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Home > Archive 〉 2011 〉 February 〉 Editorial
Catching Spring Crappie
Location and timing are the keys to getting this favorite to bite in February.
By Paul Cañada
Springtime crappie fishing is a longstanding tradition in the Lone Star State. Anglers begin venturing out at most fisheries in February and March, and at local fuel stations, buckets of minnows edge out breakfast burritos as top sellers.
Fishing a minnow under a slip cork for slabs can trigger strong memories of childhood days and times spent with dad watching that bobber dance. Neighborhood kids running home after school, grabbing their Zebcos and a bucket and pooling their change for a dozen minnows — these were common sights in the old days. For many anglers, the springtime crappie spawn remains an annual event.
There are numerous reasons why folks enjoy fishing for crappie at this time of year. First, panfish are actively feeding and willing to inhale a minnow or jig offering. Second, crappies crowd prime spawning areas, making them easy to find and exploit. Finally, post-spawn males and females remain fairly aggressive, extending the great fishing action for a few more weeks. All of these add up to a lot of fun and good eating.
However, as any experienced crappie angler knows, the great fishing days are matched by slow days. Timing and location are the keys to catching crappie in spring. The angler who understands when, where and why the fish move along the routes between their deep, cold-water homes and warm spawning flats has a much better chance of catching fish.
Transition Period
The pre-spawning period is a time of preparation and transition. Actively feeding crappie congregate in tight schools and are found in relatively deep water. They move up and down in the water column, following their food source.
As spring progresses and water surface temperatures rise, schools of crappie begin the journey to spawning areas. This journey starts at the upper end of a lake, in areas protected from wave action and cold north winds.
Greg Crafts has been fishing Toledo Bend Reservoir since 1968. Shortly after retiring from a successful career in the oil business, he took up full-time guiding for crappie on the East Texas impoundment in 1986. He begins searching for concentrations of transition fish by first locating subtle changes along a channel's edge.
Crafts' submerged target might be a secondary point along the channel, a large tree, a rockslide, a drainage ditch, a smaller creek bisecting the larger channel or a bend in the channel. The fish will collect and feed in great numbers over these types of bottom features.
"Everything is contingent on water temperature and the number of hours of daylight," Crafts says. "The movement of these fish will start at different times every year dependent on how cold the water is and how quickly it warms up. When water temperatures reach the low 50s and the number of daylight hours increase, the fish begin migrating back to spawning areas."
As water temperatures continue to rise, the fish move closer to the protected area where they will eventually spawn. After a mild winter, the impoundment's water reaches the desired temperature faster and fish start moving back sooner. Depending on the fishery's location in the state, this period of movement occurs between late January and early February.
As the fish make their way back into the creeks, they continue to relate to channel bends and points. Surprisingly large concentrations of crappie will relate to any cover found near the deeper channel. The key to locating the pre-spawn slabs is finding that cover over structure.
"People often get structure and cover confused," Crafts says. "When talking about structure, we're talking about the contour of the lake bottom, the lay of the land, if you will. It might be a ledge, hump or drop, or whatever. Your cover is going to be what's found on top of the structure. It may be stumps, standing timber, brush, hydrilla or man-created cover dropped in the lake to attract crappie."
The water depth the fish are found in is normally just below the depth of maximum sunlight penetration. Prevailing weather patterns also influence fish location. While warm, stable weather will encourage crappie to move to shallower water, cold-front conditions will push fish into deeper water.
As a general rule, crappies don't all spawn at the same time. On impoundments with limited spawning areas, groups of fish move into spawning areas in waves.
Because of this, it's possible to find fish at various stages and locations along the larger creeks.
"Usually, when you hook one, you'll find more in that same area because the crappie will stack up," Crafts says. "Throughout the migration, the fish are usually gathered together. The one exception occurs following a strong cold front, when they may scatter out until the water stabilizes."
During the pre-spawn period, when crappies congregate near channel edges, Crafts fishes a minnow vertically down to the relatively deep cover. He rigs his presentation with a split-shot weight, crimped to his line, three to four inches above the hook. The East Texas guide prefers 10-pound test, braided line.
Braided fishing line affords anglers many advantages when fishing vertically to relatively deep cover. When a big female is hooked, it's important to turn her upward and out before she has a chance to wrap up in the cover itself. Because braided line has very little stretch, it's more sensitive, making it easier to detect strikes in deep water.
"It's hard to beat fishing with live bait during the pre-spawn period," added Crafts. "I have found live bait outfishes artificial lures 90 percent of the time. And there are times when using too large of a minnow will greatly reduce the number of bites you get. So typically, I use the smallest minnow I can buy when fishing vertically for staging crappies."
There are exceptions to Crafts' live bait rule. When targeting slabs in flooded, shallow brush or timber, a minnow and bobber rig are impractical because they hang up in the cover. Under these conditions, "doodle-socking" a jig is a more efficient way to catch the big fish from heavy cover.
Doodle-socking is a technique Texans perfected specifically for brush-filled impoundments. The angler uses a long cane pole or rod, 10 to 12 feet long, and line only, no reel. Pulling the line out and away from the rod, the jig is drawn up to the rod tip. The angler then pokes the rod tip into an opening in the cover and feeds line, lowering the jig into the water.
Unlike Crafts, Guy Skinner, a retired aeronautical engineer who guides on the Dallas-Fort Worth area's lakes, prefers artificial lures to live bait in spring. He believes the artificial offerings allow him to cover water faster and fish more efficiently.
"When fishing the shallow water in the back of spawning areas, I'm either casting or doodle-socking a jig," explained Skinner. "For example, if I find a log in shallow water and suspect crappie are on it, I am going to get right over it and drop the jig down in there. I am going to walk the jig all over that log. If there's a female or two down there, they will knock the snot out of it."
Males are the first to enter the spawning areas, moving to the spawning flats when water temperatures reach the mid- to upper 50s. Females move in and out of these same areas, or stay a bit deeper until they're actually ready to spawn. The males locate a nesting site and spend their time preparing it, fanning away silt and debris. During this time, both males and females will readily take live bait and lures, answering the question regarding using live bait or jigs.
Skinner first looks for males because they are a good indicator of what's happening in the area. If he finds an area with a concentration of males in it, he backs off the bank and fishes in eight to 12 feet of water for the larger females. Using his electronics, Skinner looks for structure features.
"I don't care what it is," added Skinner. "If I find any kind of structure in the area of the males, there will be females on it. I am not looking for anything in particular, but rather for any kind of irregularity along the bottom. You'll know when you found them, because they will readily move to your bait if in the area."
The Spawn
Because crappies prefer a relatively silt-free bottom to spawn on, spawning flats are typically few and far between on lowland reservoirs with muddy bottoms. In this case, crappie will spawn on timber or human-created structures. On Toledo Bend, the fish will spawn on the knees of cypress trees in two to six feet of water.
The actual spawning location is also influenced by lake water levels. If the lake is high and the backs of coves and pockets are flooded, the fish will typically go as far back as they can get. If the impoundment's water level is lower than normal, the fish will spawn farther out from the very back of the pocket.
When water temperatures reach the mid- to upper 60s, the females join the males over the nest. The spawning act may take only an hour or two to complete, but a spawning pair may continue several days as more eggs and milt ripen in the fish. On a small body of water, the entire spawn may be over in a couple of weeks, but on large impoundments like Toledo Bend or Sam Rayburn, a crappie spawn may take a month or more to complete.
After doing their part, females move off to nearby deeper water to feed. The males stay behind to fan the nest to keep the roe oxygenated and to guard eggs against predation. The eggs take about a week to hatch, but males will remain to guard the fry until they disperse from the nesting area.
Crappie don't feed during the actual spawning activity. However, males guarding nests remain aggressive and post-spawn females do feed. Because not all crappies spawn at the same time, anglers can find lots of cooperative fish that haven't yet spawned nearby.
"Locating crappie in spawning areas isn't normally that hard," Crafts says. "When you catch one fish, you can often catch a hundred of them sitting in one spot.
You can almost stay in a single spawning area all day long and catch fish."
Once the fish have moved on to the shallow flats, Crafts fan-casts until he locates them. When fishing nesting areas, he switches to a slip cork and minnow rig. A moveable cork stop allows the angler to precisely set the depth at which the bait is fished.
Skinner fishes for shallow spawners with a rig similar to Crafts' slip cork rig. However, he fishes a jig, about six inches off the lake bottom, on the business end of his shallow-water rig. Whether he's fishing from a boat or wading, the North Texas guide moves and fishes parallel to the bank.
"The spring spawn is the most unreliable time of the year to fish for crappie," Skinner says. "You might knock the stuffing out of them one day, then come up empty the next. But, if everything is right — the weather, timing and location — you can go home with some very impressive strings. If everything isn't right, well, you still got to go crappie fishing."


The Artillery Gardens at the City of London will be transformed to a playground for the exotic and daring, by displaying some of the world's finest cars on the 8th and 9th of June. The City Concours will attract collectors, enthusiasts and those passionate about the art of car making.
The open space surrounded by historical buildings in the heart of London's financial centre will feature 80 sensational vehicles. The mix between historic and exceptionally modern cars include land speed holders, top races winners, American muscle cars, super cars, and a range of breath-taking classics.
This event promises a relaxed environment with great food, good company, as well as entertainment. Visitors can also enjoy displays from artisans and specialist suppliers.
Admission starts from £35 and there are interesting hospitality options as well. Tickets can be purchased here.


