December 27

Mirza Ghalib, the Persian and Urdu poet of the late Mughal era whose ghazals are still widely recited, was born in Agra.

Thomas William Rhys Davids, the Pali scholar who founded the Pali Text Society in 1881, died on this day in 1922.

Mehmet Akif Ersoy, poet of the Istiklal Marsi, died in Istanbul after years spent in Egypt.

Louis Pasteur, the chemist and microbiologist behind pasteurization, key vaccine work, and support for the germ theory of disease, was born in Dole, France.

HMS Beagle sailed from Plymouth, England, with the young naturalist Charles Darwin aboard, beginning the nearly five-year voyage that shaped his thinking about the natural world.