CLARKE— THE AGE OF THE EARTH. 277 



it be of biology, geography, geology, meteorology, oceanography, or 

 psychology, is there the slightest justification for seriously embalming 

 such a fancy in a scientific address and sending it abroad in the 

 world for the daws to peck at. 



We must fasten our gaze upon such impressive evidence as can 

 now be adduced of the duration of time required in the attainment 

 of organic specializations, and let me supplement those I have given 

 by others taken from the plant world. Casting up the evidences that 

 have been adduced by paleontologists and paleobotanists, I think the 

 footings show very positively a large balance of argument in favor 

 of the great conception that the life of the land has emerged from 

 the sea. I believe it may be said, on behalf of paleontologists gener- 

 ally and their broader deductions, that these are happy in the harmony 

 of their conclusions in this matter after having experimented with 

 and checked up alternate conceptions. 



The broader lines of evolutionary derivation and the best weighed 

 deductive propositions seem to intimate a convergence of the life 

 lines back to the sea and a radiation from it. The inception of life 

 was the most solemn moment in the history of the Universe. We 

 invite certain astronomers to refrain from further speculations and 

 presumptions as to life in other worlds, and followers of Arrhenius 

 from pursuing life spores through interplanetary space. These no- 

 tions seem to be very exciting to the emotional public and there is 

 indeed no shred of evidence of these things, no matter what physical 

 conditions may be predicated of other worlds than this. So far as 

 the evidence of outstanding facts and major probabilities goes, Life 

 is confined to the Earth. Into this solemn event, the birth of life, 

 the interaction of the forces requisite to emergence, we shall not here 

 attempt to pry. We look back, then, to a primitive period of life in 

 the sea, the Plankton epoch, the place and stage of life's emergence, 

 the surface life ; followed by a Benthic epoch, the secondary stage of 

 development in which the living forms had found the shallower sea 

 bottoms and thereupon began their adaptations and more rapid 

 evolution. 



I shall now borrow freely the brilliant conceptions of Church, 

 the British paleobotanist, as to the procedure among the plants thence- 



