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The Breath of Life
"The Breath of Life" is a 1915 book by American naturalist John Burroughs. It contains a number of essays related to his observations as he travelled around New England. Beautifully written and thought provoking, "The Breath of Life" will appeal to lovers of nature writing. John Burroughs (1837 - 1921) was an American naturalist, essayist, and active member of the U.S. conservation movement. Burroughs' work was incredibly popular during his lifetime, and his legacy has lived on in the form of twelve U.S. Schools named after him, Burroughs Mountain, and the John Burroughs Association-which publicly recognizes well-written and illustrated natural history publications. Contents "The Breath Of Life", "The Living Wave", "A Wonderful World", "The Baffling Problem", "Scientific", "Vitalism", "A Bird Of Passage", "Life And Mind", "Life And Science", "The Journeying Atoms", "The Vital Order", "The Arrival Of The Fit", etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
212 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
About the author
John Burroughs
1,001 books177 followersIn 1837, naturalist John Burroughs was born on a farm in the Catskills. After teaching, and clerking in government, Burroughs returned to the Catskills, and devoted his life to writing and gardening. He knew Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir and Walt Whitman, writing the first biography of Whitman. Most of his 22 books are collected essays on nature and philosophy. In In The Light of Day (1900) he wrote about his views on religion: "If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go." "When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what is it that I really see there, I am constrained to say, 'There is no God' . . . " In his journal dated Feb. 18, 1910, he wrote: "Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all—that has been my religion." He died on his 83rd birthday. The John Burroughs Sanctuary can be found near West Park, N.Y., and his rustic cabin, Slabsides, has been preserved. D. 1921.
According to biographers at the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Henry David Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. By the turn of the 20th century he had become a virtual cultural institution[peacock term] in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own. His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871.
In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs' special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world." The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.
Since his death in 1921, John Burroughs has been commemorated by the John Burroughs Association. The association maintains the John Burroughs Sanctuary in Esopus, New York, a 170 acre plot of land surrounding Slabsides, and awards a medal each year to "the author of a distinguished book of natural history".
Twelve U.S. schools have been named after Burroughs, including public elementary schools in Washington, DC and Minneapolis, Minnesota, public middle schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Los Angeles, California, a public high school in Burbank, California, and a private secondary school, John Burroughs School, in St. Louis, Missouri. Burroughs Mountain in Mount Rainier National Park is named in his honor.There was a medal named after John Burroughs and the John Burroughs Association publicly recognizes well-written and illustrated natural history publications. Each year the Burroughs medal is awarded to the author of a distinguished book of natural history, with the presentation made during the Association's annual meeting on the first Monday of April.
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bur...
http://research.amnh.org/burroughs/
According to biographers at the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Henry David Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. By the turn of the 20th century he had become a virtual cultural institution[peacock term] in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own. His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871.
In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs' special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world." The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.
Since his death in 1921, John Burroughs has been commemorated by the John Burroughs Association. The association maintains the John Burroughs Sanctuary in Esopus, New York, a 170 acre plot of land surrounding Slabsides, and awards a medal each year to "the author of a distinguished book of natural history".
Twelve U.S. schools have been named after Burroughs, including public elementary schools in Washington, DC and Minneapolis, Minnesota, public middle schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Los Angeles, California, a public high school in Burbank, California, and a private secondary school, John Burroughs School, in St. Louis, Missouri. Burroughs Mountain in Mount Rainier National Park is named in his honor.There was a medal named after John Burroughs and the John Burroughs Association publicly recognizes well-written and illustrated natural history publications. Each year the Burroughs medal is awarded to the author of a distinguished book of natural history, with the presentation made during the Association's annual meeting on the first Monday of April.
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bur...
http://research.amnh.org/burroughs/
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
September 7, 2018
It almost seems unfair to review this collection of essays, because they haven't aged well. Burroughs is one of my favorite nature essayists, and these are fairly well written, but, well.
I first discovered Burroughs through the Riverside Literature Series, when I was an early teen. In high school I cobbled together a "complete works" of Burroughs, from three different editions (all Houghton Mifflin), and I'm in the process (decades later) of reading them all. I urge anyone who is a fan of Thoreau, or the early nature writers, to explore the first dozen of the complete works (including his study of Walt Whitman, Burroughs being an early adopter); or the Tramping and Camping with Teddy Roosevelt volume.
