Unready Reading Room

I was looking for images for a project and came across this amazing image drawn by Muirhead Bone, a Scottish artist from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's a picture of the British Museum Reading Room, under construction. It's a little confusing, because the drawing is listed as being done in 1907, but the Reading Room is listed as being in use since 1897. Go figure.

Just in case you're wondering what it looks like now, here's a recent image:



It's always stunning to me to get a glimpse into how these spaces were built. They appear so sublime - and yet, someone had to work to make them that way. In fact, if you want to humanize it a little, know this: the ceiling surface is a type of papier-mâché.

I'll throw in these other pictures of the British Museum (below) for extra fun. I love looking at old pictures of familiar places.

A Rule of Thumb

"Fingerprints have been found on ancient Babylonian clay tablets, seals, and pottery. They have also been found on the walls of Egyptian tombs and on Minoan, Greek, and Chinese pottery — as well as on bricks and tiles in Babylon and Rome. ...on some pottery, fingerprints were impressed so deeply that they were likely intended to serve as the equivalent of a brand label." [wiki]

There is something eternally fascinating about the ridges and whorls on our hands and feet, those unrepeatable patterns which cover most of what is termed our "volar skin", that is, skin of the palms of the hands or the soles of the feet. When I was a kid I spent hours staring at the swirls and lines, looking at where they ended - and wondering why they were there. "Designs" I called them, when I was young.

I even went through a period, when I learned about fingerprinting and the idea that everyone has completely different fingerprints, where I made everyone around me (mostly adults) squash their fingers onto my ink-pad and leave their mark on the paper which I carried around for the purpose. Of course, it wasn't washable ink, so there seemed to be an inordinate number of long-suffering, black-fingered folks around my household.

The other night I got to talking with friends about fingerprints. How do they work? Why do we have them? The conversation didn't go very far, but it did make me decide to go look it up. Forty websites later, I am still no expert, but I continue to be fascinated.


(Koala fingerprint, above, versus human, below)

For example, did you know that koalas are one of the few mammals besides primates who have fingerprints, and in fact even with an electron microscope, it is difficult to tell koala prints apart from human prints? There's a mystery story in there somewhere, like The Murders in the Rue Morgue only (hopefully) more believable (anyone met a murderous orangutan lately?). Fishers are also said to have fingerprints, which seems to me very strange: if fishers do, why not stoats? Weasels? And so on?


Spider monkeys, whose prehensile tail-tips are so sensitive and flexible that they can pick a dime up off a floor, also have prints on the bare spot at the end of their tails. Since the tails are used not only as a sort of third arm when swinging in the trees (as a safeguard from falling), but often supports the entire weight of their bodies while they feed, this would make sense: fingerprints, and other places with "friction ridges" - the volar regions - generally tend to occur where one needs to grip something. This can mean gripping an object to keep from dropping it, or (as in the case of trees) to keep it from dropping you, or simply to keep your feet steady on the rocks so you don't fall off a cliff.

But how does it work? One source I was perusing posited that there could be a Van der Waals force element, like gecko's feet. The person cited the fact that our fingertips can feel the grittiness of a powder down to about 150 microns, and then it just didn't feel gritty anymore; since Van der Waals' forces tend to show up more when something is 150 microns or smaller, he conjectured a connection.


Other sources, however, didn't support this idea, even if it appealed to me. The general belief among my local pundits was that friction ridges weren't deep enough, enclosing enough or wet enough for either suction or for cohesion; and their structure wasn't complex enough for Van der Waals. The consensus was almost entirely on friction. Given that the flesh in these dermal ridges (to use another term) are notoriously squashy (thus making crime scene fingerprints - known as "latent prints" seriously difficult to decipher), the friction thing holds up as an answer. Just as tires made of squishy gel are more likely to stick to the road than ones made of hard plastic, so do the flexible, moist areas on our hands and feet provide an excellent surface to grip with. Thus does the fingerprint contribute to our development as tool-users.


