THE OVERCOMING OF APPEARANCES 25 



The date may still be found on the margins of practically every 

 Bible printed in the English language. 



The recent excavations of the tombs of the Nile kings, and 

 of the great cities of the Syrian plains, reveal a people at a 

 high stage of civilisation five and perhaps seven or ten thousand 

 years before our era. Their temples, their palaces, their 

 libraries, their sculpture, their jewellery, their sanitary and 

 plumbing arrangements even, tell that even this remote day 

 must have been but as yesterday compared with the distant 

 time when troglodyte man left his bones, his weapons and instru- 

 ments of flint, by the side of the remains of animals now in 

 part extinct, in the caves wherein he dwelt. 



And this Stone Age is but at the surface of the series of 

 superimposed strata of stone which must have required for 

 their deposition, and alternate elevation and depression above 

 and below the level of the sea, uncounted aeons. 



Yet again, it was hard to imagine that before the age of man 

 strange races of animals prowled the earth vast and uncouth 

 saurians and pterodactyls, which would dwarf even the mam- 

 moth ; how much harder to think that more than half of 

 Europe and North America were once covered with ice ; to 

 believe that Broadway and the crowded Strand, Himalayan and 

 Cordilleran summits even, were once the floor of the ocean. 

 It was long before there were any so to believe. Yet such is 

 the unescapable testimony of the rocks, whose weird and ancient 

 rime has never been more felicitously retold than in the haunt- 

 ing lines of Tennyson : 



" There rolls the deep where grew the tree. 

 O earth, what changes thou hast seen ! 

 There where the long street roars has been 

 The stillness of the central sea. 



The hills are shadows and they flow 



From form to form, and nothing stands ; 

 They melt like mists, the solid lands, 



Like clouds they shape themselves and go." 



Projected into this " dark Backward and abysm of time," 

 the mind soars in a chilling and lonesome grandeur, and fain 

 would go back to the lost gardens of Elysium, amid whose en- 

 chanted spaces its childhood was spent. But the gates of 

 toyland once passed are closed for ever ; and in the intellectual 



