lligent beyond all the other
animals of earth. Physically he is but a mite amid the beast monsters
that surround him, but by value of his brain he conquers them. He has
begun his career of mastery.

If we delve amid more recent strata, we find the flint weapons have
become bronze. Their owner has learned to handle a ductile metal, to
draw it from the rocks and fuse it in the fire. Later still he has
discovered how to melt the harder and more useful iron. We say roughly,
therefore, that man passed through a stone age, a bronze age, and then
an iron age.

Somewhere, perhaps in the earliest of these, he began to build rude
houses. In the next, he drew pictures. During the latest, his pictures
grew into an alphabet of signs, his structures developed into vast and
enduring piles of brick or stone. Buildings and inscriptions became his
relics, more like to our own, more fully understandable, giving us a
sense of closer kinship with his race.

SOURCES OF EARLY KNOWLEDGE

There are three different lines along which we have succeeded in
securing some knowledge of these our distant ancestors, three telephones
from the past, over which they send to us confused and feeble
murmurings, whose fascination makes only more maddening the vagueness of
their speech.

First, we have the picture-writings, whether of Central America, of
Egypt, of Babylonia, or of other lands. These when translatable bring us
nearest of all to the heart of the great past. It is the mind, the
thought, the spoken word, of man that is most intimately he; not his
face, nor his figure, nor his clothes. Unfortunately, the translation of
these writings is no easy task. Those of Central America are still an
unsolved riddle. Those of Babylon have been slowly pieced together like
a puzzle, a puzzle to which the learned world has given its most able
thought. Yet they are not fully understood. In Egypt we have had the
luck to stumble on a clew, the Rosetta Stone, which makes the ancient
writing fairly clear.[1]

[Footnote 1: See page 1 for an engraving and account of this famous
stone. It was found over a century ago and its value was instantly
recognized, but many years passed before its secrets were deciphered. It
contains an inscription repeated in three forms of writing: the early
Egyptian of the hieroglyphics, a later Egyptian (the demotic), and
Greek.]

Where this mode of communication fails, we turn to another which carries
us even farther into the past.