As men's ethical relations have rarely been championed for their own sake, they have been slow to receive the recognition to which their importance entitled them. They have usually been side issues to law or religion, or to some other psychic force that in a general way expressed civic or social relations. Impulses, appetites, fancies, reverence for custom, have been so potent a factor in regulating men's intercourse with each other, that the virtues, properly so called, have had but scant room to make themselves felt. As long as the law-abiding citizen or the orthodox believer is regarded as the ideal man, the good old times of the past must take precedence of the better new times that are still in the future. Men instinctively feel a reverence for those who are scrupulous in the observance of law or religion, whatever else they may do or leave undone. Yet so long as conduct is regulated according to any but a purely ethical motive, it is in constant danger of becoming unethical. From time immemorial but very few men have done right solely because it was right.

It is not denied here that there are primitive impulses that are purely ethical. On the contrary, they may be detected in the earliest records of our race, and may still be discovered in those tribes occupying the lowest round of the ladder of social progress. But they are so obscured by other motives and psychic forces, both individual and collective, that their advancement toward recognition has been painfully slow and, perhaps, in a majority of cases, unconscious. How difficult it is for men to see the right and do it for its own sake, is strikingly exemplified in the case of Socrates, the purest moralist of Greek antiquity and one of the most lucid thinkers the world has ever produced. He based his mission, not on his innate worth as a man, or on the reasonableness of the doctrines he advocated, but on the inspiration of a god; in other words, he did not preach righteousness for its own sake, but in the fulfillment of a mission divinely imposed. Herein he merely followed the example of the Hebrew prophets who exhorted the people to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. If they obeyed His commands and lived according to the law He laid down for their guidance, they would be victorious over their enemies and dwell in peace and plenty.

The most purely ethical standard of which we have any record is that set up by Christ in the words: Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and his righteousness, etc., with the added injunction to leave the results to take care of themselves. If the kingdom of heaven, or of God, is synonymous with the kingdom of earthly felicity, to do the will of God is also to labor for the well-being of man. Nevertheless, it is reaching one result by way of another and not directly. It seems to

I once heard a clergyman asked whether God commanded certain things because they were night, or whether they were right because God commanded them? His answer was, "Both "

admit of no doubt that ethical morality is very like a climbing plant that may indeed put forth leaves and flowers, but which is unable to rise from the earth or to attain its fullest development, except when clinging to some other object. As to Socrates, I admit that he may have adopted a conventional phraseology to make his teaching more readily comprehensible by those he addressed, but it is legitimate to take his words in their obvious, and not in some esoteric sense. Besides, his words are in harmony with those of nearly all great prophets.

Without occupying further space with generalizations that may be regarded either as preliminary to the whole question or as a summary of investigations on a number of particular points, let us examine some of the current terms that throw light on the development of our moral ideas. We shall thus be able to get much light on the question as to the extent that our notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, virtue and vice are the product of man's gregarious habits and social instincts.

Con

Auerbach says: "Nicht die Sittlichkeit regiert die Welt, sondern eine verhaertete Form derselben: die Sitte. Wie die Welt nun einmal geworden ist, verzeiht sie eher eine Verletzung der Sittlichkeit als eine Verletzung der Sitte." This passage, which can be only approximately translated into English, expresses a truth of far-reaching importance. The world judges men by a formula that is not of their own making, but which comes to them by inheritance. This formula is accepted as a standard by which to measure individual conduct. duct is judged as good or bad in proportion as it approaches or deviates from the formula. Few persons take the trouble or have the mental acumen necessary to enable them to look deeper. Many of these formule are fixed by statute, but this is no evidence that they are any longer obeyed. Others have become fixed by custom and are implicitly obeyed, in spite of the fact that everybody is at liberty to disregard them. "You might as well be out of the world, as out of fashion," is the popular verdict upon those who refuse to recognize the binding force of convention even in unimportant matters. This inexorable law of custom is undoubtedly stronger as we go downward in the scale of civilization, but it is potent everywhere: it regulates the etiquette of courts quite as much as the religious and social observances of the Australian aborigines or the dress of the European peasant. Usage has often been the outgrowth of the environment of primitive tribes, and is afterward observed when it has ceased to signify anything and has no warrant but its antiquity. Pietas, a term that meant so much to the ancient Romans and which has been preserved to our day in the greatly attenuated "piety," was regarded as a leading virtue. That man was pious who scrupulously performed the customary religious rites, or who reverently cherished the memory of ancestors no matter how far removed, or who took pains to keep in fresh remembrance the words and

deeds of departed friends. This pietas often appears in the conduct of Indian tribes, who, almost without exception, protested against being removed to a region where they could not visit the burying grounds of their forebears or make their annual pilgrimages to the same sacred spot.

"What was good enough for my father is good enough for me," is the reason often assigned by ignorant persons in our day, when they are asked to change their habits, or even the routine of their daily life. Frequently, too, persons, who can not be regarded as ignorant, feel and plainly show that they think they are doing an unworthy act when they leave the party or the church of their fathers, though the continuity is in the name much more than in the creed. And no matter how unsentimental a man may be naturally, he can not look upon the graves of his ancestors, or upon any family heirloom, though of trifling value, without feeling that their association gives them a certain character of sacredness, of which other like objects not thus associated are wholly devoid.

A RELIC FROM THE GLACIAL CLAY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA.

BY JAMES DEANS.

