Right - I'm aware I haven't had a chance to write anything for ages because of work, and I'm shortly going away on a long holiday, so I didn't want to leave you lot with nothing for two months. As a result I have written the update below to tide you over, which also includes
A GUEST WRITER...
(Also thanks for the kind words above from Soverihn and to Umbric Man for updating the ENA wiki article).
Part #209: In the Blood
“No, for the millionth time I am not getting a Quistext node. It’s a silly exhibitionist fad that’ll be forgotten by next year, who’s going to go back to glorified telegrams when we have Motext? Jocasta Smith and her little helpers can keep their stupid American campaigning ideas to themselves, I’m not going to sink to their level. DBH.”
—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)
*
(Dr David Wostyn)
I hope you have received our last few consignments intact. It’s been twenty minutes now since the team entered the building and I haven’t heard anything from them...of course, unless things proceeded faster than Captain MacCauley estimated, then if I had heard anything at this point it would probably mean something has gone wrong. Anyway, we’ve just uncovered a section of the library with some scientific works, I’m not sure if those belong to Mr Batten-Hale or another inhabitant of the house, but they should be interesting...
*
From: “No Hermit’s Play: The Impact of Scientific Discovery on World History, Religion and Politics” by Dr Jason Markham and Dr Philippa Williams” (1988)—
The nineteenth century was a dramatic period of changes for many fields, most of which (as mentioned elsewhere) have been subjected to considerable attention for their impact upon human society. Only a fool would deny the obvious fact that the advancement of lighter-than-air flight—and the baby steps of heavier-than-air flight—have transformed our world beyond any of our ancestors’ recognition. Much the same is true of the development of submersible craft, or the creation of counting engines and their impact on mathematics from ballistics to population modelling. Yet there are other fields where developments may be more subtle. Advances in chemistry, though certainly not as low-profile as in some areas, failed to provide any hints for the shocking, game-changing ‘Scientific Attack’ before it appeared at the end of the century. Much the same was true of the developments in physics that attempted to refine an apparently coherent and complete science, yet (in the later words of Alfredo Gustini) ‘every bit of trimming and sanding and polishing the pedestal of the perfect statue of Physics only revealed new cracks below’. When the nineteenth century ended, this was still no more than a series of disquieting problems—none could foresee the day when it would set the world alight—in the case of some parts of it, literally.
Even physics, however, has arguably had more scholarly attention devoted to its nineteenth century history than biology. Yet here we argue that the impact of biology upon nineteenth century society and politics was huge, even if it was below the Photrack.[1] We shall even go as far as to say that biological developments in this century played a role in the rise of Societism—and unlike the majority of lazy, headline-grabbing comparisons of this type which have inevitably proliferated since the Black Scares, we will attempt to prove it.
In many ways of course biology was already politicised. The heroic work by many in the eighteenth century to discover and classify new plants and animals around the world had ultimately, perhaps inadvertently, given birth to Linnaean taxonomy and the destructive ideologies inspired by it: Jacobin Racism (often unfairly called Linnaean Racism) and later Burdenism. Religion, already peripherally involved in the above arguments, was dragged to the forefront with Frederick Paley’s Theory of Environmental Breeding about a third of the way into the century. We should remember that controversy over Paleyism has always been exaggerated by hotheads on both sides. Commentators like Philip Bulkeley might have described Paley as ‘tearing down the Great Chain of Being and replacing it with a tug-of-war’ but Paley’s original theoretical framework did not precisely deny the old picture of the Great Chain of Being. Indeed, his idea of ‘environmental niches’ arguably resembled it in some ways, save perhaps the strict sense of hierarchy. His theory merely removed the
static nature of old conceptions of the Chain, replacing it with a
dynamic system in which individual creatures and strains could move in and out of different niches. If an isolated island was struck by a disaster that killed most links of the chain, Paley argued that the old idea would suggest that life would die out altogether, but everything researchers and explorers had discovered since then contradicted this idea of ‘the False Fragility of Life’. Instead, he claimed that examples of island dwarfism and gigantism showed that creatures would change to fill all the available niches, effectively restoring the Chain from scratch:‘The True Resilience of Life’ as he dubbed it.
