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On the Connexion Between the Distribution of the Existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles, and the Geological Changes Which Have Affected Their Area (work by Forbes)
...of the Geological Society of London (1842), professor of botany at King’s College, London (1842), and paleontologist to the British Geological Survey (1844). In 1846 he published an important essay, “On the Connexion Between the Distribution of the Existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles, and the Geological Changes Which Have Affected Their Area.” In this work he divi...
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On the Constitution of the Church and State (work by Coleridge)
...1824 brought him an annuity of £105 and a sense of recognition. In 1830 he joined the controversy that had arisen around the issue of Catholic Emancipation by writing his last prose work, On the Constitution of the Church and State. The third edition of Coleridge’s Poetical Works appeared in time for him to see it before his final illness and death in 1834....
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On the Contemplative Life (essay by Philo Judaeus)
...settled on the shores of Lake Mareotis in the vicinity of Alexandria, Egypt, during the 1st century ad. The only original account of this community is given in De vita contemplativa (On the Contemplative Life), attributed to Philo of Alexandria. Their origin and fate are both unknown. The sect was unusually severe in discipline and mode of life. According to Philo, t...
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On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (speech by Mao Zedong)
Following this initial phase of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Mao Zedong issued what was perhaps his most famous post-1949 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” (Feb. 27, 1957). Its essential message was ambiguous. He stressed the importance of resolving “nonantagonistic contradictions” by methods of persuasion, but he stated that......
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On the Correlation of Physical Forces (work by Grove)
His classic On the Correlation of Physical Forces (1846) enunciated the principle of conservation of energy a year before the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz did so in his famous paper Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (“On the Conservation of Force”)....
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On the Corruption of Morals in Russia (work by Shcherbatov)
...and the nobility and the serfs are confirmed in what Shcherbatov viewed as their “natural” (and inherently unequal) relations to each other. His work most celebrated in the West, On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, appeared in 1797. Although reflecting his melancholic and ailing disposition, it was a fine example of the outraged erudition for which he was known, as......
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On the Criterion, or Canon (work by Epicurus)
The name canon, which means “rule,” is derived from a special work entitled “On the Criterion, or Canon.” It held that all sensations and representations are true and serve as criteria. The same holds for pleasure and pain, the basic feelings to which all others can be traced. Also true, and included among the criteria, are what may be called concepts......
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On the Crown (oration by Demosthenes)
...is, a severe and perhaps forbidding personality. Although name-calling was common practice in the Assembly, Demosthenes’ wit was exceptionally caustic; when defending himself in his speech “On the Crown” against the attacks of his lifelong rival, Aeschines, he did not scruple to call him “sly beast,” “idle babbler,” “court hack,” an...
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On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough (poem by Milton)
In 1628 Milton composed an occasional poem, On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough, which mourns the loss of his niece Anne, the daughter of his older sister. Milton tenderly commemorates the child, who was two years old. The poem’s conceits, Classical allusions, and theological overtones emphasize that the child entered the supernal realm because the human....
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On the Death of Persecutors (work by Lactantius)
...of pagan cults, proposing in their place the Christian religion as a theism, or rationalized belief in a single Supreme Being who is the source creating all else. In a companion work, “On the Death of Persecutors,” Lactantius held that the Christian God—in contradistinction to the remote, unconcerned God of Stoic deism—could intervene to right human injustice.......
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On the Development of the Concept of Religion (work by Forberg)
An exponent of the Idealist school developed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Forberg is best known for his essay Über die Entwicklung des Begriffs Religion (1798; “On the Development of the Concept of Religion”), a work that occasioned Fichte’s dismissal from the University of Jena on the charge of atheism after he had published a corroborative treatise. Forber...
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On the Development of the Monistic Conception of History (work by Plekhanov)
In the 1890s Plekhanov continued his polemics against the populists, most importantly with his book On the Development of the Monistic Conception of History. In 1898 he began publishing a series of tracts defending Marxian orthodoxy from those who proposed modifications or deviations, among them the reformist revisionism propounded by the German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein....
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On the Dignity of Man (work by Manetti)
...from the new interest in Plato, were the subject of many treatises, the most important of which were Giannozzo Manetti’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis (completed in 1452; On the Dignity of Man) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (written 1486; Oration on the Dignity of Man). The humanist vision ...
