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What we find is, that the great series of formations represents a period of time of which our human chronologies hardly afford us a unit of measure. I will not pretend to say how we ought to estimate this time, in millions or in billions of years. For my purpose, the determination of its absolute duration is wholly unessential. But that the time was enormous there can be no question.

The student in the museum could have read the lyric poems of Alcæus and Stersichorus, which in matter and style were excellent enough to be judged not quite so good as Homer; the tender lamentations of Simonides; the warm breathings of Sappho, the tenth muse; the pithy iambics of Archilochus, full of noble flights and brave irregularities; the comedies of Menander, containing every kind of excellence; those of Eupolis and Cratinus, which were equal to Aristophanes; the histories of Theopompus, which in the speeches were as good as Thucydides; the lively, agreeable orations of Hyperides, the accuser of Demosthenes; with the books of travels, chronologies, and countless others of less merit for style and genius, but which, if they had been saved, would not have left Egypt wholly without a history.

This, however, can not make it improbable, for these chronologies are really no more reasonable than the monkish fancies used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to explain these civilizations.

In my mental provinces I welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, the lake-dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science; but I feel them to be intruders in my antiquity. I was brought up on quite other chronologies, and I still like a history that begins with the flood.

The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring.

I conclude this essay with some traditions of man and Nature which a certain poet sang to me. The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. And the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. A man is a god in ruins.

Therefore the historian must make a choice. Consciously sometimes, but more often unconsciously, the author will select the material which best corresponds with his political, moral, and social opinions. It is therefore impossible, unless he contents himself with simple chronologies summing up each event with a few words and a date, to produce a truly impartial volume of history.

The peculiar grandeur of such expressions lies partly in the dimness of the approximation to any attempt at settling their limits, and still more in this, that the conventional character, and consequent meanness of ordinary human dates, are abandoned in the celestial chronologies.

Historical material as identified with the life of some great architectural glory is something more than a mere repetition of chronologies; the sidelights and the co-related incidents, though indeed many of them may be but hearsay, are quite as interesting, quite as necessary, in fact, for the proper appreciation of a famous palace or chateau as long columns of dates, or an evolved genealogical tree which attempts to make plain that which could be better left unexplained.

Doubtless this is a mighty age as compared with the few thousand years allotted to us in bygone chronologies; but, looked at sub specie æternitatis, and with an eye which is prepared to look forward also, and especially with relation to what we know and can predict regarding the sun, these past six million years may reasonably be held to comprise only the infantine period of man's life.