Extraordinary Fact Research Articles

The Allentown Connection-A Tribute for Lew Jae-duk, the "Father of Korean Plastic Surgery".

In retrospect, the irony of this story began with the first meeting of these co-authors-in of all places, Coimbatore, India, in 2008, at the 12th International Perforator Flap Course. Here the junior author [hereafter "jp"] demonstrated his unparalleled skills in networking, and soon thereafter journeyed some 11,073 km to Allentown, U.S. to peruse the operating room and clinics of the senior author [sic. ggh] in action. Within 2 years jp orchestrated the presentation of the 14th International Perforator Flap Course, so ggh with great anticipation flew only 6,830 miles to reach Seoul, Korea for his first time. But four years more elapsed before ggh returned again to Korea to be a visiting professor, all the while not quite sure why any Korean would want anything from a country doctor who resided in nowheresville Allentown, Pennsylvania. Yet, an extraordinary fact then was to be unveiled, about which ggh was totally ignorant. The pioneer of plastic surgery in Korea, the first Korean to have completed an accredited plastic surgery fellowship, by coincidence had accomplished all this in … Allentown. The collegial relationship that evolved between these co-authors, who met by chance, indeed had a precedent coincidence! Was this "by chance" alone or predestination? Amazingly, in a way similar, the origin of plastic surgery itself in Korea also had Allentown connections. As a tribute to Lew Jae-duk, this important story must be here told, so let us now retrace his past in Allentown so we can find how the future was to be not so far away.

China’s Early Industrialization in the Age of the European Colonial Powers: A Controversial Beginning

At the end of the nineteenth century, China presented the characteristics of a stationary economy, rich in resources but weakened by a traditional society and a lack of understanding of economic dynamics. The extraordinary fact was that until the eighteenth century, China was equal to, if not more advanced than, Europe in scientific, technological knowledge and manufacturing processes. Scholars in the second half of the twentieth century underlined that China’s traditional society failed to create endogenous factors that would have encouraged the rise of capitalism and drew attention to ineffective institutions and government policies. More recently, modern scholars have explained that “divergence” was caused by the lack of available commodities. The empire barely stayed ahead of a soaring population and could not cope with the higher demand for natural resources. This article proposes an overview of this debate and examines arguments that are still open to intellectual contribution.

Konsep Pendidikan Sosiologi Menurut Perspektif Ibn Khaldun

This article describes the concept of sociological education according to Ibn Khaldun's perspective. The fact of sociology education is to maintain and strengthen people's social relationships in order to stay harmony and peaceful while paying attention to the values of Islamic teachings in accordance with the Qur'an and Sunnah. As a study of the intellectual history of sociological thinking, the research method used in this discussion is through historical and sociological approaches obtained through the study or study of libraries (library research) that is qualitative descriptive, namely trying to uncover, analyze, present data and facts related to this discussion through primary data taken directly in the Book of Muqaddimah and secondary data taken from other relevant books in this discussion. As for the results of this study is finding the extraordinary fact that it turns out that Ibn Khaldun's thoughts on social sciences (sociology) and history are basically. Sociological theories and history became a foothold in modern intellectuals although the big names were dimmed during the golden age of European intellectuals The role of orientalists and Muslim scholars examining the thinking of 14th-century Muslim scholars opened the world's eyes to the quality of the thinking of Muslim scholars and should be studied as a scholarly speciality, especially in the field of social and historical sciences. Even modern thinkers have not been able to match his thinking.

Lo maravilloso y extraordinario en la novela erótica griega

The ancient Greek novel was not detached from the literary tendencies of its times, such as the Second Sophistic with its constant tendency towards innovation. Sophists often declared the “novelty” of their deeds, as did the novel which, been a fictional narrative, strived for the entertainment of its public looking for the surprising, new and unexpected. Taking a closer look into the novels, we can see that each author tried to excel due to the extraordinary facts included in his work. In my exposition, I will consider the novels of Longus, Xenophon of Ephesus and Charito, that deal with extraordinary facts or situations, trying to attract the attention of their public. By analyzing a specific vocabulary related to the extraordinary (parádoxon), surprising (kainón) or incredible (ápiston), we will find that Charito, who is the author that refers less to extraordinary deeds, qualifies some of them as such.

