Biology, with Preludes on Current Events

PUBLISHERS' NOTE.

In the careful reports of Mr. Cook's Lectures printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, were included by the stenographer sundry expressions (applause, &c.) indicating the immediate and varying impressions with which the Lectures were received. Though these reports have been thoroughly revised by the author, the publishers have thought it advisable to retain these expressions. Mr. Cook's audiences included, in large numbers, representatives of the broadest scholarship, the profoundest philosophy, the acutest scientific research, and generally of the finest intellectual culture, of Boston and New England; and it has seemed admissible to allow the larger assembly to which these Lectures are now addressed to know how they were received by such audiences as those to which they were originally delivered.

INTRODUCTION.

THE object of the Boston Monday Lectures is to present the results of the freshest German, English, and American scholarship on the more important and difficult topics concerning the relation of Religion and Science.

They were begun in the Meionaon in 1875; and the audiences, gathered at noon on Mondays, were of such size as to need to be transferred to Park-street Church in October, 1876, and thence to Tremont Temple, which was often more than full during the winter of 1876–77.

The audiences contained large numbers of ministers, teachers, and other educated men.

The thirty-four lectures of the last season were stenographically reported in the Boston Daily Advertiser, and most of them were republished in full in New York and London.

The lectures on Biology oppose the materialistic, and not the theistic, theory of Evolution. (See p. 111.)

The lectures on Transcendentalism contain a discussion of the views of Theodore Parker.

The Committee having charge of the Boston Monday