They were troglodytes, millions of them, men such as the world had seen thousands of years before, as humanity had been then. They were troglodytes, wandering through the cities and towns that they themselves had built, staring in wondering fear about them at things the purpose of which they could not understand. But most had no wonder, only a brutal lack of interest in all save food and mating and sleep. There were no fires, for all had lost the use of fire and feared it now. Driven by hunger, great masses of them were pouring out of the cities into the countryside, to hunt roots and herbs and to kill small animals for food. They made rude shelters for a time, then abandoned them for caves and crannies in the rocks. They ceased to use knives or spears, they could but throw great stones at each other or wield chance clubs, or fight with bare hands. Many had remained in the cities and among them was more fighting. With each day they were changing farther, it seemed, going farther back along the long road of change that man had ascended so slowly through the ages, and that he was slipping back upon so swiftly. The streets of New York and Glasgow and Constantinople and Yokohama saw them, these animal-like, ape-like hordes that wandered there. Ape-like they were becoming, indeed, swiftly hairier of body, more crouching of gait, stooping occasionally in moving to run on hands and feet. Clothing they had discarded. The fragmentary, mumbled speech that they had kept until days before had given way to a meaningless medley of barking shouts and cries whose tone conveyed their crude attempt at communication. They roamed the great cities in little groups or tribes, of each of which one was the strongest, the tyrant, the acknowledged lord. And now, they were changing still. Were running more on hands and feet, walking upright less. Back from man to troglodyte, and from troglodyte to ape had the human races gone, and now were slipping back still into the animal races from which the apes had come! World atavism--and it was wiping the last human-like forms from the face of earth! * * * * * Of this great change that in days swept man back into the brutal forms of dead ages, I, Allan Harker, was a witness from the first. For it was at New York that the early manifestations of the change had been first noticed, in that increasing wave of terrible crime that was in days to rage over the whole earth.