̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - 19th century

Black Ned Kelly? ̽��ֱ��truth about an infamous Australian bandit

ta385 — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 08:30:00 +0000

Historian Dr Meg Foster shatters the myth that “Black Douglas” murdered a white woman and tells the story of an intelligent survivor

Historian uncovers new evidence of 18th century London's 'Child Support Agency'

sjr81 — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 15:05:44 +0000

Dr Samantha Williams’ Unmarried Motherhood in the Metropolis: 1700-1850 reveals, using London’s few surviving ‘bastardy books’, how the parishes of Lambeth, Southwark and Chelsea chased the fathers of illegitimate babies – and the lengths some errant fathers went to in order to escape not only their moral and financial obligations, but the clutches of parish constables and the feared houses of correction.

Read the full Shorthand story

How 18th and 19th century London supported its unmarried mothers and illegitimate children – essentially establishing an earlier version of today’s Child Support Agency – is the subject of newly-published research by a Cambridge historian.

Workhouse Women in St. Giles's Church by Charles Holroyd (1880-84). ©Trustees of the British Museum

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Back to the future of skyscraper design

sjr81 — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 09:09:44 +0000

Newly-published, ̽��ֱ��Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture by Professor Alan Short is the culmination of 30 years’ research and award-winning green building design by Short and colleagues in Architecture, Engineering, Applied Maths and Earth Sciences at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

“ ̽��ֱ��crisis in building design is already here,” said Short. “Policy makers think you can solve energy and building problems with gadgets. You can’t. As global temperatures continue to rise, we are going to continue to squander more and more energy on keeping our buildings mechanically cool until we have run out of capacity.”

Short is calling for a sweeping reinvention of how skyscrapers and major public architecture are designed – to end the reliance on sealed buildings which exist solely via the ‘life support’ system of vast air conditioning units.

Instead, he shows it is entirely possible to accommodate natural ventilation and cooling in large buildings by looking into the past, before the widespread introduction of air conditioning systems which were ‘relentlessly and aggressively promoted’ by inventor Willis Carrier and rival entrepreneurs.

“ ̽��ֱ��majority of contemporary buildings have absolutely no resilience to climate at all,” he added. “To make them habitable, you have to seal them and air condition them. ̽��ֱ��energy use and carbon emissions this generates is spectacular and to a large extent unnecessary. Buildings in the West count for 40-50% of electricity usage, generating substantial carbon emissions. ̽��ֱ��rest of the world is catching up at a frightening rate, China at 31% and rising in 2017.

“Modern buildings cannot survive unless hard-wired to a life support machine, yet this fetish for glass, steel and air-conditioned skyscrapers continues; they are symbols of status around the world on an increasingly vast scale.”

Short’s book highlights a developing and sophisticated art and science of ventilating buildings through the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, including the two chambers of the Houses of Parliament, and the design of ingeniously ventilated hospitals. Of particular interest were those built under the aegis of John Shaw Billings, designer of the first Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (1873-1889).

“We spent three years digitally modelling Billings' final designs and a brilliant alternative design,” added Short. “We put pathogens in the airstreams, modelled for someone with TB coughing in the wards and we found the ventilation systems in the room would have kept patients safe from harm.

“We discovered that nineteenth century hospital wards could generate up to 24 air changes an hour– that’s similar to the performance of a modern-day, computer-controlled operating theatre. We believe you could build wards based on these principles for the NHS now. Single rooms are not appropriate for all patients. Communal wards appropriate for certain patients – older people with dementia, for example – would work just as well in today’s hospitals, at a fraction of the energy cost.”

Professor Short contends the mindset and skill-sets behind these designs have been completely lost, lamenting the disappearance of expertly designed theatres, opera houses, and other public buildings where up to half the volume of the building was given over to ensuring everyone got fresh air. Early twentieth century climate determinists like Ellsworth Huntington at Yale inadvertently promoted the export of cool, temperate climates around the world and explicitly condemned the inhabitants of hot climates as uncivilised and backward.

Much of the ingenuity present in 19th century hospital and building design was driven by a panicked public clamouring for buildings that could protect against what was thought to be the pernicious threat of miasmas – toxic air that spread disease.

Bad, malodourous air was considered lethal by huge swathes of the populace. Miasmas and other quasi-mystical phenomena were feared as the principal agents of disease and epidemics for centuries, and were used to explain the spread of infection from the Middle Ages, right through to the cholera outbreaks in London and Paris during the 1850s. Miasma theory attracted the attention of luminaries such as Florence Nightingale who believed that foul air, rather than germs, was the main driver of 'hospital fever' leading to disease and frequent death. ̽��ֱ��prosperous steered clear of hospitals.

While miasma theory has been long since disproved, Short has for the last thirty years advocated a return to some of the building design principles produced in its wake.

“ ̽��ֱ��air conditioning industry has persuaded us that you can’t do this naturally any more and that it would defy progress to do so. Huge amounts of a building’s space and construction cost are today given over to air-conditioning instead.

