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 descended. I, this marvellously complicated being, torn
by desires and despairs, was the result of