One comparison that was made at the time illustrates the increasing collaboration between Paley and the Darwin brothers who had once been his rivals. Paley observed a demonstration of asimcony, the science to which another member of the Darwin family had devoted his life. He saw a village fete in which a new shorter-exposure time plate was demonstrated in an asimcon of a dance: whereas with the older plates the dancers would have had to artificially remain frozen mid-step for the asimcon to be captured without blurring, the new technology (though in the event if proved prohibitively expensive for the day) could capture an action shot of the dancers as they sidestepped and swung and swapped partners. The asimcon looked almost identical to the old one of the artificially frozen dancers. “Previously,” Paley argued, “we had looked at our asimcon of all the life on this world and said ‘aha, everything is standing still in its proper place’. We failed to see that our asimcon only shows one frozen moment in a great, ongoing dance, as partners are switched from one niche to another, new dancers join the dance floor and others retreat from it, but the dance, the overall structure, remains the same—and if we took another asimcon it would look much the same, seemingly showing nothing has changed. But it has.”
Paley’s theories were also reflected in the consequences if mankind artificially changed the niches: for example a study by the French Paleyite Gaston Fournier examined the wildlife near a polluting factory that operated during Bonaparte’s and Malraux’s rule, was shut down under the Verts and then renovated and restarted a few decades later. Fournier showed that a local species of white butterfly almost exclusively turned black when pollution had done the same to the silver birch tree trunks that was its habitat, yet when the factory ceased production and the trees gradually turned white again, so too did the butterfly. It seemed evocative of the story in the Book of Genesis in which Jacob had successfully encouraged sheep to give birth to spotted lambs by having them mate in front of suitably spotted sticks. The French example allowed for more generations than the Genetic one, but it still seemed a highly rapid process.
Paley’s Environmental Breeding provided some explanation for how the butterflies had evolved: when the trees were white, more white butterflies survived to breed and had white offspring; when the trees were black, the reverse was true. Yet this only raised more questions.
How was this information passed to the offspring? And why was it not consistent? Not every child of a butterfly of a particular colour displayed that colour, and nor did mating black and white butterflies produce a halfway grey colour as some had hypothesised. Farmers, as well as breeders of cats and dogs, could tell scientists that inheritance was a tricky business. So too could genealogists, and there was a warning sign for the future. One of Linnaeus’ more outrageous claims, one that would remain debated in the light of Paleyism, was that humanity should not be distinguished from the animals, but should be counted among them. If this was the case, regardless of other implications, then what held true for the breeding of cats or dogs or butterflies should also hold true for humans. And that observation had the power to change the world—for better or for worse. If a trait could be bred into, say, dogs—mating together males and females with larger than average ears to produce a new large-eared breed—than who was to say the same could not be done for humans? Arguably, tragically, this had already taken place, with the health problems of many members of the Hapsburg dynasty having arisen from inbreeding. Some now advocated that control of human reproduction should fall to an external body with the intention of breeding away undesired traits such as vulnerability to disease, criminality and vulgarity. This dovetailed neatly with the ‘science’ of craniography which arose around this time, arguing that a personality could be mapped based on the shape of the brain, with some areas being more developed than others, and that this (incorrectly) could be detected based on the shape of the skull.[2] Craniography has finally died a death except in the minds of the most earnest conspiracy theorists (a trait which probably does not have an area of the brain associated with it) but Superhumanism[3] has proved more persistent. Nonetheless it is far less prevalent today than in the nineteenth century.
It was in this area that we see the impact upon the development of global political ideologies. Superhumanism was inextricably bound up with both race and class: some expressions of it, not all of them explicitly Burdenist, almost unthinkably married ‘undesirable traits’ with undesirable races and classes. Published hypotheticals might depict a city in which criminals were forbidden from breeding until the supposed inherited criminal trait was removed from circulation; but they might just as easily do the same with a city in which the lower classes were subject to the same treatment, or a white man on a desert island inhabited by Negroes in which only he is permitted to breed with the women generation after generation until he has blanched the resulting population.[4] This naturally led to Superhumanism forming the groundwork for clashes between existing ideologies: nostalgic Regressives dreamed of breeding away the working classes with their unruly new power, while Mentians instead castigated the upper classes as parasites who humanity would be better off without, and should be sterilised in turn. Racism was hopelessly, inextricably bound up with Superhumanism, even though the truly extreme Racist ideologies like Burdenism would balk at the idea of interbreeding between the races anyway. Only one ideology escaped unscathed—but we shall return to this later.
