some way towards writing the history of what we have hitherto called prehistoric man. [Illustration: ANCIENT EGYPT’S STRANGE BOOKS AND PICTORIAL RECORDS, MADE OF PAPYRUS Papyrus, a tall, graceful, sedgy plant, supplied the favourite writing material of the ancient world, and many priceless records of antiquity are preserved to us in papyri. The pith of the plant was pressed flat and thin and joined with others to form strips, on which records were written or painted. The above is a photograph of a piece of Egyptian papyrus, showing both hieroglyphics and picture-writing. The oldest piece of papyrus dates back to B.C. 3500. ] Thus such tribes as the aborigines of Australia, the Fuegians of Magellan’s Straits, the Bushmen of South Africa, the Sakalavas of Madagascar, the Lapps of Northern Europe, the Ainos of Japan, the numerous “hill-tribes” of India, will all come within the historian’s ken. From each of them something may be learnt; and each of them has through contact with its more advanced neighbours affected those neighbours themselves, sometimes in blood, sometimes through superstitious beliefs or rites, frequently borrowed by the higher races from the lower (as the Norsemen learnt magic from the Lapps, and the Semites of Assyria from the Accadians), sometimes through the strife which has arisen between the savage and the more civilised man, whereby the institutions of the latter have been modified. Obviously the historian cannot record everything. These lower races are comparatively unimportant. Their contributions to progress, their effect on the general march of events, have been but small. But they must not be wholly omitted from the picture, for without them it would have been different. One must never forget, in following the history of the great nations of antiquity, that they fought and thought and built up the fabric of their industry and art in the midst of a barbarous or savage population surrounding them on all sides, whence they drew the bulk of their slaves and some of their mercenary soldiers, and which sometimes avenged itself by sudden inroads, the fear of which kept the Greek cities, and at certain epochs even the power of Rome, watchful and anxious. So in modern times the savages among whom European colonies have been planted, or who have been transported as slaves to other colonies--sometimes, as in the case of Portugal in the fifteenth century, to Europe itself--or those with whom Europeans have carried on trade, must not be omitted from a view of the causes which have determined the course of events in the civilised peoples. [Sidenote: Great Works of Little Peoples]