Greatness and tribulations of Zeiss and Leitz, two famous German optic companies - I. Zeiss

In a series of three articles, a parallel is drawn between the histories of the two most famous German optic companies, Zeiss and Leitz. Born in the middle of the 19th century, Zeiss went through National Socialism, World War II, partition and reunification of Germany. Archive documents abound, but a careful analysis is necessary to understand or guess the part played by the main actors, as Ernst Abbe, brilliant German physicist, or Küppenbender who eclipsed Emanuel Goldberg, a pioneer in information storage and retrieval. The reunification of Germany provided the opportunity for the reuniting of the eastern and western Carl Zeiss enterprises, creating a macro-economic shock, with radical change for the Carl Zeiss Jena company. Today, Carl Zeiss AG is a global leader in the optical and optoelectronic industry.     

German Missionaries and Australian Anthropology

ABSTRACT

In their primary task of converting Indigenous Australians to Christianity, German missions active in various parts of Australia through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century recorded relatively few successes. On the other hand, their endeavours in observing and recording Aboriginal languages and cultures have left a rich – and yet frequently overlooked – anthropological legacy. A common element in that legacy is their work in the area of linguistics, which they understood to be a necessary foundation for their evangelical work. Nonetheless, caution must be exercised in evaluating the German missionary contribution to Australian anthropology according to either national or religious paradigms. German anthropology, as practised within the community of missionaries and outside, evinces a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. Moreover German anthropologists, including missionaries, were by the late nineteenth century connected into international knowledge networks.     

Nostalgia,Memory, and Modernity: Bridal Portraits in Contemporary Beijing

This article examines the multiple ways in which persons of mixed descent were invisible in most New Zealand cities during the first half of the 20th century. It is argued that living as mixed descent was a highly visible experience during the 19th century, but this increasingly gave way to invisibility during an era of state-sponsored assimilation. Invisibility was a strategy for survival and success in the mainstream society, but was often accompanied by cultural loss. It is argued that oral histories, in conjunction with the family photograph album, provide an important way in which to recover lost histories, and that the descendants of persons who disappeared into urban New Zealand in the first half of the twentieth century are employing the family photograph album to assert their Māori identity and overcome a history of dispersal and loss.     

STR allelic frequencies in a German skeleton collection

Chromosomal DNA was isolated from bones from a German skeleton collection (Goslar, 18th century) and detected by PCR. Nine microsatellite regions were amplified by multiplex reactions using the AmpFlSTR Profiler Plus kit and analysed to obtain their allelic distribution. A statistical evaluation of the results revealed no allelic differentiation between the historic sample and a modern German one at each locus.     

On German-Croatian and Italian-Croatian language contact

Croatia has always been a multilingual environment. The influence of German and Italian was empowered through direct political influence. During the second part of the 18th and in the 19th century native speakers of German and Italian used Croatian as a second language carrying out their duties at work. This bilingualism can tentatively be referred to as bureaucratic bilingualism. Native Croatian speakers used Italian and German as a second language in certain social areas. Such bilingualism can tentatively be called civic bilingualism. It can be assumed that starting with the 1960s civic German and Italian bilingualism no longer existed. Language contact within the daily life results in German and Italian loan words in Croatian which are still actively present and used in daily communication.     

Taking the photographs home: The recovery of a Maori history

The act of taking back to their communities some early twentieth‐century photographs of Maori elders unlocked both history and memory. This article analyses the creation of two very different books based on photographs and the oral histories that were narrated to the authors.     

Whole-genome natural histories of apicomplexan surface proteins

The natural histories of free-living and pathogenic protozoans have been described in over a century of studies, spanning a range of disciplines such as microscopic, cellular, taxonomic, pathological, clinical and molecular. Only in the last decade has this landscape of work benefited from the availability of whole-genome nucleotide sequence data. For many pathogens, it is now possible to overlay analyses of protein repertoires onto the current spectrum of knowledge. This article illuminates protozoan natural histories, particularly the rapidly evolving and highly adaptive direct physical interface of apicomplexan parasites and their hosts, by providing a brief introduction to the origin and phylogenetic distribution of parasite-encoded surface proteins and their component domains.     