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On the Divine Names (work by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite)
...6th century and who wrote in the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, Paul’s convert at Athens. In the chief works of Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology and On the Divine Names, the main emphasis was on the ineffability of God (“the Divine Dark”) and hence on the “apophatic” or “negative” approach t...
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“On the Division of Nature” (work by Erigena)
...of Nyssa, the Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor. His views were much disapproved of by the Western church; and his great philosophical work, the Periphyseon (usually known as De divisione naturae [On the Division of Nature]), was not much read and ceased to be copied after his condemnation in 1210. But a considerable part of the text circulated in the form of......
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On the Dynamical Theory of Gases (work by Maxwell)
The word relaxation was originally applied to a molecular process by the English physicist James Clerk Maxwell. In the paper On the Dynamical Theory of Gases, which he presented in 1866, Maxwell referred to the time required for the elastic force produced when fluids are distorted to diminish or decay to 1/e (e is the base of the natural logarithm......
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On the Election of Grace (work by Böhme)
...Buch Mosis, better known as Mysterium Magnum (1623; The Great Mystery), is his synthesis of Renaissance nature mysticism and biblical doctrine. His Von der Gnadenwahl (On the Election of Grace), written the same year, examines the problem of freedom, made acute at the time by the spread of Calvinism....
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On the Embassy to Gaius (essay by Philo Judaeus)
...Against Apion bears many similarities; Against Flaccus, on the crimes of Aulus Avillius Flaccus, the Roman governor of Egypt, against the Alexandrian Jews and on his punishment; and On the Embassy to Gaius, an attack on the Emperor Caligula (i.e., Gaius) for his hostility toward the Alexandrian Jews and an account of the unsuccessful embassy to the Emperor headed by....
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On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances (work by Gibbs)
...It was followed in the same year by “A Method of Geometrical Representation of the Thermodynamic Properties of Substances by Means of Surfaces” and in 1876 by his most famous paper, “On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances.” The importance of his work was immediately recognized by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in England, who constructed a model.....
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On the Equilibrium of Planes (work by Archimedes)
On the Equilibrium of Planes (or Centres of Gravity of Planes; in two books) is mainly concerned with establishing the centres of gravity of various rectilinear plane figures and segments of the parabola and the paraboloid. The first book purports to establish the “law of the lever” (magnitudes balance at distances from......
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On the Essence of Laughter (essay by Baudelaire)
The view that laughter comes from superiority is referred to as a commonplace by Baudelaire, who states it in his essay “On the Essence of Laughter” (1855). Laughter, says Baudelaire, is a consequence of man’s notion of his own superiority. It is a token both of an infinite misery, in relation to the absolute being of whom man has an inkling, and of infinite grandeur, in relat...
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On the Eve (novel by Turgenev)
The novel On the Eve (1860) deals with the problem facing the younger intelligentsia on the eve of the Crimean War and refers also to the changes awaiting Russia on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. It is an episodic work, further weakened by the shallow portrayal of its Bulgarian hero. Although it has several successful minor characters and some powerful scenes, its......
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On the Fifth of November (poem by Milton)
Another early poem in Latin is In Quintum Novembris (On the Fifth of November), which Milton composed in 1626 at Cambridge. The poem celebrates the anniversary of the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when Guy Fawkes was discovered preparing to detonate explosives at the opening of Parliament, an event in which King James I and his family would......
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“On the Formation of the Fetus” (work by Fabricius ab Aquapendente)
Fabricius’ De Formato Foetu (1600; “On the Formation of the Fetus”), summarizing his investigations of the fetal development of many animals, including man, contained the first detailed description of the placenta and opened the field of comparative embryology. He also gave the first full account of the larynx as a vocal organ and was first to demonstrate that the pupil...
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On the Functions of the Medulla Oblongata and Medulla Spinalis, and on the Excito-motory System of Nerves (paper by Hall)
Hall’s discovery that a headless newt moves when its skin is pricked led to a series of experiments that he summarized in his paper entitled “On the Functions of the Medulla Oblongata and Medulla Spinalis, and on the Excito-motory System of Nerves” (1837). This research served as the basis for his theory of reflex action, which stated that the spinal cord consists of a chain o...
