Eminent Men Research Articles

Belgrade Manifesto

Following the trial of the six intellectuals, one of Yugoslavia's best-known writers announced the formation of a committee to defend free thought On 10 November 1984, five days after the trial of the ‘Belgrade Six’ began, the well-known Yugoslav novelist Dobrica Ćosić announced the setting up of the Committee for the Freedom of Thought and Expression. The Ćosić Committee manifesto was signed by 19 most eminent Serbian men of letters, art and science, including 12 members of the prestigious Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. What is most striking about the signatories is that they cover the whole spectrum of opinion of the Belgrade intelligentsia, from pre-war party veterans (Gojko Nikoliš, Tanasije Mladenović), Marxist philosophers of the Praxis group (Mihailo Marković, Ljubomir Tadić), advocates of pluralistic socialist democracy (Kosta Čavoški), and the so-called ‘nationalists’ (Matija Bećković, Mića Popović) to public figures who simply want an affirmation of the rule of law in a country which has had more than its fair share of lawlessness, both under the present and previous regimes, not to mention the terrible wartime period when Yugoslavs, possessed by the demon of self-destruction, engaged in a bloody and tragic civil war. Dobrica Ćosić sent the manifesto with a covering letter to the official news agency Tanjug, the radio and television services of the eight Yugoslav republics and provinces, and 30 dailies, weeklies and periodicals. The media responded with a vitriolic campaign against Ćosić and his committee. A Belgrade Radio commentary said the manifesto was ‘inspired by a desire to portray the social system in Yugoslavia as a reign of ideological terror, bureaucratic arbitrariness, police persecution — in a word, Stalinism'. Belgrade's Politika Ekspres implied that Ćosić had joined Tito's partisans (he was the political commissar of a partisan unit in Serbia) only because he wanted to be on the winning side. Zagreb's Vjesnik liked this so much that it decided to reprint it, adding its own subheadings (one of them read: ‘A Dirty Business’), but Belgrade's Književne Novine deplored this attempt to cast a slur on Ćosić's wartime record. While Književne Novine was the only paper to spring to Ćosić's defence, the hardline Croatian youth weekly Polet was the only one to carry the committee's manifesto and Ćosić's covering letter, though only to attack both Ćosić and Western critics of the current wave of repression in Yugoslavia. Vjesnik took Ćosić to task for visiting Zagreb in order to canvass support for his initiative, publishing its attack under the heading Gedža u Zagrebu (‘ The [Serbian] Yokel in Zagreb’). Zagreb's Večernji List said: ‘The political prompters and ideological fathers of the Belgrade petitioners have now at long last appeared on the stage and presented themselves to the public…. They obviously feel morally obliged to come to the aid of their puppets now standing trial for hostile activity.’ NIN wondered whether Yugoslav opposition elements were appealing for an intervention from abroad. We are grateful to the London-based South Slav Journal for the English translation.

The Reclamation of Val-di-Chiana (Tuscany)

Abstract Val-di-Chiana, a fertile alluvial valley in north-central Tuscany, was extensively settled by the Etruscans and Romans, but stream gradients were insufficient to prevent the floodplain from turning into a silty wetland after deforestation and tectonic uplift had accelerated the rate of sedimentation by tributary streams. Malarial infestation began in Etruscan times with the inception of marshes and became serious during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when the wetlands extended over 140 sq. km. Drainage modification was first suggested during the 1300s, and by 1500 had become an important land reclamation strategy in the valley. An artificial channel, the Canal Maestro, was eventually dug in order to reverse the direction of drainage from southward into the River Tiber to northward into the Arno. At the same time tributary streams were canalized, and artificial drainage divides and walled sediment traps, known as colmate, were constructed. Many eminent men were involved in the debate over the be...

Birth order as a quantitative expression of date of birth.

