A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

It is these anomalous, very occasional pricks in the crowded dome of the night sky that the Reverend Evans finds.

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Newton be! and all was light. Alexander Pope, ‘Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton’

I’m told. Incidentally, the first, much thinner edition of that atlas, produced in 1896, divided clouds into ten basic types, of which the plumpest and most cushiony-looking was number nine, cumulonimbus.fn1 That seems to have been the source of the expression ‘to be on cloud nine24’. For all the heft and fury of the occasional anvil-headed

The whole of India has yielded just one ancient human fossil, from about three hundred thousand years ago. Between Iraq and Vietnam