Word: mid-19th
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...alas, the diamond is threatened with extinction. In southeastern and southwestern France this season, farmers unearthed barely 40 tons of truffles, compared with an annual crop of 1,500 to 2,000 tons in the mid-19th century. This was no truffling matter. Accordingly, 450 farmers and scientists met at a two-day conference early this month in the Perigord region of France to discuss the tuber's troubled future. Mourned Charles Parra, president of the Federation of Truffle Producers in the Lot department in southwestern France: "If we don't find a remedy, the truffle will disappear...
Molecular biology, in part, is rooted in the science of genetics. Ever since Cro-Magnon man, parents have probably wondered why their children resemble them. But not until an obscure Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel began planting peas in his monastery's garden in the mid-19th century were the universal laws of heredity worked out. By tallying up the variations in the offspring peas, Mendel determined that traits are passed from generation to generation with mathematical precision in small, separate packets, which subsequently became known as genes (from the Greek word for race...
...friends fought out near his country home. Many of today's rule books draw heavily on Wells' work, devised, as he put it, to attract "boys of every age and girls of the better sort." With deadly seriousness, Prussian officers originally developed the idea in the mid-19th century to hone their tactical skills for actual warfare. Today, of course, professional war-gamers play out their grim battles in locked rooms in Washington and Moscow...
When Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian labor camp, he requested only one kind of reading matter: books by Dickens. In mid-19th century New York, ships arriving with the latest installment of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop were met by anxious cries from the dock: "Is Little Nell dead...
Unlike the fortified towns of old, the besieged cities of 1970 are threatened not from without but from within, by armies that are hardly ever in sight. Nor are the troops preparing for anything so vast as the great popular upheavals that swept the revolution-torn capitals of mid-19th century Europe. The cities are threatened in each case by a few hundred or at most a few thousand men. But, as the Canadian example showed, small numbers can affect a whole nation, if the right pressure point is found. In the late-20th century, minuscule bands possess disproportionate power...