Praise of a Collie
by Norman MacCaig

She was a small dog, neat and fluid —
Even her conversation was tiny:
She greeted you with bow, never bow-wow.

Her sons stood monumentally over her
But did what she told them. Each grew grizzled
Till it seemed he was his own mother's grandfather.

Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,
I remarked how dry she was. Pollóchan said, 'Ah,
It would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie.'

And her tact — and tactics! When the sheep bolted
In an unforeseen direction, over the skyline
Came — who but Lassie, and not even panting.

She sailed in the dinghy like a proper sea-dog.
Where's a burn? — she's first on the other side.
She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind.

But suddenly she was old and sick and crippled ...
I grieved for Pollóchan when he took her for a stroll
And put his gun to the back of her head.


Norman MacCaig, "Praise of a Collie" from Collected Poems. © Norman MacCaig published by Chatto & Windus. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of the physician and lexicographer Peter Mark Roget (books by this author), born in London, England (1779). He was a working doctor for most of his life, but he was also a Renaissance man, a member of various scientific, literary, and philosophical societies. In his spare time, he invented a slide rule for performing difficult mathematical calculations and a method of water filtration that is still in use today. He wrote papers on a variety of topics, including the kaleidoscope and Dante, and he was one of the contributors to the early Encylopaedia Britannica.

He was 61 years old, and had just retired from his medical practice, when he decided to devote his retirement to publishing a system of classifying words into groups based on their meanings. Other scholars had published books of synonyms before, but Roget wanted to assemble something more comprehensive. He said, “[The book will be] a collection of the words it contains and of the idiomatic combinations peculiar to it, arranged, not in alphabetical order as they are in a Dictionary, but according to the ideas which they express.”

He organized all the words into six categories: Abstract Relations, Space, Matter, Intellect, Volition, Sentient and Moral Powers; and within each category there were many subcategories. The project took him more than 10 years but he finally published his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in 1852. He chose the word “thesaurus” because it means “treasury” in Greek.

Roget’s Thesaurus might have been considered an intellectual curiosity except that at the last minute Roget decided to include an index. That index, which helped readers find synonyms, made the book into one of the most popular reference books of all time. It is considered one of the great lexicographical achievements in the history of the English language and it has been helping English students pad their vocabularies for more than 150 years.

It’s the birthday of Joseph Farwell Glidden, born in Charleston, New Hampshire (1813). For centuries hedgerows and stone walls were the only way to keep livestock contained. In the American West cowboys followed herds of cattle to make sure no harm came to them. Glidden saw an exhibition in which a wooden rail with nails protruding from it kept livestock at a distance. He rigged up an old coffee grinder to twist strands of wire around each other then clipped off the protruding ends to make barbs. A number of men filed patents for similar barbed fences at the same time and there was a tremendous fight, but Glidden won, and his barbed-wire factory made him one of the country’s richest men. That was the end of the Wild West. Long cattle drives came to an end and longhorn cattle began to disappear; it wasn’t necessary to breed cattle tough enough to survive out on the range anymore.

It’s the birthday of the man who created the most famous fictional teddy bear in the world: A.A. Milne (books by this author), the father of Winnie-the-Pooh, was born today in London (1882). A young H.G. Wells was once his schoolteacher and Milne went to Trinity College on a mathematics scholarship, but his passion was writing, particularly light verse and plays. Milne was a lifelong pacifist, though he served in World War I, enlisting in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and then working in the Royal Corps of Signals. Milne was also an atheist and he once said, “The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief — call it what you will — than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor bicycle, and golf courses.”

He wrote for the British humor magazine Punch for a number of years, played cricket on the same team as Arthur Conan Doyle and J.M. Barrie — called “The Allahakbarries” — and penned several plays, like Mr. Pim Passes By (1921) and Toad of Toad Hall (1929), before the pudgy bear took over his life and became a worldwide sensation.