Tunable two-dimensional electron system at the (110) surface of SnO2

We report the observation of a two-dimensional electron system (2DES) at the $(110)$ surface of the transparent bulk insulator SnO$_2$, and the tunability of its carrier density by means of temperature or Eu deposition. The 2DES is insensitive to surface reconstructions and, surprisingly, it survives even after exposure to ambient conditions --an extraordinary fact recalling the well known catalytic properties SnO$_2$. Our data show that surface oxygen vacancies are at the origin of such 2DES, providing key information about the long-debated origin of $n$-type conductivity in SnO$_2$, at the basis of a wide range of applications. Furthermore, our study shows that the emergence of a 2DES in a given oxide depends on a delicate interplay between its crystal structure and the orbital character of its conduction band.

The unmasking of English dictionaries by R. M. W. Dixon

Reviewed by: The unmasking of English dictionaries by R. M. W. Dixon Patrick Hanks The unmasking of English dictionaries. By R. M. W. Dixon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 258. ISBN 9781108377508. $24.99. R. M. W. Dixon is one of the world’s most original, thought-provoking, and productive linguists. He has written studies of the aboriginal languages of Australia, South America, and elsewhere. His theoretical work, in particular A new approach to English grammar on semantic principles, which appeared in 1991, played an important role in reintroducing the notion of meaning to linguistics after it had been lost sight of during the heyday of generative grammar. Now, he has written a characteristically robust book on English dictionaries. It is with some regret, therefore, that this review must report that, although D has an important point to make, he has written a muddled book—or rather, two quite different books in approximately alternating chapters. The important point that D wishes to make is that English dictionaries in general—even dictionaries aimed at foreign learners of English—fail to provide guidance on the phraseology that is associated with each word. D argues that ‘[a] dictionary should tell you when to use one word rather than another’ (his very first sentence in an introductory section entitled ‘Prologue: The work in advance’; p. ix). Chs. 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 13, and 15 develop this argument. Interspersed with these are seven chapters (4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, and 14) that constitute a historical survey of English monolingual dictionaries. Neither the historical survey nor D’s polemic on what dictionaries ‘should’ do benefits from being juxtaposed in this way. Let us look first at the historical survey. D’s main contribution here is to correct the widespread misconception that the first monolingual dictionary in English was Robert Cawdrey’s Table alphabeticall of 1604. Eight years earlier, in 1596, Edmund Coote had published The English schoole-maister, part of which is devoted to glosses of about 1,680 words recently imported to English from Latin. D attributes this error of historiography to the American lexicographer Mitford M. Matthews (1933). In actual fact, the error (if that is what it is) can be traced back to James Murray’s Romanes lecture of 1900. Within lexicography, two very different approaches to recording and explaining the lexicon of a living language may be distinguished. In both cases, the aim of the lexicographer is to compile an inventory of the words in a language. The first possible approach is to explain the meaning of words in light of their origin and history. The second is to establish the meaning of each word in terms of its present-day usage. Both are valid—for different kinds of dictionary users—but only the second of these approaches is relevant to D’s polemical aim, which means that almost half of his book is irrelevant to his declared purpose. Nevertheless, there is a point to be made here, although it could have been made more succinctly. The extraordinary fact is that during the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the belief became established that etymology guarantees meaning. Putting it another way, scholars working on the lexicon, having noticed (correctly) that in contemporary languages many words have several different meanings, assumed (incorrectly) that the oldest meaning of a word would be its most literal meaning. For this reason, for over 300 years armies [End Page 460] of lexicographers in all of the major languages of Europe have attempted to trace and record older uses of each word and to arrange them in some sort of coherent order. Insofar as people want to read the literature of the past, this is a useful exercise—though it has nothing to do with D’s argument that ‘a dictionary should tell you when to use one word rather than another’. To appreciate the point, the reader only has to consider the recorded history of the meanings of thousands of everyday English words such as awful (which is no longer normally used to mean ‘full of religious reverence’), nice (which no longer means ‘ignorant’), camera (which no longer means...

Assessing Dynamics of Change in Peacekeeping

This short contribution makes three points. The first point is simply to observe the extraordinary fact that the United Nations still exists. The UN has faced existential challenges, not least the ...

Anomalous Decimeter Radio Noise from the Region of the Atmospheric Front: I. Characteristics of the Detected Radio Noise and Meteorological Parameters of the Frontal Cloudiness

An extraordinary experimental fact is presented and analyzed, namely, a rather intense broadband radio noise detected during the passage of an atmospheric front through the field of view of UHF antennas. Local atmospheric properties and possible sources of the extraordinary noise, including the thermal noise from cloudiness and extra-atmospheric sources, are considered. A conclusion is made about the presence of an additional nonthermal source of radio noise in the frontal cloudiness. According to the proposed hypothesis, these are multiple electric microdicharges on hydrometeors in the convective cloud.

