Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

✎2073 INFO SubscribeRSS FB TW IG

Eccentrics

Sort:  Alpha  Chrono  Rando

Thomas Phillipps

Sir Thomas Phillipps was an English antiquary and book collector who amassed the largest collection of manuscript material in the 19th century, due to his severe condition of bibliomania. He was the illegitimate son of a textile manufacturer and inherited a substantial estate which he spent almost entirely on vellum manuscripts, and, when out of funds, borrowed heavily to buy manuscripts, thereby putting his family deep into debt. Phillipps recorded in an early catalogue that his collection was instigated by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts. Philipps began his collecting while still at Rugby School and continued at Oxford. Such was his devotion that he acquired some 40,000 printed books and 60,000 manuscripts, arguably the largest collection a single individual has created, and coined the term vello-maniac.

Immanuel Velikovsky

Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, a book which asserts, among many other things, that the planet Venus did not exist until recently. Some 3500 years ago in the guise of a gigantic comet, it grazed Earth a couple of times, after having been ejected from the planet Jupiter some indefinite time earlier, before settling into its current orbit. Velikovsky (1895-1979), a psychiatrist by training, did not base his claims on astronomical evidence and scientific inference or argument. Instead, he argued on the basis of ancient cosmological myths from places as disparate as India and China, Greece and Rome, Assyria and Sumer.

Athanasius Kircher

A renown polymath, Kircher’s research encompassed a variety of disciplines including geography, astronomy, mathematics, language, medicine, and music, bringing to each a rigorous scientific curiosity girded in a mystical conception of natural laws and forces. His methods ranged from the traditionally scholastic to the boldly experimental. He once had himself lowered into the crater of Vesuvius to observe its features soon after an eruption. Another example of his scientific originality is seen in the two chapters of his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae devoted to bioluminescence, where his scientific observations included an experiment to test whether firefly extract could be used to light houses. He also constructed the first known Aeolian harp, a stringed instrument that became popular in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Myrtle Corbin

Josephene Myrtle Corbin, the Four-Legged Woman, was born in Lincoln County, Tennessee in 1868. Rather than having a parasitic twin, Myrtle's extra legs resulted from an even rarer form of conjoined twinning known as dipygus, which gave her two complete bodies from the waist down. She had two small pelves side-by-side, and each of her smaller inner legs was paired with one of her outer legs. She could move the smaller legs but was unable to use them for walking. At the age of 19, she married a doctor named Clinton Bicknell and had four daughters and a son. It has been said that three of her children were born from one set of organs, two from the other.