While society tore itself apart over the implications of Paleyian inheritance, the scientists were quietly getting on with their work in the background. The biggest question was simply stated but seemingly impossible to answer:
how did creatures pass on their characteristics to their children? If this question could be solved, it would go a long way towards explaining the strange and hard-to-predict patterns of inheritance that had been observed.[5]
Cell theory came to the forefront in the nineteenth century. Cells, so called because cork cells resembled the cells of a monastery, had first been observed by early microscopists like Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the seventeenth century. Van Leeuwenhoek had also observed the smaller animalcule cells (another early name was ‘ravdics’ from the Greek word for ‘rod’)[6] which were ignored for years before being rediscovered. As microbiology instruments and understanding improved, it became increasingly obvious that everything that lived was made of cells. Some tiny organisms had only a single cell, while others—including humans—had many. Individual cells could be removed from a multicellular organism and kept alive on a suitable medium, and could even sometimes be observed dividing under a microscope. But how was this accomplished? The German microscopist Joachim Kramer argued that the inner core of the cell—formerly variously known as the nucleus or caryus (the latter term of course applied to the core of an atom)—was fundamental to the process and renamed it the ‘cytoblast’ or cell creator. Kramer’s views were controversial, not least because, while the new development of microscopic asimcony showed that the cytoblast indeed transformed during the splitting of some cells, other cells were capable of splitting without needing a cytoblast at all. These included van Leeuwenhoek’s newly discovered animalcules, which were already beginning to be suspected as the agents behind many infectious diseases. Any theory of cell reproduction which ignored the reproduction of some of humanity’s most deadly enemies was clearly unfit for purpose.
This controversy, which raged from around the mid-1840s to the mid-1860s, was finally resolved when the Bavarian scientist Walter Schuster studied leucocytes or white blood cells.[7] Schuster was one of many researchers working around the new hospitals set up in Bavaria since Prince (later King) Amadeus became the new patron of the Knights of St John. He was interested in leucocytes due to an (accurate) suspicion that they were related to the body’s fight against disease, but he was also interested in the chemistry of the cytoblast specifically. He found that the pus around patients’ infected wounds contained many dead leucocytes for study, supporting his theory. He tried treating the cells with different salt solutions of his own making to break up their structure, and then allowed the fragmented cells to settle into layers, with the least dense components floating to the top. Later, the engineer Franz Rohde would assist him with the construction of a centrifuge for a faster and more effective approach to separating the components. Schuster’s work had many implications for biology, but in particular he was able to isolate the contents of the cytoblast, which he described as ‘blastin’ and later ‘blastic acid’. Later work by both Schuster and others showed that, while animalcules lacked a cytoblast, they still contained blastic acid—it was simply not in a separate compartment to the rest of the cell, reflecting their smaller size.
All fine and good: but could blastic acid really hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of inheritance? Scientists were sceptical. Later studies showed that blastic acid was composed of a mixture of phosphates, sugars and five illuftic [nitrogen-containing] bases. The five were rather unoriginally named A, B, C, D and E. The Scandinavian chemist Oskar Dahlin was the first to suggest that these five could be used to encode information. At the time this was regarded as a bold claim: biochemists were discovering more megalins[8] and the chantrics[9] that composed them all the time, not to mention the huge diversity of sugars. Surely there was far more potential among encoding information in these molecules instead. However, this objection was rapidly shot down when the Spanish chemist Diego Herrera responded to ‘What can you write with an alphabet of five letters’ with ‘By Lectel, I can send the whole text of Don Quixote with just one’. Just as a full alphabetic code could be built out of six ‘letters’ (for Optel) or one for Lectel, so too could a huge diversity be encoded in the five bases. Or rather the four. Work done in the 1880s showed that bases B and D were always found in the same proportion, suggesting they were paired with each other, but the proportion of A was equal to both C and E together. It was later shown that E was a slight variation of C only found in some blastic acid molecules, and there were unsuccesful attempts to reclassify it as ‘C*’. The existence of a code was thus suggested and the pairing principle supported by later experiments that managed to isolate individual illuftic bases and examine their behaviour. Nonetheless, the key of the
structure of blastic acid, and the role played by the apparently useless phosphates and sugars, would not be solved until the twentieth century.[10]
