PREFACE
Having, as I thought, completed this book—bar the Preface, which is, of course, always the last chapter—I sent it in manuscript to an old friend of mine for his opinion.
He let me have it.
“Your brochure,” he wrote, “is remarkable more perhaps for what it omits than for what it contains. For example, there is no mention whatever made of the vomero-nasal organ, or organ of Jacobson.”
Then, after drastically sweeping away the much that seems to him redundant in the body of the work, he closes his general criticism (which I omit) with “I should like to have heard your views on the vomero-nasal organ. Parker devotes a whole chapter to it.”
A carpenter, according to the adage, is known by his chips. And it was by the simple removal of some superfluous marble, as every one knows, that the Venus of Milo was revealed to the world—which is only another way of saying the same thing.
But what sort of a carpenter is he who leaves
