"But," you will say, "all this is hardly history. It is not man's story. We don't want to know so much what kind of tools and weapons man had; we want to know what he did with them. You are not telling us this." It is quite true; I am not. But the reason why I have told you all this about man's tools, before telling you what he did with them, is that I want you to get clearly into your heads this truth--that even the best and most learned of the men who have searched back into history are able to tell us only a very small part of the whole story of man's doings on the earth. They have found out, perhaps, all that there is to find about the records that man has intentionally left of himself. But the records begin rather far on--at what we may call a late chapter--in the story. They begin only about six or seven thousand years ago. And though that sounds a long time you must understand that it really is quite short in comparison with all the time that man has been living on the earth. It is very difficult for us, who have lived only a few years, to form an idea in our minds of a great many years. I hardly know how best I may help you to do so. Suppose we take a thousand years as a length for our consideration in the first place. Consider this, next, that there are, certainly, people alive now who are a hundred years old, and perhaps a little older. Imagine, if you can, the lives of ten such persons who have lived one after the other. Imagine that each {8} as a baby saw one of the others when that other was a hundred years old. Thus it would only take ten of such happenings to cover the whole stretch of a thousand years of which I want you to form some idea. The years of the lives of ten very long-lived men would cover it. It is quite possible that you may have seen a living oak tree of much more than a thousand years old. The people who have studied trees tell us that there are oaks alive in England now which were alive in the Saxon times; that is to say, some 1500 years ago--one and a half thousand years. I know that these hints are not very effectual towards helping you to get an idea of what a thousand years mean, but they are the best that I can give you. They seem to help me to realise just a little what this great stretch of years is. We can do no better. I wrote, a little while ago (p. 7), "the records that man has intentionally left of himself." I put in that word "intentionally" because, of course, the weapons and tools and implements and ornaments that we find were not left, by those who used them, with any intention that they should give us any information about their users. They were just left, as a rule, accidentally. We can imagine something from them about the kind of life that their users led, and what kind of men they were that used them, but they were not trying to give us any such information. [Illustration: A BAKED CLAY TABLET INSCRIBED WITH BABYLONION ACCOUNT OF THE DELUGE]