PREFACE 



age, — and that before that they had long tails and 

 ate grubs and beetles! 



If the reader is curious to know the worst he will 

 find it in these pages. There even his own great- 

 grandfather — a Jove-like patriarch with ample 

 beard, piercing eyes and an aquiline nose — will be 

 subjected to unsparing analysis. It will be shown 

 how much the proud old gentleman was indebted 

 to a long line of freebooting forbears that strug- 

 gled for a precarious living in the sea, on muddy 

 flats, on the uplands or in the trees — aeons before 

 Adam delved or Eve span. In detail it will even 

 be charged that the real founder of the family 

 was not the powerful settler to whom the king 

 gave a grant of land extending far back from the 

 river, but a poor mud-sucking protochordate of 

 pre-Silurian times; that when in some far-off dis- 

 mal swamp a putrid prize was snatched by scaly 

 forms, their facial masks already bore our eyes and 

 nose and mouth. 



Accordingly this little book can hardly expect 

 much popularity either in Tennessee, where the 

 very idea of evolution is anathema, or in the metro- 

 politan strongholds where pithecophobia is still 



prevalent and man's complete superiority to the 



viii 



