Breeding pearls

This notion of "breeding pearls" turns out to be charming. I'm only linking an image for the first page, but you should really click through and read the whole article.



And speaking of Paul Collins (two posts back), I was excited to see a Frank Buckland reference towards the end:



A selection from Frank Buckland's works being one of the ornaments of the Collins Library.

Is this notion of "breeding pearls" still current anywhere?

Almost there but not quite. With special guest the carnivorous cockatoo.

As promised, the little article I read about beri-beri.




Leaving in the note that follows just because how could I not.

Beri-beri is actually caused by a vitamin deficiency. It really is connected with rice, just not in the way the author of this piece thinks: a diet of polished and unfortified white rice doesn't supply enough vitamin B1.  Presumably the disappearance of beri-beri among the medical students is explained by the change in diet when they began boarding with others instead of dining on the communal rice.

You see similar situations over and over in discussions of beri-beri from this era.  The facts, meticulously described (more in other accounts than in this one), and clearly explainable once you know the actual cause of the disease, but at the time attributed very plausibly to some kind of taint or parasite in the white rice itself.  I wouldn't have imagined how closely a deficiency in a staple food can resemble a contamination.

Still need to figure out what this "breeding pearls" business is all about.

Dust and bones by now, but at that time hardly grown cold

You can say all kinds of different things to say about Notes and Queries. (Right now I'm only thinking about "the" Notes and Queries, but anything called "Notes and Queries" from before about 1915 is full of treasure. Just read an interesting piece about beri-beri in the Notes and Queries of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society that I'll talk about another time.)

All kinds of things to say, but here's what I'm thinking about Notes and Queries right this minute. It records a present that's very distant from our present--that's a given. But it also records a past that's removed from our own past. Things that are part of our distant, historical past are in Notes and Queries part of the recent past, or at the edge of living memory. For example, the black rat is long since extinct in England, replaced by the Norway rat, but in Notes and Queries we can read a memory of a particular London slum's demolishing, and how it was found to be infested with the older black rats, though the Norway rat was by then already firmly established. Other things have more of an M.R. James/Wicker Man feel--peculiar local festival customs that one or two elderly people still remember fondly from childhood, statues that a few people still remember seeing in a particular church, but no one knows when they were removed or what happened to them.

The overall feeling this gives me is a familiar one, and maybe doesn't lead anywhere in particular. One of those rotary-phone type emotions, pushed back a century: someday you will die, and the things you remember from your early life will be gone not just from the world but from the personal memory of the living. But it's good to keep being reminded that one time and another time are not islands surrounded by mist and inaccessible from one another, they're always joined by the long fading out of things. It's easy to think only of the periods when things were firmly what they were, not of the complicated and strandy and indeterminate times in between.