Charles Petzold

1859 Books: George Meredith’s “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel”

cp@charlespetzold.com — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 12:00:00 GMT

The Amazing Victorian: A Life of George Meredith

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

George Meredith

The Victorian era in England is often portrayed as a rather prudish time, but that impression is based mostly on their literature, which often refers to sexual matters obliquely, if at all. Some of this reticence about sex in Victorian literature results from the custom of families reading books aloud to each other. In effect, novels had to be appropriate for all ages.

The Victorian Novel

As the 1850s glided into the 1860s, family reading time became less common, partially as a result of literature written specifically for children (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland appeared in 1865) and increased leisure time for the middle-class woman, allowing private reading time for her as well. (See the chapter "Affairs of the Heart(h)" in The Victorian Novel)

One book clearly inappropriate for family reading was George Meredith's eccentric, astonishing, comical, erudite, poetic, difficult, brainy, complex, infuriating first novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of Father and Son, published on June 20, 1859, 150 years ago today.

The high cost of books in those days required that authors rely on big sales from the lending libraries, and particularly the one run by Mudie. At first it seemed that The Ordeal of Richard Feverel would be a financial success. As George Meredith explained in a letter some months later,

Letters of George Meredith

That was a more subdued analysis than the reaction he had soon after the incident:

Letters of George Meredith

Of course, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is tame by today's standards, but anyone familiar with the conventions of Victorian literature is likely to be surprised by the large role that sex plays in this novel. For me, the jaw-dropping scene involved a high-class prostitute engaging in erotic cross-dressing.

From Google Book Search, you can access Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3 of the original 1859 edition of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, but I strongly recommend you go with a modern edition with notes that help decipher Meredith's many obscure allusions. The Penguin edition — edited and with an introduction by Edward Mendelson (my old friend from PC Magazine days) — is ideal and readily available.

The Ordeal of Richard Feveral was George Meredith's first real novel, published when he was 31 years old. He had previously published a book of poetry and two fables, but with Richard Feverel he found a unique comic voice and a sophisticated prose style that makes his novels more difficult than Dickens or Trollope. Meredith often requires we poor readers to struggle through forests of irony, and at times he slips into the incomprehensible.

For at least half its length, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is basically a comedy. Sir Austin Feverel is raising his son Richard with a System that he has developed, and which he is developing into a book, "Proposal for a New System of Education of our British Youth." This System requires that Richard remain morally pure and ignorant of sex until he is married at the age of 25 to a younger woman of Sir Austin's choosing who is as uncontaminated as his own son. In 1859, even the staidest of Victorians would have recognized that such a scheme was doomed to failure.

To keep Richard pure of thought and deed, Sir Austin has tried to prevent him from meeting girls of his own age. He is alarmed when he discovers that Richard has been reading John Lemprière's Classical Dictionary because the descriptions of randy Greek and Roman gods might have a corrupting influence on the adolescent mind. When Sir Austin discovers that Richard has been writing poetry, he directs his son to destroy all his poems. He even instructs the servents to avoid Public Displays of Affection in Richard's presence:

"I hope I am too just to object to the exercise of their natural inclinations. All I ask from them is discreetness.... No gadding about in couples," continued the Baronet, "no kissing in public. Such occurrences no boy should witness. Whenever people of both sexes are thrown together, they will be silly, and where they are high-fed, uneducated, and barely occupied, it must be looked for as a matter of course. Let it be known that I only require discreetness." (Vol. I, Ch. XVI — all chapter references are to the first edition)

Although some scholars have tried to trace Sir Austin's fictional child-rearing practices to Herbert Spencer's recent writings on education, it seems likely that Meredith based the System more on Rousseau's Émile, particularly the idea that men should marry at the age of 25 and only then educated on the birds and the bees. (Rousseau's Confessions are alluded to elsewhere in Richard Feverel.)

Although Sir Austin believes his System to be founded on sound scientific principles — and Meredith often sardonically refers to him as a Scientific Humanist — it is obvious from the early pages of Richard Feverel that Sir Austin has a misogynist view of women based on his belief in Original Sin, which he often refers to as the Apple Disease or the Great Shaddock Dogma. (Shaddock is an early term for grapefruit, which was associated with the forbidden fruit.) Sir Austin has published an anonymous book of aphorisms that includes such gems as "I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man."

On a more psychological level, Sir Austin's fear of Richard's possible "ordeal" if his marriage is not arranged correctly has arisen from Sir Austin's own disastrous marriage. His wife (and Richard's mother) ran off with a family friend, the poet Denzil Somers, who writes under the name Diaper Sandoe. (This pseudonym is not nearly as ridiculous to the British audience as it is to North Americans: In Great Britain, a "diaper" is a repeating pattern woven on fabric, while the cloth that covers a baby's bottom is called a "napkin" or "nappy.") Diaper Sandoe's poetry — which is liberally quoted in Richard Feverel, for Meredith was also a poet — also obviously influenced Sir Austin's antipathy toward's Richard's poetry.

(Curiously enough, when George Meredith was writing Richard Feverel, his wife had recently run off with a painter, and he was raising their son as a single parent. Meredith was obviously using some of his own bitterness in fabricating Sir Austin's personality and views, yet he seemed to transcend his own concerns by comically extrapolating the type of parent he might become were he to learn the wrong lessons from his failed marriage.)

Sir Austin's System isn't a complete disaster. Richard becomes a bright healthy boy, although inheriting a streak of stubborn pride from his father, and at times exhibiting a quick temper. But to credit Richard's character entirely to the System wouldn't be quite accurate either, as demonstrated by a sequence of events that begins on Richard's 14th birthday:

Richard and a friend take revenge on a farmer who offended them by burning his rick, and when Sir Austin figures out that Richard is at fault, he assumes that Richard will come to the correct decision by himself and apologize. Richard's cousin, Adrian Harley, who has been appointed by Sir Austin to tutor the boy and who Meredith ironically terms the "Wise Youth," tries to circumvent the need for apology by bribing a witness to put the blame on someone else. But it is another of Richard's cousins, Austin Wentworth, who sits down with the boy and who makes him understand the importance of taking responsibility for one's actions.

The presence of two characters with the name "Austin" is sometimes confusing (although Meredith is careful to always refer to Richard's father as "Sir Austin") but I think Meredith is inviting the reader to contrast the two men. Cousin Austin seems to be the real Humanist of the family. For much of the novel, however, he is away in South America "looking out a place — it's a secret — for poor English working-men to emigrate to and found a colony in that part the world." (Vol. II, Ch. V) Had Austin been around more, many of the problems that develop might have been averted, and there wouldn't be a novel at all.

When Richard is nearing the age of 18, Sir Austin decides the time is right for him to find a suitable wife for Richard as unsoiled as he, and to arrange a betrothal for a marriage to be scheduled 7 years hence. Sir Austin journeys to London to begin his search. But another goal is to reinforce his belief that he has made the correct decision in not allowing Richard to sow any wild oats during his youth.

Before commencing his campaign, he called on two ancient intimates, Lord Heddon, and his distant cousin Darley Absworthy, both Members of Parliament, useful men, though gouty, who had sown in their time a fine crop of Wild Oats, and advocated the advantage of doing so, seeing that they did not fancy themselves the worse for it. He found one with an imbecile son, and the other with consumptive daughters. "So much," he wrote in the Note-book, "for the Wild Oats theory!" (Vol. II, Ch. II)

Much more amenable to Sir Austin is the household of Mrs. Grandison, who Meredith tells us is a descendant of Sir Charles Grandison, the title character of a novel by Samuel Richardson. Mrs. Grandison is in complete accordance with Sir Austin concerning the importance of maintaining the purity of their children, and she proudly exhibits six of her eight daughters for his inspection, as well as the Gymnasium she has built.

Daughters and little dogs trooped to the Gymnasium, which was fitted up in the court below, and contained swing-poles, and stride-poles, and newly invented instruments for bringing out special virtues: an instrument for the lungs: an instrument for the liver: one for the arms and thighs: one for the wrists: the whole for the promotion of the Christian accomplishments. (Vol. II, Ch. III)

Sir Austin is so blinded by Mrs. Grandison's educational theories that he fails to see that her daughters are really in no better shape than the children of the Wild Oats advocates. Nonetheless, Sir Austin settles upon the youngest — a 13-year old named Carola. (And yes, even though the marriage won't be for another 7 years, it's still a little creepy.)

But it's much too late. Richard has already accidently met a young woman closer to his own age while rowing on a river, and in a famous sequence of passages, Meredith humorously and poetically captures the phenomenon of love at first sight. It begins like this:

Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by the thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying at anchor among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from the banks thick with weed and trailing bramble, and there also hung a daughter of Earth. Her face was shaded by a broad straw-hat with a flexible brim that left her lips and chin in the sun, and sometimes nodding, sent forth a light of promising eyes. Across her shoulders, and behind, flowed large loose curls, brown in shadow, almost golden where the ray touched them. She was simply dressed, befitting decency and the season. On a closer inspection you might see that her lips were stained. This blooming young person was regaling on dewberries. They grew between the bank and the water. Apparently she found the fruit abundant, for her hand was making pretty progress to her mouth. Fastidious youth, which shudders and revolts at woman plumping her exquisite proportions on bread-and-butter, and would (we must suppose) joyfully have her quite scraggy to have her quite poetical, can hardly object to dewberries. Indeed the act of eating them is dainty and induces musing. The dewberry is a sister to the lotos, and an innocent sister. You eat: mouth, eye, and hand are occupied, and the undrugged mind free to roam. And so it was with the damsel who knelt there. The little skylark went up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue: from a dewy copse standing dark over her nodding hat, the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note: the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers: a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude: a boat slipped towards her, containing a dreamy youth, and still she plucked the fruit, and ate, and mused, as if no fairy prince were invading her territories, and as if she wished not for one, or knew not her wishes. Surrounded by the green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the weir-fall's thundering white, amid the breath and beauty of wildflowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in a fair setting: a terrible attraction. The Magnetic Youth leaned round to note his proximity to the weir-piles, and beheld the sweet vision. Stiller and stiller grew Nature, as at the meeting of two electric clouds. Her posture was so graceful that, though he was making straight for the weir, he dared not dip a scull. Just then one enticing dewberry caught her eye. He was floating by unheeded, and saw that her hand stretched low, and could not gather what it sought. A stroke from his right brought him beside her. The damsel glanced up dismayed, and her whole shape trembled over the brink. Richard sprang from his boat into the water. Pressing a hand beneath her foot, which she had thrust against the crumbling wet sides of the bank to save herself, he enabled her to recover her balance, and gain safe earth, whither, emboldened by the incident, touching her finger's tip, he followed her. (Vol. I, ch. XVII)

Lucy Desborough is a fine young woman, even someone Richard's father would have selected for his son if he had not been so dogmatically fixed on making his own choice from families philosophically in accordance with his own ideas. But Lucy's uncle is a farmer (the same farmer whose rick Richard burned four years ago), and Lucy herself is Catholic, so she is summed up by cousin Adrian with the quaint label "the Papist dairymaid" (Vol. III, ch. I).

Richard is definitely his father's son. He has inherited (or learned) a combination of pride and obstinacy that pits father against son as two stubborn and immovable objects, propelling the novel down the road to tragedy.

Taking advantage of a separation between Richard and Lucy imposed by Sir Austin, a predator named Lord Mountfalcon swoops down and begins a seduction of Lucy, while his concubine — a high-class prostitute sometimes called Bella but often referred to as Mrs. Mount (and I suspect there's a pun or two in there) — is given the job of distracting and possibly seducing Richard.

Bella is perhaps the most memorable character in Richard Feverel, world-weary and love-weary at the age of 21, able to string Richard along in a relationship that begins Platonically but which she can skillfully twist in whatever direction she wills.

The tragic ending of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel was problematic for contemporary readers, who expected a novel that began as a comedy to end as a comedy. Similar criticism continued for about a century. (Do a title search of "Richard Feverel" in JSTOR and you'll turn up 14 often illuminating articles published between 1946 and 1980.) Readers today don't mind so much; following the emergence of Black Humor in the 1950s and early 1960s — Catch-22 was published in 1961 and Dr. Strangelove was released in 1964 — we're much more inclined to accept and even admire genre-bending novels like Richard Feverel.

In a first reading of Richard Feverel, the initial impression of a comedy is so strong that you keep holding on to the idea long after it has turned more solemn, and the tragic ending seems tacked on and unjustified. A second reading reveals this shift from the comic to the tragic to be integral to the novel's structure. Meredith has strewn plenty of symbols of foreboding throughout the novel, and one of the subsidiary pleasures of Richard Feverel is seeing how Meredith skillfully shifts the tone. (For my second reading I found helpful the "five-act" analysis of Lawrence Poston, "Dramatic Reference and Structure in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 6, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 1966), pp. 743-752. There is certainly a reason why Meredith titled a chapter (Vol. II, Ch. XIV) "In which the Last Act of a Comedy Takes the Place of the First.")

It's easy to detect the basic flaw in Sir Austin's System of educating his son: It doesn't allow for human nature or even common sense. It might seem like science to Sir Austin because he's sure it's based on a sound foundation, from which everything else flows in perfect rational thought. Sir Austin doesn't realize that this System is actually born of his wrath with his disastrous marriage. Sir Austin is an "egoist" — a common brunt of Meredith's comic writing — a man who sees himself as the center of a pre-Copernican pre-Lyellian world, unable to grasp that he is part of a larger natural universe.

What Sir Austin's System is missing is basic empiricism. In the context of 1859, The Education of Richard Feverel can be interpreted as the battle for Richard's soul between two world-views: natural theology, which treats science as the study of intelligent design in nature, and the emerging science of evolution through natural processes.

It's significant that the novel takes place sometime in the decade preceeding Victoria's ascension in 1837. (See John Halperin's introduction to The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Oxford World's Classics, 1984.) The early 1830s encompassed the last hurrah of natural theology with the publication of the Bridgewater Treatises, and the transition to Old Earth cosmology with the publication of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology.

Judging from the following aphorism, Sir Austin is evidently a believer in natural theology:

There is for the mind but one grasp of Happiness: from that uppermost pinnacle of Wisdom, whence we see that this world is well-designed. (Vol. I, Ch. XIII)

In a designed universe, everything is predetermined; nothing is left to chance. Sir Austin is forcing nature to conform to his "scientific" assumptions, and playing God to re-create himself in a perfected state. He's not willing to allow the serendipity of nature to play a role in life (as it did with the meeting between Richard and Lucy). He wants everything to be neat and ordered, manipulated and designed. When Sir Austin finally realizes what he's done to his son, the impact is devastating:

Sir Austin could now dissect the living subject. As if a bullet had town open the young man's skull, and some blast of battle laid his palpitating organization bare, he watched every motion of his brain and his heart; and with the grief and terror of one whose mental habit was ever to pierce to extremes. Not altogether conscious that he had hitherto played with life, he felt that he was suddenly plunged into the stormful reality of it. (Vol. III, Ch. IX)

(My analysis here was aided by Irving H. Buchen, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: Science Versus Nature," ELH, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 1962), pp. 47-66.)