My visiting family have returned home after a wonderful visit, their time here flew by all to quickly…The house seems very quite without them here.
It was then time to teach his little brother how to do running stitch, I don't think little brother was understanding what he was doing but the instructions he was giving were good and it was a delight to see him wanting to share his new found knowledge.
Later that evening I was showing my brother the basics so that he could assist with the sampler when they get home, brother asked if he could have a strip of fabric to do his own sampler and a little later sister in law asked if she could have one too, I sent them home with their strips of fabric, needles and threads to get them started and we will correspond by email as to where on the net they can find instructions and may write the occassional post as a lesson for something that they want to learn.
As I said my nephew is nearly ten, his birthday is next week and we decided to have an early birthday party for him…having enjoyed his company while working in the garden I was inspired to make him a special cake that would remind him of his holiday in Canberra, and what better reminder than a castle cake…well it was really a castle ruin, I didn't have much time to think it through so it really is a wonky castle but the overall effect still looked great.
I love how you shared with your family, and how it kept on growing! The cake is absolutely adorable! He's sure to remember this birthday for a long time to come.
what handsome boys they are….ha ha. Biased arent i.
Keep up the good work toots….


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Photo Credit: Aaron Babcock
Hot Reads: Does Your Football Coach Need to be on Twitter?
By Brandon Vogel
Does your football coach need to have a Twitter presence? Most people will view that as a dumb question at this point. "The kids" are on Twitter and coaches need to convince some of those kids to play for them. Therefore, coaches need to be on there.
One of the first things Bob Diaco did (or more likely was instructed to do) upon taking the job at Nebraska was sign up for Twitter.
https://twitter.com/CoachDiaco/status/823679971717771264
He's tweeted 10 times since then. That's not a critique, more just an example that feels like the common trajectory here: Coach is on Twitter because he has to be and basically doesn't use it or hands it off to someone else to manage.
That seems mostly fine to me, but I'm far from a social media expert. So we'll turn to Dr. Steve Dittmore. A professor at Arkansas, he recently wrote on this topic for athleticdirectoru.com:
While it is always difficult to predict the future, the guess here is that five years down the road, more coaches will adopt the strategies of [Jim] Harbaugh and [P.J.] Fleck. Using Scout.com's football recruiting team rankings as a metric, it appears the approach Michigan has taken works. Harbaugh's 2017 class ranked 3rd nationally, up from 7th in 2016 and 35th in 2015, the year Harbaugh arrived. Similarly, Fleck's first Gopher class ranked 38th, up from 46th in 2016 and 56th in 2015. This evidence also seems to support the conclusions regarding competitive advantages for coaches which Jensen, Ervin and I reached in our 2014 research.
Recruits want the attention which comes with personality-driven coaches, and every athletic department can be a media company. Social media allows those recruits to see an additional side of a coach, one which is not present during a pre-scripted official visit. Coaches which eschew the free publicity social media affords will likely find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
Not surprised by that conclusion, though I'm still not convinced it's the "competitive disadvantage" that people assume it might be. As Dittmore notes in the story, Wisconsin Coach Paul Chryst doesn't have a Twitter account as just one counter-example.
Mike Riley does have one, but I'd put him in the hands-off class of social-media coaches. He has a constructed presence on Twitter, but I wouldn't call it "personality-driven" because it's little of his actual personality. But you could still show an upward recruiting trajectory since Riley arrived in Lincoln, from 30th to 26th to 23rd per the same Scout rankings used for Fleck and Harbaugh. (Pretty flimsy proof of concept, that.)
Can social media be a tool for coaches? Sure, but I'm less convinced it's a tool every coach needs to know how to use. It's one of those "you've either got it or you don't" scenarios, and the greater risk of finding a competitive disadvantage might be in trying to force those in the "don't" category into the "do" category. Let the pros handle it, and if the coach also happens to be a social-media pro good for that school.
Nobody taught Lane Kiffin to do this, for example:
Road game. Get in and out bf they trap u!!!! pic.twitter.com/zEiEw8JUrE
— Lane Kiffin (@Lane_Kiffin) November 7, 2017
Didn't want to cover because of too much rat poison #keptuwatching #5-0 #cometothefau #playersgetweekendoff https://t.co/HCsRjZKh4E
If u run 4.4 40 please come to #thefaU we r just getting started https://t.co/5pkb18BpgD
Rock M Nation and Corn Nation revisit the "flea-kicker," which happened 20 years ago yesterday.
Feels like agent posturing and positioning, but according to "sources" Les Miles is interested in the Oregon State job.
Oh, hey, here's Lane Kiffin getting attention for his Twitter persona. Has anyone asked Saban about this?
ICYMI: Nebraska volleyball smashed Maryland last night and here are the photos to prove it. Also, here's part one of a Nebrasketball preview from Jacob Padilla.
Today's Song of Today
Brandon Vogel
Brandon is the Managing Editor for Hail Varsity and has covered Nebraska athletics for the magazine and web since 2012, Hail Varsity's first season on the scene. His sports writing has also been featured by Fox Sports, The Guardian and CBS Sports.
Tags: Football, Hot Reads, nebraska

