San Antonio College Library

Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, was one of the minds behind the late eighteenth-century industrial revolution, and one of the first, if not the first, to perceive the living world (including humans) as part of a unified evolutionary scenario. He was one of the leading intellectuals of eighteenth-century England and a founding member of the Lunar Society, an intellectual community that included such eminent men as James Watt and Josiah...

"The career of Henry Oldenburg illuminates the development of the Royal Society during the late seventeenth century. Born in 1619 in Bremen, Germany, Oldenburg first came to England as a diplomat on a mission to see Oliver Cromwell. He remained in England and in 1662 became the Secretary of the Royal Society, and its best known member of the time. He founded and edited the Philosophical Transactions, the world's oldest scientific journal. Through...