Preservation myth

Their success is attested by the presence of preserved wooden objects in museum collections, although they were hampered by a lack of understanding of the variability of wood and the mechanisms and effects of wood deterioration processes. The development of a systematic scientific approach was complicated by conservation successes that produced both preserved artifacts and a body of preservation myth. Comparable myths exist in agriculture, medicine, science, and other areas of human concern in which causes are inferred from observed effects without understanding the phenomena under observation. 

Both economic decline and military technology feature in Correlli Barnett s four-volume account of the collapse ofBritish power between the First World War and the Suez crisis of 1956. Barnett used a concept of total strategy which encompassed all factors that he believed to be relevant to a nation s ability to preserve or extend its power education, literature, religion and national myths, for example, as well as armed forces and economic and technological resources. His work may... 

In the first stages of society, education was purely domestic. Children were educated by their fathers, either by working with them or by being instructed by them in such arts as they knew they received from them the small stock of traditions that made up the history of the tribe or of the family they learnt the various myths that were preserved and they acquired a knowledge of the national customs, principles or prejudices which constituted a crude moral code. Songs and dances and military exercises were learnt in the company of friends. 

Men whose interest it was to deceive, must soon have wearied of the search for truth. They were satisfied with the docility of the people and, they thought they no longer needed new means of ensuring its continuance. Little by little they too forgot a part of the truth hidden under their allegories they preserved of their old science only what was strictly necessary if they were to retain the confidence of their disciples, and they ended by becoming the dupes of their own myths. 

Due in part to its ability to produce extremely low shear rates, the controlled stress technique has been formd to be highly suited to the determiiration of apparent yield stress, and in this respect the controlled-stress instrument is widely claimed to be more successful than its controlled-shear rate-cormterparts. This is usually attributed to the fact that, for suitably low stresses, the structure of the material may be preserved imder the couditions of test, ludeed, the introduction of the second generation of controlled-stress instruments can be said to have provoked considerable interest in, and debate siuroimding, the field of yield stress determination, with some early advocates of the controlled-stress technique advancing the controversial notion of the yield stress myth [Barnes and Walters, 1985]. 

The myth has been preserved by Zosimus, Comm.Omega 11. 

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