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On the Genealogy of Morals (work by Nietzsche)
...set forth his philosophy in more direct prose, in the publications in 1886 of Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) and in 1887 of Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), also failed to win a proper audience....
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On the Generation of Animals (work by Aristotle)
...later known, misleadingly, as The History of Animals, to which Aristotle added two short treatises, On the Parts of Animals and On the Generation of Animals. Although Aristotle did not claim to have founded the science of zoology, his detailed observations of a wide variety of organisms were quite without precedent.......
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On the Good Ship Lollipop (song by Whiting and Clare)
...of movies, including Little Miss Marker, Change of Heart, Now I’ll Tell, Now and Forever, and Bright Eyes (in which she sang one of her most popular songs,On the Good Ship Lollipop). By the end of 1934 she was one of Hollywood’s top stars, and the following year she received a special Academy Award as “the outstand...
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On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin (work by Augustine)
...the Letter) comes from an early moment in the controversy, is relatively irenic, and beautifully sets forth his point of view. De gratia Christi et de peccato originali (418; On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin) is a more methodical exposition. The hardest positions Augustine takes in favour of predestination in his last years appear in De......
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On the Heavens (work by Aristotle)
Aristotle’s contributions to the physical sciences are less impressive than his researches in the life sciences. In works such as On Generation and Corruption and On the Heavens, he presented a world-picture that included many features inherited from his pre-Socratic predecessors. From Empedocles (c. 490–430 bc) he adopted the view that ...
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On the Holy Spirit (work by Basil the Great)
...the days of creation, Basil speaks of the varied beauty of the world as reflecting the splendour of God. Against Eunomius defends the deity of the Son against an extreme Arian thinker, and On the Holy Spirit expounds the deity of the spirit implied in the church’s tradition, though not previously formally defined. Basil is most characteristically revealed in his letters, of...
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On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (essay by Meredith)
The essay “On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit” (1877), by Bergson’s English contemporary George Meredith, is a celebration of the civilizing power of the comic spirit. The mind, he affirms, directs the laughter of comedy, and civilization is founded in common sense, which equips one to hear the comic spirit when it laughs folly out of countenance and to......
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On the Incarnation (work by Theodoret of Cyrrhus)
...in Christ, addressing him exclusively in terms of God (monophysitism). Adapting with greater precision the analytical approach of his colleague Nestorius, Theodoret in his principal works, On The Incarnation and Eranistēs (“The Beggar”), written about 431 and 446, respectively, attributed to Christ an integral human consciousness with a distinct......
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On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (work by Bruno)
...a monistic conception of the world, implying the basic unity of all substances and the coincidence of opposites in the infinite unity of Being. In the De l’infinito universo e mondi (1584; On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), he developed his cosmological theory by systematically criticizing Aristotelian physics; he also formulated his Averroistic view of the relation betw...
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On the Jewish Question (work by Marx)
...during his student days, Marx soon developed significant philosophical and political differences with other members of the group. Already in his early, Rousseau-inspired work On the Jewish Question, Marx had emphasized that, in the constitutional state desired by his fellow Left Hegelians, political problems would merely shift to another plane. Religion and......
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“On the Law of Prize and Booty” (work by Grotius)
...produce a work legally defending the action on the ground that, by claiming a monopoly on the right of trade, Spain-Portugal had deprived the Dutch of their natural trading rights. The work, De Jure Praedae (On the Law of Prize and Booty), remained unpublished during his lifetime, except for one chapter—in which Grotius defends free access to the ocean for all.....
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On the Law of War and Peace (work by Grotius)
While in Paris, Grotius published his legal masterpiece, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, in 1625. In writing this work, which made full use of De Jure Praedae, he was strongly influenced by the bitter, violent political struggles both in his own country and in Europe more broadly, particularly the Thirty Years’ War, which had broken out in 1618. In one famous passage of......
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On the Laws and Customs of England (treatise)
In the 13th century the development of law became a dominant concern, as is shown by the great treatise On the Laws and Customs of England, attributed to the royal judge Bracton but probably put together in the 1220s and ’30s under one of his predecessors on the King’s Bench. Soon after Edward’s return to England in 1274, a major inquiry into government in the localitie...
