BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

PAGANISMS

The power of astrology broke down when . . . the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested: namely the geocentric system of the universe. Frnnz Cumont, Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans(1912).

Thus, Cumont went on to say, “celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed [astrologists] of their mysterious prestige.” Well, it should have been so. But our bottomless credulity has insured that astrological predictions still abound, and not only in Chinese fortune cookies or the predictions of Indian marriage brokers. This in spite of the skepticism, and the massive scholarship, of Franz Valéry Marie Cumont, born in Aalst, Belgium, on January 3, 1868. After local schooling, his education took him to universities and museums in Ghent, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, and Paris, and a good deal of fieldwork, too, in the western Balkans, Rome, and the Middle East. In the process, he became expert on early paganisms and cults in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire. These included Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and several others. Cumont’s scholarship, combined with his careful conduct of archaeological digs, brought him prestigious appointments in Belgium. In his early 30s he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at the University of Ghent and as chief curator at the Musée du Cinquantenaire at Brussels. Like many scholars of his generation, Cumont was a man of considerable (inherited) wealth, and this (in addition to his scholarship) made him popular among his students and his academic colleagues. And then, in 1910, he was denied appointment to the chair of Roman history. This happened against the unanimous recommendation of the Ghent faculty, and was the work of minister of state the Baron Edouard Eugène François Descamps. Since Descamps was of the Catholic party, this was seen as religious interference in academic affairs. Amid protests, Cumont resigned his posts and embarked on a life of independent scholarship, mainly in Paris and Rome, and a raft of publications. All this likely had to do with Cumont’s work on the paganisms of the Roman Empire, and his emerging view that the early Christian church grew up in this conceptual world, that it borrowed much of its iconography and some of its ritual from those paganisms. In this, Cumont believed that the cult of Mithras (Mithraism) was particularly important, notably in its use of sacrificial meals and baptism and its belief in the immortality of the (converted) soul. Cumont even argued (incorrectly, as it finally turned out) that the God Mithras was born on December 25. Perhaps that was indeed the root of his troubles at Ghent, but when Cumont died, in 1947, he willed his extensive library to the Vatican. More likely Franz Cumont just wasn’t Catholic enough for Baron Descamps. Or perhaps the Baron was a secret devotee of astrology? ©.

[Stanley]

BRADLEY

[Walt Whitman] extolled the values of the common, the miracle of the mouse, the wholesome soundness of the calloused hand, the body’s sweat. He attempted “to make illustrious” the “procreative urge of the universe,” or of sex in man. E. Sculley Bradley.

I took Bradley’s sophomore survey on modern American literature in Fall semester 1962, having just transferred from Penn’s business school to “The College”. I was looking for inspiration, and Bradley seemed a good bet. He was Penn’s vice-provost for undergraduate education. He was reputed a great lecturer, and it was said that he graded, personally, all his students’ papers. I found all that to be true, and I prospered. My course grade was B+ (my highest semester grade so far), and on my final paper he’d given me an A (my first one!!) and made very complimentary remarks. The assignment was to offer a critique of “a contemporary writer.” I am sure that Professor Bradley had in mind someone like J. D. Salinger or Katherine Porter or Saul Bellow, but I chose Walt Kelly, creator of the comic strip “Pogo”. It was an odd choice, but I was a Pogo fanatic and had collected all of Kelly’s ‘annuals’ and his compendium Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-eyed Years with Pogo (1959), in which there was, really, a fair amount of prose. So I thought of Kelly as a writer. Goodness knows what Bradley thought when he saw my title, but he was a gentleman and a sportsman, accepted my definition of Kelly as “a contemporary writer”, and claimed to find great merit in my critique. As I learned more about literature and teaching, I became ever more grateful for, even amazed by, Bradley’s tutorial generosity. Edward Sculley Bradley was born into Philadelphia’s Quaker elite on January 4, 1897. He entered Penn as a freshman and then never left: BA 1919 (Phi Beta Kappa); MA 1921; PhD 1925; and then upwards through the ranks until he became a full professor in 1940. By then he’d made his mark as a pioneer in “American Studies” (an interdisciplinary approach to study of the USA) and, off campus, as a leading critic. As we learned in Bradley’s survey, he also knew everybody, writers like James Farrell, poets like William Carlos Williams, and the legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins. We students could have accused Bradley of name-dropping, but his gossip was too entertaining for such carping. What I did not know, at the time, was that he had become a leading authority on Walt Whitman, and had just (in 1961) been appointed general editor of the Whitman Papers project. He was also the lead editor of the first great (and all-inclusive) teaching anthology, The American Tradition in Literature (2 vols, many editions). E. Sculley Bradley did not think that sophomores should be obliged to buy his books. I’m still grateful for that, but I owe Bradley even more for his generous decision to take seriously my ‘critical essay’ on a cartoonist. It was, perhaps, the miracle of the possum. ©.

