Classics Books

Introduction Bloodletting, the removal of blood from the body, has been practiced in some form by almost all societies and cultures. At various times, bloodletting was considered part of the medical treatment for nearly every ailment known to man. It was also performed as punishment or as a form of worship to a Superior Power or Being. It still retains therapeutic value today, although only for an... more...

I. What Evolution Is. This the age of evolution. The word is used by many men in many senses, and still oftener perhaps in no sense at all. By some it is spoken with a haunting dread as though it were another name for the downfall of religion and of social stability. Still others speak it glibly and joyously as though progress and freedom were secured by the mere use of the name. “The word evolution... more...

PREFACE. I am unwilling to suffer this tale to leave my hands without a word of explanation to my reader. If I have never disguised from myself the grounds of any humble success I have attained to as a writer of fiction; if I have always had before me the fact that to movement and action, the stir of incident, and a certain light-heartedness and gayety of temperament, more easy to impart to others than... more...

EASTERN SHAME GIRL When there is a great peace Under the gold cup of the sun Joy reaches its flowering. In the twentieth year of the period Wan-li, there came, among the thousands of students who gathered at Peking for the examinations, a certain Li, whose first name was Chia and his surname Ch'ien-hsi, or "Purified-a-thousand times." His family were from Shao-hsing fu in Chekiang; his... more...

THE CHILDREN OF THE UPPER GLEN. There was, of course, the Lower Glen, which consisted of boggy places and endless mists in winter, and a small uninteresting village, where the barest necessaries of life could be bought, and where the folks were all of the humbler class, well-meaning, hard-working, but, alas! poor of the poor. When all was said and done, the Lower Glen was a poor place, meant for poor... more...

Chapter I Julia Brabazon The gardens of Clavering Park were removed some three hundred yards from the large, square, sombre-looking stone mansion which was the country-house of Sir Hugh Clavering, the eleventh baronet of that name; and in these gardens, which had but little of beauty to recommend them, I will introduce my readers to two of the personages with whom I wish to make them acquainted in the... more...

THE TALL WOMAN I. "How little we really know, my friends; how little we really know." The speaker was Gabriel, a distinguished civil engineer of the mountain corps. He was seated under a pine tree, near a spring, on the crest of the Guadarrama. It was only about a league and a half distant from the palace of the Escurial, on the boundary line of the provinces of Madrid and Segovia. I know the... more...

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY—HISTORICAL The milk industry is one of the oldest known to mankind, and it is difficult to imagine a time when milk in one way or another did not form a part of the diet of the human race. There is a good deal of evidence to show that in Paleolithic and Neolithic times, cattle were part of the possessions of the nomadic races; and, according to the Vedas, the manufacture of... more...

INTRODUCTION. From the inauguration of the movement for woman's emancipation the Bible has been used to hold her in the "divinely ordained sphere," prescribed in the Old and New Testaments. The canon and civil law; church and state; priests and legislators; all political parties and religious denominations have alike taught that woman was made after man, of man, and for man, an inferior... more...

The calamitous circumstance of having been condemned to death by the laws of his country, for the most hateful of all crimes; and his most extraordinary deliverance from an ignominious fate, and being restored to liberty unconditionally and free! will naturally render the case of Thomas Daniels a subject of eager curiosity and warm debate. That persons in the superior stations of life should sometimes... more...