JF Ptak Science Books

From Children's Games to the Lake of Fire: Fun and Hell by Mr. Bruegel (Alpha & Omega, Part II)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2834b

Being quite filled up with Bruegel's orderly disaster of death's chaos control, I went to the other end of his work, to the Alpha of his death Omega: Children's Games (1560). It is the opposite of The Triumph of Death painting (the preceding post), showing some 200 kids at play, involved in at least 80 different games—it is a visual dictionary of fun and hope. The viewer goes from one game or kid cluster to the next, experiencing a fun slow climb to the mountaintop—and in the other, with death being death and all that, it leads the other way along a road of broken glass.

for a good and expandable view of the painting, see: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/children%E2%80%99s-games-pieter-bruegel-the-elder/CQEeZWQPOI2Yjg?hl=en

I'm sure these kids at play were thinking “ars longa, vita brevis” as they lost themselves in the easy complexity of whatever it was they were doing—well, no, they didn't think that because they didn't need to, as they were alive in it.

The game clusters seem to be distributed evenly, and in spite of all of the divergent action, everything seems to be orderly in spite of the sweaty irregularities of the kids. The composition reminds me of the ultra careful construction of engraved illustrations in 18^th and 19^th century encyclopedias—like those of Abraham Rees Cyclopedia... and J.G. Heck's Iconographic Encyclopedia—where the pages are filled to the edges with related and unrelated objects though by their arrangement there seems to be plenty of unused space.

I can only recognize a game here and there—there are a number of experts who have gone through the painting and identified every aspect of every game, as the painting really is a social geology as much as it is anything else.

For interesting reading see:

• Amy Orrock's excellent  "Homo ludens: Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games and the Humanist Educators"  https://jhna.org/articles/homo-ludens-pieter-bruegels-childrens-games-humanist-educators/#bibliography

In closing this short share I'd like to mention another fantastic Renaissance work featuring children's games: the games played by Gargantua in Rabelais' 1534 work Gargantua and Pantagruel, as there are at least 145 of them (217 in the revised edition), and they appear in a list! Again, there's only a few here that I recognize straightaway, though they all can be found and explained.

From the text (being nearly all of chapter 22):

"Then blockishly mumbling with a set on countenance a piece of scurvy grace, he washed his hands in fresh wine, picked his teeth with the foot of a hog,
and talked jovially with his attendants. Then the carpet being spread, they brought plenty of cards, many dice, with great store and abundance of
chequers and chessboards..."

"There he played.
At flush.

At love.
At primero.

At the chess.
At the beast.

At Reynard the fox.
At the rifle.

From Children's Games to the Lake of Fire: Fun and Hell by Mr. Bruegel (Alpha & Omega, Part I)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2834a

Somehow I was drawn to take a close look at Pieter Bruegel (the elder's) massively complex painting, The Triumph of Death (painted ca 1562), in which people were skeletonized by skeletons, killed in fantastic grotesqueries. No doubt I found my way there thinking about COVID-19, and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, and naturally to the time of the London plague and then the Black Death, winding up on Bruegel's bitterblack doorstep. In the painting's many nooks and crannies and its deep minutiae, there is no regard for hope to be found, no possibility of god's grace to comfort and possibly save the doomed, nothing by the delivery of myster-horrories leading to the lake of fire.

There is just so much going on in this painting, so many scenes that you'd expect to see an overall narrative, except that there is none, just hundreds of people being taken by Death and its skeleton minions, led off to the gate of Hell. There are dozens of individual passions being crushed and morals observances being made, but they all seem to stand apart and clear.

I did a quick survey to see if there was an overall census of this apocalypse, but I didn't find one, surprisingly, which probably means I didn't look hard enough. That said I thought it would be quicker to make my own scan of what is going on in the painting, starting in the near-center, where we see the spiked opening of the cave of Hell, surrounded by the armies of the dead. In the foreground is a very bad litany of very bad things, people being hanged and burned and drowned and stabbed and knifed and strangled broken on the wheel, those looking out to a deeper field of burning houses and a burning armada, everything burning or set to burn—everything was on fire, leading to the place where the fire was on fire.

