BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

A St. Louis immigrant.

We are in a state of war here . . . fighting the great destroyer, the cholera—of course no room for anything else, not even for sleeping or eating—like soldiers before the enemy. George Engelmann to Asa Gray. St. Louis, May 12, 1849.

George Engelmann, born in Frankfurt, Germany, on February 2, 1809, was often at war in his adopted country. So was his cousin Adolph Engelmann, wounded at Buena Vista in 1847 and then, in the Civil War, took part in the siege of Vicksburg and the bloodbath at Shiloh, in Tennessee. Adolph finished as Union brigadier-general, and in 1884 was buried in the Engelmann family cemetery in Shiloh, Illinois. Cousin George Engelmann’s battles were different. He was a doctor (MD, University of Würzburg, 1831), and began his battles against disease in St. Louis, where he settled in 1835 after living with his cousins across the river. A devoted medic, he built a large practice, not only amongst the city’s Germans. He was a good clinician, and prospered mightily. He founded a German language newspaper, Die Westland, which aimed to inform German immigrants how best to manage their lives in this new, western republic. He'd begun his quest as a radical undergraduate, a self-styled disciple of the great poet-philosopher Goethe, and found his native land no place for a radical battler. He had his doubts about whether his new republic, the USA, would work out much better, but he thought a good beginning would be to devote himself to education, the spread of knowledge, and in particular science. His voluminous correspondence with Asa Gray, the republic’s leading botanist and the founder of New York’s botanical gardens, indicates that George’s main scientific interest lay in plants. And the “slavery” (as he sometimes put it) of his medical practice gave him the funds to explore the west and catalog its plants. And to study them too. Near St. Louis he discovered a native wild grape that was resistant to phylloxera. It could also be grafted onto European stock, and so it was that Engelmann helped French vintners in their fight against their very own invasion—the phylloxera epidemic of the 1870s. But George Engelmann was, like his hero Goethe, a polymath. In St. Louis he spread knowledge of all the sciences (and mathematics as science’s native tongue) through St. Louis’s Academy of Science, which he helped to found in 1856, about the same year he began a nearly full-time schedule of botanical explorations and experiments. The Academy remains active today, but George Engelmann’s greatest monument is the Missouri Botanical Garden. Yet another immigrant (for St. Louis is a city of immigrants) provided the money: Henry Shaw, a steelmaker who hailed from Sheffield in England. But George Engelmann from Frankfurt in Germany was the brains behind the operation. The bulk of his papers still reside at the Botanical Garden, which is where they belong. ©.

[Stanley]

Early evolutionist

Our beautiful planet is indeed worthy of our study. It was once our cradle—it will soon be our grave. Gideon Mantell, The Wonders of Geology, 1839.

I read Loren Eisley’s Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It shortly after publication. Eisley was the Penn Provost, I was a Penn freshman, the book made a splash, and I bought it. The title implicitly omits a woman’s contributions (Mary Anning’s Ichthyosaur and Plesiosaur skeletons). Nor can I remember anything much in Eisley about Gideon Mantell, the surgeon who did so much to identify that there had indeed been an age before ours, the age of the dinosaur. This would not have surprised Mantell himself, for he took a perverse pleasure, not to mention pain, from the world’s reluctance to recognize his genius. But recognition had always been a problem for him. Gideon Algernon Mantell began life (in Lewes, Sussex, on February 3, 1790) as the child (one among eight) of a shoemaker. This was not a good start in Georgian England. His father’s radicalism didn’t help either, and Gideon (despite his baptismal name?) was not able to enter the local (Anglican) grammar school. “No Methodists need apply.” So Mantell apprenticed to a local surgeon. After serving his term, he entered into partnership with his master, married well, and settled down to a medical career. There he prospered well enough to build a big practice, and this in turn allowed him to spend much time, and in the end too much money, on his avocation, the then infant science of paleontology. His first book, The Fossils of the South Downs (1822), was soon followed (1825) by his greatest discovery, first the teeth only, of a beast he named Iguanodon. We now call it a dinosaur, but the word wasn’t yet coined. Still, it made a stir, an extinct, terrestrial, reptilian monster. The Iguanodon, and other discoveries, brought more books, a wider audience, and election to the Geological Society of London. Then came the whole Iguanodon skeleton, other “dinosaurs,” a generous grant from the Earl of Egremont, and the patronage of King George IV. All that, and an honorary degree from Yale!! It seems to have gone to Mantell’s head. His medical practice suffered, and then his fossil museum foundered, And the scientific world (let alone the religious one) overflowed with doubting Thomases, some of them very eminent. So Mantell sold his fossil collection to the British Museum for a fairly colossal sum (£700,000 in today’s ££s) and tried to re-establish his medical practice in south London. It didn’t work well. Dogged by severe physical pain (spinal scoliosis worsened by a carriage accident), embittered by the barbs of his skeptics, and disappointed by a casual brushoff from the young Charles Darwin, this pioneer of evolutionary science died of an opium overdose (probably accidental) in 1852. ©

[Stanley]

Utility as an ethic.

Priestly was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth—that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation. Jeremy Bentham.

On first reading, that sounds good. It’s often used to credit Bentham with the honor of being the founding father of ‘utilitarianism’, a system of ethics (or a public morality) that would be given its most humane statement by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Mill, who as a young man worked with Bentham, took care to include everyone (women, children, the laboring poor, animals) in his humane distribution of happiness. Jeremy Bentham, born in London on February 4, 1748, obviously knew that the idea was not his invention. Happiness was in the air, a conversation, a reasonable ideal. The actual quote (“the greatest happiness of the greatest number”) came from the Irish ‘common sense’ philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), and we Americans know that to pursue “happiness” is one of our “unalienable rights.” So says Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1776). It marks Bentham (not to mention Joseph Priestley, Cesare Beccaria, and Jefferson) as children of the Enlightenment. For them, “happiness” replaced (or challenged) “salvation” as the chief end of life as it was lived here and now, on earth, in society with others. Jeremy Bentham spent his whole life in pursuit of secular happiness, and given the sad state of the world, he lived that life as a reformer. With his beloved brother Samuel, he spent over a decade trying to reform Russia, a monumental task. He tried with France until he was disappointed by the excesses of the Revolution. And later in life he corresponded with Presidents James Madison and John Quincy Adams to help the infant republic in its own pursuit(s) of happiness. But mostly Bentham tried to reform Britain. He began with the law. His father was a lawyer and, after Oxford, he started as one. But soon he was convinced that the laws made only lawyers happy, and agitated for them to be revised, rewritten, clarified, so that everyone could follow them (effortlessly, as it were) and render lawyers superfluous. For those who broke the laws, Bentham’s “panopticon” prisons would be dedicated to rehabilitation, not punishment. There’s something quite fairly scary about Bentham’s all-seeing and all-knowing jails. Hilda Goldfarb and Michel Foucault have seen in them the architectural origins of modern totalitarianism, and indeed ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ can become a sinister calculus for minorities and eccentrics—never mind criminals. Bentham himself came to recommend a more piecemeal approach to the spreading of happiness, sewing a kindness here, weeding a sorrow there, and then contemplating the results. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to call it pragmatism. ©

[Stanley]

Oxymorons.

