A Point With Multiple Dimensions

I manage to confine my collecting to a few, discrete interests, though the temptation is always there to add another.  I admit I felt a tug as I read novelist Gary Shteyngart’s account of his obsession with expensive, mechanical wristwatches, sparked by Donald Trump’s rise to power over the course of 2016.  Yes, it seemed to him that the time is out of joint.

How almost irresistible when he writes lovingly about his four-thousand-dollar Nomos Minimatik Champagner watch with its “exhibition-case back” revealing its inner mechanics:

[It] is a riot of sunburst decoration, tempered blue screws, and a small constellation of rubies.  A tiny golden balance wheel spins back and forth, regulating the time . . . , and this action gives the watch the appearance of being alive.  It is not uncommon for some watch enthusiasts to call this part of the watch its “heart,” or even its “soul.”  (Shteyngart, 2017, p. 38.  Full citations to all reference are provided in the Sources section at the end of this post.)

But, no, collecting mechanical watches would be far too expensive and possibly smack of affectation.  Even the few interests I’m feeding are too many.

Nevertheless, there is a virtue to multiple interests because, at some rare moments, my interests intersect, suggesting there may be some sort of logic to my collecting mania, not simply a psychological need.  So it is with a recent purchase, a rather small Native American projectile point with a broken tip from New York.  Though certainly not of high quality nor expensive, this point is profoundly appealing because in it are met three of my collecting passions – points, minerals, and fossils.

This is a triangular Madison Point, an identification based on William A. Ritchie’s A Typology and Nomenclature for New York Projectile Points (1961, p. 33-34), which squares with what the seller asserted.  According to Noel D. Justice, Madison Points were part of many “cultural phases across eastern North America” during the Late Woodland period, probably dating from 800 to perhaps as late as 1350 CE (Justice, 1987, p. 224, 227).  Ritchie describes Madison Points as “very finely chipped by pressure flaking” (p. 34), though I assume that the artisan who fashioned this point used some direct percussion flaking initially to shape it.  Ritchie also notes, “Among the northern Iroquois the principal material employed was Onondaga flint from the exposures of central New York and the Ontario Peninsula.”  (p. 34)  Absent any provenience (beyond the geographic state in which it was recovered), I won’t make any such claims for this particular point.

Nevertheless, my point is manufactured from Onondaga chert.  This gray chert is often referred to as flint, though, as I have learned, geologists apply the term chert to all of those rocks that artifact and rock collectors tag with such terms as flint or jasper based on differences in color.  As Prothero and Lavin write, “The color differences are not only superficial, but frequently misleading, especially since heat treatment may change the color range of a particular chert.”  (Prothero and Lavin, 1990, p. 561.)

Chert has a geological life story understood in general, but apparently not in its smallest details.  It is a hard sedimentary rock composed of silica (silicon dioxide) in the form of very tiny crystals, either only discernable under a microscope (microcrystalline) or not even then (cryptocrystalline).  This material comes into being through what has been characterized as “an obscure chemical process”  (Roberts, 1996, p. 24) involving the precipitation of silica from solution.  Chert can be found as nodules, lenses, or beds depending upon the environment within which it forms.  Given its fine crystalline composition, chert fractures conchoidally, that is, “fracture faces have smooth, curved surfaces” with sharp edges (Ostrom and Peters, 2012, p. 12) which makes it ideal for fashioning projectile points, scrappers, and knives.