George Meredith had his own personal concept of evolution, partially based on a continuum between man and animals, but on the ability of man to transcend his intelligence, not through a System like Sir Austin's but through "the creative and beneficient forces of Nature." (William R. Mueller, "Theological Dualism and the 'System' in Richard Feverel," ELH, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Jun., 1951), p. 139) Richard Feverel was written a year or so too early to incorporate directly Origin of Species, but it's amusing to see an allusion to Darwin's theory of sexual selection (introduced in The Ascent of Man in 1871) in Meredith's 1879 novel The Egoist (1879). Notice the tone of comic playfulness:

A deeper student of Science than his rivals, he appreciated Nature's compliment in the fair one's choice of you. We now scientifically know that in this department of the universal struggle, success is awarded to the bettermost. You spread a handsomer tail than your fellows, you dress a finer top-knot, you pipe a newer note, have longer stride; she reviews you in competition, and selects you. The superlative is magnetic to her. She may be looking elsewhere, and you will see — the superlative will simply have to beckon, away she glides. She cannot help herself; it is her nature, and her nature is the guarantee for the noblest races of men to come of her. In complimenting you, she is a promise of superior offspring. Science thus — or it is better to say — an acquaintance with science facilitates the cultivation of aristocracy. Consequently a successful pursuit and a wrestling of her from a body of competitors, tells you that you are the best man. What is more, it tells the world so. (Ch. 5)

Charles Darwin was 50 years old when The Origin of Species was published in 1859; George Meredith was just 31 when The Ordeal of Richard Feverel was published earlier that same year. Darwin struggled with his religious beliefs; Meredith pretty much shrugged them off. As he told a friend "When I was quite a boy, I had a spasm of religion which lasted about six weeks, during which I made myself a nuisance in asking everybody whether they were saved. But never since have I swallowed the Christian fable." (quoted in Lionel Stevenson, The Ordeal of George Meredith, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953, p. 14)

The two-decade difference between the births of Darwin and Meredith makes all the difference. Darwin was in his twenties when Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology was published and converted the Victorian reading public to ideas of an old Earth; Meredith was a child, and a member of the first generation of Englishmen comfortable with the absence of belief. Although Meredith was at the height of his fame when he died on May 18, 1909 (just a century ago last month), he was not allowed burial in Westminster Abbey, probably because of his well-known agnosticism. A recent interview in which he indicated that marriage licenses should have a term of 10 years probably didn't help either. (Stevenson, p. 354)

When Virginia Woolf wrote about George Meredith in 1928 on the hundredth anniversary of his birth (and the same year Orlando was published), she noted that Meredith's reputation had declined in the two decades since his death. (Virginia Woolf had actually met Meredith in her younger years. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a good friend of Meredith's, and a visitor to their the Stephens home.) She finds The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to be an "odd conglomeration" and uncovers flaws in Meredith's later novels as well. Yet, she was willing to forgive these flaws for the role Meredith played in the evolution of the English novel:

Pride and Prejudice

The Small House at Allington

The Common Reader, Second Series

This formulation doesn't quite work for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, which was published five years before Trollope's Small House at Allingon, but Meredith has been cited as the link between Tristram Shandy and Ulysses (which actually contains a quote from Richard Feverel), and for this reason alone it's odd that Meredith's reputation hasn't much improved since Virginia Woolf's analysis.

It's understandable that readers find Meredith to be difficult; but it's incomprehensible why he should continue to be neglected.

Earlier Entries in This Series

1859 Books: “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” (1/15/2009)

1859 Books: George Eliot’s “Adam Bede” (2/1/2009)

1859 Books: John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” (2/26/2009)

1859 Books: Anthony Trollope’s “The Bertrams” (3/29/2009)

1859 Art: Frederic Church’s “The Heart of the Andes” (4/27/2009)

1859 Journalism: Harriet Martineau’s “Female Industry” (5/30/2009)

1859 Science: John Tyndall and the Greenhouse Effect (6/10/2009)

To Hobart Book Village (and Beyond)

cp@charlespetzold.com — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:02:53 GMT

Deirdre and I are spending the summer at our little house in the Catskills, and it's mostly quite pleasant except for the stuff we take for granted in New York City, like plenty of bookstores and even a place (J&R) that still sells classical CDs. In Sullivan County, there's only one store that sells new books (Hamish & Henry, which has become the center of the Sullivan County literary establishment) and — as far as we know — only one store that sells used books (a literacy center in Monticello).

But just over the northern county line is Delaware County, and there the bookstore situation is quite different. In fact, there's a little village called Hobart, seemingly a normal quiet community of just 390 people (as of the 2000 census), but with a shocking public display of four used-book stores and a couple others nearby. They call it Hobart Book Village, and it's a wonderfully strange anachronism is this age of disappearing stores where you can actually touch the books and flip through the pages before you buy them.

Today, Deirdre and I went on a used-book buying spree to quench our book-buying deprived souls. Our first stop was Delhi, New York, a charming little village with a Wednesday morning Farmer's Market and Steinway Book Company. Very neat, very clean, certainly not crowded. (These are not necessarily good qualities for a used-book store.) The store seemed strong in American history, the Civil War, and had a surprising large science section, but overall there was little depth. I left with one purchase:

The Journal of Irreproducible Results: Selected Papers

Hobart is about 17 miles from Delhi. Our first stop was 698 Main Street, which houses two of Hobart's four used-book stores. Enter the front door and veer to the left for Blenheim Hill Books, with a nice selection on European history with a surprising number of books on the Middle Ages, and in the science section, a peculiarly large number of books by James Jeans. I picked up:

Physics and Philosophy

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

1066 and All That

In the same building is Liberty Rock Books, which has good collections of history, poetry, and literary criticism, a bunch of children's books, and hundreds of postcards of New York State arranged by town. This was one of those stores where the more you looked, the more interesting books you found. I came away with:

The Year is 1851

Swinburne: A Biographical Approach

Tennyson's Characters: "Strange Faces, Other Minds"

Lectures on Light: Delivered in the United States in 1872-'73

We had lunch at the only dining establish in Hobart (The Coffee Pot) and then went across the street to Wm. H. Adams Antiquarian Books, which is a real antiquarian book shop, which means that most of the stock was way out of my price range. I drooled a great deal over a beautiful leather-bound 12-volume set of the works of T. H. Huxley, but the $850 price tag meant that it remained behind.

Across the street is Hobart International Bookport, which sounds rather pretentious until you realize that it does have quite a few books in foreign languages with a particular emphasis on Italian. The regular fiction section was quite adequate as well. Purchases here were:

Celt and Saxon

Queen Victoria's Secrets

Parallel LIves: Five Victorian Marriages

The Origins of the English Civil War: Conspiracy, Crusade, or Class Conflict?

All five of these stores — one in Delhi and four in Hobart — have addresses on Main Street, which in the context of these villages is the same as Route 10. Off the beaten track — indeed, almost as hard to find as a trendy New York City night spot — is the famous Bibliobarn in South Kortright. This place is totally old school — sprawling, over-stuffed, a veritable orgy of books on two massive floors, presided over by the ex-Virginians and (one would surmise) lifetime hippies, H.L. and Linda Wilson. This is one of those stores you can visit again and again, and never really make a dent. Be sure to check out the second floor bathroom, where they shelf books that don't fit into any normal category.

My arms were filled when I left Bibliobarn. I purchased:

Naturalism in Mathematics

Realism in Mathematics

The Minister's Wooing

Trollope in the Post Office

Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son

It was nearly time for dinner when we drove back to the house, the back of the car dragging on the pavement loaded down with actual books made of paper, ink, glue, and other good stuff.

1859 Science: John Tyndall and the Greenhouse Effect

cp@charlespetzold.com — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:57:08 GMT

On June 10, 1859 — 150 years ago today — British scientist John Tyndall gave a presentation before the Royal Institution describing how carbon dioxide and water vapor trap heat in the earth's atmosphere. I'll turn the telling of the rest of the story over to Stephanie Pain in a recent issue of New Scientist magazine:

The man who discovered greenhouse gases

Flax Seed Bread

cp@charlespetzold.com — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:25:15 GMT

Out of all the modern appliances whose existence would be impossible without embedded processors, my favorite is undoubtedly the bread machine: Put in the ingredients (water, flour, yeast, etc), close the hatch, press the button, and in 3 to 4 hours (depending on the model) a piping hot loaf of bread can be removed and consumed.

We still use our bread machine every Sunday for making the dough for our vegetarian pizza that I wrote about almost nine years ago (except that the toppings now include a vegetarian chorizo, and even sometimes a non-vegetarian pheasant sausage that we get at the Union Square Greenmarket on Saturdays) as well as — when we plan ahead sufficiently — bread to accompany dinner.

One of our favorite dinner breads is a Golden Flax Bread whose recipe we found on the back of a box of Milled Flax Seed made by Hodgson Mill:

Actually this is not the recipe as it appears on the back of the box. The recipe on the box indicates 7/8 cup water, 2 tablespoons milled flax seed, and 2 tablespoons butter, but a footnote indicates that the butter can be replaced with 6 more tablespoons of flax seed and 2 more tablespoons of water. (When doing the math, it helps if you know that there are 16 tablespoons to the cup.) Curiously, the recipe on the Hodgson Mill web site doesn't even have that footnote!

I don't think we ever used the version with only 2 tablespoons flax seed, and I find the requirement of 7/8 cup water very peculiar. I think the recipe as I've listed the ingredients was the original, and someone at Hodgson Mill said "Hey, we can't put a recipe on the box that calls for 1/2 cup flax seed. People will think we're crazy!" So they altered the recipe accordingly, and relegated the original recipe to the footnote. That's my theory, anyway.

Do not fear using 1/2 cup milled flax seed in this recipe! Nobody's ever complained about "too much flax seed" in the bread, and the leftovers are also great for French Toast.

1859 Journalism: Harriet Martineau’s “Female Industry”

cp@charlespetzold.com — Sat, 30 May 2009 14:46:55 GMT

If you've spent any time in Victorian England, you've undoubtedly run into Harriet Martineau. She's one of those persons who shows up everywhere there seems to be something important happening.

There she is in the summer of 1830 at the dinner party where John Stuart Mill meets Mrs. Harriet Taylor. Two years later she can be spotted at Charles Babbage's home for a demonstration of a working component of his unfinished Calculating Engine. "All were eager to go to his glorious soirées;" she later wrote in her autobiography, "and I always thought he appeared to great advantage as a host. His patience in explaining his machine in those days was really examplary. I felt it so, the first time I saw the miracle, as it appeared to me..."

While Charles Darwin is sailing around the world aboard the Beagle, his older brother Erasmus is making the acquaintance of Harriet Martineau, who later spends much time with the Darwins and Wedgwoods, inspiring them with her strong anti-slavery politics. Some even think that marriage might be in the future for Erasmus Darwin and Harriet. (Harriet Martineau never married.)

When the controversial pseudo-scientific Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is published anonymously in 1844, Harriet Martineau is suspected of being the author. (So is Charles Babbage, Augustus De Morgan, Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, Lady Lovelace, and many others.) In 1845 Harriet Martineau meets the 25-year old Mary Ann Evans, and inspires the younger woman to become a professional writer and move to London, which she does to achieve great success under the pseudonym George Eliot.

All this time, Harriet Martineau is writing dozens of novels and stories, and thousands of articles for periodicals, becoming the most famous female English journalist of the 19th century.

Harriet Martineau was born in 1802 to a Unitarian household. At the age of 20 she contracted otosclerosis, and as she aged she became increasingly deaf — requiring her to use an ear trumpet for most of her life — with no sense of smell and a defective sense of taste. Her father's business collapsed in the financial crisis of 1825–26, leaving the family poor and Harriet in the position of needing to earn an income. As a deaf woman, she couldn't teach and she had already been writing, so she began writing more, with fame and notoriety soon to follow.

Her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832—35) consisted of nine volumes of stories that explored various concepts of economics of the sort preferred by free-trade Whigs. She traveled to America and was threatened with lynching after speaking out against slavery, writing about her experiences in the three-volume Society in America (1837) followed by the three-volume Retrospect of Western Travel (1838). She wrote books on education, mesmerism, and history, became a follower of Comte, and published The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely Translated & Condensed by Harriet Martineau (1853), which was then translated back into French because her condensation and elimination of repetition managed to improve on the original.

In 1858, Harriet Martineau began writing for The Edinburgh Review — standard reading for politically progressive households of the period, and one of several periodicals of the era that featured what seemed to be book reviews, but were actually long, often unsigned, essays. For the October 1858 issue, Harriet. Martineau contributed "The Slave Trade in 1858", one of her many articles about slavery.

Harriet Martineau's major contribution to the literature of 1859 was an April 1859 article for The Edinburgh Review focusing on another subject she was passionate about — the political and economic mistreatment of women in "Female Industry".

"Female Industry" is a fascinating artifact, mostly for the vision it gives us of the wide scope of jobs women performed in England 150 years ago. As Harriet Martineau indicates, English law of the period assumed that "every woman is supported ... by her father, her brother, or her husband." But this was no longer the case. With the rise of the middle class, many women were working outside the home for their own subsistence, unfortunately for wages that would not allow them any type of retirement.

How many women are we talking about? Using census figures and other data, Harriet Martineau comes to a conclusion towards the end of her article that I find astonishing:

Out of six millions of women above twenty years of age, in Great Britian, exclusive of Ireland, and of course of the Colonies, no less than half are industrial in their mode of life. More than a third, more than two millions, are independent in their industry, are self-supporting, like men."

Apparently English men and women of the time were also astonished, following court cases that resulted from a new limited ability for women to obtain divorces that had only been in effect in England following the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857.

The proceedings in the new Divorce Court, and in matrimonial cases before the police-magistrates, have caused a wide-spread asonishment at the amount of female industry they have disclosed. Almost every aggrieved wife who has sought protection, has proved that she has supported her household, and has acquired property by her effective exertions.

Toward the beginning of the article, Harriet Martineau makes it clear that for working women, "their work should be paid for by its quality, and its place in the market, irrespective of the status of the worker." She then methodically analyzes industry by industry, examining the work that women do in that industry, indicating its difficulty, and at times (when she has the data available) showing a wide discrepancy in wages between male and female workers.

For anyone who believes that "equal pay for equal work" was a concept developed by feminists in the 1970s, Harriet Martineau's article reveals just how long this concept was successfully resisted and suppressed. Low-paid work takes an enormous toll on the women, and Martineau finds that maids of all work are particularly susceptible to medical and financial problems:

The physician says that, on the female side of lunatic asylums, the largest class, but one, of the insane are maids of all work (the other being governesses). The causes are obvious enough: want of sufficient sleep from late and early hour, unremitting fatigue and hurry, and, even more than these, anxiety about the future from the smallness of the wages.... Too often we find that the most imbecile old nurses, the most infirm old charwomen, are the wrecks and ruins of the rosy cooks and tidy housemaids of the last generation. This ought not to be.

"Female Industry" was published without a byline (as many articles of that era were published), and the anonymous author of the article at times speaks from a male perspective — perhaps to sound a little more objective about the subject. (At one point the article even mentions "a letter from Harriet Martineau"!) Yet, the article does not look disapprovingly on working women. Martineau clearly feels that female industry is inevitable with the rise of the middle class. She seems to enjoy seeing women work outside the home, and argues that they be allowed to engage even in those occupations jealously guarded by the men.

From our youth up, some of us have known how certain of the wisest and most appreciated of physicians have insisted that the health of women and their children will never be guarded as it ought to be till it is put under the charge of physicians of their own sex. The moral and emotional considerations involved in this matter need no discussion.

Given that millions of English women were already supporting themselves by their work, it would be useless to try to stop the trend. Instead, female industry must be nurtured with education and opportunities. She concludes:

With this new condition of affairs, new duties and new views must be accepted. Old obstructions must be removed; and the aim must be sent before us, as a nation as well as in private life, to provide for the free development and full use of the powers of every member of the community. In other words, we must improve and extend education to the utmost; and then open a fair field to the powers and energies we have educed. This will secure our welfare, nationally and in our homes, to which few elements can contribute more vitally and more richly than the independent industry of our countrywomen.

Harriet Martineau was a woman of strong opinions, not only about political and economic issues but about religious ones. From the beginnings of her Unitarian background, her religious beliefs gradually fell away, until an outright atheism was revealed in Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development (1851), co-authored with Henry G. Atkinson, a book that one wit summed up as "The doctrine seems to be this: There is no God, and Harriet is his phophet."

She was very ready for Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published later in 1859. In one letter she wrote,

Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist

To Darwin's cousin Fanny Wedgwood, Harriet Martineau wrote,

Charles Darwin: The Power of Place

The only problem that Martineau found with the book was the religious terminology that Darwin seemed to use too much! As she continued in her letter to Fanny,

I rather regret that C.D. went out of his way two or three times ... to speak of "the Creator" in the popular sense of the First Cause ... It is curious to see how those who would otherwise agree with him turn away because his view is "derived from" or "based on" "Theology" ... It seems to me that having carried us up to the earliest group of forms, or to the single primitive one, he & his have nothing to do with how those few forms, or that one, come here. His subject is the "Origin of Species," & not the origin of Organisation; & it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation at all. — There now! I have delivered my mind. (Desmond & Moore, p. 486-7)

Nothing, but nothing, could prevent Harriet Martineau from delivering her mind.

Business Trips and Public Transportation

cp@charlespetzold.com — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:47:08 GMT

Whenever friends come to New York for business trips, I'm always rather surprised by their promiscuous use of taxis to get around the city. Certainly it's well known that New York City has one of the most extensive and (mostly) reliable mass transit systems in the world. It's not just for the people who live here!

