making its resistless way through soil and rock, mountain and sea, until it in turn loses itself in the waters of the still mightier ocean.

And of that river that little stream is still a constituent part. But where, we ask, its will or power to go its own way, as in early days it seemed to do? And thus ourselves: our little sojourning here until we also are one with the great ocean of life.

And so the great flood of life as it wends its way into the vast ocean of eternity. Has there never been a parting of the ways where it has been in its own choice which channel it will take? The winning or losing of the war was but the tossing of a coin. Would no reversal of fortune have varied the flow of existence? Has no such cataclysmic happening ever rewritten the story of what might have been? Or has no man, however titanic, ever made his age or even helped to fashion his age, or never done more than voice his age? And yet who is the happier philosopher? The deepest thinker? No, but he who best puts into words the nebulous thought of his times. And the measure of his acceptance is fair index of what such thought must have been. We honour those with whom we agree, and thus whatever its machinery a nation is mostly represented by those who express its character and ideals. In a crisis communities usually find the leader they may reasonably expect. When does a great nation ever want a really great exponent of its will, and if he be wanting, where seek the explanation? A nation sold to the worship of mammon will find its high priests chief amongst its princes; and if in time of stress no high soul finds hearing, why should it be otherwise? What seed

flourishes in uncongenial soil? To be a leader a man must be in tune with his times. A little latitude may be his, but it is but little. It is the prevailing thought that sways humanity, the thought born and burnt into the very life of man by experience in the past. And this thought is the soul of a nation-is the soul of the world. For good or bad, in the end it is this

thought, the thought of the ages, which is all irresistible in its power. Individually, we may have some power of volition; collectively in the aggregate, we know but law alone.

And "Whither' tends this thought to-day? We would know, not that we have any great hopes of largely modifying it, if at all, but simply that by an understanding mind we may make it just a shade pleasanter and more easy for us who have to tread the road. And first our query-Whence this thought; this spirit of humanity, this driving power of the world? What moulds it in its turn? we ask. How is it modified or varied? And here we note how in common with everything of which we have sensation this thought is also subject to ever-recurrent change. The flood of life, like the ocean itself, seems subject to vast ebbs and flows, and almost with the same rhythmic precision. Perhaps better analogy, the very wave of such ocean. On the crest of a terrific Atlantic roller we look down into the abysm below; now in the trough we mark the mountains of waters towering above. And so mankind, and so his story oft repeated. Now on the summit he rushes down into the depths; now in the depths once more he ascends on high, but once more as prelude to yet another descent. One variation-one happy variation-must we mark; for whilst the trough is not so deep the crest of each successive stage has mostly been just a trifle higher. But it is only with the lapse of thousands of years that these culminating points and points of extreme depression are to be observed and measured; and, coming to particulars, perhaps the earliest trace of some such movement is to be found in the skull of that Neanderthal man, a cast of which is to be seen in every museum. And we mark the jaws. No canine or incisor teeth. What a story we can reconstruct as they tell us of a peaceful race, a grain eating race, probably an agricultural race; and then we fill in details of their doom! There is a rush of a wild, fierce, meat-eating horde ourselves of the past-and they were driven off

own.

the face of the earth. Savagery again comes into its Then we pass to the Stone Age, relatively modern. It tells of progress, though it is not the latest stage which always shows most advancement. We are now in the infancy of our own times. Man has at last learnt how to make tools and implements of fighting. The world is now his. He is the master animal. Beasts once his terror now admit his sway. Life is hard, bitterly hard, but it now has possibilities. It is a long cry from a stone hammer to a Vicker's Vimy plane, but the difference is in degree, not in kind. The remains of that age may be crude, but they are far from wanting in vigour. No weak hand, no feeble brain made those flint arrow heads and tools. Rather it is amazing that with so poor machinery they should have done so much. But skull remains indicate convolutions and brain capacity little if at all inferior to our own. They were fine workers, those stone-using ancestors of ours. And then in the dancing shadows and fanciful cloud-pictures of a past we see traces of the marvels of the amazing civilizations of Central America. Here, in archaic form we find the archetype of the inimitable tracery work of India; of the beautiful key pattern of Greece, and the wonderful pyramid of Egypt. And so old are these civilizations that by them even this of Egypt is comparatively modern. And all passed away as a story that is told. But as regards our own hemisphere, we see the Bronze Age followed by the Iron Age; great eras of advancement, until in the twilight of the awakening morn of history we come upon a civilization not so unlike our own in this selfsame Egypt of the past. On this let us dwell for a moment. A Bacon would not have found conditions so very different from what he knew. He would have found a kindred spirit in a mighty race. And in the flood of life we are at a point of culmination and it is for this reason that evidence of its greatness has come down to us. The more worthless a period, the more worthless, the more fleeting its work. But now, as the past discovers its secrets, it is a

