After four years at Harvard and the regulation two years at the Harvard Law School, John Fiske opened an office in Boston and gave his shingle to the breeze. No clients came, and this was well--for the clients. Also, for John. The law is a business proposition: its essence is the adjustment of differences between men, the lubrication of exchange, getting things on! Learned men very seldom make good lawyers. Law is a very practical matter, and as for "Law Latin," it can be learned in a week and then should be mostly forgotten. The lawyer who asks his client about the "causa sine qua non," or harangues the jury concerning the "ipse dixit" of "de facto" and "de jure," will probably be mulcted for costs on general principles. "I always rule hard against the lawyer who quotes Latin," said a Brooklyn judge to me the other day. Happily, Law Latin is now not used to any extent, except in Missouri. No more clients came to John Fiske than did to Wendell Phillips, who once had a law-office on the same street. So John sent letters to the newspapers, wrote book-reviews, and contributed essays to the "Atlantic Monthly." Occasionally, he would lecture for scientific clubs or societies. While still in the Law School he had discounted the future and married a charming young woman, who believed in him to an extent that would have made the average man pause. Marriages do not always keep pace exactly with the price of corn. Receipts in the Fiske law-office were not active. John Fiske was twenty-six; his grandmother was dead, and family cares were coming along apace, all according to the Law of Malthus. He accepted an offer to give substitute lectures at Harvard on history, for a professor who had gone abroad for his health. This he continued, speaking for any absentee on any subject, and tutoring rich laggards for a consideration. Good boys, low on phosphorus, used to get him to start their daily themes, and those overtaken in the throes of trigonometry he often rescued from disgrace. Darwinism was in the saddle. Asa Gray was mildly defending it. Agassiz stood aloof, clinging to his early Swiss parsonage teachings, and the Theological Department marched in solid phalanx and scoffed and scorned. Yale, always having more theology than Harvard, threw out challenges. Fiske had saturated himself with the ideas of Darwin and Wallace, and his intellect was great enough to perceive the vast and magnificent scope of "The Origin of Species." He prepared and read a lecture on the subject, all couched in gentle and judicial phrase, but with a finale that gave forth no uncertain sound. The Overseers decided to ask Fiske to amplify the subject and give a course of lectures on the Law of Evolution. The subject grew under his hands and the course extended itself into thirty-five lectures, covering the whole field of natural history, with many short excursions into the realms of biology, embryology, botany, geology and cosmogony.