THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 



slits yet in our early foetal life, and it is quite certain 

 that in some way we owe our backbones to the fishes. 



When the rocks that form my native Catskills 

 were being laid down in the Devonian waters, I 

 fancy that my aquatic embryo was swimming about 

 somewhere and slowly waxing strong. Up and uj) I 

 climbed across the sandstone steps, across the lime- 

 stone, the conglomerate, the slate, up into Carbon- 

 iferous times. The upper and nether millstones of the 

 " millstone grit" did not crush me, neither did the 

 floods and the convulsions of Carboniferous times 

 that buried the vast vegetable growths that re- 

 sulted in our coal measures engulf or destroy me. 

 About that time probably, I emerged from the water 

 and became an amphibian, and maybe got my five 

 fingers and five toes on each side. 



Nor did the wholesale destruction of animal life 

 at the end of Palaeozoic time cut off my line of de- 

 scent. The monstrous reptiles of the succeeding or 

 Mesozoic age, the petrified remains of one of which 

 was recently found in the sandstone rocks near the 

 river's edge under the Palisades of the Hudson, do 

 not seem to have endangered the golden thread by 

 which our fate hung. Still '*I mount and mount." 

 The stairs by which I climb were rent by earth- 

 quakes and volcanoes, the strata were squeezed up 

 and overturned and folded in the great mountain- 

 chains; the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, the 

 Coast Range were born; the earth- throes must have 



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