Assuming the chert in this point was found as a nodule, which is likely given its origin in the Onondaga Formation dating from the Devonian Period, it is also highly likely that the source of its silica was the hard silicon elements (spicules) that sponges secrete to give themselves structure and a means of protection.  (Maliva et al., 1989, p. 523)

From their analysis of thin slices of the chert from different sites in the northeastern U.S., Prothero and Lavin find that the chert in Native American implements can often be easily identified as to its place of origin.  I found their description of chert from western New York State particularly applicable.  They write, in part, of this chert:  “Small (0.1 mm in diameter) dolomite rhombs are abundant, but there are few large rhombs.  Fossils and pyrite are common . . . .”  (Prothero and Lavin, p. 570)

Two elements of that description ring very true for the point I have in hand.  First, there are the dolomite rhombs which are the rhomboidal crystals or impressions of those crystals left by some dolomite caught up in the geological process creating the chert.  The mineral dolomite is a calcium magnesium carbonate and is the primary component of dolomite, a biogenetic sedimentary rock.  Pictured below is a close-up (30x) of a small portion of one face of my point.  This chert, under magnification, appears less strongly colored than a more removed view would have it since the color is, I surmise, often the cumulative effect of impurities in the mineral.  I have marked several of the rhomboidal shapes that appear on the surface of this section of the point; these are, I assume, dolomite rhombs.

Then there are the fossils in Onondaga chert which is where another of my collecting interests finds play in this point.  Pictured below is the full point (minus, of course, its tip) with an inset showing a closer look at a small hole in its surface – a fossil mold.

Given the common occurrence of fossils in Onondaga chert, it isn’t at all that surprising that Native American stone artifacts fashioned from this material would, sometimes, contain a fossil or two.  Source of the mold in my point?  The seller suggested coral and he may well be right.  But, the impression in the point strongly reminds me of columnals from some types of crinoids.  These animals, also known as sea lilies, create long structures of “stems” topped with long branch-like appendages for food gathering.  Secreted calcium carbonate pieces (ossicles) provide crinoids with structure and protection; in the stem, the stacked individual ossicles are known as columnals.  Crinoids are still with us, but their fossil record goes back well before the Devonian Period, which means that, yes, they were around when and (based on my reading) where the Onondaga Formation was laid down.

Pictured below is a bit of a Devonian crinoid fossil (first image) I found at a site in Maryland exposing Needmore Shale (which has been stratigraphically correlated to the Onondaga Formation in the Devonian’s Eifelian Age, about 393 – 388 million years ago).  The arrow points to where some columnals remain (the grooves to the left of the head of the arrow are where columnals have been lost).  The columnal in the second image, the first one remaining in the stem, appears to match nicely the mold left in my point.

Sure, not conclusive evidence, but wonderfully suggestive.

Shteyngart’s New Yorker essay is, ultimately, quite dark.  As the presidential campaign unfolds in 2016, his need to buy watches spirals out of control; he is “in deep.”  I may be contorting his message, but when he writes of how people cope and coped in Putin-era and Soviet-era Russia (e.g., collecting deluxe shaving equipment or compulsively doing mental math problems), I read him as saying that, in a society out of joint, we turn to find refuge and security in “the particular and microscopic” because they are “the only things that could still prove reliable.”

He may have a point.


Sources

Noel D. Justice, Stone Age Spear and Arrow Points of the Midcontinental and Eastern United States, 1987.

Robert G. Maliva et al., Secular Changes in Chert Distribution:  A Reflection of Evolving Biological Participation in the Silica Cycle, PALAIOS, Volume 4, Number 6, December 1989.

Meredith E. Ostrom and Roger M. Peters, Wisconsin Rocks and Minerals, Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, ES046, 2012.

Donald R. Prothero and Lucianne Lavin, Chert Petrography and Its Potential as an Analytical Tool in Archaeology, in N.P. Lasca and J. Donahue, editors, Archaeological Geology of North America, Geological Society of America, Centennial Special Volume 4, 1990.

William A. Ritchie, A Typology and Nomenclature for New York Projectile Points, New York State Museum and Science Service, Bulletin Number 384, April 1961.

David C. Roberts, A Field Guide to Geology:  Eastern North America, 1996.

Gary Shteyngart, Time Out:  Confessions of a Watch Geek, The New Yorker, March 20, 2017.

