Who the hell is tokontologist?

[Ya Sam]

>>*Or* one who reflects upon the act itself of smoking pot?

>
>   to toke - smoke weeeeed; ontologist - one who studies the qualities of 
>being
>
>   tokontologist=one who reflects upon the nature of being while smoking 
>pot?


I love your Pynchonian interpretations, guys, but unfortunately they are not 
correct. Musil wrote it in German, so I guess they have a different word for 
'toke'. I tried to google for a possible German spelling of this science 
(i.e. Tokontologie) and here is what I found:

"C. Börner, in his fundamental tocontology (whose design significance for 
all these organisms is quite well known to all biologists) has described 
(Die natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte als Tokontologie [The natural history 
of creation as tocontology] Leipzig, Th. Weicher, 1913, 159 pgs., 10 tables 
& 11 illus.) what gigantic dimensions of differentiation within this simple 
alternation alone, between merely two nuclear valencies - namely from 
haploid to diploid phase - still remain for plants and animals."

http://www.professorenderlein.com


This must have been some nonce term as it does not seem to be much in 
currency. Search for 'tocontology' yields just one result, and for 
'tocontologist' - none at all. In the English translation of Musil's book it 
is 'tokontologist'. It is something biological, but it's not much clear what 
exactly it is.

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