I am not aware that this reprint of some of my scattered notes and essays demands any apology.

The practice of making such collections and selections by the author himself has now become very general, and is much better done thus than by friends after his death.

Besides this, it supplies a growing want of these busy times, when so many of us are prevented by the struggles of business from sitting down to the consecutive systematic study of a formal treatise.

I have kept this demand steadily in view throughout, by selecting subjects which are likely to be interesting to all readers who are sufficiently intelligent to prefer sober fact to sensational fiction, but who, at the same time, do not profess to be scientific specialists.

In the writing of these papers my highest literary ambition has always been to combine clearness and simplicity with some attempt at philosophy.

W.M.W.

Willesden, September, 1882.