A short time ago, I found an ancient spear point on our farm in the clay of the glacial drift. Several years ago, a ditch was dug in this clay, now there is no longer any use for this ditch, because the field has been drained. It was when filling up this ditch that this relic was uncovered, it having been dug up when the ditch was being made. I think this coast, or northern part of Northwest America, must have been inhabited before the glacial period, or else this relic was carried by the drift from points inhabited before that time. Altogether it goes very far to prove that there were inhabitants ingenious enough to form spear points out of stone before the glacial period.

A few winters ago, I was walking along near my home, where traces of glacial action is plainly seen on every hand, where every rock and hill is covered with ice grooves, and large tracts are so thickly covered with drift stones that a person cannot walk over them, and almost all the flat land is glacial clay. Walking along the bank of a little stream, I came to a point where the winter floods had worn a hole in the bank of the stream. In this clay along-side of the hole, a foot below the surface, I dug out a whetstone, such as was used by the Indians to sharpen their stone and bone implements. After washing it, I found it had been used to put a point on their implements.

PREHISTORIC WORK BY PROFESSOR PETRIE.

BY REV. WILLIAM C. WINSLOW, LL. D.

THE varied work of the Egyptian Exploration Fund must strike the most casual observer-one, for example, who glances into the last volume of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, or that of the Archæological Survey, or into "Dendereh" for 1898. for 1898. If he cares more for illustration than for text, he has but to scan the truly beautiful plates, some in colors, in the royal quartos of our volumes on Deir-el-Bahari (the temple of Queen Hatasu). Could there be a more diversified work, under the banner of archæology, than the achievements of Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt in our Græco-Roman Branch and the work of Professor Petrie on behalf of knowledge respecting prehistoric civilization and prehistoric,races in Egypt? In the former, the classical and Biblical are concerned; in the latter, the ethnological and anthropological are interested.

This is illustrated in the last excavations by Prof. Petrie; he pointedly said at the annual meeting of the Fund in November, as a sequence of his last efforts:

I hope that it is now clear what a great step we have made historically in the mode of reducing the prehistoric chaos into orderly sequence, and in tracing changes in the civilization of such ages.

I must anticipate the Annual Report with simply some extracts from the type-written copy furnished me in advance. Dr. Petrie was assisted by Mr. Mace in the early stage of the work; also by Mr. MacIver, Miss Orme, Miss Lawes, and Mrs. Petrie. The party settled first at Abadiyeh, and afterwards at Hu (sometimes spelt How), the site of Diospolis. Professor

Petrie says:

Altogether, about 1,250 graves of the Prehistoric Age and about as many historic graves mainly about the Twelfth Dynasty-were opened and recorded. Now, how far does all this work change our point of view, and put us in a different position toward historical subjects? This is the main test of success in excavations We started with the advantage of having an extensive corpus of the forms of prehistoric pottery, ready for reference, the produce of my work at Nagada four years before. This gave a notation for 750 forms, and we added 150 more to that corpus during our work.

By this means every jar in each grave, and generally even fragments of pottery, were exactly recorded. And having thus such a mass of observations, as well as those made less completely on some 2,500 graves at Nagada, it was possible to deal with the best and most complete graves in a systematic manner, which had never yet been attempted for any country.

Proceeding upon a scientific basis of the most exact sort, Professor Petrie is able to say:

The final outcome of all this work is that a card catalogue of the contents of over goo graves, on as many card slips, has been reduced to a near

approximation to the original order of the graves. Such a catalogue is, however, very cumbrous for reference, when we want to settle the relative positions of any fresh tombs. A portable notation for it becomes needful. The whole series is, therefore, divided in, say fifty equal parts, each part representing an equal amount of burials. These, for convenience, I numbered from 30 to 80. Thus we have a system just as convenient as a scale of years, and every kind of object can be relatively dated in it.

From the order of the graves as found, by the pottery I have obtained the history of the development of stone vases, ivories, and the working of flint and metal-for even the earliest of these tombs contain copper. And having done that, a new piece of history becomes apparent in the great change that passed over every kind of work at one point of the scale, about a quarter through the prehistoric age that we are studying. A new tribe seems to have come in with very different notions.

Our excavator remarks further:

One of the most curious differences is that the older people largely used signs which are the fore-runners of the Mediterranean alphabets, while the later people ignored such signs. The earlier people used no amulets; the later used amulets, several of which came down to the historic times. The use of a forehead pendant and face veil seems also to belong only to the later people. The characteristic pottery of the earlier people is closely like the Kabyle pottery at present; the later people had some pottery almost identical with that of South Palestine in historic times. All these indications point to the earlier being a Libyan population, overlaid later on by an eastern migration.

Other results are stated:

In other lines we have also reaped a good harvest. The cemeteries of the Sixth to Twelfth dynasties have given us the history of alabaster vases and of beads. The cemeteries of the Thirteenth to Seventeenth dynastics have shown the development of pottery, as yet unknown, and splendid dated examples of Fourteenth dynasty copper work, which fix the forms of daggers and axes. An entirely.fresh invasion of Egypt by Libyans at the close of the Twelfth dynasty has been traced; several kinds of objects known before, but without dates, have taken their historical position, and we have a sample of the civilization of the Libyan tribes at about 2000 B.C. And coming down to Roman times, we have found the continuance of a longer and fuller alphabet of Asia Minor, in an inscription scratched by a Roman legionary at the camp of Diospolis.

Professor Petrie refers to the "material results" as satisfactory, that is in objects for the museums of England and America, and announces that the historical site of Abydos has been assigned to him by the Egyptian government. He rejoices who does not?-that Professor Maspero will resume the post of director-general of antiquities in Egypt.