[Stanley]

MURDERESS AND MARTYR

Each woman is a briefe of womankind,

And doth in little even as much containe,

As, on one day and night, all life we finde,

Of either, more is but the same againe:

God fram’d her so, that to her husband she,

As Eve, should all the world of woman be/

First stanza of Sir Thomas Overbury’s poem “A Wife” (written in 1613).

There is no better—or, depending on how you look at it, worse—summary of early modern English views of the ideal woman than Overbury’s poem, (fewer than 300 lines). Overbury’s aim was to dissuade his friend, Robert Carr, from marrying Lady Frances Howard. Not only was she already married (in 1604, at the age of 14) to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, but she had acquired a bad reputation at court and was already involved in a scandalous divorce case against Devereux. Her claim that he was impotent and the marriage thus unconsummated had already inspired much smutty gossip. To see it through, King James I had to pack the court. James, he of Bible fame, had his own reasons, for in 1607 he had taken on Robert Carr as a lover, showered Carr with many favors, and wanted to grant Carr one more (marriage to Lady Frances). Overbury thought Carr was going too far, and too fast, and so wrote the poem. And Overbury paid for it. For, having been sent to the Tower for disobeying King James (on another matter), he was poisoned, and died painfully (on September 14, 1613). The case was, still is, impossibly complicated, but probably the chief agent in the poisoning was Lady Frances herself (via an enema laced with sulfuric acid!). However, justice being what it was in Jacobean England, she never paid for her crime. She was found guilty, but she (and her new husband, Robert Carr) received King James’s royal pardon in 1622. But five of her underlings were hanged, at Tyburn, on November 14, 1615. One of them was Anne Turner who, according to documents and depositions, was a perfect fall guy, or fall girl. She was a female of lowly birth (January 5, 1576) who had somehow become a physician’s wife (thus knowledgeable about poisons), then widow, who had somehow wormed her way into Lady Frances’s household (and not as a servant). There she befriended an astrologer (who was also hanged for his part in Overbury’s murder). Better yet, Anne was a Roman Catholic, of which much was made in post-trial propaganda and gossip. In short, Anne Turner was the exact opposite of the ideal woman of Thomas Overbury’s famous poem (which was published in December 1615, as if to drive the point home.). Anne Turner then confessed, in detail, to her role in the crime and how it was managed. She even begged forgiveness for wearing fancy ruffs. And, best of all, she converted to Protestantism and conducted herself perfectly and penitently at the gallows. My guess is that the truth will never be known, but Anne Turner, confessed murderess and converted Protestant, was accorded a Church of England burial. ©

[Stanley]

ADELINE

Leicester Square . . . where music halls at night belch out crowds of stout imperialists. From The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) by Robert Noonan, writing as ‘Robert Tressel’.

