Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, a preacher and a college and university president in four Southern states, published the earliest of these backwoods sketches and in the character Ransy Sniffle, in the accounts of sharp horse-trading and eye-gouging physical combat, and in the shockingly unliterary speech of his characters, he set an example followed by many after him.

One of the earliest accounts relating to a large unknown freshwater animal was in 1818, when Hamilton Hume and James Meehan found some large bones at Lake Bathurst in New South Wales.

Innovations introduced by Muslim economists, traders and merchants include the earliest uses of credit, cheques, promissory notes, savings accounts, transactional accounts, loaning, trusts, exchange rates, the transfer of credit and debt, and banking institutions for loans and deposits.

Early conceptions of ecology, such as a balance and regulation in nature can be traced to Herodotus ( died c. 425 BC ), who described one of the earliest accounts of mutualism in his observation of " natural dentistry ".

A Chinese alchemical text dated 492 noted saltpeter burnt with a purple flame, providing a practical and reliable means of distinguishing it from other inorganic salts, thus enabling alchemists to evaluate and compare purification techniques ; the earliest Arabic and Latin accounts of saltpeter purification are dated after 1200.

The very earliest accounts of belief are contained in these texts, such as early Christian creeds and hymns, as well as accounts of the Passion, the empty tomb, and Resurrection appearances ; some of these are dated to the 30s or 40s CE, originating within the Jerusalem Church.

Outside of the Book of Acts which contains the death of Saint Stephen, the Martyrdom is considered one of the earliest genuine accounts of a Christian martyrdom, and is one of the very few genuine accounts from the actual age of the persecutions.

The earliest references to Nubia's successor kingdoms are contained in accounts by Greek and Egyptian Coptic authors of the conversion of Nubian kings to Christianity in the 6th century AD.

The earliest are two eyewitness accounts written by white adventurer-traders who met Shaka during the last four years of his reign.

The earliest term by which these narratives were known, “ urban belief tales ,” highlights what was then thought to be a key property: they were held, by their tellers, to be true accounts, and the device of the FOAF was a spurious but significant effort at authentication.

By most accounts, the earliest Arabic and Latin descriptions of the purification of saltpeter do not appear until the 13th century.

The 8th century St Martin's Cross on Iona There are no written accounts of pre-Christian Dál Riata, the earliest records coming from the chroniclers of Iona and Irish monasteries.

Accounts of the event have survived in which Aethelberht is killed through the machinations of Offa's wife Cynethryth, but the earliest manuscripts in which these possibly legendary accounts are found date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and recent historians do not regard them with confidence.

However, the earliest documentary reference to sampler making is recorded in 1502 The household expense accounts of Elizabeth of York record that:

The earliest accounts of the legend state that she lived during the Northern Wei dynasty ( 386 – 534 ).

The earliest accounts of the legend state that she lived during the Northern Wei dynasty ( 386 – 534 ).

Although this concept of the circulatory system is greatly flawed, it represents one of the earliest accounts of scientific thought.

The origins of the Italian history can be traced back to the 9th century BC, when earliest accounts date the presence of Italic tribes in present-day central Italy.

Thucydides's description of the Plague of Athens is considered one of the earliest accounts of a disease epidemic.

The earliest known accounts of the death of Iphigenia are included in Euripides ' Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris, both Athenian tragedies of the fifth century BCE set in the Heroic Age.

The earliest historical accounts date to the Roman period, mostly due to Greco-Roman ethnography, with some epigraphic evidence due to the Raetians, Lepontii and Gauls, with Ligurians and Venetii occupying the fringes in the soutwest and souteast, respectively.

But the pontifical records of early Rome were most likely destroyed when the city was sacked by the Gauls in 387 BC, and the earliest accounts of Archaic Rome come from the literature of the Republic, most of it from the 1st century BC and later.

The earliest source that indisputably links the red flag with a white cross to a Danish King, and to the realm itself, is found in a Dutch armorial, the " Gelre Armorial " ( Dutch: Wapenboek Gelre ), written between 1340 and 1370 ( some sources say 1378 or 1386 ).

There is no mention of Euclid in the earliest remaining copies of the Elements, and most of the copies say they are " from the edition of Theon " or the " lectures of Theon ", while the text considered to be primary, held by the Vatican, mentions no author.

