"'Man,' said Wilhelm von Humboldt, 'ever connects on from what lies at hand (der Mensch knüpft immer an Vorhandenes an).' The notion of the continuity of civilization contained in this maxim is no barren philosophic principle, but is at once made practical by the consideration that they who wish to understand their own lives ought to know the stages through which their opinions and habits have become what they are. Auguste Comte scarcely overstated the necessity of this study of development, when he declared at the beginning of his 'Positive Philosophy' that 'no conception can be understood except through its history,' and his phrase will bear extension to culture at large. To expect to look modern life in the face and comprehend it by mere inspection, is a philosophy whose weakness can easily be tested. Imagine any one explaining the trivial saying, 'a little bird told me,' without knowing of the old belief in the language of birds and beasts, to which Dr. Dasent in the introduction to the Norse Tales, so reasonably traces its origin. To ingenious attempts at explaining by the light of reason things which want the light of history to show their meaning, much of the learned nonsense of the world has indeed been due."[5] The illustrations are drawn from the domain of human interests. They could be paralleled by others drawn from natural history. The honeysuckle may carry us elsewhere than to Assyria, revealing unsuspected kinships in the world of plants. Biology has made the conception of the continuity of living forms a familiar commonplace, and geology can find in the earth's crust the story of countless years. So familiar has the idea of continuity become that terms like "evolution" and "development" have ceased to be technical and have become terms of common speech. We speak readily of the evolution of man, of government, of the steam-engine, of the automobile, and of the atom. The idea has so possessed all departments of inquiry that a large part of the literature of every subject is occupied with setting forth connections which have gone before. Not only do we go through Milton into Homer, but through yesterday into an ever receding past which grows more alluring the more it recedes. The quest for origins has been of absorbing interest. It would seem that we can never understand anything at all until we have discovered its origin in something which preceded it.