MONOTREMATA!
(with apologies to Charles Doolittle Walcott, Alston Chase, and William
Burroughs)
"The frontal bill may have provoked most astonishment but
the rear end also provided numerous reasons for amazement. Sir Charles
Napier, subdued the Indian province of Sind and announced his triumph,
via telegram to his superiors in London, with the minimal but fully
adequate `Peccavi.'
This tale, in its own telegraphic way, speaks volumes about
the social order and education of imperial Britain. What could this
curious melange be, beyond a divine test of faith and patience? Owen
then counterattacked to support Meckle for three reasons:
the glands are largest after the inferred time of birth:
the female, living in sand and unable to thicken mucus in water
possesses glands of the same form;
finally, Owen suspended the secretion in alcohol and obtained
globules, like milk.
269, 270, 271, 277, 276, 275,
Internally the puzzle only increased. Chinese taxidermists
had long fooled (and defrauded) European mariners with heads or trunks
of monkeys stiched to the hind parts of fish. - one prominent source for
the persistance of mermaid legends. But Shaw could find no stitches,
and the skeleton was surely discrete and of one functional piece. Shaw
concluded:
`On a subject so extra ordinary as the present, a degree of
scepticism is not only pardonable but laudable.'
The glands were enormous, extending nearly from the forelegs
to the hind limbs - and they led to no common opening, for no nipples
could be found. But the Old Testament author of Proverbs, speaking of
wisdom rather than evolution, provided the proper metaphor, etz chayim:
She is a tree of life.
Geoffroy, committed to oviparity and unwilling to admit anything
like a mammilian upbringing, counterattacked. Don't shoehorn monotremes
into the class mammilia to make everything neat and foreclose discussion,
he pleads.
`The blacks were paid half-a-crown for every female, but the
price of flour, tea, and suger, which I sold to them, rose with the
supply of Echidna. The half-crowns were, therefor always just sufficient
to buy food enough to keep the lazy blacks hungry.'
This configuration inevitably led to a most troubling hypothesis
for biologists committed, as most were in these pre-Darwinian days, to
the division of nature into unambiguous, static catagories: no uterus,
no internal space. The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
have been reversed by modern studies - enterprises of great pith and
moment.
Would Australia also yield the ultimate embarrassment of fur
from eggs?"
(I have sinned. The fossil building blocks are random quotes from a
Stephen J. Gould reflection on scientific mis-understanding of the
platypus. The emerging complex reality is your own.)
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