GREAT STEPS IN ORGANIC EVOLUTION 897 



relative, for we believe that none is yet known; the point is that 

 Polypterus and Calamoichthys are the sole survivors to-day of the 

 Crossopter3^gians of the Old Red Sandstone that roused Hugh 

 Miller's enthusiasm many years ago. 



What veneration we have for an old picture painted a few hundred 

 years ago, for an old stone weapon fashioned a few thousand years 

 ago, for a Piltdown skull grown a few hundreds of thousands of 

 years ago, for the fossil remains of the first-known bird (Archaeop- 

 teryx) entombed a few millions of years ago ! Yet what modernities 

 these are compared with types that emerged in Silurian or even 

 Devonian ages. An eminent authority writes: "No geologist to-day 

 thinks that the evolution of the earth and its life could have taken 

 place in less than 100 million years. My own view, as a student of 

 Historical Geology, is that geologic time endured about 800 million 

 years." It is dramatic to add the date of this conclusion of Prof. 

 Schuchert's: it is 1918, so we see Anno Domini against a stupendous 

 background of ages i And however much we may distrust geological 

 estimates of age — if we are competent to distrust them — ^we must 

 keep in mind that — if we sum up, as geologists sometimes do, aU 

 the subsequent strata as if superposed and undenuded, and so 

 surviving— then, before we could dig back to the most recent 

 Palaeozoic rocks — that is, to the ages of fish dominance — we should 

 have to get through some twenty miles of sedimentary rocks, the 

 making of which means some time. And then to get back to the 

 beginning of the Palaeozoic rocks — that is, to the ages when back- 

 boneless animals, like Trilobites, crowned creation — ^we should have 

 to get through another thirty miles of sandstones, mudstones, and 

 limestones. 



Everything is an antiquity; and we can, if we like, trace our long 

 pedigree back to the primitive Protists of the primeval sea. But 

 the humanoid race did not emerge, separating itself, so to speak, 

 from the anthropoid, till, say, between one and two million years 

 ago. "Microcosms," Plato called us, because we incorporate all 

 creation — a profoundly true idea — ^but while our being includes 

 strands that were first spun unnumbered millions of years ago, the 

 weaving of the web that began to approach Man was an achieve- 

 ment less unthinkably remote. It has been pointed out that if one 

 could arrange a great cinema-film of Organic Evolution, giving 

 proportionate time to the successive geological periods, with their 

 characteristic steps of progress — such as fish to frog, and reptile to 

 mammal — and if we began the solemn march of events about one 

 o'clock in the afternoon, allowing ten million years to the hour, it 

 would require a good deal of speeding up to get to the advent of 

 man by closing-time, say at about five minutes before midnight. 

 (Some would say one minute, but we need not thus quarrel over 

 millions!) Our point, however, is to make a distinction between the 



VOL. II M 



