TIME AND CHANGE 



thwartings and accidents and delays could have cut 

 man off, how could he have escaped? We cannot 

 think of man as one; we are compelled to think of 

 him as many; and yet in all our experience the many 

 come from the one, or the one pair. 



How thick the field of animal life in the past is 

 strewn with extinct forms ! — as thick as the sidereal 

 spaces are strewn with the fragments of wrecked 

 worlds ! But other worlds and suns are spun out of 

 the wrecked worlds and suns through the process of 

 cosmic evolution. The world-stuff is worked over 

 and over. Extinct animal forms must have given 

 rise to other, allied forms before they perished, and 

 these to still others, and so on down to our time. 



The image of a tree is misleading from the fact 

 that all the different branches of the animal king- 

 dom, from the protozoa up to man, have come along 

 with what we call the higher branches, the mam- 

 mals ; the suckers have kept pace with the main stalk, 

 so that we have the image of a sheaf of branches 

 starting from a common origin and all of equal 

 length. Man has brought on his relations along with 

 him. 



There is no glamour of romance over that past. 

 It was all hard, prosy, terrible fact. The earth's 

 crust was less stable than now, the upheavals and 

 subsidences and earthquakes more frequent, the 

 warring of the elements more fierce and incessant, 

 deluge and inundation in more rapid succession, and 



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