“But I have designed and built a series of buildings over the past three decades which have tried to reinvent some of these ideas and then measure what happens – publishing what works as well as what doesn’t.

“To go forward into our new low energy, low carbon future, we would be well advised to look back at design before our high-energy high-carbon present appeared. What is surprising is what a rich legacy we have abandoned. There is an analogy with the widespread introduction of affordable antibiotics and the relaxation in the ferocious cleanliness regimes in hospitals and the frightening consequences emerging now.”

Successful examples of Short’s approach include the iconic Queen’s Building at De Montfort ̽��ֱ�� in Leicester. Containing as many as 2,000 staff and students, the entire building is naturally ventilated, passively cooled and naturally lit, including the two largest auditoria each seating more than 150 people.

Conventional wisdom in the ventilation and heating industry was that this omission of mechanical and electrical equipment was impossible. Confounding its critics, the building was awarded the Green Building of the Year and RIBA’s Education Building of the Year in 1995 and was at the time the largest naturally ventilated building in Europe, influencing guidance in Europe and the USA. ̽��ֱ��building uses a fraction of the electricity of comparable buildings in the UK.

Following success there, Short and industry associates have also experimented with theatre design, including the Contact Theatre in Manchester, which uses the abundant heat sources of theatre lights and audience to drive air flows around the building and the passive downdraught cooled School of Slavonic and East European Studies in Bloomsbury, epicentre of the London Heat Island.

Short contends that glass skyscrapers in London and around the world will become a liability over the next twenty or thirty years’ time if climate modelling predictions and energy price rises come to pass as expected. He points to the perfect storm of the skyscraper boom in China, where huge high-rise, all-glass metropolises expand at an exponential rate. Meanwhile, 550 million people south of the Qin-Huai line in that country are not allowed to centrally heat or cool their own homes because of the energy that would demand and consume.

Short is convinced that sufficiently cooled skyscrapers using the natural environment can be produced in almost any climate, pointing to his research work on cooling an 11-storey tower at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. He and his team have also worked on hybrid buildings in the harsh climates of Beijing and Chicago – built with natural ventilation assisted by back-up air-conditioning – which, surprisingly perhaps, can be switched off more than half the time on milder days and during the spring and autumn.

“I think you can upscale these designs,” he added. “As you go higher, airspeeds increase and it becomes easier to control the climate within tall buildings.

“My book is a recipe book which looks at the past, how we got to where we are now, and how we might reimagine the cities, offices and homes of the future. There are compelling reasons to do this. ̽��ֱ��Department of Health says new hospitals should be naturally ventilated, but they are not. Maybe it’s time we changed our outlook.”

̽��ֱ��Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture: Air, Comfort and Climate, published by Routledge, is out now.

Answers to the problem of crippling electricity use by skyscrapers and large public buildings could be ‘exhumed’ from ingenious but forgotten architectural designs of the 19th and early 20th century – according to a world authority on climate and building design.

̽��ֱ��air conditioning industry has persuaded us that you can’t naturally ventilate buildings any more.

Alan Short

Advertising Archive

Post-war advertisement for air conditioning by Carrier

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Opinion: How a comic character sparked our very modern privacy fears – 200 years ago

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 14:17:46 +0000

We live in a time where there is no longer any privacy. Everything is recorded and shared, permanently available to those who pry or, as they may think of it, research.

While AS Byatt wrote this just recently, the debate about privacy is not a new phenomenon. Back in 1825, the theatrical sensation of the year was a comedy entitled Paul Pry which played to packed houses in London, throughout the provinces, and by the following year as far away as New York. ̽��ֱ��drama became a matter of public debate through its central character’s catchphrase, “I hope I don’t intrude”, which appeared not just in the rhetoric of politicians and commentators, but also printed onto various objects in an early example of merchandising.

In the play, the eponymous hero was constantly prying into the domestic affairs of his neighbours, either by eavesdropping or by intercepting their letters. At every turn he misunderstood the secrets he had acquired, generating an escalating confusion in relations between lovers and between parents and children.

̽��ֱ��phrase expressed the increasing ambivalence of popular attitudes towards privacy. It conveyed the new enthusiasm for inquiry, the sense that advances in education and the expansion of the media were creating a new era of transparency and informed debate. ̽��ֱ��state began to sponsor elementary schools in 1833 and three years later lifted what was described as the “tax on knowledge” – a stamp imposed on newspapers to put them out of reach of working-class readers. In 1840 it sought to widen access to communication by introducing the flat-rate, pre-paid Penny Black stamp, which cost a penny irrespective of distance.

At the same time, there was an anxiety that the realm of private communication was under threat from new forms of surveillance. As the family was increasingly thrust to the foreground as the core of morality and discipline, it seemed that its capacity to keep its own secrets was coming under attack.