Over the past several months I've been travelling to several cities in the U.S. and Canada to deliver three-day courses in WPF programming and Silverlight programming in connection with the Microsoft Metro program. Increasingly I've been trying to take advantage of public transportation systems. It's gotten to the point where — well, to the point where it's become something of an obsession.

I don't like renting cars — or driving at all for that matter — so I make it a point to get a hotel within walking distance of the site where I'll be conducting the class. To a New Yorker, "walking distance" is generally anything within two miles, although I'd be willing to stretch it. I particularly like doing classes in the heart of a good walking-around city like Chicago or Vancouver, where there's also some interesting restaurants and maybe even a bookstore in the neighborhood. But I've also been able to get around by foot in Mississauga, ON and Mountain View, CA as well.

Getting to and from the airport is always interesting. Some cities excel at providing airport access via public transportation; other cities, not so much. Again, Chicago and Vancouver are great in that respect: You feel guilty of at least two deadly sins (sloth and gluttony) if you don't take mass transportation to and from the airport.

Obviously Web resources have become increasingly helpful in planning economical business trips. Google Maps provides generally reliable walking and public transportation directions in addition to driving directions, and most cities have sites for their mass transit systems, including maps, schedules, and route-finders.

This past week I conducted a three-day Silverlight course in Dallas (more specifically, Irving) — a city whose sporadic sidewalks and scorching sun (even in May) present some challenges to the aspiring walker.

My hotel (red marker) was actually quite close to the site of the class (blue marker), and it seemed reasonable that I could walk between them:

View Class and Hotel in a larger map

When I zoomed in on the map, going via N. MacArthur Blvd seemed best, yet I couldn't see any sidewalks on an overpass I'd have to take, and that made me nervous. For the public transportation option, Google Maps recommended the DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit) bus 308, which was a fairly direct route on N. MacArthur Blvd, but it wasn't clear to me that I could even reach the bus stop on the hotel side.

After spending way too much time on the DART site, I found a more foolproof bus strategy, via the North Irving Transit Center (green marker), one of several DART hubs that allow transfers from route to route:

View Class and Hotel in a larger map

I could catch the 301 bus right outside my hotel, take it to the North Irving Transit Center, where I could transfer to the 310 bus that stopped at West Royal Lane and Sierra, which was then a simple walk to the building where the class took place.

Moreover, the 310 bus also serviced the North Remote Parking area of the Dallas Fort Worth airport. That clinched it. When my trip began on Tuesday, I got to LaGuardia Airport by the standard method (the uptown N train connecting with the M60 bus in Queens for a $2.00 fare), and when I arrived at DFW, I took the free shuttle to the North Remote Parking area, and I was ready for the 310 bus with my three dollars in singles to purchase a DART Day Pass:

I took the 310 from the airport directly to the class site to set up my stuff on the machines. Then I hopped on the 310 again, transferred to the 301 at the North Irving Transit Center, and checked into my hotel. At that point, I knew the two lines I needed: In the mornings I bought a Day Pass and took the eastbound 301 and westbound 310, reversing the trip in the evening.

I found the buses rather underutilized — at least the ones I took. I don't think I was ever in a bus that was more than half full. They don't run very frequently: Generally about every 30 minutes during rush hour, and every hour otherwise. Most single trips on the DART cost $1.50 (less than the New York City rate of $2.00) but there's no free transfer between buses. That's where the $3.00 day pass comes in handy.

The buses indicate the next stop with an LED display, apparently triggered by GPS. It's roughly accurate, and only once did the bus go by my stop without alerting me it was coming up. Many of the bus stops are just poles stuck in the grass, so you really need some sense of what direction you're going so you know which side of the street to wait on.

The only time I really got into trouble was one evening when I took the 428 into Dallas to have dinner at a Red Lobster, and then couldn't figure out how to get back. I probably should have realized I was entering a confusing bus zone when the map contained a "helpful" insert for my destination that looked like this:

On the last day of class, one of the developers attending the class offered to drive me back to my hotel, and I could see for the first time the overpass I would have navigated if I had walked between the hotel and class. The overpass wasn't quite as accomodating to pedestrians as a New York City bridge, but I really could have walked between hotel and class had I been willing to tramp over beautifully manicured lawns and not minded cars buzzing close by.

As my Saturday departure date approached, it slowly dawned on me that the 310 bus I had taken from DFW does not run on weekends. Fortunately the only other bus to the airport (the 408) does not have that shocking deficiency and it connects with the westbound 301. The morning of my flight, the 301 was a little late, and I missed the 408 and had to wait 45 minutes for the next one, reinforcing the two rules of using public transportation:

Give yourself plenty of time.

Have something to read.

When I arrived at LaGuardia, I caught the M60 bus and the N train back to my apartment.

Total non-flight transportation costs for the whole trip: $19.00.

Exploring the apparently obscure Dallas mass-transit system: Priceless.

Realizing a Fisheye Effect in Silverlight

cp@charlespetzold.com — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:59:54 GMT

I've been experimenting recently with implementing a "fisheye" effect in Silverlight — the effect where a control grows larger as the mouse passes over it. I knew that it wouldn't be as simple as in the Windows Presentation Foundation, but I wanted something at least comparable. In the process I came upon several approaches, some involving the Visual State Manager.

Fisheye Buttons in WPF

In WPF, a fisheye effect can be implemented entirely in markup, as demonstrated by two XAML files from the 75-page chapter on animation in my book Applications = Code + Markup. Here's the FishEyeButtons1.xaml file:

<StackPanel xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
            xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">

    <StackPanel.Resources>
        <Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}">
            <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Center" />
            <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="12" />
            <Style.Triggers>
                <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Button.MouseEnter">
                    <BeginStoryboard>
                        <Storyboard>
                            <DoubleAnimation
                                Storyboard.TargetProperty="FontSize"
                                To="36" Duration="0:0:1" />
                        </Storyboard>
                    </BeginStoryboard>
                </EventTrigger>
                <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Button.MouseLeave">
                    <BeginStoryboard>
                        <Storyboard>
                            <DoubleAnimation
                                Storyboard.TargetProperty="FontSize"
                                To="12" Duration="0:0:0.25" />
                        </Storyboard>
                    </BeginStoryboard>
                </EventTrigger>
            </Style.Triggers>
        </Style>
    </StackPanel.Resources>

    <Button>Button No. 1</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 2</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 3</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 4</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 5</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 6</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 7</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 8</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 9</Button>
</StackPanel>

The file uses an implicit style to set an initial FontSize property on the buttons, and then animates that property based on the MouseEnter and MouseLeave routed events. If you have .NET 3.X installed, you can run the XAML file here:

FishEyeButtons1.xaml

The FishEyeButtons2.xaml file is similar except it uses a trigger based on the IsMouseOver property rather than event triggers:

<StackPanel xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
            xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">

    <StackPanel.Resources>
        <Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}">
            <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Center" />
            <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="12" />
            <Style.Triggers>
                <Trigger Property="IsMouseOver" Value="True">
                    <Trigger.EnterActions>
                        <BeginStoryboard>
                            <Storyboard>
                                <DoubleAnimation
                                    Storyboard.TargetProperty="FontSize"
                                    To="36" Duration="0:0:1" />
                            </Storyboard>
                        </BeginStoryboard>
                    </Trigger.EnterActions>

                    <Trigger.ExitActions>
                        <BeginStoryboard>
                            <Storyboard>
                                <DoubleAnimation
                                    Storyboard.TargetProperty="FontSize"
                                    To="12" Duration="0:0:0.25" />
                            </Storyboard>
                        </BeginStoryboard>
                    </Trigger.ExitActions>
                </Trigger>
            </Style.Triggers>
        </Style>
    </StackPanel.Resources>

    <Button>Button No. 1</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 2</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 3</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 4</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 5</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 6</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 7</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 8</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 9</Button>
</StackPanel>

You can run this one here:

FishEyeButtons2.xaml

The FontSize property is certainly not the best property to animate to achieve this effect, but it does the job when the Button content is text. To make the animation more efficient and workable with other forms of content besides text, it's better to animate a ScaleTransform set on the button's LayoutTransform property, like the following program (not from my book):

<StackPanel xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
            xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">

    <StackPanel.Resources>
        <Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}">
            <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Center" />
            <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="12" />
            <Setter Property="LayoutTransform">
                <Setter.Value>
                    <ScaleTransform />
                </Setter.Value>
            </Setter>
            <Style.Triggers>
                <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Button.MouseEnter">
                    <BeginStoryboard>
                        <Storyboard>
                            <DoubleAnimation
                                Storyboard.TargetProperty="LayoutTransform.ScaleX"
                                To="3" Duration="0:0:1" />
                            <DoubleAnimation
                                Storyboard.TargetProperty="LayoutTransform.ScaleY"
                                To="3" Duration="0:0:1" />
                        </Storyboard>
                    </BeginStoryboard>
                </EventTrigger>
                <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Button.MouseLeave">
                    <BeginStoryboard>
                        <Storyboard>
                            <DoubleAnimation
                                Storyboard.TargetProperty="LayoutTransform.ScaleX"
                                To="1" Duration="0:0:0.25" />
                            <DoubleAnimation
                                Storyboard.TargetProperty="LayoutTransform.ScaleY"
                                To="1" Duration="0:0:0.25" />
                        </Storyboard>
                    </BeginStoryboard>
                </EventTrigger>
            </Style.Triggers>
        </Style>
    </StackPanel.Resources>

    <Button>Button No. 1</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 2</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 3</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 4</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 5</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 6</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 7</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 8</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 9</Button>
</StackPanel>

You can run it here:

FishEyeButtons3.xaml

The switch to animating a ScaleTransform seems to double the number of animations, but perhaps not. You can define a Binding on the ScaleTransform between the ScaleX and ScaleY properties to eliminate one of the animations:

<StackPanel xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
            xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">

    <StackPanel.Resources>
        <Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}">
            <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Center" />
            <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="12" />
            <Setter Property="LayoutTransform">
                <Setter.Value>
                    <ScaleTransform
                        ScaleY="{Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource self},
                                         Path=ScaleX}" />
                </Setter.Value>
            </Setter>
            <Style.Triggers>
                <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Button.MouseEnter">
                    <BeginStoryboard>
                        <Storyboard>
                            <DoubleAnimation
                                Storyboard.TargetProperty="LayoutTransform.ScaleX"
                                To="3" Duration="0:0:1" />
                        </Storyboard>
                    </BeginStoryboard>
                </EventTrigger>
                <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Button.MouseLeave">
                    <BeginStoryboard>
                        <Storyboard>
                            <DoubleAnimation
                                Storyboard.TargetProperty="LayoutTransform.ScaleX"
                                To="1" Duration="0:0:0.25" />
                        </Storyboard>
                    </BeginStoryboard>
                </EventTrigger>
            </Style.Triggers>
        </Style>
    </StackPanel.Resources>

    <Button>Button No. 1</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 2</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 3</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 4</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 5</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 6</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 7</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 8</Button>
    <Button>Button No. 9</Button>
</StackPanel>

That one is runnable here:

FishEyeButtons4.xaml

Silverlight Fisheye: Version 1

But enough about WPF! How do we do it Silverlight? Silverlight is missing two features that ease the job in WPF: Triggers and the LayoutTransform property. Compensating for these deficiencies is what makes the Silverlight job more challenging (and therefore fun).

One reasonable approach is to create the animations entirely in code. You might have several buttons defined in XAML with event handlers for MouseEnter and MouseLeave:

The two events are implemented in code to create and fire animations. As in the WPF version, these animations target a FontSize property initially set to 12:

void OnButtonMouseEnter(object sender, MouseEventArgs args)
{
    DoubleAnimation anima = new DoubleAnimation();
    anima.To = 36;
    anima.Duration = new Duration(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1));
    Storyboard.SetTarget(anima, sender as Button);
    Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(anima,
                            new PropertyPath("FontSize"));
    Storyboard storyboard = new Storyboard();
    storyboard.Children.Add(anima);
    storyboard.Begin();
}

void OnButtonMouseLeave(object sender, MouseEventArgs args)
{
    DoubleAnimation anima = new DoubleAnimation();
    anima.To = 12;
    anima.Duration = new Duration(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.25));
    Storyboard.SetTarget(anima, sender as Button);
    Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(anima,
                            new PropertyPath("FontSize"));
    Storyboard storyboard = new Storyboard();
    storyboard.Children.Add(anima);
    storyboard.Begin();
}

You can download the whole FisheyeButtons project. The Visual Studio solution consists of one web project (FisheyeButtons.Web) and six Silverlight projects, FisheyeButtons1 through FisheyeButtons6. You can run all six versions from this web page:

FisheyeButtons.html

Silverlight Fisheye: Version 2

Generally in Silverlight, you define an animation Storyboard in a Resources section of a XAML file. The code behind file then merely has the job of accessing the Storyboard and calling Begin on it. But that approach has a problem when implementing a fisheye effect on multiple buttons. You can see that problem in this second version.

The XAML file includes a Resources section with two animation storyboards:

But keep in mind that resources are shared. There will be only one instance of the shrinkAnimation storyboard and one instance of the growAnimation storyboard, and those will be shared among all the buttons. The events handlers for the MouseEnter and MouseLeave events must stop any animations currently in progress using that storyboard and set a new target object before beginning the animation:

void OnButtonMouseEnter(object sender, MouseEventArgs args)
{
    growAnimation.Stop();
    Storyboard.SetTarget(growAnimation.Children[0],
                         sender as Button);
    growAnimation.Begin();
}

void OnButtonMouseLeave(object sender, MouseEventArgs args)
{
    shrinkAnimation.Stop();
    Storyboard.SetTarget(shrinkAnimation.Children[0],
                         sender as Button);
    shrinkAnimation.Begin();
}

It's fine to share the single growAnimation storyboard among all the buttons, but sharing shrinkAnimation means that only one button can be shrinking at any time. If you slowly move the mouse from one button to the next, buttons will grow and shrink as expected. But if you quickly move the mouse over the buttons, you'll see some buttons snap back to their original positions. That's the result of sharing the shrinkAnimation, and it's simply not a good solution.

Silverlight Fisheye: Version 3

The third version derives a new class called FisheyeButton from Button. The XAML file contains only a Resources section with two Storyboard objects:

Unfortunately, there's not a good way to set the TargetName in the Storyboard when that name must refer to the object in which the storyboards are defined. Instead, the code-behind for the OnMouseEnter and OnMouseLeave methods manually set the Storyboard target:

protected override void OnMouseEnter(MouseEventArgs args)
{
    DoubleAnimation anima =
                growAnimation.Children[0] as DoubleAnimation;

    growAnimation.Stop();
    Storyboard.SetTarget(anima, this);
    growAnimation.Begin();
    base.OnMouseEnter(args);
}

protected override void OnMouseLeave(MouseEventArgs args)
{
    DoubleAnimation anima =
                shrinkAnimation.Children[0] as DoubleAnimation;

    shrinkAnimation.Stop();
    Storyboard.SetTarget(anima, this);
    shrinkAnimation.Begin();
    base.OnMouseLeave(args);
}

Even though these animations are not shared among multiple objects, they still must be manually stopped before being begun again. Without that Stop call, it'll work right the first time, but not subsequently.

Moreover, deriving from Button for this job is not really the way to go. For a decent fisheye button that works with content other than text, you'll want to add more markup to the visual tree, and that's more conveniently done by deriving from UserControl

Silverlight Fisheye: Version 4

This fourth version creates a new class again named FisheyeButton, but this time derived from UserControl:

Now there's a Button in the visual tree, and the two animations can explicitly target that Button object. The code-behind for the OnMouseEnter and OnMouseLeave overrides becomes trivial:

protected override void OnMouseEnter(MouseEventArgs args)
{
    growAnimation.Begin();
    base.OnMouseEnter(args);
}

protected override void OnMouseLeave(MouseEventArgs args)
{
    shrinkAnimation.Begin();
    base.OnMouseLeave(args);
}

However, the code-behind file becomes rather larger because FisheyeButton has to implement some kind of substitute for the button's Content property — a property I called ButtonContent — and also duplicate the Click event of the button. Those requirements apply to subsequent versions as well.

