![The Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguins
The Sexual Habits Of The Adélie Penguins is a 100-year-old paper graphically describing the bizarre sexual practices of Adélie penguins written by George Levick, who joined Captain Scott on his Terra Nova expedition in 1911. He spent an entire Antarctic summer studying the reproductive behaviour of the species.
As a post-Edwardian gentleman, Levick was understandably taken aback by the “astonishingly depraved” acts he saw, and struggled to describe them. Douglas Russell, of the Natural History Museum’s zoology department, says “He witnesses things that profoundly shock him, to the point of being incapable of even writing them in English — he was so worried about it he started to encode it in Greek.” Nevertheless, he took to the task at hand and wrote in extraordinary detail of the “hooligan cocks … whose passions seemed to have passed beyond their control”.
Surrounded by tens of thousands of rampantly copulating birds - “sometimes more than once a day”, Levick notes with awe - he depicted a city under attack by delinquents on the verge: “Many of the colonies … are plagued by little knots of ‘hooligans’ who hang about their outskirts, and should a chick go astray it stands a good chance of losing its life at their hands. It is interesting indeed to note that, when nature intends them to find employment, these birds, like men, degenerate in idleness.”
He also gives accounts of apparent necrophilia, however, necrophilia, as Levick perceived it, is a human term, and therefore hardly likely to explain penguin behaviour. Low temperatures in the Antarctic did preserve countless dead birds and, male or female, if their frozen corpses happened to be assuming the position, a passing penguin could not pass up the opportunity to mount it. You can understand Levick’s suspicions.
Levick went on to witness what he struggles to describe as a kind of gang rape, with one female paralysed by the cold water [which is] spotted by [a male] and, “after a short inspection, he deliberately copulated with her, she being, of course, quite unable to resist him,” before six more try their luck, with varying degrees of success. The behaviours themselves can all be explained away now, of course, and are detailed here.
Levick’s thinly veiled judgement demonstrates a common practice that many fall into. “There is a dreadful habit of anthropomorphising penguins, dominantly because they are bipedal,” says Russell. Levick was therefore appalled by the behaviours he saw, holding the Adélie population up against human standards of morality: “There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins,” he comments at one point. One reviewer of Levick’s published paper put it well when he said in 1915: “The book is unique, and will appeal to… the public at large for whom these strange, erect, man-like little birds have a strange fascination.”
[Source]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/682d5469b1b8229ec1ea992f66d529d2/tumblr_mjxiq0Bzut1rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
The Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguins
The Sexual Habits Of The Adélie Penguins is a 100-year-old paper graphically describing the bizarre sexual practices of Adélie penguins written by George Levick, who joined Captain Scott on his Terra Nova expedition in 1911. He spent an entire Antarctic summer studying the reproductive behaviour of the species.
As a post-Edwardian gentleman, Levick was understandably taken aback by the “astonishingly depraved” acts he saw, and struggled to describe them. Douglas Russell, of the Natural History Museum’s zoology department, says “He witnesses things that profoundly shock him, to the point of being incapable of even writing them in English — he was so worried about it he started to encode it in Greek.” Nevertheless, he took to the task at hand and wrote in extraordinary detail of the “hooligan cocks … whose passions seemed to have passed beyond their control”.
Surrounded by tens of thousands of rampantly copulating birds - “sometimes more than once a day”, Levick notes with awe - he depicted a city under attack by delinquents on the verge: “Many of the colonies … are plagued by little knots of ‘hooligans’ who hang about their outskirts, and should a chick go astray it stands a good chance of losing its life at their hands. It is interesting indeed to note that, when nature intends them to find employment, these birds, like men, degenerate in idleness.”
He also gives accounts of apparent necrophilia, however, necrophilia, as Levick perceived it, is a human term, and therefore hardly likely to explain penguin behaviour. Low temperatures in the Antarctic did preserve countless dead birds and, male or female, if their frozen corpses happened to be assuming the position, a passing penguin could not pass up the opportunity to mount it. You can understand Levick’s suspicions.
Levick went on to witness what he struggles to describe as a kind of gang rape, with one female paralysed by the cold water [which is] spotted by [a male] and, “after a short inspection, he deliberately copulated with her, she being, of course, quite unable to resist him,” before six more try their luck, with varying degrees of success. The behaviours themselves can all be explained away now, of course, and are detailed here.