Milne was on holiday with his son, Christopher Robin, whom the family called “Billy,” when he began playing around with poems about the stuffed animals in his son’s nursery, particularly a teddy bear his son called “Edward the Bear.” The world of Hundred Acre Wood, which Milne based on Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, was quickly populated with a gloomy donkey named Eeyore, an excitable entity named Tigger, a piglet named Piglet, and a fussy owl named Owl. They were shepherded by a little boy with a bowl haircut who carried Milne’s son’s name, Christopher Robin. Winnie-the-Pooh was first featured in a Christmas story, “The Wrong Side of Bees,” published in the London Evening News in December of 1925. By 1931 Winnie-the-Pooh was a million-dollar business and an American magazine had named Milne’s son the most famous 11-year-old in the world.

Milne wasn’t altogether happy that the “bear of very little brain” had overshadowed what he considered his more serious writing. He said:

“It seems to me now that if I write anything less realistic, less straightforward than ‘The cat sat on the mat,’ I am ‘indulging in a whimsy.’ Indeed, if I did say that the cat sat on the mat (as well it might), I should be accused of being whimsical about cats; not a real cat, but just a little make-believe pussy, such as the author of Winnie-the-Pooh invents so charmingly for our delectation.”

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928) are now considered classics of children’s literature. In 2022 the character Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain.

On this date, in 1788 the first convict ship of the First Fleet arrived to establish a penal colony in Australia. Britain had sent her convicts to America, but since the American Revolution that was no longer an option, and the prisons were rapidly becoming overcrowded. Captain James Cook had discovered the eastern coast of Australia in 1770, and he reported that it was suitable for establishing a settlement, so he claimed it for the Crown. The British didn’t consider Australia to be inhabited in spite of the large native population that had lived there for 10,000 years. Because the aborigines didn’t cultivate the land, they weren’t “civilized,” and therefore the land was ripe for the picking. Eager to recover the income they lost when America gained her independence, Britain decided to kill two birds with one stone: send convicts to Australia to free up the prisons, and use their cheap labor to build up the infrastructure of a new colony.

The First Fleet was made up of 11 ships and it was led by Captain Arthur Phillip. The fleet carried about 1,500 passengers, over half of them convicts and the rest mostly marines and their families. Of the convicts, about 20 percent were women, and some of them brought their children with them. The fleet had traveled for 252 days, over 15,000 miles, and didn’t lose a single ship on the voyage. Only 48 people — 3 percent of the passengers — died on the voyage.

The fleet arrived in Botany Bay in what is now New South Wales only to find that their first landing site was unsuitable. The land around Botany Bay was lacking in freshwater, its soil quality was deemed poor, and it was too open to the sea, making it dangerous for ships to dock. The fleet continued north to Port Jackson in Sydney Harbor where they landed on January 26. They carried enough provisions to see them through until the colony was established and producing its own food through farming, hunting, and fishing. Unfortunately, the convicts were poor fishermen, and even worse farmers and everyone had to survive on food that was either rationed from the provisions or brought in on later ships. They augmented their meager supplies with meat from dogs, rats, crows, and the occasional kangaroo or emu. They had been provided with very few tools and those they had were of inferior quality and not up to the challenge of Australia’s huge trees. No one thought to send extra clothes either, so when subsequent ships arrived they found people clad in heavily patched rags.

Arthur Phillip, the First Fleet’s commander, served as the first governor of the penal colony and he instituted a system whereby convicts — regardless of their crime — were employed according to their skills. Educated convicts worked as bookkeepers. Female convicts were usually sent to textile factories, but they were released from their service if they married because they were believed to have the most value serving as wives and mothers. Laborers worked as brickmakers, cattle and sheep ranchers, carpenters, and servants. Eventually, the wool trade and gold mining, combined with a scarcity of labor over the vast territory, made Australia a land of opportunity rather than punishment.

Over the next 80 years, Britain sent more than 160,000 convicts to Australia. Most of them were thieves, but some were mutinous soldiers. Almost all of them — 99 percent — were from the British Isles, but the rest came from British outposts in Canada, India, and Hong Kong.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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