Matters came to a head in 1844 when the recently launched satirical magazine, Punch, published a cartoon depicting the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, dressed as Paul Pry, standing in the new Post Office Headquarters eagerly opening the mail that was passing through the system in ever-increasing volumes. ̽��ֱ��government had been accused of intercepting the correspondence of suspected Italian republicans at the behest of the Austrian government. Coming just four years after the costly decision to democratise the post, it stood charged of exploiting new opportunities for invading the private realm. ̽��ֱ��Lord Chief Justice depicted the Home Secretary “opening a private letter, becoming the depository of the secrets of a private family … meeting an individual in society and knowing that he was in possession of secrets dearer to him than his life.”

̽��ֱ��Home Secretary’s career never recovered from the controversy. ̽��ֱ��event, wrote his biographer was:

like a match struck for a moment amid profound darkness, revealing to the startled crowd vague forms of terror, of which they had never previously had a glimpse … and about which they forthwith began to talk at random, until a gigantic system of espionage had been conjured up which no mere general assurance of its unreality could dispel.

̽��ֱ��affair marked the beginning of the inclination to cast the privacy debate in magnified terms: from a handful of Italian exiles to all those who sent a letter. ̽��ֱ��postal network exposed the privacy of every citizen, and surveillance embraced not just their political views, but every aspect of their domestic lives committed to paper.

Adding a very modern twist was the government’s refusal to confirm or deny the charge made against it, inventing the doctrine – which has been followed in the centuries up to Edward Snowden’s revelations – of refusing to comment on its use of surveillance technologies. This had the advantage of keeping the press and readers at bay, leaving successive governments free to extend their operations in response to unforeseeable threats to the security of the state. On the other hand, it prevented the government from denying what it had not done, leaving the field open to conspiracy theorists.

Today, despite belated attempts to enshrine the powers of the security services in law through the Investigatory Powers Bill, the structures of surveillance remain wilfully opaque. David Anderson QC, reviewer of the government’s counter-terrorism legislation, wrote that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is “obscure since its inception, has been patched up so many times as to make it incomprehensible to all but a tiny band of initiates”. ̽��ֱ��current draft of the Investigatory Powers Bill claims to initiate a new regime of clarity, yet ensures that that the grounds for steaming open electronic letters are written in terms that allow the broadest interpretation.

For 19th century families, as for those of today, maintaining control over personal communication was a matter of constant adjustment and compromise, of small victories and passing defeats. But today, privacy has become a controversy played out in public – fuelled by revolutions in our means of communication, and conditioned by governments forever inclined to keep secrecy secret.

David Vincent, Visiting Fellow in Technology and Democracy, CRASSH, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

David Vincent (CRASSH) discusses the nineteenth century theatrical sensation that inspired public debate about privacy.

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC (Julie Ainsworth, photographer)

English actor John Liston as the title character in John Poole's 1825 farce, "Paul Pry"

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Opinion: Six amazing dinosaur discoveries that changed the world

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 02:14:22 +0000

Recently, an auction of a dinosaur skeleton, discovered in Jurassic-aged rocks in the US, was held in West Sussex, England. ̽��ֱ��skeleton was that of a largely complete, immature, three-metre long carnivorous dinosaur: Allosaurus fragilis – “delicate strange reptile”. It was anticipated that the specimen would sell for somewhere in the region of £300,000-£500,000. Interestingly, bidding stopped before the reserve price was reached, so the specimen is still on the open market.

Allosaurus Scott Hartman, Author provided

̽��ֱ��price or value of fossils has a history that is practically as long as the science of palaeontology (the study of fossils) itself. Believe it or not, the tongue-twister “she sells seashells on the seashore” has its origin in the work of one of the earliest and most celebrated fossil collectors, Mary Anning. Mary lived during the early decades of the 19th century and had the knack of finding fossils, including those of seashells – bivalves, brachiopods, belemnites and ammonites – along the shores of Dorset and in the crumbling Jurassic cliffs, which she then sold.

Dinosaurs are fossils and do have a value, but I am only really interested in their value as scientific objects. Here are some of the discoveries that really have made a difference to science.

Megalosaurus

Pride of place must go to Megalosaurus bucklandi “Buckland’s big reptile” – because it proved to be the earliest discovered and scientifically described dinosaur.

Megalosaurus jaw Buckland Author provided

It’s remains, though incomplete, began to be collected from quarries at the village of Stonesfield in Oxfordshire in about 1815. ̽��ֱ��bones, teeth and jaws were passed to Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Museum, where they still reside, and were studied by the greatest living anatomist of the time Georges Cuvier, who visited Oxford (and its custodian William Buckland) from Paris to see the material.

William Buckland (with Cuvier’s help) described these fossils in a scientific article published in 1824. Buckland as well as Cuvier deduced that the bones belonged to a gigantic reptile, the like of which had not been seen before. Over the next decade and half more large fossil reptile bones were recovered in England and reviewed by the British anatomist Richard Owen. In 1842 Owen decided that these fossils were so utterly different from any known reptiles that they deserved to be classified as a completely new group of giant fossil reptiles: Dinosauria – “terrible, or fearfully great, reptiles”. Prior to 1842 nobody had heard of dinosaurs, the rest is, in essence, history. And Megalosaurus was the first.

