Corrections & Addenda
A permanent record of amendments to the field catalogue. Corrigenda are silent corrections to the body of an entry, acknowledged here with credit to the observer who identified the error. Addenda are new observations appended to an entry after its initial publication.
Observed an error in the record? Address the Naturalist below, or write to archive@technatura.co. Verified corrections are entered here, with credit to the observer.
The Naturalist acknowledges receipt. Verified corrections will be entered into the record, with credit to the observer.
The Naturalist thanks the Curator for the correction: the entry as first published misdated the specimen to 2012, mounted the satellites on goosenecks they have never possessed, placed the touch controls on the subwoofer, and attributed to this generation a loss of USB audio that occurred one generation earlier.
The maker has issued a second cloth, and has declined to give it a second name. Both are called Polishing Cloth. The catalogue number is the only honest distinction between them: the specimen described above is MM6F3AM/A, and its replacement is MLH74AM/A, which now occupies the same page on the maker's website at nine dollars. The original has not been marked discontinued so much as quietly overwritten, after the fashion of a parish register corrected by a clerk who would rather no one noticed.
The present writer has handled both. The new cloth is thinner and gives more readily; laid across the edge of the hand it drapes, where P. lucrans holds its shape like a thing with opinions. It is darker by a shade. It is, by the testimony of every hand that has tried it, softer. It is also, by that same testimony, cheaper: soft in the manner of inexpensive things, which is a different softness altogether, and the hand knows it at once. The dimensions are unaltered at 160 millimetres to a side, the dual-layer construction and fused edge persist, and both forms remain endorsed for nano-texture glass. The obligate relation described above therefore survives the substitution intact.
One conclusion cannot be avoided, and the present writer records it without satisfaction. The epithet lucrans was assigned on the evidence of the price, and the price has since fallen by half. The name is not wrong: it was correct for the animal at the hour it was described, which is the whole of what any binomial undertakes to promise. But the profit has thinned along with the weave.
Dr. Erasmus Gull, F.Z.S., who owns three of the original and has never cleaned anything with any of them, has written to the Society to argue that the replacement is no member of the species at all but an imposture, on the grounds that it "yields too readily to be serious." He has offered to lend one of his own for the comparison. He specifies, twice and without being asked, that it is unwashed.