It’s a book I must read some day,. But for the moment let’s look at those music halls. In Noonan’s time (1870-1911) Leicester Square was dominated by two music halls, The Empire and The Alhambra, glowering at each other catty corner. On the square’s north side The Empire presented a Greco-Roman façade to The Alhambra’s Ottoman dream-style (complete with minarets), but inside both all was music hall jollity. Popular songs (some of them jingoistic celebrations of the British empire) jostled for attention with cross-talk acts, trapeze artists, Amazonian women, and even ballet dancers. Yes, in Victorian London the ballet became a music-hall standby! After the Alhambra’s experiment with the risqué ‘can-can,’ which resulted in the temporary loss of its music license, it turned to ballet. It was partly to add some higher-brow stuff to the music hall repertoire, but ads urged west-end gentlemen to consider the attractions of squiring ballerinas to tea or stronger drink, even between performances (for then they might still be “scantily dressed”). And there were plenty of ballerinas. The music halls’ corps de ballets grew large, and at The Empire and The Alhambra ballet became spectacle, a distinctively English translation of a continental art form. But there were among them serious dancers, primas one might say, who danced solo on stage and, when off-stage, served as instructors for the new recruits to the corps de ballet. At The Empire, from 1897, that crucial place belonged to Adeline Genée, who came to London from a promising career in Berlin and Munich. Adeline was born near Arhus, Denmark, as Anina Margerite Kirsten Jensen, on January 6, 1878. From the tender age of 10, she was trained to the dance by her adoptive father, her uncle Alexander and his wife, a Hungarian ballerina. As a teen-aged prodigy, Anina took a new name and, as Adeline, danced through Scandinavia before, at 18, fetching up in Berlin as understudy to an established prima. Ambitious for more, she accepted a telegraphed offer from The Empire, Leicester Square, where her special talents in miming gave her dancing roles special character. ‘just the ticket’ for music hall success. As one critic put it, “her feet twinkled, but so did her mind.” Another noted “the infusion of her own gracious personality” into the techniques of classical ballet. Thus Adeline Genée was well-suited to undertake the challenge to English music-hall ballet which came when Diaghilev revolutionized the art, in Paris, with his Ballets Russes. Adeline Genée turned instructor and impresario, and in 1920 we find her as one of the five cofounders (and the first president) of what became The Royal Academy of Dancing. Partly under her guidance, English ballet left the music hall for more refined company, higher-browed audiences, and royal patronage. ©

[Stanley]

ZORA

I am not materialistic. If I happen to die without money, someone will bury me, though I do not wish it to be that way. Zora Neale Hurston, letter to a friend, 1957.

The 1950s decade was tough for Zora Hurston. Whether defaulting on her rent or keeping just ahead of the debt collector, she moved from place to place, here a substitute teacher, there a sub librarian, even a short time as a maid of all work. Her last roosting place was in Fort Pierce, Florida, and when she died there, in January 1960, “someone” did bury her, in the segregated section of The Garden of Heavenly Rest. That someone was the ‘community,’ her Fort Pierce neighbors, some of whom (I hope) were aware that they had an angel in their midst. Or, more accurately, a prophet. They got together enough money to bury Zora, but not enough for a stone, and so when Zora was ‘rediscovered’ by Alice Walker, in the 1970s, Ms. Walker had to guess as to which unmarked grave was Zora’s. So Walker erected a stone, and it has since become a place of pilgrimage. The stone reads, in caps, ZORA NEALE HURSTON/”GENIUS OF THE SOUTH”/NOVELIST FOLKLORIST/ANTHROPOLOGIST/1901-1960. Whether the remains below are indeed Zora’s, the inscription is accurate enough, but fact Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. In 1917, aged 26, she lied about her age in order to attend high school, so the 1901 birth date has a clear origin. But the lie obscures a truth, which is that Hurston always regarded Eatonville, Florida, as her home ground. Her family moved there in 1894, and it was in Eatonville, she later remembered, that she learned, as she put it, “to be me.” Eatonville was a 100% black, incorporated town, and (therefore) self-governing. It became Hurston’s native, her rooted place, and the stories she heard there resourced some of her best fiction. But because of her trek north, Eatonville’s stories were undergirded by profound intellectual insights. After the Morgan Academy in Baltimore, Hurston moved on to Barnard College, Columbia’s women’s college, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boas (and withMargaret Mead and Ruth Benedict), as Barnard’s only black student. That would later issue in Hurston’s studies of black folklore and religious practices in the American South and the West Indies. Somewhere on the internet there’s a picture of Ms. Hurston playing a voodoo drum in Jamaica, and she is ebulliently black and beautiful. That identity stayed with Zora Neale Hurston throughout her life first as a leading light in Harlem’s Negro Renaissance, where she worked with Langton Hughes, Alain Locke, and Countee Cullen. Later, she followed her own path, happy with her own identity and suspicious of the integrationist aims of most black intellectuals and many white “liberals”. That individuality, often outspoken, helps to explain why Zora Hurston fell into obscurity and why her published works, her private papers, and even her bodily remains had to be “rediscovered.” Zora was herself. ©

