[A note in September 2001 from Allen Brady, Hope College, Holland, Michigan, who knew him, tells about Dr. Arthur M. Chickering. He was chair of the Biology Department at Albion College in Albion, Michigan, for more than 30 years.  He had completed his degree at Yale University under Alexander Petrunkevitch, another famous arachnologist. Chickering first visited Baro Colorado Island in 1934 and made subsequent trips in 1936 and 1939.  He continued working with Panamanian spiders for many years.  The last publication I [Allen Brady] have from him is dated 1972, a paper on "The genus Oonops (Araneae, Oonopidae) in Panama and the West Indies (Part 3)."  His most notable work was a monograph on the Salticidae of Panama (1946) consisting of 474 pages in which he described 172 species.]

Newer Photograph (below left). In July of 1950, the Baron of BCI James Zetek and arachnologist A. M. Chickering decended the steps of BCI leading from the "Old Dinning Hall" all the way down to Lake Gatun (see Found Photograph, above). 56 years later, James Robertson, as the Baron, and the entomologist Nathan Lord decended these same steps. Note that the old wooden stair railing has been replaced by metal; there also are a few differences in plants that have grown up and buildings that have been changed. Concept and photograph by Nhu H. Nguyen.

From the introduction of the book quote Borges and Foucault --“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought ? our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography ? breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.  This passage quotes a “certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in which it is written that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs,(e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”  In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.” --Michel Foucault