at some point it becomes obligatory that each generation replaces itself and no more, that the average number of live births per woman during her lifetime shall be two plus a fraction (probably between 0.3 and 0.9) to allow for couples who are non-fertile, and for childhood deaths.

— Macfarlane Burnet, Dominant Mammal, Heinemann 1970, 129.

There is no getting away from it.  It is technically possible to carry out the scientific revolution in India, Africa, South-East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, within fifty years.  There is no excuse for Western man not to know this.  And not to know that this is the one way out through the three menaces which stand in our way — H-bomb war, over-population, the gap between the rich and the poor.  This is one of the situations where the worst crime is innocence.

— C. P. Snow (1905 - 1980), The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Rede Lecture, 1959.

Curtiosity about scientific laws

Dick the Butcher:  The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

— William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), Henry the Sixth, Part 2, IV, ii, 64

The very concept of 'laws of nature' is, in contemporary usage, both a product and an expression of the absence of reflectivity.  It introduces into the study of nature a metaphor indelibly marked by its political origins.

— Evelyn Fox Keller (1936 - ), Reflections on Gender and Science, Yale University Press, 1985, 131.

Volumi eguali di gas nelle stesse condizioni di temperatura e di pressione contengono lo stesso numero di molecole.  (Equal volumes of gas under the same conditions of temperature and pressure contain the same number of molecules.)

— Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Avogadro (1776 - 1856), a lawyer, proposes 'Avogadro's Hypothesis', now called 'Avogadro's Law'.

The important point is not the bigness of Avogadro's number, but the bigness of Avogadro.

— Henry Albert Bent (1926 -  ), The Second Law, OUP, 1965.

God did not create the planets and the stars with the intention that they should dominate man, but that they, like other creatures, should obey and serve him

— Paracelsus, Concerning the Nature of Things, c. 1541

The pious Jew or Moslem abhors pork without being conscious that it was awareness of the danger of trichinosis which probably caused his law-makers to impose the prohibition.

— Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, University paperbacks, 1967, 60.

There are ignorant people who speak flowery words and take delight in the letter of the law, saying that there is nothing else.

— Bhagavad Gita, 2:42, in the translation of Eknath Easwaran, Arkana Books, 1985.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

— Max Planck (1858 - 1947), quoted in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, 1970, p. 151.

Scientific law is of a totally different nature from civil law; it does not involve an intelligent lawgiver, a command, and a corresponding duty.  It is a brief description in mental shorthand of as wide a range as possible of the sequences of our sense-impressions.

— Karl Pearson (1857 - 1936), The Grammar of Science, Everyman edition, p. 98.

The judge then went on to speak of self-paste learning, and it was then that we realised that the worthy jurist, for all his worthiness, did not have a glue.

— Duncan Bain (1944 - ) 'First let's kill all the lawyers', in A Manual Cant, Breek-Anathema Press, 1988.

Curtiosity about fossils

Be kind to colleagues, ruthless with theories is a good rule.  A scientific theory isn't merely idle speculation, it's a verbal picture of how things might work, how a system in nature might organise things — atoms and molecules, species and ecosystems.  But old palaeontological theories too often aren't treated roughly enough.  Old theories — like the reptilian nature of dinosaurs — are accepted like old friends of the family.

— Robert Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies, Penguin Books, 1986, 27.

The violence of the weather lately washed down . . . and exposed a mass, which, on digging out, proved to be the vertebrae of some animal, whose size must have been enormous.  It is in excellent preservation, every process and part being perfect. . . .  Many are the conjectures with respect to the animal; some imagine it to be the gigantic buffalo or the rhinoceros, and others the elephant.  That intelligent osteologist, Miss Anning, of Lyme, surmises it to belong to either the behemoth or the hippopotamus, yet admits that it far exceeds their acknowledged dimensions.

— The Gentleman's Magazine, December 1824, p. 548.

As compared with their present-day representatives, the Tertiary vertebrates were characterised by their larger size; not that small species did not exist, but that many which then lived were larger than any existing today.

— C. A. Sussmilch, An Introduction to the Geology of New South Wales, Angus and Robertson, 1922, page 205.

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that.

— Holy Bible, Genesis, 6:4.

In all museums throughout the world one may see plaster casts of footprints preserved for posterity, not because the animals were particularly good of their sort, but because they had the luck to walk on the lava while it was cooling.  There is just the faint hope that something similar may happen to us.

— A. B. ('Banjo') Paterson, (  - 1941), speaking of himself and Henry Lawson, quoted Time April 26, 1993, 44.

Every organism forms a whole . . . if, for instance, the intestines of an animal are so organised as only to digest fresh meat, it follows that its jaws must be constructed to devour a prey, its claws to seize and tear it, its teeth to cut and divide it, the whole structure of its locomotory organs such as to pursue and catch it; its sensory organs to perceive it at a distance . . .

