NONSUCH 



ing leathery imitation branches. As to actual labor 

 for food, I can recall only astronomers, mariners, 

 steeple- jacks, rain-makers and hunters who do not 

 sit and bend over work-bench or desk, stir up the 

 soil or burrow into the earth itself. 



As to avoiding enemies, we modern soldiers have 

 reverted to far-distant, legless ancestors and crawl 

 about trenches, and in and out of barbed wire and 

 shell-holes, reserving speed and the noble upright 

 carriage of mankind for running away. 



One hundred million years ago, more or less, 

 sharks of sorts were swimming about in oceans, 

 twisting up, down, and around. Competition, then 

 as now, was severe and new haunts and new sources 

 of food were most desirable things. It was possible 

 to stand upon one's head and feed upon delectable 

 bottom life, but it left many openings for attack and 

 was hard upon sensitive snouts. So to meet the situa- 

 tion, a zoology teacher in Tennessee will tell you 

 that God suddenly made skates and rays and other 

 flat sharks; one evolutionist will say that some 

 sharks were slightly flatter than others, and that 

 these kept near the bottom and married in their 

 own set, and had children with still flatter tummies 

 and so on until a generation appeared at which, if 

 men had then been invented, they would have ex- 

 claimed, "Oh! skates!" Or they might have de- 

 veloped by mutation or emergent evolution, or by 

 good old Darwinian action and reaction of varia- 

 tion, isolation, selection and environment. Relegat- 

 ing the Tennessee idea to the limbo of unperformed 



96 



