Author: JF Ptak

History of Children, 2/7–the First Illustrated Rendering of the World for Kids: Anatomy

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1286 Continuing the post 1285

“Taking the Scarecrows out of Wisdoms Gardens”

This is Part 2/7 of John Comenius’ great work, the first illustrated instructional to children, first written in 1676 and then translated into English in 1726–it is from this translation that all of the images (below) are taken. This is the second of seven installments on introducing 17th and 18th century children to wide ideas, the other sections including: Part 1, Occupations; Part 2, Anatomy; Part 3, Books and Book Arts; Part 4, the Sciences; Part 5, Morals and Philosophy; Part 6, Games and the Arts; and Part 7, the Military.

The work itself: John Amos Comenius’ Orbis Senfualium Piélus: Omnium Principalium in Mundo Rerun/ &f m Vita АШопит, translated as Pictura et Nomenclatur, the Visible World, or A Nomenclature, and Pictures of all Chief Things that are int he World, translated into English by Charles Hoof…1726.

The purpose of the book, writes the translator in the introduction of the 1726 12th edition, is:

To entice witty children to it, that they may not conceit a torment to be in the school, but dainty/are., For it is apparent, that children (even from their infancy almost) are delighted with Pictures, and willingly please their eyes with these fights: And it will be very well worth the pains to have once brought it to pafs, that fcare-crows may be taken away out of Wifdom’s Gardens…”

Even at this early stage of publishing books for children it was easily recognized that children learn better when eased into their subject with pictures. This is not so far off the mark with the moderns, and in its own way a precursor to the Dick and Jane and Dr. Seuss books–not so much for subject matter, but for the very act of putting a book into the hands of a child and getting them comfortable wit the idea of reading. It seems to me that this is by far the most important lesson-the actual content at tis point is secondary to the act of holding a book.

Septan Mtaies Hominis. A Man is ßrjt un Infant, 1. j Homo di primum Infasts, 1.

tien

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a Tongue and Palate,
and Teeth, 16.
in the Cheek-hone.

A Man s Chin
is covered ivith a Beard, 14.
mnd the Eye
{in •which is the White
and the Apple)
•with Eye-lids,
and an Eye-hrow, 15.

The Hand heing clofed, is a Fift, 17. heing of en ira palm, i8, in the midß is the hollow, 19. of the Hand i the extremity is the Thumh, 10.iviehfour Fingers, the Fore-finger, 2s. the Middle-finger, гs. the Ring-finger, 23 and the Little-finger, 24. .

In every one are three ]o\ms, a. h. C. and asman knuckles, d. e. f. ivith a nail, 25.

In the Body are the Skin .nvith the Membranes, the Fleih ivith the Mafcles, the Chanel;, .,

the Griffles,
tie Bones andthe Boweli.

The Skin, i: heing puttV ef, the Fleih, 2. appeareth, vol in a continued lump, Lut heing diftnhuled, es it ‘were in ßufi puddings, fuihuh they callMukks, ivhireof1here aie reckoned four hundred and five, heing the Chañeis cf the Spirits to move the Members.

The Bowels are the inward Members:

As in the Head,th.rBrains, 3. heing compajfed «bw with a Skull, and

In Corpore funt Cutis cum Mimhranis, Caro cum Mufcults, ..’

Canales,
Cartilagines,
Oßi & Vecera.

Cute, 1. detraíla,
Ca”o, 2. appaiet,
non continua raafsâ,
fed dil.tributa,
tanquam in farcimina,
quos vocant Mu/tules,
quorum numerantur
quadringenti quinque,
canales Spirituum,
ad movendum Memhra,

Vijcera funt Memhra interna:

Ut in Capite, Cerehrum, 3. cire umda tum Crem», Sc

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The Arteries currying Blood from the Heart;

4’he Veins returning the Mood to the Heart}

The Nerves carrying Setife and Motion throughout the Body from the Brain.

You jkallßnd thefe three, 1. t’very inhere joined together.

Beßdes, from the Mouth into the Stomach it the Gullet, 2,

the way of the meat and drini, and-hy it to the Light!, the Wezand, 5. for hr.athing; f cm the Stomach to the Arfe it a great Gut, 3. to purge out the Ordure; from the Li-ver to the Bladder, the Ureter, 4. for making ‘wJter. .