Why Did Dad Collect All This Crap? ~ Thoughts of Mortality

I seem to be stuck in sand.  I recently wrote about it (Sizing Up Sand, A Grain at a Time), and, now, here’s another post that turns to sand (or ashes?).

In my last post, I noted that I had stashed several precolonial Mesoamerican obsidian blades for several decades in a trunk in my basement.  When I recently opened the trunk and dug out the blades, I also found, in one dark corner, a small jar that my wife had filled in the 1960s with sand she collected from Horseshoe Bay Beach in Bermuda.

She was taken by the beautiful, soft pinkness of the sand.  Besides, it was a memento of Bermuda.

Until recently, I, too, would have been drawn to the pastel pink sand and the vision it conjured up of a broad, curved beach lapped by gentle waves under a brilliantly blue sky.  But, as I extracted the jar of sand from its hiding place, an irresistible impulse took hold, born of my recent years of searching for fossil remains of microorganisms.  And so, in rapid succession, I opened the jar, scattered a pinch of sand on a picking tray, and slid the tray under the microscope.  A new world revealed.

At still greater magnification, some amazing objects came into view.  Yes, there were the shells of various foraminifera (including the ungainly, reddish ones of Homotrema rubra that tint the beach at Horseshoe Bay pink), some tiny gastropods, and myriad mollusk shell fragments.  But, among the most breathtaking specimens that I gently transferred to a microscope slide were clear, glassy, right-angled spicules from sponges:

and wonderfully colored sclerites, the hard, calcium carbonate rods that soft corals secrete to provide themselves with some firm structure and some modicum of defense:

(A useful introduction to the microscopic world of this Bermuda sand is Guide for the Identification of Carbonate Grains and Carbonate Producing Organisms, by Harold R. Pestana, Bermuda Biological Station for Research, Special Publication No. 32, 1993.)

This transformation of the Bermuda sand from a source of passive, decorative beauty or a journey’s reminder to a window on a breathtaking world full of the tiny remains of once living creatures is a curious thing.  Nothing about this biogenic sand changed from the day it was scooped into a jar to the day a sample was examined under the scope.  What has changed, over time, is me.  (I guess my wife’s view of it has changed; she gave me the jar without hesitation, no sentimental moment involved.)

I am reminded of a conceit (perhaps there’s a better word for it, but I haven’t found it) that I came upon in David Lodge’s Small World (1984), a wickedly funny novel skewering academics, academic life, and, in particular, academic conferences, which the novel likens to Arthurian questing.  One character, the young academic Persse McGarrigle, who has recently completed his MA thesis exploring the rather prosaic topic of Shakespeare’s influence on T.S. Eliot,  cleverly recasts the thesis during a conversation with several of his “academic betters” and a publisher.

“But my thesis isn’t about that, “ said Persse.  “It’s about the influence of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare.”

“That sounds rather Irish, if I may say so,” said Dempsey [one of those academic betters], with a loud guffaw.  His little eyes looked anxiously around for support.

“Well, what I try to show,” said Persse, “is that we can’t avoid reading Shakespeare through the lens of T.S. Eliot’s poetry.  I mean, who can read Hamlet today without think of ‘Prufrock’?  Who can hear the speeches of Ferdinand in The Tempest without being reminded of ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land?”  (p. 60, Warner Books paperback, 1991)

Of course, the publisher is quite taken with the work that Persse hasn’t actually written (just one of the many complicated trials Persse faces in the novel).

Though Persse's recast thesis seemed brilliant to me when I first read the novel, it’s actually also quite prosaic.  It’s a truism presented in a smart, academic guise – Eliot the writer influencing Shakespeare the writer – when, in fact, as Persse explains, it’s our reading of Eliot that influences our reading of Shakespeare.  Why should we be surprised at that?  When has it ever been otherwise with important works?  And it’s not just works of art, but all of life.  We are constantly reinventing, renewing, and reinterpreting the past.  Learn something new and what seemed long since settled may take on a new and different life.  We have a new slant on it.

