Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Introductory. THE BASIC PROPOSITION.?My good friends:?No thoughtful person will take issue with me when I say that we cannot rightly know the present and make the best use of it unless we have a fairly good idea of the past. We all try to profit by the experiences of yesterday, and last year; by the happenings of last century and many a preceding century, as recorded in history. But most people are satisfied to stop at a few thousands of years and imagine they know all about the past. I am here to-night to tell you that a few thousands of years is only as one day of the mighty past; and I am going to affirm that we ought to know?that it would pay us to know?not only of the recent past, and the remote past, but the whole past; the long, dim, mysterious ages and aeons that reach back to Chaos, to the fire- mist. To know only a part of the past is to miss the greater part of its lesson. A DIFFICULT SUBJECT.?It is difficult to convey the teachings of science to minds not practiced in the art of scientific thinking. While some of you may be well read along the lines I shall try to follow to-night, I shall assume that the majority of my hearers have not given much time to the study of geology and evolution. Also, it is difficult to delineate, in the space of an hour or two, changes, processes and events whose history covers millions and millions of years. Add to the strenuousness of his task the deep sense of responsibility which the conscientious teacher always feels, and he who would talk on evolution in a popular way is confronted with an arduous undertaking. THE DESIRE TO HELP.?Your speaker doesn't claim to know very much. He has gleaned a few grains of thought in the broad field of science, but he hardly has ability enough to string them together and present them in a syst...