NORMAN DOUGLAS was a humanist. He was many
other things besides; novelist, travel-writer, essayist,
geologist, botanist, biologist. He was animated by an
insatiable curiosity, which extended to a great variety of
subjects and countries. In a significant passage of Alone,
when writing of children, he throws an interesting sidelight
on his own point of view: 'A man who has tried to remain
a mere citizen of the world and refused to squeeze himself
into the narrow methods and aspirations of any epoch or
country will discover that children correspond unconsciously
to his multifarious interests. They are not standardized. They
are more generous in their appreciations, more sensitive to
pure ideas, more impersonal. Their curiosity is disinterested.
The stock may be rudimentary, but the outlook is spacious;
it is the passionless outlook of the sage. A child is ready to
embrace the universe. And, unlike adults, he is never afraid
to face his own limitations. How refreshing to converse with
folks who have no bile to vent, no axe to grind, no preju-
dices to air; who are pagans to the core; who, uninitiated
into the false value of externals, never fail to size you up
from a more spiritual point of view than do their elders;
who are not oozing politics and sensuality, nor afflicted with
some stupid ailment or other which prevents them doing
this and that.' Like the child he adumbrates here, 'he was
ready to embrace the universe'.

Douglas began to write late in life. Siren Land was not
published until 1911, when he was already forty-three. This
was his first serious book, though he had published
Unprofessional Tales, a volume of short stories, under the
pseudonym of 'Normyx' in 1901, in collaboration with his
wife.

He was born in 1868 at Falkenhorst, Thuringen, in Austria.
His father was Scottish and his mother half Scottish and half
German. He spent his early years in Austria but was educated

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