So, yes, it’s a mundane observation that the jar of pretty sand became something else because I now know something else.  Is it better with my new take on it?  Not sure, but it’s different and, to me, more important.

The importance of this jar of sand comes from the seemingly endless array of calcium carbonate microstructures it contains.  Admittedly, the audience that might appreciate this aspect of it is damned small.

And there’s the rub because I’ve been wondering what ultimately happens to this jar and the other jars that occupy a drawer or two in one of my cabinets, and, for that matter, all of the fossils that sit in other drawers, in trays, on shelves, and, further, the little drawers full of microscope slides labeled (usually carefully) as to their contents.

What happens if (more likely, when) I fail to break up my various collections, “deaccessioning” them, if you will, by giving some away and tossing the rest?  Selling some specimens or giving some to a museum isn’t really much of an option since little of what I’ve collected is truly special in any financial or scientific sense.

So, in all probability, it’ll all be left for my children to deal with.  Maybe, just maybe, they will assign some sentimental value to a piece or two.  Perhaps this jar of pink Bermuda sand will revert to its decorative or its memento status and be placed on some shelf by one of my kids, because the pink is so lovely or because my wife collected it when she was a teenager.

Though that’s a somewhat reassuring thought, it probably wont happen.

Artist Roz Chast captured this perfectly in the two-page “Sketchbook” that ran in the April 4, 2016, issue of The New Yorker.  Titled Wonder-Land, the story traces how Chast “fell down a rabbit hole into the world of vintage matchbox labels for sale on eBay.”  The seductive array of matchbox labels that she explored ranged across the world and across the ages and she exclaimed, “I COULD NOT STOP LOOKING AT THESE LABELS!!!”

Ah, the irresistible siren’s call to the collector that resides in most of us . . . but Chast defied it, sanity, rationality prevailed.  She only looked!  She didn’t acquire!  The cost of the labels wasn’t the deciding factor, rather, it was the “hassle of ownership.”  And, at the next panel, I laughed out loud (awakening the dog in the next room) and then I sighed quite deeply (as did the dog before she settled back to sleep).  Though the hassles of ownership were critical to the decision to resist the collecting impulse, so was her vision of what would eventually happen to the collection.  This key panel shows her two adult children contemplating a trash can overflowing with bulging plastic bags.

“Why did Mom collect all this crap?”

“I have no idea.”

“When Time and Duty Permit” ~ Pursuit of Natural History During War

The intersection of natural history and war (particularly the American Civil War – 1861-1865) intrigues me.  Did men with a deep amateur or professional interest in natural history who were swept up into armies during wartime continue to pursue that interest while serving?  Yes, some did, at times even collecting specimens during hostilities.  Perhaps it’s not surprising they did, given the need to find respite from the stress and trauma of war.  (I wrote about this possible benefit from collecting in a post about Robert F. Scott and his ill-fated Antarctic expedition in 1912.  Although the expedition was not technically a military operation, I think it’s relevant because Scott and his men were, at the time, fighting for their lives when he led them on a fossil hunt.)

A new exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, titled When Time and Duty Permit:  Collecting During World War II, pays tribute to American soldier-scientists who, during World War II (1941-1945), collected natural history specimens for the Museum.  Located on the ground floor of the Museum, up against a side wall, it’s small and easily missed – a great shame.

When I delved into the background to the exhibit’s material I found some support for the notion that sending people with a fascination for natural history off to war might, at times, have some untoward consequences – perhaps making for distracted soldiers who forsake the war for the pursuit of natural history, or even leading them (when they’re able) to redefine their military duty to accommodate collecting.

