Zoology as Related to Evolution. 219 



a single organ. But time with those animal antediluvians 

 was of no especial value, a million years but as a watch in 

 the night, and a small eternity but as yesterday when it was 

 passed. It was the one thing and the only thing that in 

 those days they had to do ; and it was what right in the 

 midst of their frolicking and fighting and eating each other 

 up they could go on doing just as well. And here again is 

 where Nature's economy comes in and the reason comes out 

 why the originators of man were brutes instead of higher 

 beings and why he was not set to build himself. It was as 

 brutes with brute shapes and brute tastes that they could 

 best make what is animal in man. It was protoplasm alone 

 that was plastic enough to begin with, protoplasm alone 

 that could be the flask in which life could imprison the 

 four great genii of matter. Eough claws shaped parts of 

 man grandly where fine fingers would have miserably failed. 

 And what would have been the sense of having a creature 

 with fifty ounces of brain in his skull at work generation 

 after generation on the stomach, lungs, heart, and eye just 

 to establish in them the habit of involuntary action, when a 

 ganoid fish with a pennyweight of skull-stuff, or a megalo- 

 saur reptile with all the cycles of Cathay at his command, 

 could do it vastly better ? I have a young friend, a machin- 

 ist, who keeps a few barn-yard fowls for his amusement, and 

 who, like most amateurs in that line, became fascinated one 

 year with the idea of raising young spring chickens ahead of 

 Nature by means of an incubator. So one Sunday morning, 

 disregarding the remonstrances of mother, wife, and sister, 

 he went to consult a friend in the city who already had one 

 on his hands. His friend showed him his instrument, its 

 spirit-lamps and steam-pipes and hundred eggs in their 

 compartments, and then told him how careful he had to be 

 in its management, sitting up all night to watch the ther- 

 mometer and feed the lamps and to keep everything right, 

 and then took him solemnly out into the back yard where 

 were two other sets of a hundred eggs all spoiled, one 

 because he had left the apparatus fifteen minutes in the 

 care of a small boy who had let them roast, and the other 

 because he himself had gone to sleep a moment or two the 

 twentieth night and let them chill. " Now, Joe/' said he, 

 with a melancholy air, " if you will take the benefit of my 

 experience, so long as your time as a machinist is worth 

 more than that of an old setting hen as an incubator, I 

 should advise you to stick to your lathe and let the old set- 



