Science in Arcady

A parallel elsewhere will make this easier of belief. You have looked down, no doubt, from the garden of the hotel at Glion upon the lake of Geneva and the valley of the Rhone a...

The chawing-up of that wasp was a sight to behold. I have no great sympathy with wasps--they have done me so many bad turns in my time that I don't pretend to regard them as des...

At the present day, it is true, both the prickly-pear cactus and the American agave (which the world at large insists upon confounding with the aloe, a member of a totally disti...

Margate seems to have been the first place in the new Thanet to attain the honour of a place in history. As in two previous cases, the Mere Gate was at first but a fisherman's s...

It was a couple of hundred years or so more before I saw a third bullfinch--which didn't surprise me, for bullfinches are very woodland birds, and non-migratory into the bargain...

Perhaps the opossum is the very best and most crucial instance that could possibly be adduced of the intimate connection which exists between touch and intellect. For the opossu...

Have you ever grown mustard and cress in the window on a piece of flannel? If so, that's a capital practical example of the comparative unimportance of soil, except as a means o...

I say 'for every one of us,' of deliberate design. I don't mean merely for the biologist, though to him, no doubt, their value in this respect is greatest of all. Indeed, I doub...

These essays deal for the most part with Science in Arcady. 'Tis my native country: for I am not of those who 'praise the busy town.' On the contrary, in the words of the great...

In the first place, without troubling ourselves for the time being with the diverse forms of the word as now existing, a difficulty meets us at the very outset as to how it ever...

If you want a perfect model of domestic virtue, for example, where can you find it in higher perfection than in that exemplary and devoted father, the common great pipe-fish of...

The Euskarian neolithic population of Britain--a dark white race, like the modern Basques--had settlements in Sussex, at least in the coast district between the Downs and the se...

Exactly the opposite fate has happened to the eels. The salmonoids as a family are freshwater fish, and by far the greater number of kinds--trout, char, whitefish, grayling, pol...

The answer is a more profound one than you would at first imagine. Plants discovered the grand principle of the rotation of crops long before man did. The farmer now knows that...

And how did the first Watt or Edison of metallurgy come to make that earliest bronze implement? Well, it seems probable that between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age there inter...

But why this particular height rather than any other of the dozen that jut out into the plain? Well, there we get at another fundamental point in hill-top town history. Fiesole...

But fruit-eating and flower-feeding creatures, like butterflies and humming-birds--seeking their food ever among the bright berries and brilliant flowers, almost invariably acqu...

From the combination of such unfavourable conditions in Arctic countries and under the snow-line of mountains there results a curious fact, already hinted at above, that the col...

The South Saxon kings probably lived for the most part at Chichester, though no doubt they had _hams_, after the royal Teutonic fashion generally, in many other parts of their t...

Still, it is not without cause that I have ventured to call it by that strange and now almost forgotten old-world name. There is reason, we know, in the roasting of eggs, and, i...

Cirencester, the meeting-place of all the great Roman roads, is the Latin Corinium, sometimes given as Durocornovium, which well illustrates the fluctuating state of Roman nomen...