Lifecycle Planning and Responsibility: Prospection and Retrospection in Germany

Financialisation confronts households in the form of planning and risk management along standardised lifecycle stages like starting a family or preparing for retirement. The finance sector in Germany represents this as the exercise of responsibility. Yet German government institutions have long encouraged and rewarded a different kind of responsibly, manifested in prudent study, work and consumption habits. In this paper, I tease out from life histories of German retirees their nonchalance about planning, antipathy toward finance and strong sense of personal effort and investment. Contrasting them with the contingency and treacherousness of financial planning, I argue that financialisation is preceded by ideological work, which redefines responsibility according to its own needs and in so doing, obscures its stakes.     

Labrador Inuit Subsistence in the Context of Environmental Change: An Initial Landscape History Perspective

In this article, I examine the subsistence economy of the contact-period Labrador Inuit (17th to 19th century) to investigate the relationships of elements of specific cultural changes to environmental change, the effects of cultural interactions, and internal social processes. I apply paleoclimate and sea-ice records and zooarchaeological studies of life history and seasonality of ecologically sensitive species to reconstruct histories of change in particular elements of the physical landscape and of their use. I associate the use of communal houses by the Labrador Inuit and their modification of settlement patterns during the 18th century to a limited phase of environmental moderation and stability during the Little Ice Age and suggest that these changes reflect, in part, economic strategies oriented toward surplus production.     

Preliminary study of an interdisciplinary examination of the body height proportions of Germans in the 19th century and of the influence of living conditions. I. Introductory justification, problems and preliminary studies based on authentic sources from the political districts from northern Germany to Württemburg

Researches about the influences of the nutritional conditions on body-height need interdisciplinary co-operation of Anthropology, History, and Dietetics. Such a team will be difficult succeed in joining. Especially interesting for human sciences are nutritional-constitutional researches on German populations in the 19th century, because in this century multifarious varieties exist within the German settlement. Author hopes, that preliminary original researches and first trends in results facilitate the joining of such an interdisciplinary team. In part I of this inquiry, the necessity for nutritional-constitutional researches are justified, problems are treated and mustering-statistics, the most important data-material, are collected for the political regions of that time from North to the kingdom Württemberg. The kingdom Württemberg of course is the political region with the most continuous data-series, but the data-material is poor on body-height-means and needs new statistical treatments. Less data are particularly available from the middle of the German settlement.     

Preliminary studies of an interdisciplinary inquiry of the body height proportions of Germans in the 19th century and of the influence of living conditions. II. Original preliminary studies for Baden, Alsace-Lorraine, Bavaria, the whole German Reich, summarizing evaluation, historical nutritional references, literature

In Part I of this examinations, preliminary original researches about the constitutional situations in Germany from the North to the kingdom Württemberg has been presented. In this part II, such preliminary researches follow for the other southern part of the German settlement. With references to Baden, Alsace-Lorraine, and Bavaria first since the second part of the 19th century, comprehensive anthropological data exist, but these contain valuable and differentiated data material. A first analysis for this German data material does not reveal regular relation-ships between body-height, urban and rural life, and geographical altitude. But there are relation-ships between wealthy and poor social classes and between educated and heavily working people, and there exists a negative trend in the body-height-means from the North and South to the middle of the German settlement with minima in Saxony and in several regions in Southern Germany. As spread for the different means about 160 to more than 170 cm is to estimate. The spread seems to be broader in the second half of the 19th century, presumably because the better life-conditions does not hold for all Germans in the same manner. About of the beginning of the 20th century, the body-height-means show an increase with may by interpreted as an kind of rehabilitation after times of emergency in the early industrialization and of difficulties in food supply.     

Intersectionality,nationalisms, biocoloniality

The early twenty-first century is marked by new postcolonial nationalist ideologies and their indifference to modern histories of colonisation and the urgent need for anti-nationalist theories of racialised subjectification. I discuss the importance of work on ‘intersectionality’ and consider how some theoretical formations reproduce core elements of ‘common sense’ nationalisms such as universal, fixed racial categories, the gender binary and the idea of separate cultures. I then argue for a transdisciplinary theory of racialised subjectivity that I call ‘biocoloniality’.     

