Climaxing a movement for calendar reform which had been developing for at least a century, in 1582 Pope Gregory ordained that October 4 was to be fol… - Daniel J. Boorstin

MY hero is Man the Discoverer. The world we now view from the literate West — the vistas of time, the land and the seas, the heavenly bodies and our own bodies, the plants and animals, history and human societies past and present — had to be opened for us by countless Columbuses. In the deep recesses of the past, they remain anonymous. As we come closer to the present they emerge into the light of history, a cast of characters as varied as human nature. Discoveries become episodes of biography, unpredictable as the new worlds the discoverers opened to us. The obstacles to discovery — the illusions of knowledge — are also part of our story. Only against the forgotten backdrop of the received common sense and myths of their time can we begin to sense the courage, the rashness, the

"The acknowledged American leader of the new science of anthropology, Boas was a scrupulous master of detail drawn from his field experience. Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man (1911; revised and enlarged in 1938) demonstrated that "there is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man." He attacked simplistic racial stereotypes and insisted that "A close connection between race and personality has never been established." His conclusions were firmly based on facts gathered in the field. Boas argued that all surviving societies show equally the capacity to develop culture. They have evolved equally but differently. So he diverted the social scientists' focus from biology (the realism of evolution) to anthropology. And he received the accolade of the German Nazis when they burned his books and rescinded his German Ph.D."

Since the Creator had made the facts of the after-life inaccessible to man, He must not have required that man understand death in order to live fruitfully.