ing beside the hearth has also changed. He begins to take on the aspect of a wolf; his fangs and expression are ferocious; his legs lean and long; his hair matted and dark; his terrible eyes gleam like coals in the night; but he comes up, licks my hand, and shows me that he is still my friend and protector.

His senses have grown infinitely acute and he sniffs beside ancient water courses, as though he were now entering a land very familiar to him.

We are engulfed in infinite solitudes; we call to the dog now and then not to go so fast.

Unexpectedly, Mesopotamia, the Mother Land, rises. before us-home of strange religions, agriculture, irrigation, wedge-shaped writings on baked tiles, telling of old races and old glories, now vanished from the world.

*

But as the centuries come and pass swiftly, in reverse order, back into the remote past, the curse has fallen, one idea after another is perishing. Yes, before us is the hour when man is to forget how to write, and tradition takes the place of the indented sun-baked bricks.

Here, we uncover the crude beginnings of ideas preserved to us in the Psalms, as known to the Twentieth Century, come down from these strange age-old traditions, for many thousands of years.

* * *

My dog strikes off on a long journey over the lowlying sand dunes. We travel for days, resting now and then under palms; we cross wide waters, and we face cutting gales of sand; at night we fairly freeze in the desert that was intensely hot at noon.

But we press on till before our surprised eyes Egypt rises in grandeur, under the domination of a race crossed with blond, blue-eyed people of Negroid blood.

Long before ancestors of Father Abraham fed fat flocks in pleasant valleys of Asia, this ancient Egyptian people, the color of cinnamon, built the Pyramids and carved the rock-tombs; and we see tens of thousands of slaves working under the lash for many years; but all this rises and passes in a few moments, for the curse has

fallen. The clock must run backward to the beginning, and men are to forget one by one all the contributions of invention, art, science, education, even civilization itself.

These Egyptians knew the principle of the arch, and other glories of the builder's art, but all is vanishing in the night closing around us.

The trail grows fainter. My faithful dog confusedly retraces his tracks this way and that, over the sand dunes, as though for a moment he had lost the trail.

I know not where we went next, for the path was broken by many low-lying hills and strange valleys, where palms waved.

Unnumbered centuries glided one after another into

oblivion.

My dog has become a wolf, snarling defiance at the wild pack in the jungle, and turning to me with blazing eyes as much as to say: "Master, I will defend you with my life.”

We pick our way back through unmarked years and we see savage women planting corn, but the curse is thick, and we are at the very place where men forget how to make the earth yield food.

It is a stupendous loss to mankind.

And with it go ten thousand years of incessant battling with starvation; and starvation is now ahead of the race, man against man, man against beast.

Facing this catastrophe, I now realize in a blinding flash how utterly childish, yes what toys are the overrated telephone, the wireless, the automobile, and all the others.

And as for ribbons of silk, of which we are so proud; the steam engine, and other Twentieth Century wonders, what after all are they but so many baubles checked up against food and life?

Facing the prodigious problem of self-preservation, no man dare now roam freely but must stay close to his own chosen hunting ground, where he knows he will find roots, nuts and fruits, which in turn he gnaws like an animal.

We are now far beyond this happy period.

In the curse that has descended, our domesticated animals, the goat, the ass and others, leave their fields and are seen no more.

But the dog is still man's faithful companion. I have no fear.

The trail is clearer now; the dog knows it well; his eyes flash, his scent is keen, his stride is strong.

The Mother Land rises before him, like the sight of an old friend.

His deep-mouthed bay hurls defiance at the wolves in the jungle.

All night, branches break around us and we hear screaming, as battles take place between wild men and wild beasts.

A terrible fear creeps into my heart.

I hear the oldest elemental sounds, the tumult between man and beast, to the very death.

At dawn, we move forth carefully, in our hand a stone maul.

We are now on the very borderland between savagery and prehistoric man.

A black day is before us. Man, in the stupendous curse that has engulfed him, is to lose still another of his noblest ideas, the art of weaving from bark and fiber.

The only way he now can cover his nakedness from the cold is with skins of beasts.

In this moment, the fruits of thousands of years of persistent experimenting vanish; for the art of fingerweaving is at once one of the elementary as well as one of the greatest inventions; the basis of our domestic arts, coming down to us from the dawn, and continuing till the time of the disappearance of the spinning wheel, late in the Nineteenth Century.

As the years run backward with incredible rapidity, by the uncounted hundreds and thousands, there comes a black day when man forgets how he made pottery, even in its simplest form by daubing mud around willow and curing the wet clay in the blaze of the sun.

Oh, day of wrath! Precious knowledge gone out of the world; and man now tears his food raw, or with

difficulty chars it in a hole in the rocks, by adding a few hot stones.

My wolf-dog ranges freely, taking up strange trails through the jungle.

In immense vistas of time out of Arabia came the gift of bronze, and out of Armenia the gift of iron; bronze first; and both are now to perish.

In man's progress up from savagery, and the gloom beyond that stage, he tipped his arrows with a bit of iron, ahead of his use of flints.

It is now clear that those tribes that did not understand, or never learned the crude secrets of smelting, remained behind in the race of life.

And now the dog leads us to the last of the fire-workers, smelting their bits of ore, and when these stupendous ideas vanish into the midnight of gloom, man suddenly finds himself no longer king of the beasts.

Long before this, he utilized flints, but now even this is forgotten and he stands face to face with black, defiant Nature.

His hair grows long on his body and his forehead recedes like that of the gigantic apes that howl in the jungle near by.

We now enter the plutonian shadows of that terrifying time called the "Stone-Dawn," wherein piles of rubbed stones, buried deep in the ancient river beds, prove the "utterly unrisen savage."

My dog sniffs out caves black with time and leads me there his old shelters, as well he knows.

We see on the walls rude drawings depicting battles between man and the sabre-toothed tiger, the gigantic reindeer, and the mammoth.

From this moment we pass into that starless abyss in which in truth there is no longer track or trace of time. Filled with superstitious fears, the savages fall on the sand, at the sound of thunder, or the lightning's flash. Man is to become as the dumb brute-is to lose his invention called language.

He speaks now by means of incoherent syllables; squeaks, barks, moans, howls, and utters other frightful sounds, helped by motions of his hands, arms and body.

I look for some explanation and see no smoke-plumes over the savage camps in the distance.

On this tremendous day of tragedy for the human race, the secret of the utilization of fire is to pass utterly

away.

Man now tears his food raw, hunts with a sharp stick or a stone, and is not to be distinguished from the beasts in the jungle.

Everything is going fast in the tremendous wreck of

time.

His mind is darkened by a thousand strange fears. He sees the sun go down and the swift night of the tropics come creeping up, to people the jungle with new terrors.

The stinging cold, over night, freezes his blood.

He huddles in his cave, or in some casual tree, and having no occupation for mind or body and no way of making a light, he falls into the habit of sleeping throughout the long night.

The first streaks of light bring back warmth to his torpid body.

No wonder that, to his haunted mind, the sun is looked upon as the source of all life.

He is a sun-worshipper ages before he had any other form of religion.

The generous sun, warming his half-frozen body, is to him indeed a god.

All this time, year after year, his great struggle is against starvation.

To have enough to eat is the beginning and the end of all battles with the beasts, as well as with beast-men of his own kind.

Cannibalism is practiced for food.

The brute-men keep close to the great rivers to insure a supply of fish, the easiest obtainable food, which is devoured raw, like unto the beast.

We are now back to the age of the prehistoric fisherman; for man's first calling was to steal from the sea.