.... of Henslow's recommendation, as an unpaid naturalist on an expedition around the world. When the voyage began, Darwin didn't believe that species change through time, but he did believe in two prevailing ideas of the time. The first theory was that the earth was 6,000 years old and had remained unchanged except for the effects of floods and other catastropes. The second was that organisms were designed especially for certain habitats and appeared on the earth in their present form. After reading the works of a noted geologist, Darwin began to change his ideas. He saw evidence that the earth was much older than 6,000 years. In South America, he was witness to an earthquak ....

.... to build a solid foundation of knowledge out of irrefutable truths. Borrowing an idea from Archimedes, that with one firm and immovable point, the earth could be moved, Descartes sought one immovable truth. Descartes’ immovable truth, a truth on which he would lay down his foundation of knowledge, and define all that which he knows, was the simple line ‘Cogito ergo sume”; I think, therefor I am. This allowed for his existence. Where this line failed, however, was in the proof or disproof of the external world. Once Descartes established himself as a “thinking thing”, his attention turned to the external world. Descartes reflects upon his dealing with physic ....

.... She refused to believe that Heaven was a better place than Earth and eventually rebelled from the church. Emily saw herself as a woman who had her own way of thinking, a way of thinking shaped neither by the church or society. By the time she was twelve, her family moved to a house on Pleasant Street where they lived from 1840 to 1855. Emily was already writing letters, but composed most of her poetry in this home. Emily only left home to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for two semesters. Though her stay there was brief, she impressed her teachers with her courage and directness. They felt her writing was sensational. At the age of twenty-one, Emily and her fami ....

.... American in modern organized baseball. went to UCLA where he became an All-American in football and basketball. Robinson is still the only UCLA Bruin to letter in four sports: football, basketball, baseball, and track. Baseball was his weakest sport, but he played it professionally because the NBA and NFL still had their doors closed to African Americans. As a baseball player, Robinson revolutionized the way the game was played. He combined power and speed in a way that had never been done before, and is acknowledged as the greatest baserunner of all time. In 1947, when Robinson finally put on a Brooklyn Dodger uniform, he started the integration of professional athl ....

.... "I'm a child of motion pictures." Prophetically, the first film he saw, at the age of three, was the horror classic "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", staring Lon Chanley. His teenage Aunt Neva gave the boy his appreciation of fantasy, by reading him the Oz books, when he was six. When Bradbury was a child he was encouraged to read the classic, Norse, Roman, and Greek Myths. When he was old enough to choose his own reading materials, he chose books by Edger Rice Burroughs and the comic book heroes Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Prince Valiant. When Bradbury was in Waukegan he developed his interest in acting and Drama. After seeing a magician, known as Blackstone, he became f ....

.... of October 1954, when he was twelve, his whole life destiny changed in an instant. Upon finding out that there was a police officer in the basement of a gym, Ali went down in a horrendous state of mind exclaiming a "state wide bike hunt (http://www.planetpapers.com/jump.cgi?ID=182.html)," and said he was going to beat up the person that sole his bike. The way his life changed was that the police officer asked him if he knew how to fight and he said "no." The policeman offered Ali lessons in how to box so that he could seek on the bike thief. This was the starting point in Muhammad Ali’s boxing career. In the late fifties, Cassius Clay rules Golden G ....

.... of composition. Mozart’s operas are from a mind that thought symphonically, so even if you don’t know what’s going on, you can tell you are listening to an extended piece of music in which the dramatic incidents form a part of a perfectly coherent whole. Mozart wrote from some excellent libretti, yet the music is always the dominant element, giving the action inflections of meaning the words alone couldn’t reflect. Furthermore, until Mozart’s emergence, operatic characters where generalized and typical. Mozart was the first to put real people up on the stage, people who had real emotions that were inconsistent and whose personalities we ....

.... impact on film today and the world. Throughout history, it is apparent that those who are recognized as "great ones" were influenced in some way or another to become the leader who they are. In George Lucas' case, he was greatly influenced in his late teens and early twenties. Lucas claims to have chased girls and raced cars throughout high school, and barely made it through (Moritz 258). Soon after high school, Lucas attended Modesto Junior College in California and continued to work on cars as his main interest (Moritz 258). In Smith, Lucas is quoted saying, "I was a hell-raiser; lived, ate, breathed cars! That was everything for me"(84). Lucas even worked on pit cre ....