Tuesday, November 29, 1910

[Basically asks the faculty to give the students a break–proving that the issue of extending winter break by cutting class has an august tradition; our modern break of almost 4 weeks, coupled with the speed of air travel, seems luxurious in comparison]

The Christmas recess will begin at 1 p.m. Thursday, December 22, and will last two weeks.  It has been brought to the attention of the Tripod that a number of students desire to leave on the preceding Saturday, thus extending the vacation by five days.  With this in view they have been regular in attendance at classes, chapel and church, and have a balance of allowed absences sufficient to permit such a prolongation of the recess.  But the old bugbear, the possibility of assigned tests in that week, is hiding behind a post, ready to leap out and break up their plans with a menacing flourish of its stuffed club.

Now it is true of many of us that the Christmas recess is the one opportunity of going home during the entire college year.  Some students are obliged to spend a considerable portion of it on the train.  To such as have been far-sighted enough to economize their cuts the faculty should offer no hindrance to a fair vacation.

Nearly three weeks remain in which the various professors may hold their tests, and there seems to be no adequate reason why one of those four days, viz., from December 19 to 22, should be chosen for such compulsory attendance.  Every professor who abstains therefrom will be rewarded by a silent vote of thanks from his students, their families and their friends.

BEST ADVERTISEMENT:  Washburn violins, mandolins, guitars, and banjos.

Gabriele Falloppio (1523-1562) & Volker Coiter (1534-1576).  Lectiones de partibus similaribus humani corporis, ex diversis  (Nuremberg, 1575).  

I acquired this from an antiquarian bookseller in New York, and at some point before that firm owned the book, it was on the shelves of the Library of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland (what is now the Maryland State Medical Society–for its history, see here: http://www.medchi.org/about-medchi/history).

This is a scarce edition of a series of anatomical lectures by Falloppio in their first published appearance, including two tracts by Coiter on the osteology of quadrupeds and birds, illustrated with 5 large engraved plates of mammal, reptile, amphibian and bird skeletons after Coiter’s own drawings. Two texts from the present work are of particular interest for the history of anatomical science: “Coiter’s study of the skeleton of the foetus and of a child six months old, [which] was the first study of developmental osteology and showed where ossification begins” (Garrison & Morton), as well as the treatise “De avium sceletis et praecipuis musculis,” which includes in table form the first classification of birds by species.   The five large plates of animal skeletons that conclude the volume were apparently inspired by the Italian naturalist Aldrovandi.   “Coiter’s illustrations,” says one authority, “most of which he etched himself, are far superior in quality to the zoological illustrations of Aldrovandi, and they occupy a prominent position in the history of zoology and comparative anatomy.”

Tags: History of Science, natural history, New Acquisition, ornithology

November 22, 1910

“Communication”

“To the Editor of the Tripod:  Permit me to take exception, both personally and as representing a large class of undergraduates, to your editorial in last Friday’s issue.  You complain that the Library is overcrowded with desultory readers, and that the serious work of others is thereby hampered. 

Dr. Luther, in a talk to the freshman two years ago, hailed with approval the return of the genus “browser.”  I wish I could quote his enthusiastic words on discovering that a long lost species had reappeared.  But there are even stronger arguments than the mention of authorities.

First of all, only a small percentage of the books in the Library are used for reference in the various courses.  The same is true of the magazines.  The college spends hundreds of dollars annually in the purchase of volumes to which no professor refers his classes.  A set of Mark Twain’s complete writings, added shortly after his death, was certainly intended for the man whom the Tripod decries.  This is only an example, to which I might add a whole catalogue.

Secondly, there are certain peculiar advantages in the “browsing” habit, among which I may cite the broad view of the literary field thus obtainable.  To roam along the west gallery, selecting a book here and there to read a random chapter, or perhaps only the table of contents, is a practice easily comparable in value to that of boning out dry references in Logic.  The use of the alcoves by “browsers” is also to be commended for a similar general knowledge in a restricted field.”  –ONE OF THEM

Best advertisement:  Fatima Turkish blend cigarettes: GEOGRAPHY.  “Fatima Cigarettes are bounded on the north by quality, on the south by individuality, on the east by mildness and on the west by value.  In all the world, no smoke just like ’em.”

