November 16, 1890

Rupert T. Gould (November 16, 1890 to October 5, 1948), had a career in the British navy, wherein he had officer rank, from 1907 to 1914. Some of his books reference the knowledge he gained in this period. As a child Gould read David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (1843), and an interest of Gould's reflects this spirit. For beyond his books on maritime chronology, Gould collected and analyzed scientifically stories of occult phenomena.

Gould's publications include-

"The Marine Chronometer, Its History and Development" (1923)
Captain Cook (1935)
The Charting of the South Shetlands (1941)
The Story of the Typewriter, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century (1949).

Not all his books were on mainline topics.

Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts (1928)
Enigmas: Another Book of Unexplained Facts (1929)
The Case for the Sea Serpent (1930)
The Loch Ness Monster and Others (1934).

The book titled Oddities, discusses a famous Victorian event, a series of tracks which extended a long ways, in an inexplicably straight line. These foot prints appeared after a snow event, and attracted much attention to the question of their origin. These Devonshire tracks led one clergyman to send his analysis to a local newspaper of the time. Gould quotes it:

As an amateur accustomed to make ...accurate drawings from nature, I set to work soon after these marks appeared, and completed the accompanying exact facsimile of those that were visible on the lawn of our clergyman's garden in this parish. He and I traced them through a low privet hedge by a circular opening of 1 foot diameter. On applying a rule the interval between each impression was found to be undeviatingly 8 1/2 inches. This in my opinion is one of the most remarkable and confounding circumstances we have to deal with...

It is quite inexplicable that the animal, considering the scale of the foot, should leave, in single file, one print only, and, as has already been observed, with intervals as exactly preserved as if the prints had been made by a drill or any other mechanical frame. No animals with cushion paw, such as the feline tribe--(diminutive or large (cat or tiger) --exhibit, could have made these marks; for the feet of most quadrupeds tread in parallel lines, some widely divaricated, [stet]others approximately very closely.

Gould is an instance of an acute intellect whose interests were hedged by positivistic assumptions and so pertinent and real mysteries give way to topics easily categorized as mundane which yet show traces of the unexpected. Thus a thirst for reality is both evidenced and thwarted. It is as if any unanswerable mysteries are a breath of fresh air within a suffocating world view such as positivism is. Such topics have only become more trivial in recent decades, but in Gould's writing we see modest conclusions presented modestly.  The footprints referenced above, and commonly described as feline, were laid down February 8, 1855.