Tea at Trianon: Mary Anning

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Mary Anning

Miss Anning was the first female paleontologist. She did not have a lesbian love affair, contrary to the recent film. From Live Science:

Less than a year later, Anning, with the help of her brother, uncovered a fossil that baffled scientists. It was 17 feet (5.2 meters) long, had 60 vertebrae, and took months to excavate, and by the time the Annings were done, word had spread in town that she had discovered a monster. Part of it looked like a fish, but part looked like a crocodile — something like this had never been seen before, or at least not by the London scientific establishment. It would ultimately be named ichthyosaur, meaning fish-lizard. Ichthyosaur fossils had been found before, but Anning's specimen was the first complete skeleton, and it threw the scientific world into turmoil.
"I by no means consider it as wholly a fish, when compared with other fishes, but rather view it in a similar light to those animals met with in New South Wales, which appear to be so many deviations from ordinary structure," Sir Everard Home, a British surgeon, wrote when first describing the fossil in an 1814 scientific journal. He didn't mention Anning, instead noting the name of the landowner whose estate contained the cliff face. (Read more.)