Robert McCormick and the circumstances of his Arctic fossil collection, 1852–1853
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Royal Navy surgeon Robert McCormick (1800–1890) took part in three mid-nineteenth century British Polar expeditions, two to the Arctic and one to the Antarctic. Of the two Arctic voyages, the first was to Spitsbergen (in today's Svalbard) in 1827; the second from 1852 to 1853, was one of the expeditions dispatched to search for the missing ships commanded by Sir John Franklin that had set out in 1845 to navigate a “Northwest Passage” through the islands of the Canadian Arctic. The Svalbard expedition was formative in developing McCormick's interest in the Polar regions, with the likely highlight of his career being his subsequent participation in the Antarctic expedition of 1839–1843 led by James Clark Ross. Throughout these expeditions, McCormick collected natural history specimens, principally in the fields of ornithology and geology. Many of the geological specimens he retained in a personal collection which passed to what is now the Natural History Museum, London, on his death in 1890. This collection includes rock specimens from Svalbard and Baffin Bay, and a substantial number of Silurian fossils (mostly brachiopods) from Beechey Island and Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. The fossil collection was the largest of several assembled during the successive expeditions sent out in search of Franklin, but is one of those that has received no subsequent attention. That omission was largely due to McCormick's own scientific shortcomings and persisted despite his determined efforts to promote himself as a serious scientific naturalist and Arctic authority.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".