Bah Humbug

Once upon a time -- of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve -- old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already -- it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

... [then Scrooge was visited by ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Future until]...

He dressed himself all in his best, and at last got out into the streets. The people were by this time pouring forth, as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present; and walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted smile. He looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humoured fellows said, "Good morning, sir. A merry Christmas to you." And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.

Quotation from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Shelduck Siesta

In the concrete wasteland that is the lower Leith River flood protection scheme, a group of paradise shelducks have found an ideal spot for a siesta. Out of reach of people they can sleep through the noon-day heat in peace.

They are endemic New Zealand ducks. The female has the white head, whilst the males do not. Their specific name Tadorna variegata is not particularly imaginative although appropriate.

This is probably a group of non-breeding birds, both juveniles (hatched earlier this year)and yearlings (hatched last year). They mate for life and are territorial, which many a visitor to the Woodhaugh Gardens - on the middle part of the Leith, where there are ponds - has discovered!

Blackbird

Outside my office there is a car-park on two slightly different levels, marked by a brick wall and border full of low-growing thornless rose bushes. It's a favourite place for all the small brown birds that live nearby to forage. At present there are lots of aphids and other bugs which provide rich pickings. However...

that's not what is of interest to this blackbird fledgling. It would much rather have it's parent suff pre-caught insects down its throat.

FEED ME!

Good Earth

Once Ronnie got her through the tricks of the clutch and gear shifting, it seemed she'd been driving for years. She had a feel for it, and by August her license was in her new brown purse and she ventured onto roads she'd never traveled. Her fear was that the car would stall on a hill in traffic and she'd hold up the parade while she tried to start it again, would flood the engine, forget the brake and roll down backwards into an ambulance.

At first she stayed on valley highways, but after a few weeks began to pick mountain roads where she could lean into the corners or nurse the old heap up the slope to a pull-off at the top and take in the panorama through her new eyeglasses. Continuity broke: when she drove, her stifled youth unfurled like ribbon pulled from a spool.

Quotation from: Postcards by E. Annie Proulx

Starling

I discovered that this spring our office building has been home to a family of starlings. I had watched adults flit about, forage in the rose bushes, feed off dead insects from the radiators of parked cars, and generally was aware of their presence. Until, one day...

I came to the office to discover a dead baby lying just outside the door. I looked upward to see if I could see the nest but couldn't. What looks like bird poop mess down the brickwork, is in fact painters mess down the brickwork.

So Much Book-Wormery

It had long been felt by those who annually examined teachers and pupils for certificates in various branches of science, in the Science & Art Department, that the candidates displayed a sad want of practical acquaintance with the subjects in which they presented themselves for examination; many showed considerable ability and great book knowledge, but a knowledge of the things themselves with which science deals, a proof of personal intercourse with Nature, which after all is the only foundation of scientific knowledge, and without which all the ‘ologies are so much book-wormery, was to a very great extent wanting.

Under the existing state of things it seemed almost impossible to get out of this vicious condition, for the scholars who were in their turn destined to become teachers were for the most part taught by men who were deficient in practical knowledge; and with the increasing demand for science teaching there appeared to be a probability of the evil being increased by the rapid accession of these book-taught students to the position of instructors. The only way to meet this difficulty was to find teachers who had the requisite familiarity with “the solid ground of Nature,” and set them to work to leaven the mass.

Quotation from: E.Ray Lankester, 7 September 1871. 'Instruction to Science Teachers at South Kensington' Nature vol 4, p 361-4.

A Tale of Three Tulips

The gardening gurus are right, much as I hate to admit it! These rather pathetic leaves tucked under a hedge of screening evergreens are in fact tulips - they flowered in the first season - just like these...

but in subsequent years they've got smaller and smaller. These green tulips on the other hand are still flourishing - in their second year of planting, but are not a patch on these...

which were planted just a few months ago.

Fern Croziers

Since I've been talking about fern croziers I couldn't resist snapping these monsters outside the Otago Museum!

Silver Fern Croziers

Fern croziers and spring. What more needs to be said?

This silver fern is growing in our garden on the sheltered shady side of the house, just by a path of steps which climb up the steep clay bank. They have a long way to go before they are the size of those growing in a gully on our neighbour's property which must have been growing since before the houses were built about 20 years ago, as theirs are approaching 4m tall. This plant however, must have been planted when the house was built and would I imagine have been two or three years old when planted. It is about as tall as me - well to be exact the crown (with croziers) is about as tall as me. Last year's fronds add another 1.5m in height.

Bird Feeder

Silvereyes have been flocking to a spare (& stale) bread bun which we tied up on our verandah. They are smaller than sparrows and dunnocks. The book says that males have a slightly more chestnut colour on their bellies - apparently, though I think it's hard to tell. They are also known as white-eyes or wax-eyes.

