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Sir Oliver Lodge’s Making of Man has something in common with the books I have discussed and some relation to the books I am coming to; but first I wish to ward off a misconception. Sir Oliver’s views of an after life, his experiments and speculations are well-known; but Making of Man is not in any sense a spiritualist volume. It is a study in evolution; a short, simple account of physical science which the author then relates, so far as our knowledge permits, to the history of the soul. His own special beliefs are kept out of the way; his point is that what we know from physics and other branches of science makes immortality of the soul an irresistible conclusion. As he says: “It is beginning to seem possible that the conservation of matter and energy may have to be supplemented by the conservation of life and mind.... I feel sure of this: that the Universe is a much completer whole than we had imagined. Every kind of real existence is permanent; and our activities do not cease when we change our instrument.” The book is brief, very sincere, and of interest to readers of every class and shade of opinion.
In Evolution: the Way of Life, Vernon Kellogg, the zoölogist, has written a book designed for the general reader who wants exact but simply expressed knowledge concerning the theory. The author has been at pains to tie up his discussion to the evolution we all can see in ourselves and in the Nature about us. This is decidedly a book to clear up and make definite the reader’s conception of what evolution is and is not, and of its significance to mankind.
The two remaining impersonal books I have to present are both purely scientific, though almost startlingly diverse; and then I shall go on to speak of books distinctly personal to the reader.
And first I offer a work of science keenly interesting to the general reader. George Grant MacCurdy of Yale is known wherever anthropology is known. For many years he has been gathering the materials for a history of man before recorded history begins. The interest of pre-history, as the subject is called, needs no emphasis. Its appeal has been shown by the success of such books as Henry Fairfield Osborne’s Men of the Old Stone Age and by the fascination most readers confess to feeling for the earlier chapters of H. G. Wells’s An Outline of History. But pre-history, sketched by Wells, dealt with partially by Osborne, had never been fully written in a single, up-to-date work. Dr. MacCurdy has done it in the two volumes of his Human Origins: A Manual of Pre-History.
Human Origins is a great book. It must be remembered that all we know about prehistoric man is the discovery of the last hundred years, discovery that has come thick and fast, but which has remained scattered. I shall say nothing about the work involved in writing Human Origins; its immensity is apparent. But it is sheer luck that we have in Dr. MacCurdy a writer whose imagination and sense of the dramatic turn the whole affair into a superlative story.
Man, emerging as a distinct species, entered upon the Old Stone age, testified to by flint implements which we can just begin to see bear evidences of human shaping. The Old Stone Age lasted a long while. During it, in intervals of thousands of years, ice swept down over Europe and North America in four successive glaciations. The three warm intervals between these four ice epochs are the lower, middle, and upper paleolithic periods. In each, prehistoric man made some rude advance toward better tools and weapons. He even progressed in art to the extent of painting on cave walls. Then the ice came down again, and for thousands of years man lost nearly all the gain he had made.
He reappears in the New Stone Age using chipped and polished flints, mining the flints in certain places, working them in certain places. Pottery-making began, and some idea of weaving was gained. Religious ideas were first entertained. Fire was conquered and put to man’s use, the wheel was invented, animals were domesticated. Then came the Bronze Age, with its discovery of how to smelt copper, tin, gold, silver. The Iron Age arrived when man had acquired sufficient skill in smelting this more durable metal and could use it to replace all others in things of hard use.
Approximately 400 illustrations, of a fascination at least equal to the text, appear in the two volumes of Human Origins.
If the new book on Haunted Houses did not bear the name of so distinguished a scientist as M. Camille Flammarion, it would find no place, I am afraid, in this chapter. M. Flammarion is fully aware of the skepticism he must encounter, and is at pains to refute it as fully as possible in his book. But great as the interest of this controversy is, I think most readers will find the mere subject irresistible, and I am certain that everyone, even he who pooh-poohs all the evidence, will be captivated by the strange stories to be read in Haunted Houses. Dwellings that are variously authenticated for their troublesome character are discussed in chapter after chapter—a chateau at Calvados, a habitation in Auvergne, the house of La Constantine, a parsonage, a teacher’s house, the fantastic villa of Comedada at Coimbra in Portugal, the maleficent ceiling at Oxford, Pierre Loti’s mosque at Rochefort. And after so much, a chapter providing “A General Excursion Among Haunted Houses”! Flammarion then classes the phenomena as of two kinds—those associated with the dead and those not so attributable. But he is no mere credulous believer in haunting. He devotes a chapter to houses spuriously haunted. His book concludes with a search for causes and an assertion, or reassertion, of belief in certain evidence; “the unknown of yesterday is the truth of tomorrow.” It is interesting to note that there has been legal recognition of haunted houses.