Balder Ex-Libris - Wells Herbert GeorgeReview of books rare and missing2024-03-16T01:56:42+00:00urn:md5:aa728a70505b2fae05796923271581c2DotclearWells Herbert George - The Outline of Historyurn:md5:a0d26a836e230c036d7b47190ee102642012-08-26T21:28:00+01:002015-01-31T23:29:21+00:00balderWells Herbert GeorgeAfricaAmericaAsiaCivilizationsEurope <p><img src="https://balderexlibris.com/public/img/.Wells_George_Herbert_-_The_Outline_of_History_s.jpg" alt="" /><br />
Author : <strong>Wells Herbert Georget</strong><br />
Title : <strong>The Outline of History Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind</strong><br />
Year : 1920<br />
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The earth on which we live is a spinning globe. Vast though it seems to us, it is a mere speck of matter in the greater vastness of space. Space is, for the most part, emptiness. At great intervals there are in this emptiness flaring centres of heat and light, the fixed stars. They are all moving about in space, notwithstanding that they are called fixed stars, but for a long time men did not realize their motion. They are so vast and at such tremendous distances that their motion is not perceived. Only in the course of many thousands of years is it appreciable. These fixed stars are so far off that, for all their immensity, they seem to be, even when we look at them through the most powerful telescopes, mere points of light, brighter or less bright. A few, however, when we turn a telescope upon them, are seen to be whirls and clouds of shining vapour which we call nebulae. They are so fax off that a movement of millions of miles would be imperceptible. One star, however, is so near to us that it is like a great ball of flame. This one is the sun. The sun is itself in its nature like a fixed star, but it differs from the other fixed stars in appearance because it is beyond comparison nearer than they are; and because it is nearer men have been able to learn something of its nature. Its mean distance from the earth is ninety-three million miles. It is a mass of flaming matter, having a diameter of 866,000 miles. Its bulk is a million and a quarter times the bulk of our earth. These are difficult figures for the imagination. If a bullet fired from a Maxim gun at the sun kept its muzzle velocity unimpaired, it would take seven years to reach the sun. And yet we say the sun is near, measured by the scale of the stars. If the earth were a small ball, one inch in diameter, the sun would be a globe of nine feet diameter; it would fill a small bedroom. It is spinning round on its axis, but since it is an incandescent fluid, its polar regions do not travel with the same velocity as its equator, the surface of which rotates in about twenty-five days. The surface visible to us consists of clouds of incandescent metallic vapour. At what lies below we can only guess. So hot is the sun's atmosphere, that iron, nickel, copper, and tin are present in it in a gaseous state. About it at great distances circle not only our earth, but certain kindred bodies called the planets. These shine in the sky because they reflect the light of the sun; they are near enough for us to note their movements quite easily. Night by night their positions change with regard to the fixed stars. It is well to understand how empty is space. If, as we have said, the sun were a ball nine feet across, our earth would, in proportion, be the size of a one-inch ball, and. at a distance of 323 yards from the sun. The moon would be a speck the size of a small pea, thirty inches from the earth. Nearer to the sun than the earth would be two other very similar specks, the planets Mercury and Venus, at a distance of 125 and 250 yards respectively. Beyond the earth would come the planets Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, at distances of 500, 1,680, 3,000, 6,000, and 9,500 yards respectively. There would also be a certain number of very much smaller specks, flying about amongst these planets, more particularly a number called the asteroids circling between Mars and Jupiter, and occasionally a little puff of more or less luminous vapour and dust would drift into the system from the almost limitless emptiness beyond. Such a puff is what we call a comet. All the rest of the space about us and around us and for unfathomable distances beyond is cold, lifeless, and void. The nearest fixed star to us, on this, minute scale be it remembered"the earth as a one-inch ball, and the moon a little pea"would be over 40,000 miles, away. Most of the fixed stars we see would still be scores and hundreds of millions of miles away. The science that tells of these things and how men have come to know about them is Astronomy, and to books of astronomy the reader must go to learn more about the sun and stars. The science and description of the world on which we live are called respectively Geology and Geography. The diameter of our world is a little under 8,000 miles. Its surface is rough, the more projecting parts of the roughness are mountains, and in the hollows of its surface there is a film of water, the oceans and seas. This film of water is about five miles thick at its deepest part"that is to say, the deepest oceans have a depth of five miles. This is very little in comparison with the bulk of the world. About this sphere is a thin covering