Non-Classifiable Books

Preface here is no need here to enter a plea for story-telling. Its value in the home and in the school is assured. Miss Bryant, in her charming book, How to Tell Stories to Children, says, "Perhaps never, since the really old days, has story-telling so nearly reached a recognized level of dignity as a legitimate and general art of entertainment as now." And, in the guise of entertainment, the... more...

PHILOSOPHY AMONG THE GREEKS AND ROMANS. Among the Greeks and Romans of the classical age philosophy occupied the place taken by religion among ourselves. Their appeal was to reason not to revelation. To what, asks Cicero in his Offices, are we to look for training in virtue, if not to philosophy? Now, if truth is believed to rest upon authority it is natural that it should be impressed upon the mind... more...

PREFACE. It has always appeared to me a curious thing that the bow, without which the fiddle could have no being, should have received so scant attention, not alone from the community of fiddlers, but also from writers on the subject. I only know of one book in which the subject is adequately handled. Out of every twenty violinists who profess to some knowledge of the various types of Cremonese and... more...

WEST AND NORTH OF CHARING CROSS Beginning at the extreme westerly limit of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, on the south side of Hyde Park Corner, we find ourselves in the Green Park. This is a triangular piece of ground, which was formerly called Little or Upper St. James's Park. It has not much history. In 1642 fortifications were erected on Constitution Hill, and at the end of the seventeenth... more...

PREFACE Forefront in this book, because forefront in the author’s heart and desire, must stand a plea for the restoration to the greatest mountain in North America of its immemorial native name. If there be any prestige or authority in such matter from the accomplishment of a first complete ascent, “if there be any virtue, if there be any praise,” the author values it chiefly as it may give... more...

CHAPTER I I was laughed at for nearly twenty years because I stammered. I found school a burden, college a practical impossibility and life a misery because of my affliction. I was born in Wabash county, Indiana, and as far back as I can remember, there was never a time when I did not stammer or stutter. So far as I know, the halting utterance came with the first word I spoke and for almost twenty... more...

A word should be said as to the origin and history of this book. When the late Dr. Hoch became Director of the Psychiatric Institute of the New York State Hospitals in 1910, he found there an interest in just the kind of psychiatric research which it was his ambition to further. His predecessor, Adolf Meyer, had developed the conception that the psychoses should be looked on as psychobiological... more...

i. The Principle of Economy. § 1. Commenting on the seeming incongruity between his father's argumentative powers and his ignorance of formal logic, Tristram Shandy says:—"It was a matter of just wonder with my worthy tutor, and two or three fellows of that learned society, that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools, should be able to work after that fashion with them."... more...

ACRES OF DIAMONDS WHEN going down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers many years ago with a party of English travelers I found myself under the direction of an old Arab guide whom we hired up at Bagdad, and I have often thought how that guide resembled our barbers in certain mental characteristics. He thought that it was not only his duty to guide us down those rivers, and do what he was paid for doing,... more...

INTRODUCTION The Sunday school chapter of Church history is now being written. It comes late in the volume, but those who are writing it and those who are reading it realize—as never before—that the Sunday school is rapidly coming to its rightful place. In the Sunday school, as elsewhere, it is the little child who has led the way to improvement. The commanding appeal of the little ones opened the... more...