, and to the mind which sees with the eye,
appeared illimitable, like the ocean; where the house I was born in was
the oldest in the district--a century old, it was said; where the people
were the children's children of emigrants from Europe who had conquered
and colonized the country, and had enjoyed but half a century of
national life. But the people who had possessed the land before these
emigrants--what of them? They, were but a memory, a tradition, a story
told in books and hardly more to us than a fable; perhaps they had dwelt
there for long centuries, or for thousands of years; perhaps they had
come, a wandering horde, to pass quickly away like a flight of migrating
locusts; for no memorial existed, no work of their hands, not the
faintest trace of their occupancy.

Walking one day at the side of a ditch, which had been newly cut through
a meadow at the end of our plantation, I caught sight of a small black
object protruding from the side of the cutting, which turned out to be
a fragment of Indian pottery made of coarse clay, very black, and rudely
ornamented on one side. On searching further a few more pieces were
found. I took them home and preserved them carefully, experiencing
a novel and keen sense of pleasure in their possession; for though
worthless, they were man's handiwork, the only real evidence I had come
upon of that vanished people who had been before us; and it was as if
those bits of baked clay, with a pattern incised on them by a man's
finger-nail, had in them some magical property which enabled me to
realize the past, and to see that vacant plain repeopled with long dead
and forgotten men.

Doubtless we all possess the feeling in some degree--the sense of
loneliness and desolation and dismay at the thought of an uninhabited
world, and of long periods when man was not. Is it not the absence of
human life or remains rather than the illimitable wastes of thick-ribbed
ice and snow which daunts us at the thought of Arctic and Antarctic
regions? Again, in the story of the earth, as told by geology, do we not
also experience the same sense of dismay, and the soul shrinking back
on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts desolate in time
when the continuity of the race was broken and the world dispeopled?
The doctrine of evolution has made us tolerant of the thought of human
animals,--our progenitors as we must believe--who were of brutish
aspect, and whose period on this planet was so lon