are not positively thrust upon them? They have labored all day in monotony: where shall they go for recreation, and what shall the recreation be? If they go far away they are removed from the sphere of their labors; if they look near to their own abodes, they find not one true and ennobling pastime, but fifty that are degrading, and, at the same time, filled with every possible temptation.
I apply this to our own people; but it is, I fear, equally applicable to other peoples. Dr. Beard, the American I have already quoted, writes his experience, gathered in his own country, as follows: "To live," he says, speaking of the same classes, "to live on the slippery path that lies between extreme poverty on the one side and the gulf of starvation on the other; to take continual thought of to-morrow, without any good result of such thought; to feel each anxious hour that the dreary treadmill by which we secure the means of sustenance for a hungry household may, without warning, be closed by any number of forces, over which one has no control; to double and triple all the horrors of want and pain by anticipation and rumination—such is the life of the muscle-working classes of modern civilized society; and when we add to this the cankering annoyance that arises from the envying of the fortunate brain-worker, who lives at ease before his eyes, we marvel not that he dies young, but rather that he lives at all."
There remains still in the list of classes requiring recreation, and the health that springs from it, the last or indefinite class. Of the purely indefinite of these I need not speak; for they, the waifs and strays of our civilization, are, I fear, under little influence of such refining agencies as we would put forward for the future. With the very small class of persons of rank and property, less than 169,000 altogether, I have dealt already, by joining them with the professional and commercial well-to-do classes. To the seven and a half millions of scholars and children and their recreations attention will be called in a new chapter.—Gentleman's Magazine.
| EARLY TRACES OF MAN.[1] |
By G. DE MORTILLET.
QUATERNARY MAN.—The man of geological time—fossil man—is now a fact so clearly demonstrated that it is no longer called in question. The recent exposition of anthropological sciences showed us his works plentifully scattered throughout France, England, Spain, and Italy.
But, though the existence of quaternary man in the southwest of Europe is no longer denied, there is a school which, walking with fear
- ↑ Translated by J. Fitzgerald, A.M., from the "Revue d'Anthropologic."