They talk about the ‘survival of the fittest’; they think they do understand it, whereas they not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean. G. K. Chesterton.

Darwin’s revolutionary idea that speciation (or extinction) was a process governed by natural selection offended many. But for the rich and powerful of his era (or our own) the idea of selection proved attractive. They were, after all, among the “select.” QED. How tempting it was to see the selected as the lords of creation, and the “losers” as casualties of a natural process. For Chesterton, evolving into a conservative Catholicism, this ‘social Darwinism’ was “a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one.” But Social Darwinism was not Darwinism. The great architect of the Darwinian ‘modern synthesis’, Theodosius Dobzhansky, drove the point home: “nature’s stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.” But there have been plenty of evolutionary scientists eager to see evolution as a ruthlessly competitive process that could benefit only the best, the strongest, the smartest. “Mutual help,” welfare programs, free public education, redistributive taxation, could only dilute the bloodstream. One of the most persuasive of these social Darwinists was Arthur Keith, born near Aberdeen, Scotland, on February 5, 1866. He earned an MD at Aberdeen in 1888, but never really took to medical practice. A couple of scientific expeditions and a London University course in anatomy made him an expert in the evolutionary similarities between apes and humans. And their dissimilarities. Though he was a self-proclaimed Darwinian, he couldn’t accept Darwin’s educated guess that we came out of Africa. Looking around his world, at the apparent supremacy of Europe (and particularly of European Anglo-Saxons), he argued that homo sapiens was a species best suited to a temperate climate and seasonal weather. Having started, Keith couldn’t stop digging. By the 1920s, now knighted, Sir Arthur Keith became a leading spokesman for “scientific racism,” a eugenicist who believed that scientific breeding among humans was ‘natural,’ an in-group and in-bred tendency to avoid mixing with out-groups. Keith saw even capitalism (and patriotism, and morality, and nationalism) as biological at base. And of course race itself. There were three main races (Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid), but then Keith added another. Jews, he argued, had “evolved” to become a race apart. He continued to hold this “scientific” view after the horrors of the Holocaust. Hitler, Keith argued in a 1946 book, was nothing more than an evolutionist who’d got it slightly wrong. It’s a book that’s hard to find these days. In the struggle for survival, it has proved an inferior publication. Dare I say “unfit”? ©.

[Stanley]

Satire and its limits.

From Earth to Heaven Whitehead’s soul is fled:
Refulgent glories beam around his head!
His Muse concording with resounding strings,
Gives Angels words to praise the King of kings.

This doggerel was read at the ‘funeral’ of Paul Whitehead on August 16, 1775, at St. Lawrence’s Church, West Wycombe, Bucks.: not really a funeral, rather a “solemn mockery.” Whitehead died in late December, 1774. His proper funeral (January 1775) was at his parish church in west London. But he’d willed his heart to Sir Francis Dashwood, 11th baron le Despencer. The heart was placed in an urn, and (after an elaborate church ceremony) placed in Dashwood’s family mausoleum. Dashwood himself would be put there in 1781. The mausoleum, or rather its singular urn, became a grisly tourist attraction, at least until 1839, when the urn (and the heart) were stolen by a soldier bound for duty at a antipodean prison camp. The heart’s current whereabouts are not known, but legend has it that Whitehead’s ghost can still be heard at the Dashwood mausoleum. Probably laughing: for Whitehead had been one of 18th-century London’s celebrated satirists, a star in a firmament speckled with stars, some of them (e.g. Pope and Swift) much brighter than Whitehead’s. Paul Whitehead was born in London on February 6, 1710. That’s St. Paul’s Day, and his baptismal name was itself an act of piety. But piety was not to be Whitehead’s trademark. He must have been well-educated by his tailor father, for he burst on the London scene in 1733 with a well-wrought satire, The State Dunces, titled in honor of Pope’s The Dunciad (1729). Whitehead continued in this vein, attacking not only Robert Walpole, the king’s ‘prime’ minister, but also the king’s bishops and other favorites. Whitehead’s invective brought him trouble, including a brief stay in a debtors’ prison, but he kept at it. Sometimes Whitehead enjoyed the (tacit) patronage of the then Prince of Wales, but he went beyond political satire to attack (for instance) the Masonic order, some eminent physicians, and even boxers. His political satire always favored throwing the rascals out, but when the rascals were only replaced by new rascals, Whitehead turned to more self-indulgent humor by participating in the bizarre rituals of Francis Dashwood’s new model of the old Hell-Fire Club. That’s a story in itself, involving obscenity, blasphemy, and a soupçon of illicit sex. It made Whitehead himself an object of crude public satire (he as “St. Paul”, the gatekeeper at a down-market brothel). And so, in his last act of satirical defiance, Paul Whitehead gave his heart to Sir Francis Dashwood. Inadvertently, he thus showed us that, in politics, satire can get you only so far. To Australia, for instance? ©

[Stanley]

Gopher Prairie and Sauk Centre

I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dishwashing is enough to satisfy all women! Carol Kennicott, in the last chapter of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920).

Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Literature Nobel (in 1930), was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, on February 7, 1885. The village had only recently been incorporated (it didn’t appear in the US Census until 1880), and when it did win its own post office the USPS insisted on the spelling “Sauk Center”, denying (and implicitly ridiculing) the village founders’ pretentious preference for “Centre.” It was not until 1936 that the Post Office accepted the more sophisticated, or more anglophile, spelling. The town, for its part, also got over the pain of being the object of Lewis’s savage satire, for his Gopher Prairie was for all practical purposes his very own home town of Sauk Center, or Centre. At first it was hard. The nearby Minnesota town of Alexandria (an equally small place) barred Main Street from its public library. And the sports teams at the Sauk Centre High School resented being called “Main Streeters” by their nearby rivals. But Sauk Centre has got over it. The house in which Lewis was born is a National Historic Landmark. The school sports teams proudly call themselves “The Streeters.” A nice sign in front of the town’s public library now proclaims that the town’s “Main Street stands as the living symbol of the American small town.” What Lewis made of all this is difficult to sort out. In his Nobel acceptance speech he called the USA “the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring of any land in the world today.” He’d then limned an even more savage view of the small town and its alleged virtues in Elmer Gantry (1927) and Babbitt (1928) and went on to predict that a USA made up of people like George Babbitt and Elmer Gantry might become even more fascist than 1930s Germany. In view of Donald Trump’s apparent popularity in rural America, these are interesting points. But it is as accurate, and certainly more helpful, to say that Sinclair Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, then went to Yale, and found himself an alien in both places. We can say much the same thing about his Main Street heroine Carol Kennicott. She was born in a small Minnesota town. She didn’t get as far away as Yale, but she studied in Chicago, and in the Twin Cities, and learned enough in those places to think that Gopher Prairie (when she ‘returned’ to it as a housewife) could stand some improvements. It needed more beauty and more openness, more social space for its women. Only thus could Gopher Prairie acquire a sharper sense of its possibilities and the political sense to make something of them. It’s a well-balanced view. Main Street is, after all, the story of Carol Kennicott, and although she failed she fought a good fight. ©

[Stanley]

Self-made woman.

They call her
the first Black woman
to earn a medical degree.
She called herself doctress.
She called herself businesswoman.
She called herself being.

That extract from a 2021 poem by Jessy Randall tells us almost all we need to know about Rebecca Lee Crumpler. But not quite. She was born Rebecca Davis, February 8, 1831, in Delaware. It was still a slave state, so she went to live with an aunt in Pennsylvania. This auntie was a ‘wise woman’ who worked her magic providing care for people who were poor and sick, and this may be where Rebecca got the idea of medical care as a missionary endeavor. She moved to Massachusetts where she married Wyatt Lee, a formerly enslaved Virginian. She worked as a nurse and began to put together a formal education, including mathematics, at a local school that accepted students of color. At about the same time (1850), the state licensed the New England Female Medical College. It was not intended to educate women as doctors, rather as midwives, but once you give these inferior people a foothold there’s no stopping them, and in 1860 Rebecca enrolled there to become a “doctress” (as the college styled its medical graduates). So Rebecca Lee was not only the first black woman doctor in the USA but also one of the very earliest female doctors. Very much a DEI thing, some might say today, and indeed prevailing opinion at that time was that women’s smaller brains barred them from the serious professions. Inequality has always been, and remains, an attractive science. But in 1850s New England reform was in the air. Anti-slavery and abolition societies were growing. Women were speaking their minds in public and about public issues. So Rebecca Lee became a doctress. She then married Arthur Crumpler, another formerly enslaved man (Wyatt Lee had died), and in 1865 followed him to newly-liberated Virginia to provide medical care for Richmond’s newly-liberated slaves. Soon they were back in Boston where Rebecca provided homeopathic medical care to the poor and became a leading member of the Twelfth Baptist Church. She also began to write about her cases, publishing a major clinical study (A Book of Medical Discourses) in 1883. There were other essays, a thriving practice, and the Crumplers became well known, established figures in Boston. In 1874, Rebecca spoke by invitation at the funeral of the abolitionist hero, Senator William Sumner. Besides learning medicine, Dr. Crumpler had also (as she wrote and as Jenny Randall recognized in poetry) become her own “being.” That may have been her greatest accomplishment. ©

[Stanley]

Purchasing power.

I am determined to rise to the head of my profession, and nothing but death will stop me. John Gaspard le Marchant.

Brave words indeed, and prophetic. When John le Marchant fell, mortally wounded, in the Battle of Salamanca (1812), he had risen to the rank of colonel. He died sword in hand, leading a charge, “a most princely example.” Many comrades thought he deserved higher rank. The public concurred, raising £100k (in today’s £s) to erect a memorial in St. Paul’s Cathedral. But in the British Army at the time it wasn’t heroism, or even competence, which got you to the head of your profession. The plan was to purchase your commission, starting, say, with a lieutenancy and then moving up through the ranks, bearing the monetary costs of each ‘promotion.’ And if one lived long enough to retire, your commission (or ‘property’) could be sold downwards, providing a kind of pension. And that’s the way John Gaspard le Marchant began his military career. Born in Picardy, France, on February 9, 1766, but into the Channel Islands gentry, le Marchant’s father bought him his first commission in 1781. At 15, who knew what kind of officer he would be. His old schoolmaster thought him a dunce, and once in the Wiltshire militia he almost threw it all away at cards. Then he got into a spat with his colonel. Imprudent or impudent, le Marchant was a teenager. He reformed himself enough to invest in a lieutenancy in the dragoon guards just in time for the wars with France. H was humiliated enough by the disastrous performance of the cavalry in the 1794 Flanders campaign to think that there might be a better way (than mere purchase) of recruiting an officer class. He began, oddly, by redesigning the standard cavalry sabre, but then, with the patronage of the Duke of York (and perhaps King George III) Le Marchant set about drafting “An Outline of a Plan for A Regular Course of Military Instruction.” It would not get rid of the purchase system, but would start with teaching boys the basics before they bought their first commission. Once under command, these military students would advance to further training, not only by ‘apprenticeship’ but also further study (engineering even, and of course military history). And so it was that Colonel John Gaspard le Marchant became one of the founding fathers of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. The purchase system, however, remained more or less intact until 1871, and an object of satire (witness Jane Austen’s pathetic villain Wickham—an ensign by purchase—in Pride and Prejudice, 1813). It became tragedy during the Crimean War when Lord Cardigan, who’d purchased his cavalry commission for £4 million (in today’s values), led his light brigade into the valley of death. The power to command should not be up for purchase. It's an expensive lesson that needs to be relearned. ©.

[Stanley]

Red tape rationale

I don’t wish to disparage the rich, but I think it may be reasonably doubted whether these qualities are so fully developed in them. Samuel Plimsoll.

