Imaginary Mars

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-54
Author(s):  
David A. Weintraub
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Temperate Climate ◽  
Running Water ◽  
Repeated Observations

This chapter cites astronomers that began imagining a Mars that was in every way like Earth and began terraforming Mars in their minds in the 1830s. It explores the act of terraforming Mars that would change its physical environment as it would become an Earth-like world where humans could live, with a temperate climate, running water, and a breathable atmosphere. It also talks about Earthbound astronomers in the nineteenth century that could not actually terraform Mars but could reshape their collective understanding of Mars and change it from a hostile world into one where humans, butterflies, and ferns could all live. The chapter emphasizes how imagination combined with herd instinct could become powerful tools for self-deception. It mentions Wolff Beer and Johann Heinrich von Mädler, who carried out the pioneering work of terraforming Mars and carried out a program of repeated observations of Mars from 1831 through 1839.

Comment

1959 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elsa V. Goveia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
Acute Form

The West Indian area is one of the most attractive fields for comparative study. For, as Dr. Mintz has pointed out, it includes territories, generally similar in physical environment, which, nevertheless, differ in their individual histories. The marked divergence in the histories of Puerto Rico and Jamaica during the first half of the nineteenth century is only one instance among many which can be cited as worthy of attention. The interest of this particular case is that it raises the point in an acute form.

The Winding Road

Antiquity ◽  
1939 ◽  
Vol 13 (50) ◽  
pp. 191-206
Author(s):  
F. G. Roe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Field Systems

It has often appeared to the writer to be a really remarkable circumstance, during the long and sometimes acrimonious controversies of the nineteenth century concerning the various physical, social, and ‘technical’ phenomena (methods, etc.) characterizing the Saxon settlement of Britain and its more immediate antecedents, that among the various protagonists of the first rank, none seems to have thought it worth while to visit those lands where an essentially similar environment still prevailed, and to see for himself what they might yield. To make such a statement concerning archaeological students of today would certainly be to invite questions in return, which are not easily answered. Whatwasthe (physical) environment of early Saxon England; and where shall we find its ‘essentially similar’ counterpart? But at the time of which I speak, such doubts may almost be said to have been non-existent. Whatever opinions were held concerning Roman centuriation, or Teutonic three-field systems, the old ‘traditional’ view of England as ‘a land of forests’, ‘one great wood’, etc., seems hardly to have been questioned. Under such conditions, virtually any forest country occupied by settlers of European birth or descent would serve the required purpose.

scholarly journals Reminiscences about Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán’s Geographic Atlas of Peru (1865)

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hildegardo Córdova-Aguilar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
The Political ◽  
Geographic Knowledge ◽  
Political Borders ◽  
New Republic ◽  
Land Control

Abstract Peruvian cartography in the nineteenth century was very rich and fulfilled the geographic knowledge demanded by the new Republic of Peru. In effect, the country of more than 1,000,000 km2 needed to show the physical environment and to locate the distribution of its natural resources. It was the time when cartography was valued as an element of empowerment and land control, especially when the political borders were rather unstable (G. Prieto 2018). Then, it was timely the publication of Atlas Geográfico del Perú (Geographic Atlas of Peru) by Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán, a prominent Peruvian lawyer and geographer. Author’s purpose is to comment on the new edition of the Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán Atlas Geográfico del Perú, published in Lima in 2012.

Spirit of Place: The European Fashioning of Toowoomba

1996 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Lee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Coastal Plain ◽  
Temperate Climate ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
European Climate ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Spirit Of Place ◽  
Moderate Elevation

