women of the tribe; they had to go out and capture women for themselves; and each son fled from his stepmother, and hid from her lest the anger of the old man should be roused. All the world over, even to this day, these ancient, inevitable taboos can be traced. And now instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was better tended, and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him, storing food, until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted again and gave a first hint of agriculture.

THE BEGINNINGS OF LEISURE

AND already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.

Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting-place, and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. He scratched upon a bone and found resemblance, and pursued it and began pictorial art; molded the soft, warm clay of the river-brink between his fingers, and found a pleasure in its patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels, and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant water came; he blinked at the sun, and dreamed that perhaps he might snare. it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amid the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once, indeed, he had done so; at least that some one had done so. He mixed that, perhaps, with another dream almost as daring that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith began fiction, pointing a way to achievement, and the august, prophetic procession of tales.

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations, that life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of polished stone, were two or three thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So slowly by human standards did humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the beast. And that first glimmering of speculation, that first story of achievement, that story-teller,

bright-eyed and flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most marvelous beginning this world has seen. It doomed the mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun.

THAT dream was only a moment in a man's life, whose proper business it seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of power, whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even to-day -power that could make his every conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the race were in the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.

Ar last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food is abundant and life very easy, the emerging human, overcoming his earlier jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less urgently, more social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger community. There began a division of labor; certain of the older men specialized in knowledge and direction, a strong man took the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and king began to develop their rôles in the opening. drama of man's history. The priest's solicitude was seed-time and harvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundred river valleys about the warm temperate zone of the earth there were already towns and temples a score of thousand years ago. They flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the future, for as yet writing had still to begin.

Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth of power that offered itself to him on every hand. He tamed certain animals; he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into a ritual; he added first one metal to his resources, and then another, until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and silver to supplement his stone; he hewed and carved wood; made pottery; paddled down his river until he came to the sea; discovered the wheel, and made the first roads.

But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and more was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses, that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association. From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the peace of the world, man's dealings were chiefly with himself and his fellow-man, trading, bargaining, lawmaking, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating; and every little increment in power he turned at once, and always turns, to the purposes of this confused, elaborate struggle to socialize. To incorporate and comprehend his fellowmen into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of his instincts.

THE COMING OF POLITICAL LIFE

ALREADY before the last polished phase of the stone age was over he had become a political animal. He made astonishingly far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting, and then of writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to stretch out to dominion. In the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and the first written laws had their beginnings. Men specialized for fighting and rule as soldiers and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean, which had been a barrier, became a highway, and at last, out of a tangle of pirate polities, came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the Roman Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last aped Cæsar, and called himself Kaiser or Czar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured by the duration. of human life, it is a vast space of time between that first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the aeroplane; but by the scale that looks back to the makers of the 'eoliths it is all of it a story of yesterday.

Now, during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this period of the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly preoccupied by politics and mutual

aggression, their progress in the acquirement of external power was slow; rapid in comparison with the progress of the old stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematic discovery in which we live. They did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their knowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course there were inventions and changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out, and then forgotten again.

It was on the whole a progress, but it contained no steps. The peasant life was the same; there were already priests and lawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers, doctors, wise women, soldiers, and sailors, in Egypt and China and Assyria and southeastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they were doing much the same things and living much the same life that they were in Europe in 1500 A.D. The English excavators of the year 1900 A.D. could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family correspondence that they could read with complete sympathy.

There were great religious and moral changes throughout the period; empires and republics replaced one another; Italy tried a vast experiment in slavery; and, indeed, slavery was tried again and again, and failed and failed, and was still to be tested again and rejected again in the New World. Christianity and Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialized cults, but essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to material conditions that must have seemed fixed forever. The idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life would have been entirely strange to human thought through all that time.

THE COMING OF THE DREAMER

YET the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the wars and processions, the castle-building and cathedral-building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies

and incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the Middle Ages. He no longer speculated with the untrammeled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of everything barred his path: but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle, and gazed at circling stars in the sky, and mused upon the coin and crystal in his hand.

Whenever there was a certain leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of history there were men to whom this whisper had come of hidden things about them. They could no longer lead ordinary lives or content themselves with the common things of this world once they had heard this voice. And mostly they believed not only that all this world was as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that these secrets were power.

Hitherto power had come to men by chance but now there were these seekers, seeking, seeking among rare and curious. and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd, utilizable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day laughed at these eccentric beings; or found them annoying, and illtreated them; or was seized with fear, and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of them; or with covetousness, and entertained them hopefully: but for the greater part it heeded them not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first dreamed of attacking the mammoth-every one of them was of his blood and descent; and the thing they sought all unwittingly was the snare that would some day catch the sun.

SUCH a man was that Leonardo da Vinci who went about the court of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His commonplace books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Dürer was his parallel, and Roger Bacon, whom the Franciscans silenced, of his kindred. Such a man again in an earlier

city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Dædalus of Cnosus. All up and down the record of history, whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality, the seekers appeared. And half the alchemists were of their tribe.

When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder, one might have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine. But they could see nothing of the sort. They were not yet beginning to think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all too poor to make such engines, even had they thought of them. For a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this new force, even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile. Their first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited for more than five hundred years before the explosive engine came.

Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the world could use their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious purposes. If man in general was not as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his paleolithic precursor, he was at best purblind.

THE latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the verge of discovery before they began to influence human lives.

No doubt there were many such devices as Hero's toys devised and forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that coal should be mined, and burning with plentiful iron at hand, before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a curiosity. And it is to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of steam was in war; there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had ever done before, the steam pumping-engine, the steam-engine, and the steamboat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of logical necessity.

It is the most interesting and instructive chapter in the history of the human