Thanks to Gregg Camfield for offering an insightful corrective on the question of the extent and use of SLC's scientific knowledge. In defense of my perception, I will add that the camp into which SLC's skeptical use of science put him was not so terribly small, and that it grew with enormous rapidity between the 1870's and 1900. There are today people who regard science as desperate and wrong-headed attempt to contradict God's word, though relatively few. Still, those relative few are numerous enough to have newsletters, organizations, meetings and political agendas. The relatively few of SLC's cohort -- that is, the liberal intelligentsia -- regarded scientific knowledge as every bit as valuable as historical or linguistic knowledge. One might even say that SLC's drive to acquire scientific knowledge was of the same order as his drive to acquire German or an appreciation of art; he clearly liked history much more and worked harder at becoming fluent in the discipline; he liked classical music much less, and never really became knowledgeable. These are all fields which SLC's cohort believed a learned person should be familiar with and conversant in. History supported the perceptions of the liberal intelligentsia -- science became more fundamental and religion less so as the decades progressed. Mark Twain's fame is in someway dependent upon this shift. His perceptions seem prescient; reading him, most of us recognize him as a modern man caught in a backward time. Still, it is a mistake to confuse this modernity with a pioneering contribution to our society's philosophical development. It takes nothing away from Twain to say that there were others -- William James and Josiah Royce, to mention only two --whose intellectual leadership was more critical. We don't value artists for their philosophy but for their ability to move us, to capture out hearts and thoughts, to render precisely and poetically feeling which would remain inarticulate without them. I think that, contrary to what Gregg has said, that SLC and people like him were in fact dabblers in accepted fields, but that, as Gregg notes, that very dabbling was his and their participation in the ongoing social debate concerning the legitimacy of scientific knowledge in a world theretofore dominated by religious thinking. These are large question of intellectual history. I want to thank Gregg for opening them more deeply on the Forum and to ask to forebearance of those subscribers who find them a bit remote from the Forum's subject. Andy Hoffman