APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 55 



heads with whom we are familiar. But the abyss of 

 time between the period at which North Europe was 

 first covered with ice, when savages pursued 

 mammoths and scratched their portraits with sharp 

 stones in central France, and the present day, ever 

 widens as we learn more about the events which 

 bridge it. And, if the differences between the 

 Neanderthaloid men and ourselves could be divided 

 into as many parts as that time contains centuries, 

 the progress from part to part would probably be 

 almost imperceptible. 



CLXXXVI 



I have not been one of those fortunate persons 

 who are able to regard a popular lecture as a 

 mere hois ifa-imre, unw^orthy of being ranked among 

 the serious efforts of a philosopher ; and who keep 

 their fame as scientific hierophants unsullied by 

 attempts — at least of the successful sort — to be 

 understanded of the people. 



On the contrary, I found that the task of putting the 

 truths learned in the field, the laboratory and the 

 museum, into language which, without bating a jot of 

 scientific accuracy shall be generally intelligible, taxed 

 such scientific and literary faculty as I possessed to 

 the uttermost ; indeed my experience has furnished me 

 with no better corrective of the tendency to schol- 

 astic pedantry which besets all those who are 

 absorbed in pursuits remote from the common ways 

 of men, and become habituated to think and speak 

 in the technical dialect of their own little world, as if 

 there were no other. 



If the popular lecture thus, as I believe, finds one 

 moiety of its justification in the self-discipline of the 

 lecturer, it surely finds the other half in its effect on 

 the auditory. For though various sadly comical 

 experiences of the results of my own efforts have 

 led me to entertain a very moderate estimate of the 