So blastic acid, a copy kept in every cell, was found to be where the information of hereditary was kept. Experiments with animalcules exchanging blastic acid and then expressing traits previously found in the partner was strong evidence for this. Yet
how the information translated to traits was still a baffling question. It would not be until the end of the century that sufficiently simple traits were isolated in studies of plants and flies for the relationship to be understood in even the most elemental fashion. The biggest breakthrough came when studies of blastic acid showed that the syzygic cells—eggs and sperm in humans—only had half as much blastic acid as normal cells.[11] This was further expanded upon when blastic acid was found to be collected in bodies called vaphisomes[12] which were visible during cell division: the vaphisomes were paired in normal cells, but the syzygic cells had only one of each pair. The new child formed from a syzygic cell from each parent therefore had one half of the parent’s blastic acid code, and if it was a randomly chosen half, that explained the complex patterns of inheritance. Further, the inheritance studies being performed on tulips by Christiaan Ingenhousz (grandson of Jan Ingenhousz, who had discovered photosynthesis) indicated that an organism need not display a halfway house between the inherited characteristics of mother and father, but that one might dominate while the other might remain hidden. Ingenhousz described these as profane and cryptic characteristics (open vs. hidden) and noted that the cryptic characteristics could re-emerge in future generations if the child happened to get two copies of the ‘weaker’ cryptic code and no copies of the dominating profane one. This explained atavism, the tendency for characteristics to skip generations, which had long puzzled genealogists. It nonetheless did not explain the relationship between individual characteristics and the apparently unsolvable blastic acid code.
This would not come until painstaking studies at the turn of the twentieth century which consisted of slicing up pieces of blastic acid and studying how far the charged molecules moved under an electric field: lighter, and therefore shorter, pieces moved more slowly. The code was uncovered and found to work on a three-letter basis: adding one or two letters frameshifted the code and made the trait fail as it produced gibberish, but adding three letters had much less effect as there was no frameshift. Further studies on animalcules by Viktor Losev finally showed the connexion between blastic acid and megalins. Losev used the analogy of programmable looms, which had been well-known in most of Europe for years but were still filtering through to the more isolated parts of Russia and remained an object of topical discussion. A punched card was inserted into a slot and the machine read the pattern of holes, a programme, and loomed the desired product accordingly. However, Losev pointed out, canny factory owners kept a metal template which could be used to make temporary punched cards without losing the original information and having to start from scratch. He argued that the blastic acid in the cytoblast itself, containing base C, was a template copied to make temporary ‘punched card’ blastic acid containing base E instead (for some reason) which was in turn ‘read’ by the cellular equivalent of a programmable loom, producing a megalin as its product. Just as a complex weave could be produced by a few holes in a punch card, an entire characteristic could arise from a megalin produced by blastic acid.
It would still be years before the individual teuches[13] were identified as sections of the blastic acid chain, and still more before the simplistic understanding would be transformed again by the discovery of the misleadingly named ‘junk code’ between the teuches. Nonetheless, it is at this point that we must return to the impact of this science upon the world. Superhumanism and other earnest ideologies aimed at selective breeding of humanity ultimately fell foul of discoveries by Ingenhousz, the American research Carl Powell, his Meridian rival Paolo Marquez, and many others. By the very nature of examining huge numbers of plants or animals over huge numbers of generations, they discovered that sometimes characteristics could arise from nowhere (or vanish) with no obvious connection to previous generations. Could these truly be atavisms hidden even more deeply? Early painstaking blastic acid studies suggested not: they really had emerged from nowhere by random chance. The proliferation of Lectel once again provided a handy metaphor: just as a slip of a key could result in a man buying 200 gloves for his wife rather than 20, a new ‘message’ could emerge from nowhere if the code became corrupted. Here, at last, seemed a mechanism for Paley’s Environmental Breeding: not only could Fournier’s black butterflies keep the white teuch safely hidden within if it proved useful again in the future, but they could develop that trait from nothing by this random emergence—which Powell named ‘metallaxis’.[14] This discovery effectively doomed any utopian effort at selective breeding to futility: even if the ‘criminal’ trait really existed as a teuch, even if it could be elimninated from a breeding population of humans, even if that human population was kept isolated—there was nothing to stop it re-emerging through metallaxis. According to Paleyism, any niche left open would eventually be filled—and there would always be a niche available for those who sought their own path around the law of the land.
