Early English History

Barrington saw the eight-year-old Mozart perform in London. He then met with Mozart and his family, and he recounts that meeting, describing Mozart's skill at sight-reading and improvisatory composition demonstrated at the meeting, as well as describing elements of the young composer's personality. He also conveys the results of his research into Mozart's other early activities and compares Mozart's precocious talents to other well-known child prodigies of his era.

In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's Divine Comedy. Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the 20th century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars.