use, and the immediate induction was that they were designed for man’s use.  Still another work calculated the exact age of the earth by the naive method of counting the generations from Adam to Christ, to the total adding eighteen hundred and eighty-five years (for the book was written in 1885), and the original six days it required the Lord to build the earth.  By referring to Genesis and finding out precisely what the Creator did on the morning of the first day, the writer contrived to bring his calculation of the age of the earth and everything in the world to a precision of six hours, give or take,—­a somewhat closer schedule than that made by the Tennessee river boats coming up from St. Louis.

These and similar volumes formed the scientific section of Captain Renfrew’s library, and it was this paucity of the natural sciences that formed the problem which Peter tried to solve.  All scientific additions came to an abrupt stop about the decade of 1880-90.  That was the date when Charles Darwin’s great fructifying theory, enunciated in 1859, began to seep into the South.

In the Captain’s library the only notice of evolution was a book called “Darwinism Dethroned.”  As for the elaborations of the Darwinian hypothesis by Spencer, Fiske, DeVries, Weismann, Haeckel, Kidd, Bergson, and every subsequent philosophic or biologic writer, all these men might never have written a line so far as Captain Renfrew’s library was informed.

Now, why such extraordinary occlusions?  Why should Captain Renfrew deny himself the very commonplaces of thought, theories familiarly held by the rest of America, and, indeed, by all the rest of the civilized world?

Musing by the window, Peter succeeded in stating his problem more broadly:  Why was Captain Renfrew an intellectual reactionist?  The old gentleman was the reverse of stupid.  Why should he confine his selection of books to a few old oddities that had lost their battle against a theory which had captured the intellectual world fifty years before?

Nor was it Captain Renfrew alone.  Now and then Peter saw editorials appearing in leading Southern journals, seriously attacking the evolutionary hypothesis.  Ministers in respectable churches still fulminated against it.  Peter knew that the whole South still clings, in a way, to the miraculous and special creation of the earth as described in Genesis.  It clings with an intransigentism and bitterness far exceeding other part of America.  Why?  To Peter the problem appeared insoluble.

He sat by the window lost in his reverie.  Just outside the ledge half a dozen English sparrows abused one another with chirps that came faintly through the small diamond panes.  Their quick movements held Peter’s eyes, and their endless quarreling presently recalled his episode with young Arkwright.  It occurred to him, casually, that when Arkwright grew up he would subscribe to every reactionary doctrine set forth in the library Peter was indexing.