Tie Bones are in the Head, the Skull, 6. the ttuo Cheek-bones, 7. with thirty tTvo Teeth, 8. Then the Back-bone, 9. the Pillar of the Body, tonfifling of thirty four turning Joints, that the Body may hend itfelf

The Ribs, re. ,uihereof there are twenty four.

The Breaft-bone, 11. the five Shoulder-blades, ii. the Buttock-bone, 13.. the bigger Bone in the . Atta, 15. *W/¿/kfi’crBone inthi Arm.

V-Л ù •;

vi;

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Mußcal Типа.

The Nofe, 3. fcenteth fmelh and ßinhs.

The Tongue, 4. •with the reef of the Mouth taßet Favours, •what is fweet or hitter, keen or hiting, four or каф.

The Hand, 5. hy touching difcerneth the quantity and q: ality of things; the hot and cold, the moifl and dry, She hard andfft, the fnooth and rough, the bsavy and light. The in•ward Sen fes are three. . The Common Senfe, 7. under the forepart of the head, afprehendeth i

t/.ings taken from the oufward Senfes.

The Phantafye, 6. under the crown of the head, judgeth ofthefe things, t hinket h and drcameth

The Memory, 8. under the hinder part of the head, layeth up every thing end fctcbeth them out; it Ufethfome, and this is forgetfulnefs.

Sleep, is the reft of the Senfes.

The Soul is the Life tf the Body, oie in the ivhole. Only Vegetative in Plants;

Withal Seníltive in Animals;

And alfo Rational in Men.

This confifteth in three things;

In the Underftanding, wherehy it judget h, and underßandethy – a thing good and evil, or true, or apparent.

In the Will, •whereby it choofeth, and deßreth, tr rejeéleth, er mißiketh a thing knovn.

In the Mind, •whereby it purfueth

Anima eft vita corpoiii, una in tota.

Tantum Vegetativa In Plantis;

Simul Senßtinsa in Ahímalibus J,

Etiam Rational is in Hernie/i

liaec coniiftet in trihu»;

In Mente (Intelleflu) qua cognofcit, & intelligit, honum ac malum, vel verum, vel apparent»

In Voluntate-, qua eligir, Sc concupifcit, aut rejicit, & averfatur cogniuim.

In Animo, quo prpfequituv

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Protection from Aircraft, Part 3: the 1930’s and Anti-Aircraft Philosophy

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1281

This series of drawings, published in the Illustrated London News 16 July 1938, by the incredibly prolific and detail-oriented G.H. Davies depicts one segment of the city defense program being formulated by the British government in the last year or two leading up to the beginning of the European end of World War Two. (I own 150 or so of these images by Davies–he never fails to provide the detail where you need it.) The overall plan for defending major British cities consisted of anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, R.A.F. fighter squadrons and interceptors, and the “Balloon Barrage”. London and suburbs are featured here, all to be protected by a series of ten squadrons of fifty balloons each, handled by a crew of ten. The thinking was that it would make low-level bombing by fighter aircraft (?!) impossible, and force any aircraft attempting such an approach to a higher altitude where they would be theoretically susceptible to the interceptor squadrons.

I’m not terribly sure why the thinking was against low altitude attack, but my best guess is that the planners were thinking about the He-111Bs and Ju52s or other such aircraft that the Nazis checked and tested out against the Spanish Republicans during the Civil War. Perhaps freshest of all memories of the German operation Feuerzauber (Magic Fire) was the Guernica raid, just a year or so before the publication of these images, where that militarily insignificant town was attacked from the air in twenty minute intervals over three hours, destroying it in a terror blitz. If I was sitting around a big table at 10 Downing, I’d have that picture in my head. .

Be that as it may, the “air mine field” looks terribly inefficient and vulnerable to me, sort of like an exposed Maginot Defense Line, but without the very deep misunderstandings that went along with the horrible French effort.

Explanation of the Images:

a) The first image shows the incredible perimeter defense network, which extended ten miles around St. Paul’s; the balloons were moored at 100 yard intervals, making for 1100 or so balloons to “fence” the perimeter.
b) The second image shows London center and immediate suburbs, with another 500 balloons in a smaller circle inscribed in the larger.
c) The third image is a close-up of the balloons, looking down; seems as though they were tethered at about 2000 feet or so
d) The last image is a close-up of London center. .

