The Wonders Of Life On Earth

Following the route of Darwin's expedition and studies, this copiously illustrated book tells the story of life: what "it is, what has shaped it, and how - through ceaseless change and proliferation- it has unfolded the infinitely diverse panorama of flora and fauna that blanket the globe."

What is Life? Where did it come from? Why does it end?

Poetry. A PAGE FROM THE WONDERS OF LIFE ON EARTH is a book with a coherent vision of nature--constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past--through zoos, aviaries, formal gardens, menageries, and books like the Time Life one named in the title. Informed by the author's grand tour of these zoos and gardens, these poems provide a strong lens for considering the many paradoxes of inter-species relations; they open up the possibility of honest, unsentimental elegy. The book is also a model of what might be called investigative poetry, taking the poet's combination of perceptual acuity, craft, music and sensibility into these richly troubled places (prisons of, monuments to, museums for the lost natural world) where "arcades sell postcards of old photographs of the arcades," and where questions of what it means to be human, to be animal, to be other and to be art are tangibly in the air. "Bolster's work demonstrates a surety of vision supported by an insider's eye for the telling aberrant detail everywhere matched by her impeccable ear"--Judith Fitzgerald, The Globe and Mail.

A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth is a book with a coherent vision of nature -- constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past -- through zoos, aviaries, formal gardens, menageries, and books like the Time-Life one named in the title. Informed by the author's grand tour of these zoos and gardens, these poems provide a strong lens for considering the many paradoxes of inter-species relations; they open up the possibility of honest, unsentimental elegy. The book is also a model of what might be called investigative poetry, taking the poet's combination of perceptual acuity, craft, music and sensibility into these richly troubled places (prisons of, monuments to, museums for the lost natural world) where "arcades sell postcards of old photographs of the arcades," and where questions of what it means to be human, to be animal, to be other and to be art are tangibly in the air. This is Bolster's best work

"The publication of the present work on The Wonders of Life has been occasioned by the success of The Riddle of the Universe, which was written five years prior to this volume. Within a few months of the issue of this study of the monistic philosophy, in the autumn of 1899, ten thousand copies were sold. The clear opposition of the author's monistic philosophy, based as it was on the most advanced and sound scientific knowledge, to the conventional ideas and to an outworn "revelation," led to the publication of a vast number of criticisms and attacks. The present work on the wonders of life is, as the title indicates, a supplementary volume to The Riddle of the Universe. While the latter undertook to make a comprehensive survey of the general questions of science--as cosmological problems--in the light of the monistic philosophy, the present volume is confined to the realm of organic science, or the science of life. It seeks to deal connectedly with the general problems of biology, in strict accord with the monistic and mechanical principles which had been laid down by the author in 1866 in his work titled, General Morphology. In the latter publication, special stress was placed on the universality of the law of substance and the substantial unity of nature, which had been further treated in the second and fourteenth chapters of The Riddle of the Universe. The arrangement of the vast material for this study of the wonders of life was modeled on that of the Riddle. Retained in the present volume is the division into larger and smaller sections and the synopses of the various chapters. Thus the whole biological content falls into four sections and twenty chapters"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).