78 THE DI\ 7 INE SOIL 



doubt, a million years or more. The ancestor of man 

 probably took on something like the human form on 

 the third, or Miocene, day. The other and earlier 

 fifty or more weeks of the great geologic year gradu- 

 ally saw the development of the simpler forms of life, 

 till we reach the earliest mammals and reptiles in the 

 Permian, about the forty-eighth or forty-ninth week 

 of the great year. The laying down of the coal mea- 

 sures, Huxley thinks, must have taken six millions 

 of years. Well, the Lord allowed himself enough 

 time. Evidently he was in no hurry to see man cut- 

 ting his fantastic tricks here upon the surface of the 

 planet. A hundred million years, more or less, what 

 of it? Did the globe have to ripen all those cycles 

 upon cycles, like the apple upon the tree ? bask in 

 the sidereal currents, work and ferment in the sea 

 of the hypothetical ether before the gross matter 

 could evolve the higher forms of life? Probably 

 every unicellular organism that lived and died in 

 the old seas helped prepare the way for man, 

 contributed something to the fund of vital energy 

 of the globe upon which man was finally to draw. 



How life has had to adjust itself to the great 

 cosmic changes! The delays must have been in- 

 calculable. The periodic refrigeration of the north- 

 ern hemisphere, which brought on the ice age 

 several times during each one of the Eocene and 

 Miocene days, must have delayed the development 

 of life as we know it, enormously. 