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Aviation & flight — Future, History of the — Militaria — Technology, History of — Title Page Art, Beautiful
Future Steampunk on Land–1930’s/1940’s Popular Science

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1280

In a continuing thread on Steampunk themes I’ve organized some of my 1930’s-1950’s cover art into themes–first up were examples of waterborne-Steampunk, which was followed by an airborne-Steampunk, and now by Steampunk Land and Steampunk WTH(?) (All of the examples coming up are available for purchase from my blog bookstore, here.) Steampunk as a general idea is a class of technology that is large, clanging, oily, greasy, heavy, shiny, smoky, and usually driven by steam power, (though other power sources can be applied) Some make sense today, some don’t–most of the machines addressed for a particular use have actually been implemented here in the not-too-distant future of the 1930’s, and usually much more elegantly than could’ve been imagined then (obviously). But I must say that given the times and the tools, these people did a great job, if not for the reason of the invention but for pushing the idea-ball forward

Many more, below:

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Absurdist, Unintentional
Future Steampunk in the Air-1930’s/1940’s Popular Science

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1279

In a continuing thread on Steampunk themes I’ve organized some of my 1930’s cover art into themes–first up were examples of waterborne-Steampunk, which is now followed by an airborne-Steampunk, and then by Steampunk Land and Steampunk WTH(?) (All of the examples coming up are available for purchase from my blog bookstore, here.) Steampunk as a general idea is a class of technology that is large, clanging, oily, greasy, heavy, shiny, smoky, and usually driven by steam power, (though other power sources can be applied) Some make sense today, some don’t–most of the machines addressed for a particular use have actually been implemented here in the not-too-distant future of the 1930’s, and usually much more elegantly than could’ve been imagined then (obviously). But I must say that given the times and the tools, these people did a great job, if not for the reason of the invention but for pushing the idea-ball forward.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Aviation & flight — Future, History of the — Industrial & Technological art — Technology, History of
Future Steampunk in the Sea–1930’s Popular Science

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1278

In a continuing thread on Steampunk themes I’ve organized some of my 1930’s cover art into themes–first up, examples of waterborne-Steampunk, which will be followed by land- and then airborne-Steampunk. (All of the examples coming up are available for purchase from my blog bookstore, here.) Steampunk as a general idea is a class of technology that is large, clanging, oily, greasy, heavy, shiny, smoky, and usually driven by steam power, (though other power sources can be applied) Some make sense today, some don’t–most of the machines addressed for a particular use have actually been implemented here in the not-too-distant future of the 1930’s, and usually much more elegantly than could’ve been imagined then (obviously). But I must say that given the times and the tools, these people did a great job, if not for the reason of the invention but for pushing the idea-ball forward.

More below:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Industrial & Technological art — Technology, History of
An Alphabet of Giants, Part II–Under and Over the Volcano with Rabelais

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1278

Rabelais may be that man who lived under/in/over the volcano.

Francois Rabelais (1490-1553, writing under the anagram Alcofribas Nasier) was perhaps as gigantic a man in spirit, need, want and appetite as his greatest creations, Gargantua and Pantagreul, and may well be the greatest ex-monk of ex-monks, a bubbling Renaissance Humanist. I’m not saying that Rabelais spent 11 months in the womb or smoothed his hair with a 900′ comb or drank the milk of 17,000 cows like his creation Gargantua, but he did have a staggering appetite for life. He ate life as Honore de Balzac ate food. Rabelais seemed to know no boundaries, and neither did Balzac, who would typically eat a hundred oysters, twelve lamb cutlets, a duckling, partridges, fish, fruits, assorted vegetables, coffee, liquor, liquer, wine and so on, at one sittng. Every day. Nor did Rabelais necessarily drink like Eugene O’Neill or F.Scott or Edgar Poe or Hart Crane or Jack London or Dylan Thomas, though he did drink beond the boundaries.Thomas, though he did drink beyond the boundaries.

One of my favorite writers–George Orwell–didn’t have much use for Rabelais, repulsed by his abuses, but that was to be expected. So it goes.

