Teaser Tuesday: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

 

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title and author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything will be closest to hand for a while. I am trying to read a chapter a day of this nonfiction book. 

America, Buffon wrote in his vast and much-esteemed Histoire Naturelle, was a land where the water was stagnant, the soil unproductive, and the animals without size or vigor, their constitutions weakened by the "noxious vapors" that rose from its rotting swamps and sunless forests. In such an environment even the native Indians lacked virility. "They have no beard or body hair," Buffon sagely confided, "and no ardor for the female." Their reproductive organs were "small and feeble." 

I am enjoying learning about how scientific ideas came about and how they changed over time.