During WWII, the Smithsonian took a proactive role in recruiting and training soldiers to collect specimens, presumably prompted by some of the exotic, tropical places to which the American military forces were being sent.  Soldiers interested in collecting specimens received the Smithsonian’s Field Collector’s Manual in Natural History, written by Smithsonian staff and published in 1944.  It was pocket-sized, to be sure (a convenient 4 ½ inches by 5 ½ inches).  Frankly, it’s striking how much the Smithsonian staff packed into the booklet’s mere 118 pages.  Users could read detailed instructions for collecting, preserving, labeling, and shipping an incredibly wide range of specimens, such as birds, mammals, insects, earthworms, mollusks, plants, fossils, and meteorites.  Specific procedures for dealing with certain kinds of specimens were covered, including how to skin mammals and birds, or how to create plaster of Paris jackets for fossils embedded in matrix.

The authors of the Field Collector’s Manual suggested that natural history collecting would provide “welcome and valuable recreation” for servicemen “as their duties permit.”  (p. 1-2)  It was expected that the upper reaches of the chain of command would look favorably on this activity.

It is believed that Commanding Officers will recognize the merit of those men who are seriously interested and will grant them the necessary permission to make small collections.  (p. 2)

I suspect they were a trifle optimistic in this regard, particularly in light of a couple of the stories which I recount in this post.  Anyway, the Field Collector’s Manual is an interesting little volume.  (I found a copy recently on eBay.)

Of the six soldier-scientists recognized in the exhibit (wait, that’s not quite right, not all of them were soldiers, more on that in a moment), only one, Sammy Ray is still living.  Ray, born in 1919, had recently graduated with a degree in biology from Louisiana State University when he joined the Navy as a pharmacist’s mate first class and served with the 1st Marine Division.  Trained as a bird zoologist, Ray was recruited by Smithsonian Assistant Director Alexander Wetmore (shortly to become Secretary) to collect for the Museum.  When the 1st Marine Division was sent to the South Pacific, Ray proved to be a singular asset sending the Museum 171 exotic birds.  The exhibit displays a few of his specimens which, despite the passage of roughly 70 years and their obvious death poses (Ray’s handiwork), still radiate vibrant colors.  (In my picture taking, I am invariably defeated by glassed-in displays.  The pictures below are no exception.)

Ray acknowledged the invariable tension between his military responsibilities and his natural history work when he wrote to Wetmore that he would collect specimens “when time and duty permit.”  Despite being in combat zones, Ray appears to have a struck a balance between duty and collecting that seems to have given collecting a fairly wide range of play.

In one incident, his pursuit of birds took him deep into a mangrove swamp where darkness overtook him before he could return to camp.  After spending an uncomfortable night in the swamp, he wandered back into camp the next morning only to find search parties having been assembled to search for him.  Hard to imagine this endeared him to his comrades or his superiors.  Though the exhibit asserts, quite properly, that, “For many soldiers, natural history studies provided a break from the stress of war,” those same “studies” came with their own set of stresses, particularly if the collector disappeared overnight.  Not surprisingly Ray’s commanding officer frowned on his collecting, but they struck a deal.  The colonel overlooked the bird collecting and, in exchange, the pharmacist’s first mate supplied him with medicinal alcohol.

In the exhibit, next to what is described as “box and tools typically used during World War II to collect natural history specimens,” is a picture of pharmacist’s first mate Ray.

Well, the meager equipment (scalpel, thread, presumably needle, etc.) shown in that box doesn’t reflect all that the Smithsonian provided some of its servicemen-collectors.  Ray was given a “collecting gun” – I’m thinking modified shotgun – which used “dust shot” to kill birds without seriously damaging their pelts.  “I was the most-armed non-combatant to ever hit the beach in the South Pacific,” he said.

After the war, he became a marine biologist, earning degrees from Rice University, and in 1957 joined the faculty of Texas A&M University Galveston where he remains.  Oysters have been one of his principal research focuses.

