Which? or, Between Two Women, by Ernest Daudet. Translated from the French by Laura E. Kendall. Published 1893. ©1887.

Thanks to Martin Pettit for post-processing this project!

Bookp(h)ile

Book of Wise Sayings, Selected Largely from Eastern Sources, by William Alexander Clouston. Published 1893.

589 (not counting the two on the title page) aphorisms and epigrams encompassing “wisdom.” For example:

Certain books seem to be written, not that we might learn from them, but in order that we might see how much the author knows.–Goethe.

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Man is the only animal with the powers of laughter, a privilege which was not bestowed on him for nothing. Let us then laugh while we may, no matter how broad the laugh may be, and despite of what the poet says about “the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind.” The mind should occasionally be vacant, as the land should sometimes lie fallow, and for precisely the same reason.–Egerton Smith.

Related in: Book of Wise Sayings, Selected Largely from Eastern Sources, by William Alexander Clouston. London, Hutchinson & Co., 1893.

[“The descendants of man will nourish themselves by immersion in nutritive fluid. They will have enormous brains, liquid, soulful eyes, and large hands, on which they will hop. No craggy nose will they have, no vestigial ears; their mouths will be a small, perfectly round aperture, unanimal, like the evening star. Their whole muscular system will be shrivelled to nothing, a dangling pendant to their minds.”—Pall Mall Gazette, abridged.]

What, a million years hence, will become of the Genus

Humanum, is truly a question vexed;

At that epoch, however, one prophet has seen us

Resemble the sketch annexed.

For as Man undergoes Evolution ruthless,

His skull will grow “dome-like, bald, terete”;

And his mouth will be jawless, gumless, toothless—

No more will he drink or eat!

He will soak in a crystalline bath of pepsine,

(no Robert will then have survived, to wait,)

And he’ll hop on his hands as his food he steps in—

A quasi-cherubic gait!

No longer the land or the sea he’ll furrow;

The world will be withered, ice-cold, dead

As the chill of eternity grows, he’ll burrow

Far down underground instead.

If the Pall Mall Gazette has thus been giving

A forecast correct of this change immense,

Our stars we may thank, then, that we shan’t be living

A million years from hence!

The Destiny of Man, Viewed in the Light of his Origin. By John Fiske. Copyright 1884. Published 1893 (20th edition). A book-length essay discussing human evolution and the role of infancy in the development of mankind.

John Fiske was a librarian at Harvard, later a lecturer at Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri). He lectured and published on American History and on evolution, and was a frequent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly.

Point Lace and Diamonds, published 1893, by George Augustus Baker (1849-1906).

Here’s a contemporary review in The Atlantic Monthly (Vol 36, Issue 213):

Mr. Baker has a cleverness which, without being too fine or deep, is pleasant; and his pretty book of society verses is one that you may read with a fair degree of “cheerfulness and refreshment.” Our fashionable life affords scope enough for the more amiable sort of light satire, and Mr. Baker is fortunately not a satirist who cares much to moralize his theme. He does not begin to exhaust his material; the situations he suggests or portrays are not the most unhackneyed, but then, he does them with dramatic skill, and he renders without unnecessary vulgarity the tone and talk of the kind of stylish girls whose souls are in their clothes…

Thanks to Melissa Er-Raqabi for Post-Processing this book!