We must also notice that the creators of this name having connected it with the loftiest thing of which they could conceive--thought--did not stop there; the sight of what was lowest--the dust--inspired them with another name, _homo_ = earth-born; this Latin word having the same source as _humus_ = the soil. Our fathers also gave themselves a third name, which was _brotos_ in Greek, _mortalis_ in Latin, and _marta_--the dying--in Sanscrit; they could hardly have applied the word mortal to themselves if they had not at the same time believed in other beings who did not die. And this strange fact has come to pass, that on our planet there existed in former days men--simple mortals as they were--who manipulated thought, incorporating it with language, the only domain in which it can exist; then these marvellous men so entirely eclipsed themselves, and passed out of our ken, that their posterity do not recognise them under their modest garb of anonymity; for their work though still living through thousands of centuries, is so unrecognised that men ask themselves, “Why is it not possible to think apart from words?” Thus we acknowledge the profound wisdom of the conceptions of our ancestors; but their understanding worked unequally, on certain points it was very advanced, but on others behindhand. In following the march of human intellect in the past, we are struck by the slowness with which thought and speech co-operated. As long as our ancestors had no occasion to speak of the action of covering a surface with a liquid or soft substance, they did not possess the word _var_ = to cover; “the name of colour in Sanscrit is _varna_, clearly derived from this word; and not till the art of painting, in its most primitive form, was discovered and named, could there have been a name for colour.” For some time they continued to view various objects differently coloured without distinguishing the tints; it is well known that the distinction of colours is of late date; our ancestors gazed on the blue sky, or the green trees, as in a dream, without recognising blue or green, as long as they lacked words to define the two colours, and some time elapsed before they particularised the colours by giving each its proper title. We speak of the seven colours of the rainbow, because the intermediate tints elude us; the ancients acted much in the same way, Xenophanes speaks of the rainbow as a cloud of purple, red, and yellow; Aristotle also speaks of the tri-coloured rainbow, red, yellow, and green; and Democritus seems only to have mentioned black, white and yellow.