"Brother Toby," quoth my father, " I do believe thee to be as honest a man and with as good and as upright a heart as ever God created;-nor is it thy fault, if all the children which have been, may, can, shall, will, or ought to be begotten, come with their heads foremost into the world:-but believe me, dear Toby, the accidents which unavoidably way-lay them, not only in the article of our bege...

foundation for his subsequent scientific and philosophical studies. His school career ended at sixteen but the young man spent two more years with his uncle. His father had decided upon a business career for his son and had made arrangement for him to enter a large bank at Marseilles, but the national situation prevented the realization of any such hope for in 1794 France sent out a call to col...

Ernest William Hey Groves was the son of an English civil engineer and was born in India on 20th June 1872. At the age of three, when his father retired, the family settled in Bristol. He inherited an aptitude for mechanics and took a B.Sc. in engineering. In London, while pursuing his science course, he saw an advertisement for a scholarship at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, which include...

? ho is remembered chiefly for the disasters of the Franco-German war and 0r his capture by the Germans at Sedan. Inevitably he has suffered by comj^rison with his famous uncle, the great Napoleon Bonaparte, and he has jj?1* dismissed as a weak and irresolute man of small capacity, and even sj!611 ^ubbed Napoleon the Little. To live in the shadow of genius is no easy Ration for any man, and Lou...

A few readers of my last two columns may have suspected that something was afoot. Well the explanation is quite simple. I wanted to set the record straight. After seven years of labour in the field, 84 columns, I go on to a well-deserved rest. I find it hard to believe, but there must be some graduate students who began reading me when they started research and who have got their PhDs by now. I...

BEGINNINGS On August 6, 1881, Alexander Fleming was born to Hugh Fleming and Grace Stirling Morton in Lochfield Farm, Scotland. Initially schooled in Scotland, Fleming eventually moved to London with three brothers and a sister, and completed his youth education at the Regent Street Polytechnic. He did not enter medical school immediately after; instead, he worked in a shipping office for four ...

What happens when we heed a call? Few writers have been as suspicious of their vocation as Franz Kafka (1883-1924). His story, A Country Doctor, (1919) ostensibly about a night visit to a patient that goes badly wrong, suggests a modern writer's journey to the heart of his work. There he discovers that trust, like the tradition which might sustain him, is blighted. This essay also examines Kafk...