page_title: On Naval Timber and Arboriculture
section_title: Argument for preconception
hierarchical_section_title: On Naval Timber and Arboriculture / Construction / Argument for preconception
caption_attribution_description: English: Page 5 (recto) text showing through page 6 (verso, left-right mirror image) in scanned copy of Matthew (1831) c/o Bodleian Library, U. Oxford.
context_page_description: On Naval Timber and Arboriculture: With Critical Notes on Authors who Have Recently Treated the Subject of Planting is a book by Patrick Matthew published in 1831. It is noted for parts of it appendices in which Matthew discusses natural selection, 28 years prior to Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species.
context_section_description: The alignment of the addendum entry equal to the appendix notes on the Contents page, and the sense of post-production arising from Matthew's "Since this volume went to press" comment in the colophon, could be explained in two ways: that printing directions were lost or misunderstood between Black and Neill, or Matthew sent the new material directly to Neill with no printing directions. There doesn't seem another reasonable explanation for the addendum entry appearing as it does on the Contents page. One suggestion is that the book structure as is, was intended all along, because Matthew had wished to subtly pass its heretical content into society, secreted into an inconspicuous, and easily excisable portion of the book,
  
  … a dangerously condensed heretical summary of his conclusions, in an appendix. If the book was to be banned for heresy or sedition, its publisher, bookseller or owner could at least remove the appendix in order to save the rest from the bonfire.
  However, this proposal, for a preconceived structure, also needs to explain why Matthew would think it necessary to hide ideas on theistic evolution, when prominent challenges to natural theology already stretched back over half a century, to Hume and Maupertuis, and were current at his alma mater, the University of Edinburgh, because of Robert Edmond Grant, Robert Jameson, Henry Hulme Cheek and the Plinians. Other anomalies as noted previously, that also require harmonisation with this proposal of preconception, include, the Contents page alignment, Matthew's post production references to printed content, and the disjointed, erratic flow of material, that deals with at least four main topics: arboriculture, empire, entail, and evolution.
  More realistically, perhaps contradicting the multiple dates idea is that there are no breaks between the bound paper blocks that match the different sections. Each page is one part of eight, of a larger sheet folded. When bound, the pages originating from the same sheet can appear in quite different parts of a book, but always within the same block. The enigma here is that sections that seem like afterthoughts and added at later stages, do not appear as separate page bundles that were printed independent of earlier sections. If that is the case, and Matthew had devised his book as it is, from the outset, it is hard to see how he went to press before the July Revolution, as he states, with a book originally intended to be only on arboriculture, but then end up with a book quite different, if it had not been added to in the interim. Furthermore, the first part of the colophon ("In taking a retrospective glance at our pages…" p388) refers to the book as already printed, and the few mistakes he could have improved, plus, there is an erratum on the final page.
  A final oddity can be observed in what appear to be "wet ink marks" visible in the scanned PDF copy of the book held at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library. This might prove confusing to anyone unfamiliar with Victorian letterpress printing. However, it is questionable whether these are wet ink marks as, not only would the same side of the same block of eight pages be printed for the entire print run of 200 copies, according to imposition, but the same marks do not show up in other copies of the book, for example, the one at  Harvard University, or the two copies at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. Ultimately, taking the mirror image of the page, in order to make the marks more legible, the type can be seen to match the text on the other side of each page. The marks are therefore an artefact of the scanning process, and not inherent to the book.
caption: Page 5 (recto) text showing through page 6 (verso, left-right mirror image) in scanned copy of Matthew (1831) c/o Bodleian Library, U. Oxford.
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