To CHARLES DARWIN, Esq., M.A., F.R.S., etc., etc., etc. Sir : To you is dedicated this faithful report of a humble attempt to confirm, explain, and elucidate the wonderful and irrefragable theory of which you are the discoverer and the promulgator. Of which dedication the appropriateness is manifest. What other disposition of the work of your learned kinsman would be so fitting as to lay it at your feet, hind-thumbless although they be? He follows you feebly and afar. But remember that he tells

One morning in the spring of the present year I, the editor, or rather the reporter, of the following lecture, found myself in a forest of Western Africa. I was neither searching for the source of anything nor hoping to meet anybody. But, as I walked on my lonely way, I did soon come upon a man, much be-tattered and bronzed, who was plainly an Anglo-Saxon. He was bathing his feet in a muddy little spring, from which a tiny rill ran out and lost itself in the leafy gloom. As I passed him I turned

My Hairy Hearers : Many parts of the world, less happy than the wilds of our beloved Africa, are inhabited by a feeble, smooth-skinned creature called Man. This unhappy animal is much vexed with creeds and theories and notions; and the one of these which has been longest and most deeply rooted in his mind is, that he is a fallen being. For hundreds of years, for thousands, he has believed that his forefathers lived in a Golden Age, compared with which that in which he now toils and worries is an