TIME AND CHANGE 



THE LONG ROAD 



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THE long road I have in mind is the long road of 

 evolution, — the road you and I have traveled 

 in the guise of humbler organisms, from the first uni- 

 cellular life in the old Cambrian seas to the complex 

 and highly specialized creature that rules supreme in 

 the animal kingdom to-day. Surely a long journey, 

 stretching through immeasurable epochs of geologic 

 time, and attended by vicissitudes of which we can 

 form but feeble conceptions. 



The majority of readers, I fancy, are not yet ready 

 to admit that they, or any of their forebears, have 

 ever made such a journey. We have all long been 

 taught that our race was started upon its career only 

 a few thousand years ago, started, not amid the war- 

 rings of savage elemental nature, but in a pleasant 

 garden with everything needed close at hand. This 

 belief has faded a good deal in our time, especially 

 among thoughtful persons; but in a modified form, 

 as the special creation theory, it held sway in the 

 minds of the older naturalists like Agassiz and Daw- 



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