part) of a mosaic and deciding if you like it. Certainly the McLuhan test can be applied to the Gutenberg Galaxy itself. Doing so will reveal a further insight into the purpose of his own book. Prologue McLuhan declares his book to be "complementary to The Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord." The latter work follows on from the Homeric studies of Milman Parry who turned to "the study of the Yugoslave epics" to prove that the poems of Homer were oral compositions. Four epochs of history The book may also be regarded as a way of describing four epochs of history: Oral tribe culture Manuscript culture Gutenberg galaxy Electronic age For the break between the time periods in each case the occurrence of a new medium is responsible, the hand-writing terminates the oral phase, the printing and the electricity revolutionizes afterwards culture and society. Given the clue of "hand-writing" that terminates the "oral phase" one expects "printing" to terminate the manuscript phase and the "electrifying" to bring an end to the Gutenberg era. The strangeness of the use of "electrifying" is entirely appropriate in the McLuhan context of 1962. The Internet did not exist then. McLuhan himself suggests that the last section of his book might play the major role of being the first section: The last section of the book, "The Galaxy Reconfigured," deals with the clash of electric and mechanical, or print, technologies, and the reader may find it the best prologue. Oral tribe culture The oral tradition is not dead. In schools or at home or in the street, where children are taught to learn by heart, to memorize, nursery rhymes or poems or songs, then they can be said to participate in the oral tradition. The same is often true of the children belonging to religious groups who are taught to learn to say their prayers. In other words, childhood is one of the ages of man (in Shakespeare's sense) and is essentially an oral tribal culture. The transition from this oral culture takes place when the child is taught to read and write. Then the child enters the world of the manuscript culture. McLuhan identifies James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a key that unlocks something of the nature of the oral culture." Of particular importance to the Oral Culture is the Art of memory. The village In commenting on the then Soviet Union,