Until I was four years old I lived in the house of my paternal grandfather, about two miles from the pretty little village of Wallace, at the mouth of the river of that name.

Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope.

One of the most beautiful hypotheses ever propounded in physics is ... the Dynamical Theory of Gases

Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope. . . . The example of the bird does not prove that man can fly. Imagine the proud possessor of the aeroplane darting through the air at a speed of several hundred feet per second. It is the speed alone that sustains him. How is he ever going to stop?

Whenever a total eclipse of the sun was visible in an accessible region parties were sent out to observe it.

I was taught the alphabet by my aunts before I was four years old, and I was reading the Bible in class and beginning geography when I was six.

The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war.