APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 47 



To my observation, human nature has not sensibly 

 changed through the last thirty years. I doubt not 

 that there are truths as plainly obvious and as 

 generally denied, as those contained in " Man's 

 Place in Nature," now awaiting enunciation. If 

 there is a young man of the present generation, who 

 has taken as much trouble as I did to assure himself 

 that they are truths, let him come out with them, 

 without troubling his head about the barking of the 

 dogs of St. Ernulphus, " Veritas praevalebit " some 

 day ; and, even if she does not prevail in his time, he 

 himself will be all the better and the wiser for having 

 tried to help her. And let him recollect that such 

 great reward is full payment for all his labour and 

 pains. 



Ancient traditions, when tested by the severe 

 processes of modern investigations, commonly 

 enough fade away into mere dreams : but it is 

 singular how often the dream turns out to have been 

 a half-waking one, presaging a reality. Ovid 

 foreshadowed the discoveries of the geologist : the 

 Atlantis was an imagination, but Columbus found a 

 western world : and though the quaint forms of 

 Centaurs and Satyrs have an existence only in the 

 realms of art, creatures approaching man more nearly 

 than they in essential structure, and yet as thoroughly 

 brutal as the goat's or horse's half of the mythical 

 compound, are now not only known, but notorious. 



It is a truth of very wide, if not of universal, 

 application, that every living creature commences its 



