In about the year 1660 the spirit of curious inquiry which was abroad prompted the foundation of the Royal Society, for the purpose, as its title announced, of “Improving Natural Knowledge,” and it is notable that the word _improve_ should have been employed. Originating, as we saw, in Lawyer’s French, it had been used up to about 1620 to denote merely “the enclosure and cultivation of waste land”. So that when we find its old meaning butchered to make a striking metaphor, it is reasonable to assume that some new idea or feeling had come to the front, to which men were struggling to give the outward expression that is life, that their outlook had changed somewhat, and that they were groping for a means of readjusting their cosmos accordingly. We have attempted so far to trace the evolution of Western outlook from the earliest days of Greece down to the Revival of Learning in England. It must not be forgotten that this process is hitherto an unconscious one. Up to the seventeenth century the outlook of the European mind upon the world, fluid as it has always been, has yet always felt itself to be at rest, just as men have hitherto believed that the earth on which they trod was a solid and motionless body. The first appearance of a distinction between _ancient_ and _modern_, and of the word _progressive_, in Bacon’s _Essays_ has already been noted, and we find that _progress_ itself had only begun to emerge a few years before from its relatively parochial meaning of ‘royal journey’ or, as we still say, ‘progress’. To the seventeenth century, as Mr. Pearsall Smith has pointed out, we owe the words _antiquated_, _century_, _decade_, _epoch_, _Gothic_, _out-of-date_, _primeval_, and we may add to these _contemporary_, _contemporaneous_, _synchronise_, _synchronous_, and a queer jungle-growth of words with similar meanings which sprang up about the middle of the seventeenth century and has since vanished: _contemporal_, _co-temporary_, _contemporize_, _isochronal_, _synchronal_, _synchronical_, _synchronism_, _synchronistic_. A curious feature about these latter words is the number of them which first appeared in theological writings, the mystic philosopher, Henry More, being alone responsible for three. They seem to have arisen chiefly from an interest in comparing the dates of different events recorded in Scripture, and they may thus be placed beside the epithet _primitive_, applied by the Reformers to the early Church, which Mr. Pearsall Smith has pointed to as “probably the first word in which our modern historical sense finds expression”.