conditions in which we are placed which oftentimes determine our career
for good or for evil.

We had proposed embodying in this Preface one or two caustic reviews of
our late work, from an Agnostic source, but have been deterred from so
doing, for the reason that we deem it in bad taste as well as irrelevant
at this late day. We shall be pardoned, however, in alluding to _The
National Quarterly Review_, for the captious manner in which it treated us
after we had courteously replied to several inquiries made of us in its
two- or three-page review. After complaining that we had been "hailed, by a
class of callow religious critics, as a 'Savior' from scientific error and
enormities," it charged us with certain unscrupulous methods of
criticism,--such as putting language into Mr. Darwin's mouth that he never
thought of uttering, etc., etc. And as this pretentious Quarterly put
several questions to us, such as "When and where the great Evolutionist
had taught any such doctrine as this?" we ventured to reply as courteously
as we knew how. We endeavored to treat our reviewer fairly, as he had
handsomely accorded to us the credit of "searching the fields of natural
science, lance in hand, to deal hard thrusts at impious skeptics,
materialists, and evolutionists--of which Mr. Darwin and Mr. Bastian fare
the most severely." But we had no thought of using these offensive
adjectives toward either of the distinguished gentlemen named, and did not
so use them; however "unscrupulous" our methods may have been in other
respects. Our reply was unnoticed by the bulky Quarterly, and we were
content with knowing that it was received by its editor, and shared the
fate of all intrusive communications which it is easier to throw into the
waste-basket, especially in hot weather, than to answer in the interests
of science, when such answers are difficult to be made. This was the first
and only discussion we attempted to provoke with our "exhaustive
Reviewers," and it will, in all probability, be the last. Little is gained