Silverlight Fisheye: Version 5

Although the Visual State Manager classes are normally found in templates, they can also be used in UserControl derivatives, and that's demonstrated by this fifth version. The <vsm:VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> tag must be a child of the outermost element of the visual tree set to the Content property of the UserControl:

The code-behind file is pretty much the same as in the previous version, except the OnMouseEnter and OnMouseLeave overrides call the state GoToState method:

protected override void OnMouseEnter(MouseEventArgs e)
{
    VisualStateManager.GoToState(this, "MouseOver", false);
    base.OnMouseEnter(e);
}

protected override void OnMouseLeave(MouseEventArgs e)
{
    VisualStateManager.GoToState(this, "Normal", false);
    base.OnMouseLeave(e);
}

Silverlight Fisheye: Version 6

Finally it's time to stop animating the FontSize property and switch to animating something more generalized that can also be used with content other than text!

But this is where Silverlight's lack of a LayoutTransform becomes very painful. Sure, you could set the RenderTransform property of the Button to a ScaleTransform and animate that, but the Button would merely grow and shrink in size: It would not push the other buttons aside. You really want the new size of the Button to be respected in layout.

Although Silverlight does not itself have a LayoutTransform property, the indispensable Silverlight toolkit has a handy LayoutTransformer element that can enclose other elements and apply transforms to them that work much like LayoutTransform.

But if you try using LayoutTransformer for this job, you'll discover another problem: LayoutTransformer is not notified when properties of its attached transform are being modified, and hence cannot respond to animations! This is really due to another big Silverlight deficiency — the Freezable class, which in WPF implements sub-property notifications. (As Rob Eisenberg commented in one of my previous blog entries, "The absence of Freezable is pretty much the source of all evil in Silverlight.")

Of course, David Anson, the author of LayoutTransformer is well aware of this limitation, and he's offered a solution in a blog entry entitled A bit more than meets the eye.

Although I played around with his work-around, I wasn't entirely happy. After I created the third and fourth versions of the WPF fisheye button shown above, I came to the conclusion that I didn't like it. I don't think that the whole button (including its chrome and border) should grow and shrink. I think the content of the button should be changing size, and the button should accomodate that content. For that reason (and to make things interesting for myself) I decided to pursue a different approach involving deriving from ContentPresenter, which I suspect is fairly rare.

If you've never written a template for a ContentControl derivative, you've probably never encountered ContentPresenter, but it's the thing that all ContentControl objects contain to display the content of the control.

My derived class is called ScalableContentPresenter. It sets its own RenderTransform property to a ScaleTransform object stored as a field named xform and defines two dependency properties named ScaleX and ScaleY. When either of these two properties changes, the property-changed handler sets the corresponding properties of that ScaleTransform:

static void OnScaleChanged(DependencyObject obj,
                           DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs args)
{
    ScalableContentPresenter scaler =
                        obj as ScalableContentPresenter;
    scaler.xform.ScaleX = scaler.ScaleX;
    scaler.xform.ScaleY = scaler.ScaleY;
    scaler.InvalidateMeasure();
}

Scaling its own RenderTransform causes this ScalableContentPresenter to become larger, but that new size is not reflected in layout. But notice the call to InvalidateMeasure. That call initiates a new layout pass resulting in a call to MeasureOverride, which ScalableContentPresenter handles like so:

protected override Size MeasureOverride(Size availableSize)
{
    Size desiredSize = base.MeasureOverride(availableSize);
    desiredSize.Width *= ScaleX;
    desiredSize.Height *= ScaleY;
    return desiredSize;
}

It simply calls the MeasureOverride in the base class (ContentPresenter itself) and then bumps that returned size up or down based on its ScaleX and ScaleY properties.

The XAML file for FisheyeButton still has a fairly simple visual tree, consisting of a Button enclosing a ScalableContentPresenter. This ScalableContentPresenter does not replace the button's normal ContentPresenter. Instead, that ContentPresenter will have as its content this ScalableContentPresenter.

The Storyboard objects now contain animations that target the ScaleX and ScaleY properties of the ScalableContentPresenter

The code-behind file is pretty much the same as in the previous version with one crucial difference: When the ButtonContent property changes, the property-changed handler doesn't set Content property of the Button, but instead sets the Content property of the ScalableContentPresenter:

static void OnButtonContentChanged(DependencyObject sender,
DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs args)
{
(sender as FisheyeButton).presenter.Content = args.NewValue;
}

Obviously this is my preferred approach to implementing fisheye buttons in Silverlight, but I don't think I could have arrived here in a single step.

Ursula Le Guin’s Faux Pas

cp@charlespetzold.com — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:53:45 GMT

According to yesterday's New York Times (5/12/09, B1), science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin recently found one of her books posted on the internet:

“I thought, who do these people think they are?” Ms. Le Guin said. “Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?”

It's a rookie mistake. Seasoned victims of piracy know that nothing inflames the hornets more than denying their right to freely download and share all forms of media.

But certainly Ms. Le Guin's initial reaction is understandable. The first time you see your book posted on the web, it's equivalent to the sensation of being shat upon. As the years pass by, however, and it happens more and more, you realize there's not a damn thing you can do about it, and the initial insult modulates to the somewhat less offensive feeling of merely being sprayed with spittle.

The best thing to do is to just keep your mouth shut. Try instead to cherish those ever-dwindling readers whose curious morals persuade them to buy books rather than download them, and who thereby thank the author with kindly hug.

1859 Art: Frederic Church’s “The Heart of the Andes”

cp@charlespetzold.com — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT

On April 27, 1859 — 150 years ago today — Frederic Edwin Church's mammoth landscape painting The Heart of the Andes went on display in a private showing in Lyric Hall at 765 Broadway in New York City. The painting was then moved back to the Studio Building (West Tenth Streeth between Fifth and Sixth Avenues) where Church had painted the work, and it opened to the public on April 29.

Over the next three weeks, over 12,000 people paid 25¢ apiece to see the The Heart of the Andes. The painting was mounted in a large recessed dark walnut frame, and surrounded with dark curtains to mask extraneous light, making it seem almost as if it were a window into a world far from West Tenth Street. Some viewers used opera glasses to bring details of the painting into closer view, fascinated by the wealth of detail and precision from the snow-capped mountains in the distance to the steamy vegetation in the foreground. Two effusive pamphlets about the painting were available for purchase, written by friends of Church.

Following its New York City triumph, The Heart of the Andes then toured Europe, and came back to the United States for trips to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinatti, Chicago, and St. Louis, where the 26-year old Samuel Clemens saw it three times, and gushed in a letter:

Church's Great Picture

By this time The Heart of the Andes had been sold for $10,000, at that time the highest amount ever paid for a work by a living American artist. Frederic Church's painting seemed to herald a new age of American art that would incorporate accurate observations of the natural world, and scientific precision in rendering that world, uniting art and science in a powerful spiritual synthesis.

Web conventions mandate that I now drop in an img tag so you can see The Heart of the Andes without moving a muscle, like so:

But I just can't do it. You will need to move a muscle to see The Heart of the Andes. The painting is 10 feet wide and 5½ feet tall, so even a moderately large JPEG provides only a feeble approximation of the actual experience. You may as well listen to a Mahler symphony played on a kazoo, or watch Citizen Kane on a TV set.

Fortunately The Heart of the Andes isn't hidden in a private collection or tucked away in some obscure museum. It's part of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (a museum that Church helped found in 1870), and currently on display with eight other large American landscapes in the newly renovated Robert Lehman Wing, straight back on the first floor.

Frederic Edwin Church (1826 – 1900) was born to a well-to-do family in Hartford, Connecticut, and at the age of 18 became one of the rare students of the founder of the Hudson River School of painting, Thomas Cole (1801 – 1848), whose influence can be discerned throughout Church's career.

The second most powerful influence on Church was not a painter at all but a famous German naturalist and popularizer of science, Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859). Humboldt's early desires to study geology in Europe were thwarted by the Napoleonic Wars, so he instead journeyed to South America, which he explored for five years from 1799 to 1804, performing scientific experiments, making maps, documenting weather conditions, sketching the geology and wildlife, and almost — but not quite — making it to the summit of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, at the time believed to be the tallest mountain in the world.

Humboldt spent much of the rest of his life writing, including compiling the data he had accumulated from his years in South America into a multi-volume treatise, some of which was published in seven volumes in an English translation as Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799 – 1804. Even more ambitious was Humboldt's all-encompassing description of the universe and the earth in five volumes called Kosmos. Published in German beginning in 1845, Kosmos was soon translated into many other languages, becoming one of the most popular and influential science books of its time.

It was Humboldt's Personal Narrative that got the young Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) excited about exploring faraway exotic lands. That book together with John Herschel's Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy "stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science." (Darwin, Autobiography, ch. 2) This enthusiasm led directly to Darwin being invited to serve as unpaid naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle. At the age of 22, he set sail on a five-year life-changing voyage around the world, including much time in South America. "I never experienced such intense delight," Darwin wrote back home. "I formerly admired Humboldt, I now almost adore him." (quoted in Gould)

Frederic Church was entranced by both Personal Narrative and Humboldt's Kosmos, published in an English translation as Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe beginning in 1849. Humboldt's synthesis of geology, botony, and astronomy presented a vision of terrestrial and celestrial realms that revealed both the diversity of nature, and the unity that bound all things. On the first page of the preface, Humboldt wrote,

The principal impulse by which I was directed was the earnest endeavor to comprehend the phenomena of physical objects in their general connection, and to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces. (Humboldt, pg. 7)

In language that combines the spiritual and the scientific, Humboldt relates this intellectual quest to an optimistic humanist progress towards increasing knowledge and richness of life:

In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general influence on the intellectual advancement of mankind, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments. (Humboldt, 23)

rationally

[E]verywhere, the mind is penetrated by the same sense of the grandeur and vast expanse of nature, revealing to the soul, by a mysterious inspiration, the existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe. (Humboldt, 25)

Had Humboldt been an Englishman, Cosmos would have been a work of Natural Theology, demonstrating the existence, wisdom, and goodness of God as evidenced by the design of His creation. But despite the extremely suggestive language that permeates Cosmos, the book never actually mentions God. (See Nicholas A. Rupke's Introduction to the Johns Hopkins University Press reprint, pgs. xxiii ff.) This little problem was bothersome to some early English critics of the book, who interpreted this omission as evidence of atheism or Hegelian pantheism. Humboldt's use of the "first impulse" as a substitute for "God" might indicate tendencies towards Enlightenment Deism, yet at times Humboldt sounds almost animist:

Philosophy of Nature

To Americans, the theology of Cosmos could be interpreted as akin to Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a big fan of Humboldt, who he described as "one of the wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar ... who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind — a universal man...." (quoted in Bunkśe) Humboldt's quest could even be interpreted in terms of Manifest Destiny.

In the second volume of Kosmos, Humboldt examined human perceptions of nature, and "the ancient bond which unites natural science with poetry and artistic feeling." (quoted in Novak, 61) He even addressed himself directly to the landscape painter, who has the highest responsibility in the artistic and scientific representation of nature. Humboldt suggests that artists make sketches in the field directly from nature, and turn them into composite paintings back in the studio. He noted that the southern regions of the world were virgin territory to artists.

Are we not justified in hoping that landscape painting will flourish with a new and hitherto unknown brilliancy when artists of merit shall more frequently pass the narrow limits of the Mediterranean, and when they shall be enabled far in the interior of continents, in the humid mountain valleys of the tropical world, to seize, with the genuine freshness of a pure and youthful spirit, on the true image of the varied forms of nature? (quoted in Huntington, 42)

The mention of the Mediterranean indicates Humboldt was addressing himself to European artists, but Church heard the call regardless:

Church, as soon as he escaped the direct influence of Cole, fell immediately under the spell of the modern scientific approach to nature — an approach with an obvious appeal to his practical Yankee mind. His pictures are dedicated to the new religion of science — to the literal recording of stupendous geographical realities composed into "poetical" arrangements build up from the accumulation of many closely studied facts. (Gardner, 64)

Already Americans were exploring South American for scientific and commercial purposes, and in 1853, Frederic Church made his first of two trips into the northwest part of the continent, areas now occupied by Colombia and Ecuador. From that 1853 trip came several paintings, most notably The Andes of Ecuador (1855), 6 feet wide, 4 feet in height, with jagged mountains surrounding a flat plain, and in the center of the canvas a rising sun glowing with Turneresque shimmer.

But there is also a human presence in The Andes of Ecuador, and as in many of Church's paintings, the people seem swamped by their surroundings, humble visitors to the terrain rather than an integral part of nature. In the far left corner a wooden cross has been erected between two palm trees, attended by two worshippers, one standing and the other kneeling. After noticing the cross, the viewer then perhaps notices that the sun forms the apex of another cross of light that stretches across the horizon and cuts a vertical swarth down the center of the canvas.

Although Church's expedition to South American had invigorated his work, he did not restrict himself to those landscapes. One of Church's most dramatic and well-known paintings is Niagara (1857), a unique view of the falls that brings the viewer very low, as if we're hovering over the water, with only a thin sliver of visible land, and a rainbow like a meteor skimming in from the left.

Church was also experimenting with size and proportions. Most landscape paintings have an aspect ratio — the ratio of the width of the painting to its height — of about 3:2. But Niagara exceeds a 2:1 aspect ratio, with a 7½ foot width and a height of 3½ feet.

In 1857, Church voyaged to South America again, this time deliberately to get a closer view of Chimborazo, the mountain that Humboldt had climbed. He made many sketches and botanical studies, and by June of that year a concept for a large painting has crystallized in his mind. On his return to America, Church painted several works but it wasn't until he took up residence in the new Studio Building at 15 West Tenth Street in January 1858 that he really began work on the painting that was to become The Heart of the Andes, with an aspect ratio almost as extreme as Niagara and dimensions several feet larger.

There is no place on earth you could see such a scene as presented in The Heart of the Andes, yet every part of it is based on Church's accurate observations and depictions, carefully arranged to present the widest possible diversity. From this one vantage point we see geographies as various as any throughout the world. In the distance to the left are the snowy peaks of Chimborazo; in the center of the painting a more temperate zone is home to a hamlet and church on a calm lake, leading into a vigorous little waterfall. The bottom foreground of the painting is perhaps the most amazing part — steamy tropics with an abundance of vegetation and animal life rendered in meticulous detail.

If you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a crowded weekend you can still get a little sense of the excitement that accompanied the first viewings of The Heart of the Andes 150 years ago. People still find much pleasure in their personal scientific explorations of Church's South American rain forest, discovering birds and butterflies, and squealing with delight when they spot Church's name and the year 1859 carved into the bark of a tree.

As in many of Church's paintings, there is also a spiritual presence and a human presence in The Heart of the Andes. A little church sits in the temperate zone of the painting, and much more in the foreground a little path leads to a wooden cross mounted on a stone base. Is it a grave? No, it's too isolated for a grave, too far from the church. It is instead a pilgrimage cross, and here's how Theodore Winthrop described it in a pamphlet prepared for the first exhibition of the painting:

Just at the top of the ascent stands a Cross — a token of gratitude for labor past, and rest achieved. Such crosses are usual among the passes of the Andes, wherever a height has been overcome. The natives pause and repose, and say a thankful Ave, as the two figures in the picture seem to be doing. Their presence is a cheerful incident, and their bright ponchos throw in a dash of gay tropical color. To us also the Cross, prominent against its dark background, has sweet symbolical meaning, sanctifying the glories of the spot; and as in the old saintly legends, flowers sprang up under the feet of martyrs, so here a spontaneous garland has grown to wreathe this emblem of sacrifice and love. (Winthrop, 41-42)

To Frederic Church, the scientific quest, the artistic quest, and the religious quest were one and the same.

In the first New York exhibition of The Heart of the Andes, Church would sometimes hide behind the curtains and watch the people come to see his painting, and this was how he spotted Isabel Carnes, the young woman who was to become his wife. With money earned from The Heart of the Andes, Church purchased a cottage for himself and Isabel in Hudson, New York, a scenic area in the Hudson River Valley with a view of the Catskill Mountains, and it was there he built his mansion, Olana, which is now a New York State Historic Site.

Church had hoped that when The Heart of the Andes went to Europe, Alexander von Humboldt would get a chance to see his ideas about science and art encapsulated in Church's large painting. But Humboldt died at the age of 89 on May 6, 1859, just one week after the painting had gone on public display in New York City.