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On the Laws of the Poetic Art (work by Hecht)
...the pathetic fallacy and on poet Robert Lowell. A series of six lectures he delivered at the National Gallery of Art as a part of the Andrew W. Mellon lectures in fine arts were published as On the Laws of the Poetic Art (1995)....
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On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet of the Earth (work by Gilbert)
...Gilbert settled in London and began to practice in 1573. His principal work, De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure (1600; On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet of the Earth), gives a full account of his research on magnetic bodies and electrical attractions. After years of experiments he concluded......
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On the Marble Cliffs (work by Jünger)
...to power in Germany in 1933. Indeed, during Hitler’s chancellorship, he wrote a daring allegory on the barbarian devastation of a peaceful land in the novel Auf den Marmorklippen (1939; On the Marble Cliffs), which, surprisingly, passed the censors and was published in Germany. Jünger served as an army staff officer in Paris during World War II, but by 1943 he had tu...
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On the Misery of the Condition of Man (work by Innocent III)
...it did not become the discipline that shaped his worldview or his vision of the papacy. During the 1190s Lothar wrote three theological tracts: De miseria condicionis humane (On the Misery of the Human Condition), De missarum mysteriis (On the Mysteries of the Mass), and De quadripartita specie nuptiarum (......
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On the Modern Element in Literature (lecture by Arnold)
...Arnold was elected to the Oxford chair of poetry, which he held for 10 years. It was characteristic of him that he revolutionized this professorship. The keynote was struck in his inaugural lecture: “On the Modern Element in Literature,” “modern” being taken to mean not merely “contemporary” (for Greece was “modern”), but the spirit that,....
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On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (work by Milton)
In this early period, Milton’s principal poems included On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, On Shakespeare, and the so-called companion poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. Milton’s sixth elegy (Elegia sexta), a verse letter in Latin sent to Diodati...
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On the Morphology of the Chromosome Group in Brachystola magna (work by Sutton)
While a student at Columbia, he wrote two papers that greatly affected the history of genetics. Published in 1902 in the Biological Bulletin, “On the Morphology of the Chromosome Group in Brachystola magna” provided the earliest detailed demonstration that the somatic chromosomes (those in cells other than sex cells) of a grasshopper occur in definite, distinguishable,....
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On the Move (poem by Gunn)
...verse was Fighting Terms (1954; rev. ed. 1962). The Sense of Movement (1957) won a Somerset Maugham Award, which he used for travel in Italy. “On the Move,” a celebration of black-jacketed motorcyclists from that volume, is one of his best-known poems. In the late 1950s Gunn’s poetry became more experimental. He published .....
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On the Mysteries of the Mass (work by Innocent III)
...the 1190s Lothar wrote three theological tracts: De miseria condicionis humane (On the Misery of the Human Condition), De missarum mysteriis (On the Mysteries of the Mass), and De quadripartita specie nuptiarum (On Four Types of Marriage). The first was enormously popular in the Middle Ages, an...
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On the Nature and Structural Characteristics of Cancer, and of Those Morbid Growths Which May Be Confounded with It (work by Müller)
...assistant, Theodor Schwann, that the cell was the basic unit of structure in the animal body, he concentrated on the cellular structure of tumours with the aid of a microscope. In 1838 his work Über den feineren Bau und die Formen der krankhaften Geschwülste (On the Nature and Structural Characteristics of Cancer, and of Those Morbid Growths Which May Be Confounde...
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On the Nature of Animals (work by Aelian)
...and student of the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, Plutarch, Homer, and others, and his own works preserve many excerpts from earlier writers. Aelian is chiefly remembered for his On the Nature of Animals, in 17 books, curious stories of birds and other animals, often in the form of anecdote, folklore, or fable that points a moral. This work set a pattern that continued in......
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On the Nature of Things (work by Rabanus)
...and writings, he is important specifically for quoting and recapitulating the heritage of learning that he gathered from classical and early Christian authors. His most extensive work is the De rerum naturis (842–847; “On the Nature of Things”), also known as De universo (“On the Universe”), an encyclopaedia of knowledge in 22 books synthesizing....
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On the Nature of Things (work by Lucretius)
...one single atom had once made a single slight swerve, the build-up of observed phenomena could be accounted for on Darwinian lines. Democritus’ account of evolution survives in the fifth book of De rerum natura, written by a 1st-century-bc Roman poet, Lucretius. The credibility of both Democritus’ and Darwin’s accounts of evolution depends on the assump...
