Biography & Autobiography Books

Chapter 1. Parentage: introduction to the royal institution: earliestexperiments: first royal society paper: marriage. It has been thought desirable to give you and the world some image of MICHAEL FARADAY, as a scientific investigator and discoverer. The attempt to respond to this desire has been to me a labour of difficulty, if also a labour of love. For however well acquainted I may be with the... more...

HIPPOCRATES. Owing to the lapse of centuries, very little is known with certainty of the life of Hippocrates, who was called with affectionate veneration by his successors "the divine old man," and who has been justly known to posterity as "the Father of Medicine." He was probably born about 470 B.C., and, according to all accounts, appears to have reached the advanced age of ninety... more...

I War, war, war. For me the beginning of the war was a torchlight tattoo on Salisbury Plain. It was held on one of those breathless evenings in July when the peace of Europe was trembling in the balance, and when most of us had a heartache in case—in case England, at this time of internal crisis, did not rise to the supreme sacrifice. It was just the night for a tattoo—dark and warm and still. Away... more...

BEGINNINGSOne look back—as we hurry o'er the plain,Man's years speeding us along—One look back! From the hollow past again,Youth, come flooding into song!Tell how once, in the breath of summer air,Winds blew fresher than they blow;Times long hid, with their triumph and their care,Yesterday—many years ago!E. E. Bowen.The wayfarer who crosses Lincoln's Inn Fields perceives in the... more...

CHAPTER I. Early shadows--An unmerciful enemy--The miseries of the curse--Sorrow and gloom--What alcohol robs man of--What it does--What it does not do-- Surrounding evils--Blighted homes--A Titan devil--The utterness of the destroyer--A truthful narrative--"It stingeth like an adder." Truth, said Lord Byron, is stranger than fiction. He was right, for so it is. Another has declared that if any... more...

AUGUST On the 30th of July, 1914, motoring north from Poitiers, we had lunched somewhere by the roadside under apple-trees on the edge of a field. Other fields stretched away on our right and left to a border of woodland and a village steeple. All around was noonday quiet, and the sober disciplined landscape which the traveller's memory is apt to evoke as distinctively French. Sometimes, even to... more...

FOURTH FIELD AMBULANCE Shortly after the outbreak of War—after the first contingent had been mobilised, and while they were undergoing training—it became evident that it would be necessary to raise another force to proceed on the heels of the first. Three Infantry Brigades with their Ambulances had already been formed; orders for a fourth were now issued, and naturally the Ambulance would be... more...

CHAPTER I THE CAPTURE OF THE "HITACHI MARU" The S.S. Hitachi Maru, 6,716 tons, of the Nippon Yushen Kaisha (Japan Mail Steamship Co.), left Colombo on September 24, 1917, her entire ship's company being Japanese. Once outside the breakwater, the rough weather made itself felt; the ship rolled a good deal and the storms of wind and heavy rain continued more or less all day. The next day the... more...

CHAPTER I. Forty years ago the departure of a cadet for India was a much more1852 serious affair than it is at present. Under the regulations then in force, leave, except on medical certificate, could only be obtained once during the whole of an officer's service, and ten years had to be spent in India before that leave could be taken. Small wonder, then, that I felt as if I were bidding England... more...

CHAPTER I Parentage and Early Life—Appointment to West Point—Virginian Room- Mates—Acquaintance with General Winfield Scott—Character of the West Point Training—Importance of Learning how to Obey—A trip to New York on a Wager—The West Point Bible-class—Dismissed from the Academy Without Trial—Intercession of Stephen A. Douglas— Restoration to Cadet Duty—James B. McPherson—John... more...