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


In this theme, the influence of culture upon the perception of landscape quality is examined. It moves beyond the individual's perception of landscape to that of culture. Culture is the glue that cements an individual into a society. A given culture's norms in turn help to shape individual attitudes, beliefs and preferences. This is not the place to examine in depth the influence of culture on the individual, rather it is accepted as axiomatic that individual aesthetic preferences are influenced by the culture in which they live. In this theme, the focus is mainly on Western culture. The Aesthetics of Traditional Societies theme examines several non-Western cultures view of landscape.
In order to provide structure to the vast subject of the influence of culture, a thematic approach is adopted. It commences by examining the two dominant influences on Western culture's attitude to landscape, classicism and teleology. While the unifying thread is the influence of culture on landscape perception, in complementary themes, this is examined in three specific areas: the dramatic reversal of attitudes towards mountains that commenced in the late seventeenth century, the portrayal of landscape in art, and the development of designed gardens which can represent idealized landscapes.
Western culture comprises those nations in Europe, North America, Australasia and certain other countries which broadly reflect common cultural traits – the rule of law and equality under the law, democratic government institutions, the freedom of the individual, capitalist economies, advanced use and development of technology, widely available educational, health and social services, as well as a shared heritage of the Judeo-Christian religions, art, music, literature, and other pursuits. Most of these ideas and institutions derived from Europe.
While this assessment perhaps ignores the influence of the United States on democratic processes and the influence of both the United States and Japan on economic structures, nevertheless in the broad sense, Europe provided the seedbed of ideas and pressures which gave rise to many of the characteristics of Western culture, in particular, the development of its philosophy, laws, governments and institutions, mathematics, sciences, the arts, and technologies.
While Western culture may be thought of as a dominant paradigm in the world today, past centuries have seen the dominance of other cultures including the Chinese, Arabian, Egyptian, Assyrian, and Roman. Today's Western culture represents a merging of key characteristics among a number of countries that share a common heritage.
With foundations in ancient Greece and Rome, Europe fused the diverse cultures of the Mediterranean, central and northern European countries. The concept of beauty, later embraced by the broader term of aesthetics, has been of interest to Western culture since the time of the ancient Greeks. In the following sections, the development of this concept is explored through a cultural perspective.
The Western approach to the aesthetic qualities of landscape has been fashioned by various strands of influence. Classical Hellenistic and Roman influences re-emerged again during the Renaissance and later periods. And from Christian theology developed the teleological view or natural theology of nature and landscape that together with the classical influence, dominated until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Teleology is the search for final causes in relation to design or purpose in nature.
The eighteenth century saw immense speculation about aesthetics in Europe, resulting in major changes resulting in cultural attitudes to aesthetic objects. The nineteenth century was the great age of aesthetic theory, when German philosophy dominated on the Continent and in England. Darwinian evolutionary theory created a new perspective of nature and landscape, under-mining the teleological influence and greatly expanding the search for understanding physical phenomena in every field of science. And finally, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen these many strands combine in a synthesis of influences, added to by new strands including the appreciation of wilderness and of the environment in a non-utilitarian sense.
In the Christian era, the powerful influence of the teleological view of nature and landscape.
During contemporary times, these strands have tended to be demoted to the level of myths, explained away as symbolic analogies or treated simply as fairy-tales (Hunter, 1985) yet until the end of the nineteenth century, they largely shaped Western cultural image of nature and landscape.
Contemporary attitudes towards landscapes are no longer informed by a classical or teleological view. On the one hand, this releases a freedom from the fetters that these created but, on the other hand, their absence has created a vacuum of an underlying value system on which the aesthetics of landscapes could be based.
The Golden Age refers to a legendary time prior to the world of classical Greece and Rome, which was inhabited by people and by creatures which were half human and half animal who lived happily off the fruits of a bountiful earth in a pre-agricultural existence. Life was simple with no human effort required to gain food, a period of happy shepherding and innate soil fertility (Glacken, 1967). People of the Golden Age possessed physical and moral superiority, and the soil fertility was so great that agriculture was unnecessary. The myth of the Golden Age was a period in which man lived on the fruits of the earth, peacefully, piously and with primitive simplicity (Clark, 1976).
"The earth herself, without compulsion, untouched by hoe or plowshare, of herself gave all things needful… Anon, the earth untilled, brought forth her stores of grain, and the fields, though unfallowed, grew white with the heavy, bearded wheat. Streams of milk and streams of sweet nectar flowed, and yellow honey was distilled from the verdant oak" (Ovid, Metamorphoses).
The Greeks esteemed beauty, they valued the beauty of youth, of beauty in a person or a god, as beauty was a sign of perfection (Lister, 1973).
Arcadia, located in the central Peloponnese, is a wild and mountainous region that, according to legend was peopled by nymphs and satyrs, shepherds and herdsmen, living and loving in a life of innocent simplicity (Hunter, 1985). Contrary to contemporary usage in which Arcadia conveys an idealized rural environment – the Shorter Oxford defines it as the ideal region of rural felicity; ideally rural or rustic – the real Arcadia was a difficult area from which to wrest a living. With mountains rising above 2000 meters, the climate was cool and because of the hardness of life, music was introduced out of necessity to tame and soften the hardness of the soul through education (Polybius, quoted by Glacken, 1967). Pan, the patron saint of pastoral poets and the god of idealized wild nature, had his abode in Arcadia.
"Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground – trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden, and from there it divided; it had four streams." (Genesis, 2: 8 – 10).
The term paradise, which became synonymous with the Garden of Eden, derives from the Persian word pairidaeza that means an enclosed park. Similarly, the word Eden derives from the Babylonian edina, meaning a field or park. The Judeo-Christian account of the early origins of humans closely parallels that of the Grecian Golden Age. Both are centered in garden-like environments and involve people in mostly play and little work, both are harmonious places in which people can feel completely at home, and both are places to which, in subsequent ages, people have longed to return.
"Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
Since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return" (Genesis 3: 17 – 19).
Thus while the Golden Age was followed by progressive degeneration to lesser levels of contentment, Eden was followed by immediate banishment to a harsh world from which one had to seek a living by the "sweat of the brow". The contrast in landscapes, from bountiful beauty and ease to an ugly landscape requiring hard work, could not be more marked.
The fertility of the soil was considered greatest when it was least interfered with by man; with interference through plowing and cropping came the loss of soil and loss of fertility thus requiring greater exertion and effort to gain a living. The necessity of hard work and a longing for the ease of the idealized Golden Age continues its influence to the present day.
In time, certainly by the Renaissance, Arcadia and the Golden Age had fused into a single concept of a peaceful pastoral setting with large trees, contented livestock and demigods playing in the glades. The creation of the English country estates in the seventeenth and eighteenth century modeled much of their imagery on Arcadia.
From the Renaissance through to the end of the nineteenth century, the classical influence exerted a very significant effect upon Western culture, including its attitudes to landscape. The classical influence derived both from the image of the former Golden Age, the Arcadia of antiquity, and also from the ancient writers and poets. The classical influence is also termed classicism.
Classicism derived its inspiration from the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. The word "classicism" derived from classici, which was the name given in Rome to citizens of the first rank.
Classicism is characterized by "serene beauty, taste, restraint, order and clarity" a concern with the ideal in form and content, a clarity of subject matter and style, simplicity and understatement (Greenhalgh, 1978). Horace pronounced the famous aphorism ut pictura poesis, "as is painting, so is poetry," thereby linking the two disciplines and justifying art. The close links between poetry and painting were apparent in England from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
Goodness, Truth and Beauty, the ancient triad, were invisible ideals that influenced all humankind. In its temples, statues and poetry, ancient Greece was regarded as the pinnacle of perfection, of perfect proportion and balance and of goodness, truth and beauty. These qualities of ideal beauty, perfect equilibrium and harmony infused classicism into Western cultural attitudes towards landscapes.
The Roman Emperor Augustus (63 BC – 14 AD) came to epitomize the classical ideal. His name applied to the Augustan Age and the Augustan Idea meaning the ideal of classicism from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. His Emperorship was characterized by relative peace, order, security, and a republican form of government with Augustus as Emperor but refusing the dictatorship (Erskine-Hill, 1983). Though certainly not without his faults, Augustus ended the civil wars and strengthened the power of Rome. An early historian described him as: the man the world needed, and may claim to have been one of the greatest servants of the human race (Erskine-Hill, 1983).
Being the man who ordered the census at the time of Christ's birth permanently linked Augustus to Christian literature including the patristic writers of the early church, Dante in the fourteenth century and in Christian plays such as the Chester Cycle. During the period of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, various English monarchs were likened to Augustus. The comparison stemmed from the passionate desire to see, within the framework of a Christian monarchy, a better life and a higher level of civilization in Britain. The refusal by Thomas Cromwell in the seventeenth century to accept the crown also led to him being compared with Augustus.
Platonism, the key philosophy that permeated through to the modern world, delighted in the variety and beauty of the visible and temporal world but yearned for the invisible and eternal world beyond. The influence of Platonism ceased following closure of the Athenian schools in 529 AD by the Emperor Justinian until its rediscovery in the Renaissance in the fifteenth century. The Middle Ages, or the Dark Ages as they were called during the Renaissance, saw Europe permeated by the influence of the antique (Greenhalgh, 1978). Classicism was relevant to both the secular and Church powers. The monasteries founded in Italy and Switzerland in the seventh century became centers of classical learning and repositories of Latin manuscripts.
The Renaissance saw a rediscovery of the classical origins of European culture, a searching for the ancient texts and their translation and preparation of commentaries. In Florence, the Platonic Academy was established whose members regarded themselves as the modern form of Plato's Academy. By the later fifteenth century, the Academy had made Plato's personality a cult object. Marsilio Ficino played a leading role in translating Plato's works and by the time he died in 1499, most of the important literary works of antiquity had been made available to Italy and Europe in Latin translations. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the classicism that had been birthed in the Renaissance in Italy had spread across Europe in the form of neo-classicism (i.e. new or revived classicism). This took with it an educational system based on Latin and Greek, together with the common cultural heritage of ancient history, mythology and wisdom (Secretan, 1973).
Classicism peaked in France between 1660 and 1680. In Germany, classicism emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century as a reaction against the Baroque and drew its inspiration more from Greece, resulting in a tempering of Germany's harder self by the luminous humanity of Hellas. (Secretan, 1973). From about 1690, the name Augustan Age, the period of classicism, was applied to English culture. Throughout the period from 1690 to the early 1800s, the term "Augustan," a synonym for classicism, was used positively (Erskine-Hill, 1983).
The imperative, Follow Nature, was one of the "battle cries" of classicism and the imitation of nature was one of its hallmarks, imitation in the sense of typifying or drawing characters based on nature.
Classical writers such as John Dryden had a preference for order, a love of the ancients, a large stock of mythological and pagan relics, rationality and much elegance. Other classical writers including the poet, Alexander Pope, the supreme Augustan classic and Samuel Johnson, another Augustan who wrote about the role of fantasy, the function of repression, the desire to forget, the wish to avoid reality predated Freudian psychoanalytical concepts by several centuries. Important to the classical mode were reason, judgement and wit, the idea that nature, truth and beauty were irrevocably linked, and a connection between good taste and good morals.
The far-reaching influence of a classical education in seventeenth – eighteenth century England was apparent in the comment by a clergyman, Reverend Richard Warner (1801), viewing blazing iron-works on the banks of the River Wye: We saw Virgil's description realized, and the interior of Etna, the forges of the Cyclops, and their fearful employment, immediately occurred to us.
Until the end of the eighteenth century, England's focus was on Rome, but with more translations of the Greek classics and growing interest in Greek philosophy and architecture, the focus of classicism shifted sharply from Rome to Greece. This has been described as a romantic, even Byronic gesture (Crook, in Clarke, 1989). The eighteenth century has been described as the Homer's century (Turner, in Clarke, 1989) and Hellenism had a profound influence during the nineteenth century Victorian era. Greek religion, mythology and philosophy were widely studied.
"Public schools" existed in England for many centuries and the classics – Greek and Latin, dominated their syllabus. Public education is of more recent origin, having commenced in England in the mid-nineteenth century. To the modern mind, the emphasis given to the classics at schools seems incredible. Not only were students required to learn Greek and Latin but also to study the classical literature in their original language. During the nineteenth century, classicism spread to the wider middle classes, empowered by the industrial revolution to gain an education.
While mathematics and science were of growing importance, a wide-ranging report on education in 1875 found that out of a 35-hour teaching week, 6 hours each were given over to science and mathematics and the remaining 23 hours devoted to Greek and Latin! (Bowen, in Clarke, 1989). To join the Indian Civil Service, a knowledge of Greek and Latin was worth twice as many points in the competitive examination as French, German or the local Sanskrit.
By the end of the nineteenth century, forces in society were moving education away from classicism. Education was based more fully on the three "R's", whilst commerce and industrialization resulted in changed priorities in which the classics had little relevance, and modern foreign languages assumed greater importance than Greek and Latin (Kandel, 1967). The expanding British Empire made society more aware of other cultures. The First World War saw romanticism and classicism die on the battlefields of Flanders (Bowen, in Clarke, 1989) although the Third Reich brewed up a crazy mixture of classicism and German folk-art (Greenhalgh, 1978).
Nevertheless, traces of classicism live on. For example, in the far off Antipodes, Deborah Edwards traced its influence in the work of Australian artists such as Lionel Lindsay, Norman Lindsay, Rupert Bunny, and Mervyn Napier Waller (1893-1972), whose painting The Pastoral Pursuits of Australia in the Art Gallery of South Australia is strongly classical, complete with Corinthian columns! The classical influence continues to be strong in architecture (e.g. the National Library of Australia in Canberra) and recent years have seen strong classical lines in modern buildings (e.g. see Stern, 1988).
The second great theme that influenced Western attitudes to nature in general and landscape in particular was its Judeo-Christian roots, especially the concept of creation being designed by God, being an expression of God and a proof of His existence. The Genesis account of creation underlay the teleological view of nature and landscape.
Teleology is the doctrine of final causes, particularly as related to the evidence for design or purpose in nature and is used interchangeably with the terms 'natural theology' and 'physico-theology', these latter terms are theologies founded upon the facts of nature and the evidence of design found therein. The unity and harmony that are apparent in the world led inexorably to the idea of a purposefulness of creation. Final causes: having regard to end or purpose. (Shorter Oxford).
The author is particularly indebted in this section to Clarence Glacken's monumental study Traces on the Rhodian Shore – Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (1967). Among its themes, Glacken examined the idea of the earth as a purposefully made creation.
Cultures other than Judaic and Christian have viewed nature not only as created by gods, but inhabited by them as well. The Judeo-Christian view was strict on this point; God created the heavens and earth, but God is not in it; the Creator but not the creation is to be worshiped. In contrast, many other cultures worshiped nature, which is known as pantheism in which the creator and the creation are indistinguishable.
"… you will realize the truth of what I say if, instead of waiting for the gods to appear to you in bodily presence, you are content to praise and worship them because you see their works" (Xenophon, Memorabilia, 4.3.15).
"in not one of them is Nature or Beauty lacking. I add "Beauty", because in the works of Nature purpose and not accident is predominant; and the purpose or end for the sake of which those works have been contracted or formed has its place among what is beautiful" (Glacken, 1967).
Aristotle, along with many other thinkers since, did not define the purpose of nature, arguing that it is not a conscious agent; it is the vital force present in all living things. The purpose is thus an unconscious one in nature, but Aristotle was content with this. Later, Christian thinkers were to see God as supplying the purpose and design lacking in Aristotle's argument.
Stoic writers saw the beauty of the earth around them and believed that it could not have been created for animals and plants but rather for man who partakes of the divine and the gods themselves (Glacken, 1967). Panaetius (born 185 BC) built on the Stoic belief that a creative primeval force is responsible for the world's beauty and purposefulness. He saw in the Greek landscape; with its alternation of land and sea, its innumerable islands, its contrasts between the lovely shores and the steep mountains and the rough cliffs, and the variety of plant and animal life existing in this landscape, joy in the beauty of the earth, a parallel for the splendor of the cosmos, a perfection which derived from the work of a purposefully creative nature.
