Studies in Animal Life

Portada
Harper, 1860 - 146 páginas

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Dentro del libro

Otras ediciones - Ver todas

Términos y frases comunes

Pasajes populares

Página 118 - Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong, They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Página 113 - As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.
Página 111 - It is a truly wonderful fact — the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity — that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in groups subordinate to groups, in the manner which we everywhere behold...
Página 95 - Altogether at least a score of pigeons might be chosen, which, if shown to an ornithologist, and he were told that they were wild birds, would certainly be ranked by him as well-defined species.
Página 111 - On the view that each species has been independently created, I can see no explanation of this great fact in the classification of all organic beings; but, to the best of my judgment, it is explained through inheritance and the complex action of natural selection, entailing extinction and divergence of character, as we have seen illustrated in the diagram.
Página 18 - It has not been sufficiently insisted on, that in the various branches of Social Science there is an advance from the general to the special, from the simple to the complex, analogous with that which is found in the series of the sciences, from Mathematics to Biology. To the laws of quantity comprised in Mathematics and...
Página 54 - ... moisture of the breath has evaporated, the wafer be shaken off, we shall find that the whole polished surface is not as it was before, although our senses can detect no difference ; for if we breathe again upon it the surface will be moist everywhere except on the spot previously sheltered by the wafer, which will now appear as a spectral image on the surface. Again and again we breathe, and the moisture evaporates, but' still the spectral wafer reappears. This experiment succeeds after a lapse...
Página 55 - ... spectre of the key will again appear. In the case of bodies more highly phosphorescent than paper, the spectres of many different objects which may have been laid on it in succession will, on warming, emerge in their proper order. This is equally true of our bodies and our minds. We are involved in the universal metamorphosis. Nothing leaves us wholly as it found us. Every man we meet, every book we read, every picture or landscape we see, every word or tone we hear, mingles with our being and...
Página 97 - Latin ; if all historical documents previous to the fifteenth century had been lost ; if tradition even were silent as to the former existence of a Roman empire, a mere comparison of the six Romance dialects would enable us to say that at some time there must have been a language from which all these modern dialects derived their origin in common ; for without this supposition it would be impossible to account for the facts exhibited by these dialects.
Página 98 - But a change from je suis to tii es is inexplicable by the light of French grammar. These forms could not have grown, so to speak, on French soil, but must have been handed down as relics from a former period — must have existed in some language antecedent to any of the Romance dialects.

Referencias a este libro

Acerca del autor (1860)

Today Lewes is remembered primarily as the consort of George Eliot, with whom he lived---but never married---from 1854 until his death. Because he had condoned his wife Agnes's adulterous relationship with T. L. Hunt, Lewes was unable to obtain a divorce. In 1850 Agnes bore the first of four of Hunt's children, whom Lewes adopted as his own. Lewes was well known and respected as an intellectual, traveling in the most progressive and free-thinking society that Victorian London could offer. Always a great encourager of the somewhat retiring Eliot, he was also a prolific author in his own right, making significant contributions in philosophy and literary criticism. He was the author of one of the first books in English on the philosophy of Auguste Comte, Comte's Philosophy of Science (1853), and wrote essays on a number of topics, including Hegelian aesthetics, political economy, and popular drama. Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy (1845), notable for its adherence to Thomas Carlyle's dictum that history is made up of the "biographies of great men," is devoted to the Victorian (and Comtean) notion of progressive change. The best-known literary criticism by Lewes is the excellent Life and Works of Goethe (1855), which he researched, with Eliot's assistance, in Germany in 1854--55. Outside of criticism, philosophy, and science---his last work, unfinished at his death but completed by Eliot, was the multivolume Problems of Life and Mind (1874)---Lewes's writings were not overly popular. Under the pseudonym Slingsby Lawrence, he wrote a number of plays, none of which fared well. He also wrote two novels, Ranthorpe (1847) and Rose, Blanche, and Violet (1848), neither of which were well received, although the first is an interesting example of the Bildungsroman and is written in imitation of Goethe. In the 1860s Lewes served briefly as editor for both Cornhill Magazine and Fortnightly Review. Criticism of Lewes is based primarily on his relationship with George Eliot, whose literary star considerably outshines his. His ideas on philosophy, the social sciences, and physiology have long been superseded, but, as a contributor to the vibrant intellectual milieu of his age, it is difficult to find his equal.

Información bibliográfica