Faith and Hope

In 1915, British evangelist Elizabeth Reid Cotton claimed that she had visited Charles Darwin shortly before his death in 1882, and that he’d told her he regretted advancing the theory of natural selection.

“I was a young man with unformed ideas,” he’d said. “I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything, and to my astonishment, the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.” He begged her to preach to a gathering at his summer house the following day. “If you take the meeting at three o’clock this window will be open, and you will know that I am joining in with the singing.”

It’s not impossible that Cotton did meet Darwin, but his family denied that he had ever recanted the theory. “Dear Sir,” he had written in an 1880 letter, “I am sorry to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”

| Religion · Science & Math

Reflection

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In September 1835, Stendhal wrote on the shore of Lake Albano the initials of the women he had loved: Virginie Kubly, Angela Pietragrua, Adèle Rebuffel, Mina de Griesheim, Mélanie Guilbert, Angelina Bereyter, Alexandrine Daru, Angela Pietragrua, Matilde Dembowski, Clémentine Curial, Giulia Rinieri, and Madame Azur-Alberthe de Rubempré.

“I dreamed deeply of these names, and of the astonishing follies and stupidities they made me commit,” he wrote. “The habitual condition of my life is that of an unhappy lover.”

(From his unfinished autobiography The Life of Henry Brulard, 1890.)

| Literature

Portrait

A problem from Joseph Madachy’s Mathematics on Vacation (1966): If these statements are all true, what can we deduce about Major Perkins?

  1. Only bleary-eyed military men ever try to shave with a toothbrush.
  2. No bleary-eyed military men are at all musical.
  3. Men who never try to shave with a toothbrush never play golf.
  4. Major Perkins plays the tuba on Wednesdays.
  5. Only musical people who are golfers forget to change their socks.
Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Unquote

“A man doesn’t learn to understand anything unless he loves it.” — Goethe

“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” — Samuel Johnson

“We soon forget what we have not deeply thought about.” — Proust

| Quotations

Changed Men

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Iranian hermit Amou Haji ate carrion, drank from puddles, lived in a hole, smoked dung, and died at 94, a few months after bathing for the first time in 60 years. He said he became a hermit due to “emotional setbacks” after a heartbreak.

English merchant Nathaniel Bentley became known as Dirty Dick when he stopped washing in his late 30s. His filthy shop became a tourist attraction. Interestingly, he too was said to have changed after a ruined love affair, allegedly after his fiancée died on the eve of their wedding. Charles Dickens knew of the story, which may have inspired that of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.

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| Literature · Oddities