(Download) "Unnumbered Polypi (Critical Essay)" by Victorian Poetry * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Unnumbered Polypi (Critical Essay)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 205 KB
Description
In August 1829, during a "voyage among the Polynesian islands," the surgeon George Bennett acquired a pearly (or chambered) nautilus (nautilus pompilius). This creature had been spotted "floating on the surface of the water ... resembling, as the sailors on Bennett's ship put it, "a dead tortoiseshell cat." It was retrieved with a hook (which broke its shell). "The animal, when I examined it after it was brought on-board, kept the tentacula closely contracted, and the only remaining evidence of vitality ... was in a slightly contractile motion of the body." ("Only remaining" seems to suggest that the nautilus was near death, though it may have been in retreat.) Bennett detached the contracted body from the remaining shell fragments by severing "two oval muscular attachments," then "placed it in spirits, after making a pen-and-ink sketch of its external form." (1) The loss of the shell was regrettable, but such objects were a common feature of old-fashioned curiosity cabinets, whereas the creatures that lived in them had been seldom encountered and never, during modern times, studied at close range. So it was a matter of some moment when, in July 1831, Bennett presented the preserved nautilus to the Hunterian Museum (of the Royal College of Surgeons), in Lincoln's Inn Square. There it was dissected by Richard Owen, a young comparative anatomist recently hired to catalogue the huge, now jumbled collection of specimens originally assembled by John Hunter in the eighteenth century. Owen's Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus (1831) helped mark his debut as a public figure in the world of British science.
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