bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Victorian tragedy, a twentieth-century sequel
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Philip Gosse was a nineteenth-century biologist, a respected figure, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who had struggled earnestly to come to terms with Darwin’s theory. He was also an outstanding popularizer of natural history in his writings and on the lecture podium. A severe figure of unbending Victorian rectitude, he had no time for frivolity and little even for his family. An entry in his diary reads: ‘Received green swallow from Jamaica. E. delivered of a son.’
As a Christian fundamentalist, a member of the austere Plymouth Brethren sect, Gosse was deeply troubled by the evident contradiction between the fossil record and biblical chronology. After years of agonizing, he arrived at a solution to this problem and some others thrown up by scientific discoveries, and in 1884 he published the fruits of his lucubrations in a book, which he called Omphalos, the ancient Greek for the navel. For one of Gosse’s preoccupations had been the thorny problem of whether Adam, who, unlike his descendants, was not born of woman, possessed this anatomical feature. The essence of Gosse’s theory was that God’s creation had been designed to embody the appearance of pre-existence. There was thus a true, or ‘diachronic’ time, and, in addition, God’s spurious, or ‘prochronic’ timescale, in which reposed the fossils that Gosse had so single-mindedly studied. The story of how the book was received is told by Gosse’s son, Edmund, the novelist and man of letters (and Philip’s only child, whose emergence into the world had received such a cryptic diary entry).
Chemistry in the kitchen: the discovery of nitrocellulose
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In 1938, three days before Christmas, the young curator of the small East London Museum on the eastern seaboard of South Africa was assembling a display of fossils. Her name was Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer. That morning her work was interrupted by a telephone call from the harbour, where a trawler, laden with a catch that included sharks and other fish, had just docked. The trawlermen had supplied Miss Courtenay-Latimer with fish of many species for the museum’s collection. She now had a backlog of specimens from earlier catches still to be mounted and she wanted to get her fossil display finished before the Christmas holiday. She was not therefore anxious to accumulate more fish. ‘But 1 thought of how good everyone at Irvin and Johnson had been to me, and it being so near Christmas, I thought the least I could do would be to go down to the docks to wish them the compliments of the season.’
The virtues of squalor
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The life and achievements of Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) have been obfuscated by the legends that gathered around him, even before his death. Fleming made two important but accidental discoveries, the second of which initiated a new era in medicine.
Fleming passed most of his working life in a dingy laboratory in St Mary’s Hospital close by Paddington railway station in London. His superior for much of that time was the redoubtable Professor Colonel Sir Almroth Wright—the model for Sir Colenso Ridgeon in George Bernard Shaw’s play, The Doctor’s Dilemma. Wright believed that the only valid weapon against bacterial infections (and many other medical problems) was immunization, and research on chemical intervention, which in the foregoing years had, thanks to the work of Paul Ehrlich [155] in Germany, already saved many lives, was strongly discouraged. It was indeed the Inoculation Department over which Wright so majestically presided. The methods favoured by Wright were highly conventional, even old-fashioned. The circumstances surrounding Fleming’s discovery of lysozyme, an enzyme that dissolves the cell walls of some kinds of bacteria, were recorded many years after the event (which occurred in 1921) by V. D. Allison, at the time a young research worker in Fleming’s laboratory:
The maestro’s gaffe
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) was hailed as a mathematical and scientific genius from the beginning of his student years in Vienna. He was one of the small band of theoretical physicists who wrought a revolution in the perception of matter and the Universe in the years just before and after the First World War. Schrodinger’s most celebrated monument is the invention of wave mechanics, a description of the behaviour of fundamental particles, which he, with others, later showed to be the obverse of quantum mechanics. In 1927, he was elected, as successor to Max Planck, to a professorial chair at Berlin University, then the Mecca of theoretical physics. There he became closely associated with Albert Einstein, a friendship that endured intermittently, though with stormy vicissitudes, until a few years before Einstein’s death in 1955.
Charles Goodyear vulcanizes
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
It was early in the nineteenth century when Charles Macintosh and others first tried to produce waterproof materials by means of rubber coatings (whence, of rnurse, the macintosh). These efforts had mixed success: in hot weather the rubber would become sticky and run, and in mid weather crack. Charles Goodyear, born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1800, was reduced to penury by his long struggle to overcome this problem; he was forced, for instance, to write off a consignment of waterproofed mailbags, laboriously fabricated for the CS mail service, and spent no little time in debtors’ prisons.
