The Moors in Spain-The Order is founded-Its connection "Our little systems have their day; "Let knowledge grow from more to more, "But vaster." TENNYSON. GEOLOGISTS tell us that our earth has passed through long periods, and many and great changes; that it has assumed different aspects, and been covered with a flora and fauna utterly unlike what we see now. Thus, Hugh Miller says, "The figures on a Chinese vase, or an Egyptian obelisk, are scarcely more unlike what now exists in nature, than are the fossils of the old red sandstone. The possibilities of existence run so deeply into the extravagant that there is scarcely any conception too extraordinary for nature to realize." But without going back so far, there have also been other great and wonderful changes in the world's history, since man lived and thought and worked and suffered upon it. The life depicted upon the temple walls in Egypt; the life described by Aristophanes and Horace; the life of Briton and Saxon in England itself;-how various all these are the one from the other, and each from what we see and do to-day! It requires much information, and research, and not a little effort of the imagination, to realize to ourselves in any degree the sort of life that men and women lived in the Middle Ages; we must strip ourselves of many common things that seem almost necessaries of life to us, and try and imagine how men and women, high and low, did without them. There were no railways, or steamships; no carriages, no roads such as ours. A great part of England was forest or waste land. small and surrounded by walls. tion was hardly equal to that The country was full of deer and wolves, and other wild animals long since extinct. The feudal system prevailed, and the great middle class did not exist. The English language was not what it is now. The coinage was different; the prices of food and everything else were quite unlike what they are now. Towns were The whole populaof London to-day. |