* The earliest such reference occurs in 1589 when Thomas Nashe in his introduction to Robert Greene's Menaphon implies the existence of an early Hamlet: " English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences, as Blood is a begger, and so forth ; and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.

Dao is graphically distinguished between its earliest nominal meaning of dao 道 " way ; road ; path ;" and the later verbal sense of " say ".

One of his earliest childhood memories was being made to stand on a table and say " Ladies and gentlemen " to the assembled audience, probably at a gathering to promote the election of George Canning as MP for Liverpool in 1812.

Singular to say the earliest distinction he acquired in life was as a poet.

Later accounts say that oak platforms were discovered every, but the earliest accounts simply say that " marks " of some type were found at these places.

The earliest expressions of the doctrine are found in the gospels of Matthew ( Matthew 1: 18 ) and Luke, which say that Mary was a virgin at the time of Jesus ' birth and that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

Later writers, such as Diogenes Laërtius who cite Aristotle as the earliest source, say that Socrates had a second wife called Myrto.

" The whole collection, as a collection, is Homeric in the only useful sense that can be put upon the word ;" A. W. Verrall noted in 1894, " that is to say, it has come down labeled as ' Homer ' from the earliest times of Greek book-literature.

In the earliest oral history, the Algonquins say they migrated from the Atlantic coast.

This account contains much curious detail on Orkney, including the earliest account of the Picts as small people who hid in the daytime, but it has little to say about Rognvald. In the days of Harald Fairhair, king of Norway, certain pirates, of the family of the most vigorous prince Ronald, set out with a great fleet, and crossed the Solundic sea ..., and subdued the islands to themselves.

In one of the earliest cut scenes in the game Metal Gear Solid 4 Hal " Otacon " Emmerich cites " classic Werner syndrome " as the most apparent cause of Solid Snake's premature aging, though goes on to say that testing is inconclusive.

It is unlikely that it is possible to reconstruct a historical Tower of Babel linguistic community in which all humans spoke a common language ( although we can say with confidence that large stone edifices built by large organized communities of people, which date to the Neolithic era at the earliest, weren't built by any culture on Earth until at least many tens of thousands of years after there was a hypothetical common language of all humans, or even of all Eurasians ), or to gain very specific insight about what the language the original proto-Eurasians or the earliest modern humans spoke, although the lack of instances of writing more than about 5, 500 years ago, despite the extensive recovery of earlier artifacts and art from prehistory, makes it unlikely that earlier humans had anything approaching a complete written language.

The earliest, such as the " psychologist " program ELIZA, did little more than identify key words and feed them back to the user, but even forty years ago Colby's PARRY program at Stanford university, far superior to ELIZA, exhibited many of the features researchers now seek to put into a dialog system, above all some form of emotional response and having something " it wants to say ", rather than being completely passive like ELIZA.

Summarising the Christian Renoux book on the prayer, an article by Egidio Picucci on the 19 – 20 January 2009 issue of L ' Osservatore Romano says that the earliest record of the prayer is its appearance, as " a beautiful prayer to say during Mass " in the December 1912 number of the small devotional French publication La Clochette, " the bulletin of the League of the Holy Mass ".

Historians say that this was the earliest human settlement of the entire region.

The earliest two versions based on Ynglingatal, i. e. Historia Norwegiæ and Íslendingabók ( see below ) say that Dag was succeeded by his sons Alrekr and Eírikr who in their turn were succeeded by Dag's grandson Agne ( in Historia Norwegiæ incorrectly called Hogne ):

Although the ancient Greeks ( among others ) had much to say on discourse, some scholars consider the Austrian emigre Leo Spitzer's Stilstudien Studies of 1928 the earliest example of discourse analysis ( DA ); Michel Foucault himself translated it into French.

Thus from the earliest time the advowson was " appurtenant to " the manor, that is to say it appertained to the manor and was exercisable by the lord.

Biographical notes of 1887 say that Sir Charles stated that he was born in the house and lived there as a young child, and this was the scene of some of his earliest experiments.

One could also say that it is the earliest moment in time, as the Planck time is perhaps the shortest possible interval of time, and the Planck epoch lasted only this brief instant.