The Lost - Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies #250534

The Preface is the most troublesome part of a book, I have often heard my dear Father say; and now it falls to my unaccustomed pen to write a preface for him. I cannot undertake to define the aim of this book; I can only tell how the last work on it was done. In my Father's note-book I find it described as A few carefully studied mono graphs, linked together by a slender thread of ethnographic relationship. Returning in June last from a brief visit to Montreal, with the first signs of illness beginning to Show, he found a bundle of proofs waiting for him, and with the characteristic promptness which never let any duty wait, he set to work at once to correct them. It is my last book, he said, conscious that his busy brain had nearly fulfilled all its tasks; and so through days of rapidly increasing weakness and pain he lay on the sofa correcting proofs till the pen dropped from the hand no longer able to hold it. His mind turned to the book in his wandering thoughts from illness, and on one of these occasions he murmured: Sybil will write the Preface and so I try to fulfil his wish. Ask Mr. Douglas to correct the proofs himself, and to be sure to make an index, was one of his last requests, thus providing for the finishing of the work which he could not himself finish. He has passed now from this world whose prehistoric story he so lovinglybut in perfect light. The silent lips seem to speak once more in this volume his last words to the public; and I commit it very tenderly to those who are interested in his favourite study of Ethnology.