In the latter half of his publishing career, the essays turned to the Philosophy of Science. A lot of them are quite good, and his defenses of Darwin and Huxley are historically interesting and often quite poetic. He also dabbled more and more in literary criticism, and that's often quite interesting.
But, well, this one was collected in 1915, and Science has made some strides since then. Burroughs keeps mentioning the "ether" as being essential to physics, but that concept was already busted by then. (He is generally surprisingly up-to-date for his day, though. He seems sharp on atomic theory, for instance. I'm more aware of him as a mid-to-late-1800s guy, so that's a little bit of a surprise, at first.) But the real problem is that this whole book hits just one note, and it hits it three times a page, minimum.
The question he's wrestling with is What Is The Difference Between Life And Dead Matter? He sometimes poses it as 'Where is the line between physics and chemistry on one hand, and biology on the other?' or "Is life just chemistry?' He poses the question again and again, and then concludes, over and over and over, that we just don't know. He leans toward saying we probably can't know.
This gets EXTREMELY repetitive. I had trouble following the sentences, I got so bored. I had tears flowing from boredom. Then there would be some fine paragraphs (though versions of the same thing) and I'd perk up, and then the constant rephrasing of the same simple question would break me back down. Making it worse, some of his reiterations take up quite specific things we "don't know" that are things we now do know; like how cells reproduce, like how traits are kept straight between different species, etc., etc.. Now it's true that we still can't put our finger on the origin of life, so his question is still valid; but I swear unto you that twenty paragraphs could have nailed down everything he really had to say, and probably still have said it all three times.
If you want to read the most representative essay in this volume so as to be able to skip the rest in good conscience, I suggest the final one: "The Naturalist's View of Life." It states his quandary most effectively.
Really, though, only historical interest justifies the reading of this one.
I first discovered Burroughs through the Riverside Literature Series, when I was an early teen. In high school I cobbled together a "complete works" of Burroughs, from three different editions (all Houghton Mifflin), and I'm in the process (decades later) of reading them all. I urge anyone who is a fan of Thoreau, or the early nature writers, to explore the first dozen of the complete works (including his study of Walt Whitman, Burroughs being an early adopter); or the Tramping and Camping with Teddy Roosevelt volume.
In the latter half of his publishing career, the essays turned to the Philosophy of Science. A lot of them are quite good, and his defenses of Darwin and Huxley are historically interesting and often quite poetic. He also dabbled more and more in literary criticism, and that's often quite interesting.
But, well, this one was collected in 1915, and Science has made some strides since then. Burroughs keeps mentioning the "ether" as being essential to physics, but that concept was already busted by then. (He is generally surprisingly up-to-date for his day, though. He seems sharp on atomic theory, for instance. I'm more aware of him as a mid-to-late-1800s guy, so that's a little bit of a surprise, at first.) But the real problem is that this whole book hits just one note, and it hits it three times a page, minimum.
The question he's wrestling with is What Is The Difference Between Life And Dead Matter? He sometimes poses it as 'Where is the line between physics and chemistry on one hand, and biology on the other?' or "Is life just chemistry?' He poses the question again and again, and then concludes, over and over and over, that we just don't know. He leans toward saying we probably can't know.
This gets EXTREMELY repetitive. I had trouble following the sentences, I got so bored. I had tears flowing from boredom. Then there would be some fine paragraphs (though versions of the same thing) and I'd perk up, and then the constant rephrasing of the same simple question would break me back down. Making it worse, some of his reiterations take up quite specific things we "don't know" that are things we now do know; like how cells reproduce, like how traits are kept straight between different species, etc., etc.. Now it's true that we still can't put our finger on the origin of life, so his question is still valid; but I swear unto you that twenty paragraphs could have nailed down everything he really had to say, and probably still have said it all three times.
If you want to read the most representative essay in this volume so as to be able to skip the rest in good conscience, I suggest the final one: "The Naturalist's View of Life." It states his quandary most effectively.
Really, though, only historical interest justifies the reading of this one.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review