cause he failed to pick up that curious stone by the pathway? These were mighty questions and it took him a long time to form his answer.

And then, too, bad luck came to him sometimes just after he saw a rabbit run across his path, and in his mind the old error of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" took immediate form. The next time when he saw the rabbit he performed some special anti-motion and the ill-luck did not occur. Thus superstition was founded simply upon inability to relate cause and effect. As we think of him so dazedly endeavoring to reason out the laws of nature and to interpret the happenings of life, we smile at his ignorance much perhaps as men 100,000 years from now will smile at us who know so little and to whom it is so impossible to explain the hazy pathways of nature. For we are still wondering whether there is a sort of "behavior" in the universe. Do there exist habits of conduct in "Nature," dependable habits, of such sort that a man may test them, try them out, explore them? Are they favorable to certain elements of his own conduct, the moral element for example? Does the Power, the Will of the All really "make for righteousness." Does it respond to lesser wills? Is that what Lincoln really said when he remarked that he was not so much concerned about God being on his side as his being on God's side? Is it what Jesus meant when he said of any man who opposed the Will that it would grind him to powder? How sensitive is it to the wills, the purposes, the prayers of men? As sensitive as electron to electron, as cell to cell, as sun to sun? Is that action and reaction instantaneous, inevitable and exactly proportional, recording and punishing here and hereafter with unthinkable exactness? Now, as then is science leading us into the very presence of God?

At least in one point the men of the Old Stone Age were far ahead of modern man; the sensory part of his brain was much better developed, the part that had to do with quick, skillful physical reactions of sight and hearing, of nerve and muscle. He knew far better than man of today where nature set her table and supplied her eggs and fruits. He was often times fooled by his senses, he was not unlike us who are similarly deceived. But his knowledge of the laws of wild animals and birds, his sense of kinship with other living things, many of them almost as intelligent as he, which existed everywhere, and his knowledge of the secret things of all animate nature were far beyond that of his descendants of today. For it would

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be well for us to remember, as we contemplate primeval man, confused and wondering over what seems to us the simplest matters, that we also are in similar case. As it was with the stars and life and consciousness, so it is here. Ignorance merges into knowledge infinitely. As there is no end to one, neither is there to the other. We are only relatively wiser than they. As is the earth among the universes, so are our sciences and theologies among the truths of God. Absolutely, though not relatively, we are as ignorant as they. Those who come after us in the glacial or interglacial ages of the future will say so. While we have enlarged the tiny, lighted circle of knowledge, we have in no wise decreased the infinite expanse of the blackness of outside ignorance, to fully enlighten which is the task of eternity.

THE PATHWAY

There was a little path, my boyhood's path,

That led me o'er the stream, beyond the vale;
Beyond the mighty poplar and his wood;

A tiny, timid path, oppressed of stones,
With here and there a thornbush enemy.

The wild-tongued weed made threat of choking death;
The burly oak stood squarely in the way;
The gnarled pine root rose affrightingly;
And oft, the fallen limb her barrier placed.
Ah, tiny, timid, humble path, yet thou
Didst work thy will around the burly oak
And o'er delaying pine-knot; past the thorn;
Around the greedy weeds; aye past the love
Of wetted violet eyes; past daisies' tears;
Beyond the trailing, prone, arbutus' prayers;
And ever, in thy going thou didst say:
"I am thy Little Path, and, unafraid,

I lead thee o'er the Stream, beyond the Vale."

CHAPTER XV.

HOMO SAPIENS ARRIVES

Such is the cinema of earliest man that anthropologists picture to us. In it we see unrolled the whole long pathway of progress whereby our kind staggered up out of the night. Its facinating, disolving pictures melt from form into form until a creature that none would call human becomes the modern man.

The thoughtful student will observe at once that the story as it has been told is largely a European story. With the exception of the Trinil Man, of Java, all of the pictures have been thrown upon a European canvas. It is in the caves of France and Spain and the river valleys of England and Germany that we have been able to read the history of sub-men. There are, of course, very good reasons for this. One of them lies in the fact that Europe has been studied more carefully and exhaustively both by geologists and anthropologists than any other section of the world, it having been for the longest while the home of scientific research. To this should be added a second reason. It is possible in Europe to synchronize events almost perfectly, due to a most careful study of the whole Pleistocene epoch with the various retreats and advances of its ice sheets. Unfortunately, however, even a careful study of European anthropology reveals to us the fact that Europe was not the original home of mankind but that it was subjected in the earliest, as in the latest days, to a series of invasions from the east. It was from the east that the modern races who inhabit Europe came as did also those who preceded them, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, Piltdown, and Heidelberg alike. All of which raises in our minds the question: where did the human race originate?

It is interesting in this connection to review briefly some important finds made in other parts of the world. Notable among these is the remarkable discovery at Broken Hill Mine in Northern Rhodesia, about 300 miles south of the Zambezi. It consists of a skull with part of a lower

jaw, a sacral bone, a tibia, two ends of a femur, and a collarbone. Fortunately, also, the upper jaw of another individual of evidently the same species was discovered under similar conditions. Interestingly enough the teeth of the latter gave signs of suffering from caries. The face of the Broken Hill man is spoken of by competent anthropologists as the most primitive and brutal human face known to their science. The eyebrow ridges were like those of a gorilla, almost equally enormous, and the face showed no groove on the side of the nose to distinguish its boundary from that of the face, but the nose and face seem to merge. The palate and the teeth were enormous. His cranial capacity lay somewhere between a modern European and a skull such as that of La Chappelle. He seems to have walked erect. He is believed by at least one competent anthropologist to have branched from the human stock somewhere between the Heidleberg and Neanderthal man. This is the only important anthropological find that comes to us from Africa.

In America a number of important discoveries have been made. There is, for example, the Calaveras skull, discovered in the auriferous gravels of California whose age may be safely dated as Pliocene, and there are discoveries of human remains in the Trenton gravels, in the loess of Nebraska (Omaha), and the remains that have been uncovered at various points such as Lansing, Vero and at Rancho La Brea, and in the sand-pit near Dallas, Texas, and to these should be added the remains of a mastodon found by Dr. Clarke a foot above some pottery and charcoal which lay in undisturbed clay. Although, as Dr. Lull says, all of these finds exhibit the usual evidences of age required by careful anthropologists such as their discovery in ancient strata, their association with ancient animals, their similar degree of fossilization, yet they do not differ as to their bodily characters from the modern American Indian. They have not, therefore, been considered up to this time as of very high antiquity but Dr. Lull follows Sir Arthur Keith in inclining to the belief that they may be in part of the genuine Pleistocene age, in which case it is quite evident that the type of man from which the American Indian sprang was very ancient indeed.

And there should be mentioned a similar find in South America, at Lost Hope Inlet, Patagonia, evidencing the association of man with the ground sloth, now extinct, under circumstances that lead scientists to believe that either