Dear Tom, -It has long been my wish to make you the patron saint or tutelar divinity of some book of mine, and it has lately occurred to me that it ought to be a book of the desultory and chatty sort that would remind you, in your present exile at the world's eastern rim, of the many quiet evenings of old, when, over a tankard of mellow October and pipe of fragrant Virginia, while Yule logs crackled blithely and the music of pattering sleet was upon the window-pane, we used to roam in fancy through the universe and give free utterance to such thoughts, sedate or frivolous, as seemed to us good. I dare say the present volume may serve as an epitome of many such old-time sessions of sweet discourse, which I trust we shall by and by repeat and renew. But there is one link of association which in my mind especially connects you with the present occasion. My theory of the causes and effects of the prolongation of human infancy, with reference to the evolution of man, was first published in the "North American Review" for October, 1873, when you were the editor of that periodical. The article, which was entitled "The Progress from Brute to Man," was made up of two chapters of my "Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy" (part ii. chaps, xxi., xxii.), which was published a year later, in October, 1874. The value of the theory therein set forth was at once recognized by many leading naturalists. In the address of Vice-President Edward Morse, before the American Association, at its meeting at Buffalo in 1876, my theory receives extended notice as one of the most important contributions yet made to the Doctrine of Evolution; and it is declared that I have given "for the first time a rational explanation of the origin and persistence of family relations, and thence communal relations, and, finally, of society."

In the course of the year 1774 Dr. Priestley found that by heating red precipitate, or what we now call red oxide of mercury, a gas was obtained, which he called "dephlogisticated air," or, in other words, air deprived of phlogiston, and therefore incombustible. This incombustible air was oxygen, and such was man's first introduction to the mighty element that makes one fifth of the atmosphere in volume and eight ninths of the ocean by weight, besides forming one half of the earth's solid crust, and supporting all fire and all life...

John Fiske was born Edmund Fiske Green at Hartford, Connecticut, March 30, 1842. He was the only child of Edmund Brewster Green, of Smyrna, Delaware, and Mary Fiske Bound, of Middletown, Connecticut. His father was editor of newspapers in Hartford, New York City, and Panama, where he died in 1852, and his widow married Edwin W. Stoughton, of New York, in 1855. On the second marriage of his mother, Edmund Fiske Green assumed the name of his maternal great-grandfather, John Fiske.