“History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.”

“Like Kierkegaard and Hegel, Gurdjieff insisted upon ‘negative thinking,’ a critical look at current society to expose man’s surrender of his individual potential for growth of understanding to the cultural mass mechanisms of his time.”

William & Ellen Hartley (“Light and Your Health,” Popular Science, Feb. 1969) wrote …

“Pumpkins develop both male and female blossoms on the same vine. Both types of blossoms appeared on Dr. [John] Ott’s vines, but the female buds turned black and dropped off. Result: no pumpkins.

“Dr. Ott tried again the following year. But since the old fluorescent lamps were beginning to flicker, Ott replaced them with new ones of daylight white that gave off a slightly bluish light. The choice of the new lamps was accidental.

“This time the female buds developed normally, while the male buds withered and dropped off. But on plants grown under natural sunlight both genders of blossoms were healthy.”

“In many cases of cumulative constipation, the chief trouble is in the pelvic colon. This loop of the intestine, usually about a foot in length, and possessing thick muscular walls, becomes sometimes so enormously stretched and attenuated by accumulations of fecal matters and gas that its walls contract very feebly, and it is no longer an efficient instrument for forcing the feces into the rectum and thus for inducing the defecating reflex by which the bowel is normally emptied.”

“The action of massage was studied by Mosso and Maggiora, who chose for their experiments the fatigue curves of the right and left middle fingers in maximum voluntary flexion, every two seconds, with a weight of 3 kilos. These records were taken at 8 and 11 in the morning and at 2 and 5 in the afternoon, without massage, and the following day, under the same conditions, after a friction and kneading of three minutes. The average of these results proved that the muscles did twice as much work after the massage. Maggiora discovered that extension of the period of massage did not produce any greater results in the capacity for work, five minutes obtaining all the needful effect. His experiments on the comparative value of the various manipulations proved that little difference existed in the effect of friction and percussion. There was a greater increase of working capacity after the use of petrissage than from either of the other movements, but the best results were obtained by using in turn all three.”