L is for ... Lazarus

- also, Late (which this post is); and Lie (which the timestamp on this post is).

The late Emma Lazarus lies interred in Beth-Olom Cemetery, in Brooklyn, New York. A poet, she is best known for "The New Colossus," which is to be found engraved on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty, on what is now Liberty Island in New York Harbor (but perhaps not in New York... boundaries are arbitrary and capricious things). The poem contains several memorable but oft-misquoted phrases:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The poem is written in a sonnet form famously associated with the Elizabethan poet and playwright known as "Shakespeare." It was Lazarus' contribution to an art auction to support the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund - this fund raised money in the United States for the erection of a pedestal to support the statue being constructed by the French sculptor Frederic Bartholdi to commemorate the ideals of international republicanism, and the American inspiration for the French Revolution. As the poem relates, this collaboration recalls an earlier statuesque harbor guardian: the Colossus of Rhodes. Bartholdi's own title for the statue was La Liberté éclairant le monde, or Liberty Enlightening the World; Lazarus' poem transformed it into a symbol for the great melting pot of American multiculturalism, a welcomer of the world's "tired... poor... huddled masses."

Although the poem was provided to an auction to raise money for the Statue, and was read at the exhibition of artworks contributed to that auction, it was not present in any form at the Statue's official opening in 1886. When Lazarus died a year later, her poem seemed to have died with her. But her friend Georgina Schuyler, a descendant of the founders of New York City, found the poem and embarked on an ultimately successful campaign to have Lazarus immortalized. Her poem was installed in 1903, and the Statue of Liberty became a beacon attracting immigrants from all over the world. Currently administered by the National Parks Authority, the Statue of Liberty was originally the responsibility of the United States Lighthouse Board; incongruously, when Emma Lazarus transformed its character from beyond the grave, it was under the care of the Department of War.

Almost exactly halfway between the opening of the new Colossus and its adornment with "the New Colossus," another poem was authored, this one by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Almost certainly, Aldrich was not consciously responding to Lazarus, who had by then been dead eight years; but his "Unguarded Gates" takes an altogether more cynical view of those "huddled masses" flooding into New York Harbor:

WIDE open and unguarded stand our gates,
Named of the four winds, North, South, East, and West;
Portals that lead to an enchanted land
Of cities, forests, fields of living gold,
Vast prairies, lordly summits touched with snow,
Majestic rivers sweeping proudly past
The Arab's date-palm and the Norseman's pine
A realm wherein are fruits of every zone,
Airs of all climes, for lo! throughout the year
The red rose blossoms somewhere - a rich land,
A later Eden planted in the wilds,
With not an inch of earth within its bound
But if a slave's foot press it sets him free.
Here, it is written, Toil shall have its wage,
And Honor honor, and the humblest man
Stand level with the highest in the law.
Of such a land have men in dungeons dreamed,
And with the vision brightening in their eyes
Gone smiling to the fagot and the sword.

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild motley throng
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav,
Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are loud,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast
Fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of fate,
Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel
Stay those who to thy sacred portals come
To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a care
Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn
And trampled in the dust. For so of old
The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome,
And where the temples of the Caesars stood
The lean wolf unmolested made her lair.

Between them, these two poems give expression to a dialectic that continues to resonate today; one which, fittingly, has several dimensions and one to which I shall return otherwhen.

C is for ... Coelacanth

Ugly little spud, as Ray Stanz might say; but the Coelacanth - the name is derived from the Greek koilos, hollow, and akantha, spine - is also something of a remarkable creature. Back in 1937, it was known to palaeontologists as a "missing link" between fishes and tetrapods: in other words, between aquatic and terrestrial life. It was also "known" back then to have died out, along with lots of other beasties, back in the Cretaceous Period - approximately 65 million years ago.

So it was a bit of a shock when, two days before Christmas a year later, one Marjorie Courtenay Latimer, of East London, South Africa, discovered in the trawl of her fisherman acquaintance Captain Hendrick Goosen a living breathing example of the genus. A museum curator, Latimer had an arrangement with Capt. Goosen that she could regularly inspect his catch and keep any items of interest - and it is probably fair to say no more interesting item ever turned up in his nets than the coelacanth. There wasn't even a Linnaean name for the coelacanth at the time, there being little call for one, so it became Latimeria chalumnae in honor of the curator who identified it. The fellow who only went and caught it earned no honor, since all he had in his nets was an ugly darn fish that stank: framing makes a big difference. In 1999, a second Latimeria species was discovered, in Indonesia. Both known coelacanth species are deepwater fish; the fossil record shows an abundance of coelacanths that dwelled in shallower waters, although by their nature fossils of deepwater taxa are hard to come across.

Often referred to as a "living fossil," the modern coelacanth is actually discernibly different from its fossil forebears, but still has enough taxonomic oddities that it grossly bears more resemblance to a Cretaceous fish than a modern one. It may yet face a long-delayed extinction, as deep-water trawling threatens its habitat; what might misleadingly be termed the anti-humanist faction among environmentalists may have a legitimate case in decrying the casual eradication of a species that has existed perhaps 20,000 times as long as we have. Of course, it's hard to be sure - relatively few animals become fossilized upon death, so the fossil record is an uncertain guide. Coelacanths are by no means the only "Lazarus taxon" - the reference is to John 11:1-46, notable for containing the shortest verse in the whole bible ("Jesus wept"); another biblical Lazarus is a subject for blogs otherwhen - and this is to be expected. Darwin's anticipation of a "missing link" between Man and Ape was, to put it mildly, optimistic given the patchiness of the fossil record overall; discoveries like Latimer's in 1938 reveal just how imperfect our knowledge is.

One consequence of the coelacanth's discovery was an energizing of a vociferous minority among biologists: the oft-ridiculed fraternity of cryptozoologists, whose focus is on species that don't officially exist. Although a select few of these feel their pulses quicken upon the triumphant verification of the existence of Laotian Rock Rats or Mountain Pygmy Possums, the greater number pursue more tabloid-friendly quarries: Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman. Derided as pseudoscience, cryptozoology persists as a discipline because of a wealth of anecdotal evidence, a tissue-thin amalgam of ambiguous prints, spoors, and other traces... and finds like the Coelacanth. After all, if it could vanish for 65 million years, is it so hard to believe a Neanderthal clan might dwell in the Rockies and go unnoticed for a mere thirty millennia?

More on cryptids another time...