the foundations of the science of ``bacteriology'' which in the
last forty years has delivered the world from a great number of

diseases by discovering the tiny organisms which cause the
complaint. It also allowed the geologists to make a more

careful study of different rocks and of the fossils (the petrified
prehistoric plants) which they found deep below the surface of

the earth. These investigations convinced them that the earth
must be a great deal older than was stated in the book of

Genesis and in the year 1830, Sir Charles Lyell published his
``Principles of Geology'' which denied the story of creation as

related in the Bible and gave a far more wonderful description
of slow growth and gradual development.

At the same time, the Marquis de Laplace was working on
a new theory of creation, which made the earth a little blotch

in the nebulous sea out of which the planetary system had
been formed and Bunsen and Kirchhoff, by the use of the

spectroscope, were investigating the chemicalcomposition of the
stars and of our good neighbour, the sun, whose curious spots

had first been noticed by Galileo.
Meanwhile after a most bitter and relentlesswarfare with

the clerical authorities of Catholic and Protestant lands, the
anatomists and physiologists had at last obtained permission

to dissect bodies and to substitute a positive knowledge of our
organs and their habits for the guesswork of the mediaeval

quack.
Within a single generation (between 1810 and 1840) more

progress was made in every branch of science than in all the
hundreds of thousands of years that had passed since man first

looked at the stars and wondered why they were there. It
must have been a very sad age for the people who had been

educated under the old system. And we can understand their
feeling of hatred for such men as Lamarck and Darwin, who

did not exactly tell them that they were ``descended from
monkeys,'' (an accusation which our grandfathers seemed to

regard as a personal insult,) but who suggested that the proud
human race had evolved from a long series of ancestors who

could trace the family-tree back to the little jelly-fishes who
were the first inhabitants of our planet.

The dignified world of the well-to-do middle class, which
dominated the nineteenth century, was willing to make use

of the gas or the electric light, of all the many practical applications
of the great scientific discoveries, but the mere investigator,

the man of the ``scientific theory'' without whom no
progress would be possible, continued to be distrusted until

very recently. Then, at last, his services were recognised. Today
the rich people who in past ages donated their wealth for

the building of a cathedral, construct vast laboratories where
silent men do battle upon the hidden enemies of mankind and

often sacrifice their lives that coming generations may enjoy
greater happiness and health.

Indeed it has come to pass that many of the ills of this
world, which our ancestors regarded as inevitable ``acts of

God,'' have been exposed as manifestations of our own ignorance
and neglect. Every child nowadays knows that he can

keep from getting typhoid fever by a little care in the choice of
his drinking water. But it took years and years of hard

work before the doctors could convince the people of this fact.
Few of us now fear the dentist chair. A study of the microbes

that live in our mouth has made it possible to keep our
teeth from decay. Must perchance a tooth be pulled, then we

take a sniff of gas, and go our way rejoicing. When the newspapers
of the year 1846 brought the story of the ``painless

operation'' which had been performed in America with the help
of ether, the good people of Europe shook their heads. To

them it seemed against the will of God that man should escape
the pain which was the share of all mortals, and it took a long

time before the practice of taking ether and chloroform for
operations became general.

But the battle of progress had been won. The breach in the
old walls of prejudice was growing larger and larger, and as

time went by, the ancient stones of ignorance came crumbling
down. The eager crusaders of a new and happier social order

rushed forward. Suddenly they found themselves facing a new
obstacle. Out of the ruins of a long-gone past, another citadel

of reaction had been erected, and millions of men had to give
their lives before this last bulwark was destroyed.