of air, the atmosphere. As we ascend in a balloon or go up a mountain from the level of the sea-shore the air is continually less dense, until at last it becomes so thin that it cannot support life. At a height of twenty miles there is scarcely any air at all"not one hundredth part of the density of air at the surface of the sea. The highest point to which a bird can fly is about four miles up"the condor, it is said, can struggle up to that; but most small birds and insects which are carried up by aeroplanes or balloons drop off insensible at a much lower level, and the greatest height to which any mountaineer has ever climbed is under five miles. Men have flown in aeroplanes to a height of over four miles, and balloons with men in them have reached very nearly seven miles, but at the cost of considerable physical suffering. Small experimental balloons, containing not men, but recording instruments, have gone as high as twenty-two miles. It is in the upper few hundred feet of the crust of the earth, in the sea, and in the lower levels of the air below four miles that life is found. We do not know of any life at all except in these, films of air and water upon our planet. So far as we know, all the rest of space is as yet without life. Scientific men have discussed the possibility of life, or of some process of a similar kind, occurring upon such kindred bodies as the planets Venus and Mars. But they point merely to questionable possibilities. Astronomers and geologists and those who study physics have been able to tell us something of the origin and history of the earth. They consider that, vast ages ago, the sun was a spinning, flaring mass of matter, not yet concentrated into a compast centre of heat and light, considerably larger than it is now, and spinning very much faster, and that as it whirled, a series of fragments detached themselves from it, which became the planets. Our earth is one of these planets. The flaring mass that was the material of the earth broke into two masses as it spun; a larger, the earth itself, and a smaller, which is now the dead, still moon. Astronomers give us convincing reasons for supposing that sun and earth and moon and all that system were then whirling about at a speed much greater than the speed at which they are moving to-day, and that at first our earth was a flaming thing upon which no life could live. The way in which they have reached these conclusions is by a very beautiful and interesting series of observations and, reasoning, too long and elaborate for us to deal with here. But they oblige us to believe that the sun, incandescent though it is, is now much -cooler than it was, and that it spins more slowly now than it did, and that it continues to cool and slow down. And they also show that the rate at which the earth spins is diminishing and continues to diminish"that is to say, that our day is growing longer and longer, and that the heat at the centre of the earth wastes slowly. There was a time when the day was not a half and not a third of what it is to-day; when a blazing hot sun, much greater than it is now, must have moved visibly"had there been an eye to mark it"from its rise to its setting across the skies. There will be a time when the day will be as long as a year is now, and the cooling sun, shorn of its beams, will hang motionless in the heavens. It must have been in days of a much hotter sun, a far swifter day and night, high tides, great heat, tremendous storms and. earthquakes, that life, of which we are a part, began upon the world. The moon also was nearer and brighter in those days and had a changing face. <strong>...</strong></p>Wells Herbert George - The Open Conspiracyurn:md5:03d518772c8b823afd2fed62c4b90d892012-08-26T21:20:00+01:002015-01-31T23:29:11+00:00balderWells Herbert GeorgeConspiracyJew <p><img src="https://balderexlibris.com/public/img/.Wells_George_Herbert_-_The_Open_Conspiracy_s.jpg" alt="" /><br />
Author : <strong>Wells Herbert George</strong><br />
Title : <strong>The Open Conspiracy</strong><br />
Year : 19**<br />
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Introduction: H. G. Wells (1866-1946) entirely by chance came across an application form to study under T. H. Huxley; after his education in London, and writing a biology textbook, he became a prolific writer of fiction, first gaining widespread fame with 'The Time Machine' in 1895; he wrote humorous novels based on his own life (The Wheels of Chance, Kipps..) and in 1900 published 'Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress on Human Life and Thought' based on lectures at the Royal Institution, where Faraday and others had lectured. After the First World War, observing the lack of knowledge of most people about most things, he turned to history, starting, in 1918, his 'Outline of History' first published in parts with 'gorgeous' covers, then in 1920 as a two-volume work including colour plates of a lavish nature for the time. In effect it was jointly authored - his chapters were sent to collaborators, and the resulting multiple corrections reassembled by the duly-chastened Wells. A 'popular' one volume edition appeared in 1930. By the standards of its time this was a best-seller. It was praised decades later by A J P Taylor as 'still the best introduction to history'. Toynbee had a favourable opinion of it. During