Archaeopteryx

Charles Darwin profoundly disturbed the established Victorian world and galvanised scientific interest in evolution when he published his book On the Origin of Species in 1859. With masterly circumspection, his book laid out the reasons for concluding that organic life had changed or evolved over the immensity of geological time.

Archaeopteryx restored Robert Nicholls. Sedgwick Museum, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

By an astonishing coincidence, a fossil was discovered in a quarry in southern Germany just one year after the publication of Origin. This fossil comprised the major part of the crow-sized, delicately-boned skeleton of a creature that was named by Richard Owen Archaeopteryx lithographica (“ancient wing on writing stone”).

̽��ֱ��fossil was extraordinary because around the bones were seen the impressions of feathers (which of course implied that this was a bird) yet what was also seen in the skeleton were clear traces of teeth (no bird has teeth), hands with three well-developed clawed fingers (no bird has clawed fingers of that type) and its tail comprised a long string of small bones from which radiated a fan of feathers (no bird has a long string of tail bones).

Archaeopteryx NHM Author provided

This animal was an absolutely perfect “missing link” that connected living birds with feathers, to the group of scaly reptiles with teeth in their jaws, clawed fingers and long bony tails. Just a few years after this discovery was announced a friend and colleague of Darwin’s, Thomas Henry Huxley, suggested on the basis of the structure of Archaeopteryx, that birds and dinosaurs (not just any old reptile) were close relatives.

Not many agreed with Huxley at the time, but he has been proved to have been absolutely correct. Its original remains are preserved at the Natural History Museum, London.

Diplodocus

Diplodocus Scott Hartman

Andrew Carnegie was a profoundly wealthy industrialist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during the latter half of the 19th century. After he had amassed his fortune, Carnegie began to spend his money philanthropically. News came to him of the discovery of impressive dinosaur skeletons in the American mid-west so he decided he wanted one for his new museum ( ̽��ֱ��Carnegie Museum) in Pittsburgh. So he financed expeditions to northern Wyoming and southern Utah to find some more dinosaurs. And find them they did, including a near complete skeleton of the biggest dinosaur discovered to date.

̽��ֱ��skeleton was named Diplodocus carnegiei – "Carnegie’s double-beam". ̽��ֱ��entire animal, as reconstructed (with just a few additions for completeness, such as “borrowed” front feet from another animal altogether) was over 25 metres long and dwarfed in size and completeness anything discovered up to that date.

Diplodocus at the Natural History Museum Valdiney Pimenta/flickr, CC BY

So proud of this dinosaur was Carnegie that he had many copies cast in plaster and sent to museums around the world. ̽��ֱ��giant dinosaur in the main hall of the Natural History Museum in London is a cast of Carnegie’s Diplodocus.

Deinonychus

In the mid 1960s a young palaeontology professor, John Ostrom from Yale ̽��ֱ�� was exploring the badlands of Montana looking for dinosaur fossils. What he found was to change our understanding of dinosaurs, their biology and behaviour in the most extraordinary way. Ostrom discovered the scattered remains of a medium-sized predatory dinosaur which he studied and then named Deinonychus antirrhopus – “Terrible claw with a counterbalance”.

Deinonychus Scott Hartman, Author provided

He realised that this animal was a fast moving, highly intelligent, keen-sighted predator (not at all the slow, lumbering and slow-witted image of the dinosaur that was current at the time). He also showed that it was remarkably bird-like in its anatomy, and suggested that the bird similarities suggested that birds and small predatory dinosaurs were so closely similar that birds probably evolved from them.

These were highly controversial views at the time, even though they echoed the early ideas of Thomas Huxley in the 1860s. They also posed serious biological questions: if birds and dinosaurs of this type are related could it be that some dinosaurs were more like birds in a biological sense? ̽��ֱ��debate raged for decades.

Scelidosaurus

I include this dinosaur, which is somewhat less heralded than the others, because it really ought to have been a dinosaur that changed the world.

Scelidosaurus Gregory S Paul, Author provided

In 1858 dinosaur bones were discovered in the Jurassic cliffs at Charmouth and soon a nearly complete skeleton of this dinosaur was excavated and given to Richard Owen (the person who invented the Dinosauria) at the British Museum in London.

In the 1860s, Owen named it Scelidosaurus harrisonii – "Harrison’s shoulder reptile", but almost inexplicably failed to grasp the importance of its anatomy, or the way in which it pointed to the divisions between differing dinosaur groups and, in fact, why dinosaurs had proved so difficult to understand at the time.