Publications on birth order mostly differ in their findings. In 1874 Galton1 stated that firstborn dominated among eminent men. Thirty years later, Pearson2 claimed that society was corrupted through the defects of firstborn. Surveys39 covering hundreds of books and articles give a remarkably inconsistent picture of the influence of sibling position on physical and psychological development. In 1913 Weinberg10 showed that methodological slips are an important source of confusing results. One such slip is the idea that the number of older siblings (earlyborn) and the number of younger siblings (lateborn) should balance in the population. If a total sibship is considered as a unit, beginning at 0 with the oldest sibling and ending at 1 with the youngest one, it is obvious that 05 is the exact mean position of its members. The same statement is true for any sample of total sibships but not for a sample consisting of members of different sibships. In fact, Cobb,11 as early as 1914 pointed to circumstances that might fundamentally distort birth order balance in the general population, but his warnings were not taken seriously. The consequences have been devastating. Those who have studied the influence of sibling position on disease, character, performance, or fate have mostly used methods based on the Greenwood-Yule model,12 with its erroneous assumption of a balanced birth order distribution in the general population. If a researcher found that a group of trait-carriers contained more lateborn than earlyborn, or the reverse, he asked whether the ratio deviated significantly from a 50 : 50 distribution. If so he felt entitled to state that the trait and the skewed distribution (overrepresentation) had something to do with each other.

Greatrakes the Stroker: the interpretations of his contemporaries.

manded considerable attention among the scientific and intellectual communities of mid-seventeenth-century England. The healing sessions he conducted in England from January to May 1666 became a sensational topic of conversation in the London coffeehouses' and engaged the interest of a wide variety of clerics, physicians, government officials, and virtuosi, including members of the newly founded Royal Society. Many eminent men came to witness his healing procedures, and a number of them were willing to provide testimonials of his evident curative powers. The intensity of interest in the Greatrakes phenomenon is documented by a considerable amount of written correspondence and the publication of several pamphlets dealing with Greatrakes's motives and the nature of his supposed healing gift. A number of these accounts attempted to explain the Stroker's sanative power as a natural rather than a miraculous phenomenon. Such interpretations were surprisingly varied, often quite detailed, and especially revealing of their authors' particular preferences among the numerous scientific hypotheses current in mid-seventeenth-century England. The interpretations reveal the main lines of seventeenth-century scientific debate concerning the general operations of nature and the explanation of disease by ascribing Greatrakes's healing ability to ferments, effluvia, and friction in addition to the more commonplace explanation-the operation of faith. Modern researchers dealing with the Greatrakes episode have shown less interest in these naturalistic interpretations than in explicating the religious and sociopolitical context of Greatrakes's faith-healing mission or explaining his success in terms of modern knowledge of psychosomatic illness.2 A closer look at the various attempts by Greatrakes's own contemporaries to interpret this gift in rational terms is therefore warranted.

An Early Life of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros

AN EARLY LIFE OF FRANCISCO JIMÉNEZ DE CISNEROS The town of Torrelaguna is located on the Castiüan meseta, in the province of Madrid, some thirty miles north of the capital. Its major claim to fame is that it was the birthplace and childhood home of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436-1517), perhaps the outstanding figure in a period of Spanish history that was hardly lacking in eminent men and women. The magnitude and variety of his accomplishments were such as to defy summary. A Franciscan who was renowned for the austerity and rectitude of his personal life, he enjoyed an unparalleled reputation for personal integrity in a tumultuous and grasping age, and this in spite of the fact that he held the most powerful secular and ecclesiastical posts in the land. Confessor and chief advisor of Queen Isabel, he became Archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, Cardinal, Grand Inquisitor, and, near the end of his life, Regent of the Realms. He was an indefatigable administrator and monastic reformer who nevertheless found time to excel in yet other areas. As a miUtary planner he directed the eminently successful expedition against the MusUm city of Oran that gained for Spain a valuable outpost on the coast of North Africa. As a scholar he encouraged the growth of Spanish humanism, estabUshing the university at Alcalá de Henares (later moved to Madrid) which quickly became and has remained the foremost institution of higher learning in Spain. Here he established the press which raised Spanish letters to new heights, leading the way with his own project, the Complutensian Polyglot Bible. In addition to all this, he was constantly involved with endowing and overseeing the foundations of numerous charitable and ecclesiastical establishments. Among these was the monastery of La Madre de Dios in Torrelaguna, founded by Cisneros in memory of his birthplace. Needless to say, such a career has inspired many biographers, chief among them Alvaro Gómez de Castro, whose De rebus gestis a Francisco Ximenio Cisnerio... libri octo (Alcalá, 1560? and 1569; An Early Life of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros157 Frankfurt, 1581 and 1603-08) has been called the "fons et origo" of later studies. It would be impossible in the confines of this communication to present even the broadest outUne of this scholarly tradition, but it would not be inappropriate to mention the works of Eugenio de Robles, Compendio de la vida y hazañas del Cardenal... Cisneros... (Toledo, 1604) ; Michel Baudier, Histoire de l'administration du Cardinal Ximenes (Paris, 1635); and Pedro de Quintanilla y Mendoza, Archetype de virtudes, espexo de prelados, el venerable padre... Fr. Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros (Palermo, 1653) as setting the high standard of scholarship that has prevailed among Cisneros' biographers down to the present. Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros was an extraordinary man in extraordinary times, and it is unlikely that this long tradition of biographical studies will soon end. In 1974 the Kenneth Spencer Research Library of the University of Kansas acquired a small volume, measuring some 210 ? 150 mm, which it has catalogued as MS C238 under the title of "The Manuscript of Torrelaguna." The codex is comprised of fourteen gatherings of varying numbers of leaves, containing a number of items, dating from 1521 to 1809, relating to the monastery of La Madre de Dios of Torrelaguna. Although all of the material is of interest, the most exceptional feature of this collection is that it commences with six folia devoted to a brief biography of the founder of the community. The possible antiquity of this account makes it worthwhile to establish the date of its composition. The terminus post quern is a relatively clear matter established by internal evidence. On folio 5r the author refers to "el enperador don carlos." Given that Charles did not succeed to the title until 1519, it follows that the account must have been written in or after that year. There is no such internal evidence, however, to establish a firm terminus ante quern, although a strong presumptive case may be made on the place of this particular gathering in the structure of the volume as a whole. The biography is written in a typical...

