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Key message The growth of UCB-1 pistachio rootstock seedlings in the earliest years is a poor predictor of subsequent growth. Therefore, rogueing during the 1st years of growth is not effective. Abstract The UCB-1 hybrid, produced from a controlled cross between Pistacia atlantica (female) and P. integerrima (male), is the main pistachio rootstock used in the USA. Variation has been observed in orchards planted with seedling UCB-1 rootstocks for over 20 years. Reduced vigor and stunting of some trees are of particular concern to growers due to decreased nut yield. This study was conducted to better understand the growth of non-grafted UCB-1, as well as between UCB-1 rootstock and Pistacia vera scions in commercial orchards. Phenotypic traits were evaluated in the non-grafted orchard. Grafted tree data were collected for both P. vera female scions and their UCB-1 seedling rootstocks in commercial orchards. The uniformity of tree height, trunk caliper, and canopy volume decreased annually during the first 5 years of growth. Individual tree growth was not linear and was poorly synchronized among siblings, causing the population to become increasingly less uniform as it aged. Consequently, growth in the earliest years is a poor predictor of subsequent growth. The strongest correlation was between growth parameters during the later years. There was a significant correlation between rootstock and scion caliper of the grafted trees in commercial orchards, with the least vigorous rootstocks producing the least vigorous scions. These data confirm the need to reliably rogue out seedlings that later will not be vigorous; however, our data show that rogueing based on the 1st years of growth is ineffective. This study suggests the need to develop predictive molecular markers for rootstock vigor.

Locating myxomatosis resistanceMyxomatosis is a viral infection that was deliberately introduced from American cottontail rabbits into European rabbit populations to control their population. Over the past 60 years or so, similar resistance variants have emerged in parallel in the United Kingdom, France, and Australia. Alveset al.discovered that the basis for this resistance is polygenic, with selection converging on several host immunity and proviral alleles (see the Perspective by Miller and Metcalf). Interestingly, it now seems that the virus is counterevolving immune suppressive traits.Science, this issue p.1319; see also p.1277

Metaseiulus occidentalis is an eyeless phytoseiid predatory mite employed for the biological control of agricultural pests including spider mites. Despite appearances, these predator and prey mites are separated by some 400 Myr of evolution and radically different lifestyles. We present a 152-Mb draft assembly of the M. occidentalis genome: Larger than that of its favored prey, Tetranychus urticae, but considerably smaller than those of many other chelicerates, enabling an extremely contiguous and complete assembly to be built—the best arachnid to date. Aided by transcriptome data, genome annotation cataloged 18,338 protein-coding genes and identified large numbers of Helitron transposable elements. Comparisons with other arthropods revealed a particularly dynamic and turbulent genomic evolutionary history. Its genes exhibit elevated molecular evolution, with strikingly high numbers of intron gains and losses, in stark contrast to the deer tick Ixodes scapularis. Uniquely among examined arthropods, this predatory mite’s Hox genes are completely atomized, dispersed across the genome, and it encodes five copies of the normally single-copy RNA processing Dicer-2 gene. Examining gene families linked to characteristic biological traits of this tiny predator provides initial insights into processes of sex determination, development, immune defense, and how it detects, disables, and digests its prey. As the first reference genome for the Phytoseiidae, and for any species with the rare sex determination system of parahaploidy, the genome of the western orchard predatory mite improves genomic sampling of chelicerates and provides invaluable new resources for functional genomic analyses of this family of agriculturally important mites.

A combination of selective and neutral evolutionary forces shape patterns of genetic diversity in nature. Among the insects, most previous analyses of the roles of drift and selection in shaping variation across the genome have focused on the genus Drosophila. A more complete understanding of these forces will come from analyzing other taxa that differ in population demography and other aspects of biology. We have analyzed diversity and signatures of selection in the neotropical Heliconius butterflies using resequenced genomes from 58 wild-caught individuals of Heliconius melpomene and another 21 resequenced genomes representing 11 related species. By comparing intraspecific diversity and interspecific divergence, we estimate that 31% of amino acid substitutions between Heliconius species are adaptive. Diversity at putatively neutral sites is negatively correlated with the local density of coding sites as well as nonsynonymous substitutions and positively correlated with recombination rate, indicating widespread linked selection. This process also manifests in significantly reduced diversity on longer chromosomes, consistent with lower recombination rates. Although hitchhiking around beneficial nonsynonymous mutations has significantly shaped genetic variation in H. melpomene, evidence for strong selective sweeps is limited overall. We did however identify two regions where distinct haplotypes have swept in different populations, leading to increased population differentiation. On the whole, our study suggests that positive selection is less pervasive in these butterflies as compared to fruit flies, a fact that curiously results in very similar levels of neutral diversity in these very different insects.

