So one might have said a few years back.  Not so in these days.  The telos teleion of secular education, when divorced from religious or moral training, is—­I say it deliberately—­the purest and most unmitigated selfishness.  The world has seen and tired of the worship of Nature, of Reason, of Humanity; for this nineteenth century has been reserved the development of the most refined religion of all—­the worship of Self.  For that, indeed, is the upshot of it all.  The enslavement of his weaker brethren—­“the labour of those who do not enjoy, for the enjoyment of those who do not labour”—­the degradation of woman—­the torture of the animal world—­these are the steps of the ladder by which man is ascending to his higher civilisation.  Selfishness is the key-note of all purely secular education; and I take vivisection to be a glaring, a wholly unmistakable case in point.  And let it not be thought that this is an evil that we can hope to see produce the good for which we are asked to tolerate it, and then pass away.  It is one that tends continually to spread.  And if it be tolerated or even ignored now, the age of universal education, when the sciences, and anatomy among them, shall be the heritage of all, will be heralded by a cry of anguish from the brute creation that will ring through the length and breadth of the land!  This, then, is the glorious future to which the advocate of secular education may look forward:  the dawn that gilds the horizon of his hopes!  An age when all forms of religious thought shall be things of the past; when chemistry and biology shall be the ABC of a State education enforced on all; when vivisection shall be practised in every college and school; and when the man of science, looking forth over a world which will then own no other sway than his, shall exult in the thought that he has made of this fair green earth, if not a heaven for man, at least a hell for animals.

    I am, sir,

    Your obedient servant,

    Lewis Carroll.

    February 10th.

On March 29, 1876, “The Hunting of the Snark” was published.  Mr. Dodgson gives some interesting particulars of its evolution.  The first idea for the poem was the line “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see,” which came into his mind, apparently without any cause, while he was taking a country walk.  The first complete verse which he composed was the one which stands last in the poem:—­

        In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
          In the midst of his laughter and glee,
        He had softly and suddenly vanished away—­
          For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

The illustrations were the work of Mr. Henry Holiday, and they are thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of the poem.  Many people have tried to show that “The Hunting of the Snark” was an allegory; some regarding it as being a burlesque upon the Tichborne case, and others taking the Snark as a personification of popularity.  Lewis Carroll always protested that the poem had no meaning at all.