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“Departing sunbeams, loth to stop,

Still smiling on the mountain-top.”

To the vast majority even of the somewhat educated world, collecting such lore is like sending frigates to watch eclipses and North Pole explorations, and the digging up old skulls in Neanderthals—that is, a mere fond waste of money and study to no really useful purpose. There is a law of evolution which is so strictly and persistently carried out, that it would seem as if the mocking devil, who, according to the Buddhists, is the real head of the Universe, had it in his mind to jeer mankind thereby—and it is that the work of man in the past shall perish rapidly, and those who seek vestigia rerum shall have as little material as possible, even as dreams flit. So the strife goes ever on, chiefly aided by the ignorant, who “take no interest” in the past; and so it will be for some time to come. I have often observed that in Italy, as in all countries, children and peasants take pleasure in destroying old vases and the like, even when they could sell them at a profit; and there is something of the same spirit among all people regarding things which they do not understand. Blessed are they who do something in their generation to teach to the many the true value of all which conduces to culture or science! Blessed be they who save up anything for the future, “and they shall be blest” by wiser men to come! The primeval savages who heaped up vast koken middens, or thousands of tons of oyster-shells and bones, did not know that they were writing history; but they did it. Perhaps the wisest of us will be as savages to those who are to come, as they in turn will be to later men.