History & Science

Charles the Bold found after the Battle of Nancy by Auguste Feyen-Perrin, 1865.

The Battle of Nancy was the final and decisive battle of the Burgundian Wars, fought outside the walls of Nancy on January 5, 1477 between Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and René, Duke of Lorraine. René’s forces won the battle, and Charles’ mutilated body was found three days later. - enWikipedia

A copy of Ernst Haeckel’s controversial embryo drawings, by Romanes, 1892.

Despite the fact that the theory this picture illustrates has been long discredited, the drawings and the idea behind them are fascinating and intriguing, nonetheless.

Simple description of the Recapitulation Theory:

Haeckel formulated his theory as “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. The notion later became simply known as the recapitulation…theory. Ontogeny is the growth (size change) and development (shape change) of an individual organism; phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a species. Haeckel’s recapitulation theory claims that the development of advanced species passes through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species. Otherwise put, each successive stage in the development of an individual represents one of the adult forms that appeared in its evolutionary history.

History and refutation of the theory of Recapitulation:

…also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism and often expressed as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is a discredited biological hypothesis. First proposed by Étienne Serres in 1824–26 as what became known as the “Meckel-Serres Law”, it attempted to provide a link between comparative embryology and a “pattern of unification” in the organic world. It was supported by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and became a prominent part of his ideas which suggested that past transformations of life could have had environmental causes working on the embryo, rather than on the adult as in Lamarckism. These naturalistic ideas led to disagreements with Georges Cuvier. It was widely supported in the Edinburgh and London schools of higher anatomy around 1830, notably by Robert Edmond Grant, but was opposed by Karl Ernst von Baer’s ideas of divergence, and attacked by Richard Owen in the 1830s. In 1866, the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel proposed that the embryonal development of an individual organism (its ontogeny) followed the same path as the evolutionary history of its species (its phylogeny). This theory arose from Haecke’s attempt to synthesise the ideas of Lamarckism and Goethe’s Naturphilosophie with Charles Darwin’s concepts, but rejected Darwin’s theory of branching evolution in which modern species have all diverged from common ancestory, for a more linear Lamarckian “biogenic law” of progressive evolution in which “lower” species advance to “higher” levels by adding stages to their previous embryonic development. Since around the start of the twentieth century, Haeckel’s “biogenic law” has been refuted on many fronts. Darwin’s more sophisticated view that early embryonic stages are similar to the same embryonic stage of related species, but not to the adult stages of these species, has been confirmed by modern evolutionary developmental biology. - enWikipedia

L’Inhumation Précipitée by Antoine Wiertz, 1854. The painting depicts a cholera victim awakening from a coffin. I thought this was a great painting to highlight the subject of this post: premature burial! The fear of being buried alive is apparently one of the most widespread human fears, nicely illustrated by this photo of a vault built c. 1890, complete with escape hatches. A classic story involving an intense fear of premature burial is that of Hannah Beswick:

…a wealthy woman who had a pathological fear of premature burial. Following her death in 1758 her body was embalmed and kept above ground, to be periodically checked for signs of life. The method of embalming was not recorded, but it probably involved replacing the blood with a mixture of turpentine and vermilion. The body was then put in an old clock case and stored in the house of Beswick’s family physician, Dr Charles White. Beswick’s apparently eccentric will made her a local celebrity, and visitors were allowed to view her at White’s house. Beswick’s mummified body was eventually bequeathed to the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society, where she was put on display and acquired the soubriquet of the Manchester Mummy, or the Mummy of Birchin Bower. The museum’s collection was later transferred to Manchester University, when it was decided, with the permission of the Bishop of Manchester, that Beswick should finally be buried. The ceremony took place at Harpurhey Cemetery on 22 July 1868, over 110 years after her death; the grave is unmarked. - enWikipedia