Word: darwinism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...most amazing stories of innate instinct that could never have come by any process of evolution concerns Fabre's experiments with the mason bee, experiments suggested to Fabre by Darwin and made after the latter's death. The mason bee (Chalicodoma pyrenaica) builds a house of cement about as big as a thimble, fills it with honey, lays its larva, covers it over and then dies. Fabre took such houses that were built an inch apart and interchanged them, coloring with different colors each house and its bee for identification purposes. He then took the bees...
Later he actually wanted to be an actor, but failed; from play-acting he turned to playwriting. He read widely and weirdly; like Friedrich Schiller's heroes, he considered himself a rebel; like Kierkegaard, a pessimystic; like Darwin, a scientist; like Goethe's Faust, he turned to black magic (which he practiced in his attic). When he was crossed, he would roam the woods lashing at branches and hacking down young trees; sometimes he would climb a tree and yell defiance at the universe...
...inventions has reached the proportions of a national mania. Not content with claiming the airplane, telegraph, radio and electric light as Russian inventions, Soviet propagandists have been staking out their claims in every branch of the arts & sciences. Among the many Russian scientists who "were discussing" evolution long before Darwin, say the propagandists, was the 18th Century scholar, Mikhail Lomonosov. Scientist Lomonosov was quite a fellow; he also invented the helicopter and developed the theory of conservation of energy...
Whether or not William Beebe's discoveries put him among the great naturalists, his best books have as much charm and descriptive power as anything of the sort since Darwin's Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. In Beebe's career, High Jungle covers the Venezuelan phase, which began in 1945 after Beebe had abandoned his underseas adventures (during which he had successfully stared sharks out of countenance)* and returned to the job he loved best, the study of the jungle...
...Among his subjects: Oscar Wilde, Sydney Smith, Gilbert & Sullivan, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Paine, William Hazlitt, Arthur Conan Doyle...