no effort to throw himself back into prehistoric conditions and the wild
life of the earliest men. Even further than this he can pierce the dim
recesses of the past. Before his imagination the earth rises swathed in
tropical forests, and all strange forms of life issuing and jostling one
another for existence in the steaming warmth of perpetual summer. Among a
thousand types that flowered and fell, the feeble form of primitive man
is distinguished, without fire, without clothing, without articulate
speech. Through the midnight of the woods, shivering at the cries of the
stealthy-footed prowlers of the darkness, he crouches huddled in fallen
leaves, waiting for the rose of dawn. Little by little the prospect
clears round him. The branches of great trees, grinding one against
another in the windy forest, break into a strange red flower; he gathers
it and hoards it in his cave. There, when wind and rain beat without, the
hearth-fire burns through the winter, and round it gathers that other
marvellous invention of which the hearth-fire became the mysterious
symbol, the family. From this point the race is on the full current of
progress, of which the remainder of the book gives an account as
essentially true as it is incomparably brilliant. If we consider how
little Lucretius had to go upon in this reconstruction of lost history,
his imaginative insight seems almost miraculous. Even for the later
stages of human progress he had to rely mainly on the eye which saw deep
below the surface into the elementary structure of civilisation. There
was no savage life within the scope of his actual observation. Books
wavered between traditions of an impossible golden age and fragments of
primitive legend which were then quite unintelligible, and are only now
giving up their secret under a rigorous analysis. Further back, and
beyond the rude civilisation of the earlier races of Greece and Italy,
data wholly failed. We have supplemented, but hardly given more life to,
his picture of the first beginnings, by evidence drawn from a thousand
sources then unknown or unexplored--from coal-measures and mud-deposits,