Autobiography and Selected Essays

Note: The notes at the end of the book were originally referenced by page number. I have instead inserted numbers within the text in the format [xx] and cross-referenced these t...

Bright sunshine streamed through the windows of the nave, while the choir was in half gloom, and as each shaft of light illuminated the flower-covered bier as it slowly travelle...

At present, the most convinced believer in the aphorism "Bene qui latuit, bene vixit,"[3] is not always able to act up to it. An importunate person informs him that his portrait...

The newly kindled hope was deceitful. The great plague, indeed, returned no more; but what it had done for the Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in the autumn of 1666,...

Again, what simpler, or more absolutely practical, than the attempt to keep the axle of a wheel from heating when the wheel turns round very fast? How useful for carters and gig...

Attaining, as it does in some places, a thickness of more than a thousand feet, the English chalk must be admitted to be a mass of considerable magnitude. Nevertheless, it cover...

When we consider that the remains of more than three thousand distinct species of aquatic animals have been discovered among the fossils of the chalk, that the great majority of...

A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit of chalk with which we started into the hot but obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it would presently sh...

There is a well-known incident in one of Moliere's plays,[88] where the author makes the hero express unbounded delight on being told that he had been talking prose during the w...

The spectacle afforded by the wonderful energies prisoned within the compass of the microscopic hair of a plant, which we commonly regard as a merely passive organism, is not ea...

What justification is there, then, for the assumption of the existence in the living matter of a something which has no representative, or correlative, in the not living matter...

The coral mud, which occupies the bottom of the lagoon, and with which all the interstices of the coral skeletons which accumulate to form the reef are filled up, does not proce...

[Footnote 9: Nelson: Horatio Nelson, a celebrated English Admiral born in Norfolk, England, 1758, and died on board the Victory at Trafalgar, 1805. It was before the battle off...

"The design of this work, as stated by Pope himself, is to ridicule all the false tastes in learning under the character of a man of capacity enough, that had dipped into every...