Despite appearances, it is not the Epilogue, but the Prologue that is often left for last. Only after seeing what is done, can one acknowledge and apologize. My main acknowledgments are to many students and collaborators, for they have taught me much. My apologies are to those colleagues who may not find enough of their own results in the pages still ahead. For them I can only echo Longfellow that “Art is long and Time is fleeting.” The subject of large-scale structure in the universe, of which the distribution of the galaxies represents only a part, has burgeoned beyond all previous bounds as the new millennium approaches. Driven as much by the scope and depth of its questions as by new streams of data from the depths of time, there is an increasing excitement that fundamental answers are almost in reach. And there will be no stopping until they are found.

On the timescales of the physical processes we are about to consider, millennia count for very little. But on the timescale of our own understanding, years, decades, and certainly centuries have changed the whole conceptual structure surrounding our views. This may happen again when the role of dark matter becomes more transparent.

Meanwhile, this monograph is really no more than an extended essay on aspects of galaxy clustering that I've found especially interesting.