Humboldt would experience a second death later that year — and by extension, the entire metaphysical conception of The Heart of the Andes would be called into question — with the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species on November 24, 1859. In Darwin's conception of natural selection, nature isn't an overall unity driven by internal forces, but a competition for survival based on adaptation to external conditions through random variations.

Frederic Edwin Church, alas, felt even more committed than Humboldt to the philosophical comfort of their shared vision, for Church, unlike Humboldt, had rooted a good portion of his Christian fairth — for him a most important source of inspiration and equanimity — in a view of nature as essential harmony in unity. (Gould)

Design was illusory. Any harmony perceived in the world was instead a barely stabalized balance, and Church struggled with the ramifications of Darwin's discoveries for much the rest of his life.

God, the Creator, had been taken out of the landscape, thereby nullifying the significant teleological element of most of Church's major wilderness scenes. Science, once Church's friend and ally, was turning its back on religion, and the painter resisted this change. (Davis, 81)

In 1867 through 1869, Church travelled through Europe and the Near East, spending much time in the Holy Land, perhaps "his last effort to resolve post-Darwinian science with his pre-Darwinian world view." (Davis, 80) Church painted a dramatic Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives (1870) — 7 feet wide and 4½ feet high — that provides a sense of the vision that triggered George Bertram's religious experience in Anthony Trollope's novel The Bertrams, published just a month before the debut of The Heart of the Andes.

Church's fame gradually declined from the peak he reached in 1859. He died in 1900, a year after his wife. The Heart of the Andes was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1909, but Church's reputation wasn't resurrected until the 1960s.

When we look at The Heart of the Andes today, we can see much of what those first viewers saw 150 years ago: We sense the grandeur of the natural world, the sublime peace of the quiet village in the shadow of towering mountains, the excitement of the wide range of geographical environments and teeming life. Yet we understand — intellectually, at least, if not always emotionally — that the apparent harmony of Church's microcosmic universe is merely an illusion, that beneath the surface there is struggle and competition, survival and death.

The big difference between those first viewers and ourselves comes when our eyes wander up the little path to the pilgrimage cross. We don't see the cross as a symbol of God's presence in this magnificent landscape. We see instead a symbol of Man's presence — and an attempt, but ultimately an inadequate attempt, to understand the mysteries of existence.

Sources

Avery, Kevin J., Church's Great Picture: The Heart of the Andes, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993.

Avery, Kevin J., "The Heart of the Andes Exhibited: Frederic E. Church's Window on the Equatorial World," American Art Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter, 1986), pp. 52-72. JSTOR.

Bunkśe, Edmunds V., "Humboldt and an Aesthetic Tradition in Geography," Geographical Review, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Apr., 1981), pp. 127-146. JSTOR.

Davis, John, "Frederic Church's 'Sacred Geography'." Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), pp. 79-96. JSTOR.

Gardner, Albert Ten Eyck, "Scientific Sources of the Full-Length Landscape: 1850," The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Oct., 1945), pp. 59-65. JSTOR.

Gerdts, William, The Worlds of Frederic Edwin Church.

Gould, Stephen Jay, "Church, Humboldt, and Darwin: The Tension and Harmony of Art and Science" in Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church (see below), pp. 94-107. Reprinted in William H. Beezley and Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, eds., Latin American Popular Culture: An Introduction (Scholary Resources, 2000) pp. 27-44. Somewhat altered and republished as "Art Meets Science in The Heart of the Andes: Church Paints, Humboldt Dies, Darwin Writes, and Nature Blinks in the Fateful Year of 1859" in Gould's I Have Landed (Harmony Books, 2002), pp. 90-109.

Howat, John, Frederic Church, Yale University Press, 2005.

Humboldt, Alexander von, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Volume 1, Harper & Row, 1850; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Huntington, David C., The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era, George Braziller, 1966.

Kelly, Franklin, with Stephen J. Gould, James Anthony Ryan, and Debora Rindge, Frederic Edwin Church, National Gallery of Art / Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Mullenneaux, Lisa, Heart of the Andes: In the Footsteps of Frederic Church.

Novak, Barbara, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press, 2007.

Winthrop, Theodore, A Companion to The Heart of the Andes, D. Appleton, 1859. Reprinted by Olana Gallery, 1977.

Earlier Entries in This Series

1859 Books: “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” (1/15/2009)

1859 Books: George Eliot’s “Adam Bede” (2/1/2009)

1859 Books: John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” (2/26/2009)

1859 Books: Anthony Trollope’s “The Bertrams” (3/29/2009)

“Hearts and Minds” Redux

cp@charlespetzold.com — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:23:07 GMT

I see in Newsweek (4/6/09, pg. 8) that Peter Davis's 1975 Academy Award winning documentary Hearts and Minds is being re-released. Deirdre and I watched the film on DVD a couple years ago and found that it still holds up quite well.

I reviewed Hearts and Minds for the April 11, 1975 issue of The Stute, the student newspaper of the Stevens Institute of Technology, where I was then a senior, and here is that review. I have not attempted to correct any faulty grammar or improve the writing.

Hearts and Minds

Selling of the Pentagon

The Pentagon Propaganda Machine

Hearts and Minds

are

There are also the more sadistic viewpoints. George S. Patton III licks his chops with a big grin and praises American soldiers as a “bloody good bunch of killers.” A Lt. Coker — the P.O.W. from Linden — shows up a lot in this film. He enthusiastically describes boming missions as “thrilling ... deeply satisfying.” The film then cuts to a Vietnam village. A farmer is standing is a pile of rubble. He doesn't know whose planes destroyed his home, whether they were Vietnamese or American. A film taken aboard a bomber shows the bombs fall, leaving brown holes in an otherwise green countryside.

Always there are the people and death. An American father beams while telling of his dead son. A Vietnamese coffin-maker hammers together wooden coffins which are but thirty inches long; he has lost seven children himself from poison gas from American planes. American bodies are pulled out of the mud and zipped into bags. Artificial limbs are manufactured and tried on. The ruins of Bach Mai Hospital are shown. A Vietnamese farmer points to the ground where his eight-year-old daughter died in a bomb blast. “What have I done to Nixon that he come here and destroy my country?” he screams in anger.

There is an unnerving scene of a Vietnamese cemetary, where rows of dug plots await coffins. There is a burial — an hysterical woman tries to join her husband as he is being buried. Everywhere there is crying, weeping, wailing Vietnamese families. A young girl cries over a coffin holding her father. The film then cuts to William Westmoreland: “The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the westerner,” he says. Some critics have called this a cheap shot, but it is probably as fair as one can in good conscience be toward Gen. Westmoreland. The point is well made — it is Westmoreland who doesn't put a high price on Oriental life.

Throughout the film are shown interviews with former American soldiers, talking of themselves and the war. Many are disgusted with their past actions and attitudes. Towards the end of the film the camera slowly pulls away to reveal them as wheel-chair bound or without an arm or leg. They don't seem bitter, only confused and still unsure of the answer to that very basic, simple (and surely not “silly”) question: “Why?”

Hearts and Minds

1859 Books: Anthony Trollope’s “The Bertrams”

cp@charlespetzold.com — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:01:38 GMT

Perhaps the greatest benefit of setting out to read several books published in the year 1859 is encountering a few that I wouldn't otherwise have read. That's how I'd classify Anthony Trollope's The Bertrams, published 150 years ago this month. (I haven't been able to determine the exact day.)

I've read about 20 of Trollope's 40-odd novels, but mostly the more famous ones. When Trollope wrote The Bertrams (his 8th novel and hence fairly early in his career), he was halfway through the series of six novels that came to be known as the Barsetshire Chronicles. The totally wonderful Doctor Thorne was published in 1858, followed by the almost equally delightful Framley Parsonage in 1860.

But The Bertrams is not part of the Barsetshire Chronicles, and in fact takes place quite a distance from the cathedral town of Barchester — in space, in time, and in tone. The sieve of critical evaluation and popular favor that keeps some books in print while others fall into oblivion has not been kind to The Bertrams, and I won't try to claim the book has been unjustly treated.

Even Trollope himself didn't have fond feeling for the novel. In his Autobiography he tells us "I do not know that I have ever heard of it well spoken of by my friends, and I cannot remember that there is any character in it that has dwelt in the minds of novel-readers." The plot also didn't hold up: "That of The Bertrams was more than ordinarily based; and as the book was relieved by no special character, it failed. Its failure never surprised me..." (ch. 7) Oddly, Trollope felt much the same of Doctor Thorne, a much more successful a beloved book.

On Google Book Search, you can find the original Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3 that comprise the first edition of The Bertrams, as well as a one-volume American edition and a second copy of that edition.

But if you're looking for a modern edition with an introduction and a few notes to help with Trollope's more obscure cultural, literary, and political references, you will not be rewarded by a trip to the local bookstore. I know of only one such edition: an out-of-print Oxford World's Classics paperback from 1991, with an introduction and very helpful notes by Geoffrey Harvey. (The back-cover copy begins "Published in the same year as Darwin's Origin of Species, The Bertrams examines the doctrine of competition and the survival of the fittest in Victorian society...") There's also a nicely printed and illustrated 1993 slipcased hardcover Folio Society edition with a fine introduction by David Skilton but no notes. Avoid the Penguin Classics edition also published in 1993; it has no introduction and no notes.

Trollope began writing The Bertrams on April 1, 1858, the day after he finished Doctor Thorne. He was in Egypt at the time. Trollope's day job was the Post Office, and in 1858 he was sent to Egypt to negotiate a new treaty for mail deliveries to India. (Later in 1858 governance of India would pass from the British East India Company to the British crown.)

Trollope's impressions of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Cairo all found their way into The Bertrams. Two trips to the "the East" — one towards the beginning of Volume I and the other in Volume III — form a symmetrical bridge through the novel. These long-ago glimpses of exotic places are perhaps the novel's greatest appeal to modern readers, but they must be read with an awareness and understanding of the xenophobia and attitudes of racial superiority characteristic of Victorians. Trollope's description of the entrance into Jerusalem (at the time under the rule of the Ottoman Empire) is perhaps typical:

One rides up to the gate feeling that one is still in the desert, and yet a moment more, with the permission of those very dirty-looking Turkish soldiers at the gate, will place one in the city. One rides up to the gate, and as every one now has a matured opinion as to the taking of casemated batteries [concealed artillery] and the inefficiency of granite bastions, one's first idea is how delightfully easy it would be to take Jerusalem. It is at any rate easy enough to enter it, for the dirty Turkish soldiers do not even look at you, and you soon become pleasantly aware that you are beyond the region of passports. (ch. 6)

The sensibilities of we modern readers cause us to cringe at the word "dirty," of course, but I have to believe that Trollope is being entirely candid when he admits — brags almost — that the typical Englishman immediately thinks "how delightfully easy it would be to take Jerusalem." Of such attitudes are empires built.

The second overseas trip in The Bertrams is to Cairo and environs, including Suez:

Suez is indeed a triste, unhappy, wretched place. It is a small oriental town, now much be-Europeanized, and in the process of being be-Anglicized. It is not so Beelzebub-ridden a spot as Alexandria, nor falling to pieces like Cairo. But it has neither water, air, nor verdure. No trees grow there, no rivers flow there. Men drink brine and eat goats; and the thermometer stands at eighty in the shade in winter. The oranges are the only luxury. There is a huge hotel, which contains long rows of hot cells, and a vast cave in which people eat. The interest of the place consists in Pharoah's passage over the Red Sea; but its future prosperity will be caused by a transit of a different nature — the passage of the English to and from India will turn even Suez into an important town. (ch. 39).

The famous canal opened 10 years after The Bertrams was published in 1859, but the novel itself takes place in the mid-1840s. Several events of that time are mentioned — the Irish potato famine that began in 1845, the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and the resignation of Sir Robert Peel as Prime Minister later that year — and Trollope frequently contrasts the differences between the "present day" and the previous decade. "There were no telegraphs or telegrams in those days" he writes in Chapter 1 and reminds us how quickly technological progress sped through the 19th century.

When The Bertrams begins, it seems to want to position itself as a critique of competition and success, but it soon turns into a novel of thwarted love. It is mostly about George Bertram, who has just graduated Oxford with a "double first" and seems to be headed towards greatness. In pursuing business propects, however, he is less ambitious than his school days might have indicated. George is indifferent to wealth and vaguely idealistic. He takes the first of his two trips to the East to meet up with his father (a professional soldier) who he hasn't seen since he was a child. On a trip to the Mount of Olives George Bertram has something of a religious experience, and despite some tendencies toward skepticism, decides to go into the church.

Now, as he sat there, looking at the once holy city, it seemed to him to be the only profession in any way desirable. He resolved that he would be a clergyman; thanked his God in that he had brought him there to this spot before it was too late; acknowledged that, doubting as he had done, he had now at length found a Divine counsellor — one whose leading his spirit did not disdain. (ch. 7)

But on this trip to the Holy Land, George Bertram also meets Caroline Waddington, a very beautiful and intelligent Trollope heroine, but with something of a materialistic hardness:

She could speak of sacred things with a mocking spirit, the mockery of philosophy rather than of youth; she had little or no enthusiasm, though there was passion enough deep seated in her bosom; she suffered from no transcendentalism; she saw nothing through a halo of poetic inspiration: among the various tints of her atmosphere there was no rose colour; she preferred wit to poetry; and her smile was cynical rather than joyous. (ch. 9)

George and Caroline fall in love, of course, but Caroline has a low opinion of George's new-found spiritual calling:

'I do not know that I think so highly of the church as you do,' said Caroline. 'As far as I have seen them, I cannot find that clergymen are more holy than other men; and yet surely they ought to be so.'

Back in London, George decides to go into law instead, but until he's called to the bar (which will be a couple years), Caroline refuses to marry him, believing that they'd be miserable living off a tiny income. As the engagement extends over two years, George's sexual frustration mounts — not that Trollope would ever come close to using a term such as "sexual frustration" or even implying that such a thing existed, of course — and it begins to manifest itself in strange ways.

George writes a book ("or bookling, for it consisted but of one small demy-octavo volume") entitled The Romance of Scripture in which "he went on to say, that all Scripture statements could not now be taken as true to the letter; particularly not as true to the letter as now adopted by Englishman" and goes on to analyze various books of the New Testament with doubts as to their veracity.

The book was undoubtedly clever, and men read it. Women also read it, and began to talk, some of them at least, of the blindness of their mothers who had not had wit to see that these old chronicles were very much as other old chronicles. (ch. 18)

George then writes a sequel entitled The Fallacies of Early History.

It will suffice to say that the orthodox world declared it to be much more heterodox than the last work. Heterdox, indeed! It was so bad, they said, that there was not the least glimmer of any doxy whatever left about it. The early history of which he spoke was altogether Bible history, and the fallacies to which he alluded were the plainest statements of the book of Genesis. (ch. 18)

Although Trollope has some fun with the reactions of his characters to these books — "The very fact of George having written such a book nearly scared Miss Baker out of her wits. She, according to her own lights, would have placed freethinkers in the same category with murderers, regicides, and horrid mysterious sinners who commit crimes too dreadful for women to think of" (ch. 18) — it is clear that Trollope also disapproves of people promoting religious doubt in public. The two books give George a rather notorious reputation, even in Paris: "His name was already sufficiently known to secure his admittance amongst those learned men who, if they had hitherto established little, had at any rate achieved the doubting of much." (ch. 25)

George Bertram never quite repents although Trollope eventually notes that he "had written things of which he was already ashamed" (ch. 33) and seems to chalk up George's whole book-writing period to youthful impetuosity and the confusion of love. But George doesn't rediscover his faith as much as gain a maturity that causes him to be more discrete. It's OK for George to have religious doubts, Trollope seems to be suggesting — just as long as he keeps them to himself and doesn't frighten the horses.

If you accept the premise I've suggested in previous blog entries — that 1859 marks a cultural shift in England from a religious perspective of the world to a secular one — then The Bertrams fits right into this trend, for it illustrates that clash as no other Trollope novel, even if it is supposed to take place some 12 to 15 years earlier.

Trollope biographer Richard Mullen says that Trollope "skilfully introduced that developing Victorian obsession, the loss of faith" into The Bertrams and quotes John Henry Newman as noting that the novel contains "a touch of skepticism which I have never seen in him before." (Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World, 1990, p. 325) Regardless, it's still a stretch to place The Bertrams in the "crisis of faith" genre that encompassed James Anthony Froude's The Nemesis of Faith (1849) and Mrs. Humphrey Ward's Robert Elsmere (1888). In Robert Lee Wolff's essential study Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (Garland, 1977), The Bertrams earns only a brief dismissive sentence.

