Monday, July 09, 2007

Polydactyl Hemingway cats

The famous Key West cats, threatened with eviction under government statute, get a reprieve.

The Hemingway Home and Museum website has lots of pictures of the cats.

Bonus information: the phenomenon of human polydactyly caught the interest of two of the most interesting eighteenth-century investigators of the phenomenon that would come to be known as heredity (heredity really wasn't used as a noun until a hundred years later, although people did talk sometimes about hereditary traits and such-like). One was my beloved Maupertuis; the other was Reaumur, who also invented a temperature scale which put zero at the freezing point of water.

1 comment:

  1. It would be a sad thing to evict those cats. It is endearing that they remain part of the Hemmingway homestead.

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