PREFACE. 



I am very well aware that the old are prone to 

 regard their early performances with much more 

 interest than their contemporaries of a younger 

 generation are likely to take in them; moreover, 

 I freely admit that my younger contemporaries 

 might employ their time better than in perusing 

 the three essays, written thirty-two years ago, 

 which occupy the first place in this volume. This 

 confession is the more needful, inasmuch as all the 

 premises of the argument set forth in " Man's 

 Place in Nature " and most of the conclusions de- 

 duced from them, are now to be met with among 

 other well-established and, indeed, elementary 

 truths, in the text-books. 



Paradoxical as the statement may seem, how- 

 ever, it is just because every well-informed student 

 of biology ought to be tempted to throw these 

 essays, and especially the second, " On the Bela- 

 tions of Man to the Lower Animals," aside, as a 

 fair mathematician might dispense with the re- 

 perusal of Cocker's arithmetic, that I think it 



