Biography of Stephen Leacock

(30 December 1869 28 March 1944) was an English-born Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humorist. In the early part of the 20th century he was the bestknown humorist in the English-speaking world. Leacock was born in Swanmore, near Bishop's Waltham, Hampshire, England, and at the age of six moved to Canada with his family, which settled on a farm in Egypt, Ontario, near the village of Sutton and the shores of Lake Simcoe.[2] While the family had been well off in England (the Leacocks had made a fortune in Madeira and lived on an estate called Oak Hill on the Isle of Wight), Leacock's father, Peter, had been banished from the manor for marrying Agnes Butler without his parents' permission. The farm in the Georgina township of York County was not a success and the family (Leacock was the third of eleven children) was kept afloat by money sent by Leacock's grandfather. Peter Leacock became an alcoholic. Stephen Leacock, always of obvious intelligence, was sent by his grandfather to the elite private school of Upper Canada College in Toronto, also attended by his older brothers, where he was top of the class and was chosen as head boy. In 1887, defending his mother and siblings against his father's alcoholic abuse, Leacock ordered him from the family home and he was never seen again. Walter Peter Leacock went to live in Argentina where he was a merchant and lived with a woman named Annie Leacock. That same year, seventeen-year-old Leacock started at University College at the University of Toronto, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, but found he could not resume the following year because of financial difficulties. He left university to work as a teacher an occupation he disliked immensely at Strathroy, Uxbridge and finally in Toronto. As a teacher at Upper Canada College, his alma mater, he was able simultaneously to attend classes at the University of Toronto and, in 1891, earn his degree through part-time studies. It was during this period that his first writing was published in The Varsity, a campus newspaper.

Disillusioned with teaching, in 1899 he began graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he received a doctorate in political science and political economy. He moved from Chicago, Illinois to Montreal, Quebec, where he became a lecturer and long-time acting head of the political economy department at McGill University. He was closely associated with Sir Arthur Currie, former commander of the Canadian Corps in the Great War and principal of McGill from 1919 until his death in 1933. In fact, Currie had been a student observing Leacock's practice teaching in Strathroy in 1888. In 1936, Leacock was forcibly retired by the McGill Board of Governorsan unlikely prospect had Currie lived. Leacock was both a social conservative and a partisan Conservative. He opposed giving women the right to vote, and disliked non-Anglo-Saxon immigration and supported the introduction of social welfare legislation. He was a staunch champion of the British Empire and went on lecture tours to further the cause. Although he was considered as a candidate for Dominion elections by his party, it declined to invite the author, lecturer, and maverick to stand for election. Nevertheless, he would stump for local candidates at his summer home. In 1900 Leacock married Beatrix ("Trix") Hamilton, niece of Sir Henry Pellatt (who had built Casa Loma, the largest castle in North America). In 1915 after 15 years of marriage the couple had their only child, Stephen Lushington Leacock. While Leacock doted on the boy, it became apparent early on that "Stevie" suffered from a lack of growth hormone. Growing to be only four feet tall, he had a love-hate relationship with Leacock, who tended to treat him like a child. Predeceased by Trix (who had died of breast cancer in 1925), Leacock was survived by Stevie, who died in his fifties. In accordance with his wishes, after his death from throat cancer, Leacock was buried in St George the Martyr Churchyard, Sutton, Ontario Shortly after his death, Barbara Nimmo, his niece, literary executor and benefactor, published two major posthumous works: Last Leaves (1945) and The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946). His physical legacy was less treasured, and his abandoned summer cottage became derelict. It was rescued from oblivion when it was declared a National Historic Site of Canada in 1958 and ever since has operated as a museum called the Stephen Leacock Memorial Home. In 1947, the Stephen Leacock Award was created to recognize the best in Canadian literary humour. In 1969, the centennial of his birth, Canada Post issued a six cent stamp with his image on it. The following year, the Stephen Leacock Centennial Committee had a plaque erected at his English birthplace and a mountain in the Yukon was named after him. A number of buildings in Canada are named after Leacock, including the Stephen Leacock Building at McGill University,[8] a theatre in Keswick, Ontario, and schools in Toronto and Ottawa.