Johann Friedrich Meckel, Jr. as founder of scientific teratology

n the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his death, the scientific work of the famous German anatomist Johann Friedrich Meckel (1781 to 1833) in Halle is appreciated. The Younger Meckel is counted to the most outstanding figures in the history of anatomy and medicine in the first third of 19th century. According to his founded knowledges in the normal, comparative, and pathologic anatomy and embryology he was able to give a scientific argument of malformations first of all in the history of medicine and biology. The edition of Meckel's Handbook of Pathologic Anatomy (in German language; 1st vol. 1812) is the birth of scientific teratology. Through his contributions to teratology Meckel directly participated in the raising of general pathology and pathologic anatomy to scientific disciplines. Meckel's interceding for C. F. Wolff's theory of epigenesis, not at last by translation of Wolff's paper "De formatione intestinorum" (1768 to 1769) into the German language, accelerated the development of the general and special embryology during the 19th century. In the contemporary medicine the succeeding eponyms are reminding of the imposing German physician and anatomist: the Meckel's diverticulum of ileum (1809), the Meckel's cartilage of the mandibular arch (1820) and the so-called Meckel syndrome (1822).     

A century of research on the larval distributions of the Atlantic eels: a re‐examination of the data

The spawning areas of the Atlantic freshwater eels were discovered about a century ago by the Danish scientist Johannes Schmidt who after years of searching found newly hatched larvae of the European eel, Anguilla anguilla, and the American eel, Anguilla rostrata, in the southern Sargasso Sea. The discovery showed that anguillid eels migrate thousands of kilometers to offshore spawning areas for reproduction, and that their larvae, called leptocephali, are transported equally long distances by ocean currents to their continental recruitment areas. The spawning sites were found to be related to oceanographic conditions several decades later by German and American surveys from 1979 to 1989 and by a Danish survey in 2007 and a German survey in 2011. All these later surveys showed that spawning occurred within a restricted latitudinal range, between temperature fronts within the Subtropical Convergence Zone of the Sargasso Sea. New data and re‐examinations of Schmidt's data confirmed his original conclusions about the two species having some overlap in spawning areas. Although there have been additional collections of leptocephali in various parts of the North Atlantic, and both otolith research and transport modelling studies have subsequently been carried out, there is still a range of unresolved questions about the routes of larval transport and durations of migration. This paper reviews the history and basic findings of surveys for anguillid leptocephali in the North Atlantic and analyses a new comprehensive database that includes 22612 A. anguilla and 9634 A. rostrata leptocephali, which provides a detailed view of the spatial and temporal distributions and size of the larvae across the Atlantic basin and in the Mediterranean Sea. The differences in distributions, maximum sizes, and growth rates of the two species of larvae are likely linked to the contrasting migration distances to their recruitment areas on each side of the basin. Anguilla rostrata leptocephali originate from a more western spawning area, grow faster, and metamorphose at smaller sizes of <70 mm than the larvae of A. anguilla, which mostly are spawned further east and can reach sizes of almost 90 mm. The larvae of A. rostrata spread west and northwest from the spawning area as they grow larger, with some being present in the western Caribbean and eastern Gulf of Mexico. Larvae of A. anguilla appear to be able to reach Europe by entering the Gulf Stream system or by being entrained into frontal countercurrents that transport them directly northeastward. The larval duration of A. anguilla is suggested to be quite variable, but gaps in sampling effort prevent firm conclusions. Although knowledge about larval behaviour is lacking, some influences of directional swimming are implicated by the temporal distributions of the largest larvae. Ocean–atmosphere changes have been hypothesized to affect the survival of the larvae and cause reduced recruitment, so even after about a century following the discovery of their spawning areas, mysteries still remain about the marine life histories of the Atlantic eels.     

