Beginning, perhaps, some six million years ago, the fact which we call human life has persisted hitherto, and shows no signs of exhaustion, much less impending extinction, being indeed more abundant numerically and more dominant over other forms of life and over the inanimate world to-day than ever before. It is a continuous phenomenon. The life of every blood corpuscle or skin cell of every human being now alive is absolutely continuous with that of the living cells of the first human beings--if not, indeed, as most biologists appear to believe, of the first life upon the earth. Yet this continuous life has been and apparently always must be lived in a tissue of amazing discontinuity--amazing, at least, to those who can see the wonderful in the commonplace. For though the world-phenomenon which we call Man has been so long continuous, and is at this moment perhaps as much modified by the total past as if it were really a single undying individual, yet only a few decades ago, a mere second in the history of the earth, no human being now alive was in existence. “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” Indeed, not merely are we individually as grass, but in a few years the hand that writes these words, and the tissues of eye and brain whereby they are perceived, will actually _be_ grass. Here, then, is the colossal paradox: absolute and literal continuity of life, every cell from a preceding cell throughout the ages--_omnis cellula e cellula_; yet three times in every century the living and only wealth of nations is reduced to dust, and is raised up again from helpless infancy. Where else is such catastrophic continuity? Each individual enters the world in a fashion the dramatic and sensational character of which can be realised by none who have not witnessed it; and in a few years the individual dies, scarcely less dramatically as a rule, and sometimes more so. This continuous and apparently invincible thing, human life, which began so humbly and to the sound of no trumpets, in Southern Asia or the neighbourhood of the Caspian Sea, but which has never looked back since its birth, and is now the dominant fact of what might well be an astonished earth, depends in every age and from moment to moment upon here a baby, there a baby and there yet another; these curious little objects being of all living things, animal or vegetable, young or old, large or small, the most utterly helpless and incompetent, incapable even of finding for themselves the breasts that were made for them. If but one of all the “hungry generations” that have preceded us had failed to secure the care and love of its predecessor, the curtain would have come down and a not unpromising though hitherto sufficiently grotesque drama would have been ended for ever.