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On the Navy Boards (oration by Demosthenes)
Demosthenes was already 30 when, in 354, he made his first major speech before the Assembly. The speech, “On the Navy Boards,” was a marked success. The Assembly or Ecclesia (Ekklēsia), a legislative body composed of all adult male Athenian citizens, had convened to consider a rumoured threat against Athens by the King of Persia. Demosthenes’ tightly reasoned oration he...
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On the New Stage (work by Mao Zedong)
...1938 on the tactics of the anti-Japanese war. As to his overall view of the events of these years, Mao adopted an extremely conciliatory attitude toward the Nationalists in his report entitled On the New Stage (October 1938), in which he attributed to it the leading role both in the war against Japan and in the ensuing phase of national reconstruction. By the winter of......
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“On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” (work by Darwin)
England became quieter and more prosperous in the 1850s, and by mid-decade the professionals were taking over, instituting exams and establishing a meritocracy. The changing social composition of science—typified by the rise of the freethinking biologist Thomas Henry Huxley—promised a better reception for Darwin. Huxley, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, and other outsiders were......
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On the Origin of Springs (work by Perrault)
...not a scientist by profession but had been, in succession, a lawyer, a government administrator, and a writer. In his most significant scientific work, De l’origine des fontaines (1674; On the Origin of Springs), he presented a study of a substantial section of the Seine River, beginning at its source, northwest of the city of Dijon. His numerical estimates demonstrated tha...
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On the Parts of Animals (work by Aristotle)
...and marine biology. This work was summarized in a book later known, misleadingly, as The History of Animals, to which Aristotle added two short treatises, On the Parts of Animals and On the Generation of Animals. Although Aristotle did not claim to have founded the science of zoology, his detailed observations of a wide....
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On the Peace (oration by Demosthenes)
In his oration “On the Peace” late in 346 Demosthenes, though condemning the terms of the treaty of Philocrates, argued that it had to be honoured. Meanwhile, Philip continued his tactic of setting the Greek city-states, such as Thebes and Sparta, against each other. Demosthenes was one of several ambassadors sent out on a futile tour of the Peloponnesus to enlist support against......
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On the Pensive Boundary (work by Charbonneau)
...(1935–47). In 1912 Charbonneau wrote Les Blessures (“The Wounds”), the first of several volumes of poetry that dealt primarily with philosophical speculation and myth. Sur la borne pensive (1952; “On the Bounds of Thought”), which invites his readers into a garden of delights where life is a spectacle of Persian lilacs, pergolas, fountains, and.....
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On the Principles of Geometry (work by Lobachevsky)
...was not published or even publicly discussed by the college, and its content remains unknown. Lobachevsky gave the first public exposition of the ideas of non-Euclidean geometry in his paper “On the principles of geometry,” which contained fragments of the 1826 manuscript and was published in 1829–30 in a minor Kazan periodical. In his geometry Lobachevsky abandoned the......
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On the Procession of the Holy Spirit (work by Margunios)
...a theological compromise formula acceptable to both Latin and Greek churches for the disputed Filioque clause in the Latin version of the Nicene Creed. After his treatise on the subject, “On the Procession of the Holy Spirit,” appeared in 1591, he was suspected of wavering on Eastern Orthodox doctrine and was obliged to send a statement to Constantinople assuring the......
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On the Republic (work by Cicero)
...marked his new alliance. He was obliged to accept a number of distasteful defenses, and he abandoned public life. In the next few years he completed the De oratore (55) and De republica (started in 54, finished in 52) and began the De legibus (52). In 52 he was delighted when Milo killed Clodius but failed disastrously in his defense of Milo (later written......
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On the Road (work by Kerouac)
American novelist, poet, and leader of the Beat movement whose most famous book, On the Road (1957), had broad cultural influence before it was recognized for its literary merits. On the Road captured the spirit of its time as no other work of the 20th century had since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925)....
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On the Rules of Law (work by Bulgarus)
...Azzone, and Franciscus Accursius—ultimately prevailed, and Bulgarus himself served as adviser to the Holy Roman emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. His most important book, De regulis iuris (On the Rules of Law), is the earliest extant legal gloss from the Bolognese school....
