A life on (or under) the ocean wave - World Oceans Day

When we think of planet Earth seen from space, the chances are that we think of the colour green. Our planet occupies the comfortable middle ground between the searingly hot silver clouds of Venus and the cold red deserts of Mars: the so-called “Goldilocks Zone”, not too hot and not too cold, in which water can exist in liquid form and sustain life.

Our view as land-dwellers is a biassed one: to a disinterested alien, the main pecularity of our planet would probably be the large amount of blue in its colour-schemes. The presence of liquid water covering much of the planet's surface is a function of our delicately-poised position in the Goldilocks Zone. Yet, to a land-species like us the ocean is a foreign, sometimes threatening environment, on which we often turn our backs: we treat it as an obstacle, as a food-source to plunder rapidly before returning to land, or at worst as a vast sewer into which we can dump all our various wastes and fondly believe that they vanish. World Oceans Day, taking place in 2011 on June 8th, is an annual attempt to redress this balance; accordingly, today we will seek to highlight some sources in our Library relating to the oceans.

Where humankind goes, sickness and injury follows: so the expansion of Western trade and exploration in the past few hundred years has been tracked by medical men and women, accompanying the voyagers. The richness of our holdings relating to travel is a recurring theme in this blog: our regular talk on Around the World in 100 Years highlights these. We can do no more today than splash in the shallows. Some examples: within the archives department, our manuscript diaries and notebooks allow you to

- follow Harry Hayter Ramsdale on his long journey to Australia in the emigrant ship Clifton, in 1861-1862: in the course of the journey Ramsdale is pressed into service as the ship's medical man when the regular surgeon cuts his throat before they are even out of the English Channel, and subsequently delivers a child on board which he suggests should be named after him. We also share his melancholy reflections when, later, a child dies on board and is buried at sea: "I always think that when buried in our native country we do not altogether lose our friends but when buried at sea everything is apparently gone ... to become the prey of fishes or perhaps rot in the bottomless or serve as a football to every wave." (MS.5324);

- lie at anchor in the Straits of Magellan with the naval surgeon Henry Piers, whose journal of a voyage from Britain to Canada on HMS Satellite in 1856-1857 is held as MS.6110: “Our anchorage at 'Sandy Point' was so close to the shore - within half a mile I should think - that we could distinctly hear noises resembling the croaking of frogs &c. and the ripple breaking on the shore...”;

- cruise the Indian Ocean and the shores of Australia with another naval surgeon, Fleetwood Buckle, who records the coastline in a series of delicate watercolours in his journals, part of a large archive held as MSS.1395-1404 and 5656;

- take notes on the natural history of the oceans with John Temperley Gray as he travels on a P&O ship backwards and forwards between Britain and India, at one point pasting the wing of a flying fish into his notebook (MS.5875)

- in the first years of peace after the Napoleonic Wars, voyage to Madras on the East India Company ship the William Miles, whose young surgeon gives us a detailed description of the ceremonies involved in "Crossing the Line" to the southern hemisphere, which turns into the nineteenth-century equivalent of a wet T-shirt competition:

“Neptune’s Car (in the shape of a blazing tar barrel) was thrown overboard last evening at dusk, and had a very fine effect… Neptune and Amphitrite went in procession round the quarter deck in their car, attended by Triton and their attendants – chief judge, barber, physician, etc. etc. all appropriately costumed... When the procession was over, the Chief Judge came to the gang way and read out the names of those who had not before obeyed Neptune – and one by one they came up and were delivered over to one of the attendants to be blindfolded – after that they were placed upon a chair and the barber got his lathering brush (a mop) and dipping it into a bucket of a delightful mixture of pitch, grease & other highly odoriferous materials, bedaubed the poor fellow’s whole face most plenteously; then taking his razor made of a barrel iron hoop, scraped it all off very carefully not sparing the foundation on which it lay. The next process he had to undergo was the ducking – for this he was carried to a large tub, and soused & soused & soused again – they then dried him with a large swab, & dismissed him.... When the shaving was over the Captain came out and ordering a bucket stood at one of the ports and belaboured us all with water, as long as he could stand…. The ladies seemed to enjoy the fun very much – in the very midst of their laughing, the Captain went round at one of the ports with a bucket of water, & threw it among them all as they stood in the cuddy, looking thro’ the windows laughing at us – few of them escaped a good wetting...Every one seemed to enjoy the ducking very well, and the ladies more than the men.” (MS.7114)