Insight into Eminence

Examining the biographies of eminent men and women has long been a research technique utilized by educators and is effectively applied in many current gifted teacher graduate programs. The purpose of this article is to explain how teachers and parents can apply the same technique to help gifted students correlate their character traits with those displayed by eminent individuals when they were children.

S. Ramón y Cajal, R. G. Harrison, and the Beginnings of Neuroembryology

It is rare that the birth date of a branch of science can be determined rather precisely. The beginnings of modern developmental neurobiology can be traced to the eighties of the last century and to two eminent men: the German embryologist and anatomist Wilhelm His (1831–1904) and the Spanish neurologist Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852–1934). Of course, the development of the nervous system had been studied before, but the foundations of our present view were laid by these men during the years 1886–1890.

Joseph Stevens Buckminster: The Making of a New England Saint

Joseph Stevens Buckminster (1784-1812), Boston minister and man of letters, is a pivotal but elusive figure in New England intellectual history. His impor- tance has been recognized without being fully understood. In his own day he was praised without discrimination by his admirers. All the eulogies agreed that he was "one of the most eminent men whom our country has produced."1 During the seven years before his pastorate at Brattle Street Church was cut short by epilepsy, liberal Congregationalists came to regard Buckminster as their intellectual leader, despite his youth. After his death he was credited with a major role in instigating a revolution in pulpit oratory, the Unitarian move- ment, the New England literary renaissance, and the rise of American biblical studies.2

Birth Order and Paternal Namesake as Predictors of Affiliation with Predecessor by Presidents of the United States

The 38 presidents of the United States were studied to test a report, based on a diverse sample of eminent men, that closer childhood affiliation of firstborn sons with their parents results in identification with authority in adulthood. Affiliation with the preceding president, defined as membership in the same political party, characterized seven of eight presidents who were the firstborn son and given the father's first name, but only one of nine presidents who was a later son with a brother given the father's first name. Only seven (18%) of the presidents were from families in which none of the sons was given the father's first name, and six of these seven were affiliated with the predeces-

Huldrych M. Koelbing (general editor), Short biographies of eminent men and women who died between 1930 and 1940, Zürich, Medizinhistorisches Institut der Universität Zürich.

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Interest in air pollution among early Fellows of the Royal Society.

