We can now surmise with 21st century hindsight that Olivia Bisquith-Disdain, the eleventh child born into this family of scientists, most likely suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder.
Or possibly she was autistic, a condition which can sometimes seem very much like a combination of paranoid schizophrenia and O.C.D.
This, however, did not stop Olivia from making significant contributions to her favorite disciplines of science: entomology and mathematics.
What makes this young scientist's contributions stand out from other celebrated elements in the Bisquith-Disdain legacy is that virtually every one of Olivia's innovations or experiments constituted an eccentric fusion of the disciplines of entomology and mathematics.
A perfect examplar of this tendency would be her Bee Calculator (1804).
This was a difference engine which utilized the Newtonian method of finite differences and which could tabulate polynomial functions. Using bees.
This inspiration was later stolen by Charles Babbage. A treatise is known to have been purloined from Olivia Bisquith-Disdain's very bedchamber roughly a decade after the disappearance of the entire family.
It should be pointed out that it took Babbage a quarter of a century to perfect "his" invention (the "Second Difference Engine," completed 1847-1849). Olivia Bisquith-Disdain created her Bee Calculator (sometimes referred to as The Melissographic Numerator) over the course of three months.
Olivia seemed not to have known of J.H. Muller's pioneering work in this sphere (1786) and seems to have struck upon the computational device wholly under her own steam.
Her parents and siblings tried to convince Olivia to recreate this device in materials somewhat less mortal than bees, but the young woman became headstrong on the matter. We have correspondence between Olivia and her brother Eustace Bisquith-Disdain on this contretemps and one must admit the sarcastic tone her brother assumed towards her in this epistle is indeed grating and more than a little condescending.
This letter actually includes the syllogism
All bees are mortal.
Your difference engine is composed of bees.
Your difference engine is mortal.
Why Eustace was writing rather than speaking to his sister, who lived in another wing of the same large mansion, is anyone's guess.
This sarcastic treatment by her consanguines may be the reason Olivia abandoned her Bee Calculator and turned her attention to the creation of her Butterfly Engine (1805).
The Butterfly Engine was a large glass sphere (approximately ten feet in diameter) filled with Blue Morphos.
The butterflies appeared to exist in a vacuum, but the creatures would not die from this apparent lack of atmosphere.
It is believed Olivia Bisquith-Disdain pioneered a sort of oxygen-nitrogen plasma that served as a life-sustaining medium for the lepidopterans.
Somehow the energy generated by the flapping of a mere few hundred butterflies was amplified into enough energy to power a turbine the size of a cottage.
A prose vignette describing the Butterfly Engine exists. This was written by a contemporary scientist, Rudiger Cruikshank. According to Cruikshank, as the butterflies flapped their wings a yellow-green phosphorescent milky substance appeared in their wake in the glass sphere. Cruikshank referred to this as "a sort of luminescent ether." But then--writing at that date--he would not have thought to use the word "plasma."
A poem describing the Butterfly Engine by M.H. Whitlow also exists. But like most poems it is useless. To scientists or anyone else.
It is known Olivia's family was extremely grateful for this contribution and routinely used Olivia's device to provide energy needed in their own scientific experiments.
The Butterfly Engine was nowhere to be found in The Merciful Bones at the time of the Bisquith-Disdain disappearance. The turbine was the only component left behind and no one has (alas!) discovered the eccentric scientist's working notes and no patent application approximating this device (by later inventors) is known to exist.
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