Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/299

 and all forces unarrayed in that culminating force of which they themselves consist.

What striking results have, after all, come of this great branch of our knowledge! Every school to-day has its great atlas of the past of our earth; and every family may possess its own special atlas of descent, catching glimpses of its ancestry along the whole line of this descent, where, as in our own case, there are any guiding records to fix the connection or identify the restored scenes. What countless historical questions and problems have already been solved, by our grand power to bring back the actual places and events, and to look upon them and the actors, while in the very act of their history-making. Julius Cæsar, for instance, has turned up repeatedly, in the course of both his trips across the old Channel, and every school-boy can now see, for each occasion, whence he started, and whither he was obviously bound. We have long set at rest all the old dispute about ancient Troy. The building of the great pyramid has often turned up at various stages; and countless other old Egyptian questions have been solved, even to sighting the venerable Menes, after considerable chronological readjustment. Old Livy has been caught in the very act of writing one of his lost books, seated one bright day in the central al fresco of his own home; and thus three sheets have been recovered, while others lay temptingly about, but, alas! with their tablet faces downwards. Countless zealous ethnologists and evolutionists have searched for centuries, to their heart's content, amidst flint-chipping races, and still remoter missing links, until hardly anything more remains unexplored in that direction.