The Introduction, though undertaken apparently with a reluctant rather than an eager mind, and bearing indeed some marks of a perfunctory performance, is yet not only interesting in itself but valuable as a mirror in which to catch a passing reflection of its author’s mind. Aware that the book to follow would deal largely with those advances in civilization which publishers and writers in their bookkeeping like to record to the credit of the world, he cannot forbear at the outset gently reminding his readers that with all our statistics we cannot “make ourselves independent of the inextinguishable lamps of heaven,” and with a sort of under-the-breath doubt if he may not be letting his own temperament get in the way of more exact standards of measurement, he allows himself for a moment to pause over the changes in civilization, which accepted as progress do yet obliterate some very wonderful prints which the foot of man has made. It is the old song of _laudator temporis acti_, sung to the air of his own brooding age. But having thus, as it were, satisfied his conscience by discharging the debt he owed to his own personal taste in the matter of what constitutes progress, he takes up the real business of the Introcduction and quickly becomes forgetful of himself the philosopher in the pleasure which the poet and artist in him may take with a very large and plastic substance. Near the close of the paper he writes: “Should the doctrines of Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest, and Heredity, be accepted as Laws of Nature, they must profoundly modify the thought of men and, consequently, their action.” He himself, with his aversion to the speculations of science, had but a bowing acquaintance with those investigations of Darwin and Huxley and their fellows which brought about so great a revolution of thought in his lifetime, and clearly was impatient of what he regarded as the encroachment of science upon the humanities in the formation of intellectual beliefs; but he was, after all, a child of his time, and his thought had been, whether he would or no, modified by the results of scientific investigation. At any rate, he had the poet’s faculty for appropriating results, and the picture which he draws in this Introduction of the evolution of the earth and of man’s early mastery of it is a striking piece of imaginative writing, touched here and there with a dash of wit which one almost fancies was Lowell’s intellectual aside to the Balaam-like prophecy he was compelled to deliver.