Who knew of such a thing as a calendar specific to the French Revolution? I obviously missed that session in my history education, or have forgotten it; but it is good to be reminded. And the way it is invoked is an almost-missable detail but essential to thinking about how we, in all our wisdom as evolving cultures, rewrite rules in ways that sometimes moves us two steps backward for every step we had already taken forward. From the New Yorker‘s environment-focused writer, a superb new look at the earth’s history from the unexpected perspective of teeth:
ANNALS OF EXTINCTION PART ONE
THE LOST WORLD
The mastodon’s molars.
DECEMBER 16, 2013
On April 4, 1796—or, according to the French Revolutionary calendar in use at the time, 15 Germinal, Year IV—Jean-Léopold-Nicholas-Frédéric Cuvier, known, after a brother who had died, simply as Georges, delivered his first public lecture at the National Institute of Science and Arts, in Paris. Cuvier, who was twenty-six, had arrived in the city a year earlier, shortly after the end of the Reign of Terror. Continue reading
Organikos 