The mosquito midgut is a hostile environment that vector-borne parasites must survive to be transmitted. Commensal bacteria in the midgut can reduce the ability of mosquitoes to transmit disease, either by having direct anti-parasite effects or by stimulating basal immune responses of the insect host. As different bacteria have different effects on parasite development, the composition of the bacterial community in the mosquito gut is likely to affect the probability of disease transmission. We investigated the diversity of mosquito gut bacteria in the field using 454 pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA to build up a comprehensive picture of the diversity of gut bacteria in eight mosquito species in this population. We found that mosquito gut typically has a very simple gut microbiota that is dominated by a single bacterial taxon. Although different mosquito species share remarkably similar gut bacteria, individuals in a population are extremely variable and can have little overlap in the bacterial taxa present in their guts. This may be an important factor in causing differences in disease transmission rates within mosquito populations.

Motivation: Fixed nitrogen is an essential requirement for the biosynthesis of cellular nitrogenous compounds. Some cyanobacteria can fix nitrogen, contributing significantly to the nitrogen cycle, agriculture and biogeochemical history of Earth. The rate and position on the species phylogeny of gains and losses of this ability, as well as of the underlying nif genes, are controversial. Results: We use probabilistic models of trait evolution to investigate the presence and absence of cyanobacterial nitrogen-fixing ability. We estimate rates of change on the species phylogeny, pinpoint probable changes and reconstruct the state and nif gene complement of the ancestor. Our results are consistent with a nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterial ancestor, repeated loss of nitrogen fixation and vertical descent, with little horizontal transfer of the genes involved. Contact: db60@st-andrews.ac.uk Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Some group-living species exhibit social immunity, where the immune system of one individual can protect others in the group from infection. In burying beetles this is part of parental care. Larvae feed on vertebrate carcasses which their parents smear with exudates that inhibit microbial growth. We have sequenced the transcriptome of the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides and identified six genes that encode lysozymes – a type of antimicrobial enzyme that has previously been implicated in social immunity in burying beetles. When females start breeding and producing antimicrobial anal exudates, we found that the expression of one of these genes was increased by ~1000 times to become one of the most abundant transcripts in the transcriptome. We conclude that we have likely identified a gene for social immunity, and that it was recruited during evolution from a previous function in personal immunity.

Metagenomic studies are leading to the discovery of a hidden diversity of RNA viruses, but new approaches are needed predict the host species these poorly characterised viruses pose a risk to. The rhabdoviruses are a diverse family of RNA viruses that includes important pathogens of humans, animals and plants. We have discovered the sequences of 32 new rhabdoviruses through a combination of our own RNA sequencing of insects and searching public sequence databases. Combining these with previously known sequences we reconstructed the phylogeny of 195 rhabdovirus sequences producing the most in depth analysis of the family to date. In most cases we know nothing about the biology of the viruses beyond the host they were identified from, but our dataset provides a powerful phylogenetic approach predict which are vector-borne viruses and which are specific to vertebrates or arthropods. By reconstructing ancestral and present host states we found that switches between major groups of hosts have occurred rarely during rhabdovirus evolution. This allowed us to propose that 76 new likely vector-borne vertebrate viruses among viruses identified from vertebrates or biting insects. Our analysis suggests it is likely there was a single origin of the plant viruses and arthropod-borne vertebrate viruses while vertebrate-specific viruses arose at least twice. There are also two large clades of viruses that infect insects, including the sigma viruses, which are vertically transmitted. There are also few transitions between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Viruses also cluster together at a finer scale, with closely related viruses tending to be found in closely related hosts. Our data therefore suggest that throughout their evolution rhabdoviruses have occasionally made a long distance host jump before spreading through related hosts in the same environment. This approach offers a way to predict the most probable biology and key traits of newly discovered viruses.

