“An Adamless Eden” in Ingonish: what Cape Breton's archives reveal

This essay reads the archived life of a Sydney-based woman - Ella Liscombe (1902–69) - as it was recorded in her diaries, notebooks, and especially her photograph album of a 1927 camping excursion to Ingonish, Cape Breton Island. This album features pictures of women in "cross-dress," and the writings that gloss these camping records express Ella Liscombe’s erotic same-sex feelings about her female companions. As this essay explores Liscombe’s sartorial and emotional aesthetics, it also makes distinctions between "mannish" behaviour and "boyish" performance/costume, ultimately suggesting that Ella and her friends indulged in "twilight moments" to escape the strictures of domestic femininity.     

Book Reviews

A Feng 阿风, Ming Qing shidai funü de diwei yu quanli: yi Ming Qing qiyue wenshu, susong dang’an wei zhongxin 明清时代妇女的地位与权利——以明清契 约文书,诉讼档案为中心 (The status and rights of women during Ming and Qing times: focused on contractual documents and litigation archives of the Ming and Qing);Eli Alberts, A History of Daoism and the Yao People of South China;Robert Ford Campany, Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China;Barbara Hendrischke, The Scripture on Great Peace: The “Taiping Jing” and the Beginnings of Daoism (Daoist Classics);Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai;Ma Liangkuan 马亮宽, Fu Sinian shehui zhengzhi huodong yu sixiang yanjiu 傅 斯年社会政治活动与思想研究 (A study of Fu Sinian’s thought and social-political work);Daniel J. Meissner, Chinese Capitalists versus the American Flour Industry, 1890–1910: Profit and Patriotism in International Trade;Rong Xinjiang 荣新江, Sui Tang Chang’an: xingbie, jiyi ji qita 隋唐长安: 性别, 记忆及其他 (Sui-Tang Chang’an: gender, memory, and other);Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949     

Modelling land use around an early Neolithic timber ‘hall’ in north east Scotland from high spatial resolution pollen analyses

A methodology is described by which spatial patterns of land use were reconstructed from pollen analyses on anthropogenic sediments at a recently excavated early Neolithic timber ‘hall’ in north east Scotland. The anthropogenic sediments were from a deep, small diameter pit within the building. They present numerous taphonomic and interpretative challenges to the analyst, but from this type of deposit, the power to estimate quantitatively the vegetation structure around the archaeological site makes such difficult deposits very significant. A rigorous methodology is firstly described, therefore, by which confidence in ecological interpretation can be established. Secondly, the source of pollen in the deposit is evaluated. Thirdly, the possible pollen source area and structure of the surrounding vegetation are estimated by quantitative simulation modelling. Finally, these analyses are compared with region-scale pollen analyses from nearby conventional wetland deposits with much larger pollen source areas. The pollen assemblages recovered probably reflect land uses adjacent to the ‘hall’ and up to 2.5 km around. Cereal cultivation was the most important land use immediately around the ‘hall’, possibly grown between stands of scrub Corylus (hazel) woodland. These intensive but local-scale land uses cannot be discerned in region-scale pollen analyses.     

Neurognostics question. Gordon Morgan Holmes

Gordon Morgan Holmes, MD, MRCP was an Irish born neurologist who received his medical education at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. He was trained in neuroanatomy and neuropathology at the Senckenberg Institute, Frankfort-Am-Main by Ludwig Edinger. He then returned to serve as a Registrar (House Officer) mentored by Richard Gowers and John Hughlings Jackson at the National Hospital, Queen Square, London. He collaborated with Thomas Granger Stewart in describing the loss of recoil in patients with cerebellar hemispheric tumors in 1904. Volunteering in 1914 for frontline hospital duty, he examined soldiers who had injuries to their occipital area causing hypotonia, dysmetria, staggering gait, and falling to the side ipsilateral to their injured cerebellar hemisphere. Holmes discovered that increasing the pace of the finger-nose manuever and applying slight resistance to a moving limb attenuated the dysmetria. Continuing observation of these patients afforded him to describe the evolution of their injuries to include increasing tremor and decreasing hypotonia. Holmes first attached levers to the limbs of hispatients to record their movements on a moving smoked paper kymograph. In 1939 he published photograh tracings made by low mass minature light bulbs attached to ataxic limbs that showed thehpometira and hypometria of their movements ipsilateral to their damaged cerebellar lobes. Holmes made sigficant contributions to understanding of the physiology of the human cerebellum.