Scientists still think that biological evolution is driven by the process named natural selection. Perhaps this 19th century notion was indeed a revolutionary idea at the time when it has been introduced. However, now it seems that natural selection hypothesis most probably is wrong. It does not explain, above all, why biological organization arise in the course of evolution. I show, on a rathe...

Wilhelm Blandowski, a Prussian émigré, arrived in Australia in 1849 with hopes of exploring and documenting the natural history of this still relatively scientifically nai;ve colony. After several years travelling, surveying and mining gold, he became the first government zoologist at the infant National Museum of Victoria and was a key player in the burgeoning scientific establishment. Chosen ...

In post-colonial India the female foeticide, a practice evolved from customary female infanticide of pre-colonial and colonial period, committed though in separate incidents, has made it almost a unified wave of mass murder. It does not fulfil the widely accepted existing definition of genocide but the high rate of abortion of legitimate girl-foetus by Indian parents makes their crime a kind of...

This paper presents the first stages of a larger project concerning the study and realization of a 3D interactive environment of everyday life in 19th century Nicosia. The presented study involves the recreation of the built urban environment (i.e. the architecture of the city) based on historic and archival information taken from the first Land Registry documentations taking place on the islan...

The development of population policy and health legislation as a result of government, the need for more young, healthy, working and military active population, resulted in the education of all health workers including midwives, legal regulation of their work, increasing their number and training of midwifery profession. With the development of this profession conditions of women giving birth, ...

By the late 19(th) Century, storms plaguing early Victorian systematics and nomenclature seemed to have abated. Vociferous disputes over radical renaming, the world-shaking clash of all-encompassing procrustean systems, struggles over centres of authority, and the issues of language and meaning had now been settled by the institution of a stable imperial museum and its catalogues, a set of rule...

In the article a prayer against gout from the early 19th century is analysed, which reflects the surviving medieval theurgical view of healing. It also sheds light on a less known sphere of Croatian Glagolitic texts, i.e. on texts with medical content written in Glagolitic script in Croatian lands.

The depopulation of Pacific islands during the 16th to 19th centuries is a striking example of historical mass mortality due to infectious disease. Pacific Island populations have not been subject to such cataclysmic infectious disease mortality since. Here we explore the processes which could have given rise to this shift in infectious disease mortality patterns. We show, using mathematical mo...

The progress of a devastating case of enzootic anthrax is investigated by means of documents found in the archives of a private farm. These reports initiated a detailed historical study of the anthrax situation in Switzerland at the time, notably in the north-west of the country.