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.
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Two of the personal books before me are by Dr. James J. Walsh, medical director of Fordham University’s School of Sociology, professor of physiological psychology at Cathedral College, and author of that remarkable history of fakes and faith-wrought miracles, Cures. In Health Through Will Power, Dr. Walsh is dealing with a subject which, more than any other one thing, has been made the foundation of new and powerful religious sects. But Dr. Walsh’s interest is in the application and the uses of will power in the individual.
He therefore shows the preventive and curative power of the will in such universal ailments as coughs and colds, intestinal disorders, rheumatism, and the like. But most importantly he shows the rôle of the will in dealing with mental disturbances and in a therapeutic application to bad habits as diverse as self-pity, yielding to pain or succumbing to sentimentalism in sympathy, and irregular and insufficient exercise.
Health Through Will Power is untechnical. Anyone can read and understand it.
Success in a New Era, Dr. Walsh’s other book, shows that the application of the will is the most important factor in achieving success of any kind. Is education important? Yes, but “it is not for lack of knowledge but for lack of will power that men fail to accomplish what they want to. Men have powers or energies far beyond what they usually think, and the men who use them up to something like their capacity make a success of life.”
Next to will power comes work; and work must be offset by recreation, though proper recreation calls for the expenditure of mental or physical energy as great as work.