Flight Adaption of Birds

The evolution of flight has endowed birds with many physical features in addition to wings and feathers. One of the requirements of heavier-than-air flying machines, birds included, is a structure that combines strength and light weight. One way this is accomplished in birds is by the fusion and elimination of some bones and the "pneumatization" (hollowing) of the remaining ones. Some of the vertebrae and some bones of the pelvic girdle of birds are fused into a single structure, as are some finger and leg bones -- all of which are separate in most vertebrates. And many tail, finger, and leg bones are missing altogether. Not only are some bones of birds, unlike ours, hollow, but many of the hollows are connected to the respiratory system. To keep the cylindrical walls of a bird's major wing bones from buckling, the bones have internal strut-like reinforcements. The pneumatization of bird bones led to the belief that birds had skeletons that weighed proportionately less than those of mammals. Careful studies by H. D. Prange and his colleagues have shown this not to be the case. More demands are placed on a bird's skeleton than on that of a terrestrial mammal. The bird must be able to support itself either entirely by its forelimbs or entirely by its hindlimbs. It also requires a deep, solid breastbone (sternum) to which the wing muscles can be anchored. Thus, while some bones are much lighter than their mammalian counterparts, others, especially the leg bones, are heavier. Evolution has created in the avian skeleton a model of parsimony, lightening where possible, adding weight and strength where required. The results can be quite spectacular: the skeleton of a frigatebird with a seven-foot wingspan weighs less than the feathers covering it! Not all birds have the same degree of skeletal pneumatization. To decrease their buoyancy and make diving easier, some diving birds, such as loons and auklets, have relatively solid bones. Those birds are generally less skillful fliers than ones with lighter skeletons. Birds have found other ways to lighten the load in addition to hollowing out their bones. For instance, they keep their reproductive organs (testes, ovaries and oviducts) tiny for most of the year, greatly enlarging them only during the breeding season. The respiratory system of birds is also adapted to the demands of flight. A bird's respiratory system is proportionately larger and much more efficient than ours -- as might be expected, since flight is a more demanding activity than walking or running. An average bird devotes about one-fifth of its body volume to its respiratory system, an average mammal only about one-twentieth. Mammalian respiratory systems consist of lungs that are blind sacs and of tubes that connect them to the nose and mouth. During each breath, only some of the air contained in the lungs is exchanged, since the lungs do not collapse completely with each exhalation, and some "dead air" then remains in them. In contrast, the lungs of birds are less flexible, and relatively small, but they are interconnected with a system of large, thin-walled air sacs in the front (anterior) and back (posterior) portions of the body. These, in turn, are connected with the air spaces in the bones. Evolution has created an ingenious system that passes the air in a one-

way, two-stage flow through the bird's lungs. A breath of inhaled air passes first into the posterior air sacs and then, on exhalation, into the lungs. When a second breath is inhaled into the posterior sacs, the air from the first breath moves from shrinking lungs into the anterior air sacs. When the second exhalation occurs, the air from the first breath moves from the anterior air sacs and out of the bird, while the second breath moves into the lungs. The air thus moves in one direction through the lungs. All birds have this one-way flow system; most have a second two-way flow system which may make up as much as 20 percent of the lung volume. In both systems, the air is funneled down fine tubules which interdigitate with capillaries carrying oxygen-poor venous blood. At the beginning of the tubules the oxygen-rich air is in close contact with that oxygen-hungry blood; farther down the tubules the oxygen content of air and blood are in equilibrium. Birds' lungs are anatomically very complex (their structure and function are only barely outlined here), but they create a "crosscurrent circulation" of air and blood that provides a greater capacity for the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide across the thin intervening membranes than is found in mammalian lungs. Contrary to what was once believed, the rhythm of a bird's respiratory two-cycle pump is not related to the beats of its wings. Flight movements and respiratory movements are independent. The heart does the pumping required to get oxygenated blood to the tissues and to carry deoxygenated blood (loaded with carbon dioxide) away from them. Because of the efficiency of the bird's breathing apparatus, the ratio of breaths to heartbeats can be quite low. A mammal takes about one breath for every four and onehalf heartbeats (independent of the size of the mammal), a bird about one every six to ten heartbeats (depending on the size of the bird). A bird's heart is large, powerful, and of the same basic design as that of a mammal. It is a four-chambered structure of two pumps operating side by side. One two-chambered pump receives oxygen-rich blood from the lungs and pumps it out to the waiting tissues. The other pump receives oxygen-poor blood from the tissues and pumps it into the lungs. This segregation of the two kinds of blood (which does not occur completely in reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) makes a bird's circulatory system, like its respiratory system, well equipped to handle the rigors of flight. The flight muscles of most birds are red in color ("dark meat") because of the presence of many fibers containing red oxygen-carrying compounds, myoglobin and cytochrome. They are also richly supplied with blood and are designed for sustained flight. Lightercolored muscles ("white meat"), with many fewer such fibers, are found in pheasants, grouse, quail, and other gallinaceous birds. These are also well supplied with blood, are apparently capable of carrying a heavy work load for a short time, but fatigue more rapidly. If a quail is flushed a few times in a row, it will become so exhausted it will be incapable of further flight. Finally, of course, it does little good to be able to sustain flight or fly rapidly if you are always crashing into things. Although birds have found many ways to streamline, lighten, or totally eliminate unnecessary parts (like urinary bladders), they have not stinted on nervous systems. Birds have brains that are proportionately much larger than those of lizards and comparable, in fact, with those of rodents. The brain is connected to

sharp eyes, and has ample processing centers for coordinating the information received from them. A bird's nerves can rapidly transmit commands of the brain to the muscles operating the wings. It is the combination of visual acuity, quick decision making, and high-speed nerve transmission along short nerves that permits a Golden-crowned Sparrow to weave rapidly among the branches of a thicket, escaping the clutches of a pursuing Sharp-shinned Hawk.