Christ in Italy - 1912 Author:Mary Hunter Austin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I Recall once that in a season when everybody was asking what had become of the Rains and nobody could tell, I had come up the trail with a friend from the singi... more »ng, silver beaches, and there where the dunes leave off and the scrub gives place to the chaparral, we found a spray of sea blue ceanothus put forth to bloom untimely. I remember his calling my attention to the spray as he put up his hand to clear it from the trail, and my asking if he thought there was really any difference between that and the process of the primitive mind in the practice of what is called Sympathetic Magic. What I was thinking of was the tremendous urge of desire that betrays man into the quasi-satisfaction of imitation, and so to the belief that as he himself is happily affected by the performance, so may his friend be or his distant enemy, or the lurking cloud or the tardy harvest. My friend is a Biologist. That is to say he believes nothing about life that has not been demonstrated in a laboratory, though he will occasionally accept things written in a book, particularly if the Germans have done it. Of all that lies at large in the hearts of men he is profoundly unaware; but when even a Biologist has to admit that the opening and shutting of a pair of tongs in a roomful of bored callers will set them all a yawning, why shouldn't an Australian savage believe he can induce rain by drumming thunder, or a lilac bush hope to invite the belated season by the appearance of its being already there? Bloom and rain have come together so many times before . . . so many times! I remember my friend's explanation of it being much what the lilac's might have been, supposing it a very intelligent lilac with a university education, all from the operation of its own in- sides, the rising of the sap, the seasonal...« less