There was much squabbling and in-fighting as they sort out their dominance heirarchy. Some flitted their wings in appeasement. Some had full-on fisticuffs with talons almost locked together as they flew upwards; like miniscule birds-of-prey.

They first came from Australia in the mid nineteenth century, probably from Tasmania. And they didn't take long to spread right across the country. Now they are probably the commonest garden bird.

Cold Snap

A large storm the size of Australia was headed our way across the Tasman we were told on Friday. Snow was expected down to low levels and Southland farmers were advised to get their new-born lambs under cover. Hopefully they did, because further South they copped it. Here we got off with only a slight dusting on the hilltops.

You know it's spring when ... you get pretty pink cherry blossoms hidden from view by flakes of snow!

In the North Island they had very high winds and heaps of rain, trees came down bringing power lines with them. So, lucky Dunedin had a few snow flakes adn it was a bit chilly, but very pretty!

Remodel the Introduction

My Dear Parker – I have been so terribly pressed by my work that I have only just been able to finish the reading of your paper.
Very few pieces of work which have fallen in my way come near your account of the Struthious skull in point of clearness and completeness. It is a most admirable essay, and will make an epoch in this kind of inquiry.

I want you, however, to remodel the introduction, and to make some unessential but convenient difference in the arrangement of some of the figures.

Secondly, full as the appendix is of most valuable and interesting matter, I advise you for the present to keep it back.

My reason is that you have done justice neither to yourself nor to your topics, and that if the appendix is printed as it stands, your labour will be in great measure lost.

You start subjects enough for half a dozen papers, and partly from the compression thus resulting, and partly from the absence of illustrations, I do not believe there are half a dozen men in Europe who will be able to follow you.

Furthermore, though the appendix is relevant enough – every line of it – to those who have dived deep, as you and I have – to any one else it has all the aspects of a string of desultory discussions. As you father confessor, I forbid the publication of the appendix. After having had all this trouble with you I am not going to have you waste your powers for want of a little method, so I tell you.

What you are to do is this. You are to rewrite the introduction and to say that the present paper is the first of a series on the structure of the vertebrate skull... and then if you have stood good-temperedly the amount of badgering and bullying you will get from me whenever you come dutifully to report progress, you shall be left to your own devices in the third year to publish a paper on “The general structure and theory of the vertebrate skull.”

You have a brilliant field before you, and start such that no one is likely to catch you. Sit deliberately down over against the city, conquer it and make it your own, and don’t be wasting powder in knocking down old bastions with random shells.

I write jestingly, but I really am very much in earnest. Come and have a talk on the matter as soon as you can, for I should send in my report. You will find me in Jermyn Street, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday mornings, Thursday afternoon, but not Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon. Send a line to say when you will come. – Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley

Letter to William Kitchen Parker (1823-1890) from Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895). From The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley by his son Leonard Huxley. 2 vols. London, Macmillan, 1900.

Moss Garden

A capstone on an old gateway post was originally covered with pebble dash. The now-weathered cement provides a calcareous substrate for an intriguing mini-garden.

An old faithful - the yellow splash of a clump of Xanthoria lichen is quite noticeable; but as a herald of spring...

the fruiting capsule of a clump of moss growing at the top of the stone. This, I think, is a member of the Tortula genus. Most probably Tortula muralis - the specific epithet seems appropriate, and it is, after all, a very widely distributed and common moss.

Alpine Meadow

Spring is coming! Indeed in selected places, like here in the Botanic Gardens, it is already well on its way!

Undaunted Perserverance

... one would suppose that the faculty of adding anything whatever to natural knowledge was one possessed by extremely few persons. I believe, on the contrary, that any man possessed of average ability and somewhat more than average perseverance, is capable, if he will, of doing good original scientific work.

Any hardworking and commonly intelligent man, who likes his profession, will make a good soldier, or lawyer, or doctor, though that combination of powers which makes the great general, or the great jurist, or the great physician, is given to but few. So it is with the pursuit of Science: assuredly not every one of her followers, very probably not one among us now present, will become a Linnaeus, or a Cuvier, or an Agassiz.

It may not be given to any of us to make some brilliant discovery, or to first expound some illuminating generalization; but we can, each and all, if we will, do good and valuable work in elucidating the details of various branches of knowledge.

All that is needed for such work, besides some leisure, intelligence, and common-sense (and the more of each the better), is undaunted perseverance and absolute truthfulness; a perseverance unabated by failure after failure, and a truthfulness incapable of the least perversion (either by way of omission or commission) in the description of an observation or of an experiment, or of the least reluctance to acknowledge an error once it is found to have been made.

Moreover, this love of truth must extend to a constant searching and inquisition of the mind, with the perpetual endeavour to keep inferences from observation or experiment unbiased, so far as may be, by natural predilections or favourite theories.