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On the Seats and Causes of Diseases as Investigated by Anatomy (work by Morgagni)
The autopsy came of age with Giovanni Morgagni, the father of modern pathology, who in 1761 described what could be seen in the body with the naked eye. In his voluminous work On the Seats and Causes of Diseases as Investigated by Anatomy, he compared the symptoms and observations in some 700 patients with the anatomical findings upon examining their bodies. Thus, in Morgagni’s work ...
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On the Sensation of Tone As a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (work by Helmholtz)
...then, is it possible to have confidence in what the senses report about the external world? Helmholtz examined this question exhaustively in both his work on optics and in his masterly On the Sensation of Tone As a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1863). What he tried to do, without complete success, was to trace sensations through the sensory nerves and anatomical.....
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On the Senses and Their Objects (work by Aristotle)
Even in early human history, dreams were interpreted as reflections of waking experiences and of emotional needs. In his work Parva naturalia (On the Senses and Their Objects), the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 bce), despite the practice of divination and incubation among his contemporaries, attributed dreams to sensory impressions from “external......
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On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon (treatise by Aristarchus of Samos)
Aristarchus’ advanced ideas on the movement of the Earth are known from Archimedes and Plutarch; his only extant work is a short treatise, “On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon.” The values he obtained, by using geometry, are inaccurate, because of faulty observations....
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On the Soul (work by Aristotle)
...though mostly they survive only in fragments. Like his master, Aristotle wrote initially in dialogue form, and his early ideas show a strong Platonic influence. His dialogue Eudemus, for example, reflects the Platonic view of the soul as imprisoned in the body and as capable of a happier life only when the body has been left behind. According to Aristotle, the......
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On the Soul (work by Alexander of Aphrodisias)
...better known for his original writings. The most important of these are On Fate, in which he defends free will against the Stoic doctrine of necessity, or predetermined human action; and On the Soul, in which he draws upon Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul and the intellect. According to Alexander, the human thought process, which he calls the “mortal intellect,...
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On the Space-Theory of Matter (work by Clifford)
British philosopher and mathematician who, influenced by the non-Euclidean geometries of Bernhard Riemann and Nikolay Lobachevsky, wrote “On the Space-Theory of Matter” (1876). He presented the idea that matter and energy are simply different types of curvature of space, thus foreshadowing Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity....
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On the Special Laws (essay by Philo Judaeus)
That Philo experienced some sort of identity crisis is indicated by a passage in his On the Special Laws. In this work, he describes his longing to escape from worldly cares to the contemplative life, his joy at having succeeded in doing so (perhaps with the Egyptian Jewish ascetic sect of the Therapeutae described in his treatise On the Contemplative Life), and his renewed pain......
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On the Spectacles (work by Martial)
Martial’s first book, On the Spectacles (ad 80), contained 33 undistinguished epigrams celebrating the shows held in the Colosseum, an amphitheatre in the city begun by Vespasian and completed by Titus in 79; these poems are scarcely improved by their gross adulation of the latter emperor. In the year 84 or 85 appeared two undistinguished books (confusingly numbered XII...
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On the Sphere and Cylinder (work by Archimedes)
There are nine extant treatises by Archimedes in Greek. The principal results in On the Sphere and Cylinder (in two books) are that the surface area of any sphere of radius r is four times that of its greatest circle (in modern notation, S = 4πr2) and that the volume of a sphere is two-thirds that of the cylinder in which it is inscribed....
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On the Spirit and the Letter (work by Augustine)
...on Pelagianism have had a long history in Christianity, notoriously resurfacing in the Reformation’s debates over free will and predestination. De spiritu et littera (412; On the Spirit and the Letter) comes from an early moment in the controversy, is relatively irenic, and beautifully sets forth his point of view. De gratia Christi et de peccato......
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On the Statues (sermons by Chrysostom)
...of this period was a riot in 387, during which the citizens of Antioch treated the images of the sacred emperors with disrespect and were threatened with reprisals; in a famous course of sermons, “On the Statues,” Chrysostom set himself to bring his hearers to a frame of mind suitable both to the season, Lent, and to the dangerous situation in which they stood. His reputation as a...