Dermal ridges develop in the womb, and are pretty much developed by seventeen weeks. The patterns on our fingers are influenced by our time in the womb: subtle stresses and tensions affect how they grow, creating uniqueness through a combination of genetics and in utero experience (as can be seen by genetically identical twins, who don't have identical fingerprints). Once the fingerprints are set, they cannot be altered easily:

"Should the top layer of skin suffer any injury, the ridges grow back after healing in the exact pattern they had before. Therefore, superficial cuts or abrasions alter fingerprint characteristics only temporarily. If the injury reaches deep into the dermis and destroys the dermal papillae, then growth of new epidermal cells is impaired and a permanent scar is created."
[New South Wales Police Department]


The way the ridges develop, oddly, depends on the arrangement of the sweat glands, rising to pores which, in the volar regions, protrude in papillae (nipple-like structures) above the baseline of the skin surface. As these grow, they also grow connections to each other in rows - and this is how the lines and whorls of the fingerprint are created.

It also explains why fingerprints - the kind the police use for identification - are often made up of what appear to be rows of dots, rather than nice smooth lines:

"Such pore holes are critical to the production of latent prints since sweat reaches the surface of the hand and efficiently coats the tops of the fingerprint ridges with sweat. Sweat glands serve as small chemical reservoirs and contain a variety of water-soluble chemical compounds, produced or stored by the body."


In other words, we leave a chemical trace when we touch things, as rows of little oily mineral sweat-dots.

For those of you who have ever worried about the old hair-on-the-palm story, you can relax: both sebaceous glands and hair follicles appear in the dermal layer of other skin surfaces but don't in friction skin. Probably for good reason. How useful would it be to have painful pimples on the palms of your hands if your best escape from predators was to swing up into a tree?

Johann Christoph Andreas Mayer recognized in 1788 that although friction ridge patterns could appear similar, they never seemed to repeat themselves. Using fingerprints' unique patterns as an identification system, however came in much later, starting with the movement to the cities in the Industrial Revolution, when people began leaving their ancestral homes, where every face was familiar, and moving into more populous environments, where they were more difficult to identify and it was harder to find out their history.

"...felons quickly learned to lie about their names, and the soaring rate of urban crime forced police to search for a more exacting way to determine and keep track of identities. The first such system was devised in 1883 by a Parisian police clerk named Alphonse Bertillon. His method, called anthropometry, relied on an elaborate set of anatomical measurements -- such as head size, length of the left middle finger, face height -- and features like scars and hair and eye color to distinguish one person from another. Anthropometry proved useful, but fingerprinting, which was then coming into use in Britain, held more promise...


Francis Galton

"In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds published the first comments, in the scientific journal Nature, on the use of fingerprints to solve crimes. Soon afterward, Charles Darwin's misanthropic cousin, Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and the founder of eugenics, designed a system of numbering the ridges on the tips of fingers -- now known as Galton points -- which is still in use throughout the world. (Ultimately, though, he saw fingerprints as a way to classify people by race.)"
-- [Michael Specter, from a fascinating article on the fallibility of fingerprints in the New Yorker]


Bertillon's method was actually quite popular in France long after fingerprints had become popular everywhere else (a member of the Bonnot Gang actually sent his fingerprints to the French police because he knew they only had his physical measurements on record). This popularity after his long struggle for the legitimization of his system meant that Bertillon was able to go on to implement such innovations as mug shots, systematized crime scene photography, ways to preserve footprints and ballistics, and the dynamometer, used to determine the degree of force used in breaking and entering.

Now, after a nearly hundred and fifty years of fingerprint analysis being considered unquestionably right, despite any evidence against it in trials across the world, a few cases have brought the practice into the limelight. Much of fingerprint analysis hasn't changed since it was first created, and its status as a "science" is coming into question, since scientific method, not to mention actual studies of the practice to see how accurate it is, seem to be missing from the process.


Some people are, actually, born without fingerprints. A genetic disorder due to defects in the protein Keratin 14 lead to two different diseases causing embryos not to form friction ridges. It makes it difficult to do certain things, like turn pages or deal cards. Most of all, it makes it difficult to get certain kinds of jobs - such as school teacher, nurse, and so on. Not to mention working for the government in either law enforcement or classified work.


In the old days, safecrackers used to sand the ends of their fingers to make them more sensitive and to make their fingerprints less identifiable; but that seems to be going out of fashion in contemporary times. Nowadays, you are more likely to affect your whorls by picking up a tiny virus-based skin tumor called a plantar wart (veruca), which deforms the skin striae as it grows, making the ridges go around it. When the wart finally goes away, your striae never look quite the same...

