For all that any man may gainsay, the ketch Arangi, trader and blackbirder in the Solomon Islands, may have signified in Jerry's mind as much the mysterious boat that traffics between the two worlds, as, at one time, the boat that Charon sculled across the Styx signified to the
human mind.
I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really
human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-bear woman's vulpine, shifty face, strangely
human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city byway.
Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice, but its image was upon its envelope, like the
human form on the coffin of a mummy.
Oh, how many seas round about me, what dawning
human futures!
The sum of
human wills produced the Revolution and Napoleon, and only the sum of those wills first tolerated and then destroyed them.
It was at about this time that I sighted a number of the half-naked warriors of the
human race of Pellucidar.
Religious sentiment, consecrating the natural affections and rights of the
human heart, above all that pitiful care and awe for the perishing
human clay of which relic-worship is but the corruption, has always had much to do with localities, with the thoughts which attach themselves to definite scenes and places.
They have not erected to themselves colossal statues upon pedestals of
human bones, to provoke and insult the tardy hand of heavenly retribution.
Three quarters of an hour from the time of his seizure his captors dropped gently to earth in the strangest city that
human eye had ever rested upon.
He pointed out-- writing in a foolish, facetious tone--that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the
human being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages.
He was quite unaware already that he had ever been
human, and thought he was a bird, even in appearance, just the same as in his early days, and when he tried to catch a fly he did not understand that the reason he missed it was because he had attempted to seize it with his hand, which, of course, a bird never does.
It may not therefore in this place be improper to apply ourselves to the examination of that modern doctrine, by which certain philosophers, among many other wonderful discoveries, pretend to have found out, that there is no such passion in the
human breast.
