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infibulating indigent men— infibulate meaning to sew the foreskin shut. Whether this crusade was in any way inspired by the deformity of his own genitals, a condition discovered by a medical examiner after his death, is not known. A modern biographer of his noted, “Weinhold seems to have cared little for what others thought about him, and he was not afraid to propose ideas that would cause large segments of the population to despise or detest him.”
    If ever there was a real-life Dr. Frankenstein, it was Weinhold. But did he actually serve as a model for Shelley’s character? Historians have speculated about this possibility, but it is unlikely. For one thing,Weinhold published his work in 1817, a year after Shelley began work on her novel.
    Perhaps horror fans should be thankful that Shelley wasn’t 2 aware of Weinhold. Otherwise she might have been tempted to change her novel to fit his story. Imagine a mob of villagers armed with pitchforks and torches chasing after a headless zombie kitten. It just wouldn’t have been the same.

The Electrical Acari

    “Life! I have created life!” Andrew Crosse gazed down at the small white insects crawling in the liquid-filled basin. Then he threw back his head and laughed maniacally.

    In a Hollywood version of history, that would have been Crosse’s reaction to the unusual discovery he made in 1836. But in real life his reaction was probably more along the lines of, “I say, how astonishing.”
    Crosse was a Victorian gentleman who lived in a secluded mansion in rural Somerset, England. From an early age he had been fascinated by electrical phenomena, an interest his family fortune allowed him to indulge. He filled his home with all manner of electrical experiments, including more than a mile of copper wire strung between the trees on his estate to capture the power of lightning. His superstitious neighbors, seeing the lightning crackle around the wires and hearing the sharp snap and bang of electric batteries discharging, suspected he was completely mad.
    Among his experiments was an attempt to unite the sciences of geology and galvanism by using electrical current to induce the growth of quartz crystals. In his music room he fashioned a device that continuously dripped an acidic solution over an electrified stone. Crosse hoped crystals would form on the stone, but this never happened. What happened instead was much stranger. His own words tell the story well:

On the fourteenth day from the commencement of this experiment I observed through a lens a few small whitish excrescences or nipples, projecting from about the middle of the electrified stone. On the eighteenth day these projections enlarged, and struck out seven or eight filaments, each of them longer than the hemisphere on which they grew. On the twenty-sixth day these appearances assumed the form of a perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail. Till this period I had no notion that these appearances were other than an incipient mineral formation. On the twenty-eighth day these little creatures moved their legs. I must now say that I was not a little astonished. After a few days they detached themselves from the stone, and moved about at pleasure.

    For weeks Crosse watched perplexed as insects multiplied and squirmed around his experiment until they numbered in the hundreds. He repeated the experiment and got the same result—more insects. But being the respectable Englishman that he was, he didn’t want to leap to conclusions. Specifically, he hesitated to claim that his experiment had somehow brought forth a new form of life. But a visiting publisher got wind of what had happened and claimed this for him, announcing the news in the local paper under the headline EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIMENT . The media dubbed the insects Acarus crossii , in his honor.
    Once word of the experiment got out, Crosse’s neighbors decided he was not only mad, but quite possibly a devil worshipper as well.