its birthday; and that, unlike us who become wrinkled and grey, this dear old world keeps ever fresh and ever beautiful, brightened by the smiling sunlight of God playing over its face.

Now, it would be making another guess-and, as we shall never know whether we have guessed right, what is the use of guessing?— to say how many years man has lived here. It is enough for us to know-and this is no guess that the good Being who made the world put man on it at the best and fittest time, and that He makes nothing in vain, whether it be rock, tree, flower, fish, bird, beast,

or man.

But although God left man to find out very much for himself, He gave him the tools wherewith to work. Eyes wherewith to see, ears wherewith to hear, feet wherewith to walk, hands wherewith to handle,-these were given for the use of the man himself, by which I mean the mind, soul, or spirit, which is man. Perhaps we may best call it the thinking part, because the word "man" comes from a very old

word which means to think; therefore a man is one who thinks. When names were given to things, some word was best described the thing.

fixed upon which "Brute" comes from

rough, and so man

a word meaning raw or is distinguished from the brutes, which are in some things like him, and from the plants and trees, which are like him in that they breathe, by being known as the thinking being.

If I sometimes break off my story to explain the meaning of certain words, you will one day learn to thank me for it, because, as you have already seen, there is a reason, and sometimes a very beautiful reason, for the names which things bear; and it is not less strange than true, that words often tell us more of the manners and doings of people who, silent now,. used to speak them, than we can find out from the remains they have left behind them.

In one case, the words they used to speak are the only clue we have to the fact that a people who were our forefathers once lived in Asia.

They have left no traces (so far as we can find out) of the tools which they used, of

the houses they lived in, or of writings on rocks or bricks, and yet we know that they must have been, because the words they spoke have come down to us, and are really used by us in different forms and with different meanings, of which I will give you a proof.

You know that the girls in a family are called the "daughters." That word comes from a word very much like it, by which these people of old-the Aryans, as we have named them— called their girls, and which means a milkingmaid. Now, we know by this that they had got beyond the savage state, and that they must have kept goats and cows for the milk which they gave. Thus much a simple word tells us. In the same way, if the English people had died off the face of the earth, and left no records behind them other than remains of the words they uttered, we should know that English girls had learned to spin, because in course of time unmarried women were called spinsters.

II. Man's First Wants.

I have now to tell you that the first men were placed here wild and naked, knowing nothing of the great riches stored up in the earth beneath them, and only after a long time making it yellow with the waving corn, and digging out of it the iron and other metals so useful to mankind.

The first thought of man was about the wants of his body; his first desire was to get food to eat, fire for warmth, and some place for shelter when night came on, and wild beasts howled and roared around him.

See how, in the first step he had to take, man is unlike the brutes.

Wherever God has placed the brute, He has given it the covering best fitted for the place in which it lives, and has supplied its proper food close at hand. But God has placed man here naked, and left him to seek for himself the food and clothing best suited to that part of the world in which he lives. If God had given

man thick hair-covered skin, he could not have moved from place to place with comfort, and so man is made naked, but given the power of reasoning about things and acting by reason. The brute remains the brute he always was, while man never stops, but improves upon what those who lived before him have done.

Man has not the piercing eye of the eagle, but he has the power of making instruments which not only bring into view stars whose light has taken a thousand years to reach the earth, but which also tell us what metals are in the sun and other stars; man has not the swiftness of the deer, but he has the power of making steam-engines to carry him sixty miles in an hour; man has not the strength of the horse, but he has put machines together which can do the work of a hundred horses.

Whatever power man has, whether of body or of mind, improves by use. The savage, who has to make constant use of his bodily powers to secure food, is, by practice, fleeter of foot and quicker of sight than civilized man, who, using the power of his mind, excels the savage in