against them. Here recommenced the old story: the lad was at once
seized with a desire to read those books, thus exhibiting again the
identical trait that had already caused him so much trouble. But
this trait was perhaps himself--his core; the demand of his nature
to hear both sides, to judge evidence, test things by his own
reason, get at the deepest root of a matter: to see Truth, and to
see Truth whole.

Curiously enough, these books, and some others, had been much heard
of by the lad since coming to college: once; then several times;
then apparently everywhere and all the time. For, intellectually,
they had become atmospheric: they had to be breathed, as a newly
introduced vital element of the air, whether liked or not liked by
the breathers. They were the early works of the great Darwin,
together with some of that related illustrious group of scientific
investigators and thinkers, who, emerging like promontories,
islands, entire new countries, above the level of the world's
knowledge, sent their waves of influence rushing away to every
shore. It was in those years that they were flowing over the United
States, over Kentucky. And as some volcanic upheaval under mid-
ocean will in time rock the tiny boat of a sailor boy in some
little sheltered bay on the other side of the planet, so the
sublime disturbance in the thought of the civilized world in the
second half of the nineteenth century had reached David.

Sitting at his window, looking out blindly for help and helpers
amid his doubts, seeing the young green of the locust, the yellow
of the dandelion, he recalled the names of those anathematized
books, which were described as dealing so strangely with nature and
with man's place in it. The idea dominated him at last to go