177 



WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG 



It is always very difficult for us really to feel that people 

 in other places are working and playing exactly as we are 

 doing ourselves, and that when , we are dead everything 

 will go on as if we had never been alive at all. But it 

 is even harder for us to believe that for more thousands of 

 years than anyone can count, the earth went on its way 

 round the sun without numbering one single man among 

 its inhabitants. 



Not that our little planet was empty and silent, 

 because men were not there to shout and clamour. Any- 

 one looking down from the moon would have seen our 

 world very much as we see it now. There were moun- 

 tains and seas, trees, and flowers ; there were wet days 

 and fine days, high tides and low ones. To be sure, the 

 observer sitting in the moon would not have been looking 

 at the very same mountains and seas that we gaze at now. 

 At one time, countries, which are now dry land, were 

 covered by an ocean ; at another, great tracts, that are at 

 present islands, were joined to the continent itself, while, 

 on the other hand, peninsulas (such as India) were 

 divided by a sea from the mainland. In some cases, 

 mountain ranges had not been formed at all, and the 

 rivers ran in very different courses from what they do 

 to-day. 



Well, all these seas and continents were the homes of 



vast numbers of creatures, some bearing a strong likeness 



to the animals and reptiles with which we are familiar, 



others that would be absolutely strange to our eyes. 



R N 



