TRANSLATION WORK IN PROGRESS. After their return from the Uranie expedition, Quoy and Gaimard presented a paper to the Académie royale des Sciences on the origin of coral reefs. It was a significant advance on what had gone before but, because they had never seen an atoll with a central volcanic peak, there was little chance that they would achieve the insights gifted to Darwin b his observations of TAhiti and Bora Bora.

It takes a very special sort of arrogance to suppose that all climate scientists who accept Anthropogenic Global Warming as a reality are not only venal, self-serving and corrupt but also so mind-bogglingly stupid that they will repeatedly issue diagrams containing errors of the magnitude suggested by the overprints. The sort of arrogance, perhaps, that believes an argument is enhanced by spelling climate as ‘klimut’ and science as ‘siyenz’.

In 1823 Basil Hall, a British naval officer who was the first person to measure gravity in the Galapagos Islands, advised anyone who might follow him in taking gravity pendulums overseas to recognise the “… advantage which … would arise from having the whole experiment performed in England, by the person who is afterwards to repeat it abroad, not under the hospitable roof of Mr. BROWNE … but in the fields, and with no advantages save those he could carry with him…”