100 Years Ago

In the Kew Bulletin … M. N. Owen gives an account of one of the minor diseases of potato-tubers, which has never been thoroughly investigated. It is known as skin-spot, the tubers becoming dotted with small dark spots during storage. It is found to be due to a minute species of mould-fungus hitherto undescribed (Oospora pustulans). The author describes in detail the structure and development of the fungus as determined from artificial cultures. The disease is confined to the surface layers of the tubers, and, besides disfigurement, may cause serious injury by weakening or destruction of the eyes.

From Nature 27 November 1919

150 Years Ago

It is a well-known remark of the historian of science that our progress in astronomy has been made in exact accordance with certain laws which regulate the advancement of knowledge. Neither the march of the sun by day, nor that of the moon by night, is more rigidly surrounded and circumscribed by law than the march of that intellect which has successfully interpreted celestial motions. We had first of all an observing age. Thousands of years ago in the plains of the East we had astronomers who, albeit with imperfect instruments, lacked neither zeal nor intelligence in their nightly study of the stars. Many of their theoretical ideas were untenable, nay, even absurd, but yet they served to bind together into a formal law the mass of observations which their nightly industry collected. And so step by step our knowledge of celestial motions progressed, until it culminated in the discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler; and we were presented at last with a bird’s-eye view of the solar system, taken, as it were, from without, in which that which appears to be, finally gave place to that which is.

From Nature 25 November 1869