‘Belching it Forth their Sooty Jaws’: John Evelyn's Vision of a ‘Volcanic’ City
Abstract Observers of seventeenth-century London often used anatomical or geographical metaphors when writing about an early modern city undergoing rapid physical, commercial, and demographic expansion. Between the 1640s and 1680s, the writer and diarist John Evelyn regularly used volcanic language and imagery to evoke a cityscape blighted by dense clouds of smoke emitted by the city's industrial furnaces. This vision of a ‘volcanic’ city was personal, inspired by Evelyn's exploration of Vesuvius in 1645, while reflecting a broader scientific and popular fascination with volcanic activity. Considered in the immediate political context, the ‘volcanic’ city was both a powerful expression of royalist anxiety about the instability of the capital, and an assertion of the need for a powerful monarch to actively regulate the social and commercial energies of the metropolis.
Bibliography of urban history 2015
The present bibliography is a continuation of and a complement to those published in the Urban History Yearbook 1974–91 and Urban History from 1992. The arrangement and format closely follows that of previous years. The list of abbreviations identifies only those periodicals from which articles cited this year have been taken, though many other journals are also checked.
Application of resource allocation optimisation to provide profitable options for dairy production systems
A linear program (LP) model analysed resource use on a 100 ha dairy farm. A single optimum-profit combination was established for resources which were either optimised or constrained. It was found that, with a fixed herd of 320 milking cows, when production increased from 305 kg milksolids per cow (kg MS/cow) to 415 kg MS/cow, cash profit increased by 65%. This required additional supplements. If, however, feed demand and supply were optimised at 415 kg MS/cow, the LP reduced milking cow number rather than buy in feed to meet the increased feed demand from higher production per cow. At all production levels chosen between 305 and 415 kgMS/cow, it was most economic to dry off and cull cows early in dry summers to optimise feed demand vs. feed grown; use nitrogen (N) fertiliser to avoid a feed deficit only when response rates of better than 10 kgDM to 1 kg N could be expected; not use N for growing supplements to harvest. Pasture cover, within defined constraint levels, provided a buffer for feed demand and supply fluctuations. The study highlights the importance of assessing production, income and cost in an integrated framework to identify the point at which individual resources become limiting.