of Kaspar Hauser, the man with the iron mask, or the mutineers of the _Bounty_ in the Pitcairn Islands. But there must have been the man first, before he could be so modified. Now it was this very individual, my own self in fact, the spiritual self even more than the physical, that interested my critics, while I thought that the circumstances which moulded that self would be of far greater interest than the self itself. Of course all the modifications that men now undergo are nothing if compared to the early modifications which produced what we speak of as racial, linguistic, or even national peculiarities. That we are English or German, that we are white or black, nay, if you like, that we are human beings at all, all this has modified our self, or our germ-plasm, far more powerfully than anything that can happen to us as individuals now. When my friends and readers assured me that an account of my early struggles in the battle of life would be useful to many a young, struggling man, all I could say was that here again it was really my friends who did everything for me, and helped me over many a stile, and many a ditch, nay, without whom I should never have done whatever I did for the Sciences of Language, of Mythology, and Religion, in fact for Anthropology in the widest sense of that word. My very struggles were certainly a help to me, even my opponents were most useful to me. The subjects on which I wrote had hardly been touched on in England, at least from the historical point of view which I took, and I had not only to overcome the indifference of the public, but to disarm as much as possible the prejudices often felt, and sometimes expressed also, against anything made in Germany! Now I confess I could never understand such a prejudice among men of science. Was I more right or more wrong because I was born in Germany? Is scientific truth the exclusive property of one nation, of Germany, or of England? If I say two and two make four in German, is that less true because it is said by a German? and if I say, no language without thought, no thought without language, has that anything to do with my native country? The prejudice against strangers and particularly against Germans is, no doubt, much stronger now than it was at the time when I first came to England. I had spent nearly two years in Paris, and there too there existed then so little of unfriendly feeling towards Germany, that one of the best reviews to which the rising scholars and best writers of Paris contributed was actually called _Revue Germanique_. Who would now venture to publish in Paris such a review and under such a title? If there existed such an anti-German feeling anywhere in England when I arrived here in the year 1846, one would suppose that it existed most strongly at Oxford. And so it did, no doubt, particularly among theologians. With them German meant much the same as unorthodox, and unorthodox was enough at that time to taboo a man at Oxford.