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To: TheOldLady; Verginius Rufus

Don’t look at me, I love you both. :’) “A Study in Scarlet —

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it...

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”


11 posted on 09/04/2011 7:38:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: SunkenCiv
G. W. Featherstonhaugh, an English geologist who did a lot of pioneering work on the geology of the United States, reports in his Excursion through the Slave States (the book was published in 1844 but the trip was about 10 years earlier), that when traveling through the Shenandoah Valley he was told that many of the German-American residents of that area did not believe in the Copernican theory.
14 posted on 09/04/2011 8:37:34 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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