It is not difficult to see why this has been so. Social life is only one phase of the great organic life of the species; one scene of the human drama of which the earth has been "the wide and universal theatre." Change, transition, development, birth, growth, death, are universal elements in the cosmic order. Of the slow but inevitable changes in the physical history of the earth, Tennyson says: "There rolls the deep, where stood the tree; O earth, what changes hast thou seen; There where the long street roars, has been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form; and nothing stands; They melt like mists, the solid lands; Like clouds they shape themselves and go." If this mutation be true of organic changes in the physical earth, working through immeasurable æons, it is even as dramatically true of organized social life. We are learning to take a new view of history. It is no longer regarded as a collection of isolated facts. Veracious history is a record of the orderly progression of events, developed by evolutionary processes. There is in it no break, no hiatus, excepting such temporary interruptions as come from what Emerson calls "the famous might that lurks in reaction recoil." Thus we learn the _rationale_ of the events transcribed to the historical page. Until science lifted the curtain on "the eternal landscape of the past," man knew little of himself or of his kind. It is only with the enlarged vision that has come to us from the researches of the ethnologist, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, that we have begun to learn what a creature man really is; to study his inner nature; to get at the deeper meanings of the history of the race. Once the study of history was thought to be hardly more than learning a catalogue of royal dynasties; the names of famous generals and statesmen; of battles lost and won; of court intrigues; of the vicissitudes of kingdoms; of the prowess of pioneers and adventurers; of "hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach;" of the pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war! Such incidents have not lost, and never can lose, their interest. They are an integral part of the human document and must always be studied. When draped with myth and legend they minister to "the vision and faculty divine" of the poet; they visualize the possibilities of human courage; stimulate the affections; answer to the eternal cravings of the imagination. But they are only the phenomena of the real history of the race. Life is broader, larger, deeper, richer, fuller, than a mere transcript of happenings--externals, results--important as they are. We must get at the causes, motives, inter-relations, the hidden causes from which events flow, before we can unravel the web in which they are woven, and thus interpret them.