The Lucretian-Epicurean view was less flattering; given the wickedness and stupidity of man and the imperfections apparent in the world, how is it possible to conceive that the earth was made for man? Without the notion of a benevolent Mother Nature, they believed that man established his place in the world through dint of effort and by imitating natural processes – Men by their struggles add to what is already provided by nature.
Clearly to the Greeks, nature was god-designed to provide man with a suitable environment; there was both wonderment at the beauties of nature and a utilitarian purpose contained within it.
Cicero did not believe that "this most beautiful and adorn'd World" could have been produced simply by the fortuitous arrangement of atoms (Nicolson, 1959).
Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food" (Genesis 1:26-29).
You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet.
The rulership of man over creation – the Genesis account and Psalm 8:6. Glacken refers to man's power as vice-regent of God on earth. Man did not earn his rulership; it was thrust upon him.
God the creator is to be worshiped, not the creation – Romans 1:20. There are many such Biblical injunctions that marked a contrast to the pagan religions.
The brevity of the Genesis account of creation, together with the references to nature in the Psalms and elsewhere, led to the development of the hexameral literature; i.e. that concerned with the six days of creation. This started with the early Church Fathers, Philo, St Basil and St Ambrose, was magnificently expressed in Milton's Paradise Lost, and was a major focus of the physico-theology writers of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries as they sought to explain the characteristics of nature and to understand God through linking biology, geology and geography with the Biblical account of creation. Glacken refers to this literature as a vast curiosity and irrelevancy and there is much in it that is spurious and pseudo-science.
"The Judeo-Christian conceptions of God and of the order of nature were often combined by the early Church Fathers with both the classical argument of design and the idea of an artisan-deity or demiurge, creating a conception of the habitable world of such force, persuasiveness, and resiliency that it could endure as an acceptable interpretation of life, nature, and the earth to the vast majority of peoples in the Western world until the sixth decade of the nineteenth century" (Glacken, 1967).
Darwin's The Origin of Species, which was published in 1859 marked the demise of the teleological influence.
"is difficult today, in an age when social, economic, and international problems are paramount, to think ourselves back to a time when these were of far less importance than theological issues. We are so much more intent upon what man has made of man than upon what God originally made of him, so much more concerned with what man may make of Nature than with the Nature originally created by God, that once-burning issues seem trivial" (Nicolson, 1959).
The Patristic Period (literally the Church Fathers) from the first to the sixth centuries through to the end of the Middle Ages in about 1500 was the formative period for Western culture. This was a period of major cathedral building over a 300-year span, of powerful monasteries, of clearing the forests for farming and, with relevance to landscape, of a growing appreciation of and love for the beauties of nature and landscape. It was a period of substantial environmental change, resulting in wide-scale forest clearance, land drainage and the development of cultivation and farming across areas of Europe. It saw north-western Europe grow in population and power, balancing that of the Mediterranean.
During the Patristic period, the physico-theological arguments of the Greeks and Romans were adopted and absorbed by Christian theology. They wrote of God as an artisan deity who not only made things according to his plan but who, unlike a human artisan, created the materials as well, and, as St Augustine noted, "working invisibly, effects visible results." (Augustine, City of God and Christian Doctrine).
The Patristic period through to the end of the Middle Ages put into effect the Biblical injunction and mandate to fill the earth and subdue it.
"for the proper and natural adornment of the earth is its completion: corn waving in the valleys – meadows green with grass and rich with many coloured flowers – fertile glades and hilltops shaded by forests" (St Basil of Caesarea, The Six Days of Creation).
Basil saw the landscapes of his own day … (as) adornments and completions, like God's furnishings.
"Formerly, the earth did not know how to be worked for her fruits. Later when the careful farmer began to rule the fields and to clothe the shapeless soil with vines, she put away her wild dispositions, being softened by domestic cultivation" (Ambrose, Letter 18).
"Ask the loveliness of the earth, ask the loveliness of the sea, ask the loveliness of the wide airy spaces, ask the loveliness of the sky, ask the order of the stars, … ask the living things which move in the waters, which tarry on the land, which fly in the air…ask all these things, and they will all answer thee, Lo, see we are lovely. Their loveliness is their confession. And these lovely but mutable things, who has made them, save Beauty immutable?" (City of God).
Augustine wrote: beauty is a proportion of parts, together with an agreeableness of color, thus paraphrasing what Cicero and other classical sources had said. Beauty was also associated with utility – that which did the work well. It was associated mainly with living things such as women, flowers and birds rather than scenery. Beauty also tended to be small scale rather than large. Both classical and Christian writers saw aesthetics as subordinate to ethics (Nicolson, 1959).
Reason underlay Augustine's sense of beauty. In Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil, he wrote, From this stage, reason advanced to the province of the eyes. And scanning the earth and the heavens, it realized that nothing pleased it but beauty; and in beauty, design; and in design, dimensions; and in dimensions, number. Symmetry pleases because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful because the parts are like and are brought by a certain bond to a single harmony. The classical influence is apparent in these comments.
Winds round its sides a gently-sloping road.
For thou hast made it rich and fair to see.
Many other monasteries throughout Europe repeated the changes achieved here, transforming extensive tracts of land to agriculture through clearing the forests, draining the marshes, even diverting rivers.
The Church Fathers regarded nature as a book to provide further substantiation of the revealed word. And unlike the printed word which only the rich could afford, nature was a book that all could read. The Church Fathers also strove to link nature with scriptural texts and for symbolism such as the selection of a monastery cloister site in the shape of the Greek letter delta (D), which symbolized the Trinity. Paradise was regarded as an ideal landscape.
Thus every aspect reveals the character of God but is not god itself, which would be pantheistic.
St Bernard of Clairvaux (1091 – 1153) wrote that natural beauty is acceptable providing it was associated with God and his works. He said: Believe me, you will find more lessons in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what no teacher permits you to hear (Epistola CVI, sect. 2). The development of the abbey at Clairvaux changed the landscape from a wilderness to one that was more useful, more charming and more beautiful. The abbey was situated in a valley with grain and vines growing nearby –each of them offers to the eye a beautiful sight, and supplies a needful support for the inmates.
"The smiling countenance of the earth is painted with varying colours, the blooming verdure (i.e. fresh green) of spring satisfies the eyes, and its sweet odour salutes the nostrils. … In this way, while I am charmed without by the sweet influence of the beauty of the country, I have not less delight within in reflecting on the mysteries which are hidden beneath it" (Glacken, 1967).
The delight with which St Francis of Assisi (1182 – 1226) communed with nature is well known, perhaps less well known is that he followed rapturously and most literally the exhortation of Romans 1:20, i.e. of understanding God's invisible power and divine nature from the creation. In St Francis, living nature attains a dignity and holiness far removed from the crude utilitarian conceptions of the believers in design (Glacken, 1967).
"I am moved with spiritual sweetness towards the creator and ruler of this world when I behold the magnitude and beauty and performance of his creation" (Speculum Majus).
This was the era of cathedral building. There are close parallels between the form of the northern deciduous forests and the nave of the Gothic cathedral (Shepard, 1967). The tall cathedral columns symbolized the trunks, their spreading arms the branches, and the giant windows filtering light like leaves in a tall forest. The carvings of leaves on structural members and walls furthered the imagery. Thus a Gothic cathedral can be seen as a metamorphosis of the broad-leaved forest into stone (Hunter, 1985).
Albert the Great (1193 – 1280), a Dominican monk, walked throughout the length and breadth of Europe. The beauties of the earth were to Albert more than symbols, its apparent order more than a simple illustration of design. The designed earth is holy as it is God's creation (Glacken, 1967). Albert observed that human effort improved on nature – domesticated plants gave better fruit, grains and vegetables were larger, softer and better tasting under cultivation.
In about 1259, St Thomas Aquinas (1226 – 1274) wrote Summa Contra Gentiles, which some considered to be the most important and cogent discussion of natural theology to emerge in the Middle Ages. Aquinas brought together the order, planning, design and beauty of nature in a more rigorous form.
Aquinas saw that God had provided for orderly processes of nature; leaves, for example, were so arranged that they protect the fruit of the plant. Therefore, Aquinas argued, the natural agent tends toward what is better, and it is much more evident that the intelligent agent does so. Hence, every agent intends the good when it acts. Glacken added, The synthesis now expresses the goodness, the order, and the beauty of nature.
"the continuously visible creation on earth, as one constantly sees in the naturalistic, symbolic, and allegorical writings… This long discussion of creation and its meaning in the formative period of Western civilization intensified interest in unity and harmony in nature, in physical and moral evil, in intermediate agencies between God and the world of daily life, be they secondary causes or … nature personifications…" (Glacken, 1967).
While theological issues were important, so too were practical issues associated with establishing agriculture – issues such as sowing, grafting, plant breeding and animal husbandry. The period saw a shift from one in which theological ideas of man as a modifier of nature dominated to one in which these ideas are the result of experience, by ecclesiastic and lay alike, in the exploitation of natural resources (Glacken, 1967).
With its intense interest in classical sources, the Renaissance combined a love of scenery with its historical associations, seeing in the fusion the beauties of landscape altered and unaltered by man (Glacken, 1967).
In Icon Animorum (1614), John Barclay described the natural and man-made beauty of the scene along the River Thames from Greenwich Hill, asserting it to be most beautiful in England and possibly in all Europe. It was "soe faire a variety, and the industry (as it were) of Nature, displaying her riches." Barclay believed that variety of beauty and monotony was needed as any beauty would "glut and weary" the viewer unless it was beautified with contraries, and change of endowments, to refresh continually the wearied beholder with unexpected novelties.
The discovery of the New World together with the immense scientific discoveries by Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Boyle and others during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries increased interest in the designed earth, the findings being interpreted as providing further evidence of God's providence. Many scientists wrote about final causes: Newton's was grounded in the order, beauty and motion of the heavens rather than the order of nature on earth, and Robert Boyle wrote of design both in the whole of creation and in the detailed aspects of plants and animals.
The writings of this period indicated a conflict, according to Glacken, between a mechanical and an organic view of nature. The former saw the individual parts acting according to known laws, the whole being the sum of the parts and their interaction. The organic approach saw the whole as existing, perhaps in the mind of an artisan before the parts – the design of the whole explains the actions of the parts. The organic approach is based on teleology – the idea of God as the divine artisan fashioning nature according to His will permeate much of the writing of the time.
The mechanical view emphasized secondary causes and eliminated final causes. The mechanical view gained credence with the prestige of mathematics; the earth was seen as a great machine and the harmonies of nature could only be understood by studying this underlying mechanical order. The appreciation of the beauties of nature and of its interrelationships, however, would not have derived from a mechanical approach.
Revise thoroughly, lest anything be omitted (rule of control).
The influence of Descartes was subtle and ubiquitous (Secretan, 1973) and grew over the following centuries. The "Cartesian shears" which separated "what is out there" from "what is in here" (i.e. nature from mind), resulted ultimately in the emergence of the subjective view of aesthetic quality. Instead of seeing aesthetic quality as an inherent quality of a physical object such as a landscape, the distinction of mind and nature paved the way for people to understand that their aesthetic preferences derived from their own subjective feelings.
Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) opposed teleology on the basis that it was pure speculation and assumed that all of nature served mankind. He did not attribute to nature either beauty or ugliness, arguing that these were simply products of human imagination, an early subjective approach to aesthetics.
The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw enormous growth of scientific knowledge, against which physico-theology assumed a lesser standing. It drew on the findings of geographical exploration in providing new examples, and it gained a greater appreciation of interrelationships in nature.
Hale saw man's role as to control nature for the earth's sake and for his own.
Baron Gottfried von Leibniz (1646 – 1716) saw the creation as increasing one's admiration for the beauty of divine works – the general beauty and perfection of the works of God. An ardent supporter of final causes, Leibniz saw man as finishing the work of God.
Glacken believed that physico-theology was always more successful and persisted longer in the life sciences because of the abundance of opportunities for finding evidence of final causes, including in the observation of organic growth, in the relationship of plant and animal life to one another and to their habitats, in plant and animal communities, in the pattern of distribution of organic life throughout the earth.
The scientific discoveries of the late seventeenth century saw tremendous growth in human understanding of the cosmos, and with this, God had grown with his universe: the Deity of the later seventeenth century was grander, vaster, more majestic than before, expressing Himself in unnumbered worlds (Nicolson, 1959).
Newton opposed the mechanistic view of the universe saying, Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done (Westfall, 1994).
These were very widely read at the time, several being translated into other languages.
Thomas Burnet's book together with Milton's Paradise Lost, were the two most widely read theodicies of the early eighteenth century, some ranking them on a plane with Plato, Cicero and Milton (Nicolson, 1959). Theodicies are works which seek vindication of divine attributes (Shorter Oxford).
Burnet argued, Science and Scripture are not enemies but friends, one complementing the other. Burnet divided the earth's history into three periods, the past (antediluvian), present (postdiluvian), and a future period similar to the first. His former antediluvian period was contemporary with the classical Golden Age, a paradise with a perpetual equinox because he said, the earth did not tilt on its axis. The issue of the earth tilting on its axis provided much fare for the physico-theologians as it created the seasons and variations in climate across the earth, a diversity of conditions that favored humans. Newton, though a teleologist, did not believe the inclination of the earth on its axis proved the existence of God. The Golden Age ended with the Flood. The postdiluvian world was unpleasant, unfruitful and nature was hard and niggardly. The future earth would occur after fire destroyed the postdiluvian earth.
Burnet and many others of his time believed that there were no mountains at the time of the earth's creation, in the antediluvian period, but that they appeared with the Fall of Man and reflected the fallen state of the world. He had much to say about mountains.
Woodward used fossil evidence to show that the relief of the present postdiluvian world was similar to the antediluvian world. He also disputed Burnet's claim that the earth is a pile of 'Ruines and Rubbish' whose mountains have not the 'least foot-steps of Art or Counsel,' a globe which is a 'rude Lump,' a 'little dirty Planet,' that he would grant it neither order or beauty (Glacken, 1967). Woodward considered that the earth contains many areas that are indeed extremely charming and agreeable. The aesthetic quality of natural beauty was seen as another proof of the wisdom of God.
Glacken regarded John Ray's The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), which went through twelve editions, as the best natural theology ever written. Drawing on Psalm 104:24 (i.e. How many are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures), Ray presented the most comprehensive pre-evolutionary vision of the earth and its plants and animals, together with their interrelationships and extolled their diversity and variety. His view was positive and optimistic: the earth was a place of beauty and usefulness whose powers do not decline with age as do the plants and animals it supports and whose climate and relief are not evidence of ruin but rather of beauty and order.
Both Ray and Derham wrote of the significance of organic interrelationships evident on the earth and in this they preceded modern writers on the balance of nature and the web of life.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, building on Descartes' thesis, modern ideas of humanity as a controller of nature became more prominent. While the teleological arguments of design continued there was more penetrating criticism of final causes from philosophers, especially Hume and Kant, and the teleological view of nature was transformed into philosophical and theological support for the natural histories of the eighteenth century.
While science advanced, lending support to the mechanical view of nature, which could be described mathematically, teleology continued to exert a significant influence on the earth and life sciences and in geography from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries. The development of the microscope and telescope revealed an order and purpose in nature not previously seen and provided further support for physico-theology.
Consult the genius of the place, wrote the poet Alexander Pope. Genius Loci was quickly recognized to be Divine, reinforcing the natural theological view, and poems and literature followed, referring to the Divine presence in the place (Hussey, 1927). In The Moralists (1709), Shaftesbury wrote, your Genius, the Genius of the Place, and the GREAT GENIUS have at last prevail'd (Thacker, 1979). Shaftesbury considered aesthetics to involve Nature's genuine Order', the ideal form and harmony of things existing 'before the Fall' (Hussey, 1927).