So, the next time you are lying on the couch with a loved one's feet in your lap, have a look, and marvel at the fanciful shapes and swirling minutae of their toes. Think about how long they have been on our feet, probably millions of years, and how even though we wear shoes, our bodies still create these wonderful artworks. They really are amazing.




Links:

A simple timeline on the history of fingerprints

Michele Triplett's Fingerprint Dictionary: Every term you could possibly want to know about fingerprint analysis and police procedure.

A little YouTube of the beginning of my favorite story about safecrackers, Butch Minds The Baby

Website about Sir Francis Galton, above

Photoshop brushes which give you fingerprint effects over at DeviantArt

La Mongolfiera

I bought these in a flea market in France this summer. I think they're wonderful. La Mongolfiera means "the [hot air] Balloon" in Italian. What they were doing in France, and whether they were even really antiques, as the man was implying, I don't know - and I probably don't care. They're really fun, and that's enough for me. Click on them for more details...









And thanks to peacay, over at Bibliodyssey, for this link to a flickr set taken of sketches from Lyon, France - the best of which peacay himself showcased in his recent "Collected Miscellany" post. Marvelous.

My Own (Borrowed) Menagerie

My last post got me thinking, so here is a nominal set of interesting and strange animals I might consider putting around my Baroque pavilion.




• The Aye-Aye, a "native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth with a long, thin middle finger to fill the same ecological niche as a woodpecker. It is the world's largest nocturnal primate, and is characterized by its unique method of finding food; it taps on trees to find grubs, then gnaws holes in the wood and inserts its elongated middle finger to pull the grubs out."


• The yeti lobster, a very recently-discovered creature which lives, of course, in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where all the really weird and interesting creatures come from nowadays.


• The cyclops kitten was an accident, and unfortunately didn't live very long. Not totally unheard-of, just less horrible than most.


• Pill Bugs, or woodlice, or roly-polies, are weirder than you think: they are actually crustaceans, related more closely to lobsters and shrimp and so on than to insects or spiders. They are one of the world's old, (relatively) unchanged species, much, much older than the species I think of as old, like sharks and kauri trees, and they have some pretty interesting and strange habits.


• I thought the Liger was a joke when I first heard about it, along with its relative the Tigon. Or at least, some kind of hoax. But no, it's not - and they are enormous, I don't know why.


• My favorite creature: the Tarsier. I have a tiny picture clipped from a magazine of a tarsier staring with its trademark surprised look at the camera with a big bug sticking out of its mouth. For some reason, it's been a symbol for me of beloved dorks everywhere, and has inspired me to go on being silly despite everything.


• The Star-Nosed Mole is just odd. Always has been, always will be.


• Leafy Sea Dragons are something I have always wanted to see. They are endangered because they are so particular about their environment and eager collectors are always trying to take them home (where they die). But in their home environment - unbeatable.


• I had to include a Komondor because, although they aren't particularly exotic, they have great hair. They do make you scratch your head and wonder how many other strange kinds of dogs you didn't know about? (And yes, they look like a tall version of Dougal, from the Magic Roundabout)


• Grimpoteuthis, or Dumbo Octopi, are benthic creatures, living at extreme depths (up to 400 meters), and are some of the rarest octopi. Plus they use at least three different types of locomotion. Cool.


• Blobfish. What can I say?

There are a few others who aren't quite weird enough, such as Cantor's Giant Soft-Shelled Turtle,


the Long-eared jerboa,


or Pink fairy Armadillos, but they're definitely strange. If I had space, I might consider them.



Come to think of it, many of the above creatures are a bit too attractive. I'd want to make my menagerie a bit more creepy, but the strangest and most disturbing creatures I know of are all parasites, which would make them difficult to display - except in jars, and that is really something more for a Cabinet.


Just for balance, though, perhaps I ought to include the Coconut Crab, a giant terrestrial hermit crab. I do find myself actually glad that I don't live where these creatures roam, cracking coconuts and garbage cans with their bare claws (thanks, Jeff!).

In any case, my beautifully-constructed, circular, conceptual menagerie needs only a beautiful (borrowed) pavilion to complete it, and I can go to sleep secure in the knowledge that I have expressed all the (borrowed) power and wealth I have to hand. Who needs royalty after all?





Thanks to World's Strangest Looking Animals for some of the pictures.

