Conclusion 179 



member of which will presently join a new one, and retain 

 a trifle even of the old cancelled memory, by way of 

 greater aptitude for working in concert with other mole- 

 cules. This is why animals feed on grass and on each 

 other, and cannot proselytise or convert the rude ground 

 before it has been tutored in the first principles of the 

 higher kinds of association. 



Again, I would recommend the reader to beware of 

 believing anything in this book unless he either likes it, 

 or feels angry at being told it. If required belief in this 

 or that makes a man angry, I suppose he should, as a 

 general rule, swallow it whole then and there upon the 

 spot, otherwise he may take it or leave it as he likes. I 

 have not gone far for my facts, nor yet far from them ; 

 all on which I rest are as open to the reader as to me. 

 If I have sometimes used hard terms, the probability is 

 that I have not understood them, but have done so by a 

 slip, as one who has caught a bad habit from the company 

 he has been lately keeping. They should be skipped. 



Do not let him be too much cast down by the bad 

 language with which professional scientists obscure the 

 issue, nor by their seeming to make it their business to 

 fog us under the pretext of removing our difficulties. It 

 is not the ratcatcher's interest to catch all the rats ; and, 

 as Handel observed so sensibly, " Every professional 

 gentleman must do his best for to live." The art of some 

 of our philosophers, however, is sufficiently transparent, 

 and consists too often in saying " organism which . . . 

 must be classified among fishes," ^ instead of " fish," and 

 then proclaiming that they have " an ineradicable ten- 

 dency to try to make things clear." - 



If another example is required, here is the following 

 from an article than which I have seen few with which I 

 more completely agree, or which have given me greater 

 pleasure. If our men of science would take to writing in 



1 Professor Huxley, Encycl. Brit., 9th ed., art. Evolution, p. 750. 

 * " Hume," by Professor Huxley, p. 45. 



