In my blog post of 6 October 2012, entitled
Pierrot wanted a wife [
display], I spoke of the local Gerin family, one of whom,
Hippolyte Gerin [1884-1957], was the owner of my property at Gamone during the first half of the 20th century. I never knew exactly how Hippolyte earned his living on these beautiful but harsh Alpine slopes. Amazingly, the British scientist
Richard Dawkins has provided a quite plausible answer. It would appear that members of that ancient family produced a celebrated elixir: a transparent narcotic substance that became known as
Gerin Oil, which was beautifully bottled and marketed under the name
Geriniol.
Click
here to see Dawkins’s scholarly presentation of this strange affair.
PS Readers will have understood, I hope, that the terms
"Gerin Oil" and
"Geriniol" are simply anagrams of the word
"religion". I guess that Dawkins invented this fine irony. I should explain, for those who are interested, that my Photoshopped bottle originally held a mythical liquid known (among believers) as "holy water". On the other hand, the
Gerin people here at Gamone were perfectly real.
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