CHAPTER XV 



The Marvel of a Tide 



All living, when looked upon in a large sense, is a tide. Ebb 

 and flow is one of the inevitable characteristics of existence. 

 The growths of nations and their declines, the boiling sweep 

 of conquests and their recessions, the rise and fall of cultures 

 are manifestations of the turn of tides in the affairs of men. The 

 Dark Ages and the Renaissance that followed were opposite 

 halves of a single flow of energy just as the devastation of the 

 hordes commanded by Chepe Noyon had its counterpart in 

 the brilliance of the court of Kublai Khan. Only time pours 

 ceaselessly in one direction; but even the march of the hours 

 leaves behind a trail of risings and fallings, of comings and go- 

 ings. The geologic eras bear bountiful evidence of the fluctua- 

 tions of existence. Great waves of life washed up on the shores 

 of eternity and fell back again; the extinct dinosaurs and am- 

 phibians, the fossils of armored fish and the bilhons of long 

 buried trilobites are proof of this. Even individual lives are only 

 tides in miniature; birth, growth and swelHng maturity, dechne 

 and dissolution are separate phases in this phenomenon. 



I have often wondered if the ancient and very primitive re- 

 ligions which recognized the existence of Selene, the goddess 

 of the moon, did not have as their origin an instinctive recogni- 

 tion of the immense power of that satellite over the ceaseless 

 pulsing of the tide-controlled sea. The phases of the moon and 

 the correlation of the creeping of the waters into bays and 

 lagoons could hardly have escaped the attention of early man, 

 who was highly conscious of natural phenomena and who was 

 just becoming aware of a sense of power and articulation. The 



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