Skip to main content

August 10, 1500


On August 10, 1500, Madagascar was discovered by Europeans: the first known to have encountered the island was Diogo Dias, a Portuguese navigator. This land of diverse and unique species is home to many types of lemurs. Of interest to us now is the fact that in the late 19th century, at one of the early British cat shows, a lemur was showed as a cat. No one realized til afterwards that this strange cat was not even feline.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

August 23, 1941

Onora Sylvia O'Neill (August 23, 1941) is a British thinker. She studied at Oxford and received a doctorate from Harvard. After a noted career, in 1992, she  accepted the post of  Principal of  N ewnham College, Cambridge, and since 2006 she has been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Her 1997 paper, "Environmental Values, Anthroporphism, and Speciesism" contains a timely  argument  in which Dr. O'Neill, (she prefers that title to the "Baroness" to which her elevation to the peerage allows) points out inadequacies in the use of the term speciesism to argue against according humans more ethical rights than aspects of the non human world.  A viewpoint that puts " a person torturing a cat is on a par with a cat torturing a bird," is not one she finds supportable. The link is to a downloadable version of this paper.  We have  this picture  of Onora O'Neill, in 2002, at Newnham College: We meet in the Principal's lodge at Ne
Post a Comment
Read more

August 22, 1806

Jean Honoré Fragonard (April 4 1732 to August 22, 1 806) the famous French painter, whose art illustrated the lives of a gilded class, included cats occasionally in his scenes. We have some biographical context from the  National Gallery of Art : 'Fragonard was one of the most prolific of the eighteenth-century painters and draftsmen. Born ... in Grasse in southern France, he moved with his family at an early age to Paris. He first took a position as a clerk, but having demonstrated an interest in art, he worked in the studio of the still life and genre painter Jean Siméon Chardin (French, 1699 - 1779). After spending a short time with Chardin, from whom he probably learned merely the bare rudiments of his craft, he entered the studio of François Boucher ....1703 - 1770). Under Boucher’s tutelage Fragonard’s talent developed rapidly, and he was soon painting decorative pictures and pastoral subjects very close to his master’s style....Although Fragonard apparently never took cour
Post a Comment
Read more

November 21, 1852

  A comparative view of the social life of England and France from the Restoration of Charles the Second to the French Revolution  (1828) was a history written by Mary Berry, (March 16 1763 to November 21 1852). Berry was a friend of Thomas Macaulay, and other intellectual luminaries, of the late 18th century. This volume enhanced her fame, but she was already known for her editing of Horace Walpole's correspondence, and other books also. I am gong to briefly quote from the preface because it gives a good sense of an ahistorical past which governed the imaginations of writers until about this period. You can see her need to defend her history because if things really changed, that might cast doubt on the fundamentals of the 18th century world. (If things did NOT change the reason to write history is different or non-existent). Nowadays we are accustomed to the view that fundamental worldviews can shift in an historical time, but our view was itself an historical development. So thi
Post a Comment
Read more