But I must not let myself be carried away by this fascinating subject, which I have treated more at length in another work. I will only say that though their intelligence is no doubt limited, still I do not think that any one who has studied the life history of ants can draw any fundamental line of separation between instinct and reason.

When we see a community of ants working together in perfect harmony, it is impossible not to ask ourselves how far they are mere exquisite automatons, how far they are conscious beings. When we watch an ant-hill tenanted by thousands of industrious inhabitants, excavating chambers, forming tunnels, making roads, guarding their home, gathering food, feeding the young, tending their domestic animals, each one fulfilling its duties industriously, and without confusion,-it is difficult altogether to deny to them. the gift of reason; and all our recent observations tend to confirm the opinion that their mental powers differ from those of men not so much in kind as in degree.

SAVAGES COMPARED WITH CHILDREN

From Pre-Historic Times >

AVAGES may be likened to children; and the comparison is not

S only correct, but also highly instructive. Many naturalists

consider that the early condition of the individual indicates that of the race,—that the best test of the affinities of a species are the stages through which it passes. So also it is in the case of man: the life of each individual is an epitome of the history of the race, and the gradual development of the child illustrates that of the species. Hence the importance of the similarity between savages and children. Savages, like children, have no steadiness of purpose. Speaking of the Dogrib Indians, we found, says Richardson, "by experience, that however high the reward they expected to receive on reaching their destination, they could not be depended on to carry letters. A slight difficulty, the prospect of a banquet on venison, or a sudden impulse to visit some friend, were sufficient to turn them aside for an indefinite length of time." Even among the comparatively civilized South Sea Islanders this childishness was very apparent. "Their tears indeed, like those of children, were always ready to express any passion that was strongly excited, and like those of children they

also appear to be forgotten as soon as shed." D'Urville also mentions that Tai-wanga, a New Zealand chief, cried like a child because the sailors spoilt his favorite cloak by powdering it with flour. "It is not," says Cook, "indeed strange that the sorrows of these artless people should be transient, any more than that their passions should be suddenly and strongly expressed; what they feel they have never been taught either to disguise or suppress; and having no habits of thinking which perpetually recall the past and anticipate the future, they are affected by all the changes of the passing hour, and reflect the color of the time, however frequently it may vary."

We know the difficulty which children find in pronouncing certain sounds: r and, for instance, they constantly confound. This is the case also among the Sandwich-Islanders and in the Ladrones, according to Freycinet; in Vanikoro; among the Dammaras; and in the Tonga Islands. Mr. Darwin observed that the Fuegians had great difficulty in comprehending an alternative; and every one must have noticed the tendency among savages to form words by reduplication. This also is characteristic of childhood among civilized races.

Again, some of the most brutal acts which have been recorded against them are to be regarded less as instances of deliberate cruelty than of a childish thoughtlessness and impulsiveness. A striking instance of this is recorded by Byron in his narrative of the 'Loss of the Wager.' A cacique of the Chonos, who was nominally a Christian, had been out with his wife to fish for seaeggs, and having had little success, returned in a bad humor. "A little boy of theirs, about three years old, whom they appeared to be doatingly fond of, watching for his father and mother's return, ran into the surf to meet them: the father handed a basket of eggs to the child, which being too heavy for him to carry, he let it fall; upon which the father jumped out of the canoe, and catching the boy up in his arms, dashed him with the utmost violence against the stones. The poor little creature lay motionless and bleeding, and in that condition was taken up by the mother, but died soon after."

In fact, we may fairly sum up this part of the question in a few words by saying, as the most general conclusion which can be arrived at, that savages have the character of children with the passions and strength of men.

LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA

(120?-200? A. D.)

BY EMILY JAMES SMITH

URING the middle and end of the second Christian century, a

revival of Greek letters gave us the remarkable movement known as the New Sophistic. For the most part futile in aim and pedantic in method, the sophistic offers such a spectacle of solemn and fatuous frivolity that the lover of Hellenism knows not where to look. But by sheer force of monopoly in education and literature, the school counted as its disciples whatever men of talent the century produced; and among them a man of letters of almost the highest rank. Having as their aim

nothing less than a forcible recovery of the productive Greek genius, the sophists followed a vigorous propedeutic in the works of the great masters. A critical knowledge of the vocabulary of Plato, of the Attic orators, and of the Old Comedy, was the foundation of every sophist's skill. This erudition, in itself respectable and helpful, was however put to foolish use. The difference between using the language of Demosthenes and being one's self an orator was overlooked. Famous sentences of great writers were worked over, rearranged, and presented as a fresh creation, as Virgilian tags to-day coldly furnish forth the English schoolboy's verses. It was probably the influence of Rome that determined the revival as oratorical in form; the empire furnished it with endowed chairs of rhetoric, with a royal audience, and with political importance: yet it was held a solecism by the sophists to introduce a Roman name or an allusion to Rome into a Greek composition.

LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA

Worldly ambition, then, and literary tastes pulled in the same direction; and for a clever lad, growing up in a far Syrian village, conscious of great gifts, and of a tumultuous egoism, there was no alternative. Breaking away from the handicraft to which he was apprenticed, Lucian betook himself, still a boy of fifteen, to the study of Greek and to the profession of rhetoric. Asia Minor was full of

sophists. It is not likely that Lucian was able to afford a course under any of the great masters, and he nowhere speaks of any such thing. But the air was so full of their theories, and their public performances were so frequent, that an apt student could easily learn what their art was like. At any rate, we know that Lucian's ambition was successful: that he acquired what culture the sophistic had to offer, won a share of its prizes,- and then broke with it, laughing at its methods and pretensions with the detachment of a critic of to-day. The modern reader of Lucian is impressed by no quality more strongly than by his spontaneity; an adequate estimate of his talent must be based on the reflection that this spontaneity is inclosed in stereotyped forms and expressed in an acquired language. His fair structure is raised on made ground. He owed the tools he worked with, as well as the designs he followed, to the sophistic; and the weapons that he turned on his preceptress were from her own anvil. A man cannot, by criticizing his early education, rid himself of the effects of it; and in spite of Lucian's conscious originality, scorn of pedantry, and apparent disregard of convention, we must realize that he is after all but the most favorable example of what the sophistic training could do.

Possessed of a sense of humor that permitted even his irritable vanity no illusions, and of a deep conviction of the unimportance of serious matters, Lucian would have been delighted to hear that the theologians and moralists of a new era were destined to take him seriously. It is undeniable that he spoke slightingly of the Christians on the one hand, and on the other took liberties with Olympus; but it can hardly be proved that he was interested either in hastening the end of the old order or in deferring the installation of the new. In the extraordinary spiritual conditions of the second century of our era, Lucian's attitude finds a background so striking as to produce a feeling that in some way, contrary to the general laws of things, he stood alone, unrelated to the spirit of his age, and without sympathy as without peers. Religion was under the protection of the empire and of Stoicism; strange new doctrines were freely taught and followed with fanaticism; the soul was not only held immortal, but was believed to revisit the earth after its liberation from the body; new oracles made themselves heard; philosophy leaned to mysticism. And in this heyday of error a great writer appeared, distinguished next to his literary gifts by a coolness of judgment in such matters, and a taste for the truth, that would have been remarkable in any age.

The 'Dialogues of the Gods,' probably the most famous of Lucian's works, from which the first two selections in this collection are made, were written to be delivered by him in person before a popular audience. When an author under these circumstances devoted his

talents to parodying the popular religion, what idea are we to form as to his own attitude, that of his hearers, and the effect he hoped to produce? It seems idle to imagine either that Lucian's audience was a band of atheists, drawn together primarily by the spirit of philosophic controversy; or that Lucian himself, without being sure of the temper of his hearers, was willing to risk unpopularity, if need be, in the interests of truth as he conceived it. The second alternative was Friedländer's view, and is indeed generally held. But we may be sure, from Lucian's own account of the genesis of the new form of comic dialogue, that his interest in its workings was chiefly literary; it was the literary possibilities of Olympus that inspired the 'Dialogues of the Gods.' There is no trace in them of the bitterness of polemic, or the forcing of the note that we should expect to find if he relied on his irreverence as his chief charm. And next to satisfying his own high standard of literary excellence, his chief preoccupation was to recommend himself to the public. When his attacks on contemporary philosophy passed the limit of what the public wanted in that line; when his praise of a great person, or the variance between his theory and practice in the matter of taking salaries, were the subject of unflattering comment,- he was at pains to meet objections and explain them away. Half a dozen passages betray his sensitive vanity and his desire that men should speak well of him. With these evidences of his temperament and his methods, it is impossible to believe in him as an apostle.

The revival of orthodoxy which marked the religious thought of the second century was a voluntary reaction against the skepticism of the preceding age; men agreed to believe in the gods because they could not bear to do without them. The literature of the day shows a conscious surrender of the rights of the intellect, a willingness to blink the truth if error satisfied the heart; a desire to marshal the hopes and fears connected with the supernatural among the motives toward right conduct, and a bewilderment in scientific matters that left room for the existence in heaven and earth of many things inexplicable by any philosophy. The difference between an artificial religious attitude like this, and the uncritical faith of men who believe in the gods on grounds that they have never thought of questioning, must be taken into account before we can estimate the effect of Lucian's parodies. Though Aristides might write a hymn. to Zeus, and Dion celebrate him in all his functions, still each man had his own complex of ideas represented by the name; and it is hardly possible that to thoughtful minds it still called up with moving force the Homeric husband of Hera. The laborious task was not to throw off the phraseology and demeanor of orthodoxy, but to preserve them; and Lucian declined to make the effort.