Though this was not the sort of thing to provoke a dramatic and obvious confrontation, it unquestionably undermined many ideologies and was perhaps responsible for the failure of Mentianism to become as international as many of its most prominent supporters would have liked. Superhumanism and related ideas had shifted the framework of debate to isolated populations, such as a city or a nation, not unlike the Eden City idea of the Neo-Physiocrats. This in turn made ideological debate rather hidebound and unable to see a global population. Except one ideology.
Societism began as a rather obscure notion, one among many utopian ideals, scarcely distinguishable from the crowd. What brought it to the forefront of debate in so many nations, what promoted it to be the shadow hanging over the twentieth century? Many things, no doubt, and we do not seek to diminish the role played by Raúl Caraíbas in turning Sanchez’s vague dream into a coherent, functional mode of government and way of life. But unquestionably an undervalued part of the rise of Societism was that it fitted so neatly with the biological discoveries of the nineteenth century. That may seem strange to we moderns, so used to the idea of Societism clinging to outmoded ideas, means of mental classification scarcely more sophisticated than craniography (and perhaps even that, if some rumours are to be believed). Nonetheless, before the Final Society became calcified, its ideals were regarded as bold and modernist by many. Crucially, it was Sanchez’s notion of a meritocratic, flexible,
dynamic society that fitted so well with Paleyism and every discovery that supported it. Sanchez had argued that a class system was inevitable (like Paley’s niches, there would always be aristocrats, bourgeoisie and proletariat), but unlike the rigid and incapable system that had existed under the ancien régime, movement should be possible from one class or niche to another. Sanchez had claimed it was nonsensical to try to obliterate a class, as the Superhumanists on both sides had indeed found, and he had also stated that the root of many problems was the incorrect notion that aristocrats should be considered superior to proletarians, when in fact both roles were equally vital for society to function. So, too, Paleyians attacked old simplistic notions of the Great Chain of Being in natural terms—the Lion was the King of Beasts, but he would be nothing without the humbler and more numerous creatures he hunted for food. In reality the occupants of every niche were equally vital to keep the whole system going as a whole.
In this light, we can perhaps see why it was so compelling for many to regard the Societism of Sanchez—‘refined’ by Caraíbas—as reflecting the True Natural State of Humanity in the absence of everything that had happened to corrupt it. Unlike many such utopian claims it did not require people to live in caves or reject modern technology. And it could be shown to work—by definition it
must work, because it was how the natural world all around everyone was working right now. This lent it far more credibility than any radical Mentian plan to eliminate the ruling classes and establish rule by the proletariat—as the early Societist scientist Edgardo Suárez observed, ‘show me one natural society which has all prey and no predators, and then I will believe that is possible’.
The science of hereditary might be in its infancy, but it had already produced a deadly inheritance for the next century...
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From - ???????????
It begins in Lincolnshire, in the village of Grainsby. Robert Mumby had many children, but tragically, most of them had died, in a similar pattern to his father, also named Robert who had fathered many sons and daughter but had also buried a lot of them. One of his younger sons, one not expected to inherit much from a lowly agricultural labourer, was Richard Mumby, born in 1779. With few if any prospects at home except to be an even more dirt-poor labourer than his father, he took to sea, joining a merchant vessel. He would sail the seas at the height of the Revolutionary Wars, and the Russian Civil War. In 1799, he was arrested by the Romanovian faction who believed that the ship he was on was actually carrying supplies from Sweden to their Potemkinite allies. He was released in the spring of 1800.
This experience of war, and in particular the specific unpleasantness of a Russian prison, had Mumby rather eager not to experience anything like it again. He found new employment working on a merchant vessel primarily working in North America and the Caribbean. He might well have remained an Atlantic sailor and have retired to a quiet life in Liverpool, if it were not for a fateful night of drinking in New York in the summer of 1802.