[Stanley]

PIP PIP

pip . . .pip . . . pip . . . pip . . . pip . . . PIP.

BBC “Greenwich Time Signal” (GTS), first broadcast in 1924 and devised by Sir Frank Dyson, then Astronomer Royal.

To be precise, the GTS, aka “the pips,” consists of six beeps. Each beep is pitched slightly above B5 (in scientific pitch notation). The difference between pips is a matter of timing. Each of the first five lasts 0.1 second; the last pip goes on for a half-second, and the moment it starts is what you set your clock by, for it marks (as near as dammit) the changing of the hour by Greenwich Mean Time. The pips were devised by Sir Frank Dyson at the request of the BBC Director General, John Reith. At first they were widely used, and broadcast throughout BBC radio’s various services. In our digitized age, they are superfluous. But BBC’s World Service still broadcasts the pips, and in 2024 BBC celebrated the ‘centenary of the pips.’ Pure nostalgia: but it’s an odd thing to be remembered mainly for one’s pips. And misremembered. Sir Frank Watson Dyson, was born on January 8, 1868. He performed brilliantly in school and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where the sons of rural Baptist preachers were rare birds. Still, Dyson won academic distinctions in mathematics and astronomy, and then a post at the Greenwich Observatory. Except for a brief stint in Edinburgh, he spent his working life at Greenwich, from 1910 to 1933 as Astronomer Royal. Knighted in 1915, Dyson was the right person to ask about time in 1924. In mapping the stars, his first big project, Dyson had become interested in a problem of time intervals, especially for very distant stars, so he was readier than most to accept Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity (which one could say were all about time), when they came out in 1905 and 1916. And it was Dyson who organized the expedition to the South Atlantic which confirmed a central element in relativity theory by observing the 1919 solar eclipse. This was no small task, for Dyson had to begin preparations during World War I, and Einstein was then still regarded as a German scientist. Dyson had long been convinced of the importance of international cooperation in astronomy. After the armistice of 1918 he led efforts to revive old and establish new lines of international collaboration. Dyson’s younger Greenwich colleague Arthur Eddington actually made the observations, but it was Dyson who presented them to the world in late 1919. Sir Frank Dyson died in May 1939, as the world was again drifting into war. While Dyson’s obituaries gave him some credit for the 1919 expedition, what seemed most important in 1939 was Dyson’s contribution to international cooperation in science. Today, the internet confuses Sir Frank Dyson with Freeman Dyson (1923-2020), another eminent astronomer. They are probably unrelated, though both had Yorkshire-born fathers. The Dyson surname (in English) first arose in Yorkshire during the Viking invasions. So the world has been well supplied with Dysons. And with those pips. ©.

[Tripps]

Names mentioned in that post makes me look at two links -

Now I know why Eddington Cambridge is so named /

There are plenty of Dysons and they're not all just digital vacuum cleaners.
Here's another Jack Dyson sportsman
Local link - Born in Oldham, Jack Dyson joined Manchester City in October 1951 from non-League Nelson FC
The bio calls him a "free spirit". I met him at Oldham greyhounds! Good company.

