The Temple of Nature: Or, The Origin of Society

Science & Math

Darwin, Erasmus

Astronomy & Space Science

Timaios Press

Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) can be called an Isaac Asimov or a Fred Hoyle of the 19th century. He was a well-renowned astronomer and meteorologist, who became famous by writing popular science books and early science fiction novels. He presented grand cosmological ideas in a way that distinguished him from another famous and contemporary Frenchman, namely Jules Verne, who was more interested in technology and geography. But Flammarion also wrote many metaphysical non-fiction books, where he emerged as a religious freethinker with an eye for reincarnation and theosophy.He published the astronomical magazine L'Astronomie from 1882, and in 1887 he founded Société astronomique de France, which still exists. Craters on the moon and on Mars are named after him, and there is also an asteroid called 1021 Flammarion. Another asteroid called 141 Lumen is named after this remarkable novel.In Lumen (1872), the scientific and metaphysical sides of Camille Flammarion are combined into a sublime unification. Lumen is a unique cosmological and religious speculation. The novel consists of a dialogue between a dead astronomer and his friend, who is still alive. The astronomer gives eye-witness reports about the wonders of the outer space and of creatures inhabitating distant stars.This is a skillful firework of imagination and ideas, and at the same time filled with facts in an almost bone-dry manner. Here are thoughts about relativity and the nature of time, showing that scientists many decades before Einstein anticipated that there was something not quite right with the absolute time and space in the classical mechanics of Newton.Other classic works by Camille Flammarion, which were instrumental in creating the young science fiction-genre, were Uranie (1889), La Fin du Monde (1893; adapted for the screen by Abel Gance in 1931) and Stella (1897).

Lumen

Literature & Fiction

FLAMMARION, Camille

Classics

Today, the English scientist and poet Andrew Crosse (1784-1855) is almost exclusively remembered for his mysterious "Acarus electricus," a form of mites that seemed to have been created during one of his electrical experiments. But this is unfair. Among his friends were the mathematician Lady Ada Lovelace and prominent scientists such as Sir Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday, but also romantic poets such as Robert Southey and Walter Savage Landor. These and many other celebrities from the first half of the 19th century occurs in this colorful and vivid memorial, written and published by his widow Cornelia Crosse in 1857. Here is depicted not only the life and work of the eccentric and likeable Andrew Crosse; it is also an anthology with examples of his literary output. A typical amateur scientist of the upper classes, Andrew Crosse experimented for his own enjoyment and not for glory. The same applies to his writing; Crosse's poems circulated among friends, but was only occasionally published during his lifetime. In the poems, prose and letters you see his obsession with the riddle of life and death. All this should be seen in a romantic light. During this era, natural philosophers wanted to form a synthesis of science with aesthetics, imagination and breakneck speculations -- Romantic science was a concept. Researchers and laymen alike was fascinated by electricity, which was presumed to be the key to the mystery of matter and life. Explaining all mysteries of the Universe was within the boundaries of opportunity, and a gifted philosopher could anticipate the answers with his imagination and intuition. Did Crosse really see the electric mites be born in his laboratory 1837, or was this also a phantasy? Robert Southey leaked information about the mites to the press, and the sensation turned into moral panic. Crosse was accused of interfering with the Creator’s work and to run errands for atheism. Other scientists dismissed him as a charlatan. The sensible Andrew Crosse abandoned these experiments for peace and quiet. And possibly he was not himself convinced that the mites arose spontaneously by the interaction of electricity and chemicals, but were due to the equipment having been contaminated by airborne eggs. This book also shows that Crosse experimented with his electric mites during a period of strong psychological pressure because of death and a controversy with a research colleague. After her husband’s death, Cornelia Crosse (1827-1895) became an acclaimed author of popular science.

Memorials, Scientific and Literary, of Andrew Crosse, the Electrician

Crosse, Cornelia

Crosse, Andrew

Essays & Commentary

The Lodger

Lowndes, Marie Belloc

Literary

Father Brown explains: "You see, I murdered them all myself... I planned out each of the crimes very carefully. I thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was." -- "Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hears men's real sins is likely to be wholly aware of human evil?" Father Brown is one of the great detectives in world literature. Here you are served not only some of the best detective stories ever written but great literature in every measurement. The tales are thought-provoking, humorous, satirical, poetical and philosophical. They usually have an uncanny, weird, almost supernatural atmosphere -- and nevertheless how rational and logical the solutions turns out to be, the explanations in themselves tends to feel even more mysterious. Many authors have tried to imitate the paradoxical nature of these 53 stories; none has succeeded. The English author Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a very prominent cultural figure at the beginning of the last century, a true intellectual freethinker who never submitted himself to conventional ideas only because they were in vogue. In Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), when the eugenic movement was at its peak, he warned for racial purity and totalitarianism decades before the world became aware of what had happened in Nazi Germany. As a Catholic and theologian, moral questions and problems were of the highest importance for him, and his love for crime fiction should be seen in that light.

