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TO MY READERS.

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EING now past eighty years of age know that I must soon pack up and be gone, but I am unwilling to take my departure without leaving something behind which will be useful not only to those who are living, but to all who may live hereafter, even if this world should last a million years; and I doubt if it will hold out longer. For we are so busy with scratching into the earth and getting out of her all kinds of things and using them as fast as we can, and using ourselves too, that I doubt if we shall be able to go on at this rate very long. Unless Nature, the god of the philosophers, is in some way unknown to us making amends for the waste of her children and storing up new materials, we must stop for want of stuff; just as the Lancashire mills must stop, if the Confederate States won't grow cotton enough for us, or refuse

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to sell it when they have grown it, which is not very likely, or unless somebody else is good enough to make somebody work at cotton-growing for our benefit, not forgetting their own. If Nature is not doing this, I cannot see that anything else will be left for her except to make the world over again some day and to bring fresh materials up to the top by ploughing deeper. This operation will certainly cause a great disturbance and be very like what we call turning things upside down. Pyramids, temples, palaces and cotton mills; emperors, kings, queens, and popes; prime-ministers, members of parliament and shoe-blacks will all be buried more than forty fathoms deep; and perhaps shoe-blacks may lie above kings, though it matters little whether they are above them or below them, for even now a king is forgotten as soon as a shoeblack, and before he is well laid in his grave men are bending the knee before somebody who is standing in his shoes.

These philosophical reflections have long made me hesitate about writing this book, for I cannot bear the thought of its perishing, after all my trouble in making it, either by the general conflagration, which the Stoics predicted more than two thousand years ago, or by such a catastrophe as I have described in so lively and affecting a manner. It is true that I do think that this terrible cataclysm, if I may be allowed to use a fine word which does not express my meaning or any meaning at

all-I say, for it is necessary to begin the sentence again, otherwise you might not be able to join the first and the last part together, which I am quite unable to do when I read most books, I say I do not think that this terrible event (I believe that is the proper word) will happen very soon; and I have some doubts whether anybody knows when it will happen. I know very well, for I read all that is written on this subject, and indeed all that is written on all subjects, as this my book will clearly show; I know that many learned men and grave divines, for whom, as I am both learned and grave myself, I have the highest respect, I know they have fixed the exact time of the end of the world. Notice has often been given of the time before it came, and after the time was past they have found out that they were mistaken, and so very properly they give notice again. I think that they do quite right, and they should continue giving notice, and they cannot fail to be right at last. I think, however that those who fix the end very soon, as for example in the year 1900, or even much earlier, as some very learned men do, are hardly consistent in doing this and at the same time in marrying and begetting children, and giving in marriage, and scraping together gold, and dealing in railway shares, and looking after the sale of their books. For all which inconsistencies my long experience has brought me one general explanation, which I shall often apply in the course of this work; and

the explanation is this, that they do not believe what they say.

I shall certainly not expose myself to such a serious charge as writing what I don't believe. I shall not make a book for the good of mankind and myself, and at the same time talk of the end of the world being very near. Without then fixing any time for this great event either by interpretation of prophecies, in which interpretation I have observed that there is not perfect agreement, or by prophetic charts and atlases, or by deductions of reason or deductions contrary to reason, or by considerations on the nature of things in general, I have deferred the event, which still maintain to be certain, to a remote time; remote enough to comprise the whole period allowed by statute to the copyright of this book, and remote enough to allow innumerable reprints in small bad type and on dirty paper, with a great many errors in the text, and to bring money into the pockets of publishers, who don't read and can't understand what they recommend others to buy. I have supposed a million years as the utmost duration of the present state of things and of all books included. I am quite satisfied myself, if this book shall be read a hundred thousand years hence; which, let me tell a great many authors who seem very proud of their works, is a great deal longer than their books will last.

I do not fear that I am wearying my readers. I

know that people can go on reading the dullest books for hours together, written in a style so tedious that they could not be read, if our education had not been so much improved that we can now read anything; books, in which some unintelligible idea is drawn out in endless unintelligible periods, with arguments as they are called which are not arguments, and conclusions founded on facts which are not proved and cannot be proved, the whole ending in something which contradicts the beginning; periods much longer than this but not near so clear, for this is written in good plain English, while the periods which I am abusing are written in a piebald language, English, Greek, Latin, and French; French by the way more frequently wrong than right; Italian, on the increase since the battles of Magenta and Solferino; and Chinese and Japanese are plainly on the way to join in the medley. For these and other reasons, it is obvious, as the philosophical writers and critics say when they can't prove what they assert, that I may go on a little longer without wearying anybody except myself.

If the happy invention of printing had been known from the beginning, we might have had the experience of men of olden time, who lived ten times as long as I have lived, recorded in folios without end or octavos endless, for it matters little, when a book has no end, in what shape the volumes are. And it may be supposed that the ex