Marvel of the Future

You may imagine that when all our mischievous inventions have done their worst, and the wars they provoked by cowardice have been forgotten in dishonour, our greatest investigators will be remembered, as men who laid first the foundations of fruitful knowledge, and vindicated the majesty of inviolable law.

No, gentlemen; it will not be so.

In a little while, the discoveries of which we are now so proud will be familiar to all. The marvel of the future will not be that we should have discerned them, but that out predecessors were blind to them. We may be envied, but we shall not be praised, for having been allowed first to preceive and proclaim what could be concealed no longer. But the misuse we made of discoveries will be remembered against us, in eternal history; our ingenuity in the vindication of denial, of species, will be disregarded in the face of the fact that we destroyed, in civilized Europe, every rare bird or secluded flower; our chemistry of agriculture will be tainted with memories of irremediable famine; and our mechnical contrivance will only make the age of the mitrailleuse* more abhorred than of the guillotine.

...in spite of our almshouses, hospitals, and Sunday-schools; in spite of our missionary endeavours to preach abroad what we cannot get believed at home ... we shall be remembered as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth.

* mitrailleuse: a machine-gun with a number of barrels, able to discharge projectiles rapidly and simultaneously in large quantities, or singly in quick succession. First brought into service in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Quotation from: The Eagle's Nest by John Ruskin. A series of lectures delivered under the title of 'The Relation of Natural Science to Art' at Oxford in the Lent term, 1872. Published in The Works of Ruskin ed E.T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn, London, Allen 1903-12 in 39 vols.

A Museum is Like a Living Organism

The first consideration in establishing a museum, large or small, either in a town, institution, society or school is that it should have some definite object or purpose to fulfil; and the next is that means should be forthcoming not only to establish but also to maintain the museum in a suitable manner to fulfil that purpose. Some persons are enthusiastic enough to think that a museum is in itself so good an object that they have only to provide a building and cases and a certain number of specimens, no matter exactly what, to fill them, and then the thing is done; whereas the truth is the work has only then begun. What a museum really depends upon for its success and usefulness is not its building, not its cases, not even its specimens, but its curator.

...A museum is like a living organism - it requires continual and tender care. It must grow, or it will perish; and the cost and labour required to maintain it in a state of vitality is not yet by any means fully realised or provided for, either in our great national establishments or in our smaller local institutions.

Quotation from:Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 11 September 1889 by William Henry Flower, published in 'Essays on Museums and Other Subjects Connected with Natural History', 1898, Macmillan

A Busy Day

This year's summer has been almost non-existent, which is why a sunny Sunday is worthy of note - enjoy the crowds. I wonder where Wally is?

Five Lines Long

The only poem he has written in the past year is a mere five lines long:

The wives of the rock-lobster fishermen
Have grown accustomed to waking alone,
Their husbands having for centuries fished at dawn;
Nor is their sleep as troubled as mine.
If you have gone, go then to the Portuguese rock-lobster fishermen.

The Portuguese rock-lobster fishermen: he is quietly pleased to have sneaked so mundane a phrase into a poem, even if the poem itself, looked at closely, makes less and less sense. He has lists of words and phrases he has stored up, mundane or recondite, waiting to find homes for them. Perfervid, for instance: one day he will lodge perfervid in an epigram whose occult history will be that it will have been created as a setting for a single word, as a brooch can be a setting for a single jewel. The poem will seem to be about love or despair, yet it will have blossomed out of one lovely-sounding word of whose meaning he is as yet not entirely sure.

Will epigrams be enough to build a career in poetry on? As a form there is nothing wrong with the epigram. A world of feeling can be compressed into a single line, as the Greeks proved again and again. But his epigrams do not always achieve a Greek compression. Too often they lack feeling; too often they are merely bookish.

‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion,’ says Eliot in words he has copied into his diary. ‘Poetry is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality.’ Then as a bitter afterthought Eliot adds: ‘But only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’

He has a horror of spilling mere emotion on to a page. Once it has begun to spill out he would not know how to stop it. It would be like severing an artery and watching one’s lifeblood gush out. Prose is like a flat, tranquil sheet of water on which one can tack about at one’s leisure, making patterns on the surface.

Quotation: Youth by J.M. Coetzee

Pingao

Pingao or Pikao is a native sedge which is usually found in amongst sand dunes. Like marram grass it helps to hold sand together to form dunes in the first place.

Here the DCC have planted some in ornamental beds on the esplanade at St Clair. They are rather scruffy looking plants in this context. But most people just pass by without giving them a second glance. This is a shame.

The species is under threat, mostly from introduced marram grass. So we should applaud the DCC's attempt to bring them to public notice. The latin name Desmoschoenus spiralis describes how the flower heads are arranged on the stem. Its other vernacular name-Golden Sedge Grass-refers to the golden colour of its leaves which when dry are even goldener, and are used in tradtional weaving.

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!