Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews

E-text prepared by Clare Boothby, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/)
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London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1870.
LONDON R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, BREAD STREET HILL.
My dear Tyndall,
I should have liked to provide this collection of Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews, with a Dedication and a Preface. In the former, I should have asked you to allow me to associate your name with the book, chiefly on the ground that the oldest of the papers in it is a good deal younger than our friendship. In the latter, I intended to comment upon certain criticisms with which some of these Essays have been met.
But, on turning the matter over in my mind, I began to fear that a formal dedication at the beginning of such a volume would look like a grand lodge in front of a set of cottages; while a complete defence of any of my old papers would simply amount to writing a new one—a labour for which I am, at present, by no means fit.
The book must go forth, therefore, without any better substitute for either Dedication, or Preface, than this letter; before concluding which it is necessary for me to notify you, and any other reader, of two or three matters.
The first is, that the oldest Essay of the whole, that On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences, contains a view of the nature of the differences between living and not-living bodies out of which I have long since grown.
Secondly, in the same paper, there is a statement concerning the method of the mathematical sciences, which, repeated and expanded elsewhere, brought upon me, during the meeting of the British Association at Exeter, the artillery of our eminent friend Professor Sylvester.
No one knows better than you do, how readily I should defer to the opinion of so great a mathematician if the question at issue were really, as he seems to think it is, a mathematical one. But I submit, that the dictum of a mathematical athlete upon a difficult problem which mathematics offers to philosophy, has no more special weight, than the verdict of that great pedestrian Captain Barclay would have had, in settling a disputed point in the physiology of locomotion.