These, of course, are all land-dwellers' perspectives. What lies below the surface of the oceans was, until recently, as much a mystery as the dark side of the moon: oceanography as we understand it only begins in the nineteenth century. One of the first scientific expeditions to explore the deep ocean was that of the Challenger in 1872-1876, after which the Challenger Deep - the deepest point on the earth's surface, the very bottom of the Marianas Trench - is named. The Challenger expedition shed much light on what lies beneath the deep oceans that cover so much of the earth's surface. It was not, however, universally applauded. One of our odder collections is the papers of the doctor and naturalist George Wallich (MSS.4962-4970). Wallich had served as naturlist on an earlier expedition, that of HMS Bulldog in 1860, which surveyed the Atlantic seabed with an eye to the laying of a submarine telegraph cable but brought back natural history data as well. His papers seethe with a sense of grievance, that his priority in observation is being stolen by academic scoundrels: Sir Charles Wyvill Thomson (1830-1882), naturalist of the Challenger expedition, for instance, is always nick-named 'Weevil'. His notebooks cover matters such as ocean circulation and marine life, but more and more are given over to what he describes as "Dark Chapters", the tale - in various coloured inks with copious underlinings - of the injustices done to him. Frightening and mysterious things live beneath the sea but none of them, Wallich might mutter darkly, as frightening and mysterious as scientific plagiarism and deceit. If you want to immerse yourself in Wallich's mounting sense of persecution, watch the rites of Neptune on the William Miles or share in any of the other oceanic explorations in the Wellcome Library, please set sail for the Euston Road.

Images:
1/ Ascension Island, from the papers of Fleetwood Buckle (MS.1395).
2/ Parsee hats observed in Bombay, and a description of a Remora caught off Suez, from the notebook of John Temperley Gray (MS.5875).
3/ and 4/ "Dark Chapters", from the papers of George Wallich (MSS.4965-4966).

Item of the Month, March: Spring comes in 1807

Today, officially, marks the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere: the point from which days are longer than nights, and the long winter is finally behind us. Of course, this is an artificial date: spring is not something that is switched on on a particular day, but a gradual process, a slow awakening that takes place at different times at different latitudes. There is strong variation even within the United Kingdom: the same flowers may be in full bloom in Cornwall, whilst Scotland will not see them for weeks yet. For each part of the country, however, there will be a rough average date at which, year on year, the different markers of spring appear: the first snowdrops, the first catkins, and – famously the subject of competitive letters to the Times – the first cuckoo.

Would you know, however, when those rough dates are for the place you live? Could you tell if the daffodils came out a week later than usual? And, faced with the recent news reports that spring is coming earlier each year, would you be able to judge their accuracy against your own experience?

And could you do it without using your eyes?

March’s item of the month gives us a fascinating look at a man who could have said Yes to all those questions: the scientist, mathematician and all-round “natural philosopher” John Gough (1757-1825). Gough was born in Kendal, in the Lake District, and lived in the area all his life. Like many contemporary significant figures in science, he was a Quaker. He was the son of a prosperous dyer in the town, and thus came from a social stratum that would not normally expect at that time to go to university. His father Nathan Gough, unusually, was prepared to pay for him to remain in full-time education longer than was customary at this time, and Gough was still studying in his early twenties. To this extent, we could see him as having had an advantage over his peers. However, although his father could contribute to Gough overcoming social barriers, there was one difficulty Gough faced that could not be remedied: he had been blind since contracting smallpox at the age of three.

Gough’s disability did not prevent him pursuing his scientific interests. As a teenager, for instance, he set up a botanical club at school, in which he would subject a plant to minute analysis with his fingers whilst another boy would read out its description; and he carried out experiments in his father’s dye-house. As a young man he studied mathematics and collaborated with a fellow Lakeland Quaker, John Dalton (father of the modern atomic theory): Dalton would help Gough with his scientific works and in exchange Gough would tutor Dalton in Latin and Greek. Gough corresponded with the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Societey, and published papers on a wide range of topics, his core interest being in the physics and perception of sound – research in which he drew, of course, upon his own experience in using sound to compensate for his lost sight.


In the spring of 1807, Gough had just turned fifty years old. Our item of the month finds him in correspondence with another independent Quaker scientist, the chemist and meteorologist Luke Howard (1772-1864). Howard worked as a manufacturing chemist but his real interest was in meteorology: he subjected the weather and climate to long-term close examination and lives on today as the man who devised the classification scheme for clouds – stratus, cumulus and cirrus, and their various sub-categories. This classification – which revolutionised the way we look at the sky, delighted Goethe and has been cited as an influence on Constable and Turner – was first proposed in 1803. Four years later, when he and Gough corresponded, Howard was engaged in a long-term project to record the climate of London (which bore fruit in his book The Climate of London, originally published in two volumes in 1818-1820 and later reissued and enlarged in 1833).

For Howard, Gough provides a detailed breakdown, day by day, of the spring of 1807: the weather and the changes in the natural world. The large manuscript sheets on which this is recorded are now held at the Wellcome Library as part of the papers of the Hodgkin and Howard families under the reference PP/HO/K/A14.

