FOR THE FAR FUTURE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 116, 12 November 1938, Page 8

FOR THE FAR FUTURE

Experimenters usually hope to see the results of their operations; but the adventure described in a special article in this issue is, in theory, not to have its result till fifty centuries hence. It is a bold idea to plant in the ground, in the hope of its faroff recovery, a picture of presentday civilisation, but we would be very grateful to find a much less complete record of a much less remote past. Our knowledge of the life of our far-back ancestors has had to be extracted with the utmost difficulty from burial places of men, fragmentary "documents" which have chanced to be permanent and safely buried, odd remnants of buildings and chattels, and the vague evidence of accumulated rubbish. In the seats of arcieni civilisation, those whose hobby it is to dig up the story of mankind have been fortunate through the easy-going methods of the people who, when a town was destroyed by war, fire, or earthquake, merely levelled out the debris and built over it, often many times. So they left, without realising it, a record which has been unfolded page by page, giving an eloquent but tantalisingly incomplete history of their li ves — n ot unlike the record which Nature has left, on a larger scale, in the rock strata into which geologists read the history of the earth's surface layers. In rare instances, where the climate has been favourable and building very sound, the evidence has been well preserved, as, for example, in Egyptian tombs. But even in Egypt, whence so much has been learned, there remain the unsolved mystery of the Pyramids and the riddle of the Sphinx; and the evidently elaborate life of such peoples as the Mayas of America has left nothing but an insoluble puzzle-embodied in vast stone structures and incomprehensible inscriptions.

The more advanced peoples of the world are today carefully destroying the elements which might build such geological layers as have been left in the past. When they rebuild they remove the debris and dig deeper foundations- Nothing is permanent: there is no building that is not destined to be pulled down and replaced; no engineerisg work, carried out in steel, will outlast more than a few generations. Records on paper are notoriousjy impermanent. We place few written records upon stone, save epitaphs, and even these cannot last long. If all the few "permanent" tilings that exist today were brought together, they would say very little about our real lives. It is therefore " a praiseworthy thing, and let us hope not a vain one, that an attempt has been made to tell people, much further from us in time ahead than the builders of the Pyramids are in the past, something of 'the present day on the earth. Ten million words have been sunk in the ground, with all the precautions that can be thought of against decay and with provision for future discovery; and along with this colossal book, some of the domestic trifles that play an important part in ordinary life. It is an impressive legacy to unknown descendants.