"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 include: "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.
"As life nears its end with me, I find myself meditating more and more upon the mystery of its nature and origin, yet without the least hope that I can find out the ways of the Eternal in this or in any other world. In these studies I fancy I am about as far from mastering the mystery as the ant which I saw this morning industriously exploring a small section of the garden walk is from getting a clear idea of the geography of the North American Continent. But the ant was occupied and was apparently happy, and she must have learned something about a small fraction of that part of the earth's surface.'' ''My imagination and ingrained humanism are appealed to by the facts and methods of natural history. I find something akin to poetry and religion (using the latter word in its non-mythological sense, as indicating the sum of mystery and reverence we feel in the presence of the great facts of life an death) in the shows of day and night, and in my excursions to fields and woods. The love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the two may go together. To the rigid man of science this is frank mysticism; but without a sense of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat and barren. Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, and no literature. How to get from the clod underfoot to the brain and consciousness of man without invoking something outside of, and superior to, natural laws, is the question. For my own part I content myself with the thought of some unknown and doubtless unknowable tendency or power in the elements themselves - a kind of universal mind pervading living matter and the reason of its living, through which the whole drama of evolution is brought about."
John Burroughs
