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When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.
visitors were oxygen-breathing bipeds with shopping
Howard divided clouds into three groups: stratus for the layered clouds, cumulus for the fluffy ones (the word means heaped in Latin) and cirrus (meaning curled) for the high, thin feathery formations that generally presage colder weather. To these he subsequently added a fourth term, nimbus (from the Latin for cloud), for a rain cloud. The beauty of Howard’s system was that the basic components could be freely recombined to describe every shape and size of passing cloud—stratocumulus, cirrostratus, cumulonimbus, and so on. It was an immediate hit, and not just in England. Goethe was so taken
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Fortey knows an awful lot about an awful lot. He is the author of a wry, splendid book called Life: An Unauthorised Biography, which covers the whole pageant of animate creation.
I had read, the museum issued its report on the John Murray Expedition, an Indian Ocean survey, forty-four years after the expedition had concluded. This is a world where things move at their own pace, including a tiny lift Fortey and I shared with a scholarly-looking elderly man with whom Fortey chatted genially and familiarly as we proceeded upwards at about the rate that sediments are laid down. A
It starts with a single cell. The first cell splits to become two and the two become four and so on. After just forty-seven doublings, you have 10,000 trillion (10,000,000,000,000,000) cells in your body and are ready to spring forth as a human being.1 And every one of those cells knows exactly what to do to preserve and nurture you from the moment of conception to your last breath.
Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 18091 in Shrewsbury, a sedate market town in the west Midlands. His father was a prosperous and well-regarded physician. His mother, who died when Charles was only eight, was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, of pottery fame.
FitzRoy was only twenty-three, Darwin just twenty-two.
Coloured engraving of HMS Beagle, aboard which Darwin sailed as unpaid naturalist and dining companion for its unstable captain, Robert FitzRoy.
FitzRoy’s formal assignment was to chart coastal waters, but his hobby—passion, really—was to seek out evidence for a literal, biblical interpretation of creation. That Darwin was trained for the ministry was central to FitzRoy’s decision to have him aboard. That Darwin subsequently proved to be not only liberal of view but less than wholeheartedly devoted to Christian fundamentals became a source of lasting friction between them.
Darwin saw was that all organisms compete for resources, and those that had some innate advantage would prosper and pass on that advantage to their offspring. By such means would species continuously improve.
Delphinus fitzroyi, a species of dolphin discovered by Darwin and named for the captain. (Credit 25.4)
he put his notes away and for the next decade and a half busied himself with other matters. He fathered ten children, devoted nearly eight years to writing an exhaustive opus on barnacles (“I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before,” he sighed, understandably, upon the work’s conclusion) and fell prey to strange disorders that left him chronically
It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will for ever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.
