Famous Men of Science

Dr. Liddon tells of being invited to Frank's rooms, to breakfast with him. "The marmots, which had hibernated in the cellar below, had just, as he expressed it, 'thawed.' There...

Four years later, he was again in Rome to plead for the Copernican system, and to defend his own conduct in advocating a thing in opposition to the Catholic church. He said: "I...

In 1881, "The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits," was published. "Fragments of burnt marl, cinders, etc., which had be...

Dr. Darwin now sent his two boys, Erasmus and Charles, to Edinburgh University. Here, Charles found the lectures "intolerably dull," all except those on chemistry by Hope. His f...

On the return of Commodore Audubon to France, finding that the boy was following the bent of his own mind, to the neglect of a solid education, in spite of the tears and entreat...

"The temptation was too strong for Louis, and he proposed to Auguste that they should skate across, join their father at the fair, and come home with him in the afternoon. They...

A telegraph company was formed which offered to sell the telegraph to the government for one hundred thousand dollars. Congress refused to buy, much to the subsequent profit of...

From this city he journeyed West. "All trembling I reached the Falls of Niagara, and oh, what a scene! My blood shudders still, although I am not a coward, at the grandeur of th...

At seven he was sent to a school at Andover, and fitted for Phillips Academy. He received helpful letters from his father. At ten, Dr. Morse writes him: "Your natural dispositio...

At twenty-two Lyell graduated from Oxford. The same year he became a Fellow of the Geological Society of London, and also of the Linnaean Society, and, in accordance with his fa...

That very day a letter was penned him, not this time by the wife, but by his father. "My affectionately beloved son: Mysterious are the ways of Providence. My heart is in pain a...

Now we visit the Botanic Garden, which Linnaeus so loved and developed, and go over the two-and-a-half-story stuccoed house, cream-colored, where the great naturalist lived and...

The boy of fourteen said good-by to his devoted mother, and started for Stuttgart, seated between the Chamberlain and the Secretary of the Grand Duke. Both spoke German all the...

The winter of 1851 was spent in the examination of the Florida reefs and keys, a work undertaken at the request of Prof. A. D. Bache, at the head of the United States Coast Surv...

The distinguished man, though unassuming and gentle in manner, must have had a realizing sense of the greatness of his work, for he said, "I have looked further into space than...

"He afterwards took an opportunity of having some private conversation with the young musician, and asked him whether he had engaged himself for any long period to the Durham mi...

The emperor was delighted with the results of the expedition, which were published in several volumes. He said, "Your sojourn in Russia has been the cause of immense progress to...

Agassiz had taken the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, a year earlier. "The time had come," said he, years afterward, "when even the small allowance I received from borrowed capi...

The same year, when the college had been dismissed on account of the plague in Cambridge, Newton made his immortal discovery of the Attraction of Gravitation. While sitting alon...

This was a fine opening for a young man, not yet twenty-three. He went to work with unbounded energy. He investigated the general form of mountains, collected information as to...

In the spacious and well supplied laboratory of the Institution, in making his experiments, says his brother, "his zeal amounted to enthusiasm, which he more or less imparted to...

Garfield said, "No page of human history is so instructive and significant as the record of those early influences which develop the character and direct the lives of eminent men."

"I arrived in Princeton in November, 1832, and, as soon as I became fully settled in the chair which I occupied, I recommenced my investigations, constructed a still more powerf...

No wonder Lyell became fascinated with the history of the changes of this planet, and the life of man before historic times. A great book seemed open to him, and he studied it b...

November 24, 1859, when Darwin was fifty, his great work, "Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life," was p...

The results of his work were soon apparent. The yearly sales of English and Welsh salmon in Billingsgate market, London, before 1861, averaged about eight tons only. From 1867 t...