— Baron Cuvier, (1769-1832)

. . . implacable November weather.  As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

— Charles Dickens, Bleak House, London, 1852, page 1.

Limulus, the king crab of the sea-shore, is still identical with its ancestor found in the fossils of the Secondary geological era: during all this time the program has not varied, each generation punctually fulfilling its task of exactly reproducing the program for the following generation.

— Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973), p. 5.

Our young Geologist, who found

A fake fossil slab, made in Morocco.

These monstrous Bones deep underground

And sent his parcel, not a light one,

To his enlightened friend at Brighton;

Imagined, perhaps, like those who send

The marbles of almighty Greece

Here, to some Antiquarian friend,

They'd make a famous Mantel-piece.

— Anonymous verse (19th century), celebrating the purchase by Gideon Mantell, of an iguanodon found in a quarry at Maidstone.

'Cheer up,' he said, and then he winked.

'It's rather fun to be extinct!'

Ogden Nash (1902 - 1971), 'Fossils' in Carnival of the Animals

See Simulating a fossil

David Davies, a Welsh mine foreman, was the first to make really large collections of plant material from different coal seams.  He showed that even when the plants did not differ very much, there were differences in the proportions of different kinds, just as in one meadow you will find a great deal of clover among the grass, in another very little.

J.B.S.Haldane (1892-1964) Everything Has a History, Allen and Unwin 1951, page 50.

The origins of coal

'It is nothing else,' said the engineer; 'it is light bottled up in the earth for tens of thousands of years — light, absorbed by plants and vegetables, being necessary for the condensation of carbon during the process of their growth, if it be not carbon in another form — and now, after being buried in the earth for long ages in the fields of coal, that latent light is again brought forth and liberated, made to work as in that locomotive, for great human purposes.'

— Samuel Smiles, Life of George Stephenson, quoted in Charles Mackay (ed.), A Thousand and One Gems of English Prose (n.d.), p. 240.


In inland districts, on mountain peaks and in places farthest from the sea, shells, skeletons of sea-fish and marine plants are found, which are just the same as the shells, fish and plants now living in the sea, which are, indeed, exactly the same.

— Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon


Every organism forms a whole . . . if, for instance, the intestines of an animal are so organised as only to digest fresh meat, it follows that its jaws must be constructed to devour a prey, its claws to seize and tear it, its teeth to cut and divide it, the whole structure of its locomotory organs such as to pursue and catch it; its sensory organs to perceive it at a distance

Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier (1769 - 1832)

We have a lamentable instance of the gross impositions practized on the ignorant in former times, at two of their establishments on this coast - Whitby and Lindisfarn, where, to make it appear to the vulgar that their titular saints possessed the power of working miracles; St Hilda is said to have decapitated the snakes and converted them into stones of that form (now the Ammonites of the Lias); and St Cuthbert of Holy Island, is said, with his little hammer, to have forged the introchi (of the Mountain Limestone) - so called St Cuthbert's Beads.

What a gross perversion of Nature.
 
— William Smith (1769 - 1839)

The violence of the weather lately washed down . . . and exposed a mass, which, on digging out, proved to be the vertebrae of some animal, whose size must have been enormous. It is in excellent preservation, every process and part being perfect. . . . Many are the conjectures with respect to the animal; some imagine it to be the gigantic buffalo or the rhinoceros, and others the elephant. That intelligent osteologist, Miss Anning, of Lyme, surmises it to belong to either the behemoth or the hippopotamus, yet admits that it far exceeds their acknowledged dimensions.

The Gentleman's Magazine (1928??)


. . . the extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she had made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. . . . by reading and application she has arrived to that greater degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.

Lady Harriet Silvester, in her diary, 1824, after visiting Mary Anning.


She sells sea shells
By the sea shore,
And the shells that she sells
Are sea shells, I'm sure.

Verse about Mary Anning


We are lucky to have fossils at all. It is a remarkably fortunate fact of geology that bones, shells and other hard parts of animals, before they decay, can occasionally leave an imprint which later acts as a mould, which shapes hardening rock into a permanent memory of the animal. We don't know what proportion of animals are fossilized after their death - I personally would consider it a very great honour to be fossilized - but it is certainly very small indeed. . .  If a single well-verified mammal skull were to turn up in 500 million years-old rocks, our whole modern theory of evolution would be utterly destroyed. Incidentally, this is sufficient answer to the canard, put about by creationists and their journalistic fellow travellers, that the whole theory of evolution is an 'unfalsifiable' tautology. Ironically, it is also why creationists are so keen on the fake human footprints, which were carved during the depression to fool tourists, in the dinosaur beds of Texas.

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker.