become possessed of a new and once unsuspected history of the world--of which all the history that was known, for example, to Dr. Johnson is only the brief concluding chapter; and even that concluding chapter has been greatly enlarged and corrected by the exploring archæologists working strictly upon the lines of the new method--that is to say, the comparison and criticism of suggestive facts. I want particularly to insist upon this, that all this outer past--this non-historical past--is the product of a new and keener habit of inquiry, and no sort of revelation. It is simply due to a new and more critical way of looking at things. Our knowledge of the geological past, clear and definite as it has become, is of a different and lower order than the knowledge of our memory, and yet of a quite practicable and trustworthy order--a knowledge good enough to go upon; and if one were to speak of the private memory as the personal past, of the next wider area of knowledge as the traditional or historical past, then one might call all that great and inspiring background of remoter geological time the inductive past. And this great discovery of the inductive past was got by the discussion and rediscussion and effective criticism of a number of existing facts, odd-shaped lumps of stone, streaks and bandings in quarries and cliffs, anatomical and developmental detail that had always been about in the world, that had been lying at the feet of mankind so long as mankind had existed, but that no one had ever dreamed before could supply any information at all, much more reveal such astounding and enlightening vistas. Looked at in a new way they became sources of dazzling and penetrating light. The remoter past lit up and became a picture. Considered as effects, compared and criticised, they yielded a clairvoyant vision of the history of interminable years. And now, if it has been possible for men by picking out a number of suggestive and significant looking things in the present, by comparing them, criticising them, and discussing them, with a perpetual insistence upon "Why?" without any guiding tradition, and indeed in the teeth of established beliefs, to construct this amazing searchlight of inference into the remoter past, is it really, after all, such an extravagant and hopeless thing to suggest that, by seeking for operating causes instead of for fossils, and by criticising them as persistently and thoroughly as the geological record has been criticised, it may be possible to throw a searchlight of inference forward instead of backward, and to attain to a knowledge of coming things as clear, as universally convincing, and infinitely more important to mankind than the clear vision of the past that geology has opened to us during the nineteenth century?