That it is thus we should betray ourselves, a consideration of man’s history will show. While he still remained of savage simplicity, a mere child of nature, he might come and go unmarked by an outsider, but so soon as he started in to possess the earth his handicraft would reveal him. From the moment he bethought him to till the ground, he entered upon a course of world-subjugation of which we cannot foresee the end; but he has already advanced far enough to give us an idea of the process. It began with agriculture. Deforestation with its subsequent quartering of crops signalized his acquisition of real estate. His impress at first was sporadic and irregular, and in so far followed that of nature itself; but as it advanced it took on a methodism of plan. Husbandry begot thrift, and augmented wants demanded an increasing return for toil; and to this desirable end systematization became a necessity. At the same time gregariousness grew and still further emphasized the need for economy of space and time. In part unconsciously, man learnt the laws that govern the expenditure of force and more and more consciously applied them. Geometry, unloosed of Euclid, became a part of everyday life as insidiously as M. Jourdain found that he had been talking prose. Regularity rules to-day, to the lament of art. The railroad is straighter than the turnpike, as that is straighter than the trail. Communication is now too urgent in its demands to know anything but law and take other than the shortest path to its destination. Tillage has undergone a like rectification. To one used to the patchwork quilting of the crops in older lands the methodical rectangles of the farms of the Great West are painfully exact. Yet it is more than probable that these material manifestations would be the first signs of intelligence to one considering the earth from far. Our towns would in all likelihood constitute the next; and, lastly, the great arteries of travel that minister to their wants. Their scale, too, would render them the first objects to be observed. Farming as now practiced in Kansas or Dakota gives it a certain cosmical concern; fields for miles turning in hue with the rhythm of the drilled should impress an eye, if armed with our appliances, many millions of miles away.