Brave Companions

The entire first run, ocean to ocean, included twenty-six station stops and took seven hours.

It was that same summer of 1859, with the cornerstone in place, that he returned to Europe, accompanied by his wife, and it was in England the autumn following, in November, that On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared, a volume bound in green cloth and priced at fifteen shillings. The first copy to reach Cambridge, one sent

Humboldt lived long enough to see most of his ideas become old hat, and he concluded toward the end that his chief contribution had been to influence younger men.

That Uncle Tom would one day be used as a term of derision (“A Negro who is held to be humiliatingly subservient or deferential to whites,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary) she would have found impossible to fathom, and heartbreaking. For her he was something very close to a black Christ. He is the one character in all her book who li

In an odd, paradoxical way he became obsessed with an apocalyptic world of ice, the entire globe frozen in death—he who had given himself so wholeheartedly to the study of life, he who was such an exuberant life force. It remained only to find the familiar traces in the Southern Hemisphere as well. So while Darwin, gray, stooped, two years younger

What the student needed above all was the chance to learn to think for himself. So he ought to pursue the line of investigation that interested him most, just as, conversely, a professor ought to be perfectly free to devote his own efforts however he chose. One term, a course of twenty-one lectures was offered on sharks alone, a favorite topic of t

I feel so sorry for anyone who misses the experience of history, the horizons of history. We think little of those who, given the chance to travel, go nowhere. We deprecate provincialism. But it is possible to be as provincial in time as it is in space. Because you were born into this particular era doesn’t mean it has to be the limit of your exper

The first of five volumes appeared in 1845, when Humboldt…

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What the book did at the time was to bring slavery out into the open and show it for what it was, in human terms. No writer had done that before. Slavery had been argued over in the abstract, preached against as a moral issue, its evils whispered about in polite company. But the book made people at that time feel what slavery was about.