THE STUDY OF HISTORY 3

grown with moss. So the haze of romance, or the glamour of hero-worship, or the mere spell of antiquity, add to the past a charm that is history's own. But to-day we are better equipped for the study of his- tory than ever before, and are in a position to understand the men of any given past period better in some R ecent respects than they understood themselves. We progress in can compare them with men of other lands and 1S ° ry times of whom they knew nothing, and can discover the origin of some of their customs or explain the true meaning of some of their institutions. The great advances made in the natural and exact sciences in modern times have enabled man to comprehend both nature and himself much more correctly than before. For instance, it is but recently that it has been recog- nized how long man has inhabited this globe and how far back a considerable degree of civilization can A of be traced. Until the eighteenth or nineteenth man on century the Biblical account of human history was generally accepted in Christian lands, and it was figured out accordingly that God created Adam, the first man, just about 4004 B.C. To-day skulls have been discovered which scientists assert belonged to human beings who lived from two to four hundred thousand years ago; and it is certain that flourishing civilizations already existed in the Nile and Euphrates Valleys at the time when Adam was once sup- posed to have first opened his eyes upon a newly created world. A distinction used to be made between prehistoric and historic men and periods. Historians were unable to make use of any except oral or written evidence. « p re historic " Where no such evidence was procurable, they an <? ", his - spoke of the period as prehistoric and beyond the bounds of history. To-day learned investigators eagerly search out the material objects which men have left behind and draw many inferences from them concerning the life and character of their former owners. Over one hundred sites have been found in northern Italy of villages where