Continuing the survey in the image's far left-bottom, we see a king in his finery being shown an empty hour glass; to his left a skeleton in armor poking around in bags of gold and silver coins, while just nearby is a cardinal being led to eternity by a skeleton wearing a cardinal's hat. Further on we see a very strong denial of the absence of mercy, in this case a starving dog nibbling on the face of a dead baby still in its dead mother's arms, and this right next to someone being overpowered and having his throat slit.

Behind the king there is a skeleton crew operating a wagon full of the dead—one of the skeletons plays a hurdy gurdy while the other sits daintily astride the starving horse pulling the dead crate. Nearby people are being gathered in a net—like, well, people being led of to hell in a net—which seems a better end than what is going on around them, a diatribe of death by hackings and assorted other nastiness.

On the opposite side of the painting from the king, on the far right corner, is a pair of, what, friends or something singing and playing, completely oblivious to the larger scene and even to the lute-playing skeleton leering and hovering over them. To their left is particularly disturbing figure—a skeleton wearing a human face with no eyes is tipping over a brazer filled with flasks, this taking place next to an upset backgammon board and a fallen deck of cards.

Rounding it all out, in the center of the painting, we finally see Death itself, riding a red horse, horse of war, the symbol of fire, of blood, and one of the four horses of the apocalypse. Death charges on, and in this horrible commotion leads his hundreds of skeletons into what was probably a generic scene of generic people doing generic things appropriate to their generic-icity, the great an overwhelming triumph over mortals seeming abandoned by their god.

So, there it is—I just ran out of steam in thinking of a census of what was happening in the painting, settling for a summary. Its just a little too nasty for right now.

The cure for this painting is to have a look at Bruegel's superb painting of children's games, which comes up next.

"The vulcano's, or, Burning and fire-vomiting mountains..." The Luxurious Language of Science, 1669

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2833

I came to be working in the great and problematic Athanasia Kircher's glorious Mundus Subterraneus..., printed in 1665, which is a compendium of most things scientific though with the heavy flavor of application to the world underground. Figuring out what was going on in places that could not be seen or investigated or for the most part quantified didn't stop Kircher from extreme hypothesizing on the nature of the Earth, and so he came into possession of a hermetic-philosophico-alchemical-religio-scientific panspermic theory of the origin of all things. Of course there's a lot of good thinking that goes along with the Grand Theory, and some very innovative scientific thinking, and the expanse of the knowledge of this one man is extremely impressive—there is a LOT in this book.

In 1669, four years after the publication of the Mundus, came the English publication of a somewhat-beautifully and certainly surprisingly-titled book summarizing and cajoling the Mundus, called:

The vulcano's, or, Burning and fire-vomiting mountains, famous in the world, with their remarkables collected for the most part out of Kircher's Subterraneous world, and exposed to more general view in English : upon the relation of the late wonderful and prodigious eruptions of Ætna, thereby to occasion greater admirations of the wonders of nature (and of the God of nature) in the mighty element of fire. (London : Printed by J. Darby, for John Allen, and are to be sold by him ..., and by Benjamin Billingsly ..., 1669.)

How lovely is that? (By the way I cannot find any other book with "fire-vomiting" in its title¹.)

It is a stripped-down 82-page summary of some of the principle ideas of the massive two-volume Mundus, and appears with only one illustration², while the full work was magisterially published with fantastic illustrations and folding plates throughout.

There are many pleasurable turns of phrase and off-brand uses of common words, and unexpected and conjoined vocabulary throughout the work—at least so far as I have seen from the bits that I have read in it. For example, just in the first few pages of browsing I have come across “treasuries of Fire”, “forges in the profoundest Bowels of Nature”, “entrails of the Earth”, “nor as the Vulgar perswade themselves”, “sulphrous unctious matters”, “fire engendering all concocting Nature”, “ever-flowing flames”, are among the notables from the first pages.

