McClure's Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, August, 1893

“HUMAN DOCUMENTS.”

Reading edition

Illustration from McClure's Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, August, 1893

“For of the soule the bodie forme doth take, For soule is forme and doth the bodie make.” —From “An Hymne in Honour of Beautie.”—Spenser.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born eighty-four years ago on the 29th of August, 1809. He was educated at the Phillips Andover Academy, and graduated at Harvard in 1829, and was one of the founders of the ΦΒΚ Society of that university. His first general reception as a poet was gained by his successful lyrical effort to save the old frigate, “The Constitution,” from being broken up. He graduated in medicine in 1836 (after studying law in the Cambridge Law School), and in the same year published his first volume of verse. In 1839 he was made Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Dartmouth, and in 1847 he filled the same position at Harvard. He has published several volumes of poems, and the famous books known, respectively, as “The Autocrat,” “The Poet,” and the “Professor at the Breakfast Table.” He has written many medical works, and of his novels, “Elsie Venner” and “The Guardian Angel” are best known.

John James Ingalls was born in Middleton, Massachusetts, on December 29th, 1833. He graduated at Williams College in 1855. He then studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1857. Going to Atchison, Kansas, in the following year, he there practised his profession, and from that time to the present has been closely connected with the development of his adopted State and that of the country. In 1862 he was elected a Senator in the State of Kansas, and in 1863 and 1864 was defeated for the Lieut.-Governorship. For some years he was editor of the Atchison “Champion.” In 1873 he was chosen United States Senator, and served without interruption until 1889.

Jules Verne was born at Nantes in France on February 8, 1828, and was educated there. After leaving school he studied law in Paris, but, while still very young, he became known as a popular writer of dramas, comedies and burlesques for the Parisian theatres. “Les Pailles Rompues” was produced at the Gymnase Theatre in 1850, when Jules was but twenty-two years old, and “Onze Jours de Siége” shortly afterwards. He first became known as a writer of highly imaginative stories with a strong current of science in them in 1863, when his “Five Weeks in a Balloon” made a great success. Since then he has produced more than sixty novels of the same class, the most noted of which are “The Voyage to the Moon,” “20,000 Leagues under the Sea,” and “Michael Strogoff.” Many of his works have been successfully dramatized, and he has been translated into almost every modern language, including Arabic and Japanese.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

ALL FROM DAGUERREOTYPES—THE TWO LAST ONES, BETWEEN 1845 AND 1855. THE FIRST IS THE EARLIEST PICTURE OF DOCTOR HOLMES, AND HE IS UNABLE TO PLACE A DATE UPON IT.