Galileo was convinced that natural phenomena, as manifestations of the laws of physics, would appear the same to someone on the deck of a ship moving smoothly and uniformly through the water as a person standing on land.

For members of the seventeenth-century Ashanti nation in Africa, animal-hide shields with wooden frames were essential items of military equipment, a method to protect warriors against enemy arrows and spears.

The end of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of prize-stock breeding, with individual bulls and cows receiving awards, fetching unprecedented prices, and excited enormous interest whenever they were put on show.

Paleontologists believe that fragments of a primate jawbone unearthed in Burma and estimated at 40 to 44 million years old provide evidence of a crucial step along the evolutionary path that led to human beings.

Based on accounts of various ancient writers, scholars have painted a sketchy picture of the activities of an all-female cult that, perhaps as early as the sixth century B.C., worshipped a goddess known in Latin as Bona Dea, "the good goddess."

In virtually all types of tissue in every animal species, dioxin induces the production of enzymes that are the organism's trying to metabolize, or render harmless, the chemical that is irritating it.

Like the idolization accorded the Brontes and Brownings, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are often subjected to the kind of veneration that blurs the distinction between the artist and the human being.

As its sales of computer products have surpassed those of measuring instruments, the company has become increasingly willing to compete for the mass market sales they would in the past have conceded to rivals.

Although various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American poets had professed an interest in Native American poetry and had pretended to imitate Native American forms in their own works, until almost 1900, scholars and critics did not begin seriously to study traditional Native American poetry in native languages.

The Glass House Mountains in Queensland, Australia, were sighted in 1770 by the English navigator Captain James Cook, by whom they were named supposedly because its sheer wet rocks glistened like glass.