Man After My Own Heart

Sir Richard F. Burton, translator and editor of the English-version Arabian Nights. His footnotes are almost as interesting as the 1001 tales. Beside the more obvious ludicrousness of the unapologetic racism and sexism (Arabic or English in source?), and the repeated and unnecessary annotations about how black men's penises are a wonderment of size and endurance - which Burton emphasizes, he can attest from a personal, 9-hour-long observation - there are actually some serious endeavors toward real erudition. Some of the linguistic/etymological explanations, for example, are quite informative, and appear to be sound - and I can verify as much from the editor's occasional appeal to classical etymologies and such, which are more or less on point. The juxtaposition of these scholarly excursions with the more silly, prurient, voyeuristic ramblings makes the notes particularly fascinating. And more fascinating still is when you get a note like this, clearly an attempt at learning, but a spectacular, ridiculous failure of one:

The tenet of the universal East is at once fact and unfact. As a generalism asserting that women's passion is ten times greater than man's (Pilgrimage, ii. 282), it is unfact. The world shows that while women have more philoprogenitiveness, men have more amativeness; otherwise the latter would not propose and would nurse the doll and baby. Fact, however, in low-lying lands, like Persian Mazanderan versus the Plateau; Indian Malabar compared with Maratha-land; California as opposed Utah and especially Egypt contrasted with Arabia. In these hot-damp climates the venereal requirements and reproductive powers of the female greatly exceed those of the male; and hence the dissoluteness of morals would be phenomenal, were it not obviated by seclusion, the sabre and the revolver. In cold-dry or hot-dry mountainous lands the reverse is the case; hence polygamy there prevails whilst the low countries require polyandry in either form, legal or illegal (i.e., prostitution). I have discussed this curious point of "geographical morality" (for all morality is, like conscience, both geographical and chronological), a subject so interesting to the lawgiver, the student of ethics and the anthropologist, in The City of the Saints. But strange and unpleasant truths progress slowly, especially in England.

(Note 36 to The Tale of Kamar al-Zaman)