zine, and so far from finding your comments "a tangle of crude
ideas," they have even proved suggestive--perhaps not in the way you
expected. For following your line of thought, I wondered if it could have
been some violent death-rate among our own species that has produced that
desperate phenomenon, the literary consciousness of the historical
novelist I have been reviewing for you. And, come to think of it, I do not
know any other class of people whose problem of consciousness could be so
readily reduced to a "bionomical" platitude. They all write for the same
slaying purpose. Did you ever observe how few of their characters survive
the ordeals of art? Usually it is the long-lost heroine, and the hero,
"wounded unto death" however, and one has the impression that even these
would not have lived so long but for the necessity of the final page.

But I must not fail to tell you of a dramatic episode in connection with
my first venture into the realm of biological thought. _The Popular
Science Monthly_ has long been proscribed at the parsonage on account of
its heretical tendencies. And my purpose was to keep a profound secret the
fact that I had purchased a copy containing Minot's article. But some
demon prompted me to inquire of my father the meaning of the term
"epiphenomenon." Now a long association with the idea of omniscience has
rendered him wiser in consciousness than in fact, which is a joke the
imagination often plays upon serious people. But he could neither give a
definition nor find the word in his ancient Webster. This dictionary is
his only unquestioned authority outside the Holy Scriptures, and he
declines to accept any word not vouched for by this venerable authority.
Therefore he reasoned that "epiphenomenon" had been built up to
accommodate some modern theory of thought, some new leprosy of the mind
never dreamed of by the noble lexicographer. And so, fixing me with a pair
of accusing glasses, he inquired:

"My daughter, where did you see this remarkable word?"

I do not question that I am a direct descendant from my fictitious
grandmother, Eve! I am always being tempted by apples of information, and
I have often known the mortifying sensation of wishing to hide my guilty
countenance in my more modern petticoat on that account.

He read the "blasphemous" article through, only pausing to point out
heresies and perversions of the sacred truth as he went along. But when he
reached the sentence in which t