The (missing) qualities that Samuel Plimsoll had in mind were honesty, courage and “tenderness to others in adversity.” And it must be said that he wrote, and spoke, from experience. He was himself a rich man, or more accurately made himself rich, three times over. He made fortunes. He lost them too, but when in 1868 he finally entered Britain’s Parliament he was a wealthy entrepreneur, an inventor, a major figure in the coal industry, and an indefatigable reformer. MPs can speak pretty freely, and sometimes Plimsoll went over the top. Once, forced by the Speaker to apologize for his invective, he did beg parliament’s pardon for his rhetoric, but insisted that he had his facts right. Among these facts was the terrible death rate incurred by seamen in Britain’s merchant marine: over 3,000 annually in the 1860s. Clearly shipowners were lacking in “tenderness to others.” Many of their “coffin ships” (so-called by Plimsoll and others) were colliers, and Plimsoll’s first effort to stop the carnage was to move coal to London via railways. Indeed his first fortune arose from his clever invention, patented of course, for unloading coal from freight cars. But there was still more profit to be made shipping by sea, and so Plimsoll turned to parliamentary regulation, “red tape” it’s called by those with short memories or dulled moral senses. Besides being a self-made capitalist, Samuel Plimsoll may have been born a reformer, in Bristol, on February 10, 1824. His parents and grandparents belonged to a dissenting church (Congregationalist), and one of his fondest memories were of his family taking poor folk into their home for food and prayer—and instruction. Plimsoll moved north, fetching up finally in Sheffield, where he put his own schooling to work as a clever publicist and then as a coal merchant. His first bankruptcy earned him the censure of his congregation and taught him caution, but he was soon on his feet with busy offices in Sheffield and London and a burning tenderness for the laboring poor, especially those in the ‘dangerous trades’: mining, shipping, and steelmaking. He utterly rejected the absurd notion that their safety should be left to their employers (whose abiding concern had to be profit), and so supported unionization as well as legislative regulation. Plimsoll’s greatest success was safety regulation in the British merchant marine. It’s since been codified in several international agreements, most recently I think in 1966. Its comprehensive but its visible symbol, which you can see on all ocean freighters and many craft that sail only in domestic fresh waters, is still called the ‘Plimsoll Line’. It’s variously marked (some waters are more buoyant than others), but it’s a visible reminder that red tape saves lives. Overloaded ships make good money in light breezes and calm waters. But when things go amiss, they’re killers. British seafarers’ unions, I’m told, still celebrate Plimsoll Day (that’s today), and with good reason. And British children are still required to bring their Plimsolls to school. In wet weather, they keep the feet dry, as long as the water’s not over the shoes’ Plimsoll line. But Samuel Plimsoll died well before the shoe was invented. And when he died, his cortège was escorted to Highgate Cemetery by hundreds of merchant seamen, who knew him as a wise and tender friend whose work for regulations and unions had helped keep them afloat. ©

[Stanley]

An artist of science.

True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier—when it’s spelled with a lower case letter. Richard Hamming, 1986.
As far as I know, Richard Hamming never made that grade, unless you count ‘hamming it up.’ He was a bit of a wit, though. He became one of the most quotable of 20th-century scientists, an odd accomplishment, one might say, for a computer scientist. But then only a few computer scientists have won any kind of science Nobel. So the Nobel Committee knew it was making an important step when in 2024 it awarded the physics prize to the American Joseph Hopfield and the Canadian Geoffrey Hinton for their “discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning through artificial neural networks.” Sounds like computer science to me. As yet we don’t speak of “hintons” or “hopfields” (not, anyway, as we speak of amperes and joules), and we don’t really have any “hammings” either. What we do have are the Hamming code, the Hamming matrix, the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, and the Hamming distance. I don’t understand a single one of them, but they chart the importance of Richard Wesley Hamming in the development of computer science. He was born in Chicago on February 11, 1915. Schooled in the city’s Crane high school and Crane junior college, he first wanted to be an engineer. But, offered a scholarship by the University of Chicago, he became a scientist instead. Some Hamming aphorisms suggest he was glad of this escape. An engineer, he later said, is “the guy going down manholes instead of having the excitement of frontier research work.” Instead he became a mathematician, one with a Chicago bachelor’s, a Nebraska master’s, and an Illinois PhD. His first real job was with the Manhattan Project, helping physicists with their late-stage work on the A-Bomb. Among other things, Hamming ‘computed’ the probabilities that a nuclear explosion might incinerate our whole atmosphere. Pretty low, he concluded, and later said that if he had made a mistake there wouldn’t have been any need to apologize. Some of his Manhattan work depended on primitive computers (huge, slow, and hot) and he went on to help make them small, fast, and cool. He did most of this work (developing fiendishly efficient programming languages) at Bell Laboratories. At Bell he also developed fruitful notions about management and labor, but it was for his work on the processes of computing that in 1968 he won the Turing Award. It’s widely known as the “Nobel Prize of Computing.” He soon retired from Bell and spent the rest of his life at the US Navy’s Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA. There he concentrated on teaching people how best to do science—and to manage scientific work. Most of his aphoristic advice had to do with open doors and open minds. ©.

[Stanley]

The fossil business.

The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (2010), by Richard Conniff.

Recently there has been a flood of TV documentaries, newspaper articles, and books on ‘the fossil rush.’ Nowadays, indeed, fossilized bones have proven to be worth their weight in gold. According to one documentary, it’s the newly-rich who are particularly drawn to the things. Oversize ammonites grace their dining tables. Long extinct trilobites graze on their mantelpieces. And once bitten by the fossil bug, some can’t stop. The other night on TV I saw a Filipino millionaire worshipping an eight-foot raptor skeleton for which he’d built a special altar (back-lit, even) in his super-modern mansion. And the millions he’d paid for it seemed one of its greatest charms. He even trotted out the threadbare witticism that “if you need to ask the price you can’t afford it.” Richard Conniff, the author of The Species Seekers, has made a business out of writing about the business, not only books but features for (among others) the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Having sampled Conniff’s works, I don’t think he admires these nouveaux, and indeed there is much to dislike about them. The prices they are willing to pay for a complete dinosaur, minus the flesh of course, encourage industrial-scale digging, tax evasion, and the plundering of poor nations (not least, these days, Mongolia). But it’s not “new.” One of the early fossil-rushers was Barnum Brown, born on February 12, 1873. His parents named him after the great American showman Phineas T. Barnum, and he was born in a Kansas town called Carbondale, so we might say that he was fated to become the Barnum of the bones trade and, among other things, the first to excavate a real, live (or I should say dead) Tyrannosaurus rex. But fate had a helping hand when, aged only 21, Barnum Brown was invited onto a fossil-hunting expedition to South Dakota. There Barnum encountered a competing expedition (for fossils were already in style) from the American Museum of Natural History. It was a marriage made in heaven, and the Barnum of the Bones rocketed to fame (and some fortune) as chief assistant to Henry Fairfield Osborne, then at the very top of the bones business. And it was a business, at least as cutthroat as oil, and indeed when Barnum became his own star he partnered with Sinclair Oil to find fossils all over the place, blasting them free of their matrixes with dynamite and shipping them home in boxcars. And Barnum himself became a showman, oddly but spectacularly attired in knee-length fur coats, and (after the death of his first wife to whom, apparently, he was faithful) a bit of a lad with the ladies. So Barnum enjoyed his digs, a least until he was 83. So what’s going on now in the fossil rush world isn’t new. It’s just worse. There aren’t (by definition) more fossils than there once were. But there is more money. ©.

