Ah! 8 May. So, it’s the 94th anniversary of a fascist science expo at which a weird horn was exhibited which then got ‘lost’ for 80 years before being rediscovered and shedding light on the relationship between Charles Darwin and an Italian pioneer of animal grafts.
Obviously.
This, you see, was the opening day of the Mussolini regime’s Florence exhibition celebrating the country’s scientific achievements, and this was one of the University of Pavia’s contributions. It wasn’t a horn, though, despite appearances. It was much odder than that.
This was connected to the work of Paolo Mantegazza, Professor of General Pathology at the University of Pavia, and was, in fact:
Mategazza published a paper about it in 1865 (Degli Innesti Animali e della Produzione Artificiale delle Cellule, or On Animal Grafts and Artificial Cell Production, fact fans), which described the bizarre and slightly unsavoury experiment which created the object in question.
If this all sounds a bit Island of Dr Moreau to you, that’s probably because it is. (This was the 1860s, and the novel was published in 1896, but I couldn’t find anything specific to suggest that H G Wells had heard of this work.)
Mantegazza experimented on frogs, rats, dogs and guinea pigs, among other species, and found that grafted tissue affected the body to which it was attached — but also vice versa: sometimes rotting off, sometimes suppuratingly rejected, and sometimes growing like a tumour.
As we can see from his writing, the cockspur wasn’t Mantegazza’s work, but found its way to him, and really did involve removing one of these things from a cockerel (presumably carefully, after asking really nicely, or after cutting your losses and euthanising the unfortunate bird) and — essentially — shoving it in a cow’s ear.
Darwin saw a summary of the paper about the ‘horn’, and wrote about it The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication in 1868. Mantegazza was apparently something of a fan, and wrote to The Bearded Eminence.
Pavia (Italy) 19 March 1868
Sir, I am wholly occupied in reading your great work: The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication; a sublime monument to human intelligence. May you be blessed in the name of science, in the name of lovers of nature! The book will mark a great epoch in the history of the natural sciences. In the second volume (p. 369) I had the pleasure of seeing one of my studies of animal grafting cited; but you referred to Popular Science Review, where my experiments were described with little accuracy. — The cockspur was not grafted into the eye of a bull [cow], but into an ear (as is often done in Brazil), and after eight years it weighed not 306 but 396 grammes. I am sending you my original work on grafting; you will find the spur depicted in Table 3 and described on page 51.
I rather like the fact that he is slightly breathless in his admiration for the great man, but doesn’t let that get in the way of pointing out errors. Apparently, Darwin acknowledged this, quoting from the letter in the second edition of Variation.
If you want to know what Darwin’s Variation was about, by the way, this seems to be a fairly accessible summary — basically, an attempt, after Origin of Species, to explain exactly how traits were passed down generations.
The horn helped to show that Darwin’s idea — of tiny particles called ‘gemmules’ finding their way into eggs and sperm — didn’t quite work, and eventually the idea of gemmules gave way to that of genes.
In other words, there was some kind of information embedded in the cells of the spur, telling it what to grow into. Which, eventually, led to a model of a double helix, an apocryphal visit to a Cambridge pub, and a Nobel prize.
Anyway, the ‘horn’ that wasn’t a horn ‘disappeared’ twice. It was all but forgotten between the 1860s and 1929, only re-emerging at the National Exposition of History of Science in 1929. Then…
And that is why I’ve had a file on my computer entitled ‘fascist horn’ for the last few weeks. I gave this account its name for a reason.