Menageries: Exotics in a Box

Historically, menageries are to zoos what Wunderkammern are to museums. In other words, like Wunderkammern, menageries were expressions of power and influence, collections of oddities from around the world designed to wow people and give the wealthy something to design, maintain, and pay attention to - in effect, an expensive hobby that also served to prove the owners' wealth and cultural prowess. As Wikipedia says, exotic animals, alive and active, were less common, more difficult to acquire, and more expensive to maintain."

Originally, menageries were the purview of royalty, a place where exotic gifts from foreign powers were kept on display as a reminder of the royal family's many good relations with powerful people around the world. In 1235, for example, a menagerie was begun at the Tower of London when Henry III received a gift of three leopards from Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor; the menagerie was opened to the public during Elizabeth I's reign. Two hundred years later, "the price of admission was three half-pence or the supply of a cat or dog for feeding to the lions." [wiki]


Louis XIV's menagerie at Versaille, begun in 1664, was the first example of a Baroque-style menagerie, being built on a circular layout around a beautiful pavilion, so that all the pens were on view when one strolled around the pavilion, but not on view from outside.


In the nineteenth century, with the influx of Scientific Thinking and the move from simple curiosity to logic and a more definitive view of the cataloguing of the universe, most menageries were displaced by zoological gardens, which reflected a more public and educational approach to the keeping of exotics. The only remaining Baroque-style menagerie is the zoo in Vienna, which has modernized enough to make the animals comfortable without losing its essentially radial layout.

I think about the progression from the menagerie at Versaille to the ulititarian zoos of my youth, where tired-looking animals sat or lay in cement enclosures. I'm sure the animals didn't have it any better in the early days, but it seems to me that a royal menagerie must surely be a more intriguing experience than watching the most annoying person in one's class throwing popcorn at beautiful and listless tigers. It seems to me that a royal personage could be more inclined to try to make the enclosures interesting to the eye.

Besides that (and always setting aside early ideas about how little animals cared about their environment), it must have been amazing to be invited into the inner circle, so to speak, and promenaded past animals which surely must have felt more mythological than concrete.

I came across a reference, looking into this, to an exhibition at the Getty a couple of years ago, of paintings done of animals in menageries. The featured artist was Jean-Baptiste Oudry, a rococo painter:

"Jean-Baptiste Oudry was one of the finest painters of animals...in 18th-century Europe, and he employed his prodigious talents...to produce life-size paintings of star specimens from the menagerie...of French king Louis XV. Never intended as an encyclopedic zoo, the Versailles menagerie was compiled through royal commission and diplomatic gifts. Exotic animals were imported on merchant ships along with sugar, coffee, and indigo, and were intimately connected with colonialism and the luxury trade. Oudry painted these animals as individuals. He used portrait conventions such as theatrical poses, dramatic light effects, imaginary landscape backdrops, and sensual color to give his paintings great drama." [from the exhibition website, above]


The thing about these paintings is their formality, the way the creatures seem to pose for the artist. They are not, in any sense, natural, though they are very lifelike. They remind me of the stuffed specimens in old natural history museums (like the one Curious Expeditions went to in Romania), for exactly the reasons stated above: the unnatural stillness; the artificial environment; the strange lighting. And yet, they are huge, real artworks, something from another time.


"The entrance to Hagenbeck's zoo in Hamburg, c1910. Hagenbeck was a flamboyant character who supplied zoos and circuses with wild animals and native people. His zoo was the first to remove cages and build fake scenery and mountains so the animals could be seen in their 'natural' habitat. The entrance expresses the victorian confidence in their command of the natural world perfectly." [Thanks to Tim Hunkin. To me, both these photos (above and below) remind me of nothing so much as If I Ran the Zoo, by Dr. Seuss.


Of course, like all things, the menagerie must in the end come to the common person, who until recently didn't travel much. Traveling menageries became quite the thing, particularly in America, where distances were wide and people easily amazed. During the Civil War, however, these traveling menageries all but disappeared, and were swallowed up into the traveling circuses, which continued to flourish. Even small circuses were able to collect animals from the dying menageries, and this added attraction actually contributed to the health of circuses for many years. Nowadays, even Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, once the "World's Greatest Menagerie," is considering letting go the lions and tigers and concentrating on what is humanly possible.


