, II.12: Is it not better for a man to suspend his owne perswasion, than to meddle with these sedicious and quarellous [translating quereleuses] divisions?

He was so eloquent in drawing the picture of his own neglected merits, and so pathetic in lamenting over it when it was done, that I felt quite at my wits' end how to console him, when it suddenly occurred to me that here was a case for the wholesome application of a bit of Robinson Crusoe.

Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers. Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets is only a small part of what leveraged buy-outs are about, they insist. Improving the workings of the businesses they take over is just as core to their calling, if not more so. Much of their pleading is public-relations bluster.

Paleointensity cannot be predicted by theory or from numerical simulation, since the mechanisms involved in the geodynamo are not sufficiently constrained.