g that, compared
with it, the historic and prehistoric periods are but as the life of an
individual. A quarter of a million years has perhaps elapsed since the
beginning of that cold period which, at all events in this part of the
earth, killed Palaeolithic man; yet how small a part of his racial life
even that time would seem if, as some believe, his remains may be traced
as far back as the Eocene! But after this rude man of the Quaternary and
Tertiary epochs had passed away there is a void, a period which to the
imagination seems measureless, when sun and moon and stars looked on a
waste and mindless world. When man once more reappears he seems to have
been re-created on somewhat different lines.

It is this break in the history of the human race which amazes and
daunts us, which "shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities
of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of
annihilation."

Here, in these words of Hermann Melville, we are let all at once into
the true meaning of those disquieting and seemingly indefinable emotions
so often experienced, even by the most ardent lovers of nature and of
solitude, in uninhabited deserts, on great mountains, and on the sea.
We find here the origin of that horror of mountains which was so common
until recent times. A friend once confessed to me that he was always
profoundly unhappy at sea during long voyages, and the reason was that
his sustaining belief in a superintending Power and in immortality
left him when he was on that waste of waters, which have no human
associations. The feeling, so intense in his case, is known to most if
not all of us; but we feel it faintly as a disquieting element in nature
of which we may be but vaguely conscious.

Most travelled Englishmen who have seen much of the world and resided
for long or short periods in many widely separated countries would
probably agree that there is a vast difference in the feeling of
strangeness, or want of harmony with our surroundings, experienced
in old and in new countries. It is a compound feeling and some of its
elements are the same in both cases; but in one there is a disquieting
element which the other is without. Thus, in Southern Europe, Egypt,
Syria, and in many countries of Asia, and some portions of Africa, the
wanderer from home might experience dissatisfaction and be ill at
ease and wish for old familiar sights and sounds; but in a colony
like Tasmania, and in any new countr