Rapid diagnostic DNA cytometry with an automatic microscope and a TV image-analysis system

A TV-based image-analysis system (Leitz TAS plus) combined with a Leitz automatic microscope was used for rapid DNA cytometry for diagnostic purposes. Malignant or suspicious cells found by the cytopathologists in conventionally stained smears were automatically relocated and measured. A program for automatic detection and measurement of nuclear DNA content was developed. DNA data are processed by an algorithm for the diagnosis and grading of malignancy. This diagnostic procedure is performed in real time and yields highly reproducible results. With this equipment, diagnostic DNA cytometry may be introduced in the routine cytology laboratory. Our mode of application does not replace the cytopathologist, but assists him or her in cases of doubtful diagnosis and in the grading of malignant tumors.     

Evangelism,Ethnography and Linguistics: Carl Strehlow and J. R. B. Love

ABSTRACT

This article considers the intersection of evangelism, ethnography and linguistics in the work of two missionaries living among Aboriginal communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carl Strehlow was one of several German missionaries working in central Australia in the 1890s and into the twentieth century. J. R. B. Love met Strehlow briefly in 1913, but did not become a fully committed missionary himself until the 1920s. This paper first considers Strehlow’s evangelical, linguistic and ethnographic interests in relation to some of his German contemporaries, before comparing his approach to that of the younger, Presbyterian, Love to elucidate the inter-relationships between evangelism, linguistics and ethnography in the 1890s and early twentieth century in Australia.     

Variability of canine microsatellites within and between different dog breeds

Polymorphic animal microsatellites have proved valuable genetic markers. For this project, the variability of 19 canine microsatellite loci was examined within and between three pure breeds of dog: Greyhounds, Labradors, and German Shepherds. The number of alleles, absolute and relative frequencies, and the statistics that express polymorphism within a breed were determined. The evolutionary relationships among these closely related dog breeds were estimated by genetic distance measures developed for use with microsatellite loci. According to the pairwise genetic distances, Greyhounds and German Shepherds had longer diverse evolutionary histories than Greyhounds and Labradors or Labradors and German Shepherds. Although a few breed-specific alleles were observed, the significant differences between breeds are in their relative frequencies and distribution of the alleles across a locus. None of the three pure dog breeds corresponds to Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. A considerable reduction in intrapopulation variation was observed within three pure breeds, compared with the population of individuals belonging to 15 dog breeds. This reduction was especially pronounced in the Greyhound breed, which expressed the lowest degree of variation. Intrapopulation variations of Labradors and German Shepherds did not differ significantly, that of Labradors being only slightly higher. The intra-species variation of dogs is lower than in humans, mouse, or rat, but similar to that in domestic animals, probably reflecting similarly high inbreeding coefficients. However, some highly informative loci were common to all dog breeds tested so far. Such population data are necessary for mapping studies and linkage analysis in dogs. Received: 31 July 1996 / Accepted: 21 October 1996     

Morphometric and topologic analysis of freeze-fractured interphase nuclei

Interphase rat liver nuclei were studied by freeze fracturing followed by electron microscopic observations. This method permits information on the native organization of the nuclear components in the hydrated state to be obtained. Morphometric analyses, performed with a Leitz Texture Analysis System, gave precise information on the different nuclear components, based on the histograms of their size distribution in heterochromatin, interchromatin and nucleolar areas. The textural characteristics were analyzed by computer to determine the topologic distribution of the solenoid chromatin fibers, the nucleosome filaments and the ribonucleoproteins in the different nuclear domains.     

激光诱变产生无核沙田柚的胚胎学研究

采用激光诱变的方法已经成功的培育出无核(少核)沙田柚,我们采用德国产Leica DMLB生物显微镜MPS60照相系统对采摘回的花蕊(经生物技术处理)进行拍照,与未经激光处理的对照组做比较,分析了雌雄配子体发育过程,对无核果作用机理研究提供参考。     

The anthropometric history of Argentina, Brazil and Peru during the 19th and early 20th century

This anthropometric study focuses on the histories of three important Latin American countries - Brazil, Peru, and Argentina - during the 19th century, and tests hypotheses concerning their welfare trends. While non-farm Brazil and Lima, Peru, started at relatively low height levels, Brazil made substantial progress in nutritional levels from the 1860s to the 1880s. In contrast, Lima remained at low levels. Argentinean men were tall to begin with, but heights stagnated until 1910. The only exception were farmers and landowners, who benefited from the export boom.