Owen had the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone before him, yet he failed to grasp its importance. ̽��ֱ��probable reason why such an insightful scientist missed such an important moment is that he was simply too busy, including setting in motion the plans to have an entirely new national museum built. Without Owen the Natural History Museum in London, where the original bones of Scelidosaurus still lie, would not have been constructed. In fact, I am studying them at this very moment – hence my undoubted bias.

Sinosauropteryx

In 1996 an astonishing discovery was made in Liaoning, China. It comprised a virtually complete skeleton of a small, predatory dinosaur (smaller than, but generally similar to, Deinonychus).

Sinosauropteryx Author provided

It was described briefly in 1998 and named Sinosauropteryx prima – “First Chinese reptile wing” – but the most extraordinary feature associated with this fossil was that on the rocky slab upon which the skeleton was displayed there were traces of a wispy, dark-staining material that formed a sort of fringe following the body outline, as well as forming a dark spot in the area of the eye, and also formed a dark mass in the area of the gut/body cavity. ̽��ֱ��conditions of exceptional fossil preservation associated with these rocks in Liaoning seemed to preserve some remnant of the body tissues of the original animal.

Most intriguing was the fringe of tissue around the body: it looked like fur. ̽��ֱ��implication was that it had an epidermal covering (outer coat), perhaps an insulating layer. Given Ostrom’s earlier work on Deinonychus, the suggestion was made that this was indeed an insulated dinosaur that was able to keep its body warm (rather like a modern bird using fine down-like feathers that might have been preserved as a halo-like fringe when fossilised).

Still with us? Danny Chapman/flickr, CC BY

This and subsequent discoveries demonstrated the wisdom of Huxley’s intuition based largely upon Archaeopteryx and the validity of Ostrom’s work on Deinonychus. We now know that many (but not all) dinosaurs were feathered, and that some were capable of flight and some were indeed the progenitors of modern birds.

David Norman, Reader in Paleobiology, Curator of Palaeontology, Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

David Norman (Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences) discusses the fossil discoveries that really made a difference to science.

David Nicholls. Sedgwick Museum, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Deinonychus

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Solomon Schechter (1847-1915): a Jewish polymath with a gift for friendship

amb206 — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 09:49:12 +0000

Solomon Schechter was instantly recognisable in 1890s Cambridge. He was tall and untidily dressed, and he had an unruly red beard that matched his fiery personality. According to his friends, he seldom wore socks that matched in colour. People and conversations, Jewish history and books, were what mattered most to him.

In 1890 Schechter, a Romanian-born rabbi, became Lecturer in Talmudics at Cambridge. Together with his wife Mathilde he entertained a wide circle of people of different faiths. His Cambridge friends included the Presbyterian twin sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, co-founders of Westminster College, William Robertson Smith of Christ’s, J Rendel Harris of Clare, and Charles Taylor of St John’s.

His closest friend was the reclusive James Frazer of Trinity, author of ̽��ֱ��Golden Bough, a monumental comparative study of folklore, magic and religion, who proof-read Schechter’s essays and with whom Schechter liked to take long walks.

To mark the centenary of Schechter’s death, scholars are looking afresh at his remarkable life and afterlife - in particular at the contribution to scholarship made by a man with an omnivorous hunger for learning that drove him from the traditional Jewish Eastern-European world into which he was born to Vienna, Berlin, London, Cambridge and finally New York.

When he collapsed (and later died) after giving a lecture on Jewish philanthropy, his wife recounted that he asked for a book to read, protesting that “I can’t just lie down here doing nothing”.

A conference in Cambridge on Sunday, November 22, will bring together scholars from the USA, the UK, Europe and Israel to examine many aspects of Schechter’s life – from his work on ancient, medieval and modern Jewish history to his close relationships with his Cambridge contemporaries.

“Solomon Schechter was only the second Jew to be appointed to a teaching position at Cambridge. He was the quintessential absent-minded but brilliant scholar,” says Dr Theodor Dunkelgrün of CRASSH and St John’s College, who is convening the conference.

“He possessed a phenomenal intellect and was passionately interested not just in Jewish theology and history generally, but in all manner of literary, social, and cultural issues, including the role of women in Judaism, in ways that were way ahead of his time. A dazzling intermediary between rabbinic and academic worlds, he wrote beautiful, pioneering essays for an appreciative Victorian readership.”

It was a meeting with two of his Cambridge friends that won Schechter a place in history. In May 1896, Schechter was walking along King’s Parade when he met Agnes Lewis who, with her sister Margaret Gibson, had recently returned from Cairo where they had purchased a bundle of interesting documents. Lewis and Gibson, whose remarkable lives are vividly documented in Janet Soskice’s Sisters of Sinai, were self-taught scholars who had learnt Syriac in order to be able to read the earliest known versions of the Christian gospels.

Among the documents that Lewis and Gibson had acquired from a dealer in Cairo was a grubby scrap of paper which looked, in Gibson’s words “as if a grocer had used it for something greasy”. Schechter identified this fragment as part of a medieval copy of a hitherto unknown Hebrew original of the apocryphal book known as Ecclesiasticus to Christians and the Wisdom of Ben Sira to Jews. ̽��ֱ��incredible discovery suggested to him the possibility that there might well be more where it came from.

