TIME AND CHANGE 



leather." "Give us time," say the dews and the 

 rains and the snowflakes, "and we will make you 

 a garden out of those same stubborn rocks and 

 frowning ledges." "Give us time," says Life, start- 

 ing with her protozoans in the old Cambrian seas, 

 "and I w^ill not stop till I have peopled the earth 

 with myriad forms and crowned them all with 

 man." 



Dana thinks that had "a man been living during 

 the changes that produced the coal, he would not 

 have suspected their progress," so slow and quiet 

 were they. It is probable that parts of our own sea- 

 coast are sinking and other parts rising as rapidly as 

 the oscillation of the land and sea went on that re- 

 sulted in the laying down of the coal measures. 



An eternity to man is but a day in the cosmic pro- 

 cess. In the face of geologic time, man's appearance 

 upon the earth as man, with a written history, is 

 something that has just happened; it was in this 

 morning's paper, we read of it at breakfast. As 

 evolution goes, it will not be old news yet for a hun- 

 dred thousand years or so, and by that time, what 

 will he have done, if he goes on at his present rate 

 of accelerated speed? Probably he will not have 

 caught the gods of evolution at their work, or wit- 

 nessed the origin of species by natural descent, these 

 things are too slow for him; but he will certainly 

 have found out many things that we are all eager 

 to know. 



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