Here's one paragraph from page three:

“The Prodigious Vulcano's therefore and Fire-vomitting Moun∣tains visible in the external surface of the Earth, do sufficiently de∣monstrate it full of invisible and under-ground fires. For where∣ever there's a Vulcan, there also is a Conservatory, or Store-house under, as certain, as where there is a Chimney or smoke, there is fire; And argue deeper treasuries and storehouses of fire, in the very heart and inward bowels of the Earth. In so much that from hence the Holy Father's have not incongruously placed the greatest of all the * Fire-conservative Abysses in the Centre of the Earth, for an eternal Jakes and Prison, destin'd for the punishment of the Damned; and some others for Purgatory (according to the received belief of Papists.)”

Sources:

Early English Books online  https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A65153.0001.001/1:11.2?rgn=div2;view=fulltext

Wellcome Library: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ygm2etrh/items?canvas=9&langCode=eng&sierraId=b1028090x

Notes:

1.  "Vomiting" in the title, however, is not horribly uncommon. For example, here's a long title for a broadside publication that including snake vomiting, as in vomiting up snakes: A warning for all such as desire to sleep upon the grass : By the example of Mary Dudson maid-servant to Mr. Phillips a gardener ... being a most strange, but true relation how she was found in a dead-sleep in the garden, that no ordinary noise could awake her. As also how an adder entered into her body, the manner of her long sickness, with a brief discovery of the cause at length by her strange and most miraculous vomiting up of about fourteen young adders, and one old adder ... the maid is yet living. The like to this hath not been known in this age. The tune is, In summer time.--London, printed for Charles Tyus, 1664.

2. Though there is only the one illustration (a folding frontispiece) in the English summary, it is pretty remarkable:

 

Reading the Shadows of the Great Depression (Herbert Hoover's copy) 1930

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post (Part of the series on Blank and Missing Things)

There's something unusual here about the bibliographic marginalia, the White House library, and the Great Depression.  My attention was initially distracted by the design on this pamphlet, decorating the cover of the National Chamber of Commerce's report from their 1930 annual meeting. Its an interesting piece of (small, 1"x 1"), the suited person emerging from a dark geometry into the brightness of a close-by shiny city.  Business Talks it Over is the title of the pamphlet, and they did indeed talk stuff over, with topics like "America's Economic Balance" "Stabilization of Business", "Government and Business", and so on. Unfortunately the pamphlet claims victory over the Depression that was just turning into the Great Depression, only fourteen months into a near-decade-long economic crisis. The pamphlet states: "...as a business nation...has so successfully met the challenge of a recent serious crisis...", ending the report on a happy and alien note that didn't yet exist.

The odd bit, though, is that my copy of this pamphlet was in the White House library, no doubt sent to president Herbert Hoover sometime late in 1930--it wasn't there for long. It was discarded by the White House on 19 February 1931--for what reasons, I don't know. Did Hoover ever see this? Impossible to say, and it really doesn't matter. The symbolism is all that remains, this report (no matter how flawed) needed to be discarded, skinny as it is, taking up no shelf space to speak of--off it went. This is similar to the bullet-proof resiliency of the federal government to becoming involved in any strong way with resolving the Depression. Hoover was on his way to becoming ignored and forgotten, with his re-election getting boot-stomped nine months later.  Then came the beginning of the Great Resolve, with FDR no longer the sphinx of Hyde Park, exploding into the Hundred Days action in March, 1932.  Anyway, I know I'm forcing this story, but sometimes shadow reading can actually lead to something.  

A Provocative Piece of Italian Fascist Anti-U.S. Propaganda, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2832

 

This piece of propaganda from Italy in 1944 made the case for a gangster-like bloodthirsty U.S. Soldier being deployed to an immoral imperialist war in a place of ancient culture and high morals. The example it uses is LIFE magazine, which after tongue-in-cheek praise is established as a mirror of its readers' mentality, feelings, desires, and passions, offering congratulations to Mr. Luce for establishing such a magazine that so deeply displayed the character of the United States. After this follows the propaganda rain, and the horrors that were in the pages of LIFE.

The Italian reader is then introduced to a quick succession of stories that evidently displayed the building blocks of American culture, with LIFE focusing on vainglory, false culture, sex appeal (the main ingredient), and malignant ruthlessness.

In getting to this last part the writer of this pamphlet uses a story that appeared in LIFE on 22 March 1944--the reader warned of the horrifying nature of the photographs to follow “(ueste fotografie vi fanno orrore”)--which graphically displayed in a studio setting the stealthy killing method of the U.S. Soldier at war.

