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.
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