Seeing Further - Bill Bryson  ## Metadata - Author: **Bill Bryson** - Full Title: Seeing Further - Category: #books ## Highlights - The Royal Society has been doing interesting and heroic things like this since 1660 when it was founded, one damp weeknight in late November, by a dozen men who had gathered in rooms at Gresham College in London to hear Christopher Wren, twenty-eight years old and not yet generally famous, give a lecture on astronomy. It seemed to them a good idea to form a Society – that is all they called it at first – to assist and promote the accumulation of useful knowledge. (Location 50) - This philosophy is a gift of God to this old world, to serve as the only plank, as it were, which pious and prudent people may use to escape the shipwreck of atheism which now threatens us. – Leibniz, in a 1669 letter to Thomasius (Location 937) - Gregory Benford (Location 5640)