Excerpt from Literature For there is the literature which came into existence long before the art of writing, -literature which was transmitted orally from age to age or was forgotten almost in the mak ing. The verbal reflex of action and thought and feeling is forever, in much the same fashion, still taking formamong peoples quite primitive and barbarous - Asiatic, African, and Polynesian - and the curious student may observe it to-day, just as he might have observed precisely the same thing ten thousand years ago. Therefore, what we usually call the whole body of the literature of man kind - meaning that to which we have ready access - is only a pitifully meagre fragment, after all. Literature irresistibly reminds one of the marvellous fecundity, the monstrous prodigality of Nature, which will spawn a hun dred million life-germs and let them perish, in order that a single living organism may survive. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.