An exciting exhibition has just opened here in the Main Library at the University of Edinburgh –  Masterpieces III – highlighting items from the University’s collection from the perspective of science and medicine. It’s open from April 5th to July 6th, 2013 at University of Edinburgh’s Main Library on George Square on the lower ground floor with hours from 10am to 5pm Monday through Saturday. See the blog for even more information and images.

Since the themes of the exhibition are ‘Science as Art’, ‘Science as Innovation’ and ‘Science as Statement’, it was a perfect opportunity to showcase some of the Roslin Glass Slide collection. So, in the exhibition you can see 26 of the glass slides on display illustrating the diversity of the collection and highlighting the scientific and research interests of James Cossar Ewart and Professor Robert Wallace.

Hopefully you can visit the exhibition and see the slides and other items on display for yourselves. Enjoy!

The illustrated artistic representations of animals in the slides that I’ve been cataloguing have shown both an artistic romanticization and an attempted realistic depiction. Additionally, in pre-photography days it was important for breeders and scientists to have artists depict the high quality animals to show the traits of the best of the breed. It’s been interesting to see how the physicality of the animal compares between an illustration from the 19th century and a photograph from the 20th century. http://www.societyofanimalartists.com/

 
From bulls:

To cows:

Buffaloes…:

And boars!:

“Zebroid, zedonk, zorse, zebra mule, zonkey, and zebrule” –  these are the names of the offspring of any cross between a zebra, usually the stallion, and any other equine; however, the offspring of a donkey sire and zebra dam is called a “zebra hinny” or “donkra”, but are rare.

It was around the years 1894-95, when Scottish zoologist, James Cossar Ewart began his Penicuick Experiments in animal breeding on his private experimental farm where he conducted many pioneering investigations in genetics. His most famous experiments were related to telegony, which is the theory, accepted at the time by most scientists and breeders, that ‘a previous sire may so “infect” the dam served by him as to impress certain of his characters upon her subsequent offspring by other sires.’ Ewart’s experiments with a variety of species; however, were uniformly negative. One of the most famous experiments with telegony was Darwin’s lengthy citation of ‘Lord Morton’s Arab mare which first being served by a quagga produced a striped hybrid foal, and subsequently gave birth to an Arab foal as a result of mating with Sir Gore Ouseley’s Arab stallion. This foal, which is figured by Darwin, had striped markings that were said to resemble those of the quagga with which the mare had first mated.’ Ewart attempted to repeat this experiment; however, the quagga species had become extinct by that time, so he decided to use a Burchell’s zebra stallion which served several different breeds of mares which produced striped hybrid foals, called “Tartan Cuddies” by the people in the Midlothian area. One particularly fine hybrid of this pairing was “Romulus”. The mares were then bred to horses of their own breeds, but the resulting ‘subsequent foals’ never showed any evidence of The mares were then bred to horses of their own breeds, but the resulting ‘subsequent foals’ never showed markings or traits of the previous zebra sire. Ewart collected these findings into a book entitled The Penycuick Experiments (1899).

In addition to these lovely images of Ewart and Romulus, I found a couple of images of a zorse and a zonkey!

An audacious truth or an embellished fiction? History credits Sir Henry Alexander Wickham (b.1846, d.1928),  a British explorer, with bringing 70,000 rubber seeds from the plant, Hevea brasiliensis, in the Santarem area of Brazil to the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, London in 1876. These seeds would go on to be shipped to the Far East to establish rubber plantations expanding the rubber industry and breaking Brazil’s monopoly. The export laws in Brazil at this time did not prevent Wickham’s seed gathering and removal, but there is evidence that he may have misrepresented his cargo as ‘exceedingly delicate botanical specimens specially designated for delivery to Her Britannic Majesty’s own Royal Gardens at Kew’ in order to convince the Brazilian customs officials to grant him an export license. He had hoped to be sent to the Far East to help establish the new rubber plantations; however, Dr. Joseph Hooker, the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew refused to let him go.  Evidently Wickham had been promised £10 per 1,000 viable seeds delivered to Kew, but unfortunately he was only rewarded with £700 for his efforts. According to the website, Bouncing Balls, there are doubts to the veracity of his story and thoughts that he may have embellished his role. While it is known that he was in the Amazon at that time, there are questions to the collection and the shipping of the seeds. Regardless of what may have actually happened he is known throughout history as committing the world’s first act of bio-piracy by removing Brazilian rubber plan seeds, shipping them off to England and starting the rubber industry in South-East Asia.

While I’ve been busy cataloguing the scientific off-prints from the various institutes that have comprised the animal genetics programme in Edinburgh; with the start of the New Year I am moving on to catalogue the glass plate negative slide collection that makes up another aspect of the Towards Dolly project. There are c4000 glass slides, which we think were used as teaching materials, covering images of animals, plants, farming techniques and machinery from places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South East Asia among other places.

Instructing students, Wagga Farm, New South Wales, Australia, early 20th century

First, though, I’d like to tell you a bit about what a glass plate slide is and a bit of its history in regards to photography. The first collodion wet plate negative was made by the British photographer, Frederick Scott Archer in 1851 and Richard Leach Maddox, a British physician and photographer, made the first dry glass plate negative twenty years later in 1871. What is meant by these types of negatives? ‘Glass plate negatives comprise two formats collodion wet plate negatives and gelatin dry plate negatives. Both types have a light sensitive emulsion with a binder thinly layered on one side of a glass plate.’ The article, Handle with Care: Glass Plate Negative and Lantern Slide Collections at the Syracuse University Archives, is particularly useful in describing the history and technique.

Since I’m just beginning to catalogue the glass slides collection and have already found many interesting and diverse images – from a photograph of men loading horses in the Chicago Stockyards:

to an illustration of man-eating lions from Tsavo (Kenya) :

– I’m looking forward to discovering more fascinating things as time goes on. I’ll keep you posted!

In this first post of the New Year, I thought I’d start off with something fun, and while it’s not scientists performing interpretive dance in the 1950’s, it takes us in another direction combining archaeology and animals – back to the first mention of domestic birds in Ancient Egypt!

I came across J B Coltherd, a scientist at Edinburgh’s Poultry Research Centre’s article, “The Domestic Fowl in Ancient Egypt”, in Ibis, 108 (1966): 217-223 in the off-print series and discovered some interesting ideas on origin of chickens and geese in Egypt and that it could be reference by hieroglyphs depicting the different kinds of birds. In this article, he traces the birds’ history through trade routes and appearances of references in hieroglyphs from different time periods.

According to Coltherd, in 1966, ‘there is no recorded mention of the domestic fowl in Ancient Egypt before the Middle Kingdom (2134-1786 BC). Evidence for its existence there before this time is completely negative. The hieroglyph  which is found in the earliest inscriptions, and certain peculiarities in the mention of the indeterminate birds, led some early writers to believe that the fowl had already been introduced into Ancient Egypt at the dawn of history, by invaders from Mesopotamia.’

He illustrates the article with several examples:

A goose: A sentence on how four birds lay eggs every day:

and a general symbol for birds:

This article would certainly be fascinating to anyone interested in archaeology, Egyptology, as well as biology and animal migration. It would be interesting to know if anyone – scientist or archaeologist – has found any more specific and current information on when domestic fowls were introduced to Egypt. Any ideas – please post!