January 2011

The killing of the venerable Captain White was so mysterious and frightful that it attracted widespread attention before Senator Daniel Webster stepped on the scene. But his consent to appear for the prosecution gave it unprecedented notoriety.

In the summer of 1830, Webster, in his forty-ninth year, was at the absolute height of his fame—the Cicero of America, the matchless orator of the Dartmouth College Case, the Plymouth Oration, and the more recent Reply to Hayne, and not yet the perennially disappointed candidate for the Presidency. He had been elected in June, 1827, to the U.S. Senate.

Webster had had his own personal sorrows as well as his public triumphs. In January, 1828, his wife of twenty years, Grace Fletcher Webster, died after a painful illness, and his second wife, Caroline Le Roy, did not have an equally restraining influence upon him. Webster, always a free spender, lapsed deeper and deeper into debt.

I am free to confess Russia astonished me. I have sailed down the mighty Mississippi,—I have been in the dark and silent bosom of our own forest homes,—I have been under the eye of Mont Blanc and Olympus,—I grew familiar with Rome and London,—without experiencing the same degree of wonder which fastened upon me in Russia. I thought there to have encountered with hordes of semi-barbarians, yet I found a people raised, as it were, at once from a state of nature to our level of civilization. Nor have they apparently, in their rapid onward course, neglected the means to render their progress sure. And then, what an army,—millions of men! and the best forms of men,—the best disciplined, and able to endure the “labored battle sweat” by their constant activity, the rigor of their climate, and their ignorance of all pleasures which serve to effeminate. … Only think of such a power, increasing every day,—stretching wider and wider, and all confessing one duty,—obedience to the will of the absolute sovereign!

One of the most fascinating of all the mysteries left for modern man by the original inhabitants of North America is the largely indecipherable record, carved on stone by a stone-age people, of the fabulous civilization of the Maya Indians. In the jungles of Yucatan and Central America are the imposing ruins of fantastic cities or ceremonial centers, many of them dating back to the early years of the Christian era, all of them reflecting the development and the activities of a unique society whose origins lie even farther back in the past. This society had gone into a cultural decline before the first Europeans arrived, and most of its finest centers had been abandoned. For four centuries men have been trying to reconstruct its history from data that are frequently confusing and always inadequate.

What caused the ice ages? Why were the Siberian mammoths frozen alive, or how did great forests grow in Antarctica? The theory propounded by Maurice Ewing and William Donn, and described by Mr. Andrist in his article, is only one of the most rigorous and ingenious of many attempts to account for the often-contradictory evidence left behind by the glaciers. As recently as 1953 a geologist called this “one of the greatest riddles in geological history.”

Some investigators have argued for a change in the amount of heat received from the sun, either by a shift in the earth’s position or the interference of some cosmic dust cloud. And some, with much data to support them, have suggested that the poles may not always have been located where we find them now. Studies of ancient rocks have shown that many (those older than sixty million years) are permanently magnetized in a very different direction from the present poles, reinforcing the theory that the land masses on the earth’s surface—slowly, during millions of yearsmay change their positions.

A mid-nineteerith century English lady named Mrs. Mary Duncan complained that American parents not only encouraged their children to show off to guests, but if the little dears didn’t happen to be home during your visit you’d have to go through the ridiculous business of looking at their portraits.