[Stanley]

Jack of several trades.

Informer! A horror to be understood fully only by the Irish mind . . . Good God! An informer is the great danger. From the novel The Informer (1925) by Liam O’Flaherty.

When the Irish rid themselves of Viking raiders (or absorbed them into the island’s gene pool), they had to deal with the English. Those Anglo-Irish ‘troubles’ roiled the isles for another eight or nine centuries. Taken together they may constitute the longest civil war in recorded history. It’s full of heroes and villains, and the worst villains are the informers. Some acted as agents provocateurs, stirring up trouble. Others as spies. But whatever their role(s), their effectiveness depended on their abilities in disguise. And in that art the all-time champion was Leonard Macnally or, as Irish scholars tend to spell him, MacNally, as if to emphasize his perfidy as an Irishman who played the English game. The (British) National Dictionary of Biography insists on Macnally. As Seamus Heaney put it, ambiguously, “the very rhythm of his name [is] a register of dear bought treacheries grown transparent now, and inestimable.” One measure of Macnally’s success is that his treacheries became transparent only after his death, on February 13, 1820. With the opening of British state papers we found that Macnally’s undercover career really began in earnest during the “troubles” of the 1790s, when some elements of the United Irishmen toyed dangerously with the idea that France’s revolutionary armies might free the Irish. Before that Leonard Macnally was a man of several identities playing several roles. Of obscure origins, born in 1752, he was mainly self-taught and wholly flexible. He first appeared as a Dublin grocer, then fled his Irish debts to take up life in London where he became, variously, a man of letters (essays and plays), of music (he wrote at least one opera and several popular songs), an actor, and—of all things—a lawyer. An occasionally conforming Protestant, he did claim a Catholic ancestry, and he did act courageously in helping victims of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots. I suppose all this quick change stuff was training for his ‘real’ life as an informer, but that didn’t start in earnest until the 1790s, when he returned to Dublin and—besides defending in court some of the most eminent of the United Irishmen plotters—began sending regular reports to the British government. Worse, in terms of professional ethics if not ethnic loyalties, he provided details of his legal defenses to the prosecutors for the crown in cases where his clients ended up hanged as traitors. And he had the unmitigated gall to visit his condemned clients in jail, and to comfort them with religious pieties on the eve of their executions. His disguises were so effective that he became known as a paragon of legal ethics. In short, his careers were fully reflective of the moral confusions which attend all internecine conflicts. ©.

[Stanley]

A woman of means.

Just as the home is not without the man, so the state is not without the woman . . . men and women must go through this world together from the cradle to the grave. Anna Howard Shaw. 1909.

These words came at the very end of Ms. Shaw’s speech in favor of women’s suffrage in the state of New York. Or, more accurately, in favor of striking the word “male” from several articles of the state’s constitution and from a number of state laws. And quite a speech it was, judged by the journal American Rhetoric to be one of the 100 best speeches in US history. It was delivered at a time when speeches were still speeches. It runs to 10,000 words, nearly 20 pages of typescript. Delivered in monotone, hurriedly, it would run for over an hour, and it wasn’t delivered hurriedly. It’s full of logical arguments drawn down from axioms, full to the brim with facts; and then each argument has its own punch line. Some of the punches are quite funny, others merely compelling. Today we don’t do (or hear—or laugh at—or heckle) speeches like that. We deliver ‘elevator speeches,’ and (so far) none of our buildings are tall enough. As auditors, our digestions prefer ‘sound bites’ to six-course dinners. So the question arises, how was Anna Shaw able to craft, then deliver, this marathon? She’d had plenty of time, for she was born in England on February 14, 1847. And by 1909 she’d also clocked up a lot of experience. The family moved to Massachusetts in 1851, and then in 1859 her father sent her, her mother, and four younger siblings to establish a homestead in Michigan’s northern peninsula. Life was pretty hard, and Anna’s first reaction was to practice preaching to the trees. There were plenty of trees, but her teachers also heard her, assessed her talents, and sent her on to Albion College in the softer, more civilized part of the state. From there she became (in 1880) a licensed preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church and, in 1886, a certified medical doctor. With a degree in divinity and another in medicine, she was a woman professional, a rare bird indeed. It’s not surprising that she came out of it an accomplished individual (dispensing medicine and God’s Word in the slums of Boston required self-confidence). And along the way she converted also to feminism and the suffrage movement. Her abilities were manifest, and by the time she died (in 1919, just a few months before final ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, she had spoken in all (then) 48 states. She advocated (always eloquently and often at length) for the vote, of course, but also for temperance (local option rather than national prohibition), against lynching, for peace, and for the rights to life of the nation’s laboring poor. Her 1909 speech, available on line, is a good Valentine’s Day read—and it reminds us that politics can be a rational sport. ©

[Tizer]

What a star! Is it pure coincidence that I'd just posted on OG a link to Barbara Castle's long speech in 1960 about a new school needed to replace the one I was attending then?

[Stanley]

A name becomes a trademark.

Beautiful design makes a beautiful life. Charles Lewis Tiffany.

