Fiction Books

CASE I Several years ago, bent on revisiting Perthshire, a locality which had great attractions for me as a boy, I answered an advertisement in a popular ladies' weekly. As far as I can recollect, it was somewhat to this effect: "Comfortable home offered to a gentleman (a bachelor) at moderate terms in an elderly Highland lady's house at Pitlochry. Must be a strict teetotaller and... more...

CHAPTER I THE THREE FRIENDS A canoe containing two boys and a man was moving slowly on one of the little lakes in the great northern wilderness of what is now the State of New York. The water, a brilliant blue under skies of the same intense sapphire tint, rippled away gently on either side of the prow, or rose in heaps of glittering bubbles, as the paddles were lifted for a new stroke. Vast masses of... more...

PREFACE. The present paper was read in the first general meeting of the International Congress of Zoölogists at Leyden on September 16, 1895. Several points, which for reasons of brevity were omitted when the paper was read, have been re-embodied in the text, and an Appendix has been added where a number of topics receive fuller treatment than could well be accorded to them in a lecture. The address... more...

FOREWORD In all the welter of the tragic upheaval which is shattering institutions once thought immutable, condemning millions to physical death and awakening other millions to spiritual life, making staggering discoveries of unexpected human strength or weakness, thrusting men into fame one day or to oblivion the next, there has been nothing more dramatic than the sudden manifestation of the genius of... more...

Hansen was sitting at the control board in the single building on Communications Relay Station 43.4SC, when the emergency light flashed on for the first time in two hundred years. With textbook-recommended swiftness, he located the position of the ship sending the call, identified the ship and the name of its captain, and made contact. “This is Hansen on 43.4SC. Put me through to Captain Fromer.”... more...

It is well known that the number of elements has grown from four in the days of the Greeks to 103 at present, but the change in methods needed for their discovery is not so well known. Up until 1939, only 88 naturally occurring elements had been discovered. It took a dramatic modern technique (based on Ernest O. Lawrence's Nobel-prize-winning atom smasher, the cyclotron) to synthesize the most... more...

A STRANGER FROM SOUTH CAROLINA Time touches all things with destroying hand; and if he seem now and then to bestow the bloom of youth, the sap of spring, it is but a brief mockery, to be surely and swiftly followed by the wrinkles of old age, the dry leaves and bare branches of winter. And yet there are places where Time seems to linger lovingly long after youth has departed, and to which he seems... more...

The Bores is a character-comedy; but the peculiarities taken as the text of the play, instead of being confined to one or two of the leading personages, are exhibited in different forms by a succession of characters, introduced one after the other in rapid course, and disappearing after the brief performance of their rôles. We do not find an evolution of natural situations, proceeding from the... more...

ABOUT ANIMALS.THE ELEPHANTIs the biggest of all land animals. He is more than five times as big as an ox. But he is a harmless creature, for all that. When he is wild, and lives in the woods, he will run away, if you attempt to go near him. When he is tame, he will take a piece of cake out of your pocket, and let you ride upon his back.THE OURANG OUTANGThe Ourang Outang is a species of the ape; it has... more...

LECTURE I. NICHOLAS THE PISAN. 1. On this day, of this month, the 20th of October, six hundred and twenty-three years ago, the merchants and tradesmen of Florence met before the church of Santa Croce; marched through the city to the palace of their Podesta; deposed their Podesta; set over themselves, in his place, a knight belonging to an inferior city; called him "Captain of the People;"... more...