Picked it up, slender, curious worn cover - it's the slenderness and obscurity that draw me towards it, that and that it's priced at a dollar.
Enthusiastic reviews by nobody I've ever heard of adorn the back cover.
Written, late 1930's
A dialogue between a priest and a physiologist, both on a long ship voyage through the Suez Canal, the Priest, or Padre, on his way to a Mission in deepest colonial Africa, the Physiologist, also in Africa, studying the Lungfish, an evolutionary throwback to the days when fish breathed air before developing gills.
The conversations, on the one hand representing the evolutionary point of view, that life will out in all it's diversity, and the Priest is largely silent, his belief in something other than this - argued, but - not so much.
Not so much a dialogue as a advertisement for evolution and the randomness - and inevitability - of life.
So - always good to read - always, books from a different era, books with something to say. His Point of View stands today - even with all the advancements of science - the world is largely colored by our interpretation and understanding of it.
And there are no ready answers, which is, I suspect, as it should be.