Swell Quotes (4 quotes)
As a little boy, I showed an abnormal aptitude for mathematics this gift played a horrible part in tussles with quinsy or scarlet fever, when I felt enormous spheres and huge numbers swell relentlessly in my aching brain.
In Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1999), 2
By the act of generation nothing more is done than to ferment the sperm of ye female by the sperm of ye male that it may thereby become fit nourishment for ye Embryo: ffor ye nourishment of all animals is prepared by ferment & the ferment is taken from animals of the same kind, & makes the nourishment subtile & spiritual. In adult animals the nourishmt is fermented by the choler and pancreatic juice both wch come from the blood. The Embryo not being able to ferment its own nourishment wch comes from the mothers blood has it fermented by the sperm wch comes from ye fathers blood, & by this nourishment it swells, drops off from ye Ovarium & begins to grow with a life distinct from that of ye mother.
From 'Quæst 25' in Draft version of The Queries manuscript, Add. MS. 3970, folio 235 held by the University of Cambridge Library. As quoted and cited in R.W. Home, 'Force, Electricity, and Living Matter', from Margaret J. Osler and Paul Lawrence Farber (eds.), Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall (2002), 113.
One must be wary in attributing scientific discovery wholly to any one person. Almost every discovery has a long and precarious history. Someone finds a bit here, another a bit there. A third step succeeds later and thus onward till a genius pieces the bits together and makes the decisive contribution. Science, like the Mississippi, begins in a tiny rivulet in the distant forest. Gradually other streams swell its volume. And the roaring river that bursts the dikes is formed from countless sources.
In 'The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge', Harper’s (Jun/Nov 1939), No. 179, 549
To vary the compression of the muscle therefore, and so to swell and shrink it, there needs nothing but to change the consistency of the included ether… . Thus may therefore the soul, by determining this ethereal animal spirit or wind into this or that nerve, perhaps with as much ease as air is moved in open spaces, cause all the motions we see in animals.
From 'An Hypothesis explaining the Properties of Light, discoursed of in my several Papers', in Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society (1757), Vol. 3, 252. This was from Newton’s Second Paper on Color and Light, read at the Royal Society (9 Dec 1675).