PKEFACE 



This little book is a sequel to The A B G of Evolution, 

 which was published last year. In that work I told, in 

 outline, the story of the evolution of the universe, and 

 particularly the evolution of life on the earth ; and at 

 the close I briefly described how the appearance of man 

 crowned the long ages of earlier struggle. 



Unfortunately, the limits of the work, which was 

 merely a short and simple account, for people of little 

 leisure, of the story of evolution, prevented me from 

 enlarging upon the subject just when it became most 

 interesting. The predominant feeling of our troubled 

 age is social and humanitarian. We want to understand 

 human life : to learn its meaning, its laws, its destiny. 

 We feel that the pitiless struggles of the past cannot be 

 the model of the present ; that an entirely new phase 

 of evolution has opened on this planet. Constructive 

 intelligence and humane sentiment must somehow replace 

 the sanguinary struggle that fills the earlier chapters of 