Enjoying his shore leave, the twenty-three year old Richard Mumby began his night in one of New York’s many shore-side taverns. Moving on, he found some ladies of the night, and determined to make the most of his hard-earned coin, took them on a tour of some other drinking establishments. The money and ale flowed freely. But then another sailor, from a different crew tried to procure the services of one of Mumby’s female retinue. A flame of lust and booze kindled, and Mumby proceeded to have a rather a nasty brawl with the offending gentleman, which ultimately resulted in shots being fired. Nobody was killed, but Mumby was badly wounded. Without a ship’s doctor, he was treated at a hospital in the city, and the ship returned to Liverpool without him. So Richard Mumby was left there, in New York, without an Emperor to his name.
For a while, Mumby wandered the eastern cities and towns, becoming an itinerant farm-hand and labourer, working much in the way he had hoped to escape when he joined a merchant crew over ten years ago. He ended up settling in Pennsylvania, but was deeply frustrated about his situation. He wanted to go to sea again, but he had a reputation as a drinker, a whore-monger, and a brawler. Some would say a lot of sailors had these qualities, but Mumby was scarcely more than a beggar and hardly what captains looked for in a crew-member. Then in 1805, while he shivered in a hovel, he heard of news that the Empire of North America was going to war. They needed warm bodies to crew vessels of the American Squadron of the Royal Navy. Richard Mumby eagerly signed up, and his less than illustrious past was ignored in favour of his long experience at sea.
Richard Mumby never expected to be a soldier. But a soldier he became as he fought in the amphibious campaign of Admiral Byng. Having returned to what he believed to be his calling at sea, he was more enthusiastic than he had been in years. The campaign against the UPSA seemed to go from strength to strength. Then he and the rest of the Hanoverian army heard of the French invasion. The phlogistication of the King. The flight of Parliament to Fort Rockingham. The epic battle of Thermopylae-on-the-Downs. He heard that the French were advancing north, that they had burned Cambridge, and that Lincoln was next. Fearing for his family, he fought harder than ever. When peace came with the UPSA and the Hanoverians gained nothing except a confirmation of the Falkland Islands as British territory, he was consumed with rage. The news that the French had been driven out of Britain did little to console him, and neither did news that his one remaining brother and his children had survived the invasion. Mumby was disgusted with the British government’s weakness in the face of Lisieux’s France, and by its slack-wristed attitude to the UPSA. He dropped his dreams of returning to Britain and began to form plans of what to do when he returned to Pennsylvania. He fought for a while in Europe, but returned to North America with peace in 1810.
Not wanting to get entangled in a British war again, he joined the Pennsylvanian militia. The Province of Britannia was established within the Confederation of Pennsylvania, named in homage to the actions of British folk in resisting the French invader. He moved west, and found the flat grassland there pleasingly reminded him of the Lincolnshire’s own fields. He was transferred to the Britannia militia, and began by helping set up a fort on the frontier. In 1815, the Lakota War began, and as a soldier in service to the Empire, he fought against the Indians. The actions of the Americans in that war saw the Seven Fires Confederacy swell into the Thirteen Fires. However, Mumby found fighting the Indians very unsatisfying. He had begun to fall in love with the land, and with its people. In 1819, the Americans came to peace with the Thirteen Fires, and Mumby was one of a retinue of American soldiers protecting diplomats who were sent to negotiate with the Sioux. The result saw peace, but great tensions between the natives and white settlers. For a time after the peace, he was kept on commission and helped with the establishment of Fort Shuller in the Wisconsin Territory.
When he was discharged, Richard Mumby became a fur trader, putting the mercantile skills he had learned at sea to good use on the Plains. He traded throughout the Wisconsin and Othark Territories, but the largest centre of population and his main base of operations was Fort Hancock in Britannia Province. Entirely by accident, Richard Mumby, a man once considered only slightly better than a criminal was becoming a respected man, especially in Britannia. He became an agent of the Pennsylvania Fur Company, responsible for their assets in Britannia and by extension having a deal of influence beyond there in Othark and even over the border in Wisconsin.
Over the next ten years, Mumby would lay his roots deep in Britannia, building up connections with Pennsylvanians in the neighbouring province of Linneway, helping to establish forts and towns, navigating the complexities of good relations with the natives, and in general keeping shop. However, if there was one thing that Mumby noticed about the province, it was its sparseness. It was a province but it had barely any more towns than the entirety of Wisconsin Territory.