AIR pollution became a problem in London as early as the thirteenth century, shortly after the introduction of imported coal. The use of coal as a fuel in kilns in London and Southwark annoyed the public so much that a Royal Commission investigated the matter in 1284 (1). It recurred no doubt throughout the intervening centuries, but there appears to be little serious discussion of it as anything more than a transient local occurrence until the seventeenth century when a number of eminent men, such as Digby, Evelyn, Graunt and Petty, gave the matter their attention. The intense intellectual activity of the period and the formation of scientific societies catalysed many of the scientific developments of the period. But it was more likely that the interest in air pollution was engendered by the sharp deterioration in the quality of London’s air throughout the first half of the seventeenth century (2).

The Education of Elites in Modern Europe

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, my then graduate students David O. Justice, David Kelly and I took random samples of the major biographical encyclopedias for Germany, France, England and the United States. (1) The entries we considered were those for males born 1810 to 1899, who might have reached advanced educational institutions between about 1830 and 1930. (2) What we were chiefly interested in is the level and type of education enjoyed by these eminent men; but we also looked at their fathers' occupations and at a number of other characteristics. Soon after obtaining our first set of cross-tabulations, which were done by computer, we began to simplify our categories and to drop a number of variables from consideration. We did this not only where distributions produced numbers too small to be statistically significant, but also where results seemed to us devoid of significance or distinctions hard to maintain with any consistency. Our most serious problems stemmed from the fact that we had allowed the editors of the biographical encyclopedias to define our samples. We had not confronted our sources with independently established definitions of particular elite groups, of leading entrepreneurs, for example. Of course we found the editors' definitions quite interesting in themselves; for they were surely based on more than purely personal conceptions of eminence. (3) Yet it was difficult to keep the initial selections from dominating every cross-tabulation we tried. Before these problems were adequately resolved, our research group split up. I was left with a goodly number of tables, and with a long text that advanced a few generalizations at the cost of many qualifications. In an effort to improve matters, I have since experimented with a whole series of additional simplifications and schemes of tabulation. With the help of my student, Dan Graham, I also surveyed other studies on the education of entrepreneurs and high civil servants, hoping to introduce comparative perspectives where they seemed useful. But every step I took raised new difficulties of comparability and imposed additional explanations and qualifications.

Walter Bagehot and Deference

UNTIL RECENTLY THE REPUTATION of Walter Bagehot has stood high with students of nineteenth-century England. Because he was man of many parts, not only historians, but also students of literature, politics, economics have admired him. Many of them, if asked, would probably have agreed with that master of Victorian studies, G. M. Young, that Bagehot was their favorite Victorian. Bagehot wrote well. He was maker of memorable phrases, nman also of sympathy, taste, learning, wit. If, as Young has said, he was not greatest man alive working between I837 I90I, so much the better. Bagehot was a man not illustrious or consummate to be companionable, but one, nevertheless, whose ideas took root are still bearing. ' In short, Bagehot was easy to like, to such man posterity tends to be kind, restraining the critical faculty it exercises so readily upon less likeable more eminent men.2 Not that critical voices have never been heard. Maynard Keynes early in this century noted that Bagehot did not always reach the level of his reputation. His economics was better psychology than it was economics. He could theorize to limited degree in familiar fields of observation. But he was sometimes tempted beyond his powers. He could become entangled in a train of inference, as Keynes noted, that was too long for him or for which, not truly caring, he had no steady patience. Similarly, even his gift for psychological insight was limited. It was good when exercised upon those of middle position, primarily business men, financiers, politicians. It was less good when exercised upon either the high or the low. Genius violent feeling on the one hand, wrote Keynes, and servitude, confinement, distress upon the other were beyond him.' During the last decade, however, voices critical of Bagehot have grown more numerous. For the most part the critics have been political scientists.4 But

Comparison of associations of birth order with intelligence test score and height.

No accepted genetic model can explain a true association of any human attribute with birth order. This view was not understood when Galton reported on the overrepresentation of firstborns among men of eminence. Recently, scientists have been intrigued with the possibility that studies of birth order may aid understanding of the environmental sources of differences in temperament and intelligence. Many such studies have been handicapped by the confounding effects of family size, which have been difficult to eliminate in spite of the application of a variety of techniques.