Today 19 E. 72nd street is said to be one of the 10 most desirable addresses in Manhattan. It’s on the corner of 72nd and Madison, and its front door is just a short saunter from Central Park. It has 15 stories (not counting the penthouse floors) and includes a fair number of two-story units. It sits on ground once occupied by the Tiffany Mansion, itself a grand brownstone (five stories not including the several gables). It would be dwarfed today, but in its time it was huge, and without doubt it was stuffed with beautiful things, for by the time it was built (1880) “Tiffany” was already a trademark. Among others, Mrs. Abraham Lincoln had shopped there and wildly overspent the president’s measly salary. Before the mansion was built, the firm of Tiffany & Co. (incorporated in 1853) had already established branches in Paris (1850) and London (1868), patronized by European aristocrats (and by vacationing Americans, most of them—by European standards—nouveaux). Tiffany’s influence was such that most American silversmiths with any pretention to excellence had adopted “sterling” as the standard for fine silver. And yet, yet. . . . No Tiffany was among the famous “400” as Caroline Schermerhorn Astor had (circa 1890) defined New York’s crème de la crème. One cannot exhume Mrs. Astor to explain this exclusion. But why was it that the Tiffanys couldn’t keep up with the Joneses? (And there were Joneses on the list, including a Jones débutante we know today as novelist Edith Wharton, who had her own point of view on ‘The 400’). The answer may be that Charles Lewis Tiffany, the founder of the firm, was ‘in trade,’ a man who still had a workshop to attend to and who might, on any given day, be found to have dirt under his fingernails. Born in Connecticut on February 15, 1812, Tiffany began in trade in a small way (stationery and small gift items) on a $1,000 loan from his dad, a mill owner in a small Connecticut town. Charles paid attention to his customers, encouraged their taste for beauty, moved through a couple of good partnerships (one of which brought him a wife), and by 1860 his shop was the place to go for the Astors and their friends. There was then a brief interlude where Tiffany switched to making fancy cavalry sabres for Union Army cavaliers, but with the return of peace Tiffany & Co. went back to luxury items. They weren’t yet famed mainly for their designs, however. That would be the work of Charles Lewis Tiffany’s youngest son, Lewis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). I do not know whether Lewis Comfort ever made it into the Four Hundred. Probably not, for in designing elegant silver and those utterly fantastic lamps and shades, he kept on getting dirt under his fingernails. ©

[Tripps]

I'd just posted on OG a link to Barbara Castle's long speech in 1960 about a new school needed to replace the one I was attending then?

I'm all for a bit of "spooky but I don't see any reference to Barbara Castle on this thread.
Then again there is no entry for 14th February.

Stewards please . . .

[Stanley]

"Then again there is no entry for 14th February."
That's because it came in later than 15:00 which is when I log off David. Look again and note there are the right number of posts, it's just that sometimes they are late..... Two for the 15th. The first is the 14th one.

[Stanley]

Prophecy and science

They have reproached me with being too Cartesian, and made me to understand that, following the meditations of [Isaac Newton], all physics has been completely altered. Nicolas Fatio to Christiaan Huygens, 1687.

It’s always difficult for youth to fit into whatever portion of the adult world it wants to inhabit, but this is an unusually rarified example. Nicolas Fatio negotiated it in several ways. Most notably, he embraced Newton’s ‘new’ physics. Not only that, but Fatio would become one of Isaac Newton’s most perceptive critics and yet one of Newton’s closest colleagues. Since Sir Isaac was a notoriously sensitive scientific genius, we must admire Fatio for his diplomacy. Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, to give him his full moniker, was born near Basel, in Switzerland, on February 16, 1664. So he was only 23 when he outlined his problems of acceptance (in London) to Huygens, one of early modern Europe’s greatest astronomers. One solution came quickly, for Fatio was only 24 when, early in 1688, he entered the fellowship of London’s Royal Society. His collaborations with Newton began in 1689, and continued until Newton’s death. In 1728, Fatio not only composed a literary tribute to the great man but consulted on the design of the Newton memorial in Westminster Abbey. Along the way, he defended Newton’s primacy in the ‘invention’ of the calculus (against Leibniz and others) and kept beavering away on what was to be his own great work, a subtle refinement and editing of Newton’s Principia. On the side, as it were, Nicolas Fatio participated in England’s Glorious Revolution (1688-1689), and from that developed close associations with the philosopher John Locke and his “Whig” circle and with the eminent churchman Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of London. Fully conversant with the advanced political thinking of the era, Fatio was also an exceptionally clever tinkerer. He invented improved lenses for astronomical observations (and he was himself an accomplished astronomer). In 1704, he patented a way of making jeweled movements in chronometers (he used rubies and devised special tools for cutting them). In all these facets, Fatio was a product of the ‘scientific revolution’ and a pioneer of the Enlightenment. At the same time, or also, he was a theologian, perhaps arising from religious conflicts between his devoutly Lutheran mother and stoutly Calvinist father. As an adult entranced by the mysteries of life, Fatio worked with Newton on biblical prophesies (and alchemy), and with the radical “French Prophets” in their efforts to bring closer the End of Time and the Second Coming. This last brought Fatio much trouble, including a trial, in London, in 1707, for heresy. He was found guilty but (thanks to friends in high places) allowed to escape with only a public humiliation. Nicolas Fatio was a child of his time, not a prophet of ‘modernity.’ ©

[Stanley]

Crime fiction.

Nobody in their senses is going to call me a first-class writer. I don’t mind because I do the very best I can, and thousands, millions of people enjoy my books. Ruth Rendell.

The jury is still out of the courtroom, arguing over whether crime writers can or should be called “great.” Great fiction depends on the construction of character through plot (story) and language (words). Too often, authors we call ‘crime writers’ use a character as a crutch, a formula, a familiar, comforting way of getting into a plot. Their language becomes formulaic. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Watson, his semi-comic sidekick are classic examples, but there are plenty of others. So Agatha Christie gives us fussy Poirot and ponderous Hastings. From Marjorie Allingham comes suave Albert Campion and non-suave Magersfontein Lugg (both surnames are giveaways). The list could go on, each entry instantly recognizable: Jules Maigret; Philip Marlowe; ‘Easy’ Rawlins; and, even easier, Nancy Drew. The writer doesn’t have much work to do, the reader even less. So Ruth Rendell introduced Detective Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford in her first published novel, From Doon with Death (1964). She sold it, or him, to a minor publisher for £75. Coming as he did after several unsold manuscripts, Reg proved a heady drug, and there would be 23 more of him, the last coming in 2013 just before her own death. And you could argue that Reg was a found character, not a constructed one. Ruth Rendell was born just off London’s east edge on February 17, 1930. Her mother, a Swedish immigrant, soon fell ill and died, and she was brought up by her English father, Arthur Grasemann, later described (by her) as “endlessly patient, endlessly loving, endlessly kind.” During her earliest stabs at journalism, Ruth married another local reporter, Don Rendell, later a successful financial journalist. She birthed two kids and six unpublished novels, then (in 1975, after her first successes with Reg Wexford) divorced Don, only to remarry him two years later. He (Don Rendell that is) was, Ruth said, the sort of guy you could travel with all day and never have to say a word to. Was Reg Rexford at least a little like Arthur and Don? It’s an unkind, doubtless unfair comment, and it must be said that along with her Inspector Wexford series Ruth Rendell wrote fifty other novels (14 of them as “Barbara Vine”), many of them of about psychotic characters who bore no resemblance whatever to her father, her husband, or her favorite character. So Rendell qualifies as prolific. But I share her doubts about her greatness. There are many really “great” crime fictions. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, full of murders, comes to mind, and one could argue that Faulkner’s Light in August is all about crime. But each of these fictions gives us brilliant plots and immortal characters—and whole new worlds to travel. ©.

