THE LONG ROAD 



life in the old seas, how immense they appear to have 

 been; then how the age of invertebrates dragged 

 on, millions upon millions of years; then the age of 

 fishes; the Palaeozoic age, how vast — put by 

 Haeckel at thirty-four millions of years, adding 

 rock strata forty-one thousand feet thick ; then the 

 Mesozoic or third period, the age of reptiles, eleven 

 million years, with strata twelve thousand feet thick. 

 Then came the Csenozoic age, or age of mammals, 

 three million years, with strata thirty -one hundred 

 feet thick. The god of life was getting in a hurry 

 now; man was not far off. A new device, the pla- 

 centa, was hit upon in this age, and probably the 

 diaphragm and the brain of animals, all greatly en- 

 larged. Finally comes the Anthropozoic or Quater- 

 nary age, the age of man, three hundred thousand 

 years, with not much addition to the sedimentary 

 rocks. 



Man seems to be the net result of it all, of all these 

 vast cycles of Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Csenozoic 

 life. He is the one drop finally distilled from the 

 vast weltering sea of lower organic forms. It looks 

 as if it all had to be before he could be — all the 

 delay and waste and struggle and pain — all that 

 long carnival of sea life, all that saturnalia of gigan- 

 tic forms upon the land and in the air, all that rising 

 and sinking of the continents, and all that shovel- 

 ing to and fro and mixing of the soils, before the 

 world was ready for him. 



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