4 INITIATIVE IN EVOLUTION 



understand the variants of them such as the writer of Savage Child- 

 hood 1 expounds so well ? 



The Sources of Rivers. 



To trace the course and source of a river is a simple task through 

 the work of modern geographers, and such a pursuit illustrates 

 well the two methods here considered, but it is doubtful if any river 

 was ever traced originally from its fountain head to its mouth. The 

 backward way of such exploration, from the nature of the case, 

 has always been taken, and men have traced the more or less finished 

 products of the lower stretches, backward, still backwards, even 

 as in the Indus, to the still -unknown. The earliest thinkers and 

 seekers in tfte plains of Bengal were familiar with much of their 

 great sacred and composite river as it flowed into its delta. Slowly, 

 laboriously, here a little and there a little, they learned its stupendous 

 story. They found the plateau of Tibet in the Himalaj^as where 

 the twin-sisters, Brahmaputra and Ganges were born, and saw how 

 from the one high cradle they parted on their eastward course 

 for a thousand miles with the mountain-chain between them, and 

 how, coming together again, the one descending through Assam 

 and the other flowing through the plains, reinforced by the Jumna, 

 they united to form the Ganges-Brahmaputra. A great subject 

 indeed for the early geographer, but one which he could only follow 

 in the backward way. Again how well known and revered in 

 Egypt was the Nile for thousands of years before its source in 

 Victoria Nyanza could be traced, even though Nero might send 

 his explorers as far as the marshes of the White Nile, and Ptolemy's 

 search for it might lead him to guess the riddle, and assign it to 

 two great lakes ! 



Genealogy. 



Not many of us can trace our ancestry in the direct male line 

 to the 8th century by authentic and written documents as did a 

 Hebrew friend of mine, thus effectually meeting the doubts of a 

 prospective brother-in-law who asked him as to his fitness to enter 

 a family which was able to produce a stray peer of the realm in its 

 roll. On the other hand a man who has lost his parents in childhood 

 may know nothing of them but that his father's name was A. Mann, 

 and that he was buried in a Kentish churchyard. He may go on a 

 pjlgrimage and find there recorded the fact that A. Mann was the 

 son of A. Mann, Gent, who came from Northumberland. He will 

 doubtless make another pilgrimage and find there a large vault, 



1 Savage Childhood, Dudley Kidd. 



