قراءة كتاب Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists
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Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists
Little Journeys
To the Homes of the Great
Elbert Hubbard
Memorial Edition
Printed and made into a Book by
The Roycrofters, who are in East
Aurora, Erie County, New York
Wm. H. Wise & Co.
New York
Copyright, 1916,
By The Roycrofters
Little Journeys
To the Homes
of
Great Scientists
CONTENTS
| SIR ISAAC NEWTON |
| GALILEO |
| COPERNICUS |
| HUMBOLDT |
| WILLIAM HERSCHEL |
| CHARLES DARWIN |
| HAECKEL |
| LINNÆUS |
| THOMAS H. HUXLEY |
| JOHN TYNDALL |
| ALFRED R. WALLACE |
| JOHN FISKE |
SIR ISAAC NEWTON
When you come into any fresh company, observe their humours. Suit your own carriage thereto, by which insinuation you will make their converse more free and open. Let your discourse be more in querys and doubtings than peremptory assertions or disputings, it being the designe of travelers to learne, not to teach. Besides, it will persuade your acquaintance that you have the greater esteem of them, and soe make them more ready to communicate what they know to you; whereas nothing sooner occasions disrespect and quarrels than peremptorinesse. You will find little or no advantage in seeming wiser, or much more ignorant than your company. Seldom discommend anything though never so bad, or doe it but moderately, lest you bee unexpectedly forced to an unhansom retraction. It is safer to commend any thing more than is due, than to discommend a thing soe much as it deserves; for commendations meet not soe often with oppositions, or, at least, are not usually soe ill resented by men that think otherwise, as discommendations; and you will insinuate into men's favour by nothing sooner than seeming to approve and commend what they like; but beware of doing it by a comparison.
SIR ISAAC NEWTON
n honest farmer, neither rich nor poor, was Isaac Newton. He was married to Harriet Ayscough in February, Sixteen Hundred Forty-two.
Both were strong, intelligent and full of hope. Neither had any education to speak of; they belonged to England's middle class—that oft-despised and much ridiculed middle class which is the hope of the world. Accounts still in existence show that their income was thirty pounds a year. It was for them to toil all the week, go to church on Sunday, and twice or thrice in a year attend the village fairs or indulge in a holiday where hard cider played an important part.
Isaac had served his two years in the army, taken a turn at sea, and got his discharge-papers. Now he had married the lass of his choice, and settled down in the little house on an estate in Lincolnshire where his father was born and died.
Spring came and the roses clambered over the stone walls; the bobolinks played hide-and-seek in the waving grass of the meadows; the skylarks sang and poised and soared; the hedgerows grew white with hawthorn-blossoms and musical with the chirp of sparrows; the cattle ranged through the fragrant clover "knee-deep in June."
Oftentimes the young wife worked with her husband in the fields, or went with him to market. Great plans were laid as to what they would do next year, and the year after, and how they would provide for coming age and grow old together, here among the oaks and the peace and plenty of Lincolnshire.
In such a country, with such a climate, it seems as if one could almost make repair equal waste, and thus keep death indefinitely at bay. But all men, even the strongest, are living under a death sentence, with but an indefinite reprieve. And even yet, with all of our science and health, we can not fully account for those diseases which seemingly pick the very best flower of sinew and strength.
Isaac Newton, the strong and rugged farmer, sickened and died in a week. "The result of a cold caught when sweaty and standing in a draft," the surgeon explained. "The act of God to warn us all of the vanity of life." Acute pneumonia, perhaps, is what we would call it—a fever that burned out the bellows in a week.
In such cases the very strength of the man seems to supply fuel for the flames. And so just as the Autumn came with changing leaves, the young wife was left to fight the battle of life alone—alone, save for the old, old miracle that her life supported another. A wife, a widow, a mother—all within a year!
On Christmas-Day the babe was born—born where most men die: in obscurity. He was so weak and frail that none but the mother believed he would