Women, Eminence, and Career-Value Relationships

Summary Information on 270 women and 270 men was taken from the 1972–1973 edition of Who's Who and compared with data from a 1956–1957 sample, in which occupations were grouped according to value definitions in the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values. Although more women are now listed in careers which relate to men's highest ranked values (Theoretical, Economic, and Political), the largest group of women are still in occupations which relate to a value most highly esteemed by women (Aesthetic). The only masculine category in which the ratio of women to men shows a significant increase is Economic. While merely 6% of the eminent men have not married, 38% of the eminent women are unmarried, and those who married have fewer children than the men.

David Meredith Seares Watson, 1886-1973

David Meredith Seares Watson was born on 18 June 1886 at Higher Broughton, near Salford in Lancashire. He was the son of David Watson and Mary Louisa Watson ( née Seares). David Watson was a chemist and metallurgist who was a pioneer of the electrolytic refining of copper and had been educated at Clewer House School and at the Royal School of Mines where he was a student of T. H. Huxley, A. C. Ramsay and the metallurgist Perry, and took one of the earliest D.Sc.s in London, receiving a gold medal on graduation. He joined the Broughton Copper Company and eventually became the Managing Director. David Watson was a descendant of a Scottish family which included such eminent men as his father John Watson, an Advocate of Edinburgh and once Lord Provost of that city; great-uncle David Watson who was Minister of Cupar, Fife, once Moderator of the Church of Scotland; his great-grandfather James Watson who was Writer to the Signet, Edinburgh; and a Professor of Civil and Natural History in the United Colleges, St Andrews. Ultimately the line came from Turriff, Banffshire. Mary Louisa Watson was the daughter of Samuel Seares, a stockbroker of London, who was reputed to have among his ancestors a former Governor of Rhode Island at the end of the seventeenth century who married a ‘Red Indian’ wife. D. M. S. obtained a pedigree of this Sears or Seares, as variably written. From this stock apparently descended the Sears of Sears, Roebuck. D. M. S. Watson had one sister, C. M. Watson, who read classics at Manchester University and achieved first class honours on graduation at the age of nineteen, obtaining 97% marks from the famous Gilbert Murray of Oxford. She died tragically young in her second year at Somerville College, Oxford, having won the Chancellor’s prize for Greek Prose. It is not surprising that the children of such forebears should both have been brilliant.

Science in the city: the London Institution, 1819-40.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the largest and wealthiest ‘popular’ scientific establishment in London was the London Institution, founded by a group of prominent City men in 1805. During most of its early years this Institution had over 900 members; within a year of its foundation it had accumulated funds of £76,000, which dwarfed those possessed by any similar body in this period; by 1819 it had erected an imposing building in Finsbury Circus, a structure with a splendid library, a lecture theatre, and provision for laboratories, as well as meeting rooms. In that theatre eminent men of science and literature delivered lectures; by the 1840s William Robert Grove, then in the midst of his scientific career, was installed as ‘Professor of Experimental Philosophy in the London Institution’.

Head and Neck Cancer

To the Editor.— I am always pleased to find something inThe Journalthat has to do with the head and neck and otolaryngology, as in the Aug 16 issue. The thing that concerns me in this recent series of articles about head and neck cancer is that the authors are in the process of propagating some old myths that I had hoped were somewhat dispelled. Specifically, the group that you have preparing these articles is perpetrating the myth that essentially the best and only treatment for cancer of the head and neck is radiation therapy in some form or another. While the men you have selected to write these very brief articles are all eminent men in their field, many of them are outspoken in their prejudices against surgery of the head and neck and are biased for radiation therapy for cancer in this same area. For example, in

Physics in the Netherlands

For more than three centuries the Netherlands has produced world famous physicists - Stevin and Snell, who can be claimed for physics although they were officially mathematicians, Huygens, van Musschenbroek (author of the first physics textbook) and at a later stage such eminent men as the Nobel prizewinners Kamerlingh-Onnes, Lorentz, Zeeman, van der Waals and Zernike (1953). There was van Leeuwenhoek the microscopist who never attended a university.

Language Disabilities in Men of Eminence

Strong evidence exists that some of our great men had unusual difficulty in learning certain aspects of language — particularly reading and spelling. Information on this topic obtained from biographies of these men in recorded in this article. Among the eminent names mentioned are Thomas Edison, Harvey Cushing, Woodrow Wilson, Auguste Rodin, Albert Einstein. It is anticipated that this information will provide hope and stimulation for the multitude of dyslexic children, their parents, and their teachers.