The beginning and end of Epitaph for Rabelais, by Peirre de Ronsard:

If anything can sprout
From a dead man rotted out,
And if further generation
Arises from stagnation,
A grapevine will surely take birth
From the belly and the girth
Of good Rabelais, who contrived
Always to drink while alive…

All you who pass his grave,
Be you nobleman or knave,
Hang cups on this, his shrine
To vessels and sparkling wine;
Hang sausages and ham:
For if he still has sensation,
His soul prefers potation
To lilies as a gift,
And wine gives a better lift

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Perception — Perspective — Social History
Why Kindle is No Good for Kids

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1277

Words without Books–Kindle et al as a Dim Shadow in the History of Reading to Children The Kindle and its relatives may be a poor choice for reading to children–it’s a book and not a book, a collection of words without a wrapping, a constant reminder for what it isn’t, a cold remedy for warm memories.

There have been a number of books “written” now that have no words. Elbert Hubbard charmingly put one together in 1898 (called Essay on Silence). More recently, there was The Nothing Book (1970), which was precisely that, and which found its way into the NYTimes book review section (“we have nothing to add”). Elsewhere in the arts John Cage produced a four and a half minute piece on nothing, while Samuel Beckett takes far less time to produce his ode to nothing in his play Breathing–all fine examples of nothing.

There are more-lesser examples of nothing in literature, with books produced using nothing but the letter “I”, or commas, or periods/dots, or plus/minus signs. They soberly add a little something to nothing and somehow come up with less than “something” and more than “nothing”, floating in a briney failed no-man’s-land of not-nothingness. Others have taken a different route around nothingness by simply dropping the use of a single letter in the formation of their novel–the lipogram isn’t even a stutter to nothingness, just a hollow something.

And that’s where the Kindle comes in, in the hollow somethingness.

Dick and Jane are something. Or at least the physicality of reading them to children is something. The stories aren’t important, really–the handling of the book, the feel of the pages, the jumbling of position, the steadying of the text, the turning of the pages, trying to navigate the swirl of motions, the feel of the whole thing as a voice deciphers the tracks along the pages.

It’s the act of reading that might be the most mportant thing in getting children to appreciate the whole idea of reading.

Reading from a Kindle just won’t do, it can’t accommodate the range of differences, the cascade of varying stimuli, that comes from holding a book. Books are always the same size inside a Kindle–I know t hat my own children love some books because of their shape, or they just like feeling something different in their own hands as they skip from title to title.

You also can’t give your kids the book that you had when you were little, seeing the way your name changes in your books as you grew older. You won’t have a Kindle with your kid-scrawl on the flyleaf identifying the child-you in 1962. The kindle has no personality of its own–which may be fine for people already reading, but not so for people just starting out.

You also can’t press a much-loved, hard-read copy of a favorite Kindle into your kid’s hands and expect some sort of response to it. There’s just too much missing from the reading experience with a not-a-book–you just don’t want to institute a sameness when what is needed is difference

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Psychology — Social History
Autopsies of a Famous Cookie and Mocha the Whale–Proust and Melville on the Table

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1276

Following up on yesterday’s autopsy of a snowman comes two fictional autopsies: that of Mocha Dick (the spiritual and motivational father of Moby) and a cookie. Moby first; the famous cookie, second.

Mocha Dick was a terrorizing self-defender of the Pacific, a giant the size of a whaler (something like 110 feet) who makes his first appearance in the year that Herman Melville was born, 1819. He crushes and flips and bites and flukes ships and outboats for another forty years, nine past the publication of Moby Dick and in the same year (and nearly month) as the first edition of On the Origin of Species.

Mocha may have come into Melville’s consciousness in Jeremiah Reynold’s piece in the May 1839 issue of Knickerbocker Magazine (article here, just months before the first newspaper arrivd from Europe with the announcement of Daguerre’s process), and was certainly in the minds of two generations of whalers until he was caught twenty years later.

(Just a note–Mocha took his name from a mountain on Mocha Island off Chile where Reynolds sited him. Melville’s desk at Arrowhead in Pittsfield faces a window that faces a mountain that looks like the Great White Whale. I’ve seen it from a seated position there, and the man could definitely see the mountain from where his desk stood.)

When caught Mocha was a half-blind, snub-toothed shadow of himself, with a battered head and missing eight teeth. Or at least that’s how the story or legend of his lazy capture by a Swedish whaler goes. After all of that, after the adventures that Mocha or other whales mistaken for him were on, he almost made it to the end of his life at the end of his life. He was captured and killed just before he could die.

It was perhaps Madeleine Paulmier from Commercy, France, who gave her name to the cookie that when eaten gave birth to one of the most famous personal memoirs (in eight volumes) in literature. (The OED and various French resources differ on this–no matter.) Marcel Proust took a nip from the madeleine (at least in the novel, the cookie in real life was different, or so I have read) that brought on a flush of memory.
“And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray […], my aunt Léonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime blossom.” (In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way: Proust page 47).

