576 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ideals, are in eternal metamorphosis. Schrader tells us this to-day as 

 did Heraclitus long ago. The twentieth-century idea that its culture 

 and its creations will endure may be false, as have been the ideas of 

 Egyptians, Greeks and Eomans. The conception of stability is an 

 illusion. All passes and repasses. 



Egypt for millenniums has been only a gift of the Kile renewed 

 by its floods. The heroes of Homer are brigands to-day. The Roman 

 Caesar has become a Pope. Spain died when the Indies were born. 

 The cliff-dwellings of Arizona and New Mexico speak of things past 

 and gone. The Negritos, the Bushmen, the Ainu, the Lapps, the 

 Eskimo are being driven to the wall. The fate of the American In- 

 dian is partly sealed. The Aztec is a peon; the Peruvian a cargador. 

 The Beothuk and the Tasmanian are already gone. Britain is saved 

 from being an insular Labrador by the Gulf Stream. Bordeaux sur- 

 vives only through its vineyards. 



With the ebb and flow of industry and manufactures, villages, towns 

 and cities spring up like mushrooms. Others have disappeared like the 

 melting snow-flakes. The forest vanishes and the sea is encroached 

 upon. Holland reclaims a lost country, America reanimates a desert. 

 Eivers and lakes are dried up and mountains are hewn down. 



But, after all, there is an illusion about this flux itself. To re- 

 mind us of its relativity, the Fellah, direct descendant of the most 

 ancient Egyptian, keeps watch beneath the pyramids. Before him 

 have passed, as the ages came and went, Libyan and man of Punt, Sar- 

 dinian and Hebrew, Persian and Babylonian, Greek and Eoman, Arab 

 and Turk, Frencliman, Englislmian and American. And amid all their 

 notable mutations he has remained practically the same. He still waits 

 for the stirring of the waters. 



III. Lmitaiion. — Wise men before Solomon said " there is nothing 

 new under the sun." And in all they have thought, said, done or 

 dreamed, the ignorant in all times and among all peoples have cor- 

 roborated the sages. The great majority of the wise, too, have labored 

 zealously at the same task. To-day, Tarde tells us, imitation is 

 everything. 



Art is imitation of nature and nature imitation of God. God 

 imitates himself. Civilization is mimicry. Genial repetition is the 

 sum and substance of great knowledge and deep wisdom. Ignorance 

 is gross imitation. Life and death are both imitative. By imitation 

 childhood learns, youth hopes, manhood forgets, old age despairs. 

 Heredity itself is imitation. Both the individual and the race have 

 acted, " as if its whole vocation were endless imitation." 



How hard it is for man to do otherwise than his fellows are doin<r 

 or have done ! To repeat is so much easier than to invent. To borrow 

 than to create. To follow than to lead. To stand with the many 