Perfect success in such an endeavour is, perhaps, unattainable, but the scientific worker must ever strive after it; theories are necessary to guide and systematize his work, and to lead to its prosecution in new directions, but they must be servants, and not masters.

Quotation: Henry Newell Martin (1848-1896), student of Thomas Henry Huxley who was inaugural Professor of Physiology at Johns Hopkins University. Inaugural Address, The Study & Teaching of Biology. 1876.

Impatient of Drudgery

I think it more befitting to my present position however, that I should address myself especially to younger students of natural science, with a view to pointing out some of the mistakes which they perhaps are particularly liable to fall into, mistakes which no doubt further study would enable them to correct for themselves, but which often remain uncorrected very much because the studies are so fitfully pursued that it is only when some circumstance arouses a public interest in scientific subjects that their attention is drawn to them again. It may appear but a commonplace observation when I say that one of the first things to be guarded against is impatience of the drudgery needful to master even the alphabet of almost any branch of science.

I mean more by this than that there is no royal road to learning, and my meaning extends to this, namely, that there is a great temptation to forsake the steady pursuit of knowledge along the more tedious pathways of careful observation and well-considered induction for the more attractive highways of fashionable theory. I am not alluding now to those whose chief object is to get a reputation for the possession of scientific knowledge careless as to the basis upon which that reputation may rest.

It may suffice for such to read a review of them, to plunge hotly into a discussion probably with far more rashness of assertion than they dare to whom the subject had been long familiar. But I speak rather of this danger as besetting those who are sincere in their desire to get to the root of matters. It is a seductive error. It seems so much easier to discuss the merits of a theory than to plod along with the accumulation of facts, forgetting that we are not qualified to judge of the merits of a theory until we have a wide knowledge of the facts upon which it is based.

Presidential Address, by Right Reverend Bishop Samuel Tarratt Nevill, to the Otago Institute, 17 January 1878. Transactions and Proceeding of the New Zealand Institute. Volume 10, pp562-566

By-the-left, Stand!

Standing on the rails of the round bit of the railing, gives these gulls a bit more space from passers-by.

It even allowed a couple of them to tuck their beaks under their wings for a bit of shut-eye.

But there's nontheless a kind of uniformity about these smart looking gulls - they are standing in formation with their best foot forward!

Lichen Landscape

I have tried before to identify New Zealand lichens, but there is no handy identification guide. David Galloway's Lichen Flora of New Zealand, is way too technical for limited understanding, so I guess we'll just have to admire these as lichen-landscapes!

However, I am reasonably confident that this is Teloschistea chrysophthalmus. Comparing another photograph on the Forest lichens website. Of course, matching photos is probably a silly way to identify things, but never mind. And of course, Chryso- means golden coloured.

The grey 'spread-out' foliose form is what I habitually call Parmelia, which in a NZ context probably means its in the Parmeliaceae family, rather than the genus per se.

The brown bumps - are tree trunk scars - typical of most Prunus species, but particularly noticeable on this ornamental flowering cherry-tree. It was here when we moved into the house, so we have no idea what variety it is. Dunedin has plenty of these pink cherry trees, in public spaces as well as private gardens. Spring is early this year, and already there are three or four blooms. Elsewhere in town some of the early flowering pink rhododendrons are in flower, leastways those that are sited in choice sunny positions.

Progress

In throwing together my remarks on the Natural History of Creation, I shall propose to myself two or three objectives, to which I shall endeavour as much as possible to limit your attention.

In the first place, one object I have in view will be to show that in the History of Creation, the history of all that has been created, whether of the mineral, the vegetable, or the animal kingdom, there has been PROGRESS; - that all creation has commenced in comparatively simple forms, and that these have gradually become more complicated. In the second place, I wish to point out that this progress of creation in the three kingdoms of nature has had prospectively in view the welfare and the happiness of ma. In the third place, I shall endeavour to point out to you that man’s spiritual nature or reason is obedient to the same law of progress, or may be brought under and viewed from the idea of progress.

What we mean by progress, as applied to Natural History, is something different from the ordinary use of the term. It involves two ideas: the idea first of time – of a series of events, taking place in time; and secondly, the idea of the relation of certain imperfect creations, organisms, beings, to some more perfect – ideal type.

Quotation from: The Natural History of Creation By Edwin Lankester, 1848

Lunctime

One lunch-time we went to have our sandwiches in a handy carpark with a view! The local red-billed gulls clearly know the spot well. The leader of the pack calls in others ...

one of whom dances on our car bonnet. In the background can be seen part of the latest of Dunedin's public sculptures - a row of over-sized molars.

And a second perches on the roof of another car, whose occupant was also having their lunch.

It didn't take long for the canny gulls to realise sandwiches were for human consumption only, so they flew off in disgust.