508 STUDIES FOR STUDENTS 
complicated, but the fossils imbedded in the rocks are the data, 
and these are far more indisputable than are the data upon which 
ancient human history is being built. A recent writer gives the 
following definition of ancient history :* ‘A confused jumble of 
traditions, distorted to suit special pleaders; then rejumbled, and 
mixed, and confused, and redistorted according to the design of 
each new writer—the story of noble actions of big-minded men 
recast in the crucible of petty intellects, untrained in public life 
and unfit to grasp even the commonplace—the story of petty 
actions seized upon by enthusiasts and exalted into a nobility 
which would have been beyond the recognition of the original 
actors—all sorts of stories attempted to be told by weak, inca- 
pable men without purpose, or by unconscientious men or wilful 
liars with a purpose—obscure acts twisted into curious shapes in 
the brains of industrious writers—truth taken by well-meaning 
men and so changed by ignorance and lack of comprehension 
and unfitness to judge that it loses all semblance of its original 
self and becomes a misshapen, irrecognizable, utterly twisted and 
contorted thing, without much more than a vestige of fact upon 
which it is supposed to be based. This is ancient history.” If 
the human historian is able to build up a story of the human race 
from such data, how much more certainly will the paleontologic 
geologist, by diligent study and investigation of his absolutely 
indisputable data, be able to build up a creditable history of the 
life of the earth since Cambrian time. 
STUART WELLER. 
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. 
*JOHN BRISBEN WALKER, in The Cosmopolitan, March 1899, p. 476. 
