426 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Civilisation is an internittent phenomenon, its growth and 

 fall being comparable to simmer and winter in Nature. Prof. 

 Petrie shows how this analogy was familiar to the ancients 

 under the guise of the " Great Year," the Etruscans speaking 

 of the Great Year as the period of each race of men that should 

 arise in succession. He nakes the following quotation from 

 Plutarch's Life of Sulla which refers to the close of the 

 Etruscans' own period of 1,100 years, in 87 b.c. : " One day, 

 when the sky was serene and clear, there was heard in it the 

 sound of a trumpet, so sirill and mournful that it frightened 

 and astonished the whok city. The Tuscan sages said that 

 it portended a new race cf men, and a renovation of the world, 

 for they observed that tnere were eight several kinds of men, 

 all differing in life and nanners ; that Heaven had allotted to 

 each its time, which wis limited by the circuit of the Great 

 Year ; and that when me race came to a period, and another 

 was rising, it was announced by some wonderful sign from 

 either earth or heavei. So that it was evident at once 

 to those who attendee to these things, and were versed in 

 them, that a different sort of man was come into the world, 

 with other manners and customs, and more or less the care of 

 the gods than those vho had preceded them. . . . Such was 

 the mythology of the most learned and respectable of the 

 Tuscan soothsayers." 



From the foregoing examples it becomes evident that life, 

 in its main aspects, is essentially a rhythmic phenomenon. 

 The essence of rhythn being order, it seems, indeed, inevitable 

 that, with the progress of time, all biological phenomena of 

 importance, whether concerned with the inner functioning of 

 the organism or with its behaviour in relation to the outside 

 world, should tend to become increasingly rhythmic in char- 

 acter. 



Finally, it should oe evident that the sense of rhythm, which 

 forms so large a part of the pleasure conveyed by all the 

 higher forms of art, results from the successful expression by 

 man of his appreciation of the order and measured flow so 

 characteristic of his own nature and of the world about him. 



