Thomas Bell. He went to sleep just before his big moment. In 1858 he was president of a scholarly organization in London called The Linnean Society. It was a group dedicated to the study and dissemination of information concerning natural history. As he was writing his annual report, he said that there had been "no striking discovery" announced to the group in that year. Oh yeah? Among those who had delivered papers to this society during the year were Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin! Now what ever you might think about evolution both those presentations outlined revolutionary theories on biological evolution. The intellectual history of mankind took a gigantic intellectual leap on the theories of Wallace and Darwin, but Thomas Bell missed it all. He was intellectually asleep and thought that nothing vital had happened in that cozy little group. How we miss the big moment! How we fall asleep just before the great revealing. How we need to stay awake.