A rather sad PS -
Dyson's brief football career faltered because of injury, but as a cricketer he lasted longer. However, his only century in 150 first-class matches came against Scotland, and he had to cement his place with back-up offbreaks, taking 7 for 83 at Taunton in 1960. Lancashire sacked him for insubordination later that year, but he returned in 1963 for two more seasons. In his days of stardom, Dyson married a beauty queen, but his later life was apparently blighted by poverty and unhappiness. When he died in an Oldham hospital, officials had to appeal for relatives to come forward.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack

[Stanley]

Your PS is very sad David. I vaguely remember the name as a Lancashire cricketer.....

[Stanley]

FEATHERS

Very well, then. I so declare it. President Theodore Roosevelt, March 14, 1903, in creating the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge.

Since 1903, Pelican Island has shrunk (winds, tides, and boat wakes), but the refuge has grown to about 5400 acres. Teddy Roosevelt, a rich, weedy city kid, had found salvation in the wild west, and he liked the idea of an eastern wildlife refuge. TR went on to create 50 national refuges, each aimed to keep this or that or several species safe from predation and pollution. Later chief executives added more, and today there are 570+ National Wildlife Refuges, at least one in every state. One of the closest to St. Louis is atop Pilot Knob, the site of an abandoned iron ore mine. The mine shafts had become breeding sites for the partially migratory Indiana Bat. It’s a critically endangered species, so the Pilot Knob National Wildlife Refuge is closed to visitors 24/7/365, but most national refuges are open to visitors, and many allow human predation (recreational hunting or fishing, subject to stated bag limits). They are popular places, people’s parks devoted to the notion that the preservation of wild places is a valued pursuit. It all began at Pelican Island. And Pelican Island had its own patron saint, a German immigrant named Paul Kroegel. Born in Chemnitz, Saxony, on January 9, 1864, Kroegel came to Florida in 1881 with his father, Hans Gottlieb Kroegel. Thanks to Reconstruction, Florida benefited from the Homestead Act, and as soon as Hans Gottlieb could acquire US citizenship he took out a homestead claim on the Indian River. He couldn’t quite come up with 160 acres (too much water, too little land) but he homesteaded 143 acres atop an ancient sea shell midden and overlooking Pelican Island. When Paul came into the title, he made his living by building boats, keeping bees, selling honey, and (since one of the boats was big) ferrying people and their goods along the inland waterways of the Florida coastline. Kroegel came to love the place, its wildlife, and some of its people. But he couldn’t stand those who killed Pelican Island’s birds to strip them of their plumage. It was the savage face of the trade in fashionable hats, leaving piles of stinking carcasses for a feather or two. Paul Kroegel engaged the attention of the Audubon Society. The society brought Pelican Island to Roosevelt’s attention and, hey presto!, the Wildlife Refuge was born. Paul Kroegel became its first warden, at the peon’s wage of $1 weekly. It was, at first, hazardous work. Two of Paul’s warden colleagues were murdered. Today, locals in Vero Beach celebrate the place and its birds (pelicans, egrets, and others). Its birth anniversary is celebrated annually (in March 2022 with a Teddy Roosevelt impersonator saying “Very well, then. I so declare it.”). The question arising is, will the Pelican Island Refuge survive the presidency of Donald J. Trump? ©

[Stanley]

PENICILLIN

I’m not that special. Norman Heatley, frequently.

