t was the epoch when
our progenitors first took conscious thought of the morrow, first used
the crude weapons which Nature had placed within their reach to kill
their prey, first built a fire to warm their bodies and cook their
food. I love to fancy that there was some one first man, the Adam of
evolution, who did all this, and who used the power thus acquired to
show his fellows how they might profit by his example. When the members
of the tribe or community which he gathered around him began to
conceive of life as a whole--to include yesterday, to-day, and
to-morrow in the same mental grasp--to think how they might apply the
gifts of Nature to their own uses--a movement was begun which should
ultimately lead to civilization.

Long indeed must have been the ages required for the development of
this rudest primitive community into the civilization revealed to us by
the most ancient tablets of Egypt and Assyria. After spoken language
was developed, and after the rude representation of ideas by visible
marks drawn to resemble them had long been practised, some Cadmus must
have invented an alphabet. When the use of written language was thus
introduced, the word of command ceased to be confined to the range of
the human voice, and it became possible for master minds to extend
their influence as far as a written message could be carried. Then were
communities gathered into provinces; provinces into kingdoms, kingdoms
into great empires of antiquity. Then arose a stage of civilization
which we find pictured in the most ancient records--a stage in which
men were governed by laws that were perhaps as wisely adapted to their
conditions as our laws are to ours--in which the phenomena of nature
were rudely observed, and striking occurrences in the earth or in the
heavens recorded in the annals of the nation.

Vast was the progress of knowledge during the interval between these
empires and the century in which modern science began. Yet, if I am
right in making a distinction between the slow and regular steps of
progress, each growing naturally out of that which preceded it, and the
entrance of the mind at some fairly definite epoch into an entirely new
sphere of activity, it would appear that there was only one such epoch
during the entire interval. This was when abstract geometrical
reasoning commenced, and astronomical observations aiming at precision
were recorded, compared, and discussed. Closely associated with it must
have