| Excerpt from "An Essay on Man"
by Alexander Pope
ALL are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in th' ethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent:
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part;
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns
As the rapt Seraphim, that sings and burns:
To him no high, no low, no great, no small—
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all....
All nature is but art, unknown to thee:
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see:
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.
Excerpt from "An Essay on Man" by Alexander Pope. Public domain. (buy now) It is the birthday of baseball pitcher Leroy (Satchel) Paige, born in 1906 in Mobile, Alabama. His only training for the sport as a child came after he was sentenced for shoplifting, at age 12, to six years in the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers. A coach at the school recognized Paige’s talent and worked with him to hone his pitching. Paige later said, “I traded five years of freedom to learn how to pitch … They were not wasted years …” After playing in the Negro Leagues, he became the first Black pitcher in the American League at age 42, and he was 59 when he played his last major league game. No one has ever broken that record. He said, “Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it don't matter.” He also said: “Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.” Paige was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971. Today is the birthday of American genetics pioneer Nettie Stevens, born in Cavendish, Vermont (1861). Her early life was a repeating cycle of working as a teacher or a librarian, saving up her money, and then going back to school to further her education. She finally finished her master’s degree and began work on her Ph.D. in biology when she was 39 years old. She worked as a researcher at the same time. While studying mealworms she discovered that male sex cells could have either an X or a Y chromosome while female sex cells could only carry X chromosomes. Based on this observation she concluded that the sex of an organism was determined based on what chromosome it had inherited from its male parent. The theory of chromosomes as a basis for inheritance was still pretty new and Stevens didn’t get any support for her theory from other scientists, who believed that the sex of the offspring was either determined by the mother or by environmental factors. Another researcher, Edmund Beecher Wilson, came up with a similar theory to Stevens’s but hers proved to be more accurate because he had only looked at the male sex cells. Stevens was only able to devote 11 years of her life to the study of biology. She died of breast cancer at the age of 50. She was one of the first American women to be recognized for her contribution to the field of biology. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 