Then in 1840 after he had unsuccessfully tried the effect, among many other materials, of sulphur on the rubber, he carelessly allowed a mixture of rubber and sulphur to come into contact with a hot stove. Instead of melting, the paste turned into a gummy mass, which only charred at the edges. Here is how his daughter described the moment:
As in a dream
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Francis Crick [88] has argued that the function of dreaming is to efface from our consciousness the miasma of redundant memory, the detritus of daily experience. This, he suggests, serves to bring the memories that matter into sharper focus. Perhaps, then, that is why dimly perceived, inchoate ideas have so often crystallized in the minds of great scientists in dreams or dream-like states of reverie. This, at all events, was how the classification of the chemical elements presented itself to Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev in his study in St Petersburg in 1869.
Mendeleyev was born in 1834 in a remote region of Siberia into a family of schoolteachers, the youngest of 17 children. He maintained in later life that he never fully mastered the Russian that was spoken in St Petersburg, where he was sent to study. There also, in the face of no little adversity, he became Professor of Chemistry at the Technological Institute. He appears in photographs as a patriarchal figure, wild of hair and heavily bearded. His command of detail and his capacity for work were legendary. It was his conviction that the chemical elements must conform to some all-embracing pattern. In this he was not alone, and indeed the concept for which he became famous had been prefigured—to general ridicule—by an English chemist by the name of John Newlands.
The wrath of fools
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Alexandre Dumas opined that rogues are always preferable to fools, for rogues sometimes take a rest. In the Soviet Union, with science in thrall to Marxist ideology, the fools held sway. Here is a story related by George Gamow [81], famous as a physicist and cosmologist, who eventually abandoned his native country’ for a brilliant career in the United States.
Gamow was a forthright character, a large man with a loud voice and an anarchic sense of humour. He and his student, Ralph Alpher, performed a seminal calculation, concerning the formation of elements at the birth of the Universe. True to form, he co-opted Hans Bethe [62], the great mathematical) physicist, to enlarge on aspects of this work, so that it could be published under the names of Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow. (Bethe’s name was apparently initially added without his knowledge, to his considerable displeasure, but his eventual contribution was important.) Gamow drew’ another colleague, Robert Herman, into this endeavour and tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade him to change his name to Delter.
The man of principle
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
J. E. (John Edensor) Littlewood (1885-1977) was one of the foremost mathematicians of the twentieth century. His absorption in his subject and his productivity persisted almost until his death. At the age of 89 Littlewood had a serious fall and entered a nursing home in Cambridge, where he appeared to lose all interest in life. A young friend, Béla Bollobás, visited him and tried to divert him with a new mathematical problem:
In my desperation I suggested the problem of determining the best constant in Burkholder’s weak L1 inequality (an extension of an inequality Littlewood had worked on). To my immense relief (and amazement), Littlewood became interested in the problem. He had never heard of martingales [who has?] but he was keen to learn about them so he was happy to listen to my brief explanation and was willing to read some introductory chapters! All this at the age of 89 and in bad health.
The stolen invention
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Dominique François Jean Arago [166] became, after his youthful adventures, a mandarin of the French scientific establishment and a force (for good) on the national political scene. He was a formidable power-broker in the Academy of Sciences and sought to ensure that it was the deserving who were elected to its membership, not, as often in the past, those with the most influential patronage. Arago on three successive occasions thwarted the aspirations of a hydraulic engineer, Pierre-Simon Girard, who was successfully opposed each time by Arago’s preferred candidate. All three of these had distinguished records and their names are commemorated in today’s textbooks. The second of them was the noted applied mathematician Simeon-Denis Poisson (immortalized in the Poisson ratio of elasticity and the Poisson distribution in statistics). He was nominated by the venerated physicist and mathematician Pierre Simon, marquis de Laplace, but his election presented a tricky political problem.
The heat of the light
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Wilhelm Friedrich Herschel, eventually Sir William, was born in 1738 in Hanover, the son of a musician, in whose profession he was trained. At the age of 19 he travelled to England and soon established himself as a composer, conductor, teacher, and church organist in Bath. In 1766, he began to take a deep interest in astronomy and before long had built his own reflecting telescope. For this purpose he ground his own mirrors, fashioned from speculum, an alloy of copper and tin. Every spare moment, even during the intervals of concerts, Herschel would hasten to his workshop to put in a little time on his mirrors. The Astronomer Royal of the day, Nevil Maskelyne, invited to examine Herschel’s telescope in Bath, pronounced it superior to any in London. Before long Herschel had made a series of discoveries, above all that of a new planet, Uranus. He wanted to call it Georgium in honour of George III, but this was vetoed by the Royal Society.
Herschel’s fame spread and soon the King summoned him to Windsor as his house astronomer. The two Hanoverians hit it off at once, and the King remained a faithful patron. During his career Herschel constructed at least 400 telescopes with his own hands. He searched the heavens and came upon many nebulae, which he rightly conjectured to consist of clusters of stars. He discovered two moons orbiting his planet, Uranus, and he was the first to observe the existence of double-stars—two stars conjoined in orbit about their common centre of mass.