[Stanley]

Seeking asylum.

Writing letters to my wife and friends took up my entire morning; the afternoon was given over to friends. And that’s pretty much how my whole day was wasted. Journal entry of Isaac Casaubon in his Ephemerides.

The ideal of a ‘Republic of Letters’ gained wide adherence in the 18th-century Enlightenment. It wasn’t so much a place, rather a region of the like-minded in which men (and maybe some women) could exchange ideas free of the constraints imposed by nation, religion, politics, or (for that matter) the dull, daily business of life. The idea was immanent in London’s Royal Society, in the salons of pre-revolutionary Paris, even in the correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. If that ethereal “republic” ever really existed, then one of its pioneers or prophets was Isaac Casaubon, who was born in Geneva on February 18, 1559. Isaac certainly needed a sanctuary. He was Geneva-born because his Huguenot parents fled there to escape the tender mercies of Catherine de Medici. Much of his childhood was spent, back in France, hiding from bands of Catholic vigilantes. It was in a cave where Isaac got his first lesson in Greek, from his scholarly father Arnaud Casaubon. And the ancient languages became his life’s work. Back in Geneva, Isaac’s precocity in Greek brought him—aged 22!!!—a professorship, and soon he was known throughout Europe as an eminent man of letters (Greek, yes, but also Latin, Hebrew and several modern or vulgar tongues. He always wanted to be a Protestant (Calvinist) minister like his father, a real prophesier, but safety and salary required the different course of scholarship: first in Geneva, then Montpellier, then Paris, and finally London where he had the dubious pleasure of “dining” with King James I. While the king et, Isaac read to him from his own works or from classic texts. Isaac took his own meals later, when he had the time, and there never was enough time. He had only four years left to him (he came to London in 1610 and died there in 1614) and never did master English. Isaac Casaubon never found his Republic of Letters. Amidst all his scholarship (many translations and, for instance, a compendious history of satire), he did try to make peace among the culture warriors of his day, most famously at the Fontainebleau Conference of 1599 where he suffered the fate of being the only moderate in the room. Another curious effort was to assert the true (or coexistent) catholicity of both the Church of England and the Church of Rome. Had there been a ‘Republic of Letters’ in his time, Isaac Casaubon might have found asylum there. His journal remains his most characteristic document, and one of the most complete life records to come down to us from early modern Europe. But, significantly, he called it his Ephemerides. As the fates would have it, he was a prophet without a country. ©.

[Tripps]

I wonder if his name was a factor in the choice of name for this fictitious character?

Edward Casaubon

[Stanley]

The royal gift.

I protest before the Great GOD, I had rather not be a father and childless, then be the Father of wicked children. King James, Basilikon Doron. Or His Majesties Instructions To His Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince. (Edinburgh, 1599).
The Basilikon Doron was drafted in Middle Scots, James’s native tongue. Scots is a dialect of English, but it’s not easily digestible (just try Burns in the original), and so it was translated. For despite its title, it was not a childrearing manual, and James was not an early modern Dr. Spock. He was James VI of Scotland and in 1599 the odds-on favorite to succeed Elizabeth of England when she should finally expire. So Basilikon Doron (in English, “Royal Gift”) is better seen as the political manifesto of he who hoped to become James I of England. When in 1603 Elizabeth died and James began his journey southwards, a London edition was rushed into print and sold like oatcakes, thousands it is said, to that limited audience that was literate and had a profound interest in getting to know its new monarch: aristocrats, courtiers, the great merchants of London, parliament men. And of course they needed to know the object of the exercise, James’s “Dearest sonne”, his heir apparent, Prince Henry Frederick, Duke of Rothsay in Scotland and, from 1603, Duke of Cornwall in England. Born on February 19, 1594, he was first fruit of the dynastic match between James and the Princess Anne of Denmark. In 1603 Henry had two surviving siblings, the Princess Elizabeth (b. 1596) and Prince Charles (b. 1600), and because the “royal gift” depended too much on chance there would be no more. Nor did James’s idea of the Divine Right of kingship fit well with the murderous history of the Stuarts in Scotland or the skullduggery that surrounded his claims to be Elizabeth’s true heir: unless God combined the worst traits of Jack the Ripper and Niccolo Machiavelli. But that “royal gift” works according to the laws of inheritance. Basilikon Doron makes that clear, too (pedantically clear). But as Tom Paine would point out in 1776, with scathing sarcasm, inheritance is not a dependable way to transfer public power. And so it turned out with poor Prince Henry (who was invested Prince of Wales in 1610, amidst lavish ceremony). Despite all the fatherly advice that James (and legions of tutors) could give him, Prince Henry fell ill, probably of epidemic typhus, and died with devastating suddenness in November 1612. And so James transferred the ‘royal gift” to Henry’s brother Charles, who became king in 1625. It was, after all, his proper inheritance, his divine right. And on that issue King Charles I would stand as king, fall to civil war, and then (in 1649) die by the executioner’s axe. It was a royal gift, indeed: a Basilikon Doron. ©

[Stanley]

Liberty and welfare.

Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty] regardless of the injury that may be done to others. John Marshall Harlan.

