138 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS 



this view is based. But it fails to make known to us the whole truth. 

 The building of a ship from the time that her keel is laid until she is 

 making her way across the ocean is a slow and gradual process; yet 

 there is a cataclysmic epoch opening up a new era in her history. It 

 is the moment when, after lying for months or years a dead, inert, 

 immovable mass, she is suddenly endowed with the power of motion, 

 and, as if imbued with life, glides into the stream, eager to begin the 

 career for which she was designed. 



I think it is thus in the development of humanity. Long ages 

 may pass during which a race, to all external observation, appears to 

 be making no real progress. Additions may be made to learning, and 

 the records of history may constantly grow, but there is nothing in 

 its sphere of thought, or in the features of its life, that can be called 

 essentially new. Yet, nature may have been all along slowly working 

 in a way which evades our scrutiny until the result of her operations 

 suddenly appears in a new and revolutionary movement, carrying 

 the race to a higher plane of civilization. 



It is not difficult to point out such epochs in human progress. The 

 greatest of all, because it was the first, is one of which we find no 

 record either in written or geological history. It was the epoch when 

 our progenitors first took conscious thought of the morrow, first used 

 the crude weapons which nature had placed within their reach to 

 kill their prey, first built a fire to warm their bodies and cook their 

 food. I love to fancy that there was some one first man, the Adam 

 of evolution, who did all this, and who used the power thus acquired 

 to show his fellows how they might profit by his example. When 

 the members of the tribe or community which he gathered around 

 him began to conceive of life as a whole, to include yesterday, to- 

 day, and to-morrow in the same mental grasp to think how they 

 might apply the gifts of nature to their own uses, --a movement 

 was begun which should ultimately lead to civilization. 



Long indeed must have been the ages required for the development 

 of this rudest primitive community into the civilization revealed to 

 us by the most ancient tablets of Egypt and Assyria. After spoken 

 language was developed, and after the rude representation of ideas 

 by visible marks drawn to resemble them had long been practiced, 

 some Cadmus must have invented an alphabet. When the use of 

 written language was thus introduced, the word of command ceased 

 to be confined to the range of the human voice, and it became pos- 

 sible for master minds to extend their influence as far as a written 

 message could be carried. Then were communities gathered into 

 provinces; provinces into kingdoms; kingdoms into the great 

 empires of antiquity. Then arose a stage of civilization which we 

 find pictured in the most ancient records, a stage in which men 

 were governed by laws that were perhaps as wisely adapted to their 