Tags: From the Archives

Last night we had a nice group of about 25-30 people at our event, sponsored by the Trinity College and Watkinson Library Associates: a talk and book signing with Professor Emerita, Barbara Sicherman, in celebration of her book, Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women.

I put up a small display of books that Dr. Sicherman discussed in her book–all first editions.  Here they are (with one exception, all quotes are from Sicherman’s book):

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868 (part I) and 1869 (part II)).

I read Little Women a thousand times.  Ten thousand. I am no longer incognito, not even to myself.  I am Jo in her ‘vortex;’ not Jo exactly, but some Jo-of-the-future.  I am under an enchantment: Who I truly am must be deferred, waited for and waited for.   —Cynthia Ozick (1982)

“As a character readers imagined becoming, Jo promoted self-discovery, revealing hidden potentialities to those in the liminal state between childhood and adulthood.”  [15]

The Wide, Wide World, by Susan Bogert Warner [writing as Elizabeth Wetherell] (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1851). AND  Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Life Among the Lowly, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.  (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1852).

“[I]t was as fiction writers that women attained their greatest success.  They not only wrote almost three quarters of the novels published in the United States by 1872, but were among the best-selling authors of the era.  Beginning with Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1851), many “women’s novels” sold more than 100,000 copies.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the best-selling novel of the century, sold an estimated 300,000 copies within the first year and half a million in the United States alone by the end of the fifth.  Hawthorne’s dig at the “damned mob of scribbling women” was not just a manner of speaking, but a pained recognition of women’s astonishing popularity—and financial success—in the field of literature.”  [39]

Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes, by Jane Addams.  (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1910).

“When Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr took up residence at 335 Halstead Street in Chicago in September 1889, they hoped that by sharing their lives with their mainly immigrant neighbors they would find ways to help bridge the gulf between the city’s haves and have-nots . . . The women’s initiative in founding one of the first settlement houses proved to be a harbinger of one of the great social movements of the age:  by 1900, there were more than 100 settlements in the United States.”  [165]

“Like other institutions with a mission to improve the lives of the underprivileged, Hull-House became a sponsor of culture, a term used here to include educational and cultural ventures designed to extend the intellectual and social horizons of local inhabitants.  The expansion of the original mansion to thirteen buildings occupying a full city block gave visual testimony to the settlement’s cultural reach.  At its peak it encompassed three formal theater groups, art and music schools, a women’s symphony orchestra, a chorus of 500 ‘working people,’ and clubs of every description, not to mention girls’ and boys’ basketball teams.”  [166]

The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, September 1909 to September 1929, with a Record of a Growing World Consciousness, by Jane Addams. (New York:  The Macmillan Co., 1930).

“In The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930), Jane Addams expressed puzzlement at the ‘contrasts in a post-war generation,’ including younger women’s lack of interest in the social ideals that animated her contemporaries and the new emphasis on sex as the most important avenue for fulfillment.  While it is true that young women no longer had the same sense of gender consciousness—in its dual connotation of privilege and obligation—that motivated many women of Addams’s generation, they did not simply opt for exclusively private lives.  But most were unwilling to make the choice between career and marriage that their predecessors took for granted.  Fortified by the vote, and not much interested in female bonding, successive generations of women learned firsthand what the Progressive generation had assumed: that without institutional supports, career and motherhood were difficult to combine.”  [253]

Tags: Events

From an antiquarian dealer in Utrecht, we purchased an original watercolor of a parrot perched on a rock with a large butterfly, framed.  This image was intended for Manetti’s Ornithologia methodice(1767-76), which we hold in the Watkinson (shown here with the painting), but it was finally omitted, and never made it into the publication.

Saverio Manetti (1723-1785) produced one of the finest bird books in Italy in the 18th century, a forerunner to the great illustrated ornithological works of the 19thC (Audubon, Selby, etc.).  His plates were larger and more vibrantly colored than those of his predecessors, with an endeavor to show the birds in their natural habitats, rather than on sham branches and such.

