TIME AND CHANGE 



lower to the higher, from the simple to the more 

 complex, and always slowly, gently. 



Life has had its foetal stage, its stage of infancy, 

 and childhood, and maturity, and will doubtless 

 have its old age. It took it millions upon millions of 

 years to get out of the sea upon dry land; and it 

 took it more millions upon dry land, or since the 

 Carboniferous age, when the air probably first be- 

 gan to be breathable, — all the vast stretch of the 

 Secondary and Tertiary ages, — to get upright and 

 develop a reasoning brain, and reach the estate of 

 man. Step by step, in orderly succession, does crea- 

 tion move. In the rising and in the setting of the 

 sun one may see how nature's great processes steal 

 upon us, silently and unnoticed, yet alwaj^s in 

 sequence, stage succeeding stage, one thing following 

 from another, the spectacular moment of sunset fol- 

 lowing inevitably from the quiet, unnoticed sinking 

 of the sun in the west, or the startling flash of his 

 rim above the eastern horizon only the fulfillment of 

 the promise of the dawn. All is development and 

 succession, and man is but the sunrise of the dawn 

 of life in Cambrian or Silurian times, and is linked to 

 that time as one hour of the day is linked to another. 



The more complex life became, the more rapidly 

 it seems to have developed, till it finally makes 

 rapid strides to reach man. One seems to see Life, 

 like a traveler on the road, going faster and faster 

 as it nears its goal. Those long ages of unicellular 



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