THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



their natural or in artificial surroundings. So prehis- 

 toric life is portrayed until the time is reached when 

 man, having attained self-consciousness and the habit 

 of recording his impressions and acts, leaves a more 

 or less continuous history of himself and his environ- 

 ment. 



At first sight, we are impressed by the great quanti- 

 ties of relics which have been retrieved from the deso- 

 lation of the past and have been collected and noted 

 in the many museums established throughout the civ- 

 ilized world. These relics have been studied and 

 classified, both as to character and time, by patient 

 men of science ; until they have at last pieced them to- 

 gether as a mosaic and fitted them into a frame of 

 time. We are, for a while, impressed with the abun- 

 dance of these evidences of past history until, with 

 something of a shock, we begin to speculate on the in- 

 conceivable number of plant and animal forms which 

 have come and gone. The earth comprises some two 

 hundred million square miles of surface and there is 

 scarcely a portion of it which does not teem with life. 

 And this population has lived and died and been re- 

 placed endless times in the hundreds of millions of 

 years which have elapsed since the earth has been 

 cool enough to permit organic life to exist. Of all 

 this multitude of once living things, only a minute 

 portion which possessed calcareous bones or shells, 

 or chanced to have its softer parts petrified, could 

 have left any trace behind it; and only a minute por- 



C Hi 



