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 the union of two microscopic cells.  “All living things come from the egg,” such had been Harvey’s dictum.  The result was like the tonic of a cold douche.  I began to feel cleansed and purified, as though something sticky-sweet which all my life had clung to me had been washed away.  Yet a question arose, an insistent question that forever presses itself on the mind of man; how could these apparently chemical and mechanical processes, which the author of the book contented himself with recording, account for me?  The spermia darts for the egg, and pierces it; personal history begins.  But what mysterious shaping force is it that repeats in the individual the history of the race, supervises the orderly division of the cells, by degrees directs the symmetry, sets aside the skeleton and digestive tract and supervises the structure?