awesome vision of an ancient age of ice.

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

The Panama Railroad—the first steam road to El Dorado—was begun in 1850, at the height of the California gold craze. And by anyone’s standards it was a stunning demonstration of man’s “wonderful skill, endurance, and perseverance,” just as Pim said, even though its full length was only forty-seven and a half miles. It was, for example, and as almos

Like Humboldt before him, he took the greatest pride in the influence he had on the next generation of naturalists. And indeed the subsequent careers of his students and museum assistants are as strong a testament to his genius as almost anything else.

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

For Agassiz, as for Silliman and others, to study nature was to study the works of God. He had little use for formal religion because, as he once wrote to Dana, he had seen too much in his life of overbearing clerics and religious bigotry. But there could be no evolutionary process as depicted by Darwin for the simple reason that all species were s

His precepts on the teaching of natural history, certainly a significant part of the legacy, had far-reaching influence. “Never try to teach what you yourself do not know, and know well,” he lectured at Penikese his final summer. “Train your pupils to be observers. . . . If you can find nothing better, take a housefly or a cricket, and let each hol

“Antietam,” I said. “Maybe you know it as Sharpsburg.” She hadn’t any idea of what I was talking about. I said there are 57,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial and the Vietnam War lasted eleven years. At the Battle of Antietam in one day there were 23,000 casualties. In one day. It was not just the worst, bloodiest day of the Civil War; its toll in h

Stephens was the president of the railroad, which was a wholly American-owned stock company with its main office in the old Tontine Building on Wall Street. The capitalization was a million dollars.