Salient quotations

Five thousand mice weigh as much as a man. Their combined surface and food or oxygen consumption are about seventeen times a man’s. — J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), ‘On Being the Right Size’ from Possible Worlds .   You can drop a mouse down a thousand-foot mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. — J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), ‘On Being the Right Size’, from Possible Worlds .   If you fall from a high tower, you fall quicker and quicker; a judicious selection of a tower will ensure any rate of speed. — Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), Literary Lapses (1910).   But I, Simplicio, who have made the test can assure you that a cannon ball weighing one or two hundred pounds, or even more, will not reach the ground by as much as a span ahead of a musket ball weighing half a pound, provided both are dropped from a height of 200 cubits. ...

  Plague doctor It has transpired that a man died from bubonic plague in the hospital on Friday. He was a German sailor, 18 years of age, named William Eppstein, and stated before his death that he had deserted from the crew of the ship Formosa, which arrived at Port Adelaide from New York on November 12 last, and on her arrival was granted pratique by the assistant health officer. Some days later a number of her sailors deserted and disappeared inland. During the voyage of the vessel a number of cases of sickness occurred, but the captain considered them too trifling in character to log them. — Australian Town and Country Journal , 20 January 1900, 16.   I thought it prudent to isolate a wharf laborer at quarantine for observation. I regret to say that the proofs by culture and by inoculation furnished this morning by Dr. Frank Tidswell are complete, and that the disease is plague have no doubt the patient was inoculated by a flea, of which there is visible evidence. It ...

  Quack doctor Superstition is the religion of feeble minds. — Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797).   In letting of blood, three main circumstances are to be considered, who, how much, when? — Robert Burton (1577-1640), Anatomy of Melancholy .   Burton, who believed in judicial astrology, is said to have foretold, from a calculation of his nativity, the time of his death; which occurred at the period he predicted, but not without some suspicion of his having occasioned it by his own hand. — Robert Chambers, Cyclopaedia of English Literature , Edinburgh, 1844, pages 273-274.   To this, as I said before, the astrologers added stories of the conjunctions of planets in a malignant manner and with a mischievous influence, one of which conjunctions was to happen, and did happen, in October, and the other in November; and they filled the people’s heads with predictions on these signs of the heavens, intimating that these conjunctions foretold drought, famine and pesti...

Ant swarm, coin 32 mm across. Not all social animals are social with the same degree of commitment. — Lewis Thomas (1913 – ),  The Lives of a Cell , Penguin Books, 1978.   That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees. — Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 – 180),  Meditations .   A curious case has been given by Prof. Möbius, of a pike, separated by a plate of glass from an adjoining aquarium stocked with fish, and who often dashed himself with such violence against the glass in trying to catch the other fishes, that he was sometimes completely stunned. The pike went on thus for three months, but at last learned caution, and ceased to do so. The plate of glass was then removed, but the pike would not attack these particular fishes, though he would devour others which were afterwards introduced; so strongly was the idea of a violent shock associated in his feeble mind with the attempt on his former neighbours. — Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man , s...

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. — John Donne (1573 – 1631), Devotions 17 .   Said a foolish householder of Wales ‘An odour of coal gas prevails.’             She then struck a light             And later that night Was collected in seventeen pails. — anon in W. S. Baring-Gould, The Lure of the Limerick , 185.   Mr Hobbs told me that the cause of his Lordship’s death was trying an Experiment … it came into my Lord’s thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in Salt. They … bought a Hen, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the body with Snow, and my Lord did help doe it himselfe. The snow so chilled him that he fell immediately ill …they put him into a good bed, warmed with a Panne, but it was a damp bed that had not been...

Nature always tries to create its own likeness: a lamb with a pig’s head was once seen because the ewe had been covered by a boar — Ambroise Paré (1510 – 1590), Des Monstres et Prodiges , quoted by Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973).   In the family of Lepidus at Rome there were three, not successively but by intervals, who were born with the same eye covered with a cartilage. At Thebes there was a race that carried from their mother’s womb the form of the head of a lance, and he who was not born so was looked upon as illegitimate. And Aristotle says that in a certain nation, where the women were in common, they assigned the children to their fathers by their resemblance. — Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533 – 1592).   Jacob Ruhe, surgeon in Berlin was born with six digits on each hand and foot; he had this peculiarity from his mother Elisabeth, who had it from her mother. Elisabeth transmitted it to four of her eight children she bore to Jean-Christian Ruhe, wh...

I have found that a fresh cabbage leaf, put under a glass vessel, filled with common air, for the space of one night only, has so affected the air, that a candle would not burn in it next morning, and yet the leaf had not acquired any smell of putrefaction. — Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804), Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air , 2nd edition, 1775.   Finding that candles would burn very well in air in which plants had grown a long time, and having had some reason to think, that there was something attending vegetation which restored air that had been injured by respiration, I thought it possible that the same process might also restore the air that had been injured by the burning of candles. Accordingly, on the 17th of August, 1771, I put a sprig of mint into a quantity of air, in which a wax candle had burned out, and found that, on the 27th of the same month, another candle burned perfectly well in it. This experiment I repeated, without the least variatio...

  No movement either of the hand or the fingers is produced by the muscles above the elbow; and it is so with birds, and it is for this reason that they are so powerful, because all the muscles which lower the wings spring from the breast and these have in themselves a greater weight than all the rest of the bird. — Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks: Hands and Wings .   Many right skilful masters in chirurgery, and the best learned anatomists, are of the opinion that the veins of the eyes reach to the brain. For mine own part, I would rather think that they pass into the stomach. This is certain, I never knew a man’s eye plucked out of his head, but he fell to vomiting upon it, and the stomach cast up all within it. — Gaius Plinius Secundus (23-79) The Natural History, translated by Philemon Holland, 132.   I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that ...