More Science from an Easy Chair

Until instantaneous photography was introduced, a little more than twenty-five years ago (by the discovery of the means of increasing the sensitiveness of a photographic plate),...

I submit, as the final chapter of this little volume of miscellaneous diversions, a few words intended to meet what has become a recurrent misrepresentation and absurdity for wh...

In the novel by that clever but contradictious writer, Sam Butler, entitled "The Way of All Flesh," an amiable and philosophically minded old gentleman, who pervades the story,...

The word "museum" is not one of those which explain themselves and give an indication of what the thing to which they are applied should be, when it has ceased to be what it was...

Animals, taking one kind with another, nourish themselves on an immense variety of food. The flesh and the blood of other animals of all kinds, warm or cold, the leaves, twigs,...

The tradition of the existence of dwarfs, not as isolated examples, but as a race with their own customs, government, and language is familiar among civilised people, and exists...

I came across a discussion the other day as to whether it is right to tell children and to let them believe that Santa Claus puts Christmas presents in their stockings, and that...

Kissing is an extremely ancient habit of mankind coming to us from far beyond the range of history, and undoubtedly practised by the remote animal-like ancestors of the human ra...

I am writing in early September from Interlaken, one of the loveliest spots in Europe when blessed with a full blaze of sunlight and only a few high-floating clouds, but absolut...

During the last twenty years the whole attitude of the study and investigation of disease-causing microbes has advanced from the preliminary step of merely identifying certain m...

To what jewel or precious stone was Shakespeare alluding when he makes the exiled Duke in "As You Like It" (after praising his rough life in the forest of Arden, and declaring t...

After the last great extension of glaciers in Europe, during which nearly all of Great Britain and the North of France and Germany were buried with Scandinavia under one great i...

The ancients associated laughter with the New Year. I am not sure whether or no it is of good omen to begin the New Year with laughter. Omens are such tricky things that I have...

In the preceding chapter I related the curious and exceptional cases of "fatherless reproduction" by means of true egg-cells, those cells of special nature produced in the organ...

The old saying, "_De gustibus non disputandum_," is based upon the fact that both liking and the repulsion evinced by human beings for different odours (including those odours w...

Most people think of Easter as a Christian festival, but it is really in name and origin a pagan one. The word "Easter" is the modern form of "Eastra," the name of the Anglo-Sax...

This generation, which is so thankless to the great discoverers of the causes of disease, so forgetful of the epoch-making labours of the English sanitary reformers of last cent...

The possibility of protecting whales from wanton slaughter by man is, no doubt, a matter open to discussion. Protection has, however, been accorded to one particular whale in an...

One of the most interesting discoveries of recent date in regard to the processes which go on in that all-important material--protoplasm--which is the physical basis of life and...

New Zealand consists of two islands, together more than 1,000 miles long and of about 200,000 square miles area. It is 1,000 miles distant from New Caledonia, the nearest island...

Very few people have any idea of the extent to which man since his upgrowth in the late Tertiary period of the geologists--perhaps a million years ago--has actively modified the...

The terraces of gravel deposited by existing rivers and the deposits in caverns in the limestone regions of Western Europe--the so-called "Pleistocene" strata--contain, besides...

The almost complete and very sudden disappearance of the bison in North America thirty years ago does not seem to have been due simply to the slaughter of tens of thousands of t...

Varied and uncertain as the weather was in Switzerland during July of the year 1910, it showed a more decided character when I returned there at the end of August. For three wee...

It is the early summer of 1910 and I have but just returned from a visit to Switzerland. The latter part of June and the beginning of July is the best for a stay in that splendi...

No mistake, said Huxley, is more frequently made by clever people than that of supposing that a cause or an opinion is unsound because the arguments put forward in its favour by...

It has now been discovered that a great number of human diseases are caused by microscopic parasites, which are spoken of in a general way by the name invented by the great Past...