Linnaeus's celebrated lecture Oeconomy of Nature in 1749 recognized design and emphasized environmental influences in the distribution of living organisms including humans. Interestingly he justified the earth's topography on aesthetic as well as utilitarian grounds; that it is pleasing to the eye and it increases the surface area of the earth.
Count Buffon, whom Glacken placed in the front rank of eighteenth century naturalists, rejected final causes in the study of nature, believing that nature should be studied for itself. Influenced by Descartes, Buffon's De la nature, Premier Vue (1764) defined nature in terms of a system of laws established by God for the existence of things.
Aesthetic improvement, according to Buffon, came from the hand of man: Wild nature is hideous and dying; it is I, I alone, who can make it agreeable and living. He went on to advocate drying out the marshes to make their stagnant waters flow in brooks and canals, clearing out the thickets and the old forests and, in their place, making pastures and arable fields so that a new nature can come forth from our hands. Buffon's ideal nature is one that is well cared for, ordered, a little too well raked, embellished with decorations (Glacken, 1967).
Voltaire was sympathetic with final causes and wrote on the subject in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1768). He saw nature as a work of art, both revealing a sense of purpose, with beauty in nature suggestive of final causes. He made particular mention of the beauty and utility of the mountains-rivers-plains triad.
Rebutting the artisan concept, Hume argued that any artisan becomes skilled through trial and error, through countless mistakes, corrections and changes. Are we to suggest, Hume asked, that God learnt how to construct a world through such methods, that many worlds "might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, in the art of world-making?
The Prussian philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), addressed teleology in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and more particularly, in the "Critique of Teleological Judgement" in part II of Critique of Judgement. (1790). Kant built on and synthesized aesthetic ideas that had developed during the eighteenth century and is generally acknowledged to have "welded their fragments together so as to create a truly philosophical system, bringing order out of the chaos which then existed (Monk, 1935). Central to Kant's philosophy of aesthetics was his finding that an object's character lay in the judging mind rather than in the object judged. His was a subjective rather than objective approach (See the Philosophy of Aesthetics theme for an in-depth examination of Kant's aesthetics).
Kant tore away the examples of final causes and, almost regretfully, found that the teleological proofs must be rejected. Addressing the commonly used analogy of nature as a machine, such as a watch, Kant pointed out that the maker of the watch lies outside it, a cog of the watch cannot reproduce or repair itself. However nature organizes itself, the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us thus disposing of the artisan analogy.
"We may regard it as a favor that nature has extended to us, that besides giving us what is useful it has dispensed beauty and charms in such abundance, and for this we may love it, just as we view it with respect because of its immensity, and feel ourselves ennobled by such contemplation – just as if nature had erected and decorated its splendid stage with this precise purpose in its mind" (emphasis added).
As well as the arguments of philosophers, opposition to physico-theology came from another source, the development of an almost pantheistic love of nature. This movement, led by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) has had a profound effect on Western attitudes to nature, providing among other things, one of the foundations of the conservation movement.
Biese (1905) suggested that Rousseau's influence was so revolutionary and original that in a sense, the world's history began again with him. Born in Switzerland, Rousseau grew up on Lake Geneva and loved to roam the countryside. On such a ramble in 1728, he wrote of how the high mountains unfolded themselves majestically before my eyes. In 1765, he lived for two months on St Peter Island on the Lake of Bienne, a relatively insignificant Swiss lake, north-west of Berne. According to Clark, on the island, Rousseau had an experience so intense that one can almost say it caused a revolution in human feeling (Clark, 1969).
"I often sat down to dream at leisure in sunny, lonely nooks … to gaze at the superb ravishing panorama of the lake and its shores … When evening fell, I came down from the higher parts of the mountains and sat by the shore in some hidden spot, and there the sound of the waves and the movements of the water, making me oblivious of all other distractions, would plunge me into delicious reverie. The ebb and flow of the water, and the sound of it … came to the aid of those inner movements of the mind which reverie destroys and sufficed me pleasantly conscious of existence without the trouble of thinking …" (Biese, 1905).
Filled with the reverie of the lapping waves, Rousseau "became completely at one with nature, lost all consciousness of an independent self, all painful memories of the past or anxieties about the future" (Clark, 1969). In 1761, Rousseau published La Nouvelle Héloise which overflow(ed) with Rousseau's raptures about the Lake of Geneva (Biese, 1905). The book made three points: firstly, that the purpose of one's inner consciousness was to allow feelings in the heart, secondly, the worth of solitude – all noble passions are formed in solitude, and thirdly, the love of romantic landscapes, described for the first time in glowing terms.
Rousseau's feeling for nature had a profound effect on European thought, and was expressed tangibly by the upsurge in tourism to places such as Chamonix, by climbers ascending Mont Blanc and other peaks, by a delight in Robinson Crusoe type solitude, by the more sensitive descriptions of other cultures in both scientific and artistic terms, and in the appreciation of foreign landscapes found during world explorations.
The love for nature was, however, imbued with a heavy sentimentality that cast a melancholy shadow over it. It was the genius of Goethe who freed and purified the love for nature from this morbidity.
"Goethe focussed all the rays of feeling for Nature which had found lyrical expression before him, and purged taste, beginning with his own, of its unnatural and sickly elements" (Biese, 1905).
"This pantheism marked an epoch in the history of feeling. For Goethe not only transformed the unreal feeling of his day into real, described scenery, and inspired it with human feeling, and deciphered the beauty of the Alps, as no one else had done, Rousseau not excepted; but he also brought knowledge of Nature into harmony with feeling for her, and with his wonderfully receptive and constructive mind so studied the earlier centuries, that he gathered out all that was valuable in their feeling" (Biese, 1905).
Goethe objected to the teleological view of nature because it relied on analogy, which, in scientific terms, is unsatisfactory.
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) was brought up around the Lakes in Cumberland, and, like Rousseau and Goethe, developed a deep sensitivity to and delight in nature. As a poet of the first rank, Wordsworth sought to write on the complexity of what happens when eye and object meet: The delicate interplay between perception and imagination could nowhere be more intricate than in the representation of a natural scene, transmuted and recollected in the ordering form of Wordsworth's poetic language (de Man, 1984). A deeply religious man, Wordsworth sought in nature a closeness to the Reality, although Biese considered his theism contained an undeniable, though hidden, pantheism (Biese, 1905).
Wordsworth sought nature's aesthetic pleasures because they provided him with a basis for a religious interpretation of nature.
Rousseau, Goethe, Wordsworth and other nature poets and writers such as Byron, Scott and Shelley transformed the way in which Europeans viewed nature. Coming with the enlightenment their pantheism, universal love, sympathy with Nature in all her forms, was the base of feeling (Biese, 1905).
With the decline of physico-theology at the end of the eighteenth century, the definition and influence of laws influencing nature took precedence.
The criticisms of the teleological argument in the eighteenth century, particularly by Hume questioning the artisan analogy and by Kant postulating that the way nature is organized does not imply causality, paved the way for the revolution in thought which occurred in the nineteenth century, particularly as a result of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Hume and Kant showed that concepts of nature are constructs of the human mind – the modern day equivalent is that of the ecosystem. Far from being the bountiful mother of design, which had conventionally be held to be true, Hume had shown nature to be niggardly – a term which came into common parlance in the nineteenth century under Darwin and Malthus. The eighteenth century, the century of Kant, Rousseau, Voltaire, was the age of enlightenment and of Revolution. It was a period that broke with the conventions of the classics and of the Bible.
The remainder of the eighteenth century with the work by Buffon, Linnaeus and Voltaire and the contrary arguments of Hume and Kant.
Having examined the classical and teleological foundations of Western culture, complementary themes trace the development of cultural attitudes towards landscape in the development of the Western attitudes towards mountain landscapes, the depiction of landscape in Western art and the development of designed gardens. These three areas – mountains, landscape art, and parks and gardens – illustrate from a cultural perspective the emergence of present-day perceptions of landscape.
The purpose of this theme has been to examine the influence of culture upon the perception of landscape quality. In particular, it has focused upon Western cultural attitudes with a particular interest in the development of these in England. The vastness of the subject, even when confined to providing an overview of the subject as it applies to England, has necessitated this limited approach. The time frame of this review has been largely the last two millennia.
Table 1 summarizes the significant findings from the classical and teleological foundations.
The two broad influences upon Western cultural attitudes to landscape up to the current century were classicism, the influence of the antiquity of Greece and Rome, and the teleological view that the physical environment is an expression of God and a proof of His existence.
These two influences are not independent. It is apparent in the attitudes to mountains, for example, that both classicism, with its emphasis on the regularity and restraint of form, together with the teleological abhorrence of mountains, combined to define Western antipathy towards mountains through to the end of the seventeenth century. It was not that these factors ceased to have later influence, rather that there arose a new paradigm, the sublime, which provided a new way of looking at mountains (see Mountain theme).
As Western culture emerged from medieval times, teleology exerted a dominant influence. The rebirth or rediscovery of classicism during the Renaissance brought the classical influence to the fore, as expressed in architecture, painting and sculpture. Over the following centuries these two influences, classicism and teleology, proceeded in parallel, both exerting significant influence over the culture of the time.
Augustine, 426, City of God and Christian doctrine.
St Thomas Aquinas, 1260 – 64, Summa Contra Gentiles.
Barclay, J., 1614. Icon Animorum.
St Basil of Caesarea, The Six days of Creation.
Bentley, R., 1692. A Confutation of Atheism.
St Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistola CVI, sect. 2.
Buffon, 1764. De la nature, Premier Vue.
Clarke, G.W., 1989. Rediscovering Hellenism, The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Tradition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Derham, W., 1713. Physico-Theology, or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from His Works of Creation.
Descartes, R., 1637. Discourse on Method for Properly Guiding the Reason and Finding Truth in the Sciences.
Erskine-Hill, H., 1983. The Augustan Idea in English Literature. Edward Arnold, London.
Glacken, C.J. 1967, Traces on the Rhodian Shore – Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Goethe, J.W. von, 1775. Sorrows of the Young Werther.
Hale, M., 1677. The Primitive Origination of Mankind.
Hesiod, ~700 BC. Works and Days.
Kandel, I.L., In Edwards P. (Ed). 1967. The International Encyclopedia of Philosophy. MacMillan Co & The Free Press, New York.
Kant, I., 1790. Critique of Judgement.
Linnaeus, 1749. Oeconomy of Nature.
Marsh, G., 1864. Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Actions. C. Scribner, New York.
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text:
EL CUCUY
A Bogeyman Cuento in English and Spanish
Currently not available.
Everyone hears at least one teasing reference to the "bogeyman" when they're growing up, but not everyone knows him by name. In the Southwest and much of Mexico, he's known as el Cucuy. (Pronounce it coo-COO-ee: draw the second syllable out like the hoot of a lonely night bird.)
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Publication Date May 1, 2001
With his humped back and his big red ear, el Cucuy was once a standard part of child rearing. Many Mexicans and Mexican-Americans will tell you, "I grew up with el Cucuy." And there are plenty of stories of lazy, disobedient children whose feet were set back on the straight and narrow path by an encounter with this ogre.
Although today's parents no longer think it appropriate to rely on threats of calling the local bogeyman to come and carry their children away, the young still delight in tales of bad boys and girls, ones who are much worse than they are, getting the good scare they deserve from el Cucuy. Of course the best tales, like this one, always have a happy ending.
Watch Joe Hayes tell ¡El Cucuy! in this free, online video, part of the Joe Hayes Storytelling Collection.
It's no wonder that Hayes has a reputation in the Southwest and beyond as a premier storyteller. This is a tale that is meant to be read aloud with a group (and maybe even in the dark). Although the author acknowledges that the bogeyman tale is a bit harsh for modern sensibilities, he defends his choice to keep the authentic and scary elements of this traditional folktale. In it, two little girls are seen by their long-suffering father as being lazy and disobediant. Although he threatens repeatedly to call the Cucuy to take them away, they scoff at the threats and even escalate their bad behavior. When the Cucuy does come and carts them away roughly to his lair in the mountains, the girls are horrified and frightened. Robledo does a great job of making his illustrations scary with wild rolling eyes, fierce dogs, and an appropriately hideous bogeyman. The prescribed happy ending comes when a shephard finds the girls in a cave and reunites them with their grieving father. The authentically regional Spanish text reads very smoothly. Recommended for public libraries and bookstores.
This bilingual retelling is a welcome addition for Spanish speakers who may recognize the bogeyman as el Cucuy. He is described as a gigantic old man with a humped back and a large, red left ear that can hear everything (on the cover el Cucuy's right ear is shown as red and huge). The legend goes that "Sometimes he comes down from his cave in the mountains to carry bad children away." A father, troubled by his two eldest daughters' disobedience and laziness, calls out toward the mountains "'¡Cucuy! ¡Cucuy! Baja para llevarte a estas malcriadas.' Come and get these bad girls." The girls make fun of their father's belief in a bogeyman, and what happens next is not surprising—el Cucuy comes to get them and carries them away to his cave. In the end, the remorseful girls are reunited with their father. The vividly colored illustrations add much to the tale, especially the characters' large eyes, which give an eerie feel to the story. The note at the end is a wonderful resource on the history of this folktale.
Respected raconteur Hayes (La Llorona, The Weeping Woman) offers a forewarning in the guise of a potentially scary story featuring a familiar figure in the folklore of the American Southwest. His easygoing, bilingual narrative first introduces el Cucuy, a gigantic bogeyman with a crooked back and a large, glowing red ear who is known to come "down from his cave in the mountains to carry bad children away." Readers then meet two lazy sisters who play all day and refuse to help their younger sibling clean house and cook for their widowed father. After warning the delinquent duo that he is going to call the bogeyman on them, the father makes good on his threat and the ominous creature snatches the girls from the dinner table and brings them into the deepest part of his spider-filled cave. Robledo's shadowy, stylized paintings with background shadings reminiscent of El Greco's works capture the terror of the wide-eyed sisters. Their captivity allows them time to reflect on the error of their ways; and when a goatherd rescues them, they discover that their father and sister were searching for them. Kids will appreciate this chilling cautionary tale, best enjoyed during the daylight hours.
Known for his bilingual retelling of the ghost story La Llorona, the Weeping Woman (1987), Hayes now delights with his bilingual version of a tale featuring southwestern bogeyman el Cucuy. With his big, red left ear that can hear when children are misbehaving, el Cucuy comes down from his mountain to carry away bad children. A father calls el Cucuy on his two daughters who are tormenting their little sister, but the disbelieving girls mockingly holler, "Cucu-u-u-uy, Cucu-u-u-uy!" El Cucuy, "his big red ear glowing in the evening light," carries the sisters away to the deepest, darkest corner of his mountain cave. The regretful father searches for his daughters, but it is a young goatherd who eventually reunites the family. And, in Hayes' classic conclusion: "From that day on those two girls were the most polite and helpful girls living in that little town." Robledo's primitive-style illustrations done in expressive swathes of garish colors are gleefully nightmarish, featuring frightened children and monstrous dogs. Not the book for truly timid tots, but this masterfully told story belongs in the hands of those scoffing, hard-case customers who challenge you to find them a really scary story.
Remember stories about the bogeyman and how he was going to get you? Well here's one from Hispanic culture retold by Joe Hayes. This cautionary tale unfolds with strong, descriptive language in both Spanish and English. After the mother's death, a man must raise his three daughters alone. The youngest does all the work around the house because her two older sisters are too lazy and full of mischief. When their tricks go too far, the angry father calls out to the Cucuy (pronounced coo-COO-ee) to come down from his cave in the mountain and carry them away. The girls think this is just an idle threat until the Cucuy arrives and hauls them off. The poor girls are stashed deep in a cave where they truly regret their misdeeds. Father also regrets calling the Cucuy and spends his time searching for them. Finally the girls are rescued when a goatherder hears their cries. Once again united as a family, the sisters promise to be good. Bold colors in primitive style artwork add to the impact of the story. In the endnotes, the author admits that the story seems harsh in light of today's sensitivities. But his retelling has just the right touch.
The Horn Book Guide
Illustrated by Honorio Robledo. Because two of his daughters are lazy, a widower calls for el Cucuy, the bogeyman in Spanish-speaking cultures. El Cucuy takes them away to his mountain cave; they're rescued by a shepherd and return polite and helpful. Expressive folk-art-like paintings root this didactic, bilingual cautionary tale in the Mexican countryside. An author's note is appended.
In the Southwest and in Mexico, it was once common to scare disobedient children with the threat that "El Cucuy" would come and take them away if they didn't behave. Although we no longer use such threats, the tale is still a fascination to children. After a good scare, children will delight in the happy ending!
Tradicion Revista
Good to use with kids or adults learning Spanish. The pictures have a naive-kid quality that will make any aged kid enjoy reading. The more books that are bilingual, the better!
My Pet Rattlesnake
Nico Visita La Luna
Nico Visits the Moon


