My colleague, Professor W. M. Lindsay, invites, or challenges, me to reply to his note on ‘Ciris’ ; I can but take him at his word.Professor Lindsay seeks to identify the two birds Haliaetus and Ciris, and finds the task an easy one; he identifies Ciris with a Tern confidently and categorically. We learn ‘from Gallus' epyllium … that it was a sea-bird with red legs, so rapid in flight that it always evaded the swoop of the sea-eagle. What can (...) this be but a tern?’. (shrink)

In his last ‘Gleanings from Glossaries’Lindsay quotes, andascribes in part to Donatus, the Servian scholium on Verg. G. IV. 14: meropes rusticae fbarbarost appellant… sunt autem uirides earum pennae, et uocantur apiastrae quia apes comedunt. Lindsay obelizes barbaros, ‘because there is no other record of birds called by this name, except Probus' scholium: Meropes dicuntur aues quas in Italia uocant barbaros, etc.’ After quoting the Berne scholium, ‘Meropes tGalbeolif, ut putat Tranquillus,’ andIsidore's statement, ‘Meropes, eosdem et tgaulosf,’ Lindsay comes to (...) the conclusion that these latter words ‘must, each of them, contain a portion of the truth. And isnot the whole truth that Donatus wrote galbus or galuus?’ He goes on to say: ‘Now Ihope that someone with more courage will say: The barbaros of Servius Danielis and of Probus onGeorg. IV. 14 is a corruption of galbos.’ For my part, I take my courage in both hands and assert that it is nothing of the kind. (shrink)

βρυχεδανς : πολυφγος, ο δ μακρς. For μακρς read μργος. ζγγος· τν μελισσν χος, κα τν μοων. L. and S. translate literally, ‘humming of bees, etc.’; but to buzz or hum is not a common property of insects, it is peculiar to a few. For τν μοων I suggest τν μυιν. ζγγος refers especially to the buzz, or ‘ping’, of a mosquito , LL. zanzara; cf. Cassiodorus ‘Ciniphes genus est culicum, fixis aculeis permolestum, quas vulgus consuevit vocare zinzalas’; and in (...) the Appendix, De Wit adds: ‘zinzala; parva musca, id est culex; unde zinzalarium, conopeum ad eas arcendas, Gloss. Ugut. ’—i.e. a mosquito-net. Culex, by the way, is an interesting and a homely word; we lack mosquitoes in Scotland, but we know the angry bite of a ‘horse-fly’ and call it a ‘cleg’. (shrink)

In my translation of the Historia Animalium, now thirty-five years old, I pointed out a couple of passages where νθρωπος stood in the text though νος seemed to be the appropriate word. It had not occurred to me for the moment, though it soon after wards did, that ανος was at hand to account for so curious a misreading. The same contraction has other misreadings to account for, as we may read in Cobet; but I do not know that this (...) one has been drawn attention to. (shrink)

Alan M. Turing’s last published work and some posthumously published manuscripts were dedicated to the development of his theory of organic pattern formation. In “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” (1952), he provided an elaborated mathematical formulation of the theory of the origins of biological form that had been first proposed by Sir D’Arcy Wendworth Thompson in On Growth and Form (1917/1942). While arguably his most mathematically detailed and his systematically most ambitious effort, Turing’s morphogenetical writings also form (...) the most thematically self-contained and least philosophically explored part of his work. We dedicate our inquiry to the reasons and the implications of Turing’s choice of biological topic and viewpoint. We will probe for possible factors in Turing’s choice that go beyond availability and acquaintance with On Growth and Form. On these grounds, we will explore how and to what extent his theory of morphogenesis actually ties in with his concept of mechanistic computation. Notably, Thompson’s pioneering work in biological ‘structuralism’ was organicist in outlook and explicitly critical of the Darwinian approaches that were popular with Turing’s cyberneticist contemporaries—and partly used by Turing himself in his proto-connectionist models of learning. Resolving this apparent dichotomy, we demonstrate how Turing’s quest for mechanistic explanations of how organisation emerges in nature leaves room for a non-mechanist view of nature. (shrink)