not go back 500,000 years. More probable ones stop at 200,000. So that man seems to have shared the life of the globe during only one five hundredth part of its developed existence. But even this was nearly all spent in an almost completely animal state. Intelligence never reached the point at which it could furnish a record until within at most 25,000 years of our present epoch, and authentic records are confined to the past forty or fifty centuries. Thus only one fortieth or fiftieth of the little span of man's existence belongs to the age of culture, however rude. And what is there to be said in favor of the condition of the world even at its best? Read human history. As Professor Huxley has said, if nothing better was in store than what we have thus far had we should hail the advent of some friendly comet that should pass along and sweep the whole phantasmagoria out of existence. There is what we call human progress, but what is it but a rhythmic and only partial success in rendering a worse condition a trifle better? Even this is accidental and may go backward instead of forward. There are as many things that retard as there are that advance the race, and human progress, like the "regulator" of a steam engine, seems to be adjusted so as to defeat itself. Much of it is purely accidental. No one will ever know but that the state of civilization would have been a century ago what it is today but for some trifling accident. I once heard a learned and conservative physicist say that Aristotle's teachings had delayed the progress of man's knowledge of the laws of nature a thousand years. What evidence is there that there is any power making for the increase of knowledge? Our acquaintance with the true nature of animals and plants and with man depends largely upon what can be learned of their history throughout past ages of the world. Yet what is the nature of the geological record? Every practical paleontologist knows and always feels that discovery in this field depends upon the merest chance, nay, upon a coincidence of two chances, first, that anything has been preserved, and secondly, that it will ever be found. He labors under the perpetual feeling that the most important of discoveries may in fact never be made, and that he
