While I was wondering why this should be, I chanced to overhear the words of a sagacious-looking bearded man, who accompanied a party of smooth-faced youths, evidently as their tutor. “Before the Submergence,” he was saying, “we were civilized in a rude sort of way, and yet were not intelligent. That is to say, we were not intelligent as a people, for only one man in a hundred possessed any understanding of civilization; and it was that one in a hundred, or perhaps one in a thousand, who accomplished all the changes in science, art and culture. Today, however, every normal man is intelligent enough to be more than the dead lumber of civilization. You will observe this skull here”--the speaker paused, and pointed to one of the most ancient of the group--“this is the fossil of a paleolithic pre-Atlantean, who inhabited our island forty-five or fifty thousands years ago. You can see for yourselves how much higher and ampler the skull is than that of your own ancestor of thirty-two hundred years ago, although of course the latter represented the world’s most advanced civilization. Fortunately, our intellectual decline was counteracted by the vigorous measures of Agripides and his successors, and we can now boast of being on the same high mental plane as the men of fifty thousand years ago....” The speaker withdrew with his students toward a further exhibit, and I could catch no more of what he said. But I had heard quite enough, for it seemed to me that his words were not to be taken seriously. And I was more interested in browsing about the gallery than in listening to his pointless remarks--particularly since I had chanced to set eyes on some arresting tables of statistics. These figures, which dated back more than three thousand years, showed how the rise in the appreciation of beauty had been almost simultaneous with the growth of intellect; how the mental advance and the decline of crime seemed likewise to be related phenomena; how the general measure of happiness, as indicated by the absence of nervous disorders, mental aberrations and suicides, had been incalculably increased since the intellectual revival.