TIME AND CHANGE 



ture living in the primordial seas with no more 

 brains than a shovel-nosed shark or a gar-pike, puts 

 our scientific faith to severe test. 



Think of it. For countless ages, millions upon 

 millions of years, we see the earth swarming with 

 life, low bestial life, devouring and devoured, myri- 

 ads of forms, all in bondage to nature or natural 

 forces, living only to eat and to breed, localized, 

 dependent upon place and clime, shaped to specific 

 ends like machines, — to fly, to swim, to climb, to 

 run, to dig, to drill, to weave, to wade, to graze, to 

 crush, — knowing not what they do, as void of con- 

 scious purpose as the thorns, the stings, the hooks, 

 the coils, and the wings in the vegetable world, mak- 

 ing no impression upon the face of nature, as much 

 a part of it as the trees and the stones, species after 

 species having its day, and then passing off the 

 stage, when suddenly, in the day before yesterday in 

 the geologic year, so suddenly as to give some color 

 of truth to the special creation theory, a new and 

 strange animal appears, with new and strange pow- 

 ers, separated from the others by what appears an 

 impassable gulf, less specialized in his bodily powers 

 than the others, but vastly more specialized in his 

 brain and mental powers, instituting a new order of 

 things upon the earth, the face of which he in time 

 changes through his new gift of reason, inventing 

 tools and weapons and language, harnessing the 

 physical forces to his own ends, and putting all 



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