Emilia by Shakespeare's Globe

Reviewed by: Emiliaby Shakespeare's Globe Eleanor Rycroft EmiliaPresented at Shakespeare's Globe, London, 08 10– 09 1, 2018. Written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm. Directed by Nicole Charles. Designed by Joanna Scotcher. Costumes supervised by Lydia Crimp. Music composed by Bill Barclay. With Leah Harvey (Emilia One), Vinette Robinson (Emilia Two), Clare Perkins (Emilia Three), Jenni Maitland (Countess of Kent and others), Carolyn Pickles (Henry Carey and others), Charity Wakefield (William Shakespeare and others), Sophie Stone (Margaret Clifford and others), Shiloh Coke (Anne Clifford and others), Anna Andresen (Mary Sidney and others), and others. In Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum(1611), Emilia Lanier reshaped a number of poetic genres to place women at their heart, dedicating the work to Queen Anne and the great women patrons of her day and then envisioning religious and country house poetry through a feminist lens. Barbara K. Lewalski asserts that Lanier's work rewrote "patronage in female terms, imagining for the poet Lanyer a family of maternal and sisterly patronesses who will honor and reward her celebrations of them and of the female sex" (106). In Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's new play a similar celebration of this remarkable woman took place, Lanier finally, and deservedly, taking center stage. The performance elements were deceptively simple. To distinguish between genders in an all-female cast, female characters were dressed in blue and male in red. The scheme was mirrored in the mammoth bookcases that made up the set, although here the red far outweighed blue. In a nice touch, Emilia was at one point given a blue-boxed gift by a suitor, placing it immediately on the shelf where it was subsumed by the books. There were also two library ladders onstage, but these were barely used and came to stand for the lack of mobility in the society into which Emilia was born. On the balcony was a huge circular wooden bookcase of red spines in which Emilia's Muses sat in the first scene; her own "Wooden O." The idea, too, was simple—a dramatization of the life of Emilia Bassano, later Lanier. English Literature undergraduates may become aware of her poetry on their early modern literature modules, perhaps reading some of the more startling stanzas of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. That she was the first woman to declare herself a poet tends to be assimilated among all of the extraordinary facts of the period. But to dislocate her life from her peers and to treat it as a subject in its own right is to accord [End Page 703]her astonishing achievements the respect that they merit; to ensure that she does not, like the gift, get lost among the books of men; to give Lanier her proper place. Malcolm's play is so much about place, and finding one. Young Emilia is repeatedly told by her superiors to remember her place as she emerges into womanhood: "As I grow, I must shrink," she says. At the beginning of the second half, disoriented and wandering Bankside after the tragic death of her only daughter, she finds a seedpod on the shore. It is foreign, too large and lovely for this country, and Emilia wades into the Thames to hold it. Seeds are a motif of the play, the seeds of children, of ideas, of desires for more. Sometimes Emilia is seeded by others: a sense of being colonized is her reaction to finding out she is pregnant by her lover, Henry Carey, for instance, but it also happens when William Shakespeare— Emiliadramatizes the theory that Lanier is the Sonnets' "dark lady"—hijacks her words and plants them directly into the mouth of his fictional Emilia in one of Othello's most famous speeches. Where can Emilia lay roots? How can she grow? What is the least hostile environment for a literary woman of color—in this play her heritage is African, not European—at this time? Malcolm's Emilia struggles to find her place, either in her childhood home with the Countess of Kent, at court, as Carey's mistress, or as wife to Alphonso Lanier. She is told she lacks a place because she has not understood how the system...

CHISA – Worldwide Meeting for Chemical Engineers in the Heart of Europe

AbstractNo abstract.

«Apocryphal Nightmares». Observations on the Reference to Damascius in The Nameless City by Howard Phillips Lovecraf

In his tale entitled The Nameless City, Howard Phillips Lovecraft includes unspecified «paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius» among the «fragments» of the «cherished treasury of daemoniac lore» of the protagonist In the present essay, I suggest that there is a connection between this unusual reference and a note in the writer’s Commonplace Book, which refers to the notice by Photius (Bibl. cod. 130) on a lost work by Damascius that nowdays is generally referred to as Paradoxa and assumed to consist of a variegated collection of extraordinary stories and facts. I, therefore, delineate a general presentation of the testimony by the Byzantine Patriarch (very probably only indirectly known to Lovecraft), upon which I attempt to bring into focus the motivations that led the Providence to make the writer insert the name of Damascius in the fantastic plot of his story.

