H9 



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 

 premisses of the argument set forth in "Man's 

 Place in Nature " and most of the conclusions 

 deduced 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 

 Relations of Man to the Lower Animals," aside, as 

 a fair mathematician might dispense with the 

 reperusal of Cocker's arithmetic, that I think ic 



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