the 1920s it sparked a controversy with Hilaire Belloc, who believed in such things as the 'Fall of Man'. It was also attacked by a teacher of Greek. Wells' hopes that school history could be taught in an international sense still, of course, have not come to fruition. He planned and collaborated a hefty set of volumes on biology, The Science of Life, with his own son, and with Julian Huxley; the theme was largely evolutionary ('The Origin of Species' was published only a few years before his birth). Huxley, a descendant of T H Huxley, regarded Wells as something of a Cockney upstart. And he wrote a descriptive, rather than analytical, book on economics, which includes many ingenious observations but was eclipsed by Keynes' General Theory of four years later. Some of his books were filmed; his 'Invisible Man' was turned into a filmscript by Preston Sturges, who however regarded his books as not very filmable and infuriated Wells by making the invisible man mad. Another media incident was Orson Welles' radio broadcast of 'War of the Worlds' in 1938, involving aggressive Martians landing in a location Americanised from its original Surrey, and which was reported to have cause mass panic among less educated Americans on the eastern seaboard. C.P. Snow wrote of Wells that he could 'throw out a phrase that crystallised a whole argument', and that he 'never heard anyone remotely in the same class.' Among these phrases were 'the War that will end War', coined when he worked with the Ministry of Propaganda under Northcliffe during the First World War, which he supported, and 'the New World Order', which he seemed to be the first to use, or popularise, in a 1940 book of that title. His less successful phrases included the 'competent receiver'. He said of himself that he 'worked all the time'. He was a socialist of an empirical, rather vague, rationalist type, disliking Marx and unenthusiastic about the managerial socialism of the Webbs. His book 'The Open Conspiracy' was published in 1928, subtitled 'Blue Prints for a World Revolution'. Bertrand Russell said of this book '.. I do not know of anything with which I agree more entirely' though since this was in a begging letter perhaps he was just being polite. It was revised and republished as 'What Are We to Do with Our Lives?' in 1931. In this short book, Wells attempts to answer the question: What should socialists actually do? - to which he confessed several times to having no very clear idea. It's a counter to Marx: why shouldn't non-proletarians unite to change the world? <strong>...</strong></p>Wells Herbert George - The New World Orderurn:md5:f22148b6c68f97540ca9c6258892eb482012-08-26T21:12:00+01:002015-01-31T23:29:03+00:00balderWells Herbert GeorgeConspiracyJew <p><img src="https://balderexlibris.com/public/img/.Wells_George_Herbert_-_The_New_World_Order_s.jpg" alt="" /><br />
Author : <strong>Wells Herbert George</strong><br />
Title : <strong>The New World Order Whether it is attainable, how it can be attained, and what sort of world a world at peace will have to be.</strong><br />
Year : 1940<br />
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IN THIS SMALL BOOK I want to set down as compactly, clearly and usefully as possible the gist of what I have learnt about war and peace in the course of my life. I am not going to write peace propaganda here. I am going to strip down certain general ideas and realities of primary importance to their framework, and so prepare a nucleus of useful knowledge for those who have to go on with this business of making a world peace. I am not going to persuade people to say "Yes, yes" for a world peace; already we have had far too much abolition of war by making declarations and signing resolutions; everybody wants peace or pretends to want peace, and there is no need to add even a sentence more to the vast volume of such ineffective stuff. I am simply attempting to state the things we must do and the price we must pay for world peace if we really intend to achieve it. Until the Great War, the First World War, I did not bother very much about war and peace. Since then I have almost specialised upon this problem. It is not very easy to recall former states of mind out of which, day by day and year by year, one has grown, but I think that in the decades before 1914 not only I but most of my generation - in the British Empire, America, France and indeed throughout most of the civilised world - thought that war was dying out. So it seemed to us. It was an agreeable and therefore a readily acceptable idea. We imagined the Franco-German War of 1870-71 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 were the final conflicts between Great Powers, that now there was a Balance of Power sufficiently stable to make further major warfare impracticable. A Triple Alliance faced a Dual Alliance and neither had much reason for attacking the other. We believed war was shrinking to mere expeditionary affairs on the outskirts of our civilisation, a sort of frontier police business. Habits of tolerant intercourse, it seemed, were being strengthened every year that the peace of the Powers remained unbroken. There was in deed a mild armament race going on; mild by our present standards of equipment; the armament industry was a growing and enterprising on; but we did not see the full implication of