Before his death, Dr. Hatch had written out and sent to press the first eight Lectures. Of these he had corrected six, while the proofs of the seventh and eighth, with some corrections in his own hand, were found among his papers. As regards these two, the duties of the editor were simple: he had only to correct them for the press. But as regards the remaining four Lectures, the work was much more arduous and responsible. A continuous MS., or even a connected outline of any one of the Lectures, could not be said to exist. The Lectures had indeed been delivered a year and a half before, but the delivery had been as it were of selected passages, with the connections orally supplied, while the Lecturer did not always follow the order of his notes, or, as we know from the Lectures he himself prepared for the press, the one into which he meant to work his finished material. What came into the editor’s hands was a series of note-books, which seemed at first sight but an amorphous mass or collection of hurried and disconnected jottings, now in ink, now in pencil; with a multitude of cross references made by symbols and abbreviations whose very significance had to be laboriously learned; with abrupt beginnings and still more abrupt endings; with pages crowded with successive strata, as it were, of reflections and references, followed by pages almost or entirely blank, speaking of sections or fields meant to be further explored; with an equal multitude of erasures, now complete, now incomplete, now cancelled; with passages marked as transposed or as to be transposed, or with a sign of interrogation which indicated, now a suspicion as to the validity or accuracy of a statement, now a simple suspense of judgment, now a doubt as to position or relevance, now a simple query as of one asking, Have I not said this, or something like this, before? In a word, what we had were the note-books of the scholar and the literary workman, well ordered, perhaps, as a garden to him who made it and had the clue to it, but at once a wilderness and a labyrinth to him who had no hand in its making, and who had to discover the way through it and out of it by research and experiment. But patient, and, I will add, loving and sympathetic work, rewarded the editor and his kind helpers. The clue was found, the work proved more connected and continuous than under the conditions could have been thought to be possible, and the result is now presented to the world.