THE BREATH OF LIFE 



man, that were not in his line of descent, and played 

 no part in his evolution. During that carnival of 

 monstrous and gigantic forms in Mesozoic time the 

 ancestor of man was probably some small and insig- 

 nificant creature whose life was constantly imperiled 

 by the huge beasts about it. That it survived at all 

 in the clash of forces, bestial and elemental, during 

 those early ages, is one of the wonders of time. The 

 drama or tragedy of evolution has had many actors, 

 some of them fearful and terrible to look upon, who 

 have played their parts and passed off the stage, as 

 if the sole purpose was the entertainment of some 

 unseen spectator. When we reach human history, 

 what wasted effort, what failures, what blind grop- 

 ing, what futile undertakings ! war, famine, pesti- 

 lence, delaying progress or bringing to naught the 

 wisdom of generations of men! Those who live in 

 this age are witnessing in the terrible European war 

 something analogous to the blind, wasteful fury of 

 the elemental forces; millions of men who never saw 

 one another, and who have not the shadow of a 

 quarrel, engage in a life-and-death struggle, armed 

 with all the aids that centuries of science and civili- 

 zation can give them a tragedy that darkens the 

 very heavens and makes a mockery of all our age- 

 old gospel of peace and good will to men. It is a 

 catastrophe on a scale with the cataclysms of geo- 

 logic time when whole races disappeared and the 

 face of continents was changed. It seems that men 

 248 





