lmost achieved a blush under his tan.
He held out the second book on the philosophy of the organism. "It's
the work of a German scientist who stands rather high. I read it last
winter, and it interested me. I got it from a clergyman I know who is
spending the winter in Santa Barbara."

"A clergyman!"

Strafford laughed. "An 'advanced' clergyman," he explained. "Oh, a lot
of them are reading science now. I think it's pretty decent of them."

I looked at Strafford, who towered six feet three, and it suddenly
struck me that he might be one of the forerunners of a type our
universities were about to turn out. I wondered what he believed. Of
one thing I was sure, that he was not in the medical profession to make
money. That was a faith in itself.

I began with the elementary work.

"You'd better borrow a Century Dictionary," I said.

"That's easy," he said, and actually achieved it, with the clergyman's
aid.

The absorption in which I fought my way through those books may prove
interesting to future generations, who, at Sunday-school age, when the
fable of Adam and Eve was painfully being drummed into me (without
any mention of its application), will be learning to think straight,
acquiring easily in early youth what I failed to learn until after
forty. And think of all the trouble and tragedy that will have been
averted. It is true that I had read some biology at Cambridge, which
I had promptly forgotten; it had not been especially emphasized by my
instructors as related to life--certainly not as related to religion:
such incidents as that of Adam and Eve occupied the religious field
exclusively. I had been compelled to commit to memory, temporarily, the
matter in those books; but what I now began to perceive was that the
matter was secondary compared to the view point of science--and this had
been utterly neglected. As I read, I experienced all the excitement of
an old-fashioned romance, but of a romance of such significance as to
touch the very springs of existence; and above all I was impressed with
the integrity of the scientific method--an integrity commensurate with
the dignity of man--that scorned to quibble to make out a case, to
affirm something that could not be proved.

Little by little I became familiar with the principles of embryonic
evolution, ontogeny, and of biological evolution, phylogeny; realized,
for the first time, my own history and that of the ancestors from whom
I had developed and descend