TIME AND CHANGE 



to-day? Much less can one picture to one's self 

 what his ancestor was like in the age of the inverte- 

 brates, amid the trilobites, etc., of the earlier Palaeo- 

 zoic seas. But we must go back even earlier than 

 that, back to unicellular life and to original proto- 

 plasm, and finally back to fiery nebulous matter. 

 What can we make of it all by way of concrete 

 conception of what actually took place — of the 

 visible, eating, warring, breeding animal forms in 

 whose safekeeping our heritage lay? Nothing. We 

 are not merely at sea, we are in abysmal depths, 

 and the darkness is so thick we can cut it. 



We meet the same difficulty when we try to figure 

 to ourselves the line of descent of any of the animal 

 forms of to-day. How did they escape the world- 

 wild catastrophe of earlier geologic times? Or did 

 the creative impulse bank upon life as a whole and 

 never become bankrupt, no matter what special 

 lines or forms failed? 



The first appearance of the primates is in Eocene 

 times and the anthropoid apes in the Miocene, 

 probably five millions of years ago. The form which 

 may have been in our line of descent, the Dryopithe- 

 cuSy later appears to have become extinct. Did our 

 fate hang upon the success of any of these forms? 

 The monkeys and anthropoid apes appeared at the 

 same time in different countries. Nature seems to 

 have been making preliminary studies of man in 

 these various forms, but when and where she hit 



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