No other town in Queensland is so well favoured by nature for combining these rare advantages. We have the healthiness of climate, the coolness of a fine English summer, the pure and rarefied air of a moderate elevation, which dwellers along the hot and humid coast so much desire. We have beauty of scenery in picturesque variety, with a panorama of rolling Downs and far-reaching plain … ours is the first town on the elevated Downs after rising from the close and exhausting atmosphere of the ‘littoral’ country.So rhapsodised the editorial in the Toowoomba Chronicle on 14 June, 1890. From the nineteenth century the drop in temperature which greeted the traveller's ascent to the elevated tablelands of the Darling Downs was greeted as a sign of a more vitalising and health-giving climate than the sub-tropical humidity of the Brisbane coastal plain. Katie Hume in 1866 felt Toowoomba's air 'cool and English like … after the heat of Brisbane’, while the consumptive Walter Coote argued in 1887 that the Downs possessed ‘a climate as healthful and even invigorating as that of any place in the World’ (Hume 160, Coote 201). The Social-Darwinist connection between the moral character of a people and the temperature of their climate was a frequent theme of nineteenth century culture. The imperial triumphs of European civilisation were often explained by Europe's temperate climate, for the cooler the climate the more ‘civil’ the people are deemed to be (Spurr); and Europe's temperate climate was also an acknowledged cause of the reasoned moral restraint of the civilised colonial settler. Thus the celebration of Toowoomba's ‘European’ climate served to familiarise an alien Australian space as a place which would support European settlement.

Kentucky’s Distilling Environment

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-55
Author(s):  
Karl Raitz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Water Analysis ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Crop Production ◽  
Produced Water ◽  
Steam Engine ◽  
Early Winter ◽  
Steep Gradient ◽  
Limestone Bedrock ◽  
Gain Access

Kentucky’s nineteenth-century distillers operated in a physical environment that varied from one location to another and presented opportunities as well as impediments. Groundwater was available across the Bluegrass country and had long been regarded as “pure” and therefore acceptable for distilling. With the development of modern scientific water analysis, hydrologists were able to establish that many of Kentucky’s springs produced water that was comparatively high in iron, calcium, and inorganic minerals and metals and was not consistently “pure.” The climate is conducive to corn and wheat production and is characterized by hot summers and comparatively dry, cool winters. The nineteenth-century distilling calendar was seasonal, with works operating from early winter through late spring, when the grain harvest was over and farmhands were available for hire. Distillers utilizing waterpower often sited their works beside steep-gradient streams; adoption of the steam engine permitted them to choose level sites and gain access to primary transport routes. Limestone bedrock yielded the most productive soils for crop production and also attracted distillers

“Most Beautiful Sewer”

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Cumbler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Wastes ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Clean Water ◽  
Running Water ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Health Gains ◽  
Major River ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Polluted Waters

The reforms of the late nineteenth century did help protect New England’s drinking water. The plague of water-borne diseases that made the region’s cities so infamously dangerous to live in seemed to be in retreat. For a moment, it looked as if the new century would bring a world in which there did not have to be trade-offs between economic development and environmental quality. The ideal articulated by Lyman and Mills—that professional expertise would transcend conflicts of interests between manufacturers and reformers—seemed at hand. Yet there were still problems that these optimists overlooked. And these problems broke into view again in the new century. Despite the health gains, New England’s rivers and streams continued to receive massive influxes of pollution of both industrial wastes and human sewage. The larger cities along the major river systems continued their practice of dumping raw sewage downstream, while manufacturers still saw running water as a natural disposal system for their wastes. Industrial wastes, although less central in the conversation around public health and the environment, were clearly polluting water systems, and reformers never completely gave up the struggle to clean water of industrial pollutants. In its 1896 report, the Massachusetts State Board of Health discussed possible solutions to the problems of “waste liquors or sewage from those manufacturing industries in the State which pollute or threaten to pollute our rivers and ponds.” The Lawrence station experimented with different methods of removing industrial wastes. Yet the “problem of successful and economical disposal of this sewage [remained].” As people began to look at clean water as an aesthetic as well as a health issue, the ability of water to sustain live fish, which had been dismissed twenty years earlier, now became a concern. Commissions on fisheries that had focused attention on fishways and fish cultivation in the nineteenth century began to revisit the issue of water pollution as they noticed their hatchery fish dying in polluted waters; oyster growers complained to the commissions that their oyster beds were being polluted.

