TIME AND CHANGE 



I 



THE LONG ROAD 



THE long road I have in mind is the long road of 

 evolution, the road you and I have traveled 

 in the guise of humbler organisms, from the first uni 

 cellular life in the old Cambrian seas to the complex 

 and highly specialized creature that rules supreme in 

 the animal kingdom to-day. Surely a long journey, 

 stretching through immeasurable epochs of geologic 

 time, and attended by vicissitudes of which we can 

 form but feeble conceptions. 



The majority of readers, I fancy, are not yet ready 

 to admit that they, or any of their forebears, have 

 ever made such a journey. We have all long been 

 taught that our race was started upon its career only 

 a few thousand years ago, started, not amid the war- 

 rings of savage elemental nature, but in a pleasant 

 garden with everything needed close at hand. This 

 belief has faded a good deal in our time, especially 

 among thoughtful persons; but in a modified form, 

 as the special creation theory, it held sway in the 

 minds of the older naturalists like Agassiz and Daw- 



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