48 NATURE'S STORY OF THE YEAR 



ments of flint weapons with which our ancestors, a 

 hundred generations ago, slew enemies, or scraped 

 skins. The brown arable fields bear annually a 

 crop of these relics, which are turned up by the 

 plough, washed by winter rains, and left all the 

 spring ungathered amongst the debris of common 

 rocks. Within many a solitary upland mound of 

 earth are traces of the crematorial fires through 

 which the ancients paid the great debt to the 

 world fires that still smoulder, and give promise 

 of once more spreading around the globe. Those 

 sun-taught savages seem to have been wiser in 

 this matter than their cultured descendants whose 

 dead are withheld in treasured vaults. And while 

 the guardians of these childish historians of the 

 dead pause to drop the annual chaplet, they too 

 are treading the same easy path. A brief space of. 

 time, and their very names will have rotted from 

 the stony witnesses to their existence. A little 

 chiselling by frost, the growth of a wisp of 

 greenery, and the ground will be smooth again, 

 rearing its fresh wreaths of flowers where once 

 the pitiful chaplet was laid by the tearful mourner. 

 Let us try to perpetuate our names by rational 



