How a mind imagines its formation: The Pocket University 14 July 2024

"Looking backward, I can now perceive how my love for science gradually preponderated over every other taste." Why, yes it did, sir.

This Galapagos tortoise had so much sex at the San Diego Zoo, he retired home, having fulfilled his grand purpose. This tortoise is tangentially related to the autographical excerpt below. Sex until retirement is not the related tangent. (Source: ABC News)

He suspects he was a naughty boy. He didn’t take to memorization and rote learning, though he worked at it, forgetting what he’d studied a day or two later. But somewhere in a childhood and young adulthood, he found mentors and inspiration and an inclination, perhaps, to a way of thinking he attributes a bit to science:

… On first examining a new district [with its geology] nothing can appear more hopeless than the chaos of rocks; but be recording the stratification and nature of the rocks and fossils at many points, always reasoning and predicting what will be found elsewhere, light soon begins to dawn on the district, and the structure of the whole becomes more or less intelligible. [My emphasis in bold italic]

Seeing something and guessing what you’ll find when you see the next thing is an excellent way, if remaining very humble and observant and reflective, of gathering information about the world and how it ties together. Prediction is also one of the benchmarks that can tell you, oh, yes, I’m smart about this, and I’m reading this right.