women-scientists-from-scotland

"If one could only go on and on with original work…, life would be a most beautiful dream; but you…use most of your available time preparing the work of others for publication"

"Labor honestly, conscientiously, and steadfastly, and recognition and success must crown your efforts in the end.”"

"My home life is necessarily different from that of other officers of the University since all housekeeping cares rest on me, in addition to those of providing the means to meet their expenses. My son Edward…knows little or nothing of the value of money and, therefore, has the idea but that everything should be forthcoming on demand"

"I am immediately told that I receive an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand.…Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of as well as the men?…And this is considered an enlightened age!"

"While we cannot maintain that in everything woman is man’s equal, yet in many things her patience, perseverance, and method make her his superior"

"It might seem an extremely easy matter to obtain accurate records of food consumed. Experience shows that it is not so. At the foot of the social scale there is a residue of housewives who are incapable of keeping accurate records, even with help and supervision. The work of Dr A. M. Thomson (unpublished) on shows that those unable to keep records are, almost certainly, worse fed than the more intelligent. In most surveys they swell the proportion of non-cooperators. But in all social and intellectual grades, vigilance is needed. Even highly intelligent scientists have been found grossly inaccurate in attempts to record what they ate the day before (Morrison, Russell & Stevenson, 1949)."

"A very large number of variables must be considered and either eliminated by matching or allowed for in the plan of any piece of research in . First the animals, including man: to be taken into account are breed, sex, age, size at birth and at completed growth, rate of growth or of production (milk, egg, meat), stage of reproductive life, previous dietary history, physical environment (e.g., temperature and humidity). Second, in diet there is a great complexity of s. Known to be of importance are about 20 s, 14 inorganic elements each in many different compounds, and 17 s of known structure; of s there are 10 sugars and 8 groups of s; 14 s, and as many s, innumerable pigments and aromatic substances, as well as many injurious and inert components, present in countless different foods. Add to which that a complete longitudinal study of human growth must take about 20 years, of growth in a pig at least 3 years and even in a rat 9 months; and that there is the reproductive span also, and old age beyond that. It is obvious that the number of possible questions is enormous and that no one man or one team in the whole of a lifetime can hope to cover by original research more than a minute part of any nutritional field."

"... Dr Isabella Leitch ... had a profound but often unacknowledged or unrecognizaed influence on nutritional science and scientists. Though a member of the since its formation, she never held office except as an editor of the first three volumes of the ' and the first five volumes of the . She contributed several papers of notable originality to its meetings and in 1979 the Society paid tribute by electing her as an Honorary Member. She was Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Nutrition in Aberdeen from 1945 until her retirement in 1960; and as a member of staff of the Bureau since its formation was the driving force behind Nutrition Abstracts and Reviews for over 30 years."

"The decline of Harappan urbanism probably had many contributing factors. The shift to a concentration on kharif cultivation in the outer regions of the state may have seriously disrupted established schedules for craft production, civic flood defense, building and drain maintenance, and other publicly organized works on which the smooth running of the state depended. The reduction in the waters of the Saraswati and the response of its farmers by migrating into regions to the east tore apart the previous unity of the Harappan state, disrupting its cohesion and its ability to control the internal distribution network."

"In contrast, changes taking place in the Saraswati Valley in the early second millennium were probably a major contributor to the Indus decline. In Harappan times, the Saraswati was a major river system flowing from the Siwaliks at least to Bahawalpur, where it probably ended in a substantial inland delta. The ancient Saraswati River was fed by a series of small rivers that rose in the Siwaliks, but it drew the greater part of its waters from two much larger rivers rising high in the Himalayas: the Sutlej and the Yamuna. In its heyday the Saraswati appears to have supported the densest settlement and provided the greatest arable yields of any part of the Indus realms. The Yamuna, which supplied most of the water flowing in the Drishadvati, a major tributary of the Saraswati, changed its course, probably early in the second millennium, to flow into the Ganges drainage. The remaining flow in the Drishadvati became small and seasonal: Late Harappan sites in Bahawalpur are concentrated in the portion of the Sarawati east of Yazman, which was fed by the Sutlej. At a later date the Sutlej also changed its course and was captured by the Indus. These changes brought about massive depopulation of the Saraswati Valley, which by the end of the millennium was described as a place of potsherds and ruin mounds whose inhabitants had gone away. At the same time new settlements appeared in the regions to the south and east, in the upper Ganges-Yamuna doab. Some were located on the palaeochannels that mark the eastward shift of the Yamuna. Presumably many of the Late Harappan settlers had originated in the Saraswati Valley."

"The now-dry Hakra River forms part of this river system. Surveys along its dry bed revealed that this was one of the most densely populated areas of the 3rd millennium, the agricultural heartland of the civilization, although it is now virtually desert."

"This work revealed an incredibly dense concentration of sites, along the dried-up course of a river that could be identified as the ‘Saraswati’. . . Suddenly it became apparent that the ‘Indus’ Civilization was a misnomer—although the Indus had played a major role in the rise and development of the civilization, the ‘lost Saraswati’ River, judging by the density of settlement along its banks, had contributed an equal or greater part to its prosperity...Many people today refer to this Early state as the ‘Indus-Saraswati Civilization’ and continuing references [in her book] to the ‘Indus Civilization’ should be seen as an abbreviation in which the ‘Saraswati’ is implied."

"‘[The desertion of the Drishadvati and the Sutlej] is typical of the instability of the river courses in the Indus plains—but in the case of the Saraswati, the effect was not localized but devastating on a major scale. Cities, towns, and villages were abandoned, their inhabitants drifting to other regions of the Indus realms and eastward towards the Ganges, pushing back the centuries-old eastern boundaries of Indus culture and venturing into uncharted territory.’"

"In the Indus period the Saraswati river system may have been even more productive than that of the Indus, judging by the density of settlement along its course. In the Bahawalpur region, in the western portion of the river, settlement density far exceeded that elsewhere in the Indus civilization . . . While there are some fifty sites known along the Indus, the Saraswati has almost a thousand . . . [The Yamuna] shifted its course eastward early in the second millennium, eventually reaching its current bed by the first millennium, while the Drishadvati bed retained only a small seasonal flow; this seriously decreased the volume of water carried by the Saraswati. The Sutlej gradually shifted its channel northward, eventually being captured by the Indus drainage . . . The loss of the Sutlej waters caused the Saraswati to be reduced to the series of small seasonal rivers familiar today. Surveys show a major reduction in the number and size of settlements in the Saraswati region during the second millennium."

"The Indus civilization has challenged scholars’ understanding since its discovery some eighty years ago, and in recent years the application of systematic and problem-orientated research, coupled with much new and unexpected data, has overturned many previous interpretations."