PREFACE 



THIS little volume is founded on three discourses which I have 

 slightly modified for the present purpose, and have endeavoured 

 to render interesting by the introduction of illustrative process 

 blocks, which are described sufficiently fully to form a large extension 

 of the original text. 



The first, entitled ' Nature's Insurgent Son,' formed, under 

 another title, the Romanes lecture at Oxford in 1905. Its object 

 is to exhibit in brief the ' Kingdom of Man,' to shew that there 

 is undue neglect in the taking over of that possession by mankind, 

 and to urge upon our Universities the duty of acting the leading 

 part in removing that neglect. 



The second is an account, which served as the presidential 

 address to the British Association at York in 1906, of the progress 

 made in the last quarter of a century towards the assumption of 

 his kingship by slowly-moving Man. 



The third, reprinted from the Quarterly Review, is a more 

 detailed account of recent attempts to deal with a terrible disease 

 the Sleeping Sickness of tropical Africa and furnishes an example 

 of one of the innumerable directions in which Man brings down 

 disaster on his head by resisting the old rule of selection of the fit 

 and destruction of the unfit, and is painfully forced to the conclusion 

 that knowledge of N ature must be sought and control of her processes 

 eventually obtained. I am glad to be able to state that as a result of 

 the representations of the Tropical Diseases Committee of the Royal 

 Society, and, as I am told, in some measure in consequence of the 

 explanation of the state of things given in this essay, funds have been 

 provided by the Colonial Office for the support of a professorship of 



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