The pamphlet makes the point along the “this is your enemy” lines, that this is what the U.S. was all about. And if the reader was surprised by the images, then they had no idea of what the “Ameriucan mentality” was. (“Ma se queste illustrazioni vi stupiscono, allora — vogliate scusare — finora avete avuto ben poca nozione della mentalità americana!” “But if these illustrations amaze you, then - please excuse - so far you have had very little notion of the American mentality!”)

The short (14pp) pamphlet ends with a full page picture of American “gangsters and life prisoners” in prison, training to fight for the “imperialist war of Franklin”.

The work is certainly provocative —whether or not it was believed is unknown to me. I do know that U.S. Marines were depicted as baby murderers and baby rapists to Imperial troops, scaring the hell out of soldiers and civilians (re the native population on Okinawa) alike, further enforcing the belief and demand of a fight-to-the-death mentality because not only was this the codified way to behave, but the shame of surrender would be worsened by the treatment and torture they would receive in captivity. The results of this propaganda was horrific for the soldiers and for thousands of Okinawans. As I said, I don't know anything at all of the effectiveness of this Italian effort, though my best guess is that the reader would've thought this to be bullshit  inaccurate. 

 

The First Meteorological Map (Created by Edmund Halley) 1686/7

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2831  History of Lines series

Fresh on the heals of a post a few days ago on Athanasius Kircher's great map on ocean currents is this famous 1687 map by Edmund Halley¹--it is recognized as the first meteorological map ever printed, and depicts the trade winds:

This is the French translation of Halley's "An Historical Account of the Trade Winds, and Monsoons, Observable in the Seas between and near the Tropicks, with an Attempt to Assign the Phisical Cause of the Said Wind," that appeared several months earlier in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1686, in issue no. 183).

Here is a summary of the map from the Princeton University site dedicated to thematic maps:

Wondrous and Weighty Pen Names Used by Ambrose Bierce

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I used fifteen minutes of my life to collect some of the most outrageous/anti-subtle subtle, non sequitur , and just plain odd pseudonyms used by the great Ambrose Bierce in his long and wide writing career, ending with him disappearing into a Mexican sunset in 1914 (or so). Many of them are taken from various iterations of The Devil's Dictionary.  There are many others. 

The partial list: Agb, Anita M. Bobe, Conmore Aple Brun, Bnashi Basouk, Oogum Bem, Hamin Benjarrison, Joel Ffrad Bink, A. Brute, Salder Bupp, Choggins, Clementina, Clericus, Purzil Crofe, Ambat Delaso, Arion Spurl Doke, Etcetera, Almira Faircheek, Booley Fito, Aramis Loto Frope, Bissel Gip, Boot Gish, Dod Grile, Hestiba, Jamrach Holobom, Gat Huckle, Ignotus, Infallible, An Insulted Giant, Jebel Jocordy, Little Johnny, Opoline Jones, A Mandarin of the Order of the Golden Teapot, Atla Mipo, Jupiter Muke, N.P. Nopput, Naramy Oof, Orm, Pludge, Phela Orm, Pylades Nupkins, Phrytz, Bogul S. Purvy, Jobo Rem, Doddington Pry, Samboles, Dr. John Satan, Dudley Spink, Statanella, J. Milton Sloluck, Theophilus Smallbeer, Venable Strigg, Sukker Uffro, Barlow Vode, and many others. Oh: and John Smith.

The Gulf Stream in 1678

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2831

This is one of the earliest depictions of what we know today as the Gulf Stream, and it appears one among many wonders in Fr. Athanasius Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus (1678). The map appears about a century before the first map to truly distinguish the Gulf Stream (the B. Franklin/Folger map of 1768-1785) and shows the remarkable activity that must have come with the acquisition of the data necessary to show on even this popular map.  Given that the data was necessarily spotty at this early period the Kircher effort was largely theoretical (and for what it was worth he likened the currents to something similar to blood moving though the body, which at least put to use the work of William Harvey).   (Eberhard Happel is on a similar wavelength as Kircher with the currents map, and published his map a few years later, though he was mainly a science popularizer who "relied" heavily upon the Kircher map and was nowhere near to being Kircher's intellectual rival--his map is still interesting given its very heavy lining and beauty.)

