All things are queer and opposite again

Thanks once more to my colleague David Hansen, and through him also to John McPhee, I am put in mind of all things queer and opposite by this charming portrait reproduced from a glass-plate negative in the collection of the Museum of Victoria in Melbourne. According to information published on their website, the photograph was taken by the pioneering radiologist Dr. Thomas Beckett in November 1891, during an extended visit with his family to London. This is the doctor’s maternal grandmother, old Mrs. Hoyt.

Thomas George Beckett was born in London in 1859 and was one of the seven children of Mr. Beckett, a pharmacist, and his wife Julia, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Hoyt. Thomas studied medicine in Edinburgh, graduating in 1880, and spent several years as a ship’s surgeon before going to Victoria in 1885, accompanied by his young wife Kate (née Lawrence).

The Becketts went at first to the town of Charlton, which is half way between Wedderburn and Wycheproof on the road from Bendigo to Mildura. In 1892 they moved permanently to Melbourne. Beckett was one of a small number of colonial doctors who specialized in radiology soon after the discovery of x-rays in November 1895 by W. C. Röntgen. Another was Beckett’s friend Frederick (Fred) Clendinnen (1860–1913), whose collection of x-ray tubes is in the collection of the Museum of Victoria. Clendinnen purchased his first X-ray apparatus from W. Watson for £5 13s. 9d., but Beckett built his own equipment, including tubes, batteries, and the ad hoc cabinetry for housing them—not only for taking fairly primitive x-radiographs, but actually for treating cancer patients with admittedly mixed results, and certainly not much concern for the harmful effect upon himself of more or less continual exposure to radiation, which, of course, soon killed him. Beckett was head of the x-ray department the Alfred Hospital from 1901 to 1908, “electrician in charge of equipment,” a keen cyclist, and a captain then major in the militia.

However, what concerns me here is the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus, formerly O. paradoxus) that you see hanging prominently among the little framed photographs on the wall of old Mrs. Hoyt’s London parlour—evidently a mature animal, if slightly over-stuffed, I suspect, by a taxidermist with grandiloquent, possibly even histrionic tendencies. At her left elbow one glimpses also a preserved lizard, possibly a baby goanna, a large sea shell, and other curios. Neatly stacked on the dresser behind, one makes out albums, books, and maybe boxes—in other words hints toward Mrs. Hoyt’s serious contemplation of natural history and the South Seas, where so many things were without question queer, and determinedly opposite.

All things are queer and opposite

When I saw him lately in Melbourne, my colleague David Hansen, formerly senior curator of art at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart, gave me a reproduction of this marvelous drawing of a slightly squashed-looking duck-billed platypus with, looping over it, the neat longhand inscription: “All things are queer and opposite.” This was inscribed on the cover of the first minute book of the Tasmanian Society of Natural History, the direct institutional ancestor (via the Royal Society of Tasmania [1843]) of the T.M.A.G. At its foundation in 1839, the first society chose as its emblem the platypus, originally classified in 1800 as Ornithorhyncus paradoxus by the perplexed Johann Blumenbach, on the basis of a specimen furnished by Sir Joseph Banks—a term eventually altered to Ornithorhynchus anatinus, which means literally duck-like, bird-snouted creature. (Platypus, from the Greek, means flat-footed.) To this platypus emblem the society added a Latin motto: Quocunque aspicias hic paradoxus erit.

Upon returning to New Haven, Conn., I tried to find out where this motto originated, in what if any Classical source, or else adapted from what ancient, medieval, or even Renaissance model. None appears ever to have been proposed, so I made discreet inquiries. My learned colleagues Tristan Taylor and John Dillon, formerly of the Yale Department of Classics, have now proffered excellent advice which, with their permission, I am delighted to pass on here.

Quocunque aspicias hic paradoxus erit is certainly not a Classical quotation. Only one ancient author, the Augustan poet Ovid (43 B.C.–A.D. 17/18), is known to have combined the words “quocunque aspicias” or “quocunque aspiceres,” and he used the phrase twice in describing Tomis, from A.D. 8 his bleak place of exile in Scythia Minor on the Black Sea (modern Rumania): “quocunque aspicio nihil est, nisi Pontus et aer / fluctibus hic tumidus, nubibus ille minax,” that is, “In whatever direction I look, there is nothing except sea and air, one swollen with waves, the other menacing with clouds” (Tristia, 1.2.23–24), and “quocumque aspicias, campi cultore carentes / vastaque quae nemo vindicat arva iacent,” that is, “in whatever direction you look, fields lie lacking cultivation and vast fields no one claims” (Epistulae ex Ponto, 1.3.55–56). If the Tasmanian Society of Natural History composed its motto as a conscious allusion to Ovid—and the Vandiemonian setting might indeed suggest logical, if rather gloomy grounds for alluding to Tomis—they did it very well indeed, because Quocunque aspicias hic paradoxus erit parses in elegiac meter; specifically as the second line of a carefully crafted couplet. The long and short syllables of the motto are: _ _ _ . . _ _ . . _ . . _ (provided we elide the -que with asp-, and treat them as one syllable, specifically the third long one.) This is skilled Latin poetic composition.

As for the translation, paradoxus is masculine, so it must refer to the platypus itself because a paradox in Latin is otherwise neuter, i.e. paradoxum. It follows, then, that the word hic is not an adverb meaning “here” but a masculine singular demonstrative pronoun, “this (creature),” referring to the platypus, agreeing thus with paradoxus. Literally, then, the motto translates as “Whichever way you look [at it], this [creature] is baffling,” that is, from the front or from the back. Smoothing out the awkward English, and taking into account the fact that the Classical Latin adjective paradoxus means something closer to baffling, strange, or surprising than literally paradoxical, a neater translation might be: “Whichever way you look at him, this fellow will surprise.” So who on earth in Hobart Town was the composer of this fragment of Latin elegy, and possibly a clever pasticheur of Ovid as well? One should never underestimate the sophistication of nineteenth-century British colonists’ Latin, nor indeed that of the estimable Tristan Taylor and John Dillon, to whom I am indebted for these insights. Even so: All things are queer and opposite, so let us be gay.