Books: After Us, The Insects?

CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL (263 pp.)—> Arnold J. Toynbee—Oxford ($3.50).

"The Kingdom of England is only 1,000 years old." "These last 6,000 years—brief though they are . . ." "After all, the reign of man on the Earth . . . is so far only about 100,000 years old . . ."

This is British Historian Arnold J. Toynbee speaking. As readers of his abridged, bestselling A Study of History (TIME, March 17, 1947) well know, on the Toynbee time-&-space scale the Dark Ages are a mere cat nap and the British Empire a flash in the...