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Note on Title

This title was chosen rather than something like "Benthamic bric-a-brac" or "curiosities" because Bentham used the phrase several times in his works and correspondence:

Chrestomathia, ed. M.J. Smith and W.H. Burston (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983), Notes to Chrestomathic Tables, Table 1., Objections Answered, p. 41:

  • The bringing so many, and most of them such widely extending masses of instruction, within so comparatively small a compass in point of time, will be apt to be productive of a sort of doubt and jealousy which is too natural and too plausible, and, in a certain point of view, too well grounded to be suffered to pass altogether without notice. Such a variety and multitude of things crowded together,--and to attempt to force all these things at once into the minds of such young children! One thing must drive out another, instead of their being all of them learnt, at least to any useful purpose; and what at length may stick, will be no better than a confused hodge-potch, composed of odds and ends

"Legislator of the World": Writings on Codification, Law, and Education, eds. Philip Scholfield and Jonathan Harris (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998), p. 19:

  • Law, blundered out by a set of men, who,--their course of operation not being at their own command, but at the command of the plaintiffs in the several causes,--were all along as completely destitute of the power, as, under the influence of sinister interest, they could not but be of the inclination to operate in pursuit of any clear and enlarged views of utility, public or private, or so much as upon any comprehensive and consistent plan, good or bad, in the delineation of the rights they were confirming, and the obligations they were imposing:--and which accordingly never has been, nor, to any purpose, good or bad, ever could have been, nor ever can be, the result of antecedent reflection, grounded on a general view of the nature of each case, of the exigencies belonging to it, or the [analogous] cases connected with it: nor, in a word, any thing better than a shapeless heap of odds and ends, the pattern of which has, in each instance, been necessarily determined by the nature of the demand, put in by the plaintiff, as above:--

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 7: January 1802 to December 1808, ed. J.R. Dinwiddy (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988), p.126:

  • You shall have in the first place a release of all prior claims, signed and sealed by Romilly. In the next place, all the odds and ends--the disjecti membra poeta 14 that Dumont had to work upon, and which he has returned to me: and as the 'ends' would not be of your own 'gathering', you might go to work boldly, without apprehension of the statute. Your censorial care would give the retranslation whatever corections the original scraps might not suffice for giving to it.  14 Literally, 'the scattered limbs of the poet'. Bowring corrected 'disjecti' to 'disjecta'. Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, iii. 724

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 8: January 1809 to December 1816, ed. Stephen Conway (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988), p. 61:

  • Amidst your odds and ends, I found a conjunct knife and fork, upon the best plan, for Travellers in savage countries, such as France, but in a rueful plight, and divested of one of its green sides: I gave it to Lawrence, he got it furbished up, and I hope you will see it here.

Correspondence, Volume 8, p. 196:

  • any purpose, good or bad, ever could have been, nor ever can be, the result of antecedent reflection, grounded on a general view of the nature of each case, of the exigencies belonging to it, or the analogous cases connected with it: nor in a word any thing better than a shapeless heap of odds and ends, the pattern of which has, in each instance been necessarily determined, by the nature of the demand, put in by the plaintiff, as above:--