Quotes from Richard Holmes

There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.

Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.

The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as 'the sum of the functions by which death is resisted

He (the British soldier) is generally beloved by two sorts of Companion, in whores and lice, for both these Vermin are great admirers of a Scarlet Coat.

One of the wilder proselytizers, a Scandinavian geologist Henrick Steffens, was said to have stated that 'The diamond is a piece of carbon that has come to its sense.' To which a Scottish geologist, probably John Playfair gave the legendary reply, 'Then a quartz, therefore, must be a diamond run mad.

Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer. HUMPHRY DAVY

Most people today couldn't tell a bombardier from a brigadier" - said during a lecture in aid of the Army Benevolent Fund in 2009

Alan Moorehead in The Fatal Impact (1966).

Cowper invented the idea of the 'armchair traveller': 'My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from my fireside.'90

Glaisher emphasised the particular scientific virtues required by ballooning: meticulous care and accuracy, calmness and detachment, stoic self-discipline; and a kind of spiritual openness to the wonders of Creation.

Highlands of Scotland:

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky; So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! …5

In October 1864 the Scottish literary magazine Blackwood's published a satirical article on superfluous Victorian hobbies, especially extreme sports and the fashion for futile risk-taking. It was particularly fierce on the desire to rise above one's station.

Every invention, every innovation in the history of the world, has been laughed at. Columbus was renounced as a faker; Morse was called a crank; Franklin a fool; Charles Darwin ridiculed for years. It seems to be the fate of every man or woman who discovers a new fact, to be made the subject of attacks of the most violent nature, without rhyme or reason.

People today do not know the difference between a bombardier and a brigadier

The writer is a kind of tuning-fork for a melody yet to be composed.

The cool feats of our scientific men are known to us all – such as that of Sir Humphry Davy inhaling a particular gas with an accurate report every minute or two of its successive effects upon his brain and sense.