I found this in Julian Huxley’s papers. I think it’s a joke.
I mean, he might plausibly have needed an alligator but I can’t see why Berings would stock them.
Huxley was both a writer and a collector of amusing doggerel, by the way, and there’s a great deal of it squirreled away in these papers. The best bit is an obscene attempt to finish Aldous Huxley’s famously unfinished limerick: “There was a young man of East Anglia, whose loins were a tangle of ganglia.” I’m not going to reproduce it here but if you stop me on campus, I might be persuaded to tell you the rest.
Alligator was a model of stove manufactured by the Independent Stove Co. of Owosso, MI. See http://www.sdl.lib.mi.us/history/stove.html, among others.
And here’s a link to some advertising pieces for the Alligator. http://www.wrinkledwillytreasures.com/Independent-Stove-Co-Advertising-Alligator-Letter-Opener-Very-Hard-To-Find-Free-Shipping_p_1136.html
Ha–that’s great! How on earth did you figure it out?
Melissa, I looked at the products Bering offered and figured that a stove was the most likely thing on the list that Huxley might have needed. So I Googled “alligator stove,” and bingo!
But why would he order a stove in May? Perhaps he had to wait weeks/months for delivery?
More importantly, how can we make Melissa finish the limerick?
Melissa, this is an extremely scientifically curious forum: The introduction of the term “ganglia” has necessitated –necessitated, I say– the completion of said limerick!
That question occurred to me. No one orders a stove in Houston in May unless he gets a terrific off-season discount. But this was near the end of the school year, and Huxley may have been anticipating his return to England later that year. Considering what was going down in Europe at the time, it was a shrewd move.
Although Karl probably has the right answer, another possibility might be a reference to an “alligator shear” (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_shear), but that seems less likely to be something that Berings would sell. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_shear)
I suspect that it was for departmental or office use. It might have been because it was easier to purchase it here and ship it to England, although I would imagine that shipping something that big would have been pretty expensive, especially with, to paraphrase Karl, what was going down (literally) in the Atlantic at the time. Are there other Huxley papers that show obviously personal items? And, don’t forget that the sales ticket says “Rice Institute,” not “Julian Huxley.” Concerning the May date, I don’t know how the University dealt with fiscal years at that time but the use of end-of-term funds for needs that made themselves known during the term is a time-honored tradition for us in academia.
http://abscissa.stormpages.com/LimericksE.html
See second limerick on the left. Do not read the second on the right.
Heh. That’s not at all the version in Julian Huxley’s papers, which is bawdier than the second one on the right.