ART
A CHAPTER OF ART

WHEN a baby is perfectlyhealthy and has had enough to eat
and has slept all it wants, then it hums a little tune to show how

happy it is. To grown-ups this humming means nothing. It
sounds like ``goo-zum, goo-zum, goo-o-o-o-o,'' but to the baby

it is perfect music. It is his first contribution to art.
As soon as he (or she) gets a little older and is able to sit

up, the period of mud-pie making begins. These mud-pies do
not interest the outside world. There are too many million

babies, making too many million mud-pies at the same time.
But to the small infant they represent another expedition into

the pleasant realm of art. The baby is now a sculptor.
At the age of three or four, when the hands begin to obey

the brain, the child becomes a painter. His fond mother gives
him a box of coloured chalks and every loose bit of paper is

rapidly covered with strange pothooks and scrawls which represent
houses and horses and terrible naval battles.

Soon however this happiness of just ``making things''
comes to an end. School begins and the greater part of the

day is filled up with work. The business of living, or rather
the business of ``making a living,'' becomes the most important

event in the life of every boy and girl. There is little time left
for ``art'' between learning the tables of multiplication and the

past participles of the irregular French verbs. And unless
the desire for making certain things for the mere pleasure of

creating them without any hope of a practical return be very
strong, the child grows into manhood and forgets that the

first five years of his life were mainlydevoted to art.
Nations are not different from children. As soon as the

cave-man had escaped the threatening dangers of the long and
shivering ice-period, and had put his house in order, he began

to make certain things which he thought beautiful, although
they were of no earthly use to him in his fight with the wild

animals of the jungle. He covered the walls of his grotto with
pictures of the elephants and the deer which he hunted, and

out of a piece of stone, he hacked the rough figures of those
women he thought most attractive.

As soon as the Egyptians and the Babylonians and the
Persians and all the other people of the east had founded

their little countries along the Nile and the Euphrates, they
began to build magnificent palaces for their kings, invented

bright pieces of jewellery for their women and planted gardens
which sang happy songs of colour with their many bright flowers.

Our own ancestors, the wandering nomads from the distant
Asiatic prairies, enjoying a free and easy existence as

fighters and hunters, composed songs which celebrated the
mighty deeds of their great leaders and invented a form of

poetry which has survived until our own day. A thousand years
later, when they had established themselves on the Greek mainland,

and had built their ``city-states,'' they expressed their
joy (and their sorrows) in magnificenttemples, in statues, in

comedies and in tragedies, and in every conceivable form of
art.

The Romans, like their Carthaginian rivals, were too busy
administering other people and making money to have much

love for ``useless and unprofitable'' adventures of the spirit.
They conquered the world and built roads and bridges but they

borrowed their art wholesale from the Greeks. They invented
certain practical forms of architecture which answered the

demands of their day and age. But their statues and their histories
and their mosaics and their poems were mere Latin imi-

tations of Greek originals. Without that vague and hard-to-
define something which the world calls ``personality,'' there can

be no art and the Roman world distrusted that particular sort
of personality. The Empire needed efficient soldiers and

tradesmen. The business of writingpoetry or making pictures
was left to foreigners.

Then came the Dark Ages. The barbarian was the proverbial
bull in the china-shop of western Europe. He had no use

for what he did not understand. Speaking in terms of the year
1921, he liked the magazine covers of pretty ladies, but threw

the Rembrandt etchings which he had inherited into the ash-
can. Soon he came to learn better. Then he tried to undo the

damage which he had created a few years before. But the ash-
cans were gone and so were the pictures.

But by this time, his own art, which he had brought with
him from the east, had developed into something very beautiful

and he made up for his past neglect and indifference by the so-
called ``art of the Middle Ages'' which as far as northern Europe

is concerned was a product of the Germanic mind and had
borrowed but little from the Greeks and the Latins and nothing

at all from the older forms of art of Egypt and Assyria, not
to speak of India and China, which simply did not exist, as far

as the people of that time were concerned. Indeed, so little
had the northern races been influenced by their southern neighbours

that their own architectural products were completely
misunderstood by the people of Italy and were treated by

them with downright and unmitigated contempt.
You have all heard the word Gothic. You probably associate

it with the picture of a lovely old cathedral, lifting its slender
spires towards high heaven. But what does the word really

mean?
It means something ``uncouth'' and ``barbaric''--something