So wrote Associate Justice Harlan, for the majority (7-2), in the case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts, decided in favor of the state of Massachusetts on February 20, 1905. The dispute involved a dispute of vaccination against smallpox. The Rev’d Mr. Jacobson, pastor of the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church in Cambridge, MA, had a bad reaction to his own vaccination (in Sweden, years before) and on this ground refused a compulsory vaccination order for himself and son. He was fined $5, refused to pay, and in the end took the case all the way to SCOTUS. Jacobson pleaded his own bad experience, the liberty of his person, and the views of “many” medical doctors. Massachusetts, in defense, stood on the state’s responsibility for the “general welfare,” on the idea that the public’s health was a public issue, on the general weight of scientific findings, and the plain fact that one person’s liberty ought not to compromise everyone else’s. Harlan was chosen to draft the decision. John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911) had, throughout his court tenure (from 1877), proven a stout defender of individual rights against state power, most notably in a string of civil rights cases. He’s particularly remembered for his eloquent dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) in which he had argued that a racist state (Louisiana) could not infringe upon the liberty of a person of color (Homer Plessy) to ride on a railway car. The Constitution, Harlan said, was color-blind, and Homer Plessy’s sitting in a train seat didn’t endanger anyone. But it was entirely reasonable to fear that Rev’d Jacobson’s refusal to inoculate (himself or his son) could endanger the health of his neighbors, his fellow citizens. Scientific opinion on that was nearly enough unanimous to enable the state to act on grounds of the health—and the liberty—of every other inhabitant. The public health is a public issue. Quite apart from vaccinations, it is why we have sewers. It’s why Philadelphia’s subways had signs (in a dozen languages) prohibiting people from spitting on the platforms. And, fittingly, Harlan’s opinion was a balanced one. It was very “reasonable” (the concepts of “reason” and “unreason” are cited 22 times). It was also essentially statistical, running along the utilitarian line of the greatest good for the greater number. Precisely because Harlan’s ruling was balanced, sensible, and statistical it keeps coming up, for each and all of those are problematic standards. With Robert F. Kennedy in charge of the nation’s health and a president who has spoken in favor of the bleach cure, we are now likely to see a rerun. One can only hope that reason will, once again, counterbalance liberty. ©.

[Stanley]

Toothache.

A caries, the longer it is allowed to run on, the deeper it goes, and therefore the more difficult to cure. Bartholomew Ruspini, A Treatise on the Teeth (London, 1768).

Good advice! Ruspini goes on to single out excessive use of tobacco (chewed or smoked), sugar (alone or in confectioneries), and food particles of all sorts (if left undisturbed) as particularly bad for dental hygiene. Born in Italy (near Bergamo, on February 21, 1730), Bartholomew Ruspini was already in 1768 a leading London dentist. He’d snagged Queen Mother Augusta as a client. He’d established a ‘surgery’ near her residence, Carlton House, in Westminster. He’d made a surprisingly good second marriage to a young heiress. And so Ruspini was well placed, literally, to become chief dentist and boon companion to Augusta’s grandson, the future King George IV. Of course that would be a while yet, for George Augustus Frederick was only a child when Ruspini started cleaning grandma’s teeth. I can’t find when Ruspini took on Prince George’s bicuspids. Perhaps it was in 1783, when the boy reached his maturity and was officially installed (as Prince of Wales) in Carlton House. If so it was good timing for it was about then when the prince started to use his annual income (about £8 million in today’s values) to pursue the profligacies that would make him a byword. So he could afford a dentist. And who better than Bartholomew Ruspini? Ruspini’s office and residence were still close by Carlton House. His Treatise on Teeth was a best-seller. But what may have been more important was that Bartholomew (or Bartolomeo) was an exotic. He was Italian. He was elegant in manners and dress. He was a great dancer. And he was a Freemason, part of that mysterious international brotherhood that included (inter alia) Voltaire, Condorcet, Lafayette, the duc d’Orléans, and real revolutionaries like Georges Danton, George Washington, and old Ben Franklin. And it was indeed Bartholomew Ruspini who initiated George Augustus Frederick into the Masonic Order. Later, of course, as Prince Regent to his ailing (half-mad) father, as the patron of Beau Brummel, and as Britain’s most indebted individual, the Prince of Wales would continue to build (or break) his own reputation. But George Frederick became a Mason (and then insisted that his dentist join the new “Prince of Wales Lodge”) because he liked to dress up, he loved to dance, and he aimed to be a good fellow well met. Bartholomew Ruspini may have been a pioneer in scientific dentistry (modern opinion holds not), but he was certainly all those other things. And like all good Masons Ruspini was a paragon of charity. Indeed, when he died in 1813, he had spent so heavily on his charities that he had little left but his teeth. ©.

[Stanley]

Sic Transit

King of Upper and Lower Egypt . . .
With his cycle of divinities,
Who giveth all life stay and away.
Like the sun forever.
----From a hieroglyphic inscription, north face, “Cleopatra’s Needle.”

The king in question was Thûtmosis III, Men-kheper-ra, who had the 200-ton ‘needle’ quarried at Aswan, brought downriver to Heliopolis, erected, and inscribed with his glories. Thûtmosis ruled for 54 years, so had the time, money, and manpower needed for the task. Inevitably, the needle became a monument to others’ vainglories. Two later pharaohs muscled in their own inscriptions on spaces Thûtmosis had left blank. With the Roman conquest (Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, and all that), circa 12 BC, the needle (and its companion needle) were moved to Alexandria and erected on seafront property near Cleopatra’s palace. For reasons which might seem obvious to Sigmund Freud, they soon were dubbed “Cleopatra’s Needles”, a name that stuck when on 1798 Napoleon conquered northern Egypt (in French, they were les aiguilles de Cléopâtre). The inscriptions were soon deciphered, and since victors must take the spoils the idea took root that the aiguilles really belonged in Paris. But empire is a fleeting thing, and by the time it was practicable to move 200-ton obelisks Britain was winning the contest (against the French) to control Egypt and its new ditch, the Suez Canal. And so the needle felled by an ancient earthquake was installed on the north bank of the Thames, where (later) it survived a hit by Hitler’s blitz. But what to do with the other? Clearly it couldn’t stay in Egypt. “Empire” had moved elsewhere, to London of course, but New York was becoming capital of a different empire, and the US was already playing amicus curiae at the court of the Egyptian khedive, helping him play England off against France, and so the khedive offered the still-standing needle to the USA. With great difficulties (including cutting a freighter up twice and building a special railway bridge across Manhattan Island) Cleopatra’s second needle was moved to New York City and erected in Central Park, on a knoll just west of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on February 22, 1881. The dedication was presided over by the Grand Master of Masons in the State of New York, prayed over by a prominent Protestant clergyman, and preceded by a parade (up Fifth Avenue) of 9,000 more minor Masons. No Mason chiseled a new inscription, but the lesson was implicit in the artifacts buried at the needle’s base, along with a tourist’s guide to Egypt: the Declaration of Independence, the complete works of Shakespeare, and Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language. As they say, sic transit gloria mundi. ©.