EXTRACT VIII. A. 



STRATIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE. 



WE are compelled to believe that cosmogenic or general 

 knowledge has been gradually and slowly evolved and 

 collected from crass ignorance as the human family 

 has spread over the earth and passed through its in- 

 numerable vicissitudes and experiences of rise and fall, 

 of advancement and retreat, in the progress or race of 

 civilisation, individual and communal, family, tribal, and 

 national, and that it has had its more or less well-marked 

 periods of production, accumulation, decline, and decay, 

 usually synchronising with these vicissitudes and experi- 

 ences, and determined by the family, tribal, and national 

 environment : and therefore in the earlier periods of its 

 evolution it was constantly liable to more or less complete 

 obliteration, leaving, it might be, only the slightest and 

 most ephemeral trace or stratum of indestructible residuum 

 or knowledge deposit, in the form of more or less coherent 

 and available fragments, for future higher human neces- 

 sities and future human guidance. 



Thus from the early conditions of the race knowledge 

 was constantly being fitfully and slowly evolved and 

 acquired by limited communities, and with the greatest 

 difficulty diffused throughout their various branches and 

 surroundings, so that constant leakages and entire dis- 

 appearances of the ''raw material," as well as the more 

 or less reasoned collections of knowledge, were of constant 

 occurrence, leaving, after each such occurrence, the same 

 intellectual barrenness and the same necessity for begin- 

 ning the process of its re-acquirement and re-arrangement 