Tags: New Acquisition

November 18, 1910

[An interesting article by an alum about collegiate sports and their unfortunate focus on star athletes, rather than general physical conditioning for students]

“Alumni Communication”  [Sydney G. Fisher, of Philadelphia, Class of 1879]

To the Editor of the Tripod.  Dear Sir:  I have lately noticed some remarks in the Tripod implying that there was to be an effort to broaden its scope beyond more advertisements and screeching for the football games.  This effort has certainly been fulfilled in the publication of Colonel Cogswell’s admirable and historically valuable Founder’s Day address, and I sincerely hope the effort will be continued. 

When I was at the college a few weeks ago, there were complaints of the small number of alumni that subscribed for the Tripod.  The reason is obvious.  It contains nothing that interests them.  The old Tablet [the Trinity Tabletwas published 1868-1908] always c0ntained a great deal of information about the college, and about the doings of alumni in various parts of the world, and was to my mind a very inspiring and useful college journal.  So far as the alumni are concerned, all of the footbal screeching that interests them could be put in one column, or even in half a column.  We are all very glad that Wesleyan was “done up” the other day, but there are other things of equal importance in the world and in the college world.

Athletics are valuable and necessary, but that particular form of them which consists of eleven men, or nine men, getting all the exercise and the rest of the undergraduate body neglecting exercise and sitting in the grand stand to “root” for the nine or eleven, is not by any means the most commendable phase of the situation.  We may not be able to get rid of it.  It will flourish without encouragement; and it certainly should not be encouraged by those of us who have had experience of life and know the sort of physique required in the commercial and professional worlds.

If I had my way the “rooters” and the “digs” would be all hustled off the benches and compelled to play games and exercise as much as the nine or eleven.  A system of college athletics which makes nine-tenths of the undergraduates ashamed to play games or do anything much but “root,” because they are unable to break records and win distinction, is radically defective[my emphasis].  The craze about records and destruction is, as Colonel Roosevelt once said, the ruination of the general usefulness of sport and athletics in this country. 

The natural athelete, the record man, will take care of himself.  Do not encourage him; for then he overdevelops and carries about for the rest of his days in sedentary life, a muscular system through which the heart finds great difficulty in pumping the blood.  The man to be looked after and encouraged in college athletics is the “dig,” the over-studious, the ordinary chap who after all does the work of the world, or the fellow who shrinks from games and cultivates what he is pleased to describe as his intellect. 

I believe gymnasium exercise is now compulsory for the freshmen.  That is a great gain.  I would go farther and make exercise, either gymnasium or out-of-doors, compulsory for all the classes, including the lordly seniors.  In my time the seniors were regarded as beings who had passed through the drudgery of education and lived a sort of strolling, easy existence among historical and literary studies and the society of young ladies.  They would not have much time for that under my system:  for being older and presumably stronger, the compulsory athletics would be given to them in such doses that every thing that would happen to them in after life would seem easy.

BEST ADVERTISEMENT:  The College Tailoring Co.: “Suits pressed, 40 cents each.  Called for and delivered, 50 cents each.  We clean and press four suits a month for $1.50.”

Tags: From the Archives

The following is a nice addition to our collection of conduct guides for youth (women and men), which we hope some day to be the subject of a full exhibition:

The Young Lady’s Pocket Library, or Parental Monitor (Edinburgh, 1793).  The Pocket Library collects three of the most popular conduct manuals for women in the eighteenth century: John Gregory’s Father’s Legacy (1774), Sarah Pennington’s Unfortunate Mother’s Advice(1761, when she was unfortunate in being separated from her husband and children by unexplained marital discord), and the Marchioness de Lambert’s Avis d’une Mere à sa Fille (1728, translated in 1729). Also present is Edward Moore’s verse Fables for the Female Sex (1744), which is in a different vein, written for amusement but still sometimes moralizing and cautionary.