Perhaps Heatley was right, but he lived long enough (until 2004) to become the sole survivor of the Oxford University team that figured out how to make penicillin in industrial quantities. Or, more precisely, how to “grow” penicillin: for that foundational antibiotic is a mold. Its 1928 discovery, best described as a happy accident, happened in Alexander Fleming’s lab in London’s Paddington Hospital. At first, no one (including Fleming) saw the mold’s earth-shaking potential. Writing in 1998, Sir Henry Harris summarized what happened in the 1930s decade. “Without Fleming, no [Ernst] Chain; without Chain, no [Howard] Florey; without Florey, no [Norman] Heatley; without Heatley, no penicillin.” Norman Heatley was born in Suffolk on January 10, 1911. As a lad, he distinguished himself as a sailor and a tinkerer, and his Cambridge PhD (1936) was all about tinkering, how to apply chemical methods to biological problems. It was precisely for that reason that in 1939 he joined the Florey-Chain team at Oxford. Wheatley observed the dramatic effect of penicillin (on infected mice), and set himself to solve the problem of how to stabilize the mold, purify it, then produce it in quantity. It was wartime, and there weren’t enough materials in hand, so Wheatley devised a small ceramic chamber (onlookers called it a ‘bedpan’), had it produced in the Staffordshire potteries, and began to farm penicillin. With the help of six ‘penicillin girls’ (Ruth Callow, Claire Inayat, Betty Cooke, Peggy Gardner, Megan Lancaster, and Patricia McKegney), the Oxford lab soon sprouted stacks of those stinky bedpans, producing enough penicillin to save a few human lives. But way more was needed, urgently, and Wheatley and his process were transported to Peoria, Illinois, where a still unidentified woman (“Moldy Mary” in the literature) supplied the needed medium (overripe cantaloupes) for a truly industrial production schedule. That meant that by June 6, 1944, Dwight Eisenhower’s Allied Expeditionary Force had enough penicillin to treat its wounded on site and (if they were whole) return them to the battle front. My dad got his dose in Holland, for a shrapnel wound in his glutes which had disabled him, temporarily, from his duties as forward observer for the American artillery. Later, in December 1948, there was enough penicillin around to treat a very ill five year old kid in Waterloo, Iowa. That was I. Indeed there was so much of it that, according to my uncle Bill (who flew in from Louisville to serve as my hospital MD), they had to map my butt. For that 10-day overdose, I am still grateful to Norman Wheatley, the Penicillin Girls of Oxford, Moldy Mary of Peoria, and of course, to dad, the Antifa coalition of 1944, and Uncle Bill. ©.

[Stanley]

CORNELL

I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study. Ezra Cornell, 1868.

On October 7, 1868, at a formal ceremony marking the founding of Cornell University, Ezra made his intentions clearer. Then, working with the university’s first president, Andrew White (“Andy” in Cornell legend), Ezra insured that Cornell would have no racial or gender prohibitions in its admission policies. Once admitted, Cornell students could study in almost any field, and not only the “agricultural and mechanic arts” favored by other American land-grant colleges. Before he died (in 1874) Cornell transferred $3 million of his own fortune ($85 million in today’s $$s) to the infant university. But Cornell was from its founding a ‘land-grant’ institution, and it was there that Ezra made his most lasting contribution. New York would invest its ‘land-grant scrip’ in valuable lands—and then, instead of selling the land to raise quick cash, would retain title, deriving income from the land’s use and capital gains from its increased value. Today, Cornell University retains the mineral rights to about 150,000 acres of northern Wisconsin, down from Ezra’s original 500,000 acre purchase, but still a tidy nest egg. In all this, Ezra Cornell was a man in tune with the spirit of his age. He was born on the banks of the Hudson River on January 11, 1807. Educated at a Quaker school to believe that his fate rested in his own hands, he struck out as a journeyman carpenter, but an inventive one. By 1828 he was a partner-manager in a flour milling business at Ithaca, NY. He settled there, married outside the faith (and was censured and dismissed for that), and became an inventor and investor. Among his triumphs was a plow suitable for marginal lands, and he sold that up and down the eastern states, but his fortune arose out of his personal connection with Samuel F. B. Morse and his stockholding in what became the Western Union Telegraph Company. Along the way, Cornell became an ardent abolitionist and a pioneer member of the Republican party, fully embracing its “free soil, free labor, free men” ideology. He retired from business in 1862 and devoted his remaining years, and his fortune, to good works. His first major benefaction was the ‘Cornell Free Library’ in the center of Ithaca, and then he turned his attention to Justin Morrill’s land grant act, and to how the state of New York (with little remaining “public land” within its borders) might benefit from it. Federal scrip was the answer. Already heavily invested in Michigan timberlands (tall pines made great telegraph poles), Ezra Cornell became the leading spirit behind New York’s own land-grant college. His monuments remain—not only the university itself, but “far above Cayuga’s waters,” Ezra’s mansion is now a rather grand fraternity house. And a lineal descendant, class of 1970, still sits on the university’s board of trustees. ©

