But don't worry, she continued. Most snakes don't want to hurt you. If you're out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over your shoes.This, I decided, was the least-li...
But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness...
Buffon found himself threatened with excommunication for expressing it. A practical man, he apologized at once for his thoughtless heresy, then cheerfully repeated the assertions throughout his subseq...
Boys normally attended the school for seven or eight years, beginning at the age of seven. The schoolday was long and characterized by an extreme devotion to tedium. Pupils sat on hard wooden benches...
Boxing Day.Country pubs.Saying 'you're the dog's bollocks' as an expression of endearment or admiration.Jam roly-poly with custardOrdnance Survey mapsI'm Sorry I Haven't a ClueCream teasThe shipping f...
Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refashioning the pelvis into a full load-bearing instrument. To preserve the required strength, the birth canal in the female must be comparative...
Between December 1606 and February 1625, Virginia received 7,289 immigrants and buried 6,040 of them. Most barely had time to settle in. All but 500 of the 3,500 immigrants who arrived in the three ye...
Before, prior to. There is no difference between these two except length and a certain affectedness on the part of 'prior to.' To paraphrase Bernstein, if you would use 'posterior to' instead of 'afte...
Baseball remains one of the most fertile grounds for inventive wordplay in American life. Among the more notable—and on the face of it more bewildering—recent neologisms are to dial 8 for a home run a...
Atoms, in short, are very abundant. They are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several sta...
At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America -- a belief that no commercial activ...
At one time he personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.
At first, the letters were arrayed in alphabetical order, an arrangement hinted at on modern keyboards by the sequences F-G-H, J-K-L and O-P, but the fact that no two other letters are alphabetical, t...
At all events, thanks to the work of Clair Patterson, by 1953 the Earth at last had an age everyone could agree on.
At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners—this is a basic requirement of most British institutions—and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evo...
Annie Jump Cannon (left) and Henrietta Leavitt, whose unsung labours and incisive deductions made Hubble’s breakthroughs possible.
And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number,...
And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble h...
An upright hominid could see better, but could also be seen better. Even now as a species, we are almost preposterously vulnerable in the wild. Nearly every large animal you can care to name is strong...
Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn’t know what it was when they had found it, and hadn’t described or interpreted its character in any paper, they r...