Gough gives us an account of natural phenomena minutely observed. There is weather, of course, both general description and also precise measurements of wind direction and speed, atmospheric pressure, maximum and minimum temperatures, and precipitation. But there is also the naturalist’s perspective, recording birdsong and the way that plants are opening out in their appointed sequence, a close engagement with a landscape that can no longer be seen but can be heard and touched. Some sample entries give the flavour of what seems to have been, like this year, a cold March, but one in which there is a perceptible gathering of pace as the days pass:

March 2: Sambucus nigra, Elder, leafing
March 4: Slight snow showers A.M.: the three preceding days fine
March 17: Snow from 5 PM to 11 PM. Ewes lamb
March 22. White wagtail sings. Primrose fl[owe]rs.
March 24. Daffodil fl[owe]rs.
March 25. Goos[e]berry leafing.
March 26. Min[imum] of temperature at Kendal 23° [Fahrenheit], occasioned by hoarfrost. Oats sown.
March 30. Sleet. Snipe hums.

April continued intermittently cold, with two inches of snow as late as the 17th, and the fieldfare (a member of the thrush family that typically visits England from Scandinavia in winter) still present on the 20th. By the end of the month, however, he is noting the arrival of swallows (26th), thunder to the south and blackthorn blossom (30th) and – of course – the first cuckoo, on the 27th. All the markers of spring are in place.

On March 21st, incidentally, Gough records: “Wet. Lapwing arrives.” This weekend we invite our readers in northern Europe to walk in the fields – with luck, dry ones – and see if any lapwings have arrived to breed. (Identification details can be found here). For an extra taste of Gough’s work, sighted readers are invited to close their eyes, take a shoot or leaf between their fingers and feel it carefully, then try to work out how many different types of birdsong can be heard; and imagine themselves in the Lake District in 1807, as a long cold spell comes to an end and nature wakes itself.

The top image shows a chromolithograph of a goldfinch amidst cherry blossoms, from the Library's Iconographic Collections. The other images are from Gough's meteorological journal, PP/HO/K/A14.

"Nature's art forms"

The Wellcome Library has acquired a set of Kunstformen der Natur ("Nature's art forms") by the German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Kunstformen der Natur is described by Breidbach as the last and most ambitious of Haeckel's major graphic works and the summing up of his world view [1]. It consists of one hundred colour plates which are intended to justify Haeckel's adaptation of Goethe's "typological" biology. The "typologies" which they publicise are analogous forms in different domains, such as the antlers of the African antelope, the scales of fish and the sense-organs of bats.

These analogous forms or types are demonstrated graphically in an overwhelmingly generous supply of colour lithographs. They purport to show how the simplicity and uniformity of nature is expressed in invertebrates and some vertebrates in an almost unbelievable profusion and multiplicity of repeating and varying patterns. Most are from Haeckel's favourite research areas in natural history such as jelly-fish, protozoa, infusoria, and corals, some of them newly discovered on a research trip to Malaya and Java. Who would have believed that slime could be so colourful and well-constructed? Some higher animals such as insects, frogs, snakes and birds are also included.

The spectacular lithographs were sketched by Haeckel from his research notes going back many years, then drawn professionally by his lithographer Adolf Giltsch (1852-1911) of Jena, emended by Haeckel, and finally redrawn on the stone in colours by Giltsch for printing. Most of the plates are in a single delicate colour (one in a variety of hues), but some are in three or four colours, such as the print of hummingbirds (right).

The plates act as a visual source book comparable to the works on the Alhambra and on the "grammar of ornament" by Owen Jones . Indeed, the last chapter of Jones's The grammar of ornament (1856) discusses ornamental patterns taken from flowers and foliage, providing a starting-point from which Haeckel (and others, including Haeckel's opponent D'Arcy Thompson) could extend the discovery of patterns to animals. Like those other works, Kunstformen der Natur was also raided by designers of lamps, vases, drinking fountains and ceramic tiles [2].

The plates for Kunstformen der Natur were published loose in fascicules. The set acquired by the Wellcome Library comes from the firm of Henry Sotheran and is perfectly preserved with its original covers and boxes as issued--a remarkable survival. There is also a supplement containing textual tables.

Within a few years World War I would break out and such luxuries would become a thing of the past.

Kunstformen der Natur. Von Prof. Dr. Ernst Haeckel. Hundert Illustrationstafeln mit beschreibendem Text, allgemeine Erläuterung und systematische Übersicht. Leipzig ; Wien [Vienna]:Bibliographisches Institut, 1899-1904.

Wellcome Library no. 674505i

[1] Olaf Breidbach, Ernst Haeckel: Bildwelten der Natur. München; London : Prestel, 2006.

[2] Christoph Kockerbeck, Ernst Haeckels "Kunstformen der Natur" und ihr Einfluss auf die deutsche bildende Kunst der Jahrhundertwende: Studie zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Naturwissenschaften im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter. (Europaïsche Hochschulschriften. Reihe XX, Philosophie, Bd. 194), Frankfurt am Main & New York: P. Lang, 1986.