The fourth movement was north-westward across or around the barriers of desert and mountain to Western Asia, Europe, and North Africa. These emigrants were the true adventurers, hardy, progressive, and energetic; and their descendants have developed into the strongest and most vigorous of the human family. The less progressive of them remain still on the further side of the mountains of Western Asia. The three passage-ways used by the original emigrants seem to have been (1) the Red Sea Nile-Valley path, in which the dusky white and the Ethiopian races mingled; (2) the Euphrates Valley, down which the Semitic races moved; and (3) the tracts of the more northerly plateau, across which moved the ancestral Aryan races. It is also quite certain that some races moved backwards by this route and returned to India to give rise to the Brahmins, the most learned race of that country. We have thus traced, so far as our limited knowledge will allow us, the geographical spread of man's dominance. But we cannot associate him with the history that in previous chapters we have roughly traced, of the development of the lower members of the animal kingdom. The qualities which have developed in Man are of such an unprecedented power and so far dominate everything else in his characteristics and surroundings that they justify the view that he forms a new departure in the gradual unfolding of this world's predestined scheme. Knowledge, Reason, Self-consciousness, Will, are the attributes of Man. He goes on from strength to strength, and in the Divine purpose which created him may lie the possibility that in the future he may attain a fuller knowledge than any he yet possesses. The great poet of the Victorian Age wrote of Knowledge:-- Flower in the crannied wall I pluck you out of the crannies; I hold you there, root and all, in my hand, Little flower--but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. The nearer approach to that understanding is the greatest and truest aim of scientific investigation. The End INDEX