148 THE DAWN OF MIND. 



and experiences of a nation, yea often of many nations, 

 and of all which through long centuries they have 

 attained to and won. It stands like the Pillars of 

 Hercules, to mark how far the moral and intellectual 

 conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like 

 those pillars, fixed and immovable, but even itself 

 advancing with the progress of these. The mighty 

 moral instincts which have been working in the popu- 

 lar mind have found therein their unconscious voice ; 

 and the single kinglier spirits that have looked deeper 

 into the heart of things have oftentimes gathered up 

 all they have seen into some one word, which they 

 have launched upon the world, and with which they 

 have enriched it forever — making in the new word a 

 new region of thought to be henceforward in some 

 sort the common heritage of all." 1 



What then, when we open this marvellous struct- 

 ure, is the revelation yielded us of the mental states 

 of those who lived at the dawn of speech? An im- 

 pression of poverty, great and pathetic. All fossils 

 teach the same lesson — the lesson of life, beauty, 

 structure, waning into a poverty-stricken past. 

 Whether they be the shells which living creatures 

 once inhabited, or the bones of departed vertebrate 

 types, or the forms of words where wisdom lay en- 

 tombed, the structures became simpler and simpler 

 cruder and cruder, less full of the richness and 

 abundance of life as we near the birth of time. They 

 tell of days when the world was very young, when 

 plants were flowerless and animals back-boneless, of 

 later years when primeval Man prowled the forest and 

 chipped his flints and chattered in uncouth syllables 

 1 Trench- Tiw Study of Words, p. 28. 



