The Ascent of Man

And that means that this city and all the cities here rested on an invisible base of communication

what interests me is the history of man’s mind as an unfolding of his different talents.

over the fifty million years or so to be talked about, there are only six or seven essentially distinct skulls which we can identify as stages in that evolution.

is comic to think that cotton underwear and soap could work a transformation in the lives of the poor. Yet these simple things – coal in an iron range, glass in the windows, a choice of food – were a wonderful rise in the standard of life and health.

The universe of Newton ticked on without a hitch for about two hundred years. If his ghost had come to Switzerland any time before 1900, all the clocks would have chimed hallelujah in unison. And yet, just after 1900 in Berne, not two hundred yards from the ancient clocktower, a young man came to live who was going to set them all by the ears: Albe

Emmer crossed with another natural goat grass and produced a still larger hybrid with forty-two chromosomes, which is bread wheat. That was improbable enough in itself, and we know now that bread wheat would not have been fertile but for a specific genetic mutation on one chromosome.

is a tightrope that man walks, between his desire to fulfil his wishes, and his acknowledgement of social responsibility. No animal is faced with this dilemma: an animal is either social or solitary. Man alone aspires to be both in one, a social solitary.

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

culture is a multiplier of ideas, in which each new device quickens and enlarges the power of the rest.