Excerpt from History of Europe, Ancient and Medieval: Earliest Man, the Orient, Greece and Rome General European history is one of the most perplexing sub jects to deal with in the high school. It seems absolutely essen tial that boys and girls should have some knowledge of the whole past of mankind without that they can have no real understand ing of the world in which they live, for the simple reason that the present can only be explained by the past. The older historical manuals were, in the main, short accounts of past events; but it is really past conditions and past institutions and past ideas that are best worth knowing about. The older books tended, more over, to give too much attention to the remote past and too little information in regard to recent history, so that there was little chance of the pupil's realizing the vital bearing of the past on the present. The aim of these two volumes is to avoid the defects of the older books, first, by frankly subordinating the mere happenings of the past to a clear statement of the conditions under which men lived for long periods, of the ideas which they held, and of the man ner in which conditions and ideas have undergone great changes in man's slow rise from his original savage estate; secondly, by devoting about half of the work, namely, Volume II, to the past hundred and fifty years, which concern us most immediately. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.