Reporting History

London, July 7.

History is made hand over hand so rapidly in this year of grace and destruction that human energies are overtaxed in keeping up with it. The transition from one century to another has offered ironical contrasts between Christendom organized at The Hague in a diplomatic campaign for the reduction of armaments and for minimizing the evils of war, and Christendom harassed and perplexed by the battle between white races for supremacy in South Africa and by the conflict between civilisation and barbarism in the Far East. There is enough in the rapid march of events during these distracted and momentous crises in current history to sober and appal reflective minds; and one puts aside his newspaper every morning with the conviction that the world has grown too serious, and that too much has happened over night. History has not always gone with so precipitate a rush. Explorers from the great Libyan desert have found cumulative evidence of the slowness and deliberation with which the earliest stages of human progress have been approached and passed. Burrowing deep in the sands, they have sampled the crude arts and deciphered the records of bygone centuries buried in oblivion. So true Is it that, although the changes and evolution of decades or generations may now be compressed within the compass of a single week or month, a thousand years are but as yesterday, or a watch in the night.

It is with a feeling of relief over evidence that the world has not always been in so driving a hurry as it is now that a visitor loiters in the classrooms of University College, where Professor Flinders-Petrie has collected the antiquities excavated at Abydos during his recent season of work. One table is devoted to relics of the early kings in the first Egyptian dynasty, and three tables and a window seat are covered with prehistoric objects antedating 5000 B. C. Seven of the eight kings of the first dynasty are represented in the collection, and two of their predecessors of even earlier antiquity, whose names are not yet known. There are fragments of the royal drinking bowls, bits of slate and alabaster once used on kings’ tables; a piece of a crystal vase once handled by Mena, the founder of the Memphite monarchy; worked flints, stone vases, carnelian beads and arrow heads tipped with red: and examples of the carving and metal working of seven remote reigns. To these fragments from the first dynasty are added stout jars, clay sealings and other pottery from the prehistoric period which preceded the line of the mysterious Mena.