Insects are an important model for the study of innate immune systems, but remarkably little is known about the immune system of other arthropod groups despite their importance as disease vectors, pests, and components of biological diversity. Using comparative genomics, we have characterized the immune system of all the major groups of arthropods beyond insects for the first time--studying five chelicerates, a myriapod, and a crustacean. We found clear traces of an ancient origin of innate immunity, with some arthropods having Toll-like receptors and C3-complement factors that are more closely related in sequence or structure to vertebrates than other arthropods. Across the arthropods some components of the immune system, such as the Toll signaling pathway, are highly conserved. However, there is also remarkable diversity. The chelicerates apparently lack the Imd signaling pathway and beta-1,3 glucan binding proteins--a key class of pathogen recognition receptors. Many genes have large copy number variation across species, and this may sometimes be accompanied by changes in function. For example, we find that peptidoglycan recognition proteins have frequently lost their catalytic activity and switch between secreted and intracellular forms. We also find that there has been widespread and extensive duplication of the cellular immune receptor Dscam (Down syndrome cell adhesion molecule), which may be an alternative way to generate the high diversity produced by alternative splicing in insects. In the antiviral short interfering RNAi pathway Argonaute 2 evolves rapidly and is frequently duplicated, with a highly variable copy number. Our results provide a detailed analysis of the immune systems of several important groups of animals for the first time and lay the foundations for functional work on these groups.

read Allan Hepburn's Intrigue: Espionage and Culture soon after reading John LeCarre's masterful The Constant Gardener and seeing the equally masterful film adaptation of that psychologically intriguing and culturally scathing novel. The Constant Gardener provides clear testimony to the central focus of Hepburn's Intrigue-that is, the examination of how the spy-fiction genre has always been firmly anchored in the cultural issues of each particular novel's time and space. Just as LeCarre's brutal (and meticulously researched) indictment of the global drug industry in The Constant Gardener takes a huge shadow conspiracy and spots it in the bright light of a spy-fiction best-seller, so also does Hepburn's broadly theorized, cultural-studies-based literary criticism of the spy narrative genre spotlight the basic concepts of surveillance, abrogation of identity, loss of control over one's own body, and immersion in a ghostly landscape haunted by history. Hepburn works earnestly to rearticulate the spy-fiction genre (and some of its most revered classic texts) in the terms of a wide-ranging application of critical theory. In Intrigue, the reader will be reacquainted with Robert Ludlum (The Bourne Identity), John Buchan (Greenmantle), Robert Harris (Enigma), Joseph Conrad (Under Western Eyes), Graham Greene (The Third Man), Elizabeth Bowen (In the Heat of the Day), John Banville (The Untouchable), John Barth (Sabbatical), Joan Didion (Democracy), Don DeLillo (Libra), and, of course, LeCarr6 and Ian Fleming in all of their mass culture ubiquity.

Insects are an important model for the study of innate immune systems, but remarkably little is known about the immune system of other arthropod groups despite their importance as disease vectors, pests, and components of biological diversity. Using comparative genomics, we have characterized the immune system of all the major groups of arthropods beyond insects for the first time--studying five chelicerates, a myriapod, and a crustacean. We found clear traces of an ancient origin of innate immunity, with some arthropods having Toll-like receptors and C3-complement factors that are more closely related in sequence or structure to vertebrates than other arthropods. Across the arthropods some components of the immune system, such as the Toll signaling pathway, are highly conserved. However, there is also remarkable diversity. The chelicerates apparently lack the Imd signaling pathway and beta-1,3 glucan binding proteins--a key class of pathogen recognition receptors. Many genes have large copy number variation across species, and this may sometimes be accompanied by changes in function. For example, we find that peptidoglycan recognition proteins have frequently lost their catalytic activity and switch between secreted and intracellular forms. We also find that there has been widespread and extensive duplication of the cellular immune receptor Dscam (Down syndrome cell adhesion molecule), which may be an alternative way to generate the high diversity produced by alternative splicing in insects. In the antiviral short interfering RNAi pathway Argonaute 2 evolves rapidly and is frequently duplicated, with a highly variable copy number. Our results provide a detailed analysis of the immune systems of several important groups of animals for the first time and lay the foundations for functional work on these groups.

