Nothing is to him indistinct through familiarity. In virtue
of this absolute clearness of vision it costs him no effort to
throw himself back into prehistoric conditions and the
wild life of the earliest men. Even further than this he
can pierce the strange recesses of the past. Before his
imagination the earth rises swathed in tropical forests,
and all strange forms of life issuing and jostling one
another for existence in the steaming warmth of per-
petual summer. Among a thousand types that flowered
and fell, the feeble form of primitive man is distinguished,
without fire, without clothing, without articulate speech.
Through the midnight of the woods, shivering at the cries
of the stealthy-footed prowlers of the darkness, he crouches
huddled in fallen leaves, waiting for the rose of dawn. Little
by little the prospect clears round him. The branches of
great trees, grinding one against another in the windy
forest, break into a strange red flower ; he gathers it and
hoards it in his cave. There, when wind and rain beat
without, the hearth-fire burns through the winter, and round



46 Latin Literature. [!•

it gathers that other marvellous invention of which the
hearth-fire became the mysterious symbol, the family.
From this point the race is on the full current of progress,
of which the remainder of the book gives an account as
essentially true as it is incomparably brilliant. If we
consider how little Lucretius had to go upon in this
reconstruction of lost history, his imaginative insight seems
almost miraculous. Even for the later stages of human
progress he had to rely mainly on the eye which saw deep
below the surface into the elementary structure of civilisation.
