Jim Menegay  wrote:

> r norman  wrote:
> > Tim, I am afraid the facts indicate that prokaryotes really do
> > outweigh everything else.  
> 
> Everyone has heard of Newton and his apple, but it is a little known
> fact that Archimedes was also a victim of the falling fruit.  After
> some investigation, he came up with the theory that apples accelerate
> as they fall.  However, his contemporaries pointed out that apple 
> leaves do not seem to accelerate, and there are more leaves than
> apples.  The debate soon turned to whether the leaves outweighed
> the apples.  Archimedes eventually lost interest in his original idea
> and turned to his brilliant studies regarding the count of the number
> of grains of sand in the cosmos.
> 
> This story was told in the first edition of Plutarch, and was known
> to every Roman schoolboy, but it was suppressed from later editions
> due to the influence of the neoAristotelian establishment.  ;-)

Care to identify which work by Plutarch it was?
http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/browse-Plutarch.html

Otherwise it's just a legend ab urbe condita :-)
-- 
John Wilkins
john_SPAM{at}wilkins.id.au   http://www.wilkins.id.au
"Men mark it when they hit, but do not mark it when they miss" 
                                               - Francis Bacon
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