William Dean Howells

A review by William Dean Howells of Herman Melville's "Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War"

At every stage of his development, Man has tried to read the future. In America numerologists, ostrologists, palmists, and mediums still beckon the gullible. A Bantu diviner gets his advance information from bones, and in Borneo the behavior of birds is the best clue to the future. In this article, drawn from his forthcoming book. The Heathens: Primitive Man and His Religions, William Hotvells has collected the more significant omens and portents. He is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin.

The magazine was already established in its traditions when I came to it, and when I left it fifteen years later it seemed to me that if I had done any good it was little more than to fix it more firmly in them.

A review