Excerpt from Man's Place in Nature, and Other Anthropological Essays I AM very well aware that the old are prone to regard their early performances with much more interest than their co'n temporaries of a younger generation are likely to take in them; moreover, I freely admit that my younger contemporaries might employ their time better than in perusing the three essays, writ ten thirty-two years ago, which occupy the first place in this volume. This confession is the more needful, inasmuch as all the premises of the argument set forth in Man's Place in Nature and most of the conclusions deduced from them, are now to be met with among other well-established and, indeed, elementary truths, in the text-books. Paradoxical as the statement may seem, however, it is just because every well-informed student of biology ought to be tempted to throw these essays, and especially the second, On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals, aside, as a fair mathematician might dispense with the reperusal of Cocker's arithmetic, that I think it worth while to reprint them; and entertain the hope that the story of their origin and early fate may not be devoid of a certain antiquarian interest, even if it possess no other. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.