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The Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition was the famous survey that took place in 1913-14 to follow the path of the Rio da Dúvida ("River of Doubt") in the Amazon basin. The expedition was jointly led by Theodore Roosevelt, the former President of the United States, and Colonel Cândido Rondon, the Brazilian military engineer known for his explorations of the Western Amazon Basin and his lifelong support of Brazilian indigenous populations. Almost from the start, the expedition was fraught with problems: diseases left the explorers in a constant state of sickness; the canoes were ...

In 1799, with extensive travel permissions from the Spanish government, Alexander von Humboldt and the botanist Aimé Bonpland departed for the Americas on a journey of exploration that would last well into 1804. In writing the “Personal Narrative…”, von Humboldt combined a description of the places and people of their travels with diverse scientific observations; but particularly of plants and animals, geology, weather and astronomy. von Humboldt’s narrative (and Thomasina Ross’s translation) of their adventures is marvelously well written and at times poetically descriptive. Volume...

The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was published in competition to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Costing just one penny, it was aimed at the working class and needed broad circulation in order to survive. Initially successful, its content proved to miss the mark and be of more interest to the upper classes and folded after a couple of years. Its format was to offer short essays on a variety of topics the paternalistic publisher deemed important to its readership. - Summary by Lynnet

An entertaining tour of the seemingly simple formula guiding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence Cloudy with a Chance of Starships takes listeners on an irreverent expedition through the marvelous world of astrobiology, using as a guide the most important equation in science since E=mc2...

The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was published in competition to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Costing just one penny, it was aimed at the working class and needed broad circulation in order to survive. Initially successful, its content proved to miss the mark and be of more interest to the upper classes and folded after a couple of years. Its format was to offer short essays on a variety of topics the paternalistic publisher deemed important to its readership. - Summary by LynneT

“When a man weighs anchor in a little ship or a large one he does a jolly thing! He cuts himself off and he starts for freedom and for the chance of things. He pulls the jib a-weather, he leans to her slowly pulling round, he sees the wind getting into the mainsail, and he feels that she feels the helm. He has her on a slant of the wind, and he makes out between the harbour piers.” (quotation from Hilaire Belloc)

This is a frank eyewitness description of the suffering, starvation in particular, that was widely experienced in Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of "The Great War". “It is not stating matters too strongly to say that…peace had caused at least as much misery as the four years’ fury of embattled armies.” It is a powerful political and anti-war statement with scant mention of any battle. – Lee Smalley

“None of us think enough of these things on which the eye rests. But don't let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone else may do it better, if anyone else will only try. ” (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)

The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was published in competition to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Costing just one penny, it was aimed at the working class and needed broad circulation in order to survive. Initially successful, its content proved to miss the mark and be of more interest to the upper classes and folded after a couple of years. Its format was to offer short essays on a variety of topics the paternalistic publisher deemed important to its readership. - Summary by LynneT

The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was published in competition to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Costing just one penny, it was aimed at the working class and needed broad circulation in order to survive. Initially successful, its content proved to miss the mark and be of more interest to the upper classes and folded after a couple of years. Its format was to offer short essays on a variety of topics the paternalistic publisher deemed important to its readership. - Summary by LynneT

The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was published in competition to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Costing just one penny, it was aimed at the working class and needed broad circulation in order to survive. Initially successful, its content proved to miss the mark and be of more interest to the upper classes and folded after a couple of years. Its format was to offer short essays on a variety of topics the paternalistic publisher deemed important to its readership. (Summary by LynneT)

The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was published in competition to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Costing just one penny, it was aimed at the working class and needed broad circulation in order to survive. Initially successful, its content proved to miss the mark and be of more interest to the upper classes and folded after a couple of years. Its format was to offer short essays on a variety of topics the paternalistic publisher deemed important to its readership. - Summary by LynneT

The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was published in competition to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Costing just one penny, it was aimed at the working class and needed broad circulation in order to survive. Initially successful, its content proved to miss the mark and be of more interest to the upper classes and folded after a couple of years. Its format was to offer short essays on a variety of topics the paternalistic publisher deemed important to its readership. - Summary by lynneT

In January 1909 a friend of the Scientific American paid the sum of 500$ which was to be awarded as a prize for the best popular explanation of the Fourth Dimension. The object being to set forth in an essay not longer than 2500 words the meaning of the term so that the lay reader could understand it. 245 essays were submitted, the 500$ prize was awarded to Lieut.-Col. Graham Denby Fitch, Corps of Engineers, USA, and the essay was published in the Scientific American of July 3rd 1909. Despite the character of the subject, extraordinary interest was manifested in the contest. Competitive essays...

Early in his life Samuel Butler began to carry a note-book and to write down in it anything he wanted to remember; it might be something he heard some one say, more commonly it was something he said himself. In one of these notes he gives a reason for making them:“One’s thoughts fly so fast that one must shoot them; it is no use trying to put salt on their tails.”So he bagged as many as he could hit and preserved them, re-written on loose sheets of paper which constituted a sort of museum stored with the wise, beautiful, and strange creatures that were continually winging their way ...

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up ...

The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was published in competition to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Costing just one penny, it was aimed at the working class and needed broad circulation in order to survive. Initially successful, its content proved to miss the mark and be of more interest to the upper classes and folded after a couple of years. Its format was to offer short essays on a variety of topics the paternalistic publisher deemed important to its readership. This was the third edition. - Summary by LynneT

Starr visited Mexico in 1894 and became acquainted with a wide array of contemporary writers. This work is a compendium of 29 of those writers, their short biographies, and extracts of their writings which Starr believed represent their best work. Summary by Mario Pineda

The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was published in competition to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Costing just one penny, it was aimed at the working class and needed broad circulation in order to survive. Initially successful, its content proved to miss the mark and be of more interest to the upper classes and folded after a couple of years. Its format was to offer short essays on a variety of topics the paternalistic publisher deemed important to its readership. - Summary by LynneT

The Columbian Orator, a collection of political essays, poems, and dialogues first published in 1797, was widely used in American schoolrooms in the first quarter of the 19th century to teach reading and speaking. Typical of many readers of that period, the anthology included many speeches celebrating "republican virtues" and promoting patriotism. The Columbian Orator is an example of progymnasmata, containing examples for students to copy and imitate. In his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, former slave and abolitionist writer Douglass describes how he "got hold" of a copy of the ...