striking picture it unfolds to our wondering eyes. Towering through the mist of the centuries we see the great pyramid of Cheops, and in its way almost as thrilling the wonderful statue of Chephren. They are the climax of science and inspiration. They are so great that they have hardly been surpassed by the greatest works of a later era. We look on the statue of Chephren--its calm, cold, massive, quiet greatness and dignity, and we ask where has it been excelled even by a Phidias himself? And the great pyramid : what romance of mathematics has been evolved from its measurements alone! For standard of length-no less than the axis of the world itself. Divided into 5,000,000 parts, and you have a working scale by which the most perfect plan can be laid out in every detail. We measure the four sides of the base. They measure 365 units and a fraction, or one unit for each day. Of those 365 units make a circle and find its radius, and that radius-some 58 units-will give the height itself. But more wonders lurk behind. As we and our planetary system revolve round the sun so does the solar system revolve round one of the still mightier suns of the Pleiades. For a complete revolution it takes some 258 centuries. Now measure the diagonals of the base of the pyramid and together they will be found to measure 258 units, or one unit for each century.* And yet another marvel. We have seen that the height is some 58 units, referring to the axis of the world as the standard of measurement. ratio of this height to one half of a diameter of the base is as 10 to 9. Raise 10 to the ninth power and multiply the height by the result, and you get the approximate mean distance of the earth from the sun, some ninety odd million miles. Enthusiasts give calculations to an inch; the sceptic has doubts as to what is the true base. So he rightly points out that the

The

The royal vault, or king's chamber, is on a level with the fiftieth course of masonry, the perimeter of which is also 258 units. Still, it is a high chamber, with corresponding margin to select from.

form of a pyramid is such that between the limits of the perimeter of the base at the bottom and zero at the apex you can obtain any line of any length you desire. Then, as to the other calculations, they are simply general properties of every square and circle, but that the original builders were aware of them is far from having been proved. But in judging that epoch it is enough for us that such a monument existed; that given one factor-the length of the base-and all the rest followed. It is the mere proportions that stagger; the relations of the measurements amongst themselves. And note, as to the length of the base, sceptic and enthusiast differ only in inches. So, of course, granting that they could calculate the length of the earth's axis, and they could easily have worked out every other result as well, thus anticipating the triumph of our most up-to-date science. And we find corroboration of the high level attained by them in one direction by the similar high level attained in another direction in the rival valley of the Euphrates. This time it is in their law that we find how far the human mind had advanced. In the code of Hammurabi, dating B.C. 2300, we find a scientific compilation never excelled, not even by the code of Napoleon. Some of the principles still find acceptance amongst ourselves. But one amusing example. We allow a dog one free bite. The code of Hammurabi allowed his ox one free push. But if an ox has pushed a man, by pushing made known his vice, and the owner have not blunted his horn, has not shut up his ox, and that ox has gored a man of gentle birth and caused him to die, he shall pay half a mina of silver. If a gentleman's servant, he shall pay one-third of a mina of silver" (ss 251-2). What a ring of modernity in this most ancient of texts, by comparison how puerile many a later compilation! In the best we find hopeless confusion between laws of ceremonial, laws of moral, and laws delimiting rights. Down to the latest periods we find ecclesiastical, canon, civil, and criminal law jumbled together in one unscientific hodge-podge. Here alone we find the same