Here is a quote from the Marchioness to her daughter:

“The world has in all ages been very negligent in the education of daughters . . . they design them to please; they give them no instructions but for the ornament and graces of the body; they flatter their self-love; they give them up to effeminacy, to the world, and to false opinions; they give them no lectures of virtue and fortitude: surely it is unreasonable or rather downright madness to imagine that such an education should not turn to their prejudice.”

Tags: New Acquisition

November 9, 1910

THE STROLLER  [op-ed]

Yale has for the first time been forced to write “no award” after the Greek entrance prize, basing this action on the general inferior quality of the papers presented.  The New York Times, which is authority for this statement, adds that since Greek was made an optional subject for entrance two years ago, the quality of entrance papers in the subject has steadily declined.

It will not be surprising if the publication of this statement shall revive the perennial discussion as to the place of the classics in our educational system.  We shall have grey-headed and high-browed culturalists, unwashed and ungroomed, with frayed cuffs; and we shall hear from the advocates of the “bright, energetic young man” who knows all about carburetors and how to sell insurance, but can’t spell, never heard of the Pantheon, and is altogether as hard as nails.

Now it may be that the dust from the books of the sages is bad for ball bearings; and it is very certain that the fumes and noises of the laboratory and the workshop would be obnoxious in the library.  But the man isn’t chained to the motor, nor need the brain be entirely walled up in books.  Suppose we could realize and engineer quoting Horace, or a poet criticizing highway construction!  Don’t laugh.  I can imagine wilder things than that.  (It is unscientific and illogical to laugh anyway, and some day I’ll prove it to you).

The solution of this whole classical question is never going to be reached by present methods of attacking it, which for the most part consist in expressing one’s own opinions and prejudices and letting it go at that.  It is as if two chemists were to mix the unknown contents of several phials, place the mixture in a safe, and then argue over what the result ought to be.  What we need to do first, is find out what is causing this anti-classical trend, and its probable future tendency; second, what the end must be if the process goes on unchecked; third, if this end is desirable, and if not, how it can be dodged.

The Tripod is glad to offer a valuable prize for the best answer.  Solutions limited to 50,000 words.  Write on both sides of the paper.  After revising your manuscript, put it in the nearest waste-basket.

BEST ADVERTISEMENT:  “Silk Slumber Robes.  We have just received at our Blanket Department a new importation of the exquisitely beautiful Italian silk slumber robes, that are so universally admired.  Suitable for use as couch covers, for extra bed throws, or for the college students’ room–they give a bit of glowing color that adds much to the furnishings.”  (Brown, Thomas & Co.).

Tags: From the Archives

The Jubilee, an Interesting Game.  (London: John Harris, 1810).

This board game was designed as a jigsaw puzzle, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of reign of King George III. The game highlights the historical events that occurred during George III’s long reign, an important period for both Australia & the United States.  In the South Pacific, James Cook’s voyages yield important discoveries–vignettes include South Pacific natives, a Tahitian woman in a wide skirt, “Botany Bay” (aborigine & a kangaroo), and the Mutiny on the Bounty.  Events of the American Revolution are illustrated at length–“Stamps” being burned; the 1st meeting of Congress at NY; the battle at Lexington, MA; the Declaration of Independence; the Surrender of Burgoyne; the Surrender at Yorktown. Other events include the King’s marriage & birth of his children, riots in London & Birmingham, the Irish Rebellion, wars with Spain & France, and the subsequent peace.  Abolition of the slave trade; Haley’s Comet, Handel, hot air balloon & the smallpox vaccine, etc.  The game was published by John Harris, who took over Elizabeth Newberry’s publishing business in 1801 and worked until it was sold in 1843.  Newberry was part of the famous 18th century children’s literature publishers.  Harris also worked with John Wallis, one of the most prolific publishers of games and dissected puzzles between 1775 and 1847.

Here is a detail of the images.  At some point soon, we will reconstruct the counters and other pieces from the rules, and be able to PLAY this game of history in the Watkinson!

Tags: New Acquisition