Platypus : 無料・フリー素材/写真
Platypus / Giles Watson's poetry and prose
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
|---|---|
| 説明 | PlatypusNodder is engaged today in paintingpieces of the platypus: the flat webof one foot, three meticulous studiesof that chobbling, wide-brimmed bill,the poison spur. We work froma sketch and skin, growing evermore incredulous. This must be some ingenious Chinese fakery,but I have macerated the wholein water, searched the thing forstitches, probed with a dubiousfinger – and now I dip a hesitantpen, anticipate my peers’ politestridicule, scrawl the description: a duck’s bill on the body ofa quadruped, a beaver’s furand tail; habits half mole, halfotter. “A degree of scepticismis not only pardonable butlaudable”: my curt disclaimer.Welcome to my laboratory. Poke it about for yourselves.Scrutinise from dorsal andfrom ventral perspectives. Draw in breath. Ask, inhushed tones, what othersecrets this prodigymay still be holding back.Poem by Giles Watson, 2014. Picture: NM, Volume 10. The earliest encounter between a white man and a platypus appears to have occurred in 1797, when Captain John Hunter observed an aboriginal spear one in Yarramundi Lagoon, near the Hawkesbury River, just north of Sydney. Hunter himself was a keen naturalist and a fellow of the Royal Society, and he supplied many specimens and illustrations to English naturalists. In 1798, he sent his sketch, accompanied by a skin, to the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle-on-Tyne. From here, they fell into Shaw’s hands, and he published his description of Platypus anatinus (flatfoot duck) in 1799. He rightly classified the creature as a mammal, but his description invited the incredulity of other scientists. The Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox (now better known to us as the man who paid for the human cadavers acquired by the murderers Burke and Hare) wrote in 1823: “It is well known that the specimens of this extraordinary animal first brought to Europe were considered by many as impositions. They reached England by vessels which had navigated the Indian seas, a circumstance in itself sufficient to rouse the suspicions of the scientific naturalist, aware of the monstrous impostures which the artful Chinese had so frequently practised on European adventurers; in short, the scientific felt inclined to class this rare production of nature with eastern mermaids and other works of art; but these conjectures were immediately dispelled by an appeal to anatomy.” See Brian K. Hall, ‘The Paradoxical Platypus’, in BioScience, March 1999. Because Shaw only had a sketch and a skin to work with, he had no way of discovering the most improbable-seeming fact of all: that the platypus also lays eggs. |
| 撮影日 | 2014-07-10 02:30:46 |
| 撮影者 | Giles Watson's poetry and prose , Oxfordshire, England |
| 撮影地 |