that; we preferred to believe that the increasing general good sense would be strong enough to prevent these multiplying guns from actually going off and hitting anything. And we smiled indulgently at uniforms and parades and army manoeuvres. They were the time-honoured toys and regalia of kings and emperors. They were part of the display side of life and would never get to actual destruction and killing. I do not think that exaggerates the easy complacency of, let us say, 1895, forty-five years ago. It was a complacency that lasted with most of us up to 1914. In 1914 hardly anyone in Europe or America below the age of fifty had seen anything of war in his own country. The world before 1900 seemed to be drifting steadily towards a tacit but practical unification. One could travel without a passport over the larger part of Europe; the Postal Union delivered one’s letters uncensored and safely from Chile to China; money, based essentially on gold, fluctuated only very slightly; and the sprawling British Empire still maintained a tradition of free trade, equal treatment and open-handedness to all comers round and about the planet. In the United States you could go for days and never see a military uniform. Compared with to-day that was, upon the surface at any rate, an age of easy-going safety and good humour. Particularly for the North Americans and the Europeans. But apart from that steady, ominous growth of the armament industry there were other and deeper forces at work that were preparing trouble. The Foreign Offices of the various sovereign states had not forgotten the competitive traditions of the eighteenth century. The admirals and generals were contemplating with something between hostility and fascination, the hunger weapons the steel industry was gently pressing into their hands. Germany did not share the selfcomplacency of the English-speaking world; she wanted a place in the sun; there was increasing friction about the partition of the raw material regions of Africa; the British suffered from chronic Russophobia with regard to their vast apportions in the East, and set themselves to nurse Japan into a modernised imperialist power; and also they "remembered Majuba"; the United States were irritated by the disorder of Cuba and felt that the weak, extended Spanish possessions would be all the better for a change of management. So the game of Power Politics went on, but it went on upon the margins of the prevailing peace. There were several wars and changes of boundaries, but they involved no fundamental disturbance of the general civilised life; they did not seem to threaten its broadening tolerations and understandings in any fundamental fashion. Economic stresses and social trouble stirred and muttered beneath the orderly surfaces of political life, but threatened no convulsion. The idea of altogether eliminating war, of clearing what was left of it away, was in the air, but it was free from any sense of urgency. The Hague Tribunal was established and there was a steady dissemination of the conceptions of arbitration and international law. It really seemed to many that the peoples of the earth were settling down in their various territories to a litigious rather than a belligerent order. If there was much social injustice it was being mitigated more and more by a quickening sense of social decency. Acquisitiveness conducted itself with decorum and public-spiritedness was in fashion. Some of it was quite honest public-spiritedness. In those days, and they are hardly more than half a lifetime behind us, no one thought of any sort of world administration. That patchwork of great Powers and small Powers seemed the most reasonable and practicable method of running the business of mankind. Communications were far too difficult for any sort of centralised world controls. Around the World in Eighty Days, when it was published seventy years ago, seemed an extravagant fantasy. It was a world without telephone or radio, with nothing swifter than a railway train or more destructive than the earlier types of H.E. shell. They were marvels. It was far more convenient to administer that world of the Balance of Power in separate national areas and, since there were such limited facilities for peoples to get at one another and do each other mischiefs, there seemed no harm in ardent patriotism and the complete independence of separate sovereign states. <strong>...</strong></p>Wells Herbert George - Complete worksurn:md5:bcb7fdac6b656fd2ed97a7ab45d74aa62012-08-26T21:10:00+01:002015-01-31T23:28:51+00:00balderWells Herbert GeorgeNovel <p><img src="https://balderexlibris.com/public/img/.Wells_George_Herbert_-_Complete_works_s.jpg" alt="" /><br />
Author : <strong>Wells Herbert George</strong><br />
Title : <strong>Complete works</strong><br />
Year : 1***<br />
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Biography. The time machine. The island of Dr. Moreau. The wheels of chance. The invisible man. The war of the worlds. When the sleeper wakes. First men in the moon. Twelve stories & a dream. Tono-Bungay. The war in the air. Ann Veronica - A modern love story. Door in the wall and other stories. The new Machiavelli. The world set free. The research magnificent. God the invisible king. The soul of a bishop. War and the future. The secret places of the heart. <strong>...</strong></p>