A BACKWARD GLANCE 
as a result of specialization, could see better, move 
more readily, digest more easily, than the separate 
elements which went into it. 
And so, through the early pictures of our reel, 
there would be spread before us the development 
of the little simple cell into more and more 
complex forms of life—first vegetable, then animal 
—into everything, finally, that lives and grows 
about us today—into us, ourselves. 
In an actual motion picture as it is thrown 
on the screen, it is only the quick progressive 
succession of the pictures that makes us realize 
the sense of motion. 
If we were to detach and examine a single film 
from the reel, it would show no movement. It 
would be as stationary and as fixed as a child’s 
first kodak snapshot. 
In the motion picture of Nature’s evolution, 
the world, as we see it about us in our lifetime, 
represents but a single snapshot, detached from 
those which have preceded it and from those 
which are to succeed it. 
And so, some of us—too many of us—not 
confronted with the same necessity which irre- 
sistibly leads the plant student into the study of 
these forces—viewing only the single, apparently 
unmoving picture before us, have concluded that 
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