Introduction: Science and Literature Special Isssue

The most extraordinary fact about the need for a discussion of the relationship of Science and Literature, is that it needs discussing. The strangeness of the idea can be more fully elaborated if we consider it next to two other great conjunctions, Science and History and Science and Philosophy. The former, Science and History, was in existence even before Science and History acquired their present disciplinary panoplies. There is a well-documented story of how history was used in understanding the work of early modern natural philosophers, for example, or how History of Science itself emerged as a coherent modern discipline within the Twentieth century (Kragh 1989, pp. 1–19). The latter conjunction, Science and Philosophy, had its origins in the birth of systematized thinking. From there, it has only grown stronger. In these cases, there seems to be no need to establish the necessity of the rapprochement or argue for its inevitability. What is then the differentiating factor for Science and Literature? What is the reason that two such broad and archetypical fields of study are only cautiously approached together? Or to be more provocative, why aren’t there Departments of Science and Literature alongside the venerable History and Philosophy of Science Departments and Programs? These are of course rather rhetorical questions. But in the next few pages, we will try to take them at face value, in order to show how this special issue of Science & Education tackles the subject of Science and Literature. A first attempt to examine the apparent incompatibility of Science and Literature is to consider their relationship historically. It could be the case that what we today call Science did not intersect with Literature, in their evolution towards modern disciplinary status. But recent scholarship has done much to dispel such notions. Even in the case of exemplary figures of early modern sciences, such as Galileo Galilei or Nikolaus Copernicus, it has

An evolutionary approach to discover intra- and inter-class exceptions in databases

Data mining algorithms produce information of a statistical nature that contains accurate and reliable knowledge. However, in many cases these algorithms do not discover hidden facts which may be interesting to users. Therefore, the recent aim of knowledge discovery in databases KDD is to expose patterns that are exceptions to the existing knowledge. Exceptions are considered interesting as they add extraordinary facts to the knowledge base and create an incentive in users to re-examine their decisions. Discovering exceptions along with the decision rules increases the quality of decision making in those rare circumstances where the rules are not applicable. This paper is an attempt to devise a framework to discover exceptions using an evolutionary approach. In this work, we have categorised exceptions as inter and intra class. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.

Freud in the National Portrait Gallery

Freud in the National Portrait Gallery Michael Molnar (bio) There’s no art To find the mind’s construction in the face. —Macbeth I.iv During the afternoon of September 13, 1908 Freud visited the National Portrait Gallery in London and jotted down one and a half sides of unsystematic observations which he entitled Notes on Faces and Men. These notes have been published and discussed elsewhere (Molnar, 1998, pp. 41–2; Tögel, 2002, pp. 250–255). My intention here is to investigate their origin and context. For good reason it is the first line of the notes that has attracted most attention: Shakespeare looks completely exceptional, completely unenglish Jacques-Pierre (Molnar, 1998, p. 41). This is the earliest hint of Freud’s uncertainty about the authorship of Shakespeare, long before the 1920s and 30s when that theme would develop into something of an obsession. Though my interest here is not in following that development forward, but in looking backwards or sideways at its repercussions in terms of Freud’s life at that period, that future inevitably casts its shadow over this account. The notes on the portraits were written on a single sheet of the large, approximately foolscap size paper that Freud favored. Since the sheet was not folded, he probably wrote them up later that day, perhaps that evening back in his room at Ford’s Hotel [End Page 107] on Manchester Street. This conjecture is founded on entries in Freud’s small notebook for summer 1908, which, along with the rest of his notebooks for that period of his life, has only recently been transcribed and is now being prepared for publication (Fichtner and Hirschmüller, 2011 p. 142). It gives us the immediate record of his visit to the gallery, a short list of some of the portraits in the gallery, and last of all “Chandos Pt Shakesp” (Fichtner and Hirschmüller, Bl. 7.16r). In the switch from notebook to manuscript this last entry has become the first, and in the process acquired its puzzling commentary. Thus it dominates, and sets the tone for, the other notes, on less obviously exceptional, more English portraits. Above all, this first entry implies that extraordinary facts or conjectures about a person may be read in their face. But these are telegraphic notes: there is no instruction how to read appearances, that is, no science of physiognomy. As it stands in these notes, Freud’s reading of the portraits comes across as intuitive, although clearly reinforced by previous and external knowledge of the sitter. A year later, in a letter to Ernest Jones, Freud would explain “Jacques-Pierre” as a “derivation [ . . . ] given to me by a very erudite old gentleman, Prof. Gentilli, who now lives in Nervi” (Paskauskas, 1993, p. 32). That source is less an authority than a mystery in itself, for the old gentleman is so obscure as to be historically invisible. But the fact that Freud was corresponding on this question with Jones means that this was not just some casual etymological joke. Afterwards “Jacques-Pierre” disappears from view and it would be another decade before a better-documented contender for the authorship, Edward de Vere Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, appears. Though English, de Vere was a scion of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and thus also French by surname and origin. And that raises the question of nationality. What are the implications of a French rather than an Anglo-Saxon derivation? And were there any racial considerations behind Freud’s conjecture? Obviously only a native English speaker could have written Shakespeare’s works. Hence the authorship question Freud raises is one of cultural influences. If his, and Gentilli’s, conjecture is valid, one must accept that the greatest work of [End Page 108] English literature has foreign origins. Well then, and so what? If that alone were Freud’s point, he would be pushing an open door: textual scholarship reveals the numerous classical and European sources of Shakespeare’s work. But the point was the man, not the work. This is clearly a question of flesh and, vitally, of blood. There is a second reference to Shakespeare near the end of the manuscript: Shakespeare is...

