Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot.

Adjust your volume. Take a nice deep breath in. Let it out slowly and off we go.

This evening we're relaxing with science primers, an introductory by Professor Thomas Henry Huxley, first published

in 1880 by Macmillanin Co, London. Let's begin. Part 1, Nature and Science.

1. Sensations and things.

All the time that we are awake, we are learning by means of our senses, something

about the world in which we live and of which we form apart.

We are constantly aware of feeling or hearing or smelling, and unless we happen to be in the dark of seeing.

At intervals we taste.

We call the information thus obtained, sensation.

When we have any of these sensations,

we commonly say that we feel or hear or smell or see or taste something.

A certain scent makes us say we smell onions, a certain flavor that we taste apples, a certain sound

that we hear a carriage, a certain appearance before our eyes that we see a tree and we call that which

we thus perceive by the aid of our senses a thing or an object.

Two causes and

moreover we say of all these things or objects

that they are the causes of the sensations in question and that the

sensations are the effects of these causes. For example, if we hear a

certain sound, we say it is caused by a carriage going along the road or that it is the effect or the consequence of a carriage passing along.

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