Information about osteological changes in the groups of reptiles that gave rise to mammals is preserved in the fossil record, but the musculature of these reptiles has been lost forever. Nevertheless, a reasonably accurate picture of the morphology and the spatial relationships of the muscles of many of these extinct vertebrates can be inferred by studying the scars or other marks delimiting the... more...

INTRODUCTION André Dacier's Poëtique d'Aristote Traduite en François avec des Remarques was published in Paris in 1692. His translation of Horace with critical remarks (1681-1689) had helped to establish his reputation in both France and England. Dryden, for example, borrowed from it extensively in his Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693). No doubt this earlier... more...

INTRODUCTION When the traveller, bent on some important quest, makes a prolonged and perilous journey and returns in safety to his friends and neighbors, instinctively those who have known him in former years realize that he is, and he is not, the same person who had dwelt among them. He has seen unfamiliar peoples, traversed strange lands, encountered unexpected dangers. Old prepossessions have been... more...

CHAPTER ONE One afternoon in late October four lean mules, with stringy muscles dragging over their bones, stretched long legs at the whirring of their master's whip. The canalman was a short, ill-favored brute, with coarse red hair and freckled skin. His nose, thickened by drink, threatened the short upper lip with obliteration. Straight from ear to ear, deep under his chin, was a zigzag scar... more...

The cemetery of Père Lachaise is the Westminster Abbey of Paris. Both are the dwellings of the dead; but in one they repose in green alleys and beneath the open sky—in the other their resting place is in the shadowy aisle and beneath the dim arches of an ancient abbey. One is a temple of nature; the other a temple of art. In one the soft melancholy of the scene is rendered still more touching by the... more...

CHAPTER I A GREAT BANK ROBBERY On the eleventh day of April, 18—, the officers of the Bank of England were greatly excited on receiving notice of a special meeting called for that night at ten o'clock, an unusual hour, and indicating, surely, something of great importance. Promptly at the hour appointed fifteen directors occupied their usual places in the council chamber. There were also present... more...

THE TRAVELLERS. In the month of June, (the jubilee month of poets and travellers) in the year eighteen hundred and eighteen, Mr. Sackville, his wife, and their two children, Edward and Julia, made the grand tour of Niagara, the lakes, Montreal, Quebec, &c. Both parents and children kept journals, in which they recorded with fidelity whatever they observed which they deemed worthy of note. We have... more...

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" is an Hitchcockian and blood-curdling study of the psychopath and his victims. At the centre of this masterpiece, set in the exquisitely decadent scapes of Italy, is a titanic encounter between Ripley, the aforementioned psychopath protagonist and young Greenleaf, a consummate narcissist. Ripley is a cartoonishly poor young adult whose overriding desire is to belong to... more...

everend Sir, THE author of the following strictures hopes your candour will pardon his addressing you in this public manner. Who he is, or what he is, signifies very little; only he begs leave to intimate, that he hopes he is a follower of that Saviour who “gave himself a ransom for all.” He was convinced when young in years, in a great measure, by reading “Alleine’s Alarm;” and the... more...

This time two hundred years ago—in the beginning of January, 1666—those of our forefathers who inhabited this great and ancient city, took breath between the shocks of two fearful calamities: one not quite past, although its fury had abated; the other to come. Within a few yards of the very spot on which we are assembled, so the tradition runs, that painful and deadly malady, the plague, appeared... more...