High Technology Industry In Israel

News is frequently heard about the Arabian world regarding different types of conflicts brought about by different motivesfor example, by religious, ethics, and/or cultural (as well as others). Nevertheless, when the name of Israel is spoken, an extraordinary fact must also be considered: the fact of the amazing development in high technology that its industry has presented recently.

The frontier in the Egyptian myth of the state: A Nubian perspective

there was... an unwillingness to accept that Rome had any boundaries. That feeling derived perfectly rationally from certain ideological principles. It is an extraordinary fact that no Roman geographic description or map tells us where the boundaries of empire actually lay or whether there were ever any marker stones. It is true that two places are marked as fines Romanorum on a section of the Peutinger table depicting Syria and Mesopotamia... these fines look as if they were the boundary between the provinces and a client state (possibly Palmyra), since underneath one is written fines exercitus Syriaticae, showing where the military responsibility of the Roman army ended. It could have been a trading post as well, since the words commercium barbarorum are also written... [I]deology is no guide to the reality of frontiers... there is no hint of a scientific assessment of the strategic advantages and disadvantages... On the contrary, it is the conventional cries of imperialism that are deafening.

The Jewish Writer in America

The Jewish Writer in America Eugene Goodheart (bio) The year 1953 was an extraordinary one in the history of American literature. With the publication of Saul Bellow's third novel, The Adventures of Augie March, American-Jewish writing entered and took center stage. His first two novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, had been critical successes; but Augie March was at once a critical success and a best seller, winning the National Book Award. "I am an American, Chicago born," the hero declares in the opening sentence of the novel. That he is Jewish is not mentioned, though there is no doubting Augie's identity as the novel unfolds. The focus on his Americanness and his birth in Chicago dispels any expectation that this may be another novel of a Jewish hero enclosed in a claustral shtetl psychology. The echo of Mark Twain's great novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the title suggests that Bellow sees himself in the great tradition of American writing. In considering William Einhorn, wealthy and crippled but politically powerful, one of Bellow's larger-than-life characters, Augie enters him on his "eminent list" of world-historical figures. He imagines one of Einhorn's disciples having to make an important decision and asking himself: "What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn think?" Against the philistine democratic view that the human "race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names," Augie insists on his "right to praise Einhorn," an epic character of his time. At the end of the chapter devoted to this "superior man," Augie finds himself "not in the center of the labyrinth but on a wide boulevard." There are, of course, no boulevards in the shtetl. Isn't this the achievement of Bellow—to take the Jew off the side streets and put him on the boulevard of the imagination? The titles of his first two novels are a measure of the imaginative leap he made in writing Augie March. No longer dangling man or victim, Augie in his swagger displays a confidence in his place in American life that verges on bravado. "[I] go at things as [End Page 93] I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way, first to knock, first admitted, sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." Even anti-Semitism fails to faze the youthful Augie, whose take on it is peculiarly American: "And sometimes we were chased, stoned, bitten, and beat up for Christ-killers. . . . But I never had any special grief from it, or brooded, being by and large too larky and boisterous to take it to heart, and looked at it as needing no more special explanation than the stone-and-bat wars of the street gangs or the swarming on a full evening of parish punks to rip up fences, screech and bawl at girls, and beat up strangers." How did Bellow manage the leap? Well, there is the matter of genius and temperament that goes beyond explanation. But genius and temperament alone do not guarantee recognition, let alone success. There is also the matter of the historical moment, the post–World War ii period. It is one of the most extraordinary facts of our democracy that the military may be in the social sense its most democratic institution. It is the place where men and women of different religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds mix in a condition of equality, sometimes under fire, despite the hierarchical structure of the military. Moreover World War ii was a war against the most pernicious racism and anti-Semitism in history. During the postwar period America became increasingly hospitable, though not without resistance, to the claims of its minorities to full cultural, social, and political enfranchisement. The war served as a rite of passage for Jews as well as for other ethnic groups. Bellow was a pioneer in literature; Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and others would soon follow. According to an anthology of American-Jewish writing published in the 1960s, the "breakthrough" meant not that "the Jew has caught up with America...

