CONCLUDING REMARKS. 301 



science, and it is as well that there should be no mis- 

 take on this head ; I neither know, nor want to know, 

 more detail than is necessary to enable me to give a 

 fairly broad and comprehensive view of my subject. 

 When for the purpose of giving this, a matter impor- 

 tunately insisted on being made out, I endeavoured to 

 make it out as well as I could ; otherwise that is to 

 say, if it did not insist on being looked into, in spite of 

 a good deal of snubbing, I held that, as it was blurred 

 and indistinct in nature, I had better so render it in my 

 work. 



Nevertheless, if one has gone for some time through 

 a wood full of burrs, some of them are bound to stick. 

 I am afraid that I have left more such burrs in 

 one part and another of my book, than the kind of 

 reader whom I alone wish to please will perhaps put 

 up with. Fortunately, this kind of reader is the best- 

 natured critic in the world, and is long suffering of a 

 good deal that the more consciously scientific will not 

 tolerate; I wish, however, that I had not used such 

 expressions as " centres of thought and action " quite so 

 often. 



As for the kind of inaccuracy already alluded to, my 

 reader will not, I take it, as a general rule, know, or 

 wish to know, much more about science than I do, 

 sometimes perhaps even less; so that he and I shall 

 commonly be wrong in the same places, and our two 

 wrongs will make a sufficiently satisfactory right for 

 practical purposes. 



Of course, if I were a specialist writing a treatise or 

 primer on such and such a point of detail, I admit that 



