OF THE SOIL OF THE EARTH 421 



brain and its outposts that in the end he might know himself and all 

 that went about him. Bit by bit bone and muscle, ligament and sinew, 

 were pieced together — strange artifices to do the brain's bidding. The 

 heart began as a throbbing pool of blood, the red current of which 

 found its devious way to every nook and cranny of the rapidly growing 

 form. Long before the possibility of air ever reaching into these depths 

 of dawning life the lungs were fashioned, and the mouth and stomach 

 were prophecies of the hunger to come. 



Each particle of life matter that went into the building of this 

 man was indelibly stamped with the impress of inheritance. He was 

 fashioned after his kind. When he finally appeared among his people 

 and as he grew into manhood the bronze color of his skin, the straight 

 black hair, the dark iris, the long head with its high arched cheeks, 

 betokened the stock from which he sprang. His ways and his speech 

 were those of his ancestors. The more remote of these ancestors had 

 come from a hyperborean land at a time far back in the dim, unre- 

 corded lapse of millennia beyond the reach of tradition — a forgotten 

 dream period like that before birth. These ancient men without doubt 

 saw the mastodon in the flesh, as our cave-dwelling ancestors over the 

 seas beheld the mammoth. Successive generations of them may have 

 witnessed the floods of the melting ice-sheet and the changing features 

 of lake and river basins. A later horde, within the period of tradi- 

 tion, crossed the Eiver of Fish (Nameesi Sipu), fought and drove out 

 an ancient people — the Alligewi — who dwelt in the forest land to 

 the east of the great river and whose curious earthworks remain to 

 this day, and finally reached the place at the rising of the sun, beyond 

 the mountains (Alleghany), by the shores of the Great Lake of Salt- 

 water. Such is the meager thread of this man's race history. 



Through the lapse of time with its shifting scenes the never-ending 

 drama of the generations of men goes on — birth, and the span of life, 

 and death. One indestructible thread is woven into this tissue of 

 humanity — the thread of inheritance that reaches back, like the 

 strands of a cable, into abysmal depths. This subtle thread of in- 

 heritance that runs through the generations had made this man what 

 he was and had cast him into his time and place. And the end of 

 it all is an unknown grave, as it is with Homer and Caesar, and the 

 innumerable host of men, small and great, that have ever lived. 



In the waning light of a November afternoon I found the man 

 where he had lain these two hundred years or more imbedded deep in 

 the soil of the earth. The sockets in which the light of life once 

 gleamed, the cavernous nares through which the smells of young April 

 poured into the brain ; the bony ear canals that once rang to the rhythm 

 of the stream; the mouth place resonant with its strange speech — all 

 plugged solid with the clay. The very bones themselves had taken on 



