422 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the earthy hue and texture, crumbling into fine dust. A few enduring 

 bits of handiwork — quartz pebbles which had been laboriously bored 

 through for a bead string, a brass finger-ring, a curious piece of shell — 

 were scattered about in the clay ; simple things that seemed to mock the 

 less enduring framework of life. 



The one haunting thought, after the emotional and scientific ele- 

 ments of the mind had satisfied themselves, was that this man, this 

 aborigine, whosoever he may have been in the flesh, had resolved into 

 nature. There was no victory about this sepulture. The earth had 

 simply taken this man again to herself, and as she had molded him 

 from her clay and built him up out of her breast milk and her maize 

 and beans and the flesh of her fish and fowl, so now she was gently 

 and leisurely scattering the molecules that her magic hand had once 

 so artfully put together. Here then, methinks, is the plain tale of all 

 men. 



The sun sank behind the Brandywine hills ; the light of the western 

 sky faded and with it the outline and color of the landscape. The first 

 few stars twinkled dimly overhead. The filling crescent of the moon 

 hung low in the darkling west and passed out of sight. The Dipper 

 turned slowly across the northern arc. The dawn light of a new day 

 came into the east. It was the never-ending change of the eternal back- 

 ground. Countless generations of men had passed, their very existence 

 forgotten — blotted out in the lapse of time — and still the everlasting 

 shift from day to night, from night to day, went ceaselessly on. Of 

 what account was this man or all the millions of men that had lived 

 only to be forgotten — lost in the soil of the earth? 



As the thread of inheritance is seemingly indestructible so far as 

 the race of men is concerned, there appears still another manifestation 

 of immortality, of a purely individual character, which appeals to every 

 man as an element of his being that must outlast the things of time. 

 Just what this is has never been vouchsafed to any man to know. It 

 is the eternal riddle of life, the hopeless tangle of all mythology and 

 philosophy throughout the ages. Mankind has ever found itself in a 

 world of material facts and elemental forces the manifestations of 

 which have revealed a vast environment of the unknown. What a man 

 calls his soul is the recognition of this unknown which lies beyond 

 the reach of his senses. The mind has explored a half-way region — a 

 region of principles and forces — and has analyzed these with some 

 degree of surety. Beyond this, on the boundless ocean of infinity, the 

 chart and compass of the mind are of no avail. Men have framed 

 theories of this outer realm far more crude and improbable than any 

 notion entertained of the outer geography of the Odyssey and they 

 have peopled it with beings quite as improbable as those encountered by 

 the adventurous Ithacan. More than this, mankind in every age and 



