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How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, or bays; And their uncessant labours see Crown'd from some single herb or tree, Whose short and narrow verged shade Does prudently their toils upbraid; While all flowers and all trees do close To weave the garlands of repose. The common aims of plants and animals are the conversion of energy to their own purposes and the perpetuation of their species. All energy in the solar system ultimately comes from the Sun as light emission, and organisms that can use this source directly belong to one of the autotrophic groups, which are independent of outside sources of organic substances. These direct solar energy converters, or phototrophs, are almost exclusively plants, the rare exceptions being found among the bacteria. An example of this latter esoteric group is Halobacterium halobium. But not all plants are autotrophic. A major division, or phylum, of the plant kingdom are the mycophyta, or fungi, which include mushrooms, moulds and yeasts. These heterotrophs are all either saprophytes, obtaining nutriment in solution from the decaying tissues of plants or animals, or parasites. The latter group are important agents of disease, mainly in other plants but occasionally in animals. We will not be concerned here with such plants, and neither will we consider all phototrophic plants. The algae, which are simple photosynthetic plants, were formerly classified as belonging to a single taxonomic division. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What! will the line stretch out to the crack of doom? When Lewis Carroll's Walrus suggested that the time had come ‘to talk of many things; of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings’, the intention was to reel off an impressively incongruous list of items. In point of fact, however, he was merely reciting an inventory of materials all of which are at least partly composed of polymers. And the list was by no means exhaustive, for he could have gone on to add paper and paint, rubber and rope, fur and flax, and wood and wool, and so on. The polymer domain is a veritable pot-pourri which displays greater variety than is seen in any other class of substances. Of all materials used by Man, those based on polymer molecules have been around longest. Wood, for example, was pressed into service long before metals were being smelted, and wood is composed of cellulose, lignin and resins, all of which are natural organic polymers. Nevertheless, an adequate knowledge of polymer structure and properties has been acquired only during recent decades. The reason for the delay lies in the fact that these molecules are frequently very large and complex compared with anything encountered in metals and ceramics. Analysis of such huge aggregates of atoms, with molecular weights frequently running into the hundreds of thousands, has required the sophistication of modern instrumentation, and polymer science is still a relatively young discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep in unfathomable mines Of never failing skill He treasures up his bright designs And works his sovereign will The way in which the world came into being, and the time of this important event, have of course been the subject of frequent speculation down through the ages. The issue reveals an interesting schism between oriental and occidental philosophies. The Hindus, for instance, have long maintained that the Earth has existed for thousands of millions of years. In sharp contrast to this, we have the views of Archbishop Ussher and Dr Lightfoot, who, in the middle of the seventeenth century, made a systematic scrutiny of the Bible. They found that a consistent chronological sequence could be established and were able to announce that creation commenced promptly at 9 am on Sunday, 23 October, in the year 4004 BC. The remarkable fact is that this result continued to be taken seriously until not much more than a hundred years ago. And there are many who still believe it. The various scientific methods that have been brought to bear on the question during the past century have successively increased the estimates of the age of the Earth and its neighbouring planets. One can now state, with reasonable confidence, that the solar system is about 6000 million years old. This makes it between a third and a half the age of the Universe itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering. Our world is a material world. Everything we see, touch, taste or smell is composed of one or more materials. Even our hearing depends on the interaction of the eardrums with the gaseous form of that familiar, though invisible, material known as air. Interest in the matter that makes up our environment has grown with the realization that it can be brought under control. At the dawn of civilization this control was of a rather rudimentary type. The earliest use of such materials as stone, wood, and the bones and skin of animals involved relatively minor alterations to these substances, and they were naturally taken for granted. Just which physical phenomena led to speculation about the nature of materials remains a matter of conjecture. The stimulation probably came from observations of simple modifications of state, such as the irreversible change caused by the burning of wood and the reversible changes between the solid, liquid, and gaseous forms of substances like water. The great diversity of form and behaviour seen in the material world stems from the wide range of chemical composition. Although chalk and cheese, for example, are both composed of atoms, the atoms are of different kinds and are combined in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A police officer recently told us a story about a “rogue” caravan park. The caravan park was a known problem site with an average of twenty calls being received each month by the police department about disturbances, domestic disputes, drug dealing, car breaks and malicious damage at the park. Police had power under state laws to enter caravans and issue directions to prevent serious nuisances, including a provision that allowed them to exclude offenders from the park for up to twenty-four hours (Police Powers and Responsibilities Act 2000 (Qld) ss368–371), but this was not preventing the problems from recurring. After many frustrating attempts to deal with the problem, the police learned that the manager was in violation of capacity conditions set in a permit from the local council (issued under the Brisbane City Council Local Law Caravan Parks and Relocatable Home Parks 2000), slotting more residents into the park than was allowed. The police created a crime control partnership with the local council as well as with the company that held the caravan park insurance policy. The local council instigated action (for failure to comply with the conditions of the permit, an offence attracting a maximum penalty of up to 50 penalty units or $3750 under s13 of the Local Law, and also leading to possible revocation of the permit, under s19). The insurance company investigated the caravan park and cancelled their insurance because of breach of policy conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]