But it's interesting that Trollope sets this story in the past. It was not in 1859 that books such as George's would have caused a commotion, but as Trollope obviously knows, some years earlier.

George Bertram wasn't the only Englishman going through an evaluation of the basis of faith in earlier decades of the 19th century. A recent biography of George Eliot tells the story of the author's friends, the Hennells and the Brays: In 1836, Caroline Hennell married Charles Bray, who then began to disclose to her his rather unconventional religious beliefs. He believed in a "moral and physical universe ... governed by unchanging laws authored by God" but "that there was no firm evidence for the divine authority of the scriptures." Cara asked her brother Charles Hennell his opinions on the matter, who took the job to heart and wrote a 379-page book, An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), which concluded there was "insufficient evidence to support the view that Christ was divinely born, worked miracles, was resurrected from the dead or ascended into heaven" (Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian, Farrar Straus Girous, 1998, p. 47) Google Book Search has the first edition and expanded 1841 second edition of Charles Hennell's book.

The famous and anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was first published in 1844 (and only much later disclosed to have been written by Scottish publisher Robert Chambers). Although clearly a work of pseudo-science, Vestiges painted a vivid picture of the evolution of the universe and living things. Initially controversial, the book continued to be a best-seller during the remainder of the 19th century.

The intellectual turbulence of the 1840s in England partially resulted from two different but related trends that emerged during the 1830s and grew more powerful in subsequent decades.

First, there was increasing evidence that the Earth was much more ancient that the approximately 6,000 year period suggested by a literal reading of Genesis. As early as 1750, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon had suggested an old age of the Earth, and later tried to establish the age based on treating the Earth as a cooling ball. It is likely after learning of Buffon's theories in English magazines that the English poet William Cowper was provoked to sardonically write,

The Task

Was 1785 too early a year for an English evangelical poet to start getting nervous about geology? Perhaps. It wasn't until a few years later that James Hutton famously concluded after extensive studies of the geology of Scotland that of the Earth "we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end" (1788). But what really weaned the Victorians off Biblical narratives of the Earth's creation was Charles Lyell's enormously popular and influential Principles of Geology (1830-33).

Some progressive clergymen warned their flocks not to attack the geologists too blindly. Said the Archbishop of Dublin in the 1830s,

Sermons on Various Subjects

The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise

Of course, the shift in belief from a young Earth to an old Earth took place over a period of time, and at different times for different groups of people. Identifying an exact date of this shift is impossible, of course, but in his two-volume history The Victorian Church, Owen Chadwick attempts to do just that:

The Victorian Church

The second volume of Chadwick's history begins roughly around the year 1860 — another indication of the significance of the period I'm focusing on — and Chadwick analyzes the effect of increasing doubt in the truth of Genesis:

The Victorian Church

The second trend that began in the 1830s was the so-called Higher Criticism of the Bible — treating the Bible as an ancient literary document and attempting to analyze its origins. One major work, David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, was published in Germany in 1835-36, and translated into English by George Eliot (before she was George Eliot) as The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined in 1846.

The mid-1840s, then, saw the publication of both Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined. As David Skilton notes in his introduction to the Folio Society edition of The Bertrams, it was "a time when the twin blows of geology and German scriptural studies were being felt in Christian faith." (p. x) Trollope knew that it was the perfect period in which to plop George Bertram and let him write his own two heretical books. In the 1840s, George's two books would cause a minor scandal. By 1859, they would hardly have raised an eyebrow. By 1859, the literate public largely knew that the Earth was much older than 6,000 years.

If you need to be convinced how pervasive the geological evidence for an old Earth had become by the late 1850s, it is only necessary to read Philip Henry Gosse's Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, published in 1857. Gosse didn't try to argue against the geology. He knew that was impossible. Instead he asserted that the divine sudden creation of the Earth necessarily resulted in objects that appeared to be older than they actually were. Consider, he wrote, the trees in the Garden of Eden. If you cut down one of those trees, it would have rings indicating its age despite having just been created. Similarly, the strata of the Earth would contain remnants of living things that had never actually been alive. (You can access the original edition of Omphalos on Google Book Search.)

As Gosse’s son wrote of his father's book a half-century later, "The theory, coarsely enough, and to my Father’s great indignation, was defined by a hasty press as being this — that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity." (Edmond Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, 1907) But not only a “hasty press” condemned the theory. Cleric, author, and Victorian icon Charles Kingsley tried to be sympathetic but simply could not. To agree with Gosse would require Kingsley giving up "the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years study of geology, and believe that God had written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie." (quoted in Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley, 1975, p.167)

Omphalos was the last gasp of Mosaic chronology: By the late 1850s the accumulated geological evidence for an ancient world was so strong that it simply could not be ignored. Philip Henry Gosse had described the only possible reconciliation of Genesis and geology: The world appeared to be millions of years old simply because God made it that way.

Anthony Trollope's The Bertrams looked back from 1859 to a not-so-ancient time in the previous decade when books questioning the orthodox interpretation of the Old Testament could still cause a minor scandal. But The Bertrams was prophetic as well: It was in late 1859 that Origin of Species was published and proved that books could still be powerfully disruptive of conventional beliefs.

But that wasn't the end of it: A few months later, in March 1860, another book of quite a different sort arrived — one that gave the Victorians a wallop even more painful than evolution by means of natural selection.

WPF in F#

cp@charlespetzold.com — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:26:15 GMT

I am always delighted when somebody converts the code in one of my books to another programming language. For well over a year, John Liao's Blog has been tackling chapters from my WPF book Applications = Code + Markup and converting the code into F#, the functional programming language developed at Microsoft. F# inventor Don Syme has provided a convenient guide to John Liao's postings on WPF and F#, not all of them focused on my book:

Learning WPF through F#, and vice versa, by John Liao

I've been able to explore F# myself just a little, but I hope to have the opportunity for total immersion sometime in the future.

Silverlight sans Xaml

cp@charlespetzold.com — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:16:42 GMT

When exploring new programming environments, sometimes it's instructive to strip down an application to determine the minimum code required for the app to run. For example, does a Silverlight application require XAML files? Does a Silverlight application require a class named Page that derives from UserControl? Does a Silverlight application require a class named App that derives from Application?

The answers are No, No, and Yes. The NoXamlApp project (source code here) is an attempt to reduce a Silverlight application to its bare essentials. (But I didn't extend this exercise into the realm of the web-hosting project except for the routine deletion of the aspx files and renaming the test-page html file. Nor did I try to eliminate the AssemblyInfo.cs file.) The NoXamlApp project has no Page.xaml, no Page.xaml.cs, and no App.xaml. The entire App.cs file looks like this:

Of course, this could be considerably shorter, but I wanted to implement something non-trivial — in this case, a button that spins in a circle when it's clicked. You can run it here:

NoXamlApp.html

Notice that everything is done in the App constructor, and that I use a ContentControl rather than the customary UserControl so I wouldn't have to derive a new class just to set the Content property.

If you try renaming the App class to something else, it no longer works. Apparently the Application derivative must be named App, and the RootVisual property must be set to some UIElement. But the ContentControl that I use isn't really required, either. You can set RootVisual directly to the Button object, and it'll look a little different but it'll still run.

Nothing Worthwhile Published Before 1776?

cp@charlespetzold.com — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:35:55 GMT

Google Book Search has always had a problem with publication dates. (So has most of the rest of the Internet, by the way.) But a recent "enhancement" to the Advanced Book Search page has made the situation even worse.

Let's review the existing date-related problems in Google Book Search so we can put the new problem into perspective:

Existing Problem No. 1: Incorrect Dates

The first big problem is that many items in Google Book Search are dated incorrectly. It's hard to estimate what percentage, and the problem definitely seems worse for periodicals, but it's easy to uncover a few: For example, try a search for "Hillary Rodham Clinton" for publications prior to 1975 (the year she was married). I think we can all agree such a search shouldn't turn up 84 hits.

Existing Problem No. 2: No Sort-by-Date

On the page with the search results, it would be so so nice to have a Sort-by-Date option, and by "nice" I mean pretty much "indispensble." If you are searching for a particular edition of a book, or a particular issue of a periodical, this feature would make the job much easier than it is now.

Existing Problem No. 3: The "More editions" Link

Because there's no Sort-by-Date feature, if you are searching for a particular edition of a book, or a particular issue of a periodical, then to avoid insanity you need to filter your search results by specifying a range of dates. However, as anybody who has used Google Book Search knows, very often particular hits are accompanied by a "More editions" link. This link brings up additional pages that show books and periodicals with the same title and author, but not filtered by the date range, or any other search criteria. Sometimes — particularly for periodicals and books published in many editions — there can be pages and pages of these other editions with no filtering and no sorting.

Google Book Search has no real concept of an "edition," and definitely no concept that books can be published in multiple volumes, and it is currently very far away from any rational listing of periodicals, so this "More editions" feature simply makes everything much worse than it needs to be. I wish I could turn it off.

New Problem: Year One is Apparently 1776

Now for the new problem: To limit a search to a particular range of dates, there is now a new drop-down list. The list begins with the arbitrary date of 1776, apparently under the assumption that no-one could possibly be interested in a book published prior to the American Revolution.

Yesterday I wanted to check the availibility of a book first published in 1691. I performed the search without date filtering and saw a lot of editions published in the mid-18th century. I wanted to limit the list to a very early edition, which (given the all the other limitations I've cited) would normally be done by filtering the search to a date range of (let's say) 1690 through 1710. But that is no longer possible. (Or it might be if I can figure out the search string that used to be generated for the old date range logic.)

I probably use Google Book Search much more than the average person. It's become an extremely important reference tool. But the design of the thing remains so idiotic that I'm frustrated every time I use it. It's been well over a year since I posted one, two, three, four, five blog entries with (generally) constructive criticisms, and as far as I'm aware, there hasn't even been an acknowledgment that anything is wrong, and the Inside Google Book Search blog remains a repository of "happy news" and corporate BS where no actual issues are ever addressed.

Perhaps it's time for Google to admit defeat and turn over this collection to someone who actually knows how to organize it and make it properly accessible.

Reading Darwin’s “The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects”

cp@charlespetzold.com — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:23:36 GMT

I guess a lot of people will be reading books by Charles Darwin this year in celebration of the bicentennial. Although Darwin is best known for a couple books on evolution, he wrote more than 20 books during his lifetime, as can be discovered in the Wikipedia article List of Works by Charles Darwin. Many of Darwin's later books are on botanical subjects; he seemed particularly interested in plant fertilization, movement, and feeding habits.

Reading even the more obscure books by Darwin has never been easier: The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online features side-by-side text and image views as well as PDFs. You might also try Google Book Search for original editions, and if you actually want to buy something, AbeBooks is a great source for used books. First editions of Darwin books are expensive, of course, but later editions and printings published by John Murray (Darwin's London publisher) or D. Appleton (his New York publisher) can be reasonable (i.e., in the mid two figures).

Darwin's first book after The Origin of Species (1859) was entitled On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foriegn Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing (1862), a very focused book and (like all of Darwin's research) based on close personal observation and experimentation. The revised second edition published in 1877 had a somewhat shorter title, The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and added some new research from the intervening 15 years, including some gracious admittances by Darwin of previous errors. I read an 1885 printing of the second edition (in a facsimile edition from Elibron) and unless otherwise indicated, the page numbers I cite are from the second edition. The book is quite short (about 300 pages) and well worth the time.

Like most animals and plants, orchids achieve greatest generational health through cross-fertilization, and they have evolved to help ensure that cross-fertilization occurs. Insects (generally flies, moths, bees, and butterflies) are attracted to orchids in various way, including the promise of nectar. The insect generally lands on the labellum, which is modified petal found in the center of the orchid between the other two symmetrical petals. When the insect enters the flower and disturbs an inner part called the rostellum, it ruptures, causing part of it — a disk coated with a viscous fluid, attached by a caudicle to a pollinium, which is a collection of pollen grains — to stick to the insect. Sometimes this sticks to the insect's proboscis, or leg, or head, or even eye. When the insect leaves the flower, the caudicle bends somewhat as it dries so that by the time the insect visits another flower, the pollinia is aligned in the right way to dump pollen on the stigma, which fertilizes the plant.

There are many species of orchids, of course, and they are all built somewhat differently, and throughout The Various Contrivances..., Darwin describes the workings of many of these variations. This is a very personal book: Darwin describes to us the experiments he performed, and shares his struggles to understand particularly tricky configurations. Darwin mentions many of his correspondents and helpers around the world, as well as research in orchids performed by three of his sons: William (1839 – 1914), George (1845 – 1912), who later did important research on tides and tidal friction, and Francis (1848 – 1925), who later edited his father's autobiography and letters.

Despite the seemingly dry nature of the subject, the general tone of The Various Contrivances... is that of sheer joy. As Darwin discovers how these mechanisms work and reveals them to his readers he frequently expresses his awe with phrases like "beautiful contrivance" (p. 13), "liveliest admiration" (p. 23), "one of the most wonderful cases of adaptation which has ever been recorded" (p. 44), "so complex, so apparently artificial, and yet so admirable an arrangement" (p. 208), "wonderful and often beautiful productions" (p. 224), and "beautiful adaptations" (p. 282), and this is all without paying much attention to the beauty of the orchids themselves: The diagrams Darwin provides are generally stripped of the three sepals and the outer two petals to show only the parts of the orchid involved in cross-fertilization.

Descriptions of the ways in which animals and plants were precisely adapted to their environments was a common feature of British natural history long before Darwin came around. Under the influence of the Anglican version of natural theology, such adaptation was attributed to the acts of a divine Creator. This assumption can be found in the works of John Ray (1627 – 1705) through at least the 1830s, when even a very smart and famous 19th-century scientist could observe how the Creator deliberately set the length of the day and year to precisely fit the rhythms of terrestial plants and animals. (William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, 1833, pgs. 21-41)

Darwin's revolutionary move in The Origin of Species was to describe an alternative way of interpreting adaptation: Rather than a Creator making each individual species fit its environment, variations of species have resulted in accumulated changes based on survival and procreation. But for the most part, The Various Contrivances... is agnostic on how the reproductive mechanisms in orchids came about: At the outset of the book, Darwin assures his readers that "the study of organic beings may be as interesting to an observer who is fully convinced that the structure of each is due to secondary laws [e.g., natural selection], as to one who views every trifling detail of structure as the result of the direct interposition of the Creator." (p. 2)

Until the last chapter, only occasionly does Darwin interject his own interpretations based on natural selection. Sometimes he just can't help himself, as when discussing some parts of the orchid that perform no function:

At a period not far distant, naturalists will hear with surprise, perhaps with derision, that grave and learned men formerly maintained that such useless organs were not remnants retained by inheritance, but were specially created and arranged in their proper places like dishes on a table (this is the simile of a distinguished botanist) by an Omnipotent hand "to complete the scheme of nature." (p. 203)

In the last chapter, Darwin gives up trying to make the book acceptable to all worlds, and describes how the various types of orchids were the result of natural selection, but still with that sense of awe he had in describing the orchids themselves:

The more I study nature, the more I become impressed with ever-increasing force, that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations slowly acquired through each part occasionally varying in a slight degree but in many ways, with the preservation of those variations which were beneficial to the organism under complex and ever-varying conditions of life, transcend to an incomparable manner the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of man could invent. (p. 285-286)

In the annals of evolution, one famous story comes from the writing and publication of The Various Contrivances.... In the first edition, Darwin discusses the Angræcum sesquipedale, "of which the large six-rayed flowers, like stars formed of snow-white wax, have excited the admiration of travellers in Madagascar" (1st ed, p. 197; 2nd ed, p. 162). He discovers a nectary in this species 11½ inches long, with nectar in only the lowest inch and a half. Darwin surmises that "in Madagascar there must be moths with probosces capable of extension to a length of between ten and eleven inches." (1st ed, p. 198)

Really? A moth with nearly a foot-long proboscis? You're kidding, right? So thought many readers of that first edition. But in the second edition, Darwin has been redeemed:

This belief of mine has been ridiculed by some entomologists, but we now know from Fritz Müller that there is a sphinx-moth in South Brazil which has a proboscis of nearly sufficient length, for when dried it was between ten and eleven inches long. When not protruded it is coiled up into a spiral of at least twenty windings. (p. 163)

After reading The Various Contrivances..., I was more than ready to see The Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, and Deirdre and I drove up there this morning. The exhibit designed by Raymond Jungles is simply amazing — an indoor creation of seveal environments, including rainforests and deserts, with many other plants accompanying a whole lot of different fascinating species of orchids of all sizes and colors and jaw-dropping beauty. Outside, the great weather this morning allowed observing beauty of another sort, because scattered about the Botanical Garden were 19 bronzes by everyone's favorite modern sculptor, Henry Moore, dating from 1949 through 1984.

