PREFATORY. 
I first read Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” 
in the library of my sainted uncle, John Schaller, at New 
Ulm, Minnesota, in 1892. I did not comprehend all of it 
then, a cause, to me, of considerable chagrin, for which I 
later found some consolation in the opinion of Dr. Fred- 
erick Lynch, who pronounces Darwin’s epochal work “one 
of the two most difficult books in the English language.” 
But like many others, I understood enough of Darwin’s 
book to catch glimpses of the grandeur of the conception 
which underlies its argumentation. It was then that my 
beloved uncle, out of that wide and accurate reading which 
so frequently astonished his friends, and with that pene- 
trating dialectic of his, opened my eyes to certain falla- 
cies in Darwin’s argument, especially to the fatal weak- 
ness of the chapter on Instinct. The reading of St. 
George Mivart’s book “The Genesis of Species” later con- 
vinced me of the accuracy of my uncle’s judgment. But 
the fascination of the subject persisted, and for a time 
Herbert Spencer’s “Synthetic Philosophy,” by the com- 
prehensiveness of its induction and its vast array of data, 
exercised its thrall. Alfred Russel Wallace’s “Darwin- 
ism,” Huxley’s “Lectures on Evolution,’ Tyndall’s “The 
Beginning of Things,” Grant Allen’s “The Evolutionist at 
Large,” Eimer’s “Orthogenesis,’’ Clodd’s “Story of Cre- 
ation,” occupied me in turn, until the apodictic presenta- 
tion of John Fiske’s Essays on Darwinism, no less than 
the open and haggard opposition to Christianity which 
prevails in Huxley’s “Science and Hebrew Tradition”’ 
