AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE

TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS, AND CONSEQUENCES OF

THE GREAT EVENTS

(FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE OVERTHROW OF THE PERSIANS)

CHARLES F. HORNE


History, if we define it as the mere transcription of the written
records of former generations, can go no farther back than the time such
records were first made, no farther than the art of writing. But now
that we have come to recognize the great earth itself as a story-book,
as a keeper of records buried one beneath the other, confused and half
obliterated, yet not wholly beyond our comprehension, now the historian
may fairly be allowed to speak of a far earlier day.

For unmeasured and immeasurable centuries man lived on earth a creature
so little removed from "the beasts that die," so little superior to
them, that he has left no clearer record than they of his presence here.
From the dry bones of an extinct mammoth or a plesiosaur, Cuvier
reconstructed the entire animal and described its habits and its home.
So, too, looking on an ancient, strange, scarce human skull, dug from
the deeper strata beneath our feet, anatomists tell us that the owner
was a man indeed, but one little better than an ape. A few æons later
this creature leaves among his bones chipped flints that narrow to a
point; and the archæologist, taking up the tale, explains that man has
become tool-using, he has become intelligent beyond all the other