One of my earliest memories is of a tall, thin clergyman who arrived late for a meeting as I stood outside the Lodge room as an Entered Apprentice whilst the ceremony of a higher degree was in progress. He was the treasurer of the Lodge and his name was the Reverend Prebendary Charles Waton. He was the Vicar of St Benet Fink, Edmonton and was a Grand Officer. To me, he was a very important maso...

UST about a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein began writing a paper that secured his place in the pantheon of humankind's greatest thinkers. With his discovery of special relativity, Einstein upended the familiar, thousands-yearold conception of space and time. To be sure, even a century later, not everyone has fully embraced Einstein's discovery. Nevertheless, say "Einstein" and most everyone...

One hundred years ago a young Russian scientist, Dimitri Ivanovsky (1864 to 1920), presented a paper before the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg in which he stated that "the sap of leaves infected with tobacco mosaic disease retains its infectious properties even after filtration through Chamberland filter candles" (10). This observation suggested a disease agent smaller than any known bef...

In June 1905, Ernest Starling, a professor of physiology at University College London, UK, first used the word ‘hormone’ in one of four Croonian Lectures— ‘On the chemical correlation of the functions of the body’—delivered at the Royal College of Physicians in London. Starling defined the word, derived from the Greek meaning ‘to arouse or excite’, as “the chemical messengers which speeding fro...