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On the Study of Celtic Literature (lectures by Arnold)
...and nobility as medicine for the modern world, with its “sick hurry and divided aims” and condemned Francis Newman’s recent translation as ignoble and eccentric—and the lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), in which, without much knowledge of his subject or of anthropology, he used the Celtic strain as a symbol of that which rejects the despotism ...
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On the Sublime (work by Longinus)
The 1st-century Greek treatise On the Sublime (conventionally attributed to the 3rd-century Longinus) deals with the question left unanswered by Aristotle—what makes great literature “great”? Its standards are almost entirely expressive. Where Aristotle is analytical and states general principles, the pseudo-Longinus is more specific and gives many quotations:......
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On the Sublime and Beautiful (work by Burke)
...or, more specifically, the analysis of the “language of criticism,” in which particular judgments are singled out and their logic and justification displayed. In his famous treatise On the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke attempted to draw a distinction between two aesthetic concepts, and, by studying the qualities that they denoted, to analyze the separate human....
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On the Theoretical Principles of the Machinery for Calculating Tables (paper by Babbage)
...the Royal Society, about the possibility of automating the construction of mathematical tables—specifically, logarithm tables for use in navigation. He then wrote a paper, On the Theoretical Principles of the Machinery for Calculating Tables, which he read to the society later that year. (It won the Royal Society’s first Gold Medal in 1823.) Tables then i...
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On the Town (film by Donen [1949])
In 1944, back in New York, Comden and Green joined with composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins in creating the musical On the Town, which later (1949) was filmed by MGM. In 1951, with Two on the Aisle, Comden and Green began their long collaboration with composer Jule Styne, who created the music for most of their shows,......
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On the Transmigration of Souls (work by Adams)
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City commissioned a work from Adams: On the Transmigration of Souls, for orchestra, chorus, children’s choir, and prerecorded sound track, first performed Sept. 19, 2002. The text of the work derived from three sources: fragm...
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On the Treatment of Acute and Chronic Diseases (work by Aretaeus of Cappadocia)
After his death he was entirely forgotten until 1554, when two of his manuscripts, On the Causes and Indications of Acute and Chronic Diseases (4 vol.) and On the Treatment of Acute and Chronic Diseases (4 vol.), both written in the Ionic Greek dialect, were discovered. These works not only include model descriptions of pleurisy, diphtheria, tetanus, pneumonia, asthma, and......
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On the Trinity (work by Hilary of Poitiers)
...talk of God claims to be a response to the divine initiative, not simply a record of humanly generated experience. As Hilary of Poitiers wrote in the mid-4th century in his On the Trinity (IV.4), “God is to be believed when he speaks of himself, and whatever he grants us to think concerning himself is to be followed.”...
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On the Ultimate Origin of Things (work by Leibniz)
...the two; rather, the Supreme Watchmaker has so exactly matched body and soul that they correspond—they give meaning to each other—from the beginning. In 1697, De Rerum Originatione (On the Ultimate Origin of Things) tried to prove that the ultimate origin of things can be none other than God. In 1698, De Ipsa Natura (“On Nature Itself”) explained the......
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On the Unity of the Catholic Church (work by Cyprian)
...then relations between the churches of Carthage and Rome had been cordial. In 251 Cyprian had supported Bishop Cornelius against his rival, Novatian, and had written on his behalf the treatise On the Unity of the Catholic Church, which stressed the centrality of the see of Peter (Rome) as the source of the episcopacy. Though Cyprian may have written two drafts of an important passage......
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“On the Universe” (work by Rabanus)
...and writings, he is important specifically for quoting and recapitulating the heritage of learning that he gathered from classical and early Christian authors. His most extensive work is the De rerum naturis (842–847; “On the Nature of Things”), also known as De universo (“On the Universe”), an encyclopaedia of knowledge in 22 books synthesizing....
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On the Value of Scepticism (essay by Russell)
...soon described Ayer as “the best student I have yet been taught by.” While at Eton, Ayer had read essays by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), one of which, On the Value of Scepticism (1928), proposed a “wildly paradoxical and subversive” doctrine that Ayer would adopt as a lifelong philosophical motto: “It is undesirable to......
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On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects (work by Darwin)
...flowers—and make them test cases for “natural selection.” Hence the book that appeared after the Origin was, to everyone’s surprise, The Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1862). He showed that the orchid’s beauty was not a piece of floral whimsy “designe...
