02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Humphery Davy: Poem About a Weeping Monument
My eye is wet with tears For I see the white stones That are covered with names The stones of my forefathers’ graves. No grass grows upon them For deep in the earth In darkness and silence the organs of life To their primitive atoms return. Through ages the air Has been moist with their blood The ages the seeds of the thistle has fed On what was once motion and form... Thoughts roll not beneath the dust No feeling is in the cold grave They have leaped to other worlds They are far above t...There are various versions of this early poem in the HD Archive: see Paris, vol 1, p29; Treneer, pp4-5; or Fullmer, p13
13 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
Evidence in Geology is Overwhelming
The gradual advance of Geology, during the last twenty years, to the dignity of a science, has arisen from the laborious and extensive collection of facts, and from the enlightened spirit in which the inductions founded on those facts have been deduced and discussed. To those who are unacquainted with this science, or indeed to any person not deeply versed in the history of this and kindred subjects, it is impossible to convey a just impression of the nature of that evidence by which a multit...In the layers of geological strata are written more evidence than any human witness could bare.
18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
The Founding Fathers were Scientists
Declaration of Independence puts it - 'the laws of nature and of nature's GOD'. Dr Benjamin Franklin was revered in Europe and America as the founder of the new field of electrical physics. At the Constitutional Convention of 1789 John Adams repeatedly appealed to the analogy of mechanical balance in machines; others to William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. Late in life Adams wrote, 'All mankind are chemists from their cradles to their graves . . . The Material Universe ...Scholars of the enlightenment.