Category: Brevity and Complexity

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2474

Sydney Smith was a cleric and critic; I don’t know much about the former, but I have seen some of the later, and it could be insightful and acidic. Here’s an example that I had seen years ago and then bumped into again this morning, a massive and stinging observation on the United States, in general. It comes in a review of a seemingly brickish/factoid work by Seybert, and is a data-trove publication of statistical information, and appears in The Edinburgh Review.

After a lengthy appreciation of the work, Smith can hold himself no more. It is in the final two paragraphs of the review in which he freezes everything stock still, wanting whomever was reading his words to answer his series of questions so that they can form the answers themselves–but no matter, Smith provides the answer in the end, impatient for someone else to do the thinking.  That’s okay–the man made a good point.  

In my experience if this wit is remembered at all it is for the opening fragment about the American book–that actually comes way at the end of the page-long paragraph; and it is really in the rejoinder, the final bit of that long sentence ending the paragraph, where the real venom sits, waiting for its victim to step into it.

“…In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? Or what old ones have they advanced? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy, and sell, and torture?”

“When these questions are fairly and favourably answered their laudatory epithets may be allowed. But till that can be done we would seriously advise them to keep clear of superlatives.” –Review of  Adam Seybert’s Annals of the United States, published in The Edinburgh Review (January, 1820).¹

Ouch.  I wanted to get to the main quote straight-away in this short blog post; it is preceded by some rougher stuff, as insightful as the above but not as committed to the overall social memory:

“…The Americans are a brave industrious and acute people but they have hitherto given no indications of genius and made no approaches to the heroic either in their morality or character. They are but a recent offset indeed from England and should make it their chief boast for many generations to come that they are sprung from the same race with Bacon and Shakspeare and Newton. Considering their numbers indeed and the favourable circumstances in which they have been placed they have yet done marvellously little to assert the honour of such a descent or to show that their English blood has been exalted or refined by their republican training and institutions. Their Franklins and Washingtons and all the other sages and heroes of their revolution were born and bred subjects of the King of England and not among the freest or most valued of his subjects. And since the period of their separation a far greater proportion of their statesmen and artists and political writers have been foreigners than ever occurred before in the history of any civilized and educated people. During the thirty or forty years of their independence they have done absolutely nothing for the Sciences for the Arts for Literature or even for the statesman like studies of Politics or Political Economy…”

The entire review is worth a read–it is a good overview of the data, and is also peppered with choice nuggets, like this one on Florida:

 Notes:

1.  The review is reprinted in The Literary and Scientific Repository, and Critical Review, Volume 1, by Charles Kitchell Gardner, pp 177-186.

• Read a short, interesting insight into the book that Smith was reviewing here, by Eric Salughter.

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

The history of exploration and capitalism and imperialism and conquest for much of its history is a fleshed-out skeleton based on misery and temptation and ruin. There are of course many images of he background to fortune of the beauty that hard-fought money has brought. It is interesting to look though at the scenes  when the wizards draw back the curtain to history, accidentally or not, even in such inauspicious locations as this pamphlet, a minor work on the rubber industry in Sumatra. 

The photograph of the decimated and routed forest is one of pride, ca. 1931-style, a mark of progress, development, industry, capital.

There were millions of acres under cultivation at this point, with (according to the figures quoted in the pamphlet) more than 320,000 workers/laborer-peasants doing the heavy lifting, the vast percentage of these being from China and Java.  There is also a mention of the worker agreements that would get them to Sumatra, noted as “penal sanctions”–the practice required people to work for three or five years and if they somehow forfeited that agreement they would be imprisoned and sentenced to further labor when released.  It was a vicious enterprise. 

But as strong as this was it must have undoubtedly been a manifestation of an even wider form of societal control, such as worker society existed there, living under the domination of the plantation owners.  

In any event the photograph on the cover was a prideful thing that today would be seen as usurious and representative of some deep tragedy. In short: nothing new. 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post
[Source: the City of London]

There was once a scrutable man who wrote a scrutable book with the description of a scrutable event that was actually a non-event of a scrutable happening. There was no problem with all of this–especially as it was lounging beneath layers of a Very Demanding Title–until one of the events  somewhat “foretold” by the author came to be true.  It could not have been a bigger deal unless the story had been about the king or queen, and maybe not even then.  The event was the catastrophic Great Fire of London, an extreme ravage that burned for four days in September 1666, and which ate up 13,000 houses and 87 parish churches.  

The event was predicted after a fashion by astrologer William Lilly (1602-1681) in his book Monarchy or No Monarchy, which was printed in 1651, fifteen years before the event.  Perhaps it might have attracted less notice to authorities had Lilly not written (and illustrated) what he thought to be the coming of a great plague in the same work–the plague struck London a year before the Fire.  

The Great Plague killed far more than the Great Fire, perhaps 100,00 or more with teh plague, and far fewer than that in the fire, though the fire did cause huge destruction. (It seems that casualty figures for the fire are indeterminate, from a few to hundreds to thousands.)  

So some central figures in government bade Mr. Lilly visit them soon after the fire, just to make sure that “England’s Merlin” and the most popular astrologer of his day did not have an actual role in starting the fire. He didn’t of course have anything to do with the fire, or the plague.  His predictions were cloudy enough to both mean something and nothing, part of the great anti-charm that is the heart and soul of all manner of  what James Randi calls “Whoo-whoo”.  He was left to the rest of his life, which still had a fair bit of fame and social acclaim left to it, though most of that would slip away with the Restoration.  It turns out that a number of people predicted a great fire for London, which was not surprising given the way the city expanded and converted itself into a major metro area (of 500,000+ people) which was partially built on kindling.