On searching further a few more pieces were found. I
took them home and preserved them carefully, experiencing a
novel and keen sense of pleasure in their possession; for
though worthless, they were man's handiwork, the only real
evidence I had come upon of that vanished people who had been
before us; and it was as if those bits of baked clay, with a
pattern incised on them by a man's finger-nail, had in them
some magical property which enabled me to realize the past,
and to see that vacant plain repeopled with long dead and
forgotten men.
Doubtless we all possess the feeling in some degree--the sense
of loneliness and desolation and dismay at the thought of an
uninhabited world, and of long periods when man was not. Is
it not the absence of human life or remains rather than the
illimitable wastes of thick-ribbed ice and snow which daunts
us at the thought of Arctic and Antarctic regions? Again, in
the story of the earth, as told by geology, do we not also
experience the same sense of dismay, and the soul shrinking
back on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts
desolate in time when the continuity of the race was broken
and the world dispeopled? The doctrine of evolution has made
us tolerant of the thought of human animals,--our progenitors
as we must believe--who were of brutish aspect, and whose
period on this planet was so long that, compared with it, the
historic and prehistoric periods are but as the life of an
individual.
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