Sadie is a playful and active calico cat at Homeward Trails Animal Rescue, Inc. in Arlington, VA.
For cats, seeing the cat carrier is often the first sign that something bad is about to happen (i.e. a trip to the vet). So the first step to reducing the stress of vet visits (or travel in general) is to create positive carrier associations for your cat — a process which will take some time and patience, but can be well worth it.
Start young: Kittens usually adjust to new experiences and surroundings more easily than adult or senior cats, so start the carrier-training process as early as possible. But fear not — adult and senior cats can still learn that the carrier is a-okay (my 9-year-old cat Mojo certainly did!).
Keep the carrier accessible: Too many cats only see the carrier when it's time to go somewhere, so they begin to stress as soon as the carrier appears. Instead, keep your cat's carrier on the floor and open at all times. Your cat should be free to come and go as he pleases so he doesn't see the carrier as a place where he gets trapped.
Make the carrier a nice place to be: Place some comfy bedding in the carrier and toss in a few treats, your cat's favorite toys or some catnip when you first set it up. Check and replenish the supply every few days at random.
Feed your cat inside the carrier: If your cat will eat his food inside the carrier, start putting his food dish inside the crate daily. If he won't, try putting his food dish a few feet away and moving it an inch or two closer to the crate each day — just make sure your cat keeps eating. If he doesn't, move the food a little further away and try moving it closer more slowly. TIP: Some extra smart cats won't enter the crate with you standing nearby — they think you'll lock them in — so try moving away and watching from across the room.
Get your cat's mind working by teaching an "in" command: Once your cat's confident enough to go into the carrier to eat and get treats, start calling your cat over to the crate to get treats. Toss a treat in the carrier and when your cat goes in say "in." Praise him for as long as he's in the carrier. Once he comes out, toss in another treat and repeat.
Over time, you can start saying "in" first and your cat should go into the carrier on his own — just be sure to treat him after he does and while he's still in the carrier. Working with your cat around the carrier pairs all of your cat's favorite things together — playing, learning, treats and you! — and shows him the carrier's not only safe, but fun.
Practice shutting and opening the carrier door: Keep up with steps 1-5, but now start closing the door and locking it before giving your cat the treat after the "in" command. Once he's eaten the treat entirely, reopen the crate, let him come out and repeat. Practice this and gradually increase the amount of time the crate door stays shut. If your cat is calm while the door is shut, give him more treats. If he seems upset or tries to get out, do not treat and try again with less time in the crate.
Practice picking up the carrier: After your cat learns that a shut carrier door is okay, try picking up the carrier with him in it and putting it back down gently. Add this to your training routine.
Practice walking with the carrier: Once you're able to pick up the carrier with your cat inside and remaining calm, try taking a couple steps and then gently putting the carrier back down, treating him and then letting him out.
Practice going outside with the carrier: You don't have to go far — just outside your front door and back inside could be far enough at first. The key is to make sure kitty remains calm while you repeat this — you can gradually increase your distance and time over time.
Walk around the block: Keep practicing with kitty until you're able to walk all the way around the block with him inside the carrier and remaining calm. Once you can do this you'll know your cat's fear of the carrier has been conquered.
For cats who refuse to enter the carrier with you nearby, try tipping the carrier on its end and putting your cat in rear-end first.
Give your cat time, time and more time. Even if you set up the carrier, "it might be days or even weeks before the cat feels comfortable enough to explore it," says Dr. Johnson. Don't fret, let your cat take the time he needs.
It's okay if the carrier's not his favorite place. "While the cat may not like the carrier, he or she should learn that it's a safe place," says Dr. Johnson. By knowing the carrier is safe, your cat is less likely to have serious anxiety about being in the carrier — even if he never likes being inside it.
I've been practicing this routine for nearly three years now and my cat Mojo's a different cat. Before, Mojo disappeared as soon as the carrier appeared. Now, she seeks out her carrier for naps, willingly climbing into and finding comfort in the small space.
Next time: Getting your cat to relax in the car.