Filaments within the Perseid meteoroid stream and their coincidence with the location of mean-motion resonances

Positions of 17 filaments found inside the Perseid meteoroid stream by method of indices are compared with those of low-order mean-motion resonances with Jupiter and Saturn. By this comparing, the Jupiter and Saturn branches of the Perseid stream were identified. The existence of gaps in the distribution of the semi-major axes of the Perseids is confirmed using the more numerous material of a new version of the IAU Meteor Data Center Catalogue. Our integrations of the motion of particles in the Perseid stream lead to an extraordinary important fact. The found filaments are located in close proximity of strong resonances. They represent, with a high probability, increased numbers of particles gravitationally expelled from a resonant gap and (temporary) settled down in its close proximity.

DONOGHUE, P. C. J. & SMITH, M. P. (eds) 2004. Telling the Evolutionary Time. Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record. Systematics Association Publication no. 66. viii + 288 pp. Boca Raton, London, New York, Washington D.C.: CRC Press (Taylor & Francis), for the Systematics Association. Price £72.99 (hard covers). ISBN 0 415 27524 5

J. B. S. Haldane, famous for his quip about the Creator’s inordinate fondness for beetles, is also well known for his reply as to whether anything might make him abandon his belief in evolution. The response was to the effect that a rabbit found fossilized in Ordovician strata would shake his faith to the core. Haldane’s reply was hardly surprising; we do not find Ordovician rabbits any more than we do Devonian tulips or Cambrian dinosaurs. To the first approximation, the history of life shows an overall order that investigations of the fossil record continuously refine, but these days very seldom overthrow. In recent years, however, and perhaps as a distant echo of the corrosive relativism of the Kuhnian world picture of paradigm shifts, the old securities seem to have been eroded. One topical instance is the renewed questioning of whether the effect of the available sediment in a given geological interval, as well as other factors, such as Raup’s ‘Pull of the Recent’, do not conspire to distort completely any original diversity trends. Of equal, if not greater, importance, is the rather extraordinary fact that with few exceptions the estimated times of divergence that are based on molecular ‘clocks’ significantly exceed the palaeontological data points of first appearances. The implications are as obvious as they are intriguing. Could it be that the …

The making of extraordinary facts: authentication of singularities of nature at the Royal Society of London in the first half of the eighteenth century

This paper is concerned with the particular problems raised by observations of phenomena outside the common course of nature for their validation as knowledge. It examines to what extent the content of the reports and, in particular, their lack of intrinsic plausibility affected the methods used in their authentication and the assessment of testimony at the Royal Society in the first half of the eighteenth century. I show that literary strategies were usually necessary but not sufficient for the validation of these kinds of observations. Next, I discuss why visual representations were especially useful in establishing the singularity of the observations, but I point out that their high costs and other restrictions meant that they were not so widespread. In contrast I show that, for a long period of time, testimony was used in the majority of the reports as the true stamp of authenticity. I note, however, that the Royal Society accepted reports by authors of varied social status, level of education and occupation, and I discuss some of the factors responsible for the complexity of the handling of testimony at the Society. I argue against Shapin that in the case of reports of extraordinary phenomena, the competence of the reporter and witnesses was often more important than their social status. The increasing role of expertise in the assessment of observations at the Society become especially apparent by the middle of the eighteenth century.