[Stanley]

BALDWIN

As to the prominent place given to psychology, no further justification of it is required than the statement that this is what we set out to do—to prepare a work devoted to philosophy and psychology. The association of these two subjects is traditional and, as to their contents, essential. James Mark Baldwin, ‘Introduction,’ Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901).

For the last half-century, departments of Psychology have redefined their discipline as a science. They may be correct, but certainly they have been encouraged by the pharmaceutical industry. To paraphrase bank-robber Willie Sutton, ‘science is where the money is.’ But in the USA, psychology was rooted in philosophy, notably in the person of William James (1842-1910) who, in his career, moved from philosophy to psychology. And James Mark Baldwin’s team of editorial consultants, in his 1901 dictionary project, was headed up by James (from Harvard) and John Dewey (from Columbia and Chicago). But the American academy forgot about James Mark Baldwin. This was partly because, in 1908, he was arrested in a dawn raid at a “colored” brothel in seafront Baltimore. The scandal cost Baldwin his professorship at Johns Hopkins. Given the temper of the times, his was regarded as both a moral and a racial offence, and he spent the rest of his life in exile, mainly in Paris. There he continued his research, and his ideas about cognitive development were taken up by Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and other progressive educators. James Mark Baldwin was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on January 12, 1861. It was a fateful time for South Carolina and for the Baldwin family, for Baldwin’s father, a northerner by birth, had acquired the unenviable (in Charleston) reputation of being an outright abolitionist. With secession, the Baldwins fled north, but they returned with General Sherman to work on the radical reconstruction of southern society and southern racial mores. With the apparent failure of reconstruction in South Carolina in 1876, young Baldwin went north again, to the College of New Jersey (Princeton), where he majored in theology. While James moved from philosophy to psychology, Baldwin made a similar trek from one moral science, theology, to another one, psychology. He wanted to know what made people tick, and that plunked him in the middle of the ongoing debate between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ as formative in cognitive development: nest building in birds, schooling in humans. Predictably, Baldwin took a humanistic stance. Nature (or genetics) provided a starting point, but not a limiting one. Just as he wanted to rescue Charles Darwin from the determinism of the ‘social Darwinists,’ so he wanted to rescue human children from the idea that inheritance was their fate. So it’s not surprising that the internet’s ‘artificial intelligence’ credits James Mark Baldwin with the quote “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In fact, that hopeful advice comes to us from the novelist James Baldwin. But it could have been James Mark Baldwin’s, for he also viewed psychology as a moral science. And ‘artificial intelligence’ is, in the end, a mechanistic invention. ©

[Stanley]

THE GREAT AUDLEY

These intricate Cases make up Audleys life, a life of intricacies and misteries, wherein he walked as in a maze; and went on as in a labyrinth with the clue of a resolved mind, which made plain to him all the rough passages he met with; he with a round and solid mind fashioned his own fate, fixed and unmoveable in the great tumults and stir of business, the hard Rocke in the middest of Waves. From The WAY to be RICH, According to the Practice of the GREAT AUDLEY. (London, 1662).

