TIME AND CHANGE 



and death of a man, but in doing so they reckon 

 with periods of time for which we have no standards 

 of measurement. They walk and talk with the 

 Eternal. To us the mountains seem as fixed as the 

 stars. But the stars, too, are flitting. Look at Orion 

 some millions of years hence, and he will have been 

 torn limb from limb. The combination of stars that 

 forms that striking constellation and all other con- 

 stellations is temporary as the grouping of the clouds. 

 The rise of man from the lower orders implies a scale 

 of time almost as great. It is unintelligible to us be- 

 cause it belongs to a category of facts that tran- 

 scends our experience and the experience of the race 

 as the interstellar spaces transcend our earthly meas- 

 urements. 



We now gaze upon the order below us across an 

 impassable gulf, but that gulf we have crossed and 

 without any supernatural means of transportation. 

 We may say it has been bridged or filled with the 

 humble ancestral forms that carried forward the 

 precious evolutionary impulse of the vertebrate 

 series till it culminated in man. All vestiges of that 

 living bridge are now gone, and the legend of our 

 crossing seems like a dream or a miracle. Biological 

 evolution has gone hand in hand with geological 

 evolution, and both are on a scale of time of which 

 our hour-glass of the centuries gives us but a faint 

 hint. Our notions of time are not formed on the 

 pattern of the cosmic processes, or the geologic 



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