11 PREFACE. 



fled by the knowledge of the fact that the University had 

 completed all its plans to erect upon its broad grounds an 

 expensive and substantial college, equipped with faculty, 

 library and modern laboratories, in the halls of which 

 were to be taught to Catholic students the various 

 branches of the biological sciences. 



Later in the present preface, however, it will be neces- 

 sary for me to show that the pleasure, to which reference 

 has just been made, did not remain an unmixed one 

 throughout all my relations with the University and her 

 Washington press exponents; and, as such subsequent 

 slight jars as did occur undoubtedly are significant and 

 have their lessons for us, they will be briefly dwelt upon 

 in the present connection, robbed of all passion and all 

 personality. So far as the lecturer was concerned he was 

 invariably treated with the utmost courtesy on all oc- 

 casions, by everyone having anything to do with the 

 University, and for that his sincere thanks are here 

 tendered. The first lecture was received by both faculty 

 and divinity students with very general and marked ap- 

 proval. Not so, however, the second one, and still less, 

 the remaining two. They were disapproved, and upon 

 the best authority the writer learned that he was roundly 

 denounced as a "heretic" and a "pagan," by one or two 

 of the students in their discussions of the lectures after 

 the same had been delivered. In one instance, it required 

 the action of the rector to quell the feeling; 

 especially in the case of one student, who openly ex- 

 pressed himself in words to this effect: "That had the 

 lecturer lived in a former century he would have been 

 burned as he well deserved to be." At the latter part of 

 the last lecture, one of the "Fathers," a member of the 

 faculty, was seen to place his fingers in his ears rather 

 than be corrupted by listening to my heresy. When one 

 thinks for a moment how the dreaded Inquisition dealt 

 with anatomists, "in a former century," such acts can, 

 by the writer, only be construed as the very greatest com- 

 pliments that possibly could have been meted out to him. 



