Nor, again, is the truth of the proposition confined to what we ordinarily mean by history. The Greek poet has said 'Art had to wait on and welcome chance, and chance to wait on Art': or as we may paraphrase it, if every invention and discovery is in a measure a lucky chance, it is a luck that only falls to the wisely prepared head and hand. The casual event falls as a germ of new construction or theory only on an intelligence ready to welcome it,--prepared with its complement in the spirit of an idea, eager to take shape. The means again, in the arts and crafts, is not only a means to something else; it is also a means to its own end, to realise or perfect itself. The rude tool of the savage, for instance, is not merely a means to supply his wants: it is also a means towards completing and improving itself, and towards perfecting itself by constructing an ampler tool, which supersedes it, because it can do all and more than all the work of the earlier, or can do it more economically. All progress that deserves the name is an incessant and continuous revision of a first step: a re-adaptation of an old instrument: a repeated and unending self-correction. It is only a partially-true symbol of human advance to speak of it as a line: unless we add, by another piece of symbolism, that the line is only the protracted or extended phase in which the form of time drags out for us the magnified and organised point-nucleus. It is a truth--which we are only too ready to forget or discount--that the savage (and he bears with justice both epithets, 'the noble savage,' and 'the brute barbarian') is not something left happily behind us, in the onward march of civilisation; but that he is, however much we may fancy him suppressed and superseded, still present, at least 'ideally' in the finest products of humanity, and may hap only too likely--as the Russian is said, when scratched, to betray his original Tartar breed--to burst put on provocation into a grim reality. The Pullman car of to-day retains within it for the archaeologically-trained eye the rudiments of the primitive wain of the primitive nomade: and the careful study of either end of the scale will not merely throw a marvellous light on the excellencies or the defects of the other, but will probably also tend in the impartial observer to moderate the self-gratulations of modern advance. For it is only those whose view ranges within narrow limits that are over-impressed by the magnitude of the advance made in the 'last new thing.'