Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/280

266 time in estimating the age of the Omori deposits. It can be stated with absolute certainty that they are pre-Japanese; and there are as good reasons for believing them pre-Aino as early Aino.

I have to return my sincere thanks to the university authorities for the zeal they have displayed in assisting me in the examination of the deposits, and to the personal help afforded me in the excavations by Profs. Yatabe, Toyama, and Dr. David Murray, Messrs. Matsumura, Sasaki, Matsura, Fukuyo, and others. I made a special request that the deposits should be completely examined during my absence, and this examination was most faithfully done. A much larger collection was made with many new and curious forms of pots. I hope at some future time to illustrate them.



HIS world of ours has, on the whole, been an inclement region for the growth of natural truth; but it may be that the plant is all the hardier for the bendings and buffetings it has undergone. The torturing of a shrub, within certain limits, strengthens it. Through the struggles and passions of the brute, man reaches his estate; through savagery and barbarism his civilization; and through illusion and persecution his knowledge of Nature, including that of his own frame. The bias toward natural truth must have been strong to have withstood and overcome the opposing forces. Feeling appeared in the world before knowledge; and thoughts, conceptions, and creeds, founded on emotion, had, before the dawn of science, taken root in man. Such thoughts, conceptions, and creeds, must have met a deep and general want; otherwise their growth could not have been so luxuriant, nor their abiding power so strong. This general need—this hunger for the ideal and wonderful—led eventually to the differentiation of a caste, whose vocation it was to cultivate the mystery of life and its surroundings, and to give shape, name, and habitation to the emotions which that mystery aroused. Even the savage lived, not by bread alone, but in a mental world peopled with forms answering to his capacities and needs. As time advanced—in other words, as the savage opened out into civilized man—these forms were purified and ennobled, until they finally emerged in the mythology and art of Greece:

 Where still the magic robe of Poesy Wound itself lovingly around the Truth." 