• Tabula Fluxus et Refluxus rationes in Mari Anglico...
• The map measures 7 3/4 x 7 3/4" on a 14 3/4 x 9" sheet, being folio 141/142. 

This is a detail of the larger map (below) with a East-West orientation for bottom-to-top, making  the northern North American coastline along the top of the map, with the European coast from Spain to Denmark, and then hopping over to the Nordic countries, and of course with England and Ireland, and lonely Iceland. 

Newspaper Report on the Largest Slave Auction in U.S. History (1859--"the Weeping Time")

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2830

One of the most striking news items I found while browsing a volume of  the newspaper The Independent¹ was on the front page of the very first issue of this volume--a very strong, emotional, reaching-for-irony anti-slavery article reporting on the largest single slave sale in the history of the U.S

The publisher, Joseph H. Richards, was one of three people (including Pettengill and Tubbs) who in mid-1859 conceived and implemented the idea of bringing Abraham Lincoln to NYC to deliver a paid lecture. After much correspondence and delay Lincoln would lecture at what would be known as his famous and campaign-heightening Cooper Union speech in late February 1859. The newspaper was an eight-page weekly and was very strongly anti-slavery, its pages filled with Abolitionist writing. Henry Ward Beecher was given space for a sermon/lecture in nearly every issue for the volume that I have—Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Greenleaf Whittier were listed as special correspondents in the masthead.

The article, “The Great Slave Sale at Savannah²”(the sale itself also referred to as “the Weeping Time”) appeared on 10 March 1859, about a week after the two-day event was held in a driving rain at the Ten Broeck Race Course, about two miles west of downtown Savannah. The slaves were the “property” of Pierce Mease³ (1810-1867), a profligate Georgia aristocrat who led himself to ruin, the slave sale intended to restore his economic condition. The sale was held at a race track 

I imagine that The Independent sent an undercover correspondent (much like for Horace Greeley did for the New York Tribune) to cover the event—or perhaps not; I can't tell for sure....there is enough detail to make you think that this was information not taken from some other newspaper source; I just can't tell. In any event these reporters would not have been welcomed at the auction, and could have been dealt with as spies or infiltrators, or worse.

The pseudonymous reporter (the article signed “T.T”) notices the details of those in charge of the proceedings, some of the aspects of the crowd, though mostly the descriptions are focused on the poor people waiting to be sold...and then, mostly that on the children, and the infirmed.

I've reproduced the article below--so far as I can tell this has not been reproduced anywhere else.

“The event was reported extensively in the Northern Press and reaction to the sale deepened the nation's growing sectional divide”, states a respectful if not understated and mundane historical marker (placed 149 years later) at the sale's location, the text attributed to the Georgia Historical Society. At least the state of Georgia chose to officially recognize the place and donated a small remembrance park to it, which is still steps ahead of, say, Washington D.C. where at least two of the "slave pens" that were very nearly on the National Mall are still not officially recognized by a marker.  

Notes:

1. The Independent¹, March 10, 1859. "The Independent was founded by the Broadway Tabernacle Church as an anti-slavery newspaper. The original Broadway Tabernacle, now known as Broadway United Church of Christ, was founded as the Second Free Presbyterian Church, organized in 1832 by Lewis Tappan for Charles Grandison Finney, a famous evangelist / revivalist from western New York.”--Wikipedia
2. “The Great Slave Auction (also called The Weeping Time) was a March 2 and 3, 1859 sale of enslaved Africans held at Ten Broeck Race Course, near Savannah, Georgia. Slaveholder and absentee plantation owner Pierce Mease Butler authorized the sale of approximately 436 men, women, children, and infants to be sold over the course of two days. The sale's proceeds went to satisfy Butler's significant debts, much of it from gambling. The auction is regarded as the largest single sale of enslaved people in U.S. history.”-Wikipedia
3. . “... inherited two plantations in the Sea Islands of Georgia from his wealthy Southern family; one on Butler Island, and another on St. Simon Island. Both lands were worked by slaves.” https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/slaveowners_civil_war/1/