When war again broke out on the frontier, this time against the Superior Revolutionaries, Mumby once more took up arms. But he ended up fighting a battle he never expected. Recruited into a Pennsylvanian regiment, he found himself fighting in the Legion of the Restoration of Order, not against the Superians but against Virginians, mostly Marylanders. Despite being commissioned as an officer, Mumby was becoming tired of the military life, particularly disillusioned by fighting fellow Americans. In 1832, he marched into Fredricksburg and was one of the men who restored order in the imperial capital. Fortunately for Mumby, peace in the east came at the same time as peace in the west. Mumby stayed in Fredericksburg long enough to watch Dashwood’s execution, and finally returned to Britannia, tired of the long struggles of the Virginia Crisis.
On returning to Britannia, he built a log cabin near the shores of the Mississippi. This became the seed of Richard Mumby’s most obvious legacy. In 1835, he bought a substantial tract of land in that same area, helped by a friend of partly native origin who had been given quite a generous portion of land when peace was negotiated with the natives of Britannia. A small town was born on the land that Mumby’s friend had acquired, and that town became known as Mumby. Its position on the Mississippi River put it in an ideal position to trade with other outposts upriver, and even with natives in the Indian Confederacy. But Mumby also became one of the important outposts on the frontier, ideally situated to trade with other Mississippi settlements, a spot of American urbanity on the wild frontier.
Richard Mumby would spend the rest of his life as an Indian agent, working to ensure that the peace was kept between the white settlers and the natives. He himself had a native wife, who he had married many years before the Superior War. When he managed to get a treaty signed between the Pennsylvanian government and the Sauk and Fox natives, recognising their lands, he retired to the estate he had slowly built on the Mississippi River. He died peacefully in his sleep in 1844...[15]
*
(Dr David Wostyn)
Ah – my apologies for that – I understand one of the new men you sent us, a Sergeant Mumby, has been researching his own family’s history in this timeline...you see the pile had ‘hereditary’ written on it so I got it mixed up with my own notes on the science of hereditary...never mind.
[1] Radar.
[2] I.e. TTL version of phrenology.
[3] Eugenics.
[4] The last incredibly racist example was used (of course) in OTL by the Scots engineer Fleeming Jenkin in his criticism of early eugenic ideals; Jenkin argued that any favourable trait would ultimately be diluted out and the white man’s genetic input would not make that much impact in the long run.
[5] In OTL Gregor Mendel made an important breakthrough in genetics in the mid-nineteenth century (though his work was ignored for decades) because he happened to look at a very simple set of genetic traits in peas which obeyed the dominant-recessive rule in an easily observed fashion. The vast majority of genes interact in more complex ways and such a pattern is not so easily seen. Therefore, it can be argued in the vast majority of timelines that the chances of anyone stumbling upon the rules in this fashion are actually quite remote. The order of discoveries in TTL are thus rather different to OTL.
[6] Named ‘bacteria’ in OTL after
another Greek word for rod.
[7] A convergent name because it’s the obvious one--the layer containing leucocytes/white blood cells (the Greek name simply means white cells) is white in the separated cell mixture mentioned later.
[8] Proteins. So named in TTL because of their large size and molecular weight. In OTL megalin is the name of a specific protein.
[9] Amino acids (the OTL term only dates from the end of the nineteenth century). Derived from the Greek word bead, as in beads on a necklace by analogy to a chain of amino acids making up a protein.
[10] A, B, C, D and E are the OTL adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine and uracil respectively. Note that in OTL they were isolated amid many other biological molecules before they were found to be components of DNA, and thus their OTL names are rather happenstance and humble—adenine as it was isolated from the pancreas and ‘aden’ is the Greek term for that organ, guanine as it was isolated from guano, and so on. Also note that the controversy over DNA being ‘too simple’ to hold the information of life was much more persistent in OTL; in TTL Herrera’s point is much easier for scientists to grasp because of the recent switch from Optel to Lectel—going down in the number of ‘letters’ did not produce a less efficient way of encoding data.
[11] ‘Syzygic cells’ = gametes in OTL. Gamete means wife in Greek, syzygos means spouse.
[12] Chromosomes. Named for the same reason as OTL, that they dye very strongly in microscopic experiments – chroma = colour, vafi = dye.
[13] Genes. From the Greek word meaning book or issue (as in Pentateuch).
[14] Mutation.
[15] Credit for writing this section goes to, of course, Bob Mumby.
