the Veda sent from India, or a better reading of an obscure passage. _Diversos diversa iuvant_, and it is fortunate that it should be so. All these things, I thought, should form part of my Recollections, and my own little self should disappear as much as possible. Even the pronoun I should meet the reader but seldom, though in Recollections it was as impossible to leave it out altogether as it would be to take away the lens from a photographic camera. Now I believe I have always been most willing to yield to my friends, and I shall in this matter also yield to them so far that in the Recollections which follow there will be more of my inward and outward struggles; but I must on the whole adhere to my old plan. I could not, if I would, neglect the environment of my life, and the many friends that advised and helped me, and enabled me to achieve the little that I may have achieved in my own line of study. If my friends had been different from what they were, should I not have become a different man myself, whether for good or for evil? And the same applies to our natural surroundings also. And here I must invoke the patience of my readers, if I try to explain in as few words as possible what I think about _environment_, and what about _heredity_ or _atavism_. I was a thorough Darwinian in ascribing the shaping of my career to environment, though I was always very averse to atavism, of which we have heard so much lately in most biographies. Even with respect to environment, however, I could not go quite so far as certain of our Darwinian friends, who maintain that everything is the result of environment, or translated into biographical language, that everybody is a creature of circumstances. No, I could not go so far as that. Environment may shape our course and may shape us, but there must be something that is shaped, and allows itself to be shaped. I was once seriously asked by one who considers himself a Darwinian whether I did not know that the Mammoth was driven by the extreme cold of the Pleiocene Period to grow a thick fur in his struggle for life. That he grew then a thicker fur, I knew, but that surely does not explain the whole of the Mammoth, with and without a thick fur, before and after the fur. It is really a pity to see for how many of these downright absurdities Darwin is made responsible by the Darwinians. He has clearly shown how in many cases the individual may be modified almost beyond recognition by environment, but the individual must always have been there first. Before we had a spaniel and a Newfoundland dog there must have been some kind of dog, neither so small as the spaniel nor so large as the Newfoundland, and no one would now doubt that these two belonged to the same species and presupposed some kind of a less modified canine creature. It is equally true that every individual man has been modified by his surroundings or environment, if not to the same extent as certain animals, yet very considerably, as in the case