The Wholeness of Father Brown: The Complete Collection of Detective Mysteries

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

CHESTERTON, GILBERT KEITH

Mystery

A serial killer calling himself "The Avenger" is prowling the streets of London. But Mr. and Mrs. Bunting has things of a more everyday nature to worry about. Facing the prospect of hard times, they are happy when a gentleman rents the upstairs rooms in their home. Soon, however, they find reasons to believe that this stranger, with his nightly walks and religious rants, is in fact The Avenger, whose preys are prostitutes. 
This crime novel from 1913, a classic of the first water, is a retelling of the killing spree conducted by Jack the Ripper. It was the foundation for Alfred Hitchcock’s first masterpiece, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), and have been adapted several other times for movies, theater, TV and radio. 
The English-French author Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) became world-famous with her many elegant novels and stories in the genre of psychological thrillers, an early "queen of crime." She was inspired to write The Lodger by a supposedly real story about a couple, owners of a lodging house, who believed that one of their guests was Jack the Ripper. It had previously been told by the psychiatrist and amateur detective Dr. L. Forbes Winslow (1844-1913) in an article in New York Herald Tribune 1889, and also by the painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942). Sickert was told by his landlord and landlady, an elderly couple, that his rooms in Camden had been rented before him by someone they thought was Jack the Ripper. However, the stories by Winslow and Sickert are not connected, and it is possible that they originated from an urban myth.

Thrillers & Suspense

In this remarkable proto-science fiction story from 1666 -- which also bear striking resemblances with modern fantasy -- the author Lady Margaret Cavendish explores an allegorical and satirical world, which she finds through a portal at the North Pole. The bizarre beings in this world need to understand the true meaning of science and philosophy, which Lady Cavendish provides them, and thus she becomes their empress. The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World criticize and explore such issues as science, gender and power. The natural philosopher, author and poet Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-73) lived during the scientific revolution and participated in this brand new world, with contemporaries such as Descartes, Leibniz and Newton. One of her correspondents was the astronomer Huygens. She was the first -- and during a long time the only -- woman who was allowed to attend a meeting at Royal Society of London. Lady Cavendish was viewed by her contemporaries as being rather eccentric. She was extravagant and flirtatious, accused of using speech full of "oaths and obscenity," and was noted for her unusual sense of fashion. Today, she is honored as an original, unique and clear-sighted thinker, as well as an early feminist.

The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World

Cavendish, Lady Margaret Lucas

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Classic horror in the form of a supernatural thriller: London is haunted by mysterious cases of death, stalkings and burglary. A prominent member of parliament seems to be the focus of the incidents. Behind the events is a hostile and powerful entity called "the Arab," which takes the shape of a man or a sexually seductive woman depending on circumstances and intentions. It is a thing born of neither God nor human, but connected with the Egyptian cult of Isis. The Englishman Richard Marsh (pseudonym for Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857-1915) was a major best-selling author during the late Victorian era, though now largely forgotten except among scholars and connoisseurs of horror fiction. Especially The Beetle (1897) was reprinted numerous times and translated into languages all over the world, with a popularity that lasted decades into the 20th century, adapted to the screen in a British movie 1919 and several times for the stage, most notably in a big production for Strand Theatre 1928. Today the novel has been reinstated by scholars as a great Victorian classic, similar in themes and mood to Bram Stoker's Dracula which was published the same year, a prime example of fin de si&#65533;cle literature. Richard Marsh was specialized in horror, suspense and the supernatural, with strong elements of crime and detective fiction; he also wrote clear-cut detective stories, for example with the character Judith Lee, an early female detective. One of his recurring characters is the Hon. Augustus Champnell, an aristocratic detective with an interest in the occult, who is also the main protagonist in this novel.

The Beetle: A Mystery

Marsh, Richard

Genre Fiction

CHESTERTON, G.K.

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