In accordance with Jewish law, no document containing the Holy Name may be destroyed. Jewish communities collect old texts beyond use in a so-called Geniza, a tomb for texts. ̽��ֱ��precious fragment of text that had, according to Gibson, made Schechter’s eyes glitter with excitement came from such a Geniza, a vast repository of documents stored, in haphazard fashion, in the oldest of Cairo’s synagogues, the Ben Ezra.

̽��ֱ��discovery and importance for medieval history of this unique collection is told in riveting detail by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole’s book Sacred Trash and in Stefan Reif’s A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo.

Sponsored by his friend Professor Charles Taylor, Master of St John’s College, Schechter travelled from Cambridge to Cairo, where, after winning the trust of the chief rabbi, he entered a windowless room that contained several hundreds of thousands of documents and manuscripts accrued, layer by dusty layer over a period of nearly a thousand years.

“A battlefield of books” is how Schechter described the chaos of handwritten manuscripts mingled with later printed text. Extraordinary as it may now seem, the chief rabbi authorised Schechter to take as much as he liked to deposit in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library. Schechter famously commented that he liked it all.

After spending a month trying to separate out the early material which mattered to him most, Schechter packed a “whole mass of rugged, jumbled, dirty stuff into huge sacks” which were dispatched to Cambridge. A black-and-white photograph reproduced in Sisters of Sinai shows Schechter sitting in a room in the old ̽��ֱ�� Library surrounded by boxes brimming over with documents that range from love letters and children’s doodles to hymns and religious texts.

Today these 193,000 manuscript fragments make up the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection in the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library – a treasure trove that an ambitious digitisation project has recently made accessible to scholars worldwide.

Schechter is not surprisingly best remembered for his contribution to the preservation of an archive that offers a unique window onto daily life of the medieval Jewish past in the Islamic world. But his pioneering study of the Geniza was just one strand in a career that took him from the Hassidic milieu of the small Romanian town where he was born to the rarefied world of late-Victorian Cambridge, and eventually to America.

In 1902, Schechter left Cambridge to take up the chancellorship of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, where he helped shape a generation of scholars and communal leaders and became the unintentional founder of the movement now known as Conservative Judaism.

Dunkelgrün says: “Schechter’s name will always, and justly, be associated with the Geniza, but he was much more than a Geniza scholar – he was a polymath who cared passionately for the entirety of the Jewish tradition, mystical and rational, from antiquity to his own time and beyond, towards the future. He paired this panoramic vision both with the traditional rabbinical education he received at home, in Lemberg and in Vienna, and with the philological skills he acquired in Berlin to produce critical editions of several major Rabbinic texts.”

A postdoctoral research fellow at CRASSH, Dunkelgrün is contributing to a European Research Council-funded project on ̽��ֱ��Bible and Antiquity in 19^th-century culture. He insists that Schechter’s work in Cambridge over a period of 20 years was made possible in large part because of the fascination of Victorian England, and Cambridge in particular, for biblical antiquity.

“Schechter cut an exotic figure, but one that was strangely at home in academic circles already convinced about the importance of rabbinic studies for the early history of Christianity. Schechter was the second in a line of six teachers of Rabbinics at Cambridge, the last of whom was Professor Nicholas de Lange, now formally retired from his post. We hope very much that this conference will draw attention not only to Schechter but also to this unique and precious tradition of Cambridge scholarship, and the importance of keeping it alive.”

Attendance at Sunday’s conference, Solomon Schechter’s Life and Legacy, is free of charge. Particulars and a link to registration may be found here: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26067/

Inset images: Solomon Schechter, before his death in 1915 (Wikimedia Commons); Solomon Schechter at work in the old ̽��ֱ�� Library (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library).

̽��ֱ��Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter is best remembered for his work on the Cairo Geniza. A conference this Sunday will explore the wider impact of a man with an unquenchable thirst for learning.

A dazzling intermediary between rabbinic and academic worlds, he wrote beautiful, pioneering essays for an appreciative Victorian readership

Theodor Dunkelgrün

Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Solomon Schechter at work in the old ̽��ֱ�� Library

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What is so unusual about a sloth’s neck?

amb206 — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 09:58:52 +0000

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Xenarthra is an order of primarily South American mammals that includes sloths, ant-eaters and armadillos. Several are sufficiently endangered to be on the IUCN ‘red list’. In previous millenia, the group was far bigger. It covered many other creatures, now extinct, such as giant ground sloths estimated to have exceeded the size of a male African elephant.