The evolutionary importance of hybridization and introgression has long been debated. Hybrids are usually rare and unfit, but even infrequent hybridization can aid adaptation by transferring beneficial traits between species. Here we use genomic tools to investigate introgression in Heliconius, a rapidly radiating genus of neotropical butterflies widely used in studies of ecology, behaviour, mimicry and speciation. We sequenced the genome of Heliconius melpomene and compared it with other taxa to investigate chromosomal evolution in Lepidoptera and gene flow among multiple Heliconius species and races. Among 12, 669 predicted genes, biologically important expansions of families of chemosensory and Hox genes are particularly noteworthy. Chromosomal organization has remained broadly conserved since the Cretaceous period, when butterflies split from the Bombyx (silkmoth) lineage. Using genomic resequencing, we show hybrid exchange of genes between three co-mimics, Heliconius melpomene, Heliconius timareta and Heliconius elevatus, especially at two genomic regions that control mimicry pattern. We infer that closely related Heliconius species exchange protective colour-pattern genes promiscuously, implying that hybridization has an important role in adaptive radiation. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited.

Beyond Hollywood’s strong sense of history (and New Historicism) in some of its big-event films of the nineties decade, there was something else happening that took the mainstreaming of academic critical theory into a whole new dimension. Defining the nineties as an identifiable historical epoch isn’t as easy a task as, perhaps, it has been for earlier decades. For example, if the Eisenhower fifties was the decade of stability and expansion, the rise of suburbia and the building of the interstate highway system, is the nineties the decade of chaos and gridlock on the information highway? If the sixties passionately rocked and saw everyone get involved, is the nineties the decade when everyone stopped reaching out to help others, went slack? If the seventies was the decade of the introduction of the computer, the corporate structuring of the American dream, and the loss of confidence in the moral ascendancy of America itself, is the nineties the decade of the Internet and the cyber-isolation of the individual? If the eighties was the decade of Reagan and neoconservatism, is the nineties the decade of Clinton and out-of-control liberal promiscuity? While the nineties may have been all those things—the decade of cyber-isolation and information overload, the decade of the slacker, the decade of an ethics-challenged liberalism, the answer to all those questions is a resounding “no.” More than anything else, the nineties is the decade of spin.

That fluid relationship between film and history in the late twentieth century leading up to the millennium drew the attention of postmodernist academics. The decade began with books like Tom O’Brien’s The Screening of America and Mark Crispen Miller’s Seeing Through Movies and ended with Robert Brent Toplin’s Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood while, in between, offering other titles like The World According to Hollywood, The Political Companion to American Film, and Hauntings: Popular Film and American Culture— 1990–1992.1 What those books signaled was that the alliance between history and film was fully formed and the electronic version of history offered through motion pictures, television documentaries, and the Internet would be writing the historical narrative henceforth.

At the end of the nineties decade, only months before the demise of the two-term Clinton presidency, Neal Gabler described what the American presidency had become under the influence of the spin that Bill and Hillary Clinton and Kenneth Starr, assisted by an accommodating American media, created. First describing how Lee Atwater (as campaign manager for the elder Bush whose son would succeed the Clintons as a result of the contested 2000 election) commissioned Clotaire Rapaille, a medical anthropologist, to hold therapy sessions with groups of voters to analyze their most primal associations with the American presidency, Gabler goes on to write, “What he [Rapaille] discovered is that Americans see their president as a kind of ‘movie character’ whose primary function is to provide ‘cheap entertainment’ for the country…. But the idea that the office of the presidency would become a provender of entertainment, the idea that one of the president’s key functions would be to provide the public with a few voyeuristic thrills is a relatively new phenomenon.”1

AIDS changed the whole sexual landscape and redefined sex in the nineties for both gays and straights. Naturally, gay culture needed to create an elaborate spin strategy to deal with the AIDS epidemic because homosexuality was being blamed for causing it. But AIDS had an equally powerful impact upon heterosexual culture. Straight sexual adventuring in the nineties had to make the same behavioral adjustments that gay cruising made. Those industries that fed on the prurient allure of promiscuous, illicit, deviant, erotic sexuality—the movies, the porno industry, strip joints, prostitution—had to develop elaborate spin strategies to justify their continued existence as cultural purveyors of sex in the era of sexual disease.

