Charles Mackay, in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, his classic book on speculation (and other departures from reason), tells gleefully a story first told in Blainville’s Travels, that of a young sailor who, for bringing word of a shipment of goods from the Levant, was rewarded by a merchant with a fine red herring for his breakfast. Presently the merchant, who was much involved in the tulip speculation, found missing a bulb of a Semper Augustus worth some 3,000 florins, an unimaginable $25,000 to $50,000 today. When he sought out the sailor to question him, the
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