We had felt, a moment before, all around us, the cold of a dense
whiteness which engulfed the scene. The first of the great Glacial
periods? Ice coming down from the Poles? The axis of the Earth
changing perhaps? Our spectral cage hummed within the blue-gray ice,
and then emerged.

The beasts and man fought the surge of ice, withdrawing when it
advanced, returning as it receded. The Second Glacial Period came and
passed, and the Third....

We swept out into the blended sunlight and darkness again. The land
stretched away with primitive forests. The dawn of history was
approaching. Mankind was questing upward now, with the light of
Reason burning brightly at last....

At 75,000 B. C., when the Third Glacial Period was partially over, man
was puzzling with his chipped stone implements. The Piltdown--the Dawn
Man--was England....

The Fourth Glacial Period passed.

50,000 B. C. The Cro-Magnons and the Grimaldi Negroids were playing
their parts, now. Out of chipped stone implements the groping brain of
man evolved polished stone. It took forty thousand years to do that!
The Neolithic Age was at hand. Man learned to care for his family a
little better. Thus, he discovered fire. He fought with this newly
created monster; puzzled over it; conquered it; kept his family warm
with it and cooked.

* * * * *

We passed 10,000 B. C. Man was progressing faster. He was finding new
wants and learning how to supply them. Animals were domesticated, made
subservient and put to work. A vast advance! No longer did man think
it necessary to kill, to subdue: the master could have a servant.

Food was found in the soil. More fastidious always, in eating, man
learned to grow food. Then came the dawn of agriculture.

And then we swept into the period of recorded history. 4241 B. C. In
Egypt, man was devising a calendar....

This fragment of space upon which we gazed--this space of the Western
Hemisphere near the shore of the sea--was destined to be the site of a
city of millions--the New York City of my birth. But it was a backward
space, now. In Europe, man was progressing faster....

Perhaps, here in America, in 4000 B. C. there was nothing in human
form. I gazed out at the surrounding landscape. It seemed almost
steady, now, of outline. We were moving through Time much less rapidly
than ever before. I remarked the sweep of a thousand years on the
Time-dials. It had become an appreciable interval o