If we have for more than fifteen centuries, yielded ourselves to doctrines, conveyed to us through all the highways of life, so assiduously, that neither infancy, youth, manhood or old age, have escaped their tireless importunities for acceptance; doctrines, which consign seven-eighths of humanity to eternal torture for no faults to most of them but a lack of opportunity, which under Providence has been denied, it is not unreasonable to conclude, with this experience of the mutability of human understanding, that there are other beliefs fastened on our minds by ages of custom and mistaken thought, equally untenable, which may be as justly placed in our catalogue of errors. Where then shall we look for truth? Authority, as we have seen, is not an infallible guide. We shall never know how much the industrious promulgation of error is due to the selfish love of corporate power, how much to a pure benevolence. Neither are the brightest minds safe monitors in all things of thought. Aristotle defended slavery, Hobbes persecution, Johnson witchcraft, and Gladstone religious superstition; but, for all that, we shall never arrive at the extremity of despair; for a cultivation of the mind, the deductive use of positive knowledge, and the untrammeled exercise of reason, lead to truth, as directly, as the line of gravity points to the center of the earth, and only by these will its reign be established in the world. W. S. INTRODUCTORY. My habitation is upon the plateau of a mountain in California. I entered this region and became a settler by a fortuitous event. About thirty-five years ago, I took a summer outing from a close application to business in the metropolis, and came here for a deer hunt. One of those beautiful animals that I had wounded with my rifle led me further into this wild and picturesque locality than I had intended to go, and I thus arrived upon this spot, as I believe, the first white man that ever set foot upon it. Reaching here late in the afternoon, I found myself too far out of my path to return by daylight, and so, building a fire, I spent my first night alone in this weird place. It was the first time in my life that I had slept where some human creature was not within the sound of my voice, and from that night I date a change of sentiment, thought, and feeling, which has altered my career, and made me, what I have chosen to be, a recluse.