Of course, you know my friend the squirting cucumber. If you don’t, that can be only because you’ve never looked in the right place to find him. On all waste ground outside most southern cities–Nice, Cannes, Florence: Rome, Algiers, Granada: Athens, Palermo, Tunis, where you will–the soil is thickly covered by dark trailing vines which […]

Who knows the Mediterranean, knows the prickly pear. Not that that quaint and uncanny-looking cactus, with its yellow blossoms and bristling fruits that seem to grow paradoxically out of the edge of thick fleshy leaves, is really a native of Italy, Spain, and North Africa, where it now abounds on every sun-smitten hillside. Like Mr. […]

A singular opportunity was afforded me last summer for making myself thoroughly at home with the habits and manners of the common English geometrical spider. By the pure chance of circumstance, two ladies of that intelligent and interesting species were kind enough to select for their temporary residence a large pane of glass just outside […]

Aristocracies, as a rule, all the world over, consist, and have always consisted, of barbaric conquerors or their descendants, who remain to the last, on the average of instances, at a lower grade of civilisation and morals than the democracy they live among. I know this view is to some extent opposed to the common […]

Everybody knows mountain flowers are beautiful. As one rises up any minor height in the Alps or the Pyrenees below snow-level, one notices at once the extraordinary brilliancy and richness of the blossoms one meets there. All nature is dressed in its brightest robes. Great belts of blue gentian hang like a zone on the […]

A distinguished Positivist friend of mine, who is in most matters a practical man of the world, astonished me greatly the other day at Venice, by the grave remark that Italian was destined to be the language of the future. I found on inquiry he had inherited the notion direct from Auguste Comte, who justified […]

Comparatively little is known as yet, even in this age of publicity, about the domestic arrangements and private life of fishes. Not that the creatures themselves shun the wiles of the interviewer, or are at all shy and retiring, as a matter of delicacy, about their family affairs; on the contrary, they display a striking […]

It is an error of youth to despise parrots for their much talking. Loquacity isn’t always a sign of empty-headedness, nor is silence a sure proof of weight and wisdom. Biologists, for their part, know better than that. By common consent, they rank the parrot group as the very head and crown of bird creation. […]

I mean what I say: science in education, not education in science. It is the last of these that all the scientific men of England have so long been fighting for. And a very good thing it is in its way, and I hope they may get as much as they want of it. But […]

It is a common, not to say a vulgar error, to believe that trees and plants grow out of the ground. And of course, having thus begun by calling it bad names, I will not for a moment insult the intelligence of my readers by supposing them to share so foolish a delusion. I beg […]

“Alas, how easily things go wrong!” says Dr. George MacDonald. And all the world over, when things do go wrong, the natural and instinctive desire of the human animal is–to find a scapegoat. When the great French nation in the lump embarks its capital in a hopeless scheme for cutting a canal through the Isthmus […]

Even a prejudiced observer will readily admit that the most valuable mineral on earth is mud. Diamonds and rubies are just nowhere by comparison. I don’t mean weight for weight, of course–mud is ‘cheap as dirt,’ to buy in small quantities–but aggregate for aggregate. Quite literally, and without hocus-pocus of any sort, the money valuation […]

One great English thinker and artist once tried the rash experiment of being true to himself–of saying out boldly, without fear or reserve, the highest and noblest and best that was in him. He gave us the most exquisite lyrics in the English language; he moulded the thought of our first youth as no other […]

Westminster Gazette, 1 (25 February 1893) Britain is now the centre of civilisation. Will it always be so? Is our commercial supremacy decaying or not? Have we begun to reach the period of inevitable decline? Or is decline indeed inevitable at all? Might a nation go on being great for ever? If so, are we […]

A sportive friend of mine, a mighty golfer, is fond of saying, “You Radicals want to play the game without the rules.” To which I am accustomed mildly to retort, “Not at all; but we think the rules unfair, and so we want to see them altered.” Now life is a very peculiar game, which […]

‘Why, what did they want to build a city right up here for, anyway?’ the pretty American asked, who had come with us to Fiesole, as we rested, panting, after our long steep climb, on the cathedral platform. Now the question was a pertinent and in its way a truly philosophical one. Fiesole crests the […]

Every American woman is by birth a duchess. There, you see, I have taken you in. When you saw the heading, “American Duchesses,” you thought I was going to purvey some piquant scandal about high-placed ladies; and you straightway began to read my essay. That shows I rightly interpreted your human nature. There’s a deal […]

For the reasons which have determined the existence of Sussex as a county of England, and which have given it the exact boundaries that it now possesses, we must go back to the remote geological history of the secondary ages. Its limits and its very existence as a separate shire were predetermined for it by […]

Perhaps you have never heard its name before; yet in the earlier ages of this kingdom of Britain, Ruim Isle, rising dim through the mist of prehistoric oceans, was once in its own way famous and important. Off the old and obliterated south-eastern promontory of our island, where the land of Kent shelved almost imperceptibly […]

In the first of these after-dinner causeries I ventured humbly to remark that Patriotism was a vulgar vice of which I had never been guilty. That innocent indiscretion of mine aroused at the moment some unfavourable comment. I confess I was sorry for it. But I passed it by at the time, lest I should […]