gh intellectual, moral, and
religious condition, has slowly risen from low and brutal beginnings.
In Greece, among the philosophers contemporary with Socrates, we find
Critias depicting a rise of man, from a time when he was beastlike
and lawless, through a period when laws were developed, to a time
when morality received enforcement from religion; but among all the
statements of this theory the most noteworthy is that given by Lucretius
in his great poem on The Nature of Things. Despite its errors, it
remains among the most remarkable examples of prophetic insight in
the history of our race. The inspiration of Lucretius gave him
almost miraculous glimpses of truth; his view of the development
of civilization from the rudest beginnings to the height of its
achievements is a wonderful growth, rooted in observation and thought,
branching forth into a multitude of striking facts and fancies; and
among these is the statement regarding the sequence of inventions:

"Man's earliest arms were fingers, teeth, and nails, And stones and
fragments from the branching woods; Then copper next; and last, as
latest traced, The tyrant, iron."

Thus did the poet prophesy one of the most fruitful achievements of
modern science: the discovery of that series of epochs which has been so
carefully studied in our century.

Very striking, also, is the statement of Horace, though his idea is
evidently derived from Lucretius. He dwells upon man's first condition
on earth as low and bestial, and pictures him lurking in caves,
progressing from the use of his fists and nails, first to clubs, then
to arms which he had learned to forge, and, finally, to the invention of
the names of things, to literature, and to laws.(189)

(189) For the passage in Hesiod, as given, see the Works and Days, lines
109-120, in Banks's translation. As to Horace, see the Satires, i, 3,
99. As to the relation of the poetic account of the Fall in Genesis to
Chaldean myths, see Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, pp. 13, 17. For
a very instructive separation of the Jehovistic and Elohistic parts
of Genesis, with the account of the "Fall" as given in the former, see
Lenormant, La Genese, Paris, 1883, pp. 166-168; also Bacon, Genesis of
Genesis. Of the lines of Lucretius--

"Arma antiqua, manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt, Et lapides, et item
sylvarum fragmina rami, Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta, Sed
prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus"---

th