INTRODUCTION The greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age. Ben Jonson came of the... more...

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was the last male descendant of a French ancestor who came to this country from the Isle of Guernsey. His character exhibited occasional traits drawn from this blood in singular combination with a very strong Saxon genius. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 12th of July, 1817. He was graduated at Harvard College in 1837, but without any literary distinction. An iconoclast... more...

CHAPTER I Outside there was shimmering heat and dry, thirsty sand, miles upon miles of it flashing by in a gray, barren blur. A flat, arid, monotonous land, vast, threatening, waterless, treeless. Its immensity awed, its bleakness depressed. Man's work here seemed but to accentuate the puny insignificance of man. Man had come upon the desert and had gone, leaving only a line of telegraph-poles... more...

The Calamities of Authors have often excited the attention of the lovers of literature; and, from the revival of letters to this day, this class of the community, the most ingenious and the most enlightened, have, in all the nations of Europe, been the most honoured, and the least remunerated. Pierius Valerianus, an attendant in the literary court of Leo X., who twice refused a bishopric that he might... more...

Chapter I The voice of the clergyman intoned the last sad hope of humanity, the final prayer was said, and the mourners turned away, leaving Mrs. Turold to take her rest in a bleak Cornish churchyard among strangers, far from the place of her birth and kindred. The fact would not have troubled her if she had known. In life she had been a nonentity; in death she was not less. At least she could now mix... more...

FACT SHEET Defense Nuclear AgencyPublic Affairs OfficeWashington, D C. 20305 Subject: Project TRINITY Project TRINITY, conducted by the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), was designed to test and assess the effects of a nuclear weapon. The TRINITY nuclear device was detonated on a 100-foot tower on the Alamogordo Bombing Range in south-central New Mexico at 0530 hours on 16 July 1945. The nuclear yield... more...

PREFACE. There is no lack of good manuals of botany in this country. There still seems place for an adequately illustrated book of convenient size for field use. The larger manuals, moreover, cover extensive regions and sometimes fail by reason of their universality to give a definite idea of plants as they grow within more limited areas. New England marks a meeting place of the Canadian and... more...

A PLEA FOR HUMOR More than half a dozen years have passed since Mr. Andrew Lang, startled for once out of his customary light-heartedness, asked himself, and his readers, and the ghost of Charles Dickens—all three powerless to answer—whether the dismal seriousness of the present day was going to last forever; or whether, when the great wave of earnestness had rippled over our heads, we would pluck... more...

CHAPTER I. THE METAMORPHOSIS. NEW YORK, Sunday, Dec. 16. I am going to set down as calmly and fully as I can a plain statement of all that has happened since I came to New York. I shall not trim details, nor soften the facts to humour my own amazement, nor try to explain the marvel that I do not pretend to understand. I begin at the beginning—at the plunge into fairy tale and miracle that I made,... more...

CHAPTER I.THE ORIGIN OF RELIGIOUS FEELING. I believe that man originated his first ideas of the supernatural from the external phenomena of nature which were perceptible to one or more of his five senses; his first theogony was a natural one and one taken directly from nature. In ideation the primal bases of thought must have been founded, ab initio, upon sensual perceptions; hence, must have been... more...