British Immigration into India in the Nineteenth Century

Itinerario ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temperate Climate ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
Tropical Areas ◽  
The One ◽  
The Military ◽  
European Migration

In a by now classic definition, European expansion in the nineteenth century has been characterised as the integration of large tracts of the earth's surface into a world-economy dominated by Britain,. Distinctions are conventionally drawn between two processes of integration: on the one hand, the creation of new economies by European settlement in ‘empty’ lands of temperate climate, from which a thinly scattered indigenous population had been displaced, and, on the other, the subordination and partial development of existing economic systems in densely populated tropical areas. Migration from Europe clearly had a role in both processes. It was crucial to the first: economic integration of ‘new’ lands could hardly take place without it, or at least historically it has not done so. The role of European migration in the second process would appear to be more limited. Whites were only likely to be involved in productive processes of agriculture or manufacturing at the highest managerial levels or as technical experts, and much of the military and administrative underpinning deemed necessary for economic domination could be provided by Asian or African clerks and soldiers.

scholarly journals Political Economy, Ideology and the Persistence of Working-Class Housing Problems in Britain, 1850–1914

1987 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-143
Author(s):  
Richard Rodger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Organized Sport ◽  
Running Water ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The People ◽  
The Family ◽  
Urban Conditions

Nineteenth-century housing was not all gloom and doom. For significant elements of the nation the standard of comfort and material welfare improved substantially. Suburbanization of the middle classes in the second half of the century appreciably improved environmental conditions, the family in particular benefitting from a semi-rural existence with only the commuting breadwinner subject to the hostility of urban conditions. In the last third of the nineteenth century rising real incomes were especially beneficial to artisans and the more regularly employed labouring class. last third of the nineteenth century rising real incomes were especially beneficial to artisans and the more regularly employed labouring class. Linoleum, curtains, parlour furniture, even pianos transformed the immediate appearance of the home; shoes, a change of clothes and running water that of the people; and the kitchen range, water closets and gas mantles re-arranged the domestic patterns in other respects. The possibility of an outing to the seaside was for many a realistic one, while the growth of organized sport created leisure possibilities, as did the expansion of clubs and other social activities.

Environmental changes of the Mazovian (Holsteinian /~MIS 11) palaeolake near Szymanowo (eastern Poland) in the light of malacological analysis

2014 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Szymanek
Keyword(s):  
Water Level ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Energy Conditions ◽  
Temperate Climate ◽  
Running Water ◽  
High Frequencies ◽  
Bithynia Tentaculata ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Palaeoecological Reconstruction

Abstract The malacofauna of the palaeolake deposits at Szymanowo (eastern Poland) was investigated. It represents the younger part of the climatic optimum of the Mazovian (Holsteinian) Interglacial (~MIS 11) and possibly the postoptimal period. The mollusc assemblage is composed of both standing and running water species, mostly connected with temperate climate. The presence of biostratigraphical indicators of the Mazovian, Viviparus diluvianus (Kunth, 1865), Lithoglyphus jahni Urbański, 1975 and Pisidium clessini Neumayr, 1875, is noteworthy. Variability in the structure and composition of the assemblage enables palaeoecological reconstruction. Changes in the water-level, vegetation and energy conditions are inferred from the malacological succession. Three stages of the lake development were distinguished. The first one is connected with deeper conditions and predominance of V. diluvianus and L. jahni. The second one, dominated by Bithynia tentaculata (Linnaeus, 1758), records a fall of the water-level and the growth of aquatic plants, evidenced by high frequencies of Valvata cristata Muller, 1774 and Acroloxus lacustris (Linnaeus, 1758). The third stage corresponds to another rise of the water-level and an increase in V. diluvianus, L. jahni, Valvata piscinalis Muller, 1774 and Pisidium henslowanum (Sheppard, 1823), which evidence some higher energy conditions.

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