The story goes that David Geffen, then CEO of Asylum Records and soon to be one of the founding partners of DreamWorks SKG, “spent 45 minutes in the pre-Monicagate Oval Office of 1994 lecturing President Clinton on how to spin the press.”1 Scary as that scenario may be considering the epic hustler reputation of Geffen, it demonstrates a rather powerful street savvy and sense of what is important in his time, the nineties, on the part of Bill Clinton. The political world of the nineties can safely be triangulated as the very epicenter of spin. First, the Congress of Newt Gingrich and then the Whitewater/Monica-gate/impeachment proceedings White House of Bill Clinton became accustomed to playing every public policy and public pronouncement only to the press and not to the people. In consternation in 1999, Newsweek magazine announced that for “the first time politicians displayed the serious bipartisanship befitting a constitutional crisis … last week when senators met in the old Senate Chamber with the TV cameras off. A timeout from the 24-hour-a-day cycle of speculation and spin gave them a chance to apply some order to the chaos.”2 If there was ever any question that the nineties was the decade of spin, politics answered that question with a vengeance.

At the 2000 Oscars, a short compilation film celebrated History and the Movies. It was appropriate for the millennium Academy Awards to look back at the film industry’s engagement with the history of the tumultuous century just ending, but equally important was the recognition of the power of historical representation and interpretation that the motion picture industry gathered to itself in the last half of the twentieth century. From the sixties on, films became a looking glass through which cultures, nations, governments, societies, and individual historical figures saw themselves. Movies defined the history and culture of the latter half of the twentieth century by capturing it in a medium available and comprehensible to all. The movies became what Dominick LaCapra termed the major “instruments of diffusion”1 for the historical consciousness of the second half of the twentieth century. This was a New Historicist consciousness that called into question not only the “Grand Narratives”2 of the nineteenth century but also the sources, the methodology, and the very style of the voices of traditional twentieth-century academic history.3

Myriapods (e.g., centipedes and millipedes) display a simple homonomous body plan relative to other arthropods. All members of the class are terrestrial, but they attained terrestriality independently of insects. Myriapoda is the only arthropod class not represented by a sequenced genome. We present an analysis of the genome of the centipede Strigamia maritima. It retains a compact genome that has undergone less gene loss and shuffling than previously sequenced arthropods, and many orthologues of genes conserved from the bilaterian ancestor that have been lost in insects. Our analysis locates many genes in conserved macro-synteny contexts, and many small-scale examples of gene clustering. We describe several examples where S. maritima shows different solutions from insects to similar problems. The insect olfactory receptor gene family is absent from S. maritima, and olfaction in air is likely effected by expansion of other receptor gene families. For some genes S. maritima has evolved paralogues to generate coding sequence diversity, where insects use alternate splicing. This is most striking for the Dscam gene, which in Drosophila generates more than 100,000 alternate splice forms, but in S. maritima is encoded by over 100 paralogues. We see an intriguing linkage between the absence of any known photosensory proteins in a blind organism and the additional absence of canonical circadian clock genes. The phylogenetic position of myriapods allows us to identify where in arthropod phylogeny several particular molecular mechanisms and traits emerged. For example, we conclude that juvenile hormone signalling evolved with the emergence of the exoskeleton in the arthropods and that RR-1 containing cuticle proteins evolved in the lineage leading to Mandibulata. We also identify when various gene expansions and losses occurred. The genome of S. maritima offers us a unique glimpse into the ancestral arthropod genome, while also displaying many adaptations to its specific life history., Author Summary Arthropods are the most abundant animals on earth. Among them, insects clearly dominate on land, whereas crustaceans hold the title for the most diverse invertebrates in the oceans. Much is known about the biology of these groups, not least because of genomic studies of the fruit fly Drosophila, the water flea Daphnia, and other species used in research. Here we report the first genome sequence from a species belonging to a lineage that has previously received very little attention—the myriapods. Myriapods were among the first arthropods to invade the land over 400 million years ago, and survive today as the herbivorous millipedes and venomous centipedes, one of which—Strigamia maritima—we have sequenced here. We find that the genome of this centipede retains more characteristics of the presumed arthropod ancestor than other sequenced insect genomes. The genome provides access to many aspects of myriapod biology that have not been studied before, suggesting, for example, that they have diversified receptors for smell that are quite different from those used by insects. In addition, it shows specific consequences of the largely subterranean life of this particular species, which seems to have lost the genes for all known light-sensing molecules, even though it still avoids light.