We then drove out to a place I had never been, City Island, which looks more like a Maine seaport town than a part of New York City, and where we had fried soft-shell crabs and fried shrimp from Johnny's Famous Reef Restaurant, sitting outside on the south-end tip of the island, and got home just as the light rain was beginning, so as not to spoil quite a lovely day.

Podcast of my Talk about Turing at the University of Toronto

cp@charlespetzold.com — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:33:12 GMT

Last night I had the wonderful opportunity to speak at the University of Toronto about Alan Turing and the Turing Machine. This talk is now available as a podcast:

http://podcasts.ischool.utoronto.ca/?p=97

In the talk I make a couple references to web sites. Here's the work that Microsoft Research is doing on program analysis:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/terminator/

Warren McCulloch appears at the top of this page, and if you scroll down, you can view a video of him interviewed on Canadian TV in 1969:

http://www.cyberneticians.com/

1859 Books: John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”

cp@charlespetzold.com — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

In 1867, the British Parliament debated what was to become one of the most important bills of the 19th century: the Representation of the People Act 1867 (more commonly known as the Second Reform Act), which effectively doubled the number of Englishmen who were allowed to vote. On May 20th of that year, the well-known philosopher and writer John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), Member of Parliament for Westminster, celebrated his 61st birthday by introducing an amendment to change the word "man" in the bill to "person."

It was the first time a measure had been introduced in Parliament that would give women the right to vote. Mill defended this change using arguments from a book he had already written but not yet published entitled The Subjection of Women, as well as introducing some humor regarding the assumption that women have no experience in politics and economics:

John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand

Mill's amendment received 73 votes, but it did not pass. The women of England would not be allowed to vote on equal terms with men until 1928.

John Stuart Mill took a lot of flak for supporting women's rights in that long-ago era. The satirical magazines referred to him as the "women's member" of Parliament, and cartoons showed him wearing a dress. Mill's support of women's suffrage was perhaps the major issue contributing to his loss in the election in 1868, limiting his stint in Parliament to just three years. (It also didn't help that he contributed money to the campaign of radical atheist Charles Bradlaugh.)

The tendency of John Stuart Mill to be much ahead of his time came at a young age. Many years earlier, while walking through St. James's Park, he had discovered an abandoned and dead newborn. His response was to recruit a friend to help him distribute pamphlets about contraception to working-class families in London, and he was arrested for the promotion of obscenity. The year was 1823 and Mill was 17 years old.

During his years in Parliament, John Stuart Mill was considered to be a political radical. Nowadays his politics seem fairly mainstream in the Western world — who today would argue that women shouldn't be allowed to vote? — and even sometimes horrifyingly reactionary (his support of capital punishment, for example).

John Stuart Mill's most significant contribution to our culture goes much deeper than specific political issues. He was also responsible for developing a particular flavor of the philosophy of Utilitarianism that has become very influential, even if we don't quite acknowlege it.

In a very literal sense, Mill was raised in Utilitarianism. His father was good friends with Jeremy Bentham, and applied Utilitarian concepts to Mill's childhood education, famously recounted in Mill's Autobiography (1873). In Jeremy Bentham's formulation, Utilitarianism (basically, good is that which provides the overall greatest happiness) was rather crude, cold, easy to parody (Thomas Gradgrind in Charles Dickens' Hard Times) and downright scary in its implications. (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a society founded on sound Benthamite principles.) John Stuart Mill knew the problems with Utilitarianism first hand: His Utilitarian education — and the mental collapse, despair, and depression that followed — nearly killed him.

Mill essentially rescued Utilitarianism by replacing the vague and slippery idea of "happiness" with a more modern concept of self-fulfillment. As he emerged from his depression, "I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual." (Autobiography, ch. 5) In Mill's Utilitarian universe, it is better to be smart, self-knowing, and not altogether happy rather than stupid, doped-up, and therefore blissful. Self-fulfillment, in Mill's view, is an on-going developmental process of personal growth and education that is unique to each individual.

On Liberty

John Stuart Mill's reformulation of Utilitarianism seems very much to be the implicit philosophy that currently guides many Western civilizations in balancing the needs of the many members of their populations. Even without much thinking about it, we feel that the best arrangement of society is that which allows people to become educated and cultured to explore their own individualistic paths. Whether we acknowledge it or not, Mill's philosophy is the one that dominates our culture. John Stuart Mill, c'est nous.

John Stuart Mill's most enduring book, On Liberty, was published 150 years ago this month, in February 1859. (I have not been able to determine the exact day of publication.) It joins several other 1859 books in making that a pivotal year in the transition of Western society from a religious orientation to a secular one.

On Liberty is a very short book, readily available in annotated Penguin and Oxford World's Classics editions, as well as several on-line versions, and there's really no excuse for never having read it. (I have not been able to find a first edition on Google Book Search but here's a rather marked-up second edition published later in 1859, just 207 pages with generous line spacing. It is well known that Mill made no changes to On Liberty in its various editions.)

The book itself is not quite what you might expect. You probably imagine a spirited defense of the freedoms of speech, press, and religion. But the book really begins with the assumption that we are at last free of government control in these areas. The second of the book's five chapters begins "The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necesary of the 'liberty of the press' as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical governments."

Mill is in favor of liberty of a much less socially acceptable variety. On Liberty is really an advocacy of extreme individuality, even eccentricity. The book warns of the dangers of conformance to societal norms and pressures, and the "tyranny of the majority."

Society ... practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. (ch. 1)

To counter this tendency, people should be allowed and encouraged to practice liberty "without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong." (ch. 1)

Mill is an advocate of free speech, obviously, but interestingly enough, not so much because people have "natural rights" to express their opinions. Mill advocates free speech from a Utilitarian perspective: The suppression of speech is actually dangerous to society. Without hearing contrary views, we never question our assumptions. Dissenting opinons are valuable to a society regardless whether they're right or wrong. "If the opinion is right, they [society] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error." (ch. 2)

It is in Chapter 3, "On Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being," that Mill reveals the revolutionary nature of his book by extending the concept of free expression to individuals themselves:

As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. (ch. 3)

There is, of course, much societal pressure not to engage in any "experiments of living" but to conform to pre-established modes. This, to Mill, does not guarantee personal growth: "Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develope itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing." (ch. 3)

Again, however, it is not just the individual that benefits from this unique individual growth, but society at large:

In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee of custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few no dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. (ch. 3)

While it's important for individuals to challenge societal norms of behavior and conduct, sometimes these norms have also been written into law, and it is in Chapter 4 ("Of the Limits to the Authority of Society") that Mill examines legal regulation of what we now term "victimless crimes." Mill realizes that the urge to prevent people from harming themselves is a strong one, and "that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities." (ch. 4) Yet it must be resisted.

Among the victimless crimes that Mill specifically mentions are drunkenness (although he clearly acknowledges that some occupations should not allow drunken workers), working on the Sabbath (even though abstaining from work one day a week "is a highly beneficial custom"), gambling, and "fornication" (by which I'm pretty sure he's referring to prostitution). What people do to themselves or by themselves is none of society's business.

Mill's arguments in On Liberty were influenced somewhat by Wilhelm von Humboldt's Sphere and Duties of Government, first published in an English translation in 1854. Mill uses a quotation from the book as an epigraph to On Liberty and paraphrases von Humboldt's observations about the contract of marriage: "[Marriage,] having the peculiarity that its objects are frustrated unless the feelings of both parties are in harmony with it, should require nothing more than the declared will of either party to dissolve it." (ch. 5)

Mill, however, does not go quite this far. He believes that divorce should be somewhat harder because the marriage might affect others besides the two married people. The difficulty of divorce in Victorian England was an issue very close to Mill: For about 20 years, John Stuart Mill and a married woman, Harriet Taylor, were in love with each other, and they were only able to marry after her husband died. They had seven years of married life together (accompanied by ill health) before she died. Mill considered many of his later works, such as On Liberty and The Subjection of Women to have been collaborations with Harriet Taylor, and On Liberty is dedicated to her.

The Subjection of Women would not be published until 1869, but Mill's feminism is on full view in On Liberty as well:

The almost despotic power of husbands over wives needs not be enlarged upon here, beause nothing more is needed for the complete removal of the evil, than that wives should have the same rights, and should receive the protection of law in the same manner, as all other persons; and because, on this subject, the defenders of established injustice do not avail themselves of the plea of liberty, but stand forth openly as the champions of power. (ch. 5)

One of the most interesting passages in On Liberty tackles a still volatile topic: plural marriage as practiced by Mormons. Mill makes it clear that the current concept of marriage "far from being in any way countenanced by the principle of liberty, it is a direct infraction of that principle, being a mere rivetting of the chains of one-half of the community, and an emancipation of the other from reciprocity of obligation towards them." But given the existence of unequal marriage between two people, Mill can't see any problem extending the institution to more than two:

Still, it must be remembered that this relation is as much voluntary on the part of the women concerned with it, and who may be deemed the sufferers by it, as is the case with any other form of the marriage institution; and however surprising this fact may appear, it has its explanation in the common ideas and customs of the world, while teaching women to think marriage the one thing needful, make it intelligible that many a woman should prefer being one of several wives, to not being a wife at all. (ch. 4)

Mill also takes a radical view of the interests of society over parents in the care of children. He is rather against uniform State education (being "a mere contrivance for moulding peole to be exactly like one another") but very much in favor of compulsory education. For the child's (and society's) benefit, he wants to coerce parents into providing that education along with other care.

It still remains unrecognized, that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and that if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the charge, as far as possible, of the parent. (ch. 5)

Despite Mill's bow towards the parents in this passage, he seems to have a decided leaning towards children's rights, and it would have been interesting to hear him expound on some more modern issues regarding the relative rights of children and parents.

The provocative nature of On Liberty has kept the book controversial for the past 150 years. The text remains unnerving to those who believe that government has a role to play in enforcing morals, including what goes on in private between consenting adults. (It is worthwhile remembering that the Lawrence vs. Texas decision is only six years old, and affected laws in 14 states.) Because Mill's ideas arise from a Utilitarian-based morality, On Liberty is particularly abhorent to those who believe that morality comes from an external source, e.g., a Supreme Being. At the extreme fringe are those who wish a return to Biblical Law, including the half dozen thought-crimes that form a majority of the Ten Commandments.

On Liberty didn't quite make the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries conducted by Human Events magazine, "Headquarters of the Conservative Underground," but it did get an honorable mention. On the other hand, conservatives of a more Libertarian bent sometimes find a kindred spirit in Mill. Liberals more prominently claim Mill for their side, although the big parternalistic "welfare state" governments common in the Western world are quite foreign to his more laissez-faire politics. In her introduction to an older Penguin edition of On Liberty, Gertrude Himmelfarb refers to this contradiction as a "schizophrenic" split of liberalism. (p. 47)

Everyone agrees that it's necessary to maintain a proper balance between the rights of the individual and the needs of society, but setting the fulcrum for this balance remains extremely devisive. The culture wars — abortion, gay marriage, drugs, pornography, guns — are all fought on the battlefield of On Liberty, and the book remains a bold assertion of the primacy of the individual over authority — whether that authority be religious, political, or even the collective coercion of others.

Speaking at the University of Toronto on March 5

cp@charlespetzold.com — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:13:39 GMT

I am very pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the University of Toronto on Thursday, March 5, 2009. The talk is free and open to the public, and will be held in Room 1160 of the Bahen Centre at 40 St. George Street starting at 7:00 pm. Here's a description:

Alan Turing's Amazing Imaginary Computing Machine

The Annotated Turing

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine

Hope to see you there! (And bring one of my books if you want it autographed.)

February 25, 2009

Here's the page on the UT web site announcing the event, including a map:

http://www.events.utoronto.ca/index.php?action=singleView&eventid=3401

Wiley	Amazon US	Barnes & Noble
Amazon Canada	Amazon UK	Amazon Deutsch
Amazon Français	Amazon Japan	Blackwell
“Petzold will be a stalwart companion to any reader who undertakes to read Turing's classic with his aid. The Annotated Turing will also be quite enjoyable to a more casual reader who chooses to dip into various parts of the text.” — Martin Davis in American Scientist

Pinnacles of 19th Century Science

cp@charlespetzold.com — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:00:00 GMT

Richard Feynman famously presented his students with his unique (and let's admit it, hyperbolical) view of history when he said

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

Others might acknowledge Maxwell's work but argue that the most important scientific event in the 19th was instead the codification of the laws of thermodynamics. Many people contributed to thermodynamics, including designers of steam engines, Sadi Carnot, James Joule, and Rudolf Clausius, but it was William Thomson (later known as Lord Kelvin) who first stated the first two laws of thermodynamics in the early 1850s, and who popularized the use of the word "energy" in its modern sense.

Thermodynamics and Maxwell's equations help us understand how the universe works, but 19th-century science also brought about an increased understanding of the mechanism of living things, primarily through the discovery of the process of biological evolution by means of natural selection and sexual selection as described by Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday we celebrate today.

To quote the famous title of Theodosius Dobzhansky's 1973 essay, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." Yet Darwin was clearly aware from the beginning of his researches that evolution had profound implications not just for biology in general, but for the origins of human beings. Evolution answered millennia-old questions like "Where did we come from?" with the revelation of a marvelous process involving the accumulation of small incremental changes tested for viability in the real world over millions of years, accepting what works, abandoning what's harmful.

We are part of this process, so evolution also tells us much about ourselves. Every other living thing is one of our distant cousins. Instead of having "dominion" over all the earth, we are yet another creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. We came about through a blind, mechanistic, natural process, yet one that led to the development of minds capable of self reflection and wonderment, including the inquisitive, experimental, brilliant mind of Charles Darwin.

Evolution is a process more beautiful than any work of art, more awe-inspiring than any miracle, more meaningful than any theology.

Reading “Darwin’s Sacred Cause”

cp@charlespetzold.com — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 16:12:00 GMT

It is well known that English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) had a particular abhorrence to slavery and even (unusual in the 19^th century) an affinity for people of color. From Darwin's Autobiography (published 1887) everyone knows the story of how Darwin learned taxidermy as a student in Edinburgh paying for lessons from a black man skilled at stuffing birds, "and I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man." Everyone as well knows about the big argument aboard the Beagle between Darwin and Captain Robert FitzRoy after FitzRoy had "defended and praised slavery, which I abominated."

It is also widely known that Darwin's two grandfathers, Erasmus Darwin (an early theorist of evolution) and Josiah Wedgwood (of pottery fame) were active in the English anti-slavery movement. (The Darwin and Wedgwood families became very close: Charles Darwin's mother was a Wedgwood and so was his wife.) In 1787, Wedgwood had a medallion designed of an enchained black man with the inscription "Am I not a man and a brother?", which became the seal of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Wedgwood distributed the medallions for free — including sending some to Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia — and they became a fashionable item for people to wear to signal their belief in the cause.

Dig a little further into Charles Darwin's attitudes towards race and slavery, and you might find the illuminating essay "Charles Darwin: Slavery and the American Civil War" by Ralph Colp, Jr. (Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. XXVI, No. 4, October 1978). During the Civil War, sympathies among the English were mostly with the South, partially because England was one of the beneficiaries of cheap slave-produced cotton, and partially because Southerners were perceived as more "civilized" than the Yankees (despite the use of stolen labor to erect this "civilization"). Particularly in his correspondence with American botonist Asa Gray, Darwin reveals a wish that "the North would proclaim a crusade against Slavery [resulting in] that greatest curse on Earth Slavery abolished." During the Civil War, Darwin only waivers in his pro-North sympathies when the North interferes with an English mailpacket ship, and it appears that England might join the South in the war, at which point Darwin's English patriotism clashes with his Abolitionism.

