one period to the first
cities, historically a vast interval, would have seemed to that still
watcher, measuring by the standards of astronomy and the rise and
decline of races and genera and orders, a, step almost abrupt. It took,
perhaps, a thousand generations or so to make it. In that interval man
passed from an animal-like obedience to the climate and the weather and
his own instincts, from living in small family parties of a score or so
over restricted areas of indulgent country, to permanent settlements, to
the life of tribal and national communities and the beginnings of
cities. He had spread in that fragment of time over great areas of the
earth's surface, and now he was adapting himself to the Arctic circle on
the one hand and to the life of the tropics on the other; he had
invented the plough and the ship, and subjugated most of the domestic
animals; he was beginning to think of the origin of the world and the
mysteries of being. Writing had added its enduring records to oral
tradition, and he was already making roads. Another five or six hundred
generations at most bring him to ourselves. We sweep into the field of
that looker-on, the momentary incarnations of this sempiternal being,
Man. And after us there comes--

A curtain falls.

The time in which we, whose minds meet here in this writing, were born
and live and die, would be to that imagined observer a mere instant's
phase in the swarming liberation of our kind from ancient imperatives.
It would seem to him a phase of unprecedented swift change and expansion
and achievement. In this last handful of years, electricity has ceased
to be a curious toy, and now carries half mankind upon their daily
journeys, it lights our cities till they outshine the moon and stars,
and reduces to our service a score of hitherto unsuspected metals; we
clamber to the pole of our globe, scale every mountain, soar into the
air, learn how to overcome the malaria that barred our white races from
the tropics, and how to draw the sting from a hundred such agents of
death. Our old cities are being rebuilt in towering marble; great new
cities rise to vie with them. Never, it would seem, has man been so
various and busy and persistent, and there is no intimation of any check
to the expansion of his energies.

And all this continually accelerated advance has come through the
quickening and increase of man's intelligence and its reinforcement
through speech and writing. All this has