Abstract
THIS book is intended for preachers and Sunday-school teachers, and the lessons which it draws are not inferences but moral analogies. Thus an account of the bower bird establishes the maxim that “the relief times of life secure bodily and mental energy, and good spirits.” The advertisements at the end of the book inform us that there are several volumes on the same plan, and that they have a good sale. The one before us is a compilation from many authors, with Darwin at one end of the scale and a crowd of obscure or anonymous writers at the other. The author is not particular in his choice of materials. He draws lessons from the most unlikely stories, and his familiarity with the literature of natural history can be estimated by the fact that be attributes to George Shaw the delightful account by Gilbert White of the behaviour of Timothy, his tortoise, in a shower of rain. The illustration or epigram from nature, which is so attractive in Shakespeare and other great writers, is here reduced to a “sad, mechanic exercise.” When the allusions and emblems are arranged in cyclopædias, so that the preacher has only to look up a virtue or a vice in the index to find a more or less appropriate analogy, it is plain that the didactic anecdote is now “hackneyed and worn to the last flimsy thread.”
Lessons from Life, Animal and Human.
With an Introduction by Rev. Hugh Macmillan. Pp. xvi + 529. (London: Elliot Stock, 1897).
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M., L. Lessons from Life, Animal and Human. Nature 57, 172 (1897). https://doi.org/10.1038/057172c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/057172c0