There's a fine article by Kristopher Monroe in The Atlantic about the event: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/the-weeping-time/374159/

Full article, follows:

 

Advertising in the Newspaper of the Manzanar Japanese Relocation Camp (1944)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2829

The Manzanar Free Press is a remarkable publication, issued by the “internees” of the Japanese Relocation Center/Concentration Camp, Manzanar, near Lone Pine, California. It was located in a beautiful and desolate-mountainous AnselAdams-scape made of the Inyo and Sierra Nevada mountains, and was one of 10 camps (plus another two dozen other facilities including isolation centers, temporary camps, and other smaller areas managed by the Department of Justice and U.S. Army) that held nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent (62% of them U.S. citizens) who were forcibly removed and imprisoned via the U.S. Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on 19 February 1942. The area covered by the evacuation decree was quite large: half or so of Washington and Oregon states, all of California, and the bottom third or so of Arizona.

Manzanar was a semi-dead town 220 miles NE of Los Angeles, located in high desert with huge swings of temperature and unrelenting and challenging weather—semi-killed by the city of Los Angeles, which purchased the water rights to the region in 1929, forcing out the remaining inhabitants.  Manzanar had a peak population of about 11,000 before the Japanese were returned to what remained of their previous lives. And it was here that thousands of the unfortunate people of Japanese decent lived for several years.

What struck me on this go-round with the camp newspaper were the advertisements, which for reasons unknown didn't register with me in the other times I went browsing. (There are many of them available online via the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84025948/1944-01-29/ed-1/?sp=3&st=text.) It has the feel of a small town daily, with all of the trimmings—except this was a concentration camp (U.S. Style), so it was hardly an “average” publication, though it was filled with basic/domestic/social/small-town "average" news from camp baseball to the newest shipment of non-rationed goods. And again, like any small town newspaper, there they were, the ads, usually a dozen or two in the newspaper's twelve pages (the first half in English, the second in Japanese).

Who advertised what?  It just seemed extraordinary, and contrary, to see the ads in there, all of which combined gave the enterprise a feeling of everyday normalcy to a decidedly not-normal situation, with people gathered up,completely uprooted, losing businesses and property and of course freedom.  For the issue of January 29, 1944, we have the following advertisements:

• The Los Angeles Fish & Oyster Company was there (“supplying fresh fish to the canteen”);
• The Utah Nippo (which is one of only four Japanese newspapers published in the Continental U.S. through the course of WWII. http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Utah_Nippo_(newspaper)/ Does that mean that people received copies of the newspaper in the mail, or was it just posting its name because it made monetary contributions to the Manzanar paper?)
• LB Woolens and Trimming (from L.A.);
• Showa Shogu Brewing Co. (Glendale, Arizona);
• Dorfman Hat & Cap Co. (Oakland);
• Lone Pine Lumber and Supply (an ad for ready-pasted wallpaper), Lone Pine, CA.;
• Sears (for delivery of canned goods and such);
• Josephs Lone Pine (a general store “orders taken for non-rationed items”);
• Freeman, Los Angeles Barber & Beauty Co. offering “Southern California's Leading Pomade”):
• Hotel Montezuma (Santa Fe, NM--I have no idea what this one was all about);
• Western Trunk Line, Lone Pine Depot;
• Hand-Knit Yarns (Peter Pan Yarns, NYC)';
• and interestingly, Audiofilms Co., advertising their next film, Boy Slaves (starring. Anne Shirley, Alan Baxter Roger Daniel. According to IMDb "A runaway follows the leader of a gang of boys, and they all wind up working in a turpentine camp". Oddly enough, the tagline for the "b" film was "SOLD - Human Beings, In This Modern Age, Actually Sold Into Slavery!")

And there was Blossom Girl, of Hollywood (pictured at left).

There was one ad placed by one of the internees: Mastercraft Cleaning and Laundry, located at “Ironing Room 10”.