More historical research might resurrect the matter of Edward Eyre, the governor of the British colony of Jamaica. (In British colonies, slavery was theoretically ended in 1834, but slaves were forced into an "apprenticeship" period and weren't entirely emancipated until 1838.) In 1865, following an uprising of black peasants, Eyre had his troops burn over a thousand homes, execute 439 Jamaicans, and flog 600 more. A political opponent, a mixed-race man named George William Gordon, was also hanged after a rigged court martial. Eyre was exonerated by Parliament, but MP John Stuart Mill founded a Jamaica Committee to promote the prosecution of Eyre, and he got the support of Charles Lyell, Thomas H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Charles Darwin. Supporting the actions of Governor Eyre were Thomas Carlyle (who will figure again in this blog entry), John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Kingsley, and — how sad is this? — Charles Dickens. (See Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy, MacGibbon & Kee, 1962, and Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, Atlantic Books, 2007, p. 376-383)

Despite this background, nothing quite prepared me for the overwhelming impact of the brilliant new book by the pre-eminent Darwin scholars Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Read that subtitle again: Desmond and Moore are suggesting that not only was Darwin one of the most humanitarian scientists of the 19^th century, but that his attitudes towards slavery and race actually drove and influenced his science! The premise is audacious, yet this book uses Darwin's journals, letters, and even notes he made in other author's books to build a very solid case. As they put it in the Introduction,

first

As joint authors of Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (1991) — highly regarded as the definitive Darwin biography until Janet Browne's recent two-volume study, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002) — Desmond and Moore know their subject and the source material extremely well. They have given Charles Darwin a terrific present for his 200^th birthday, and the rest of the world a must-read in this bicentennial year.

Darwin's Sacred Cause begins with the grandfathers, and in its opening chapters the book reveals itself to be just as much about British anti-slavery politics from the 1780s through the 1850s, a fascinating subject in its own right. The most prominent agitator against slavery was Thomas Clarkson. It was he who convinced William Wilberforce to take up the battle in Parliament, leading to the banning of the slave trade in the British dominions in 1807. (However, slavery still existed in British colonies, especially in the West Indies, with almost a third of a million slaves in Jamaica.) Clarkson was partially funded by Josiah Wedgwood, even when others weren't entirely pleased with Clarkson's radical turns.

With that start, opposition to slavery seemed ingrained in the Darwin and Wedgwood family genes. Throughout Darwin's Sacred Cause we are constantly hearing from Charles Darwin's in-laws and cousins who continue to battle for the emancipation of slaves in British colonies (and then turn their sights on America). Throughout his life, Charles Darwin had a strong conviction that all the races of the world were bound in a unity of origin and a common descent.

In his voyage on the Beagle, Darwin witnessed slavery and the slave trade first hand, and the experience never left him. When he received a letter from a family member about how Parliament might abolish slavery in the colonies during the 1833 session, he wrote back (with characteristic misspellings):

I have watched how steadily the general feeling, as shown at elections, has been rising against Slavery. — What a proud thing for England, if she is the first Europaean nation which utterly abolishes it. — I was told before leaving England, that after living in Slave countries: all my opinions would be altered; the only alteration I am aware of is forming a much higher estimate of the Negros character. — it is impossible to see a negro & not feel kindly towards him ... (p. 87)

This racial "unitarism" of Darwin was pretty much a minority view. Most people — scientists and non-scientists alike — were "pluralists," meaning that they believed the races were created or emerged separately, and even that the races represented separate species.

This was not an issue of science vs. religion. Even among those who treated the book of Genesis as literal truth, there were unitarists who identified the source of all people with Adam and Eve, and pluralists who focused on the Curse of Ham, and noted how Ham's son Canaan had become a "servant of servants" (and by tradition this meant a black slave). Others believed in a more benign separation of races concomitant with the origin of different languages in the Tower of Babel incident.

Captain FitzRoy of the Beagle later took up a Curse of Ham justification for slavery.

Such views grew increasingly common as demands peaked for the abolition of American slavery. By 1838 religious tracts were already depicting the whole of Africa filled with Ham's cursed descendents. In the Southern Slave States, particularly, God's favours and curses were seen as very unequal, and Noah's descendants were ranked accordingly. (p. 109-110)

(The Curse of Ham has never really gone away; "father of modern creationism" Henry M. Morris uses the Curse of Ham to explain the origin of races in The Beginning of the World: A Scientific Study of Genesis 1-11 in an edition printed as late as 1996.)

In the mid-1840s, the American Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches all split into North and South factions over the issue of slavery, and two decades later Abraham Lincoln said what everyone already knew in his Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865, six weeks before his assassination) that "Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other."

Science experienced a split as well. The calm persuasive dignity of the three volumes of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830 – 1833) did much to wean Victorian minds from Biblical chronology and to establish a long history of the Earth. But there was still much confusion about where people and other living things came from. In Lyell, they just seem to pop up and disappear in periodic epochs, a process that seemed to require a Creator. Transmutation of species (an early term for evolution) was still a dreaded concept, and without transmutation to explain how species could change, scientists were almost forced to accept a pluralist explanation of race.

Regardless whether it came from religion or science, pluralism was a problem because pluralism provided the intellectual infrastructure for slavery. If God had turned Canaan black and intended for him to be a "servant of servants," then God had ordained slavery, and there were plenty of examples of slavery in the Bible. If Genesis was a fairy tale but the Creator had nonetheless planted different species in different parts of the world, then justification of enslavement of one of these species by another was much less onerous.

Some histories of science create a streamlined view by eliminating entire people, theories, and concepts. Darwin's Sacred Cause is not one of them. We are instead plunged into the extremely chaotic, constantly shifting, sloppy and ideological scientific milieu of Great Britain (and later America) in the 1830s through 1860s, with a dizzying parade of scientists and crackpots difficult to keep straight without a scorecard.

Early on, one hero emerges: He is James Cowles Prichard (1786 – 1848), whose book Researches into the Physical History of Mankind described a single origin for the world's people and their languages. While others were exaggerating immutable differences between the species, Prichard was identifying similarities and adaptations through small-scale variations over long periods of time. The collection of 30 black-and-white plates in Darwin's Sacred Cause includes a gorgeous drawing from Prichard's Researches of two Hottentots (now known as the Khoikhoi of southwestern Africa) that is very unlike the typical racist caricatures of most 19^th century anthropological literature.

In Darwin's Sacred Cause, however, the villains outnumber the heroes, and they become more numerous and more vehement as the century advances. As we all know, slavery in the United States did not gradually fade away as people became progressively enlightened about the true nature of the vile institution. Quite the contrary: As the pressure to end slavery from the North and from Europe became stronger, the South clung tighter to its slaves, and in the decades leading up to the Civil War, racist religion and racist science sky-rocketed to justify slavery.

The English intelligentsia frequently weighed in on the issues. The fiercely Abolitionist journalist Harriet Martineau shows up frequently in Darwin's Sacred Cause as a favorite family friend of the Darwin's and Wedgwood's. At the opposite extreme is Thomas Carlyle, whose viciously racist rantings sickened many of the people who heard him speak, and still sickens the reader of this book over 150 years later.

Some of the scientists justifying slavery, such as Dr. Josiah Nott and George R. Gliddon, are discussed in Darwin's Sacred Cause but otherwise lost in the backlots of history. It is sad to see Charles Lyell in his trips to America succumb to the charms of the aristocratic and genteel South, form a distorted view of slavery, and later decide that the different races had sprung independently in different parts of the world. Later on, the book's true villain emerges as Louis Agassiz (1807 – 1873), born in Switzerland but based at Harvard from 1847 on, who also adopted a separate-creation/separate-immutable-species theory of the world's races. (How many races were there? The number ranged from 2 to 63. Agassiz thought there were 8. [p. 375])

It is Agassiz's writings — and their joyful reception by the South in justifying slavery — that prompts Darwin to action to refute him, and in turn to inch closer and closer to disclosing his theory of Natural Selection to the world. Darwin's Sacred Cause assumes a breathless pace as the reader approaches the end of the 1850's, with full prior knowledge that the end of the decade will bring both the publication of The Origin of Species in November 1859, the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, and the secession of seven states prior to his inauguration in March 1861.

By the 1850s, the debate about the unity or plurality of human races had "carried over into domestic-breed studies." For example, it was pretty much established that domesticated dogs and pigeons were bred from wilder animals. But it was generally assumed that the many varieties of dogs and pigeons had come from separate origins. If it could be shown that all domesticated pigeons derived from one wild species, then by extension, human races might also have arisen from one source as well. "By the 1850s, the [pigeon] loft, the farm and the kitchen garden has become the battleground for good natualists and bad propagandists at loggerheads over human origins." (p. 244)

Darwin loved data. He read voraciously to extract data out of books that he otherwise considered completely wrong. He used the full resources of the British Empire to gather data from around the world. He formed deep friendships with correspondents who would respond to his queries with loads of data. And he loved experimentation. For example, it had always been assumed that seemingly related plants on different land-masses must be result of independent creations because seeds could not survive immersion in salt water. Nobody had ever tested that hypothesis until Darwin did his own experiments, keeping seeds immersed in numerous smelly jars of salt water for weeks, then for months. Most of the seeds survived the experience just fine, and some even sprouted better! He wrote an article about his experiment for Gardeners' Chronicle and reminded the readers

As such experiments might naturally appear childish to many, I may be permitted to premise that they have a direct bearing on a very interesting problem, which has lately, especially in America, attracted much attention, namely, whether the same organic being has been created at one point or on several on the face of our globe. (p. 248)

This is one of very many quotations that Desmond and Moore have dug up to show that even when Darwin was submerging seeds in salt water, he was thinking about the implications for the origins of race. "There was no need for aboriginal species or aboriginal humans to be created over their entire range, for dispersal was viable, even across oceans." (p. 251)

Darwin began accumulating so many livestock that he was listed as a "Farmer" in Bagshaw's History, Gazetteer and Dictionary of Kent. (p. 252) One of the most entertaining passages in Darwin's Sacred Cause is his experiments in pigeon-breeding (including joining two pigeon-breeding clubs), leading to his determination that all varieties of domestic pigeons that he had accumulated — which he said an ornithologist would see as "three good genera and about fifteen good species" — were actually members of the same species that had originated with the rock dove. All the pigeon varieties were successfuly inter-breedable with fertile offspring — the most common test of species unity. (This is why Origin of Species begins with a discussion of pigeons.)

In 1857, the pluralists Josiah Nott and George R. Gliddon published a book Indigenous Races of the Earth in which they gave new names to the pluralists and unitarists. Pluralists like themselves who believed in separate creations of similar species would now be known as Polygenists. Those who believed in uniform origins became believers in Monogenesis, suggesting a very old-fashioned affection for Adam and Eve. (p. 288-289)

Although Darwin originally had much grander plans for it, Origin of Species did not discuss humans. But every reader was able to extrapolate, and one review even began "Mr. Darwin boldly traces out the genealogy of man, and affirms that the monkey is his brother, and the horse his cousin, and the oyster his remote ancestor." (p. 328) Despite Darwin's overall intent, some people insisted on extracting from Origin of Species only what they wanted to see, interpreting the "struggle for existence" described within its pages as a mandate for racial extermination. (p. 337)

Darwin would not specifically tackle the issue of race for another 12 years, in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), the completion of which Desmond and Moore suggest was prompted by the Governor Eyre matter. Race required a separate book because Darwin did not believe that most racial characteristics offered a survival benefit. Hence, they did not come under the category of Natural Selection. The second half of the mechanism of evolution was Sexual Selection — the way in which animals and humans choose mates. Most racial characteristics develop simply because different population groups develop different standards of physical beauty. To a certain extent, through the choice of mates, we govern our own evolution as a self-selecting "domesticated animal." (p. 359)

The Descent of Man is not a perfect book. It reveals plenty of prejudices and stereotypes that are normal for someone living in England in the middle of the 19^th century, and it is even possible to extract some passages, mangle them a bit, and then "prove" that Darwin was a proponent of eugenics or something equally vile.

But this is not the whole picture. The whole picture that emerges from Darwin's Sacred Cause is a man who is extraordinarily decent and kind and driven to demonstrate the unity of all people of the world in one human race. Very few other scientists of the 19^th century come close to Darwin's standards.

Darwin's Sacred Cause is a much-needed corrective to the recent creationist assault on Darwin and evolution from books such as From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany and Darwin's Plantation: Evolution's Racist Roots, and movies such as Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Anybody who looks at Darwin's life and work only to find facism and racism is simply dense, or (more likely) too full of their own bigotries to see reality.

Humanitarian scientist stares down creationist
toady in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Graphical Paths with Gradient Colors

cp@charlespetzold.com — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:57:13 GMT

In WPF, you can draw a graphical path (in this case, a Bézier spline) with a thick width (24 units here) and the Stroke property set to a LinearGradientBrush:

It almost looks as if the gradient goes from one end of the Bézier spline to the other, but that's only because the spline is roughly oriented with the LinearGradientBrush. The paradigm used in WPF is that the brush encompasses the entire area occupied by the graphical object, which then works like a stencil to let the color come through:

If the Bézier spline were altered somewhat, the sense that the gradient goes from one end to the other would be revealed as an illusion:

You might prefer that you have the option to draw graphical paths with a gradient brush that truly runs from one end of the figure to the other:

regardless how the Bézier spline is oriented:

You might instead prefer applying a gradient that is perpendicular to the path rather than parallel with it:

Those last three screen shots display a GradientPath class I wrote. You can play around with this class in a Xaml Browser Application (XBAP) here:

GradientPathDemo.xbap

The sample app creates a PathGeometry consisting of a straight line, a Bézier spline, and another straight line. You can change all of the points defining the path by dragging the gray dots, and yes, you can deform the figure to a point where the drawing logic breaks down. But if you keep the figure fairly continuous without sharp bends, it pretty much works.

You can download the GradientPathDemo source code. The GradientPath class derives from FrameworkElement and defines eight properties:

Data

Geometry

Path

GradientStops

GradientStopCollection

GradientStop

LinearGradientBrush

RadialGradientBrush

ColorInterpolationMode

LinearGradientBrush

RadialGradientBrush

GradientMode

Parallel

Perpendicular

StrokeThickness

double

StrokeStartLineCap

StrokeEndLineCap

PenLineCap

Tolerance

double

Most of the action in GradientPath occurs in the OnRender override. When this method is called, the Data property of the class is set to a Geometry, which might look like this:

The OnRender method begins by converting that Geometry to a flattened PathGeometry by calling the GetFlattenedPathGeometry method:

A flattened PathGeometry approximates a Geometry with polylines. It might contain multiple PathFigure objects, but each PathFigure contains only a single PolyLineSegment in its Segments collection.

At each point in the polyline approximation a perpendicular is determined. This perpendicular is StrokeThickness units in length, and is actually the average of the perpendiculars of the little line segments on each side of the point:

Each pair of adjacent perpendiculars defines a tetragon (alternately color blue and red here for illustrative purposes):

Each of those tetragons must be colored with a gradient brush. (For the remainder of this description I'll use the Perpendicular mode which happens to be algorithmically simpler.) I tried a couple different approaches here, but the best one involved first rotating the tetragon so that the original line segment through its center is horizontal:

This rotated tetragon gets a LinearGradientBrush that goes from top to bottom:

And the resultant object is rotated back into place:

Coloring the little tetragons for the Parallel mode was a little more complicated because each of the little figures must contain only a portion of the total gradient. I did this by creating a new GradientStops collection and modifying each Offset based on the ratio of the length of the polyline segment to the total length of the figure.

The line caps had to be handled separately, and here again, the Perpendicular mode was much easier. For the Parallel mode I didn't try to gradate the caps at all, but instead determined an appropriate color based on Offset values of 0 (for the StrokeStartLineCap) and 1 (for the StrokeEndLineCap). There is no guarantee that the GradientStops collection will actually contain GradientStop objects with those precise Offset values, so I had to perform the interpolation myself.

I regret to say that GradientPath has a problem if one of the gradient colors is transparent or partially transparent. In WPF, if two filled polygons share an edge (and this edge is not horizontal or vertical), there will often be a slight visual gap between the two figures. To avoid this gap between the tetragons, I not only filled the path, but stroked it with a pen that is outlinePenWidth units wide (defined as a constant 1 in the GradientPath class) and the same brush as the fill. However, this causes the tetragons to overlap slightly, and when there is partial transparency, the overlap shows up as a darker line.

I tried fiddling with different values of outlinePenWidth, but nothing seemed to work well for both non-transparent and transparent colors.