100 YEARS AGO

Elementary Physiology and Hygiene. This book has obviously been written to supply the wants of the American schoolchild, and consequently “the subject of alcohol has been treated very thoroughly and in full compliance with the laws of the various States.” “Throughout the book the effects of alcohol and other narcotics have been discussed in close connection with the accounts of the functions of the body.” The above quotations from the author's preface show that it has been a pleasure to him to comply in his book with the law enjoining that all text-books of physiology used in American State schools must contain a description of the effects of alcohol on the body. So thoroughly has this instruction been carried out that it appears on reading the book as if in many cases the very brief descriptions of the physiology of the different tissues had been written chiefly as introductions in order to make clear the dire effects of alcohol, which are subsequently described in each case... Truly this book must be appalling reading to the American schoolchild whose parents may be in the habit of making even moderate use of alcoholic drinks.

From Nature 21 January 1904.

50 YEARS AGO

For the Seventh Arthur Stanley Eddington Memorial Lecture... Prof H. H. Price, Wykeham professor of logic in the University of Oxford, spoke on “Some Aspects of the Conflict between Science and Religion”... Prof. Price argues that of late the main conflict between science and religion has been over two opposed conceptions of human personality, a materialist and a dualist one. On one side, it is held that all mental processes are produced by and inseparable from bodily processes, or else actually are bodily. According to the religious conception, on the other side, some kind of cognition of the divine is possible, which cannot be supposed to have any ordinary physiological correlates, and also some kind of other-worldly existence distinct from the present bodily one. The systematic investigation of the phenomena of para-normal cognition, such as telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition, has made the materialist conception far less plausible, if not untenable. A dualist type of theory... can no longer be dismissed as unscientific and superstitious.

From Nature 23 January 1954.