"Mental Efficiency And Other Hints to Men and Women"

It has immensely influenced all the scientific thought of the nineteenth century, especially Darwin's. Mr. H. G. Wells, as cited in Chambers Cyclopedia of English Literature," describes it as " the most ' shattering' book that ever has or will be written." If I may make a personal reference, I would say that it affected me more deeply than any other scientific book that I have read.

Although it is perfectly easy to understand, and free from the slightest technicality, it is the most misunderstood book in English literature, simply because it is not read. The current notion about it is utterly false.

It might be a powerful instrument of education, general and sociological, but publishers will not reprint it -- at least, they do not.

And yet it is forty times more interesting and four hundred times more educational than Gilbert White's remarks on the birds of Selborne.

I will leave you to guess what X " is, but I do not offer a prize for the solution of a problem which a vast number of my readers will certainly solve at once.

If those who are worrying themselves about the change in our system of marriage would read X," they would probably cease from worrying.

For they would perceive that they had been putting the cart before the horse; that they had elevated to the dignity of fundamental principles certain average rules of conduct which had sprung solely from certain average instincts in certain average conditions, and that they were now frightened because, the conditions having changed, the rules of conduct had changed with them.

One of the truths that X makes clear is that conduct conforms to conditions, and not conditions to conduct.

The payment of taxes is a duty which the citizen owes to the state. Marriage, with the begetting of children, is not a duty which the citizen owes to the state. Marriage, with its consequences, is a matter of personal inclination and convenience. It never has been anything else, and it never will be anything else.

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