Contemporary Evolution. 



one region has obtained the title of " Mauvaise Terre" 

 from the numerous furrows and depressions by which 

 progression is again and again arrested. Farther south, 

 the great Rio Colorado has by the secular attrition of its 

 stream worn for itself a course here and there bounded 

 by parallel precipices descending vertically some five hun- 

 dred feet or more from the level plain above, and forming 

 the celebrated canons of California. 



The slow, secular action of social change has resulted 

 here and there, under special conditions, in the production 

 of more or less sudden and abrupt manifestations, serving 

 for all future time as sociological landmarks, canons on 

 the plain of history. 



If a Greek who had watched the solemn procession of 

 the crocus-coloured Peplos to the Parthenon on the great 

 Panathenaic festival, or had laughed with Aristophanes 

 at the tiresome^old sophist whose moral obstetrics wearied 

 his ears as his ugliness offended his Attic taste for 

 beauty ; or if one of the succeeding generation who, 

 having listened in the Pnyx to a philippic from the 

 greatest orator who ever filled the bema, consoled himself 

 for existing political troubles with Herodotus or with 

 Homer, if either of these Greeks, reflecting on his sur- 

 roundings, deemed himself a witness of a social culmina- 

 tion in art, the drama, oratory, history, and poetry, 

 constituting his fellow-citizens the models and the teachers 

 of mankind for thousands of years to come, he would 