Links:

Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West - a very different presentation of zoos through history, looking at the sociological side of how people view wild animals and how that has changed over time. Really, a marvelous-sounding book, with over 400 unusual illustrations.

The Fantastic Menagerie Tarot Kit - based on the drawings of J.J. Grandville, an illustrator of strange animal-headed people.

More about the Tower's menagerie, courtesy of the BBC.

Dolphins Have Memes, Too

I just heard about this from the BBC: there have been sightings of dolphins off the coast of Australia who are doing what is called "tail-walking" - standing above the water by waving their tales in the water. Tail-walking is not a behavior that wild dolphins display in nature; however, one dolphin from that area did spend some time in a dolphin facility recovering from illness - and, while she wasn't trained to tail-walk, she did see other dolphins doing it. What it looks like is that she took this new behavior with her out into the wild and taught it to the others.

Observers have been trying to understand what triggers the dolphins to do this, but they haven't yet discovered anything. What the article doesn't mention, and I think is probably significant, is the deep sense of play which dolphins have always displayed. It is likely they are doing it as an interesting and fun thing to do - though of course there are more boring possible explanations, such as looking for schools of fish.

But the really interesting thing about this is that it displays what is called "cultural behavior":

"Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, norms of behavior such as law and morality, and systems of belief as well as the art." [wiki]

Dolphins off the western coast of Australia have been known to teach their young to use sponges to help them gather food, so this kind of dolphin-to-dolphin teaching is not undocumented. But to do something as a group that doesn't inherently gain them better survival actually points to something deeper, a communication and a passing-on of interesting stuff which, like internet memes and social networking in humans, is a cultural phenomenon. Strange and wonderful stuff!

PS. Link:
Another interesting article from New Scientist (of course - I love that magazine!) about animals teaching each other stuff.

Tarnish and Style: Why I Like Venice, part 1

I just came back from a short trip to Venice, which isn't far from Split (but not easy to get to, for some reason). So, below are some pictures of things n' stuff that I found while I was there. My apologies for the quality of some of these, as they were often taken through shop windows or without flash in places where photography was not allowed. Lots of pics, but not too much writing, so I hope you enjoy the (somewhat blurry) eye-candy (Blogger is not accepting any more pictures, so this will be part 1).



Venetian Crypts, artlessly defunct



The inside of a store where one gets one's pictures framed. The variety and wonderfulness of these bits is perhaps a perfectly conscious thing, but the workmanlike atmosphere of the shop was real.

My daughter and I walked past this man probably a dozen times and were never able to get a good picture of him. We couldn't believe how like a waxwork he looked: thin and weirdly out of date with his white coat on, talking on an old-fashioned telephone, with a corpselike pallor. We speculated that he was actually an automata who was put there for atmosphere, and then decided he was too creepy to be art.

These were on a bunch of the trash cans. I could never figure out if it was for a particular show or what. It seemed to be for a place that called itself "O" but the words below were so impenetrable that it was impossible to tell. I found the image captivating, though. What is happening in this picture? Why is the baby all wrapped up? Is it dead, and in a shroud? Then why does it look so alert? And who is the man who is handing the baby to its mother? Or is she handing it to him, reluctantly??

This is a Bocca di Leone, a Lion's Mouth, where people used to be able to put messages denouncing someone for treason. A very Venetian idea, somehow. They are everywhere at the Doge's Palace, as if they expected denunciations at any moment; or perhaps there were different ones for different kinds of denunciations. However, this was the only one we found that wasn't completely defaced - erased, even (see the ones on either side). Why this is so, I don't know. I speculate that either Napoleon had them removed, or the message below was embarrassing at some point and so was removed (for example, if it said, "Denounce witches here," or something). Either way, it's an unfortunate loss. You can read more about them here (great blog about Venice).

Here is the back of the Bocca, taken, of course, when I wasn't supposed to use a camera. Thus the odd angle and blurriness. But please note the double door and the serious lock. They took these things seriously, and had a complex way of dealing with complaints, either about other people or about the government.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose... Treasures are indeed alive and well in Venice.

This is a little, old-fashioned doctor's cupboard - a miniature, about 16 inches high - with all the chemistry bits and the cool jars full of weird stuff. Total Cabinet of Wonders. I took about 6 pictures and this was the best one.


Bonus link:

- More on the The Most Serene Republic of Venice, who ran our part of Croatia for hundreds of years. Interesting reading...