Guardian Notes & Queries 16 10 13 - Why is Humpty Dumpty an egg?
image generated by ChatGTP In July 1945, the chief architect of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, pondering on the success of the recent nuclear test at White Sands, recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” One hundred-and-forty-three years earlier, and approximately five-thousand miles to the east, another man of science, this one a “rattle-brained” naturalist by the name of Edward Caton, had also earned himself the moniker 'destroyer of worlds.' On this occasion the title was not self-appointed, but was bestowed upon him by his peers at The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Knowledge of the Natural Sciences (later it was renamed The Royal Society of the Natural Sciences by men with more common sense than its founders). Caton's grand folly, which was to earn himself a toehold in the footnotes of history, was the careless placement of a perfectly spherical gharial egg (a gharial is a narrow-jawed, fish-eat...