Coprophilia

It is better to sniff the French dung for a while than to eat China’s all our lives. 
— Ho Chi Minh (1890 – 1969), inviting the French back into Indochina, 1945.

By means of a straight cottage chimney I had an opportunity this summer of remarking, at my leisure, how swallows ascend and descend through the shaft; but my pleasure, in contemplating the address with which this feat was performed to a considerable depth in the chimney, was somewhat interrupted by apprehensions lest my eyes might undergo the same fate with those of Tobit.
— Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), The Natural History of Selborne, (1789), Letter XXII [Tobit in the Apocrypha, was blinded by sparrow-dung].

One afternoon in 1976, some of the more boisterous members of Mary Leakey’s field team were amusing themselves by throwing hunks of dried elephant dung at each other. This may seem a peculiar pastime, but recreational sources are limited on palaeontological digs, and there are times when young spirits need to blow off steam. One who felt this urge was Andrew Hill, a palaeontologist from the National Museum of Kenya, who, while ducking flying dung and looking for ammunition to fire back, found himself standing in a dry stream bed on some exposed ash layers. One of these had unusual dents in it. When Hill paused to examine them, he concluded they probably were animal footprints.
— Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey, Lucy: the beginnings of humankind, Penguin Books, 1990, 249.

Unslekked lym, chalk and gleyre of an ey,
Poudres diverse, asshes, donge, pisse and cley,
Cered pokkets, sal peter, vitriole,
And diverse fires maad of wode and cole;
Sal tartre, alkaly, and sal preparat …

Unslaked lime (quicklime), chalk and white of an egg,
Diverse powders, ashes, dung, urine and clay,
Wax-sealed bags, saltpetre, vitriol,
Assorted fires made of wood and coal,
Salt of tartar, alkali and prepared (common) salt
— Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1345 – 1400), Canterbury Tales, ‘Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’.

It appears, by the dung that they drop on the turf, that beetles are no inconsiderable part of their food.
— Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), The Natural History of Selborne, (1789), Letter XXVII, about hedgehogs.

It is impossible in this connection to avoid deploring the sewage system which is so generally prevalent in towns and cities, for by this means practically the whole of the nitrogen from the food of the human population is irrecoverably wasted.
— Sir William Tilden (1842 – 1926), Chemical Discovery and Invention in the Twentieth Century, London, 1916, 395.

The virtue and patience of ancient chemists must have been superhuman, or perhaps my inexperience with organic preparations was boundless. All I got were foul vapours, boredom, humiliation, and a black and murky liquid which irremediably plugged up the filters and displayed no tendency to crystallise, as the text declared it should. The shit remained shit, and the alloxan and its resonant name remained a resonant name.
— Primo Levi (1919 – 1987), ‘Nitrogen’ in The Periodic Table (1985).

Tellurium compounds can be absorbed into the body through the skin, by ingestion, or by inhalation of the finely divided particles or vapours, and these compounds are excreted in the exhaled breath, sweat, urine and faeces. If a foul breath is to be avoided in personnel exposed to it, the maximum allowable concentration is 0.01 to 0.02 mg/cu. metre of air.
— N. Irving Sax, Handbook of Dangerous Materials, Reinhold, 1951, 367.

… the resulting viscous, electrically conducting jet can trigger sparkover by reducing the air gap. Fascinating side-issues of hydrodynamic stability are involved. Ordinarily such a jet would break up because of sausage-mode pinch instabilities caused by surface tension. When the jet is very close to the insulator, this normal capillary break-up is accelerated by electrostatic forces. Under some conditions, however, the reverse may be true, since such jets can be stabilized by longitudinal current-flow, produced perhaps by corona at the ends of the jet. To simulate the phenomenon, engineers at the Bonneville Power Administration in the United States, after consultation with avian experts, designed a mechanical cloaca consisting of a pressure chamber with an adjustable-diameter orifice. A balloon within the chamber contained raw scrambled eggs (for correct viscosity) doped with salt (for correct electrical conductivity). The doping level was determined from measurements on rehydrated cage scrapings from a local zoo. A solenoid operated needle broke the balloon on command, discharging the contents. In full-scale tests conducted at 500 kV, the mechanical cloaca operated perfectly, resulting in spectacular electrical fireworks. As a result of this study, spikes were installed on cross-arms to discourage roosting. Animal rights activists will be pleased that no living birds were injured, and that a hazard to wild birds was reduced.
— David C. Jolly, ‘Bird dropping research continues apace’, Nature 319: 625-6, 20 February, 1986.

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