684 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



flight of time, its likeness to a running stream, the great world spinning down 

 the grooves of change, endless change and decay, have been food for the melan- 

 choly ruminations of philosophers from the earliest times. " Tout ce qui fut un 

 jour et n'est plus aujourd'hui incline a la tristesse surtout ce qui fut tres beau et 

 tr&s heureux," says Maeterlinck. 



But regard for the old is not always vague sentiment alone. In one of his 

 essays, Emerson remarks that Nature often turns to ornament what she once 

 employed for use, illustrating his suggestion with certain sea shells in which the 

 parts which have for a time formed the mouth are at the next whorl of growth left 

 behind as decorative nodes and spines. Subsequently, Herbert Spencer applied 

 the idea to human beings, remarking how the material exuviae of past social states 

 become the ornaments of the present, for example ruined castles, old rites and 

 ceremonies, old earthenware water-jars. The explanation of this metamorphosis 

 simply is, that so long as a thing is useful its beauty often goes for the most part 

 unobserved. Beauty is the pursuit of leisure, and it was probably in those 

 rhythmic periods of relaxation when the primitive potter or stone carver paused 

 from his labour that the aesthetic sense according to some was given birth. 



Now it is certain that there be some to whom the perpetuation of Stonehenge 

 or the Diplodocus is a matter of large indifference, in whom arises no joy in the 

 fruits of the conservator's art upon handling, say, a Syracusan tetradrachm or a folio 

 of Shakespeare with " the excessively rare title-page ' for Richard Meighen.' " Yet 

 over the question of self-perpetuation these same men will be as desirous as others. 

 Few men, save Buddhists, relish the idea of self-extinction. No one likes the 

 thought of the carrion worm in the seat of intellect. The Egyptians bravely 

 fought the course of Nature and gained some solace, we may assume, by embalm- 

 ing. Christians, if they resign themselves to the decay of the body, labour in its 

 stead to save the soul. On his death, every man at least claims a tombstone. 

 The surface of the earth is stippled with crosses (especially in France), with monu- 

 ments, obelisks, mausoleums, pyramids, cenotaphs, tombs, tumuli, barrows, cairns, 

 designed to keep evergreen the memory of the dead, to forestall oblivion lurking 

 like a ghoul in the background. Look at Keats's naive preoccupation with his 

 future fame, his passionate desire to be grouped among the heirs of all eternity. 

 If we are to believe Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonneteers, their common 

 obsession was to combat brass and stone with their own immortal lines. 



No doubt there are a few apparently sincere, high-minded gentlemen (" Rocky 

 Mountain toughs " William James calls them) who emphatically declare that when 

 they die they will, after cremation, have their ashes scattered to the winds of 

 heaven, who scoff at the salvation of their souls, and quote Haeckel's jibe about 

 man as "a gaseous vertebrate," who are indifferent to fame and spurn monuments 

 that live no longer than the bell rings and the widow weeps. In short, since con- 

 servation must always be o'erswayed by, sad mortality in the long run, they will 

 have nothing of it. " Give me my scallop shell of quiet," they would say— and 

 let the world pass on its primrose way to the everlasting bonfire. 



But conservation cannot be so summarily set aside. Every man, willy nilly, 

 collects and preserves, for his consciousness is of itself an automatic collecting in- 

 strument and his memory a preservative. After a life of it a man's mind is a museum, 

 a palimpsest, a hold-all. In the heyday of manhood we may perhaps go adven- 

 turing on in lavish expenditure of life, nomads, careless of the day as soon as it is 

 over. Yet he must be a very rare bird indeed, the veteran who, when all the 



