The way late imperial political elites in China positioned themselves in the tianxia—their life world—can be described as a balance between polity and locality, which was often accompanied by an enduring sense of local identity. This article argues that despite the fall of the tianxia concept in modern China, the age-old locality–polity relationship and the elite local identity did not disappear. Taking the flourishing local gazetteer production of the Republican era as a case, I suggest that instead of suppressing locality, the crisis of the polity and the coming of the nation-state in China brought it more to the foreground. The decline of locality in China's political culture occurred only after the communist takeover. The study makes use of the Local Gazetteer Research Tools (LoGaRT) developed by Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciences.

The vertebrate retina contains only five major neuronal classes but these embrace a great diversity of discrete types, many of them hard to define by classical methods. Consideration of their spatial distributions (mosaics) has allowed new types, including large ganglion cells, to be resolved across a wide range of vertebrates. However, one category of large ganglion cells has seemed refractory to mosaic analysis: those that project to the accessory optic system (AOS) and serve vestibulocerebellar mechanisms of motion detection and image stabilization. Whenever AOS-projecting cells have been analyzed by nearest-neighbor methods, their distribution has appeared almost random. This is puzzling, because most aspects of visual processing require the visual scene to be sampled regularly. Here, spatial correlogram methods are applied to distributions of large ganglion cells, labeled retrogradely from the AOS in frogs, turtles, and rats, and to the AOS-projecting displaced ganglion cells of chickens. These methods reveal hidden spatial order among AOS-projecting populations, of a form that can be simulated either by superimposing a single regular mosaic on a random population or, more interestingly, by overlapping three or more regular, similar but spatially independent mosaics. The rabbit is known to have direction-selective ganglion cells (not, however, AOS projecting) that can be subdivided into functionally distinct, regular mosaics by their tracer-coupling patterns even though they are morphologically homogeneous. The present results imply that the direction-selective AOS-projecting ganglion cells of all vertebrates may, likewise, be subdivided into regular, independent mosaics.

The changing cosmological symbolism incorporated in Phases 1 and 2 at Stonehenge is reviewed in the light of new evidence from patterns of deposition prior to the construction of the bluestone and sarsen stone settings. The early structure of the monument and attendant depositional practices embodied a scheme of radial division, including a symbolic quartering primarily demarcated by solstitial rising and setting points. Through sustained ritual practice, however, the motions of the moon came increasingly to be referenced through deposition, particularly of cremations. This evidence seems to contradict earlier claims of a sudden shift in and around Wessex during the mid-third millennium BC from a predominantly lunar to a predominantly solar cosmology. It suggests instead that interest in solar and lunar events did not necessarily preclude each other and that over the centuries there was a process of subtle change involving the continual reworking of symbolic schemes emphasizing a sense of ‘timelessness’ and the unchanging order of the universe.