Out of the shadows of night The world rolls into light:        It is daybreak everywhere.             Longfellow. BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY JOHN FISKE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED...

Dear Tom ,—It has long been my wish to make you the patron saint or tutelar divinity of some book of mine, and it has lately occurred to me that it ought to be a book of the desultory and chatty sort that would remind you, in your present exile at the world's eastern rim, of the many quiet evenings of old, when, over a tankard of mellow October and pipe of fragrant Virginia, while Yule logs crackled blithely and the music of pattering sleet was upon the window-pane, we used to roam in fancy thro

In the course of the year 1774 Dr. Priestley found that by heating red precipitate, or what we now call red oxide of mercury, a gas was obtained, which he called "dephlogisticated air," or, in other words, air deprived of phlogiston, and therefore incombustible. This incombustible air was oxygen , and such was man's first introduction to the mighty element that makes one fifth of the atmosphere in volume and eight ninths of the ocean by weight, besides forming one half of the earth's solid crust

It was not strange that among the younger men whose opinions were moulded between 1830 and 1840 there should have been one of organizing genius, with a mind inexhaustibly fertile in suggestions, who should undertake to elaborate a general doctrine of evolution, to embrace in one grand coherent system of generalizations all the minor generalizations which workers in different departments of science were establishing. It is this prodigious work of construction that we owe to Herbert Spencer. He is

In one of the most beautiful of all the shining pages of his "History of the Spanish Conquest in America," Sir Arthur Helps describes the way in which, through "some fitness of the season, whether in great scientific discoveries or in the breaking into light of some great moral cause, the same processes are going on in many minds, and it seems as if they communicated with each other invisibly. We may imagine that all good powers aid the 'new light,' and brave and wise thoughts about it float alo

The remarks which my friend Mr. Clark has made with reference to the reconciling of science and religion seem to carry me back to the days when I first became acquainted with the fact that there were such things afloat in the world as speculations about the origin of man from lower forms of life; and I can recall step by step various stages in which that old question has come to have a different look from what it had thirty years ago. One of the commonest objections we used to hear, from the mou

In approaching the subject of the origins of liberal thought in America, one cannot help remembering that the discovery of the new continent was itself such a stimulus to free thinking as the world had never before witnessed. From time immemorial, the trade between Europe and the remote parts of Asia had followed certain customary routes. From ancient days, long before Olympiads were heard of, when Assyrian kings with curly beards commemorated their victories in arrow-headed inscriptions, men ha

With the single exception of Cromwell, the greatest statesman of the heroic age of Puritanism was unquestionably the younger Henry Vane. He did as much as any one to compass the downfall of Strafford; he brought the military strength of Scotland to the aid of the hard-pressed Parliament; he administered the navy with which Blake won his astonishing victories; he dared even withstand Cromwell at the height of his power, when his measures savoured too much of violence. After the death of Pym in 16

After negotiations which had been pending for nearly two years, the general Arbitration Treaty between the United States and Great Britain was signed on the 11th of January [1897] by Mr. Richard Olney and Sir Julian Pauncefote, representing the two countries concerned; and on the following day the document was sent by President Cleveland to the Senate for ratification. The provisions of this important treaty may be summarized as follows:— It is expected that differences arising between the two c

In the summer of 1865 I had occasion almost daily to pass by the pleasant windows of Little, Brown & Co., in Boston, and it was not an easy thing to do without stopping for a moment to look in upon their ample treasures. Among the freshest novelties there displayed were to be seen Lord Derby's translation of the Iliad, Forsyth's Life of Cicero, Colonel Higginson's Epictetus, a new edition of Edmund Burke's writings, and the tasteful reprint of Froude's History of England, just in from th

The sudden death of Professor Freeman, last March [1892], was a great calamity to the world of letters. Although his achievements in the field of historical writing had been so varied and voluminous, yet some of his most important themes—some of those which had been slowly ripening and most richly developed in his mind—were still awaiting literary treatment at his hands, and at the time of his death he had just finished the third volume of a colossal work which was still in its earlier stages. H

We have met together this evening on one of those occasions, which keep recurring, for communities as well as for individuals, when it is desirable to take a retrospect of the past, to call attention to some of the characteristic incidents in our history, to sum up the work we have done and estimate the position we occupy in the world. As long as we retain the decimal numeration that is natural to ten-fingered creatures, we shall encounter such moments at intervals of half centuries and centurie

Since the days when Castrèn made his arduous journeys of linguistic exploration in Siberia, or when the brothers Grimm collected their rich treasures of folk-lore from the lips of German peasants, an active quest of vocables and myths has been conducted with much zeal and energy in nearly all parts of the world. We have tales, proverbs, fragments of verse, superstitious beliefs and usages, from Greenland, from the southern Pacific, from the mountaineers of Thibet and the freedmen upon Georgia pl

"The small philosopher is a great character in New England. His fundamental rule of logical procedure is to guess at the half and multiply by two. [Applause.]" [31] It is [in 1880] only two or three years since the philosopher from whom this text is quoted was himself a great character in New England, inasmuch as he could give a lecture once every week, in one of the largest halls of New England's principal city, and could entertain his audience of two or three thousand people with discussions o

Some time ago, while I happened to be looking over a wheelbarrow-load of rubbish written to prove that such plays as "King Lear" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" emanated from one of the least poetical and least humorous minds of modern times, I was reminded of a story which I heard when a boy. I forget whether it was some whimsical man of letters like Charles Lamb, or some such professional wag as Theodore Hook, who took it into his head one day to stand still on a London street, with face turn

But even this lofty flight of inspiration is out-flown by Mr. John Landis, who was limner and draughtsman as well as poet. In his "Treatise on Magnifying God" (New York, 1843) he gives us an engraved portrait of himself surrounded by ministering angels, and accompanies it by an ode to himself, one verse of which will suffice:— Immortality of fame is something desired by many, but attained by few. Physical immortality is something which has hitherto been supposed to be inexorably denied to human

From the Springfield Republican . (1876.) As queer a people as are often met, and apparently as upright and religious, withal, are the Community situated on the stage-road between Athol and Petersham, and commonly known thereabouts as "Howlandites" or "Fullerites." According to their account, nearly twenty-one years ago, two Worcester women, Mrs. Sarah J. Hervey and her sister, Caroline E. Hawks, had come to hope for a divine revelation to them, and in expectation of it had gone to a camp-meetin