Lost and Found

It is a sad fact that dead babies figure largely in the contents of the railway Lost Property Offices. These are at once handed over to the police, and a formal inquest is held. Some little time ago, Mr. Groom tells me, a live child was found in a small box on the departure platform, close to the eight o’clock Scotch train. The little one was cosily packed in wadding, and was provided with a feeding-bottle. A few holes had been drilled in the box–which, by the way, was covered with wallpaper, and was addressed to a home in Kilburn. The authorities of this home, however, refused to take in the child, as no money had been sent with it. So the poor, lost property infant was handed over to the police, who, in turn, passed it on to the workhouse, where it was christened ‘Willie Euston,’ and lived for four years. I succeeded in obtaining a photograph of the finding of this child, and the incident is shown in the accompanying illustration. The official on the right gave his own Christian name to the poor little waif.

— William G. FitzGerald, “The Lost Property Office,” Strand, December 1895

October 29, 2011October 28, 2011 | Oddities · Society

Overstuffed Monograms

In 1960, Cambridge graduate Ron Hall announced a discovery he called Hall’s Law: “For any sufficiently large group of people the average number of initials possessed by members of that group is a direct measure of the predominant social class of the group.”

Hall’s computer analysis of the English aristocracy found that dukes averaged four names apiece, marquesses 3.96, earls 3.92, barons 3.53, baronets 3.49, viscounts 3.41, and knights 3.06. As modern examples he named John Selwyn Brooke Lloyd and Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell; those from the past included Admiral the Honorable Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunket-Ernle-Erle-Drax, a commodore of convoys during World War II, and Major Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache, who was killed in World War I.

From across the sea, an American newspaper observed, “It would be interesting to know what the worthy major’s parents called him in his boyhood years.”

October 20, 2011October 19, 2011 | Language · Society

The Divestiture Puzzle

Suppose you own stock in a company that you believe has acted immorally. You want to sell the stock, but is this morally permissible? If owning the stock is wrong, then selling it to another person amounts to abetting an immoral act. The buyer might not feel the stock is tainted, but you do.

Even just renouncing ownership amounts to redistributing the stock’s value among the other stockholders, which increases their moral culpability. Is principled divestiture possible?

(Steven M. Cahn, “A Puzzle Concerning Divestiture,” Analysis 47:3 [1987], 175-176.)

October 19, 2011November 12, 2021 | Society

“The Horse Race”

Who loves a horse race? Are not too many fond of it? Does it not lead to many evils, and to frequent ruin? Never go to a horse race. Mr. Mix had one child, whom he called Irene; he had also a good farm, and some money. He went to the races with his child, dressed in black crape for the loss of her mother. Here Mr. Mix drank freely, and bet largely, and lost all he was worth. At night he went home a beggar; took a dose of brandy, and died before morning, leaving his child a pennyless orphan. Never go to a horse race.

— From The Clinton Primer, 1830, quoted in “The Readers Our Grandparents Used,” The New England Magazine, November 1903

October 13, 2011October 11, 2011 | Society

Keeping Things Interesting

Each year, when the last flight of the summer field season departs the U.S. research station at the South Pole, the remaining staff gather to watch The Thing.

The next flight won’t arrive for eight months.

October 13, 2011October 12, 2011 | Entertainment · Science & Math · Society

Odd Rents

In 1910, Flint, Mich., landowner Neil Boyston provided a lot for the Flint Union School in return for “one clover blossom a year.”

In exchange for an acre of land in Philadelphia, the Schuylkill Fishing Company used to pay landowner William Warner an annual tribute of three perch on a pewter platter.

In 1772, a Manheim, Pa., congregation rented the site for its church from Henry William Stiegel in return for “one red rose, payable in June, when the same shall be lawfully demanded.”

When Henry VIII granted an estate to the Lord of Worksop Manor in 1542, he received it on the condition that he and his heirs should provide a right-hand glove for the king and support his arm on the day of his coronation.

“Once a year a Lord of the Manor of Essington was compelled to bring a goose to Hilton,” noted the New York Times in 1910. “He was called upon to drive the bird around the room. In the meantime a kettle of water was placed over a wood fire, and the unfortunate tenant was required to drive the goose around the room until the water was boiled and began sending steam out of the spout of the pot. It does not take a very great stretch of the imagination to conjure up the chaos that must have ensued on rent day at Hilton.”

October 12, 2011October 10, 2011 | Oddities · Society

A Good Man

Should other species be regarded as human? In 1779 Lord Monboddo proposed that orangutans should: They walk upright, use weapons, form societies, build shelters, and behave with “dignity and composure.” “If … such an Animal be not a Man, I should desire to know in what the essence of a Man consists, and what it is that distinguishes a Natural Man from the Man of Art?”

Thomas Love Peacock mocked this view in his 1817 novel Melincourt, in which a civilized orangutan (“Sir Oran Hout-ton”) is elected to Parliament. And an anonymous wag objected even to the satire:

The author of a novel lately written,
Entitled “Melincourt,”
(‘Tis very sweet and short),
Seems indeed by some wondrous madness bitten,
Thinking it good
To take his hero from the wood:
And though I own there’s nothing treasonable
In making ouran-outangs reasonable,
I really do not think he should
Go quite the length that he has done,
Whether for satire or for fun,
To make this creature an M.P.
As if mankind no wiser were than he.
However, those who’ve read it
Must give the author credit
For skill and ingenuity,
Although it have this monstrous incongruity.

But today Monboddo’s view is on the ascendancy. In Rattling the Cage (2014), Harvard legal scholar Steven M. Wise argues that orangutans — as well as chimpanzees, bonobos, elephants, parrots, dolphins, and gorillas — deserve legal personhood. “Ancient philosophers claimed that all nonhuman animals had been designed and placed on this earth just for human beings,” he writes. “Ancient jurists declared that law had been created just for human beings. Although philosophy and science have long since recanted, the law has not.”

October 7, 2011October 15, 2021 | Literature · Science & Math · Society

Unquote

“As a general rule, nobody has money who ought to have it.” — Benjamin Disraeli

October 3, 2011September 27, 2011 | Quotations · Society

Since You Asked

In 1956, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that the city of Williamsport could legally tax a Williamsport bar owner’s jukebox. One justice, Michael Musmanno, thought the machine shouldn’t be taxed — but:

In the eyes and ears of many people, including the writer of this opinion, a juke box confined to ‘jazz’ records may be a nuisance. It robs the air of sweet silence, it substitutes for the gentle concord of stillness the wailings of the so-called ‘blues singer,’ the whinings of foggy saxophones, the screeching of untuned fiddles, the blasts of head-splitting horns, and the battering of earshattering drums. It makes a mockery of music, it replaces harmony with cacophony, tonality with discord, and peace with annoyance.

Musmanno’s dissents could run to 20 pages — in another he called Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer “a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.”

His reputation may have cost him — when asked whether he read Musmanno’s dissents, Chief Justice Horace Stern said he was not “interested in current fiction.”

October 3, 2011September 27, 2011 | Society