TIME AND CHANGE 



time of Hadrian with the people of those countries 

 to-day. 



We are prone to speak of man's emergence from 

 the lower orders as if it were a simple thing, almost 

 like the going from one country into another. But 

 try to think what it means; try to think of the slow 

 transformation, of the long, toilsome road even 

 from the halfway house of our simian ancestors. 

 If we do not give him the benefit of the sudden 

 mutation theory of the origin of species, then think 

 of the slow process, hair by hair, as it were, by which 

 a tailed, apelike arboreal animal was transformed 

 into a hairless, tailless, erect, tool-using, fire-using, 

 speech-forming animal. We see in our own day in 

 the case of the African negro, that centuries of our 

 Northern climate have hardly any appreciable effect 

 toward making a white man of him; nor, on the other 

 hand, has exposure to the tropical sun had much 

 more effect in making a negro of the white man. 

 Probably it would take ten thousand years or more 

 of these conditions to bleach the pigments out of the 

 one skin and put them in the other. There is con- 

 vincing proof from painting and figures found in 

 Egypt that neither the African negro nor the 

 Egj^ptian has changed in features in five thousand 

 years. 



The most marvelous thing about man's evolu- 

 tion is the inborn upward impulse in some one low 

 organism that rested not till it reached its goal in 



190 