text:
Aug 18, 2022 9Agustus2022
Financial lotteries have been criticized for being addictive forms of gambling. However, money raised from financial lotteries is used for public good. In other words, a lottery is a random draw in which a winner is chosen from among a large group of numbers. Prizes are awarded based on how many of those numbers match the second set chosen through a random drawing. This process is often conducted to ensure that all players are treated equally.
Lottery is a game where players select a group of numbers from a large set
Lottery is a popular type of gambling. Players select a group of numbers from a large set, and the result of the draw depends on the matching of the numbers to a larger set. While lotteries are popular and are a good way to raise money for charity or public-sector causes, the underlying concept is the same, and this is a game of chance. However, the outcome of togel games can be more equitable.
The first known lotteries were held in the Low Countries during the 15th century. These games raised money for the poor, and also helped the government fund a range of public projects. While the lottery was seen as a way to generate revenue, the system was not only popular, but was also seen as a form of painless taxation. In Ghent, a record from the year 1445 refers to a lottery held to raise funds for wall repair, and it mentions a prize of 1737 florins, or US$170,000 in today's currency.
Lotteries are addictive form of gambling
The addiction to lottery play is a dangerous habit with long-lasting consequences. It can ruin one's career, relationships, and life in general. It also has a negative effect on one's financial stability. It is no secret that many lottery players have committed theft to chase their winnings. It is no surprise that the number of lottery fraud cases has increased significantly. In fact, one in ten people who commit theft are lottery gamblers.
In order to understand whether lottery playing is addictive, it is necessary to know more about lottery addiction. The study conducted by Burns and colleagues shows that people play lotteries in high proportions. People who are heavy lottery players are typically older and from higher income groups. These players have more money and are more likely to fantasize about winning the lottery than light lottery players. Their behavior also shows characteristics of compulsive consumption and are more likely to engage in other forms of gambling.
Lotteries offer popular products as prizes
One of the most common promotional marketing strategies is to offer consumers the opportunity to win a variety of products. These promotional lotteries are often branded and include a variety of products. This is because consumers are more likely to purchase the largest product size in the promotional lottery. However, it is important to note that the objective odds of winning do not vary according to the size of the product. If you have ever won a lottery, you'll have noticed that the prizes are typically supersized.
In addition to offering prize money, many companies have created promotional lotteries, with a gradient in prize amounts and odds of winning. One popular example is Tim Hortons' Roll-Up-the-Rim lottery, which has prizes ranging from a hot beverage to a new car. Other examples of promotional lotteries include Pepsico's Win Every Hour and Coca-Cola's Sip & Scratch campaign. Wendy's Dip & Squeeze and Win are also promotional lotteries.
The Convenience of a Casino Online
IDNPoker – Play Online Poker


