November 17, 1800 the United States Congress and then president John Adams move the United States government from the comfort of Philadelphia to the hardly finished and rather rough quarters in Washington D.C. Adams would become the first American president to live in the White House.
Adams’ love of country and ardent desire to separate from Great Britain made him the ideal candidate to join Jefferson and Franklin on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. Finally Adams’ skill as a writer would find a use. A great use in fact.
Though the term “fossil” – a derivation of the Latin word for “dug up” — was first used in 16th century France, the petrified impressions of centuries old flora and fauna — including some of what later come to be known as dinosaurs — have been known to man, though wholly misunderstood, since the dawn of civilization.
For thousands of years in China, the gigantic remains of prehistoric lizards and mammals were used as the principle justification for the existence of dragons and even prescribed as a folk medicine. Meanwhile, in the West, scholars from Aristotle to Leonardo da Vinci concluded that fossils were indeed proof of ancient life, while less sound conclusions — such as that fossils were evidence of a long extinct race of giants and the Biblical flood — were propagated by thinkers seeking to reconcile natural science with theology.
One such theorist was the first curator Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Robert Plot, who in 1676 sketched what he thought to be the thighbone of a colossal man. Though his initial supposition was incorrect, Plot’s discovery would eventually lead to the classification of the first dinosaur genus ever to be categorized by man: megalosaurus.
Over the next century, the number of accidentally discovered fossils from around the world soared upwards, until it became clear that the hugely proportioned remains could not belong to any extant species. In 1796, French naturalist Georges Cuvier was the first to put forward that such animals had been “destroyed by some kind of catastrophe” and were something heretofore unknown to the human race: extinct. Not did his work fly in the face of creationism and a supposed Great Chain of Being dictated by God alone, but also laid the foundations for the theory of evolution that would soon be popularized by Charles Darwin in the second half of the 19th century.
Cuvier spent the rest of his career cataloguing as many of the bygone creatures as he could locate, including the first pterodactyl and mosasaur, as well as Robert Plot’s aforementioned megalosaurus. While he did speculate that there had indeed been an “age of reptiles” before man when giant saurians roamed the Earth, it wasn’t until 1841 that British scientist Richard Plot, drawing Culvier’s conclusion, realized that some fossils were so different that they deserved a distinct name. He subsequently dubbed this kingdom of extinct reptiles “Dinosauria” – meaning “terrible lizards” – and cemented the credibility of a new scientific field — paleontology – in the minds of the general public.
| History Collectors: We offer a wide selection of museum quality replicas and authentic items representing nearly every century of the Common Era and the most significant civilizations of ancient history. Once you browse through our online catalogue, we are certain you’ll find the perfect gift for yourself or a loved one with an interest in history. |
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Though the term doppelganger - translated as “double walker” - first saw print in Jean Paul’s German Romantic novel, Siebenkas, in 1796, the motif of the evil twin as externalized self draws upon millennia of world mythology. Ancient legends of Roman, Indian, Norse, Native American, Egyptian and Greek origin all recount the consequences of tumultuous twins – one good, one evil and often unaware of one others existence, until a fateful and ontologically devastating meeting. The philosopher Aristotle contributes the earliest recorded firsthand account of such an encounter to the historical record.
English poet Percy Blythe Shelley, while visiting the Italian city of Pisa, encountered a hooded doppelganger, who upon revealing his face, Pisa said but two words: “Siete soddisfatto (Are you satisfied)?” Shelley would go on to drown in the Mediterranean shortly before his 30th birthday. French novelist Guy de Maupassant wrote about meeting doppelganger “face-to-face.” While writing his story, “The Horla,” Maupassant’s double entered his study, casually sat itself and began to dictate the contents of his freshly written page as if from memory.