The mosquito Aedes aegypti transmits some of the most important human arboviruses, including dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya viruses. It has a large genome containing many repetitive sequences, which has resulted in the genome being poorly assembled — there are 4,758 scaffolds, few of which have been assigned to a chromosome. To allow the mapping of genes affecting disease transmission, we have improved the genome assembly by scoring a large number of SNPs in recombinant progeny from a cross between two strains of Ae. aegypti, and used these to generate a genetic map. This revealed a high rate of misassemblies in the current genome, where, for example, sequences from different chromosomes were found on the same scaffold. Once these were corrected, we were able to assign 60% of the genome sequence to chromosomes and approximately order the scaffolds along the chromosome. We found that there are very large regions of suppressed recombination around the centromeres, which can extend to as much as 47% of the chromosome. To illustrate the utility of this new genome assembly, we mapped a gene that makes Ae. aegypti resistant to the human parasite Brugia malayi, and generated a list of candidate genes that could be affecting the trait., Author Summary Mosquitoes are important for transmission of human diseases including dengue and yellow fever. The sequencing of the genomes of key mosquito species including Aedes aegypti has helped us to understand the factors that allow mosquitoes to vector disease. While the genome for Ae. aegypti has been sequenced, it is in many pieces which have not yet been arranged on chromosomes. To this end, we have created a genetic linkage map and measured the distance between genetic markers, which allows us to assign them to regions of the genome. Using this method, we also detected errors in the current genome sequences. We used our genetic map to find regions of the mosquito genome associated with the development of Brugia malayi, a nematode that causes lymphatic filariasis in humans. A better genome assembly will be important for the development of novel methods for controlling disease transmission.

HISTORY AS A cyclical experience of life in the world is a preoccupation of the characters in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. In the opening scene of the novel, Gaffer Hexam defines the interrelationship between time and history as he tells Rogue Riderhood, "We have worked together in time past, but we work together no more in time present nor yet future."1 In making this break with Riderhood, Gaffer has "taken an unassailable position" (Bk. I, Ch. i, p. 5), because all historical time has converged within his simple mind. For Gaffer in this scene the meaning of the past and its impact upon the future is clearly intelligible, but for others in the novel there is no such easy understanding of the cyclical experience of history. Many characters in Our Mutual Friend delve into past history, but invariably they misinterpret its meaning. The people at the Veneering dinner party express a morbid enthusiasm for hearing Mortimer Lightwood's story of "The Man from Somewhere," but even when the past events of that story suddenly intrude into the present situation of the dinner party no one realizes what impact, if any, this fragment of past history will have upon their own lives. In another sense, the people around the Veneering dinner table are themselves involved in either the obliteration or the falsification of the past as a means of creating deceptive identities in the present. Twemlow subsists on the fiction that he is a close relation of Lord Snigsworthy. The mature young lady and the mature young gentleman, later to be Mr. and Mrs. Lammle, create false pasts in the present interest of fortune-hunting. Worst of all are the Veneerings who are completely devoid of both past and future. Because "the Veneering fiction" (Bk. i, Ch. x, p. 115) has no basis and no prospects, those who believe in it show their utter dislocation from the reality of time and personal history. By far the most singular delvings into past history are those undertaken by Noddy Boffin, one of the few characters who has a concretely realized past. The essential knowledge acquired in his past life as "foreman at the Bower" involves the value of looking beneath the surface of things, of delving and sifting through every available fragment of material, in order to salvage what is usable and to discard what is obsolete, tainted, or false. When his station in life changes and he is master instead of foreman, his articulated past experience serves to stimulate his interest in the accumulated historical material of the past. When he becomes proprietor of the Harmon holdings, Boffin expresses his desire to delve into the past by hiring Silas Wegg to unearth the mysteries of the "Decline-and-Fall-Off-The-RooshanEmpire." Boffin's erroneous conception of the content of Gibbon's history gives vitality to his interest in the past. He looks "with beaming eyes into the opening world" which Wegg is unveiling for him in order to "see a way to our bettering ourselves" (Bk. i, Ch. v, pp. 58-60). Boffin sincerely hopes that his study of the past can give direction to his actions as a rich and influential man in present-day England. But, as J. Hillis Miller observes in writing about this novel