THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 



and smaller bodies, is a very significant fact, and 

 one quite beyond the range of the mechanistic con- 

 ception of life. 



Our own immediate line of descent leads down 

 through the minor forms of Tertiary and Mesozoic 

 times — forms that probably skulked and dodged 

 about amid the terrible and gigantic creatures of 

 those ages as the small game of to-day hide and flee 

 from the presence of their arch-enemy, man; and 

 that the frail line upon which the fate of the human 

 race hung should not have been severed during the 

 wild turmoil of those ages is, to me, a source of per- 

 petual wonder. 



Ill 



The hazards of the future of the race must be 

 quite different from those I have been considering. 

 They are the hazards incident to an exceptional 

 being upon this earth — a being that takes his fate 

 in his own hands in a sense that no other creature 

 does. 



Man has partaken of the fruit of the Tree of 

 Good and Evil, which all the lower orders have es- 

 caped. He knows, and knows that he knows. Will 

 this knowledge, through the opposition in which it 

 places him to elemental nature and the vast system 

 of artificial things with which it has enabled him to 

 surround himself, cut short his history upon this 

 planet.^ Will Nature in the end be avenged for the 

 secrets he has forced from her? His civilization has 



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