General Books

PREFACE It is very difficult to write a preface to a work which is expressly intended as a revelation of the faith of the writer. The successive stages of thought and emotion that have been passed through are still too near, and one feels too deeply. I have made several futile attempts to concentrate into a short note the Truths about Woman that I have tried to convey in my book. I find it impossible... more...

I. THE NEW ECONOMIC LIFE 1. The Historic Present The knell of a dying order is tolling. Its keynote is despair. Gaunt hunger pulls at the bell-rope, while dazed humanity listens, bewildered and afraid. Uncertainty and a sense of futility have gripped the world. They are manifesting themselves in unrest, disillusionment, the abandonment of ideals, opportunism, and a tragic concentration on the life of... more...

I. AS TO HUMANNESS. Let us begin, inoffensively, with sheep. The sheep is a beast with which we are all familiar, being much used in religious imagery; the common stock of painters; a staple article of diet; one of our main sources of clothing; and an everyday symbol of bashfulness and stupidity. In some grazing regions the sheep is an object of terror, destroying grass, bush and forest by omnipresent... more...

Of all the natural sciences there is not one which offers such sublime objects to the attention of the inquirer as does the science of astronomy. From the earliest ages the study of the stars has exercised the same fascination as it possesses at the present day. Among the most primitive peoples, the movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars commanded attention from their supposed influence on human... more...

This history of woodworking hand tools from the 17th to the 20th century is one of a very gradual evolution of tools through generations of craftsmen. As a result, the sources of changes in design are almost impossible to ascertain. Published sources, moreover, have been concerned primarily with the object shaped by the tool rather than the tool itself. The resulting scarcity of information is somewhat... more...

CHAPTER I Shakespeare Translations in Norway In the years following 1750, there was gathered in the city of Trondhjem a remarkable group of men: Nils Krog Bredal, composer of the first Danish opera, John Gunnerus, theologian and biologist, Gerhart Schøning, rector of the Cathedral School and author of an elaborate history of the fatherland, and Peter Suhm, whose 14,047 pages on the history of Denmark... more...

PREFACE This book is not intended to be a full or detailed history of animal morphology: a complete account is given neither of morphological discoveries nor of morphological theories. My aim has been rather to call attention to the existence of diverse typical attitudes to the problems of form, and to trace the interplay of the theories that have arisen out of them. The main currents of morphological... more...

THE WAR THAT NEVER ENDS If, at last the sword is sheathed,And men, exhausted, call it peace,Old Nature wears no olive wreath,The weapons change—war does not cease. The little struggling blades of grassThat lift their heads and will not die,The vines that climb where sunbeams pass,And fight their way toward the sky! And every soul that God has made,Who from despair their lives defendAnd struggling... more...

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. Social organisation. Associations in the lower stages of culture. Consanguinity and Kinship. The Tribe. Kinship groups; totem kins; phratries. The passage from what is commonly termed savagery through barbarism to civilisation is marked by a change in the character of the associations which are almost everywhere a feature of human society. In the lower stages of culture, save... more...

The Contemporary View of Bewick After 1790, when his A general history of quadrupeds appeared with its vivid animals and its humorous and mordant tailpiece vignettes, he was hailed in terms that have hardly been matched for adulation. Certainly no mere book illustrator ever received equal acclaim. He was pronounced a great artist, a great man, an outstanding moralist and reformer, and the master of a... more...