A world of science in a teacup
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
R. A. (later Sir Ronald) Fisher was one of the founders of applied statistics. He devised methods, standard to this day, of analysis of biological data and of design of such undertakings as clinical trials of drugs. Fisher was born in north London in 1890 and in 1910 he began his research career at the Rothamsted Experimental Station near London, then and still a centre of agricultural research. Four years earlier the life of the laboratory had been enriched by the arrival of its first female staff member, Muriel Bristol, an authority on algae. It was out of consideration for her that the custom of afternoon tea in the com mon-room was initiated.
One day, soon after his arrival at Rothamsted, Fisher courteously handed Dr Bristol a cup of tea, which, however, she declined, protesting that she preferred the milk to be added to the tea, rather than the tea to the milk. (This fine distinction was long seen as a shibboleth of English social class.) Fisher was astonished: surely she, as a scientist, could not believe that it made any difference to the taste. But Dr Bristol insisted: she could certainly tell the difference. Fisher decided to put the matter to the test with a blind tasting, and he and william Roach, a chemist at the laboratory, devised a trial. The question was resolved in Dr Bristol’s favour: she could indeed tell the difference (though with what statistical certainty is not recorded). It was this episode that caused Fisher to ponder the general principles of statistical evaluation, which culminated in his magisterial treatise, Statistiml Methods for ReseMch Workers, published in 1925.
A copper or two
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Rudolf Schoenheimer was a German biochemist of exceptional accomplishment. As a Jew, he lost his position in Germany before the Second World War and found refuge, along with many others in the same predicament, in the medical school of Columbia University in New York. There the Head of the Biochemistry Department, Hans Thatcher Clarke, assembled a brilliant, polyglot, and captious galère of Europeans.
The years immediately after the war saw a succession of remarkable advances in the chemistry of physiological processes, thanks in large part to the advent of radioactive isotopes [149]; it was now possible to render radioactive, and thus label, substances involved in metabolism and follow their chemical transformations in a cell or in an animal. But radioactive isotopes were still in short supply and precious. Schoenheimer wanted to experiment with radioactively labelled urea, the metabolic end-product excreted by animals and man. A leader in the field of isotope purification was Harold Urey, who agreed to make available to Schoenheimer a minute quantity of ammonium nitrate, greatly enriched in the isotope of nitrogen with an atomic weight of 15, which makes up only a vanishingly small proportion of the Earth’s nitrogen, with its atomic weight of 14. Urey had prepared the material from bulk ammonium nitrate, a dangerous, explosive chemical, which he had illicitly driven into New York from a plant in New Jersey through the Holland Tunnel in the rumble-seat of his coupe. The glass ampoule, which he presented to Schoenheimer, contained the bulk of the world’s supply of the purified isotope, N.
The case of the flaccid ears
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Lewis Thomas was a distinguished medical scientist, who became the head of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York, and achieved wider fame for his collections of lucid and elegant essays on science, medicine, and related subjects. One of his first adventures in research occurred in 1936 when he was an ambitious medical student. Thomas had become intrigued by something called the Shwartzman phenomenon. The eponymous researcher had observed that when a rabbit’s skin was injected with bacterial endotoxin (a rather mildly toxic secretion from certain bacteria), the only result was a little local inflammation; yet when the process was repeated, though only within the very narrow time interval of 18-24 hours, extensive skin lesions and haemorrhages ensued. If the second dose of toxin was injected into a vein nothing happened, but when both injections were intravenous the result was catastrophic, culminating in destruction of the kidneys.
The flat-earther’s revenge
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Alfred Russel Wallace was a passionate naturalist, whose long life stretched from 1823 to the eve of the Great War in 1913. He spent his early years exploring the wildlife in remote corners of the world from Sarawak to the Amazon. He pondered the nature of speciation, and the concept of natural selection crystal lized in his mind as he lay shivering, too weak to move, in the grip of a malarial fever.
Darwin, who had been toiling for many years at his mighty work, 011 the Origin of Species, was shocked to find the essential principles of his grand conception prefigured in a paper, which wallace dispatched in 1858 from his base on a Malayan island. Danvin sought reassurance from his friends: could he, having read Wallace’s manuscript, now honourably publish an abstract of his own, which he would otherwise not have done? He wrote to his friend and supporter, the geologist Charles Lyell, of his mortification at his own ‘trumpery feelings’. ‘I would far rather’, his letter concluded, ‘burn my whole book than that he or any man should think I had behaved in a paltry spirit.’ But Wallace was a humble man, who recognized Danvin’s genius, and was happy with the accommodation that was quickly reached: an abstract, or ‘sketch’ of Darwin’s theory would be read, together with Wallace’s offering, at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. Wallace was content henceforth to appear as ‘the Moon to Darwin’s Sun’.
