Copernicus’s residence in Frombork (see yesterday’s blog) was in a tower which formed part of the medieval town walls. Nearby was the medieval cathedral which, like the walls, was built of brick. This invites a comparison with Hull which, during the life of Copernicus 1473-1543, also retained its medieval town walls built of brick as was […]

Last evening attended another lecture given at the Mercure Hotel (ex Royal Station Hotel), Hull by the President of the Hull and East Riding Astronomical Association and organised by the Hull Literary and Philosophical Association. Held in the large ground-floor room it was an excellent talk with good visuals and left one reeling at the

The short answer is we couldn’t know as he never experienced or conceived of such a thing back in the 1870s. However he was a noted supporter of the ideas of the Rev. Thomas Malthus who had published his Essay on Population back in the late 18th century. Malthus believed that there was a natural

In her Introduction to the 2013 re-publication of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (in the series Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) Janet Browne of Harvard University doesn’t duck the evidence ‘he (Darwin) believed that sexual selection fostered inbuilt male superiority …In early human societies, the necessities of survival, he

Darwin decided that the various races of homo sapiens around the globe in the 19th century constituted but one species. Also when on his voyages of the 1830s he took a benign interest in the language and culture of the ‘primitive’ tribes-people’ encountered in South America, Tierra del Fuego, Australia and New Zealand. But how/why, he

Recently attended lecture at the Royal Station Hotel, Ferensway, Hull (see above) organised by the Hull Literary and Philosophical Soc. which is a society with a proud history stretching back to 1822 (book recently published on the history of the Society). The subject of the presentation was the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador and