Today in Science

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

Births

1838 - Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, French scientist

1905 - George H. Hitchings, American scientist, Nobel laureate

1940 - Joseph L. Goldstein, American scientist, Nobel laureate

Deaths

1674 - John Graunt, English statistician

1796 - Johan Wilcke, Swedish physicist

1802 - Erasmus Darwin, English physician, botanist, and poet (sample from The Temple of Nature above)

1873 - Justus von Liebig, German chemist

1945 - John Ambrose Fleming, English physicist and engineer

1955 - Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize laureate

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