And then there was this small placement, simple, but powerful in it innocence:

The Japanese people at Manzanar and the other camps made extraordinary efforts to create a society and civility and reasonableness in the depths of an unreasonable situation in which much of their society had been ripped apart. Superb effort. As Charlie Goodnight inscirbed on Bose Ikard's tombstone; "splendid behavior".  

"Manzanar" means "apple orchard" in Spanish; there were no apples here in 1944. 

Life in Stone--Some Interesting Work by the Great Fr. Kircher (1678)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2825

The great semi-mystifying polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) lived for a long time and filled his life with ideas and words,  producing dozens of books during his time on Earth, some of which were never published even though written, some manuscripts lost forever. His was a massive output of extraordinary breadth.  He wasted little time what I can see, writing on a spectacular range of subjects, enlightening people, confusing people, generating great theories and some bad ideas. 

The images below comes from his Mundus Subterraenus ("Athanasii Kircheri Mundus subterraneus in XII libros digestus... "), an edition published in 1678, and which was concerned mainly with geology and the theory of the Earth.  Kircher a product of the great Jesuit institution, the Collegio Romano, postulated the structure of the interior of the Earth, the origin of heat, the source of the tides, the composition of light, mechanics, the structure of music, linguistics, astronomy, and of course the existence of the Virgin Mary in amber.  There was also a fair amount of work on one of his side interests that populated a number of his works, alchemy and the search for the organization of materials.

But what I am looking at today with Kircher is the Mary-in-Amber part, his investigations (and theorizing, and documentation) on naturally-appearing, organic objects found in inorganic material--rocks and minerals--like these birds:

Which is a detail from  

The engraving, entitled Figure Volucrum, quas Natura in lapidibus depinxit, ex variis Museia decerpt et aliunde transmissa (or "Figures of winged creatures, painted by nature on stones, taken from various museums, and otherwise transmitted.") shows Kircher's collection of anthropomorphically based inorganic items.  It is a remarkable exercise to try and place yourself within the context of the scientific world of Kircher's time, 350 years ago, and try to explain these naturally-occurring phenomena, without even the benefits of the conception of long geologic time, or of expanded time in general.  

The descriptive text (at the bottom of the engraving) from Kircher on these objects is translated, as follows:

1.  The first figure represents a head of a Stork, together with some, but I do not know what, quadruped. At the top is something like a human face. Extracted from Aldobrandinot (see PI. XXIII. Fig. 1). 
2.  Shows various forms and parts of animals, winged creatures as well as quadrupeds, although very imperfect, the cause of which we give in the physical examinations (see PI. XXIII. Fig. 2). 
3.  Represents the figures of two birds expressed by nature on marble in the church of St. George's, at Venice, referred to by Ambrosinua (see Vol. VII. PI. II. Figs. 3, 4). 
4.  Shows the head of an Owl, surrounded by rudiments of other birds (see PI. XXIV. Fig. 2). 
5.  Represents the figure of a Wagtail, or as others prefer, of a Peacock (PI. XXIV. Fig. 3). 
6.  Shows the figure of a monstrous bird (Vol. VII. PI. II. Fig. 4). 
7.  The figure of a Merle (Vol. VII. PI. II. Fig. 5).

Massive Art Deco-ness (1932)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is the Union Inland Terminal, a massive Art Deco structure built in 1932, occupying the entire city block on 111 8th-9th Avenue between 15th and 16th. It was the city's biggest building (by square footage) from its construction to 1968, when it was overtaken by the WTC, 3.5 million sq ft to 2.9 million.  The building was explained to people in this 1932 pamphlet, which oddly enough is a tall and skinny affair, which is everything that 111 is not.  In any event, I wanted to share this scarce pamphlet for this gigantic structure. 

Nazi Propaganda Against the B-17 (1943)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2824

This is quite the piece of anti-U.S. Propaganda, printed in 1943 and targeted so to speak against the B-17 Flying Fortress. (I'm not sure why this is in French, though no doubt it was focused on occupied territories in France and Belgium and other areas reached by Lingua Franca.) This was a difficult piece to work through given my tender spot for this aircraft--I've long admired it, and was even a passenger on one many years ago (it was much louder than I expected). As a piece of propaganda I would have expected to see more copies of this here and there, but as it turns out there is only one copy (at Nanterres) located by WorldCat--this in mind I've reproduced the whole of the very short work.