Learning, Literature, And Art
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The century which saw the recovery of the works of Aristotle, the real beginning of scholasticism, the rise of the universities, the age of Abailard and Gratian, may properly be termed a renaissance, an intellectual revolution which marks an era in the history of learning and education. Education in the middle ages was wholly the province of the church, and was primarily intended for the training of the clergy. It was controlled by the bishop or his deputy, the chancellor or magister scholarum without whose licence no one could teach or open a school. Unlicensed or ‘adulterine’ schools were ruthlessly sup pressed by the bishops. Although the canon law required a parish priest to provide instruction in singing and reading the psalter, we can scarcely credit the statement of Theobald of Etampes, who was teaching at Oxford in the early years of the twelfth century, that there were experienced schoolmasters (peritissimi scholarum magistri) not only in cities but even in villages (in villulis). There were, however, attached to cathedrals, the larger monasteries, and collegiate churches, besides the elementary song schools (scholae de cantu), also grammar schools.3 Grammar was the first and the most vital of the liberal arts, for it comprised not only the rules of grammar studied in the textbooks of Donatus and Priscian, but also classical literature or philology.
Creativity out of chaos: Poetry between the death of Caesar and the death of Virgil
Authors: Morgan Llewelyn 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The last survivor of the New Poets, Cinna, died in the violent aftermath of Julius Caesar’s funeral. His cries of ‘I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet’ (according to Shakespeare’s version) were of no avail, and his death is emblem atic. Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 ushered in the most murderous period of the Roman civil wars, and neither poets nor poetry were exempt. But despite the general chaos-or more accurately in direct response to it, and in an attempt to make sense of it-this period also witnessed a creative efflorescence in Roman literature such as had never been seen before. Some of the greatest poets in the Latin language began their careers in this, the darkest period of Roman history. In particular, the years immediately after the death of Caesar formed the context for the first major work by Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BCE: styled ‘Virgil’ by Christian commentators by association with the word ‘virgin’), the greatest of all Roman poets.
Powers of horror and laughter: The great age of drama
Authors: Wilson Peter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
When the tragic flower first blossomed in Attic soil late in the sixth century it represented a major innovation on the horizon of Greek poetry and society. For the first time the familiar figures of myth—the men, women, and gods sung of by the Homeric bard and his successors—had miraculously come to life. They moved and interacted as real physical presences before the eyes; they spoke and sung directly to the ear of the audience; the new technology of the theatrical mask and costume introduced the possibility of total impersonation. A unique set of circumstances had produced a radically new kind of performance, and with it the first fully theatrical audience.
Disney ‘s Rivals,1928-1937
Authors: Barrier Michael 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In February 1928, just before Walt Disney ‘s confrontation with Charles Mintz in New York, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising finally agreed to sign one-year employment contracts with Mintz. Harman was to be production manager, with broad authority (that would not, however, extend to salaries). Ising and George Winkler began equipping a studio at 1154 North Western Avenue in Hollywood, in the same space that Harman and Ising rented briefly in 1926 when they made Aladdin ‘s Vamp.2 Even after they agreed orally to work for Winkler Pictures, though, Harman and Ising did not give up trying to win their own release: late in February they unsuccessfully approached Paramount.3 Since Mintz was still trying to bring Disney to heel, he as well as Harman and Ising had good reason to put off signing a contract until mid-March, after Mintz had finally broken with Disney. Friz Freleng returned from Kansas City to join the new studio ‘s staff, and production got under way in early May, after Harman and Rollin Hamilton left the Disney payroll.
UPA,1944-1952
Authors: Barrier Michael 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
By 1942, men from every Hollywood cartoon studio were entering the military. Most of those new soldiers, whether draftees or volunteers, did not go into combat units but were put to work instead on animated training films. The Army Signal Corps had established its first small animation unit in the middle thirties,1 and some World War II draftees from the animation industry went to Signal Corps studios in New York City and at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. The Signal Corps was, however, locked into a kind of animated filmmaking that relied heavily on instructional diagrams; the Hollywood draftees who wound up in New York or Dayton were simply absorbed into that system.
Old Leftists, New Leftists, and Lumpen-Logocrats: The Radical Fringes
Authors: Derber Charles , Schwartz William A , Magrass Yale 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Some professionals really are subversive. In the United States and Europe over the past hundred years, they have been both foot soldiers and leaders in radical movments. The dreams of both the Old Left and the New Left have been, to a surprising degree, radical professionals’ dreams. Some advocate a centrally planned society; they include Old Leftists and the Communist class of planners in Eastern Europe challenged in the revolutions of 1989. Members of the New Left recoil from centralized authority and support participatory democracy or anarchism.