Genre:

Regular Feature, Notes, Drollery

Subjects:

Medical Practitioners, Philosophy, Political Economy, Gravity, Natural Law, Discovery,

    Describing the artefacts of the famous, considers the emotions felt when one handles the toothpick which Alexander Pope was said to have bequeathed to John Arbuthnot, and which is now kept in the College of Dentists, Glasgow. Similarly, contemplates the thoughts that pass through the mind when handling the 'penwiper' that Thomas R Malthus used on the day he completed Malthus 1798 or 'Newton's tobacco-stopper, formed out of a fragment of the apple-tree under which he was sitting in September, when the Yorkshire codling [a variety of apple] fell at his feet, and unfolded to him his grand discovery of the laws of good society'. Later notes how Joseph Banks and Joshua Reynolds found Edmund Burke in his Wolverhampton villa 'feeding his turkey poults with Indian corn, at luncheon time'.