Descrip­tion of Com­plex Sys­tems in terms of Self-​​Organization Processes of Prime Inte­ger Relations

The Project Guten­berg ver­sion of W.A. Clouston’s Flow­ers from a Per­sian Gar­den has been posted by Bar­bara.

Please enjoy. Unlike the copy pre­sented by Google Print, this new HTML edi­tion is 100% copyright-​​free.

We’re work­ing on a num­ber of Clouston’s other works, as I write this. Patience brings many rewards.

I don’t link to the New York Times these days, but my wife just showed me a pic­ture from an arti­cle enti­tled “Hun­gry Goats Atop a Tree, Doing Their Bit for Gour­mands”, By CRAIG S. SMITH, Pub­lished: Octo­ber 27, 2005. The accom­pa­ny­ing photo shows a num­ber of odd black ani­mal sil­hou­ettes, perched high in a tree in an arid clime some­where. I thought they were baboons until she told me: goats. Goats in a tree.

Why they’re in a tree is the sub­ject of the story. As is the eco­nomic import of their poop.

But I care not a whit for that. What came to mind, imme­di­ately. was an old pic­ture present in many biol­ogy text-​​books, and which I sus­pect is engrained in the engrams of many a sci­en­tist raised in the 60s: On the left pane, a sad lit­tle short-​​necked pri­mor­dial giraffe ances­tor, stand­ing beside a tree ten­ta­tively nib­bling the low­est leaves, look­ing long­ingly up into the higher branches. On the right pane, a robust, spot­ted mod­ern long-​​necked giraffe grace­fully defo­li­at­ing the ten­der shoots with a self-​​satisfied gleam in its eye — or is that a sly glance over to its sickly neighbor?

I sus­pect that this one image, with its accom­pa­ny­ing rhetoric of directed adap­ta­tion, informs many people’s (pro­fes­sion­als and lay­men) under­stand­ing of selec­tion pressure.

They ought to have a pic­ture of those goats, snack­ing com­fort­ably 20+ feet high in the flimsy branches of a tree, sit­ting right next to it.

at Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers tonight:

[just the one page, as I’m given it to work on]

…spoke of prin­ci­ples as old as his toi­let. He was read­ing, too, a loyal paper, loyal, at least, in those days,—the Jour­nal des Debats. Bow­ing, as we passed, he con­signed us, with a grace­ful wave of the hand, to the care of Pierre, the frot­teur. I took him for some frag­ment of a duc et pair of the old school; but, on putting the ques­tion to the frot­teur, who him­self might have passed for a fig­u­rante at the opera, he informed us that he was ‘Notre bour­geois,’ the mas­ter of the hotel.” It is quite won­der­ful to us how Miladi could have sur­vived to relate so shock­ing a meta­mor­pho­sis. Ovid has noth­ing half so strange and heart-​​rending.

The instances we have men­tioned are far from being the only ones in which her Lady­ship was “put out of sorts” by the Anglo­ma­nia, which, she would make us believe, is oper­at­ing at present as great a rev­o­lu­tion in the social, as was effected in ’98 in the polit­i­cal con­di­tion of France. All along the road from Calais to Paris, she sees noth­ing but “youths gal­lop­ing their horses in the cav­alry cos­tume of Hyde Park,” “smart gigs and natty den­nets,” “cot­tages of gen­til­ity, with white walls and green shut­ters, and neat offices, rivalling the diver­si­fied orders of the Wyatvilles of Isling­ton and High­gate,” in short, noth­ing but “Eng­lish neat­ness and pro­pri­ety on every side,” with one ter­ri­ble excep­tion, how­ever, “an Irish jaunt­ing car!” of which she chanced, to her infi­nite dis­may, to catch a glimpse. The sec­ond appear­ance that she makes in the streets of Paris, is for the pur­pose of buy­ing some “bon­bons, dia­blotins en papil­lotes, Pastilles de Nantes, and other sug­ared pret­ti­nesses,” for which Parisian con­fec­tion­ers are so renowned. Accord­ingly, she goes into a shop where she sup­poses that “fan­ci­ful ide­al­i­ties, sweet noth­ings, can­died epics and eclogues in spun sugar, so light, and so per­fumed as to resem­ble (was there ever such non­sense) con­gealed odours, or a crys­tal­liza­tion of the essence of sweet flow­ers,” are to be sold, but on inquiry she is told by a “demoi­selle behind the counter, as neat as Eng­lish muslin and French (what a won­der it wasn’t Eng­lish) tour­nure could make her,” that ‘we sell no such a ting,’ but that she might have ‘de cracker, be bun, de plom-​​cake, de spice gin­ger­bread, de mut­ton and de mince pye, de crompet and de muf­fin, de gelée of de calves foot, and de apple dumplin.’ Reader, Lady Mor­gan “was struck dumb!” She pur­chased a bun­dle of crack­ers, “hard enough to crack the teeth of an ele­phant,” and hur­ried from the shop. But mis­for­tunes never come sin­gle, and her lady­ship, though an excep­tion to most other gen­eral rules, was not des­tined to prove the cor­rect­ness of that one in this instance, for just as she was escap­ing from the place where she had expe­ri­enced the seri­ous incon­ve­nience of being “struck dumb,” she was struck in another way—viz. on the left cheek, by the explosion…