Why Black Bears Sleep in Trees

The ancestors of modern North American bears evolved in Asia during the Pleistocene, wandering over to Alaska during several appearances of the Bering land bridge, between the Bering and Kamchatka Peninsulas. Advancing and receding glaciers, fueled by evaporating sea water, caused ocean levels to alternately drop and rise, exposing and resubmerging the Bering Strait. The ancestors of black bears came across half a million years ago, and it is suspected that black bears adapted to climbing tr...

 The Stagnation of the Sciences in Ancient Societies

Such is the origin of almost all the religions that are known to us, and which the hypocrisy or the extravagance of their inventors and their proselytes afterwards loaded with new fables. These casts seized upon education, that they might fashion man to a more patient endurance of chains, embodied as it were with his existence, and extirpate the possibility of his desiring to break them. But, if we would know to what point, even without the aid of superstitious terrors, these institutions, s...