Brooding over it, and wondering why it should be so, my boyish soul felt deeply the tragedy of being born into an uneventful age. I fully believed that the great achievements of the world were in the past. Imagine then my joy when, in the course of my later studies, it slowly dawned upon me that the age in which I lived was, after all, an age of unparalleled activity. I saw the much vaunted discoveries and inventions of by-gone days in their true proportions. They no longer preëmpted the whole world--present and future, as well as past, but, freed from romance, they ranged themselves in the form of a foundation upon which the structure of civilization is building. The successive steps in human achievement, from the use of fire to the harnessing of electricity, constituted a process of evolution creating "a stage where every man must play his part"--a part expanding and broadening with each succeeding generation; and I saw that I had a place among the actors in this play of progress. The forward steps of the past need not, and would not prevent me from achieving in the present--nay, they might even make a place, if I could but find it, for my feet; they might hold up my hands, and place within my grasp the keen tools with which I should do my work. The school boy, passing from an attitude of contemplation and wonder before the things of the past into an attitude of active recognition of the necessities of the present, passed through the evolutionary process of the race. The savage, Sir Henry Maine tells us, lives in a state of abject fear, bound hand and foot by the sayings and doings of his ancestors and blinded by the terrors of nature. The lightning flashes, and the untutored mind, trembling, bows before the wrath of a jealous God; the harvest fails, and the savage humbly submits to the vengeance of an incensed deity; pestilence destroys the people, and the primitive man sees in this catastrophe a punishment inflicted on him for his failure to propitiate an exacting spirit--in these and a thousand other ways uncivilized peoples accept the phenomena in which nature displays her power, as the expressed will of an omnipotent being. One course alone is open to them; they must bow down before the unknown, accepting as inevitable those forces which they neither can understand nor conquer. Civilization has meant enlightenment and achievement. In lightning, Franklin saw a potent giant which he enslaved for the service of man; in famine, Burbank discovered a lack of proper adjustment between the soil and the crops that men were cultivating--thereupon he produced a wheat that would thrive on an annual rainfall of twelve inches; in pestilence, Pasteur recognized the ravages of an organism which he prepared to study and destroy. Lightning, famine and pestilence are, to the primitive man, the threatening of a wrathful god; but to the progressive thinker they are merely forces which must be utilized or counteracted in the work of human achievement.