The Gem Bouquet

If such things can be judged by the quality of gifts, Maria Theresia (on the right) must have loved Franz Stephan (on the left) a great deal indeed: knowing of his passion for the natural sciences, the Austrian Empress presented her husband with a bouquet of gems.

Leaves of silk, 761 precious stones, and 2,102 diamonds make up a bouquet of varied flowers, adorned with insects, and situated inside a rock crystal vase. The Empress placed it nonchalantly in the Emperor's Mineral Cabinet on a fine spring morning in the middle years of the eighteenth century. And thus began the Precious Stone collection of what is now The Natural History Museum of Vienna.

Although the bouquet, made especially at the request of the Empress, is traditionally ascribed to Michael von Gosser, a Viennese jewler, there is evidence that it may, in fact, have been crafted by Franfurter Georg Gottfried Lautensack.

The Scythian Lamb

"Rooted in Earth each cloven foot descends
And round and round her flexible Neck she bends"

[Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Botanic Garden, 1781]

The Danish doctor and man-of-the-world Ole Worm had in his chambre des merveilles a Scythian Lamb, alternately known as the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, the Barometz, and the Planta Tartarica Barometz; the unfortunate possessors of stunted imaginations may also refer to this most marvellous of creatures as Cibotium Barometz or Gossypium. I myself am inclined to believe the Ambassador Sigismund, Baron von Herberstein when he states,

"It had a head, yes, ears, and all other parts a newly born lamb...For myself, although I had previously regarded these Borametz as fabulous, the accounts of it were confirmed to me by so many persons of credence that I thought it right to describe it." [Rerum Muscoviticarum Commentarii, 1549]

Furthermore, Sir Thomas Browne, although rather unimpressed, adds that

"Much wonder is made of the Boramez, that strange plant-animal or vegetable Lamb of Tartary, which Wolves delight to feed on, which hath the shape of a Lamb, affordeth a bloody juyce upon breaking, and liveth while the plants be consumed about it." [1646, Pseudodoxia Epidemica]

A modern conspiracy exists to cover up the existance of this fantastical being. It has been explained away as a fanciful description of the cotton plant or a particularly hairy species of fern.

The Islands of St. Kilda

"Whatever he studies, the future observer of St Kilda will be haunted the rest of his life by the place, and tantalised by the impossibility of describing it, to those who have not seen it." [James Fisher, 1947]

In the Outer Hebrides off the north coast of Scotland, the St. Kilda archipelago is scattered, its craggy shores battered by the full force of the north Atlantic Ocean. St. Kilda was inhabited from the Iron Age to the 20th Century, and place names such as Oiseval and Bàgh a' Bhaile hint at its Norse and Gaelic history. In modern times its population likely never exceeded 180 persons, and, after years of disease, crop failure, and losses to the Great War, its last 36 inhabitants wre willingly evacuated in 1930.

Today St. Kilda is a World Heritage Site, known for its high sea-cliffs and spectacular bird life (including fulmars, gannets, and puffins).

Evidence of human life remains in the shape of stone cottages aligned down the Village's Main Street

ancient cleitean scattered over the landscape

and flocks of Soay sheep.