ption of the lapse of time and no preconception as to
the limited period of man's life, the infirmities of age might very
naturally be ascribed to the repeated attacks of those inimical powers
which were understood sooner or later to carry off most members of
the race. And coupled with this thought would go the conception that
inasmuch as some people through luck had escaped the vengeance of all
their enemies for long periods, these same individuals might continue
to escape for indefinite periods of the future. There were no written
records to tell primeval man of events of long ago. He lived in the
present, and his sweep of ideas scarcely carried him back beyond
the limits of his individual memory. But memory is observed to be
fallacious. It must early have been noted that some people recalled
events which other participants in them had quite forgotten, and it may
readily enough have been inferred that those members of the tribe who
spoke of events which others could not recall were merely the ones who
were gifted with the best memories. If these reached a period when their
memories became vague, it did not follow that their recollections
had carried them back to the beginnings of their lives. Indeed, it is
contrary to all experience to believe that any man remembers all
the things he has once known, and the observed fallaciousness and
evanescence of memory would thus tend to substantiate rather than to
controvert the idea that various members of a tribe had been alive for
an indefinite period.

Without further elaborating the argument, it seems a justifiable
inference that the first conception primitive man would have of his
own life would not include the thought of natural death, but would,
conversely, connote the vague conception of endless life. Our
own ancestors, a few generations removed, had not got rid of this
conception, as the perpetual quest of the spring of eternal youth amply
testifies. A naturalist of our own day has suggested that perhaps birds
never die except by violence. The thought, then, that man has a term of
years beyond which "in the nature of things," as the saying goes, he
may not live, would have dawned but gradually upon the developing
intelligence of successive generations of men; and we cannot feel
sure that he would fully have grasped the conception of a "natural"
termination of human life until he had shaken himself free from the idea
that disease is always the result of the magic practic