As ‘exotic’ animals, xenarthrans have long fascinated westerners and became a must-have item in ‘cabinets of curiosities’ – collections gathered from a world that was opening up to exploration from the 15th century onwards. In the mid-17th century, the naturalist-physician, Georg Marcgrave, stationed in Dutch Brazil, described the armadillos that he encountered:

" ̽��ֱ��Tatu or Tatu-peba in Brazilian, Armadillo in Spanish, Encuberto in Portuguese, we Belgians call Armoured-piglet. It is a most powerful animal that lives in the ground, though also in water and soggy places. It is found in various sizes."

As a consequence of the blossoming of scientific enquiry in the 19th century, many leading zoology museums have examples of xenarthrans in their collections. Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology, for example, has a fine collection of specimens collected on expeditions to South America, from the diminutive Pink Fairy Armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus) to the towering giant ground sloth (Megatherium americanum) which became extinct some 10,000 years ago.

̽��ֱ��ground sloth is one of a number of relatively recently extinct large sloths, one of which Charles Darwin himself helped discover on the voyage of the Beagle. On September 18, 1832, Darwin noted in his dairy that he had dined on “Ostrich dumpling & Armadillos”. ̽��ֱ��‘ostrich’ he ate was, in fact, rhea; the abundant armadillos were a staple diet of the local gauchos.

Not long afterwards, Darwin saw for the first time fossils of shells and other animals, embedded in soft sea cliffs, including a specimen of giant ground sloth which was to be named Mylodon darwinii in his honour.

Xenarthans have been a source of fascination to Dr Robert Asher, an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Zoology, ever since he first began studying mammalian diversity as a graduate student some 20 years ago. He’s particularly interested in the evolutionary stories told by the structure of their skeletons – and the ways in which their bones act as clues to their relative position within the tree of life.

Natural history museums in Berlin, Paris and London have in their collections examples of three-toed sloths, including embryos and foetuses. These specimens enabled Dr Robert Asher and his colleague Dr Lionel Hautier (formerly a Cambridge postdoctoral fellow and now at the ̽��ֱ�� of Montpellier) to publish research on an aspect of the anatomy of sloths which sets them apart from almost every other mammal on earth.

̽��ֱ��difference lies in the arrangement of vertebrae in sloths’ spinal columns – which can be seen as clues to xenarthrans’ divergent evolutionary pathways over the past few million years.

You might think that animals with long necks would have more neck vertebrae than those with short necks. This is certainly true of some birds and reptiles. But almost every placental mammal on earth (some 5,000 species in total) has seven ‘ribless’ vertebrae in the neck – even creatures with long necks such as giraffes. ̽��ֱ��three-toed sloth deviates from this rule: many of these tree-living creatures have eight, nine or even ten cervical vertebrae.

This remarkable diversity was noticed in the 18th century and scientists continue to tease apart the mechanisms by which mammals deviate from the “rule of seven”. In 2009, Asher and colleagues set out to learn more about this intriguing quirk. Neck vertebrae are known as cervicals and the rib-bearing vertebrae below them are known as thoracics. Thoracic vertebrae have facets which allow articulation with the ribs.

Asher and colleagues looked at patterns of bone formation in mammals as they developed. They found that, in all mammals, the centrum (or middle part) of the first thoracic (number eight, counting down from the skull) turns from cartilage to bone earlier than the centra of the posterior-most cervicals. In sloths, too, the eighth vertebrae begins to develop early – but, in their case, this ribless vertebra is located in the neck and generally considered to be ‘cervical’.

“ ̽��ֱ��‘extra’ vertebrae in sloths’ necks have the same developmental characteristics as thoracic vertebrae. They are, in effect, ribcage vertebrae, masquerading as neck vertebrae. In sloths, the position of the shoulders, pelvis and ribcage are linked with one another, and compared to their common ancestor shared with other mammals, have shifted down the vertebral column to make the neck longer,” explains Asher.

“Even in sloths, the mammalian ‘rule of seven’ applies to the vertebral centra. ̽��ֱ��ossification of the centra in a long-necked sloth resembles ossification in other mammals. However, sloths can deviate from the “rule” by shifting the embryonic tissues that give rise to the limb girdles and rib cage relative to the vertebrae, adding what are essentially one or more ribcage vertebrae into the caudal end of their neck. ̽��ֱ��next question to address is why and how sloths managed this shift.”

Xenarthrans also pack some intriguing surprises when it comes to teeth. Anteaters have no teeth. Sloths have just one set of teeth to see them through life – as do all but one genus of armadillo. Armadillos in the genus Dasypus (including seven- and nine-banded species) are unlike other armadillos in having two sets of teeth during their lifespan: deciduous (or ‘milk’) teeth and permanent teeth.

Most mammals, including humans, shed their baby teeth while they are growing. Recent research by Asher and colleagues from the ̽��ֱ�� of La Plata, Argentina, into the dentition of Dasypus revealed that its permanent teeth erupt long after the animal reaches its full size. “ ̽��ֱ��equivalent scenario in a human would be losing your milk teeth, and gaining all your permanent ones, once you were fully grown and well into your 20s,” says Asher.

