“Zugassent,” said Mr. Lister, and his lip quivered, and a sudden moisture sprang into his eyes as he spoke, “was a pure and noble soul who believed that everything that was of human interest was worthy of conscientious, painstaking study, and that everything which involved human happiness or misery was a legitimate field for honest effort for improvement. The appalling sum of misery resulting to woman from the present system of marriage, and indirectly to men and children as well through the too great division of the means of subsistence, filled his heart with a divine compassion. It is said that his attention was first called to this subject by observing the suffering of his own wife. That he should be the cause of producing such unavailing suffering became a source of deep disquietude to him. He resolved rather than to pursue a course so fraught with evil to woman, to return to the simple relations of courtship. He fondly loved his wife, but he had firmly decided to content himself with the purely Platonic and spiritual pleasures of her society. Being, however, a natural thinker and a man of studious tastes and habits, he could not help revolving the problem in his thoughts, much wondering at its mind-baffling character. The more he pondered the matter the more was he struck with the astounding anomaly presented by this scientific age. He saw that the explorer, the discoverer and the pioneer were pushing their caravans and wagon-trains into every unmapped land on the globe, and steering their barks into every unknown sea. Applauded by the world, they were daring the burning fevers of Central Africa, and leaving their bones for others as determined discoverers to find in the frozen regions of the North Pole. He saw that in the domain of Science, and Art, and Invention an innumerable host of patient, earnest workers and thinkers, lured on by the highest rewards which Earth could offer, were burning midnight oil in an agonizing search after improvement. Consuming brain and nerve with unremitting and profligate energy, these toilers after newer and better ways were fast robbing the earth of all its material secrets. Even in Religion the rock-bound creeds of hoary churches were being diligently revised and unscrupulously altered to adapt them to the new light of a refulgent present. Everywhere there was light, change, improvement, discarding the old and adopting the newer and better, except in the social relation of man and woman. This alone remained, not, indeed, unquestioned, but unexplored and unimproved, the one stationary fixture of an obsolete and decrepit past. Zugassent saw with absolute and increasing wonder that none of the new light which was flooding the world was allowed to penetrate this dark Continent. A superstition as black, as unreasoning, as utterly inconsistent as that which compelled Galileo to retract his affirmation about the earth’s motion, shrouded this dark Continent and forbade any student to set foot therein.