Chapter VIII

], and invest every penny I have in an annuity that shall terminate when I am 89, who knows but that I may live on to 96, as he did, and have seven years without any income at all? I prefer the modest insurance of keeping up my notes which others may burn or no as they please.

I am not one of those who have travelled along a set road towards an end that I have foreseen and desired to reach. I have made a succession of jaunts or pleasure trips from meadow to meadow, but no long journey unless life itself be reckoned so. Nevertheless, I have strayed into no field in which I have not found a flower that was worth the finding, I have gone into no public place in which I have not found sovereigns lying about on the ground which people would not notice and be at the trouble of picking up. They have been things which any one else has had—or at any rate a very large number of people have had—as good a chance of picking up as I had. My finds have none of them come as the result of research or severe study, though they have generally given me plenty to do in the way of research and study as soon as I had got hold of them. I take it that these are the most interesting—or whatever the least offensive word may be:

1. The emphasising the analogies between crime and disease. [_Erewhon_.]

2. The emphasising also the analogies between the development of the organs of our bodies and of those which are not incorporate with our bodies and which we call tools or machines. [_Erewhon_ and _Luck or Cunning_?]

3. The clearing up the history of the events in connection with the death, or rather crucifixion, of Jesus Christ; and a reasonable explanation, first, of the belief on the part of the founders of Christianity that their master had risen from the dead and, secondly, of what might follow from belief in a single supposed miracle. [_The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ_, _The Fair Haven_ and _Erewhon Revisited_.]

4. The perception that personal identity cannot be denied between parents and offspring without at the same time denying it as between the different ages (and hence moments) in the life of the individual and, as a corollary on this, the ascription of the phenomena of heredity to the same source as those of memory. [_Life and Habit_.]

5. The tidying up the earlier history of the theory of evolution. [_Evolution Old and New_.]

6. The exposure and discomfiture of Charles Darwin and Wallace and their followers. [_Evolution Old and New_, _Unconscious Memory_, _Luck or Cunning_? and “The Deadlock in Darwinism” in the _Universal Review_ republished in _Essays on Life_, _Art and Science_.] {376}

7. The perception of the principle that led organic life to split up into two main divisions, animal and vegetable. [_Alps and Sanctuaries_, close of