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| Image Credit: Nicola Marshall |
Introduced already in an earlier post, but this one I think deserves another look.
Writing on "The Language of Moby-Dick," Maurice S. Lee cites the word fossiliferous with other examples of Melville's "extraordinary language that is simultaneously archaic and fresh":
" 'Fossiliferous' is one of many abstruse terms that Melville lifts from specialized fields." --Maurice S. Lee in A Companion to Herman Melville (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006; paperback 2015) edited by Wyn Kelley.Moby-Dick (1851):
"... it now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view." --Moby-Dick, Chapter 104, The Fossil WhaleScenes Beyond the Western Border, August 1852:
"—all by the light of your chronological, fossiliferous, infernal shell!"
| "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (August 1852) |
Significant revisions to the August 1852 dialogue on paleontology between "C." and "F." (shown above) in the 1857 book version (shown below) include:
- removing the self-reflexive allusion to the writer's journal
- adding the oxymoronic jokes of being "decidedly non-committal" and, later on, of having a "profound smattering" of the subject at hand (paleontology).
- thoroughly re-working "a thousand miles from a library" to read, "amid all the charm of a complete laisser aller in a glorious wilderness, a thousand miles from all the schools of pedantic, groping, and guessing philosophy."
- deleting sentence containing the word "chronometry."
- revising F. (which in the magazine version stands for "Frank") to "Friend." Similarly, all references to "I. F." for "Imaginary Friend" have been revised throughout Part II of the 1857 book version to read simply, Friend.
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| Scenes and Adventures in the Army, page 360 |
"'Fossiliferous' is one of many abstruse terms that Melville lifts from specialized fields." --Maurice S. Lee in A Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley.
ReplyDeleteWell, one English major's "abstruse term" is another man's household word. :-)
Geology in the early 19th century had the kind of cultural prominence that DNA has today (and I'd suggest an even greater one). Google books gives me hundreds upon hundreds of appearances of "fossiliferous" from everything from penny cyclopedias to Quaker periodicals.
Yes, these scholars bless them! need to learn about Google. And I need to add two most relevant usages of "fossiliferous limestone" in published reports of the 1845 expedition of Dragoons to the Rocky Mountains by Carleton in the Prairie Logbooks, and by Philip St George Cooke himself in "Sketches of the Great West."
ReplyDeleteIn terms of phrasing or rhetorical "style," the cited usages here in Moby-Dick and Scenes Beyond the Western Border are similar in that "fossiliferous" occurs as the middle term in a series of three adjectives. Let's see how many hits can match that... I'm interested in anything close.