Dec. 20.
It is one of the amiable foibles of human nature to take a pride in believing that one is descended from good stock. Perhaps a great deal of the opposition to the evolutionary theory of the descent of mankind from an animal ancestry is due to this predilection for patting oneself on the back and indulging the comfortable thought that our ancestors were of no ignoble breed, We see this trait in the Chinese whose profoundest religious sense finds its express sion in the worship of their ai cesters which, if it be idolatry, is idolatry of a praiseworthy Kind, The penniless Scot "wi a long pedigree" is another instance that comes readily to mind, His forebears may have been highland caterans who made an honest living by plundering their neighbours, but he swaggers through life with the insoudance of one in whose veins runs the blue blood of a Howard or a Cecil, Even our democratic cousins from the other side of the Atlantic spend no small part of their holidays in Europe in tracing the noble ancestors from whom nine-tenths of them had their origin, They secure a brick from the ruins of the baronial halls where once the chieftain of their race held suspected that he was embark-jing on this adventure because Ihe knew that good pearls were to be found there and he was in the habit of giving pearls to this lady friends! Well, history records worse reason for going ito war than this. Anyway, the resistance he met with was so stubborn that about the middle lof September he had had enough, lof fighting and embarked his troops and sailed back to France where in the Gallic wars he had stormed 800 towns, subdued 300) tribes and killed a million men, The Britons of those days were traders as they are at present, Coins of Carthage dated 200 B. C. have been found. Also Greek or Etruscan vases and Egyptian beads, The author ates: "In upper Egypt 1, myself, dug up a vase dating from 1,200 years before Christ, made of tin, which might well have come from Corwall." And so the forgotten history of our land unrolls itself before us, The earliest glimpses we get of our forefathers show them to us not fas painted savages but as civilized men who tilled their fields and traded to the far distant marts of Phoenicia and Egypt. Their chiefs wore linen tunics and brilliantly coloured cloaks. They carried swords by—their sides and when they met the disciplined Roman legions they, either conquered or died gloriously where they stood. And we may take to heart the words of a great Englishman of our sway and proudly exhibit it injown day. Sir John Seeley says: their much more palatial resid. ences in Texas or Nebraska, It is very amusing but also very human and we, who are still attach-_ ed by unbreakable ligaments to the land of our common birth, sincerely trust that the supply of bricks will never fail. Not one of us but would be willing to offer a substitute from our own ancestral hearth—provided we possess such a luxury—rather than see our kinsman disappointed, It is only a sentiment, but such sentiments do us honour "T tell you that when you study history you study not the past England but her future. It is the welfare of your country, it your whole interest as citizens that is at stake when you study' history." And the more we! know of our country's great past the worthier we shall be lable to live in what seems to us, but only to us, the drab routine of our daily lives in this port far distant from her shores. and we are both pleased and proud to recognize its existence, These thoughts are brought to mind by the perusal of a book that has recently been published in London on "Roman Britain." We received the impr sion from our schoolbooks that our British ancestors, in the days before the Roman invasion, were barbarians who had neither art nor civilization and that the history of our islands Vegan with the irruption of Julius Caesar and his legions to our country on the 25th day of August B.C. 55. The Tearned author of this book disabuses our minds of that misconception. He has been tray-ersing the land with a spade and a notebook and he gives us some very startling results of his investigations.
The inhatants of Britain, he says, had been civilized for' at least' 1500 years before the coming of the Romans. The bronze weapons of that early period were magnificont and in no way inferior to those that have been found in the tombs of Egyptians of the same date, He instances a beautiful dagger, with a hilt of red amber inlaid with gold. Toilet articles such as razors, mir-tors, ointment pots and even rouge for colouring the cheeks of the ladies have been found, and countless necklaces, jewels,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.