Behold the rain, which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.
Conservative. Idaho. Software engineer. Historian. Trying to prevent Idiocracy from becoming a documentary.
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Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The Famous Franklin Quote About Beer
You know, the one about "Beer is proof that God loves us"? There's some question about that, but this does seem to be properly sourced:
I suppose it's not surprising that Franklin was familiar with the experiments of Jan Baptista van Helmont, who had discovered in 1662 that trees gain their mass from water rather from the soil as popularly believed. (He missed the contribution of carbon dioxide, and the role that sunlight plays in photosynthesis.)
ReplyDeleteBy the standards of the day, this probably counted as current news, although it was perhaps a bit stale even then to be considered breaking.
As corrector of history yourself, you may be interested to know that there was recently something of a scandal involving the modern teaching of Helmont's work by Douglas Allchin in 2002.