We must think of it as a growing, developing thing, showing its stages of evolution in the ascending animal scale, and also in the unfolding of the child; as revealing its nature in every change of our daily lives which we experience and tell to one another or find ourselves unable to tell; as allowing itself to be discovered in the laboratory, and as willing to leave the marks of its activity on the scientist's blackened drum and the dial of the chronoscope; as subject to the limitations of health and disease, needing to be handled with all the resources of the asylum, the reformatory, the jail, as well as with the delicacy needed to rear the sensitive girl or to win the love of the bashful maid; as manifesting itself in the development of humanity from the first rude contrivances for the use of fire, the first organizations for defence, and the first inscriptions of picture writing, up to the modern inventions in electricity, the complex constitutions of government, and the classic productions of literary art; and as revealing its possibilities finally in the brutal acts of the mob, the crimes of a lynching party, and the deeds of collective righteousness performed by our humane and religious societies.
It would be impossible, of course, within the limits of this little volume, to give even the main results in so many great chapters of this ambitious and growing science.

I shall not attempt that; but the rather select from the various departments certain outstanding results and principles.

From these as elevations the reader may see the mountains on the horizon, so to speak, which at his leisure, and with better guides, he may explore.

The choice of materials from so rich a store has depended also, as the preface states, on the writer's individual judgment, and it is quite probable that no one will find the matters altogether wisely chosen.

All the great departments now thus briefly described, however, are represented in the following chapters..