Rustic Sounds, and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History

Some of the prettiest methods of demonstrating this process depend, not on the manufacture of starch in the leaf, but on the fact that an assimilating plant sets free oxygen, by...

I have always felt that the best teaching I received was in two practical matters, viz., how to play the flute, and how to use a microscope. It may be said that these were subje...

But to return to the musical instruments of the Morris dancers--the Pipe and Tabor. I am told that the little drum on which the piper accompanies his tune should be pronounced '...

PAGE I Rustic Sounds 1 II Francis Galton 13 III The Movement of Plants 36 IV A Lane in the Cotswolds 55 V Jane Austen 61 VI The Education of a Man of Science 78 VII The Pipe and...

And she, like Nature, has the power of creating in her devotees a minute interest which I rarely experience in other writers. It does not seem to Austenites a foolish thing to i...

Sir Francis Galton goes on to give a list of qualities that "nearly every one except cranks would take into account in picking out the best specimens of his class." The list inc...

After all, the real fun of science begins when one finds out something that was not known before. This is what is rather pompously called original research. It is interesting to...

There is a certain kind of inverted action familiarly known as the tail wagging the dog, and it is on this principle of inversion that my experiment is designed. Inversion may i...

Hales' belief that plants draw part of their food from the air, and again, that air is the breath of life, of vegetables as well as of animals (p. 148), are based upon a series...

Sir Isaac Newton was the dominant figure in English science while Hales was developing. He died in 1727, the year in which Hales published his _Vegetable Staticks_, a book, whic...

Man is a social animal, and his natural strength lies in community of action with his fellows. It is this which gives music its power over masses of men, the pulsation of the dr...

At a later stage in his boyhood Galton transferred his study of method from his sisters to his schoolmasters. He describes what he suffered from the absurd limitations (which st...

We have seen that George was elected a Fellow of Trinity in October 1868, and that five years later (October 1873) he began his second lease of a Cambridge existence. There is a...

The earliest of topographic surveys, the model which other national surveys adopted and improved upon, was the Ordnance Survey of the United Kingdom. But the great trigonometric...

{74b} Mr. Austen Leigh, _Memoir_, p. 140, quotes from Sir Denis Le Marchant that Fanny Price was a "prime favourite" of Sydney Smith. Mr. F. Myers I remember speaking to me of h...