A casual glance at crystals may lead to the idea that they were pure sports of nature, but this is simply an elegant way of declaring one’s ignorance. With a thoughtful examination of them, we discover laws of arrangement. With the help of these, calculation portrays and links up the observed results. How variable and at the same time how precise and regular are these laws! How simple they are ordinarily, without losing anything of their significance! The theory which has served to develop these laws is based entirely on a fact, whose existence has hitherto been vaguely discerned rather than demonstrated. This fact is that in all minerals which belong to the same species, these little solids, which are the crystal elements and which I call their integrant molecules, have an invariable form, in which the faces lie in the direction of the natural fracture surfaces corresponding to the mechanical division of the crystals. Their angles and dimensions are derived from calculations combined with observation.

Again and again, often in the busiest phases of the insulin investigations, he [Frederick Banting] found time to set a fracture or perform a surgical operation on one of his army comrades or on some patient who was in need.

Emission of lava … during geological time … would produce more contraction than any reasonable amount of cooling of the Earth. It has been shown that contraction could lead to fracturing of a kind which might show many of the principal features observed in existing and past mountains. A vast amount remains to be done, but no other theory can explain so much. Continental drift is without a cause or a physical theory. It has never been applied to any but the last part of geological time.

God help the teacher, if a man of sensibility and genius, when a booby father presents him with his booby son, and insists on lighting up the rays of science in a fellow's head whose skull is impervious and inaccessible by any other way than a positive fracture with a cudgel.

The breaking up of the terrestrial globe, this it is we witness. It doubtless began a long time ago, and the brevity of human life enables us to contemplate it without dismay. It is not only in the great mountain ranges that the traces of this process are found. Great segments of the earth's crust have sunk hundreds, in some cases, even thousands, of feet deep, and not the slightest inequality of the surface remains to indicate the fracture; the different nature of the rocks and the discoveries made in mining alone reveal its presence. Time has levelled all.

The Chemical conviction
That Nought be lost
Enable in Disaster
My fractured Trust—
The Faces of the Atoms
If I shall see
How more the Finished Creatures
Departed Me!

The frequency of disastrous consequences in compound fracture, contrasted with the complete immunity from danger to life or limb in simple fracture, is one of the most striking as well as melancholy facts in surgical practice.