Coming Attraction: Charles Morton wonders where birds come from (1685) | Hacker News Reader

Coming Attraction: Charles Morton wonders where birds come from (1685)

laphamsquarterly.org

24 pointsbenbreen11 comments

I find it fascinating that the author apparently knew about planets and gravitational attraction (which are fairly advanced concepts) while at the same time being completely unaware that animals can migrate long distances.

You'd think migration is a very easily-explainable phenomenon. But for thousands of years it completely flummoxed Western thinkers. The big breakthrough came in 1822, when a stork arrived in Germany... carrying an African-made arrow impaled through its neck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch

The Cajuns were one of the first groups to realize this.

After being expelled from Canada ([0]Le Grand Dérangement, 1755-1764), they realized the ducks that spent the summer in their previous home up north spent the winter in their new home on the gulf coast.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians

1822? Makes me question whether King Arthur would have known that African swallows existed[0].

But in all seriousness, wow, I had no idea this was such a recentish phenomenon.

[0]: Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference.

What did they think of migratory birds which would “disappear” one season to “reappear” another season. What was the explanation, if any?

Hibernation

Woodcocks travel a fairly immense distance (see https://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/3c74c7b19cb733d0f68b3c4f...).

I would suspect, had one guessed in 1685 that the birds arriving that Halloween in London had been relaxing in Spring around the Caspian Sea, you would have been laughed at. Persia in the 1600s might as well have been the moon. I suppose one can forgive them for their lack of belief in the power of our fellow animals - that is more or less the major mistake of their time period: hubris.

> Now, if this be true (as I have no reason to doubt it), it either shows the creature to come from above, or at least thus much, if it come from any remote part of the earth, it first mounts above the attraction of the earthly globe before it begins its journey toward us. Which, if it be gained, it fairly helps our supposal, as is before noted; for if there be such an attraction (which is called gravity) and it have bounds in a certain height, then it may as well serve their going to the moon as to some other parts of the earth.

I do love this though. Perhaps birds travel to the moon! One cannot fault him for lack of imagination.

<pedantic engineer voice>The distance to the moon was well-enough known at the time, though. That's quite a migration! And I think they should at least be entertaining a strong doubt about air along the way: from how attenuated the sun/moon look near the horizon vs. high in the sky, most of whatever's attenuating that light stays very near the Earth. I think astronomers had been accounting for refraction from the atmosphere since at least Tycho Brahe.

Added: just found this on the early history of atmospheric refraction. https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~lehn/_Papers_for_Download/hist...

Indeed but the bit about “maybe gravity stops applying at some point” is key. Just floating to the moon seems more doable that that this small huntable bird has an active domain larger than any human empire ever.

Like obviously they were way wrong - but I think it’s important to frame historical ideas with an honest “what would I have to believe in order to believe this”.

Agreed! I wanted to come across in a "yes, and" spirit. I just think "what would I have to ignore?" is interesting, too. Such as a distance that'd take weeks of travel at the speed of a jet plane -- much faster than a hurricane -- nonstop. Some such celestial current is also quite a thing to imagine.

His main problem seems to be missing data (specifically about where birds migrate to). I wonder how many things we are wrong about from lack of data that people in the year 2359 will look back at us like we look back at Charles Morton.

> If seasonal birds did, in the time of their absence from us, reside anywhere in this earth, it is likely that someone would in one age or other have discovered the place; but I cannot, from any record of the learned or distinct and reasonable account of other men, find that there is any man who has seen them out of their seasons; and therefore I conclude they are nowhere in this our earth.

I don’t know this Charles Morton. But, with all due respect to the guy, I bet his colleagues would have pointed out the weakness of his argument…

Morton must have known about the existence of South America (and the vast tracts of unexplored N. America) as well as Asia and Africa.

Surely he wouldn’t have expected to have found treatises on bird populations written by Incas and Zulus, Chinamen and Mongols, in whatever collection of writings he had access to.

I think he may have really wanted to believe in the moon theory.

Perhaps thats the lesson here… not so much missing data, as a blind spot for fallacies when you have a cool thing you want to believe in.

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