(Though Ray is featured in the exhibit, there’s not much background information provided.  I have relied on several pieces for my treatment of Sammy Ray, including the following:  WWII Navy Corpsman Collected Birds Between Pacific Theater Battles, Around The Mall:  Scenes and Sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and Beyond, July 13, 2012; and Sea Aggies Professor is Recognized by the Smithsonian Institution, Texas A&M University Galveston.)

Among the other men identified in the exhibit is S. Dillon Ripley (1913-2001).  Now, here’s another fascinating character.  Ripley, who later became Secretary of the Smithsonian, was born to wealth and privilege, and early on fell in love with birds.  After graduating from Yale, Ripley spent much of his time abroad, collecting birds.  Enrolled at Harvard in the early 1940s in pursuit of a doctorate in zoology, Ripley was hired by the Smithsonian as an associate curator of birds in 1942, but soon resigned to join the war effort as a civilian member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he was trained as a spy and a spy master.  (I must admit that I didn’t do due diligence on Ripley having relied, for better or worse, on a delightful profile published in The New Yorker on August 26, 1950, titled Curator Getting Around, by Geoffrey T. Hellman.)

Stationed in such places as India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Ripley did not ignore birds.  Looking back, he said, “I thought about birds all during the war.”  Of Ripley and another Smithsonian scientist who joined the OSS, Herbert G. Deignan (1906-1968), the exhibit notes:  “During their free time, they collected the local flora and fauna to study and send back to the Museum.”  I wonder about the implied secondary status of collecting to duty in that sentence.  Geoffrey Hellman in his New Yorker piece certainly offers that Ripley approached it differently.

The fact that ornithology, like archeology and butterfly-collecting, has often served as a cover for espionage and other extraterritorial political activity constitutes, in his [Ripley’s] opinion, a regrettable subordination of the affairs of birds to those of men and a distasteful violation of the rules of proportion.  He has done his best to restore the balance.  Ripley is as patriotic as the next ornithologist or aviculturist, and he has functioned with airy competence both as a political observer and as a secret agent, but in so doing he has on occasion reversed the politics-and-espionage-through-ornithology formula.  He once posed as a man of considerable political influence in order to gain access to an extremely esoteric birdy terrain in the Himalayas.  During the war against Japan, he took advantage of his position as chief of the Office of Strategic Services’ Secret Intelligence branch in southeast Asia to make an avifaunal survey of Ceylon.

Duty redefined.

And the Smithsonian reached an agreement with him, providing collecting equipment for the bird survey in exchange for the birds so obtained.  Among the tools he received was a shotgun (similar to the one sent Ray?).

The intersection of collecting and duty was not without its moments of revealing levity.  Among the birds Ripley secured for the Museum was a green woodpecker, a Picus chlorolophys wellsi under the following circumstances.  He caught the little woodpecker in Kandy (in Ceylon)

one afternoon in 1944 while tidying himself up for a cocktail party that was being given by Lieutenant General Raymond A. Wheeler, the American Deputy Supreme Allied Commander on the staff of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, head of the South East Asia Command.  At the time, Ripley was living, and shaving, in a palm-leaf hut a hundred yards from the site of the cocktail party, an outdoor affair.  He caught sight of the Picus while in mid-lather.  Dressed only in a bath towel, he grabbed his gun, rushed out, and hanged [sic] away.  [Clearly, “banged away” was what Hellman wrote, though I did enjoy the typo in this transcription.]  His towel fell off, and as he ran up to retrieve the bird, he noticed a number of officers and ladies, Martinis in hand, peering at him over some tea bushes that separated him from the festivity.  He joined them a few minutes later, and modestly advised Mountbatten, who had greeted him a trifle coolly, that the Picus, though up to then unrepresented in his collection, was not unknown to science.

In the picture below, taken in OSS quarters, Ceylon, 1945, Ripley (clothed) is second from the left.  (This photo was taken from the Smithsonian webpage announcing the opening of the exhibit.)

It’s a complicated business this mixing of natural history and war and it plays out in fascinating ways.