794 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



are not positively thrust upon them ? They have labored all day in 

 monotony : where shall they go for recreation, and what shall the rec- 

 reation be ? If they go far away they are removed from the sphere of 

 their labors ; if they look near to their own abodes, they find not one 

 true and ennobling pastime, but fifty that are degrading, and, at the 

 same time, filled with every possible temptation. 



I apply this to our own people ; but it is, I fear, equally applicable 

 to other peoples. Dr. Beard, the American I have already quoted, 

 writes his experience, gathered in his own country, as follows : "To 

 live," he says, speaking of the same classes, " to live on the slippery 

 path that lies between extreme poverty on the one side and the gulf of 

 starvation on the other ; to take continual thought of to-morrow, with- 

 out any good result of such thought; to feel each anxious hour that 

 the dreary treadmill by which we secure the means of sustenance for a 

 hungry household may, without warning, be closed by any number of 

 forces, over which one has no control ; to double and triple all the hor- 

 rors of want and pain by anticipation and rumination — such is the Ufe 

 of the muscle-working classes of modern civilized society ; and when we 

 add to this the cankering annoyance that arises from the envying of the 

 fortunate brain-worker, who lives at ease before his eyes, we marvel not 

 that he dies young, but rather that he lives at all." 



There remains still in the list of classes requiring recreation, and 

 the health that springs from it, the last or indefinite class. Of the 

 purely indefinite of these I need not speak ; for they, the waifs and 

 strays of our civilization, are, I fear, under little influence of such refin- 

 ing agencies as we would put forward for the future. With the very 

 small class of persons of rank and property, less than 169,000 altogether, 

 I have dealt already, by joining them with the professional and com- 

 mercial well-to-do classes. To the seven and a half millions of scholars 

 and children and their recreations attention will be called in a new 

 chapter. — Gentlemavb s Magazine. 



■♦»» 



EAELY TKACES OF MAN.' 



By G. DE MORTILLET. 



QUATERNARY MAN.— The man of geological time— fossil man— is 

 now a fact so clearly demonstrated that it is no longer called in 

 question. The recent exposition of anthropological sciences showed us 

 his works plentifully scattered throughout France, England, Spain, and 

 Italy. 



But, though the existence of quaternary man in the southwest of 

 Europe is no longer denied, there is a school which, walking with fear 

 ^ Translated by J. Fitzgerald, A. M., from the " Revue d' Anthropologic." 