Where have all the triplets gone?
After a steep rise in the 1980s and '90s, the number of women giving birth to three or more babies is about half of what it was at its peak. The reason, scientists say, for both the rise and the fall of these multiple births is changing practices in assisted reproduction.
Fortin, 30, gave birth to identical boys and a girl in August 2015 after struggling for years with infertility. When she and her husband decided to have in vitro fertilization, they chose to implant two embryos in hopes of having at least one baby.
Just two decades ago, a woman Fortin's age would commonly have had twice as many embryos implanted. "The reason [doctors] put in many embryos is that we weren't sure which were the good ones," said Dr. Lawrence Grunfeld, associate clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive science at Mount Sinai Hospital.
But, probably partly thanks to improvements in IVF, both of Fortin's embryos implanted — and one divided to form identical twins.
Vitrification, or flash freezing, began allowing doctors to freeze and thaw embryos at a survival rate of nearly 100 percent. This meant all the embryos do not need to be used at once. Doctors also developed better means of screening embryos before they were implanted, what's called preimplantation genetic screening. "We have learned that most embryos that don't stick, don't stick because the embryos themselves were not normal," said Grunfeld.
As a result, in 1998 the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) introduced guidelines to encourage doctors to implant fewer embryos, and those have been continually revised downward since then. On top of that, doctors have felt a professional pressure to be conservative in their practice. "Even staying within the guidelines there is a concern about multiple birth … so there has been an incredibly big push over the past two or three years to put in only one embryo at a time," said Grunfeld.
Guidelines based on the patient's age and health history help doctors and their patients decide exactly how many embryos to implant. No more than five embryos may ever be implanted at a time, and facilities that consistently have higher-order births may be audited by SART.
Both of Desi's embryos successfully implanted. During her first ultrasound, she and Ryan discovered that one of the embryos had split and they were expecting triplets. At 34 weeks she delivered Charlize and her younger twin brothers Sawyer and Jax by caesarean section.
Still, even knowing her one baby might turn into three, Desi said that she would make the same decision again today. "You need to take in what the doctors are telling you, take in the advice and listen, and just go with what is best for you," she said.
God Almighty blessed me with a triplet.


text:
The Resource Report to the Congress : adequacy of penalties for fraud offenses involving elderly victims (as directed by section 240003 of Public law 103-322), United States Sentencing Commission
Report to the Congress : adequacy of penalties for fraud offenses involving elderly victims (as directed by section 240003 of Public law 103-322), United States Sentencing Commission
The item Report to the Congress : adequacy of penalties for fraud offenses involving elderly victims (as directed by section 240003 of Public law 103-322), United States Sentencing Commission represents a specific, individual, material embodiment of a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Indiana State Library.
United States Sentencing Commission.
Washington, D.C., The Commission, 1995
Cover title
Distributed to depository libraries in microfiche, shipping list no.: 1997-0193-M
"March 1995."
http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS938
Report to the Congress : adequacy of penalties for fraud offenses involving elderly victims (as directed by section 240003 of Public law 103-322)
Report to the Congress
adequacy of penalties for fraud offenses involving elderly victims (as directed by section 240003 of Public law 103-322)
United States Sentencing Commission
Adequacy of penalties for fraud offenses involving elderly victims
Fraud -- United States
Older people -- United States -- Crimes against
Sentences (Criminal procedure) -- United States
Victims of crimes -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States
Additional physical form
Also available via Internet from the U.S. Sentencing Commission web site (PDF file only).
VVJ
Sentences (Criminal procedure)
Victims of crimes
Indiana State LibraryBorrow it
315 W. Ohio St., Indianapolis, IN, 46202, US

 Data from Report to the Congress : adequacy of penalties for fraud offenses involving elderly victims (as directed by section 240003 of Public law 103-322), United States Sentencing Commission - Indiana State Library

Data Citation of the Item Report to the Congress : adequacy of penalties for fraud offenses involving elderly victims (as directed by section 240003 of Public law 103-322), United States Sentencing Commission


While it would be great to be able to manage all of the details of your business, there are items that will slip through the cracks if you aren't careful.
Think of it as being like the circus act where the performers spins plates in the end of a stick, adding more and more until he can't keep up and they all wobble and crash.
Signing up at virtualassistantforums.com can be beneficial in a number of different ways. The most obvious is the ability to submit your request for proposal in the forums, but you might also be able to find recommendations from other VA's, especially since this is a pretty tight little community.
The internet is full of sites that cater to those looking for a virtual assistant, but you need to be aware that not all are created equal. If in doubt, take to the forums and ask if anyone has had experience with the site you are considering using. After all, there is still no better form of recommendation than positive word of mouth.
How to spend your time more wisely to get more clients and more results.
Its really very useful for me as i was searching for an virtual assistant and virtual assistant forums seems to be the best options and will certainly pick one or two VA for my business needs.


text:
Chironomus restrictus är en tvåvingeart som beskrevs av Jean-Jacques Kieffer 1922. Chironomus restrictus ingår i släktet Chironomus och familjen fjädermyggor.

Artens utbredningsområde är Tyskland. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

Källor

Fjädermyggor
restrictus

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