Poor Hugh Audley!! Poor in reputation, anyway, for most of what we know about him is contained in this anonymous tract, published at about the time of his death. Chapter by chapter, or rather section by section, we learn how Hugh Audley rose (from the comfortable circumstances of his birth, round about January 13, 1577) to become richer still, and then even richer, worth perhaps £400,000 when he died in 1662. That was an almost unimaginable sum, about a third of the total annual revenue of King Charles II’s government. There were richer men in England in 1662, almost all of them great landed magnates, hereditary peers whose wealth had come down to them through the ages. But Hugh Audley was a commoner, son of a London cloth dealer. How had he become the “GREAT AUDLEY”? On its face, the 1662 tract says that Hugh was a cheat. He fooled one man (apparently arithmetically handicapped) into abject poverty by promising that the man’s debt was but one penny, and would only double every month. After the penny had doubled every month for ten years, of course, the man was worse than bankrupt. Just so, Audley “insinuated” himself into friendships with greater men (often through the great men’s servants), created obligations, and then called them in as debts. He had partners in his businesses, true enough, but he collected partners simply to “vex” them. If any dared to sue him, Audley could exhaust them in the law courts, for his first way of getting more money was as a lawyer. The “GREAT AUDLEY” tract is a libel, no doubt about it, composed with malice aforethought. If its readers were in any doubt it closes with several short diatribes about other great men who’d grown rich through robberies—including even a couple of bishops. But read between the lines, the tract becomes ambiguous. For this Hugh Audley was in some signal ways a man replete with virtues. Indeed he sounds a little like the young Ben Franklin. He was industrious to a fault. He was so thrifty that when his clothes finally wore thin they were unsuitable even for his servants. He assiduously learned just what he needed to know. He regarded his friends as assets. But his best asset was, clearly, himself. One might almost suspect that Hugh Audley wrote the tract himself. But I think he was a stranger to irony. At any rate he died in the arms of the Church of England, and quite able to pay heaven’s admission charge. The vices of capitalism are also its virtues. ©.

[Stanley]

BRONGNIART

Nothing is more extraordinary in the history of the vegetable kingdom, it seems to me, than the apparently very sudden or abrupt development of the higher plants. Charles Darwin to Joseph Hooker, 1879.

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) was among Darwin’s closest friends. His early support of Darwin’s evolutionary theory was particularly valuable, for he was a botanist, and was already convinced that the ‘kingdom’ plantae exhibited some kind of evolutionary development. This owed in part to Hooker’s own researches on plant anatomy. But it is as important to note that both Hooker and Darwin were familiar with the work of Adolphe-Théodore Brongniart, known today as the ‘father of paleobotany.’ Born in Paris on January 14, 1801, and into a family already eminent in science and the arts, Brongniart worked for most of his adult life at the Muséum Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle. As early as 1822, at the tender age of 21. Brongniart published a paper in which he noted resemblances between fossil plants and living species. The idea that these were familial traits came quickly to his mind, and he pursued this idea through later publications. Fossilized parts of apparently extinct varieties found their echoes (in both structure and function) in living plants. Moreover, these similarities often followed geographical patterns (much of Brongniart’s research was on Asian plants). He found these patterns not only in plants’ leaves and stems, but more importantly in their generative (sexual) parts, even pollen grains. It’s likely that Joseph Hooker told Darwin about Brongniart’s findings, but it’s certain that Darwin was familiar with them when he published On the Origin of Species (1859), Since the weight of Darwin’s work had mainly to do with animal evolution, Brongniart’s work was particularly valuable. He was truly among those pioneers who built up what has been called “Darwin’s Century.” But at the same time, Brongniart threw a wrench into Darwin’s works. One of Darwin’s bedrock principles was (still is) that evolution makes no great or sudden leaps (Natura non facit saltum). But Brongniart’s reading of the fossil record revealed a relatively sudden emergence of the angiosperms, the flowering plants: round about 130 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous. It looked like a great and sudden leap, literally a ‘spring flowering,’ not least because was accompanied by another saltation, the rapid “coevolution” of pollinators (mainly insects). To the end of his life, Darwin referred to this problem as an “abominable mystery.” It has since been solved, more or less, by DNA researchers and by the paleontologist’s constant complaint about the equally abominable scarcity of fossils. Unless you are a devotee of the ‘saltational’ theories of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, you needn’t worry about this particular ‘missing link’. ©