The Retreat from Moscow 355 118. The Battle of Waterloo 358 119. Napoleon Goes Into Exile 359 120. The Spectre Which Frightened the Holy Alliance 364 121. The Real Congress of Vienna 367 122. The Monroe Doctrine 385 123. Giuseppe Mazzini 395 124. The First Steamboat 407 125. The Origin of the Steamboat 408 126. The Origin of the Automobile 409 127. Man-power and Machine-power 414 128. The Factory 416 129. The Philosopher 427 130. Galileo 429 131. Gothic Architecture 437 132. The Troubadour 442 133. The Pioneer 447 134. The Conquest of the West 451 135. War 457 137. Animated Chronology 467 142. The End 472 THE STORY OF MANKIND [Illustration] High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by. THE SETTING OF THE STAGE We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. Who are we? Where do we come from? Whither are we bound? Slowly, but with persistent courage, we have been pushing this question mark further and further towards that distant line, beyond the horizon, where we hope to find our answer. We have not gone very far. We still know very little but we have reached the point where (with a fair degree of accuracy) we can guess at many things. In this chapter I shall tell you how (according to our best belief) the stage was set for the first appearance of man. If we represent the time during which it has been possible for animal life to exist upon our planet by a line of this length, then the tiny line just below indicates the age during which man (or a creature more or less resembling man) has lived upon this earth. [Illustration] Man was the last to come but the first to use his brain for the purpose of conquering the forces of nature. That is the reason why we are going to study him, rather than cats or dogs or horses or any of the other animals, who, all in their own way, have a very interesting historical development behind them. [Illustration: IT RAINED INCESSANTLY]