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On the Waterfront (film by Kazan [1954])
...Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins. He also wrote the scores for the ballets Fancy Free (1944), Facsimile (1946), and Dybbuk (1974), and he composed the music for the film On the Waterfront (1954), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. His Mass, written especially for the occasion, was performed at the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for......
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On the Way to Deal with the Rebel Subjects of the Valdichiana (work by Machiavelli)
In 1503, one year after his missions to Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli wrote a short work, Del modo di trattare i sudditi della Val di Chiana ribellati (On the Way to Deal with the Rebel Subjects of the Valdichiana). Anticipating his later Discourses on Livy, a commentary on the ancient Roman historian, in this work he contrasts the errors of Florence with the......
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On the Will in Nature (work by Schopenhauer)
His leisure, though, was not idle. In 1836, after 19 years of “silent indignation,” he published his short treatise Über den Willen in der Natur (On the Will in Nature), which skillfully employed the queries and findings of the rapidly expanding natural sciences in support of his theory of the will. The preface for the first time openly expressed his devastating....
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On the Wool Track (work by Bean)
...in My Crowded Solitude (1926) was another who encountered timelessness for a time. And C.E.W. Bean found the same slow rhythms of experience out on the great Western plains (On the Wool Track [1910]) and down the Darling River (The Dreadnought of the Darling [1911]). Like Banfield and Murdoch, he identified a genial world and men whose essential......
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On Thermonuclear War (work by Kahn)
...the 1950s, Herman Kahn and others pioneered the so-called scenario technique for analyzing the relationship between weapons development and military strategy. Later Kahn applied this technique in On Thermonuclear War (1960), a book that examines the potential consequences of a nuclear conflict. During the time of Kahn’s first studies, the mathematician Olaf Helmer, also at RAND, p...
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On This Island (work by Auden)
The second period, 1933–38, is that in which Auden was the hero of the left. Continuing the analysis of the evils of capitalist society, he also warned of the rise of totalitarianism. In On This Island (1937; in Britain, Look, Stranger!, 1936) his verse became more open in texture and accessible to a larger public. For the Group Theatre, a society that put on experimental......
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On Translating Homer (lectures by Arnold)
...moral and intellectual “deliverance.” Several of the lectures were afterward published as critical essays, but the most substantial fruits of his professorship were the three lectures On Translating Homer (1861)—in which he recommended Homer’s plainness and nobility as medicine for the modern world, with its “sick hurry and divided aims” and cond...
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On Trial (play by Rice)
Rice graduated from the New York Law School in 1912 but soon turned to writing plays. His first work, the melodramatic On Trial (1914), was the first play to employ on stage the motion-picture technique of flashbacks, in this case to present the recollections of witnesses at a trial. In The Adding Machine (1923) Rice adapted techniques from German Expressionist theatre to depict......
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On Trial (work by Sinyavsky)
...were convicted of producing anti-Soviet propaganda through their writings. Daniel was sentenced to five years of hard labour and Sinyavsky to seven. The trial, a record of which was published in On Trial (1966), prompted domestic and international protest. Sinyavsky was released from prison in 1971 and two years later moved to Paris, where he taught Russian literature at the Sorbonne.......
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“On Triangles of Every Kind” (work by Regiomontanus)
Regiomontanus thoroughly mastered Hellenistic and medieval mathematics. His own contributions to the subject range from the formalization of plane and spherical trigonometry in De triangulis omnimodis (1464; “On Triangles of All Kinds”) to his discovery of a Greek manuscript (incomplete) of Arithmetica, the great work of Diophantus of Alexandria (fl. c.......
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On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense (work by Nietzsche)
Nietzsche was disturbed by the Enlightenment’s unswerving allegiance to the concept of scientific truth. In a brilliant early text, On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense (1873), he offered a number of insightful observations about the vocation of philosophy that would ultimately find their way into his mature thought of the 1880s. The will to philosophy, with its....
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On Vision and Colours (work by Schopenhauer)
...lived in Dresden until 1818, associating occasionally with a group of writers for the Dresdener Abendzeitung (“Dresden Evening Newspaper”). Schopenhauer finished his trea tise Über das Sehn und die Farben (1816; “On Vision and Colours”), supporting Goethe against Isaac Newton....
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