12 CONNECTICUT GEOL. AND NAT. HIST. SURVEY. [Bull. 



see our petty periods sub specie perennitatis." World-facts con- 

 templated in this way help us, so says yet another historical 

 writer (Villari), to " gain a new consciousness of our own being, 

 and to win deeper insight into recesses of our own nature." 



The essayist just quoted gives it as his opinion that the history 

 of the whole universe is required to explain the individual man, 

 " because," as he says, " more or less transformed, all history 

 lives in us human beings. Therefore, as it lives in us all, why 

 should we marvel at our power of transporting ourselves back 

 into past times and living once more in them? In studying the 

 history of Greece, we not only read the tale of a vanished past, 

 but also that of a society and of a civilization that, although 

 transformed, still endures within us as a constituent element of 

 our mentality. Thus we are reading the history of a part of 

 ourselves, and gain a clearer appreciation of that part on seeing 

 it developed, magnified, and surrounded with its pristine glory, 

 as it first flashed upon the world through the deeds of the Grecian 

 people. . . . Thus in reading universal history we learn to 

 recognize the process by which our own intelligence has been 

 gradually built up. It has been justly remarked that, even as 

 the geologist can trace the history of the transformations of 

 the globe from any chance handful of earth, so too the philol- 

 ogist, on analyzing some phrase you have uttered, will find in it 

 the record of the transformations of tongues."^ 



It is an obvious truism that to every man the world as he 

 sees it depends on his physical organization and upon the way 

 he has been taught to look at it through education and years of 

 experience. But the scientific conception of the world and of 

 the value and meaning of life has become profoundly modified 

 within comparatively recent times through the influence of re- 

 organizing ideas. Men in all ages have shown the keenest 

 interest in the problems of man's origin and past development. 

 The first great step in advance was made by the shores of the 

 ^gean more than two thousand years ago. But the positive 

 results of ancient philosophy were inadequate and limited, as 

 compared with modern, because of its more limited resources. 

 After the time of the Greek poets and philosophers, more than 

 two milleniums were to pass away before those new reorganizing 



1 Villari, Pasquale, Studies Historical and Critical, 1907, p. 37 ff. 



