Letters

Sir:

We would like to express our appreciation of Daniel Aureliano Newman's note "A Source for the 'Most Profound Sentence' in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," JJQ, 52.1 (Fall 2014), 165-68. It is not the case, as Newman states, however, that "only Don Gifford and Bradley D. Clissold" have looked into this matter; and although it is true that neither of them correctly identifies the source as Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson's The Evolution of Sex, our annotations to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Richmond, United Kingdom: Alma Classics, 2014) do. Furthermore, as we note, Oliver St. John Gogarty writes in his autobiographical Tumbling in the Hay (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939), "'Reproduction is the beginning of Death,' as old Thompson [sic] says" (p. 173), which means that the source has more or less been hiding in plain sight.