Lastly, the reader must ask himself the question: What mental effects have centuries of freedom or slavery, or of civilisation, or of barbarism, on races? Do they produce innate changes, or do they merely render certain acquirements so nearly universal that their perpetuation by imitation is insured? If he supposes that the changes are innate, he must ask himself the additional question whether they arose through the transmission of parental acquirements to offspring, or through the actual and constant destruction in certain environments of certain definite types of individuals who were thus prevented from leaving offspring and so perpetuating their like. The former hypothesis is now generally repudiated by science. The latter may be true, but as yet has not been supported by evidence; or at any rate is supported only by such evidence as that which Mill and Buckle denounced. In either case, though history may furnish him with intellectual occupation, it will supply few lessons of practical value. If, on the other hand, he has perceived the greatness of the part played in the human mind by acquirement, if he has noted that man is man, a thinking and rational being, the conqueror of the earth, only because he is the most impressionable and therefore the most adaptable of living types, the reader will learn from the racial see-saw of the past what kinds of mental training have conduced to success and happiness and what to ruin, and so perhaps he may find himself in a position to help the fortunes of his people and his children. The real value of history, as in the last analysis of all experience, lies in its educational applications. G. ARCHDALL REID [Illustration: PREHISTORIC MEN ATTACKING THE GREAT CAVE BEARS] [Illustration: THE RISE OF MAN AND THE EVE OF HISTORY] THE WORLD BEFORE HISTORY By Professor Johannes Ranke THE WONDERFUL STORY OF DRIFT MAN [Sidenote: Nature’s Great Book of History] The history of the world is the history of the human mind. The oldest documents affording us knowledge of it lie buried in those most mighty and comprehensive historical archives, the geological strata of our planet. Natural philosophy has learned to read these stained, crumpled, and much-torn pages that record the habitation of the earth by living beings; but only a few sections of this book of the universe have yet been perused, and these appear but fragmentary in comparison with the whole task. The passages that relate to the human race are small in number and often even ambiguous, and it is only the last pages that can give an account of it.