The cookie that caused this fabulous composition had little to be composed of, itself. Flour. Butter. Sugar. Eggs. All in equal parts. Then lemon rind. Bake. Voila. Reverse engineering the cookie is simple. Actually making it taste like what it is supposed to taste like, is, well, something else.

But the autopsies of a half-sighted, semi-toothless, shriveled and scar-worried whale and four common kitchen ingredients and a snap of lemon don’t lead to much, except for the spectacular imaginations that the autopsies missed.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of
The Origin of the Term “Intellectual Capital”, 1842

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1275

It seems that the first use of the term “intellectual capital” is seen to be with John Maynard Keynes in 1975; nice company of course, but the true first use seems to be much earlier. It seems to appear in The Southern Literary Messenger (1834-1864) for September 1842, in an article “Geneaology of Ideas”, (pp 548-557) and written by “E.W.J.”, who turns out to be Edward William Johnston, writer/editor, born in Culpepper County in 1799 (or 1804), and brother of Confederate General Albert Sydney Johnston. (It is also available from our blog bookstore.)

Here it is:

To resume now our historical deduction of matter Intellectual capital appears to be as capable of being amassed among a nation as materia1 wealth but by no means to follow the same laws –page 552

If that isn’t what Keynes (and then everyone else) was talking about, I don’t know what is.

The article is interesting for its dipping into the history of plagairism and finding it comfortably nestled somewhat undisturbed, comfortably even, in the general history of ideas:

He who writes therefore steals as well as he can and as beggars when they can filch from no richer wardrobe purloin each others tatters so mean authors rob one another and go undetected partly because their works pass unscanned and parity because they from whom they borrow are unread So that after all the essential difference between the genius and the scribbler is not as to the fact of stealing nor even as to the quantity stolen but entirely as to the value of what they steal (page 551)

Long intellectual history of borrowing and building, collection of tropes wound through entirely original work, based on some common building blocks that have been used over and over agian across the centuries. When looking at the geneaology of ideas, the business of utter stand-alones is slim. Shakespeare built upon Plutarch in bits and starts, for example, but everyone who knew everything at that time would’ve recognized the Plutarch shining through, Shakespeare himself finding it unnecessary to say any more about it. Albert Einstein had not one footnote in the SRT paper of 1905, yet owed some intellectual heritage to Lorentz and Poincare.   Anyway Johnston writes about the fluid nature of the history of ideas with many fine examples (though not the two listed above), all of which can be read here in the full text of the article.

(This subject of plagiarism and forgery, of originality and copying, of recognizing what has come before and not, gets to be very knotty very quickly. What is “real”, what is “original”, we are reminded, gets complicated and complex.)

Notes:

1. The Southern Literary Messenger: Vols. I-XXXVI (August 1834 – June 1864, when it was eaten up by the war). Even though it was an interesting journal with a good solid and long run, I guess many people will remember it for being edited for a short time by Edgar A. Poe, who also made a number of literary, critical reviews and poetical contributions to the magazine, though not in this issue for any of those three.

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Future, History of the — History of the Future — Social History
Women Against Women Wanting the Vote, 1909

JF Ptak Science Books (Rapid) Post

One in this blog’s History of Women series

By the time this photo of petitions against granting the voting to women in Great Britain appeared in The Illustrated London News in 1909, only six other places in the world had given women voting power: Pitcairn Islands (1838), Isle of Man (1881) , Cook Islands (1893), New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902) and Finland (1906). Admittedly, in the population of nations worldwide this was a very small percentage–smaller still if you considered the figure by population. The idea of universal suffrage was far from being popular, even only 101 years ago, within the lifetime of a few thousand people living today.

There were no new additions between 1906 and 1913, but after that, from 1913 to 1920, 24 countries¹ (including hundreds of millions of people this time) had granted the right, not the least of which was Great Britain (1918) and the United States (1920).

The complaints and arguments against women getting the vote have a recent ring to them: the vote for many threatened the home, undermined the scope of the family, would destroy the foundations of marriage, would take women away from their domestic duties, and in general would weaken the nation. It seems as though you could replace “votes for women” in this series of complaints with any number fof different issues today.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Social History — Women, History of