Levick’s thinly veiled judgement demonstrates a common practice that many fall into. “There is a dreadful habit of anthropomorphising penguins, dominantly because they are bipedal,” says Russell. Levick was therefore appalled by the behaviours he saw, holding the Adélie population up against human standards of morality: “There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins,” he comments at one point. One reviewer of Levick’s published paper put it well when he said in 1915: “The book is unique, and will appeal to… the public at large for whom these strange, erect, man-like little birds have a strange fascination.”
[Source]
![Typhoid Mary
Mary Mallon [foreground above] was born in Northern Ireland in 1869 but emigrated to the USA in ‘84. She worked as a cook in New York, where, within two weeks of her first employment, the residents developed typhoid fever. After this, each family for whom Mary worked invariably became ill with typhoid. Wherever Mary went outbreaks followed her. When one family she worked for rented a house in Oyster Bay for the summer, six of the eleven people in the house came down with typhoid, a disease said by local doctors to be “unusual” at that time.
Typhoid researcher George Soper was hired to investigate. He published his results saying he believed soft clams might be the source of the outbreak and that:
“It was found that the family changed cooks … about three weeks before the typhoid epidemic broke out. She remained in the family only a short time, leaving about three weeks after the outbreak occurred. The cook was described as an Irish woman about 40 years of age, tall, heavy, single. She seemed to be in perfect health.”
No one knew her whereabouts but eventually Soper traced her to an active outbreak in a Park Avenue penthouse. When Soper approached Mallon she adamantly rejected his request for urine and stool samples.
The New York City Health Department sent Dr. Sara Josephine Baker to talk to Mary but still she refused to cooperate, believing she was being persecuted because she was an immigrant. A few days later, Baker arrived at Mary’s workplace with several police officers who took her into custody. Cultures of Mary’s urine and stools, taken forcibly with the help of prison matrons, revealed that her gallbladder was teeming with typhoid salmonella. She refused to have her gallbladder extracted or to give up her occupation as cook, maintaining stubbornly that she did not carry any disease.
She was held in isolation for three years until, in 1910, she agreed that she “[was] prepared to change her occupation, and would give assurance by affidavit that she would upon her release take such hygienic precautions as would protect those with whom she came in contact”. Upon release, Mallon was given a job as a laundress, which paid lower wages, so she changed her name to Mary Brown and returned to her previous occupation as a cook. For the next five years, she went through a series of kitchens, spreading illness and death, keeping one step ahead of Soper.
In 1915, a serious epidemic of typhoid erupted among the staff of a hospital, with twenty five cases and two deaths. City health authorities investigated, learning that a portly Irish-American woman had suddenly disappeared from the kitchen help. The police tracked her to an estate on Long Island. Mary spent the rest of her life in quarantine until, aged 69, she died of pneumonia.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/0e0d04b65299d5f39a7972999dee6b46/tumblr_mgzwrivqj91rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
![Galvanic Reanimation of the Dead
In biology, galvanism is the contraction of a muscle that is stimulated by an electric current. The effect was named after the scientist Luigi Galvani, who investigated the effect of electricity on dissected animals in the 18th century. When Galvani was doing some dissection work in his lab, his scalpel touched the body of a frog, and he saw the muscles in the frog’s leg twitch. Galvani referred to the phenomenon as animal electricity, believing that he had discovered a distinct form of electricity. [Source]
Two decades later, Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, took the process one step further when he applied it to the corpses of humans. In 1803 he performed experiments in public on the severed heads of ‘malefactors,’ despatched in Bologna and London. The following accounts demonstrate what was witnessed:
“George Forster was hung … at Newgate Prison, for the drowning of his wife and youngest child in the Paddington Canal. After hanging for an hour in sub-zero temperatures, Aldini procured the body and began his galvanic experiments. On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion. Mr Pass, the beadle of the Surgeons’ Company, who was officially present during this experiment, was so alarmed that he died of fright soon after his return home.”
“[The galvanic] stimulus produced the most horrible contortions and grimaces by the motions of the muscles of the head and face; and an hour and a quarter after death, the arm of one of the bodies was elevated eight inches from the table on which it was supported, and this even when a considerable weight was placed in the hand.”
There is much speculation that Aldini’s experiments were the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdwldduVf41rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