In this regard, Dasypus is similar to most species of endemic African mammals (Afrotheria) – a group of animals that includes elephants, manatees, tenrecs, golden moles and sengis. “Eruption of adult teeth after the attainment of full body size and sexual maturity is not unheard of in other mammals,” says Asher. “Some people reading this won’t yet have erupted their ‘wisdom’ teeth or third molars. But few groups do this as pervasively as Afrotherians and Dasypus.“

With gratitude to PhD candidate Natalie Lawrence (Department of History and Philosophy of Science) for her input on early western encounters with ‘exotic’ animals.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: Y is for an animal that is an integral part of high-altitude livelihoods throughout the Himalayas, Tibet and Central Asia.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Illustration of an armadillo from Historiae Naturalis Brasilae Tatu by Georg Marcgrave; Skeleton of a giant land sloth (Museum of Zoology); Three-toed sloth - Bradypodidae - Luiaard (Martha de Jong-Lantink); Lateral view of 3D reconstruction of computerized tomography (CT) scans of skeleton in the three-toed sloth Bradypus (Hautier et al).

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge’s connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, X is for Xenarthran. A must-have item for 15th-century collectors of 'curiosities' and a source of fascination for evolutionary biologist Dr Robert Asher.

It is a most powerful animal that lives in the ground, though also in water and soggy places

Georg Marcgrave

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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A whale’s remarkable journey from Sussex to Cambridge

amb206 — Wed, 04 Nov 2015 14:21:22 +0000

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On 13 November 1865 a dead finback whale was washed up on the shingle at Norman’s Bay, close to Pevensey in Sussex. ̽��ֱ��carcass was stripped of its flesh and the skeleton moved from the beach to a nearby cricket field. An estimated 40,000 people came to see it; a small station was even built to cater for visitors arriving by rail.

In Sussex, the whale washed up at Norman’s Bay is the ‘Pevensey whale’. In Cambridge, the same creature is synonymous with the Museum of Zoology, which acquired the whale in 1866 and has displayed it almost without a break since 1896. Thought to be the largest skeleton of a finback whale on display in the world, it measures around 70 feet from nose to tail and weighs two tonnes.

̽��ֱ��whale skeleton is such a Cambridge landmark that since June 2015 it has even had its own twitter account @whale_whispers. Not surprisingly, an ambitious project to re-develop the Zoology Museum puts this iconic creature at the centre of the stories about the natural world told by displays of thousands of items – including objects collected by Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and Alfred Newton.

Visitors to the newly-built museum (which will open in autumn 2016) will enter a glass hall where the whale will take pride of place. Suspended in an atrium, it will be surrounded by skeletons of five smaller whale species. A sound installation of ‘ocean songs’ performed by local groups, blended with whale calls recorded out at sea, will provide a backdrop. A display will tell the history of the whale, complete with letters about its purchase, for the first time.

To allow the museum to be rebuilt, the whale skeleton was dissembled and stored in various locations within one of Cambridge’s main teaching and research sites. A crane lifted the animal’s skull to a safe place where a weather-proof shed was built around it.

̽��ֱ��existence of the finback whale at the centre of a university museum is tribute to the farsightedness of William Henry Flower, conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, who rushed to the south coast to see the dead giant a few days after it was washed up.

Flower quickly wrote to John Willis Clark at Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology to suggest that he acquired it. More than a year passed, however, before the whale was transported to Cambridge. It changed hands several times and was put on display at Hastings cricket ground.

Visitors who paid to see it were treated to music played by a band standing between its jaws and, on one occasion, the sight of 68 children standing in its mouth.

A poster speculated in a fanciful vein about the whale’s origins: “It was probably brought into the world in the cold regions – the Arctic Seas – some time after the Great Flood, where it has sported about, catching ‘small fry’, and otherwise amusing itself, probably for centuries.”

In Cambridge, the whale was for more than 80 years suspended high up inside the main gallery of the original Zoology Museum. It then spent a period in storage. When, in 1996, the museum received a major make-over, it was moved to a balcony above the main museum entrance.

Bringing the finback whale skeleton into the heart of the refurbished museum will give it new prominence. ̽��ֱ��museum is scheduled to re-open in autumn 2016.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: X is for an animal that became a must-have item in 15th-century 'cabinets of curiosities', and which has several surprising physiological traits.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Close-up of the skeletal finback (Museum of Zoology); Artist's impression of the finback whale's new place in the Museum of Zoology (Museum of Zoology); William Henry Flower’s letter to John Willis Clark (Museum of Zoology); ̽��ֱ��finback whale skeleton in the old Museum of Zoology (Museum of Zoology).

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge’s connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, W is for Whale: the journey of one iconic whale in particular, from a Sussex beach to pride of place in the Museum of Zoology.

It was probably brought into the world in the cold regions – the Arctic Seas – some time after the Great Flood

Poster from 1896

Museum of Zoology, Cambridge

̽��ֱ��'Pevensey whale'

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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