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At the end of the nineteenth century, many Japanese immigrants arrived in the San Francisco area after being told that it was possible to work and study in the area. The Gospel Society was formed by recent converts to Methodism and Congregationalism to assist these often penniless students. The first meeting place was an austere, windowless room in the basement of the Chinese Methodist Episcopal Mission in the city’s Chinatown. Every Saturday night, thirty-five members assembled for Bible study and debate. For a fee of thirty-five cents per month, the society provided community support, room and board, and help with job searching. Over the years, a variety of splinter groups emerged, including a group that formed the First Japanese Presbyterian Church of San Francisco. In 1886, the group moved out of the Chinese Mission basement with the newly established Japanese Methodist Episcopal Mission. Despite the success of the Japanese Mission, the Gospel Society remained an autonomous student residence until the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Courtier. Charles Sackville was born on January 24, 1643, near or at Copt Hall, Essex, England, the second son of Richard Sackville, Lord Bruckhurst, fifth Earl of Dorset, and Lady Frances Cranfield. A descendent of the earls of Dorset on his father’s side and the earls of Middlesex on his mother’s, Sackville would grow up to be a playful pastoral poet who lived a long and interesting life.

Poet. Sir Samuel Garth was born around 1661 in Bolan, Durham, England. A physician by vocation, as a poet he is chiefly remembered as the author of The Dispensary (1699), a burlesque poem defending the practice of the Royal College of Physicians of supplying medicines to outpatient dispensaries, and ridiculing the opposition of apothecaries to this practice. The poem was highly popular, going through ten editions in a little more than forty years.

English painter and writer. Founder of the English School of painting, Reynolds served for more than two decades as the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. His Discourses express the fundamental tenets of neoclassical art, while his paintings anticipated the Romantic movement.

Definition: An ancient branch of the physical sciences with roots at the foundations of Western scientific thought, mechanics has applications in a variety of modern scientific fields. Classical mechanics studies the physical laws and forces that govern the movements and interactions of objects; it covers the motion and behavior of all bodies, from celestial to biological and engineered. Applied mechanics is the branch of physics and engineering that studies the practical and engineering applications of principles of classical mechanics.

Perhaps the profession that most determines its workers’ identities is prostitution. People who exchange the use of their bodies for money are viewed according to their society’s opinion of prostitution. In ancient Greece and Rome, courtesans were socially accepted; however, respect fell away from prostitution with the rise of Christianity. In modern times, prostitution became associated with urban filth, poverty, and disease.

Individualism, a term often used in contrast with collectivism and totalitarianism, prioritizes the needs of the individual—morally, politically, socially and ideologically—to the extent that the total worth of each individual increases and each begins to practice and value their personal aims, goals, dreams and desires more than the collective good of the state. Individualism advocates that the individual is primary and the state secondary. In this doctrine, self-reliance and individual freedom take precedence over the interests of the institution, society, cultural group, or the state. Other philosophies that share some governing principles with individualism including anarchism, existentialism, and classical liberalism. Individualism tends to promote unconventional lifestyles and cultivate appreciation of artistic endeavours while expanding tendencies toward experimentation and self-creation. The term came into disrepute and attracted negative connotations among socialists and conservative intellectuals during the nineteenth century.

Physician. John Arbuthnot (born Arbuthnott) was the eldest of seven children born to a Scottish minister, Alexender Arbuthnott, and his wife, Margaret Lammie. He entered Marischal College in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1681 to study mathematics and physics and graduated in 1689.

English mathematician. John Wallis (WAHL-uhs) was born in the village of Ashford, Kent, the son of the village rector, John Wallis, senior, and his second wife, Joanna Wallis, née Chapman. Wallis’s father died in 1622. He was left with sufficient resources to obtain a good elementary education and enrolled at an Essex school run by Martin Holbech in 1630. There, he was told by the master that he was the best prepared student in mathematics he had encountered. Wallis was, in addition to his mathematical learning, something of a calculating prodigy. From Holbech’s school, he proceeded to Emanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied medicine and took courses in physics as well as moral philosophy.

Philosopher. John Locke was born in the small English village of Wrington, in Somerset, on August 29, 1632. His father, John Locke, Sr., was a local attorney of modest means. His mother, née Agnes Kneene, was the daughter of a local tanner. Both parents were educated Puritans, and while the home atmosphere was austere, it was also intellectual. Locke’s father was a stern and taciturn man who seemed little interested in his son during his youth, but grew friendlier as Locke became an adult. Agnes Locke was ten years older than her husband and thirty-five when John, her first son, was born. She was a pious and affectionate mother. Locke had only one brother, Thomas, born August 9, 1637. Shortly after John Locke’s birth, the family moved to Belluton and a larger and more comfortable farmhouse. Locke, John [g]England;John Locke[Locke, John] Locke, John [c]Philosophy;John Locke[Locke, John]