[Front and rear covers.]

The little pamphlet got to business straightaway, claiming on the back of the title page that the “Flying Fortress” suffered terribly at (“terrorist raid”) Schweinfurt—true enough for the 8^th Air Force, though the numbers aren't quite right. The author tells us that the “Flying Fortress” was actually “the Flying Coffin”. “This is how the Americans call their heavy four-engine lighters [the “Flying Fortress”]. The harsh reality, the inexorable practice of fighting has long since given them another name: that of flying coffins. C'est ainsi aue les americains appelent leurs bombrdiers lourds quadrimoteurs. la dure realite, l'inexorable practique des combats leur a depuis longtemps fqit attribuer un autre nom: celui de cercueils volantes.”)

In the explosive scene on the page there's a picture of mass destruction of B-17's being blown out of the sky—this a result of the (“tight”) formation flying that the writer says used to be a strength, but now with new (German) weapons would prove to be the 17's weakness. (“The greater the function, the bigger their devastation.”)

The next scene, a two-pager, is heartbreaking and brutal. “Voila ce qui les attend” it shouts--”this is what awaits them”! And then, boldly beneath the scene, the pamphlet repeats the Flying Fortress is the Flying Coffin claim.

Huxley and the Inelegance of Mathematics (?)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

 This is the lovely response by the great mathematician J.J. Sylvester to Thomas Huxley's muckety comment on the lack of imagination in the mathematical sciences.  Huxley's remarks were made at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, stating that (mathematics) "is that study which knows nothing of observation, nothing of induction, nothing of experiment, nothing of causation". This quote is taken from Sylvester's quick and elegant responses in two articles in Nature, December 30, 1869 (pp 231-3) and January 6, 1870 (pp 261-3), as "A Plea for the Mathematician" and "A Plea for the Mathematician II", part of which is reproduced below. "For Sylvester, the ability to be able to imagine  what the experience of space would be like in dimensions other than three is sufficient to establish the empirical basis of geometry--the three-dimensional Euclidean is not the science of space in general, but the science of the space of our experience."--Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary ...by Jonathan Smith, pp 181-182.

I don't know what the story was re maths with Darwin's Bulldog. 

 

Blindfolded Chess Players, Dropped Cats, and Channels that aren't Canals (1894)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Okay, here's another entry in an occasional series on antiquarian sci journal issues with multiple interesting bits in them. The example today is a slender (23pp) but crammed (1500 words per page) weekly issue of the venerable journal Nature (volume 51,  22 November 1894)--it initially raised my interest for a two-pager Francis Galton paper on synesthesia and super-abilities entitled  "Psychology of Mental Arithmeticians and Blindfold Chessplayers".  This irresistible paper shared space with a famous paper by another great 19th c polymath, Etienne Marey,  "Photographs of a Tumbling Cat", being a full page (four strips) of "chronophotography" of a cat being dropped upside-down showing the progress of how the cat rights itself in a short distance to landing on its feet. Marey (along with Edweard Muybridge) helped create and establish the motion picture--this paper came a dozen years or so after his groundbreaking work appeared in the 1880 and 1882 volumes of the Comptes Rendus...de l'Academie des Sciences (Paris). 

• [Source: this image is from an already-scanned version from an issue of the Comptes rendus but is identical to the top half of the Nature image.]

This Nature issue isn't done yet! There's also the article "Schiaparelli on Mars" (pp 87-90) including a full page of about 2000 words on "The Canals or Channels",  though the editor  points out in a footnote that "canale" in the original Italian version should be translated as "channel" or "strait", and not canal, a sentiment that didn't have enough impact in preventing the avalanche of the Martians-on-the-loose syndrome that was building steam. This was also right about the time that astronomers as a whole began to doubt the existence of Martian seas (first brought into the conversation by Secchi in 1858). 

Anyway, there it is, a wonderful Victorian super-issue of beautiful Nature. (Oh yes, there's also two book reviews of works on (Hamilton and Taits) quaternions.  

The full text is available at Hathi Trust:  https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c2754927&view=2up&seq=112