GREAT STEPS IN EVOLUTION 69 



skulls, a series of weapons a series of every- 

 thing that has evolved. 



Similarly, yio one can adequately appre- 

 ciate a fully-formed creature, whether an 

 oak tree or the bird on its branches, a frog 

 or an eel, a butterfly or a starfish, who does 

 not know the stages of its individual develop- 

 ment, from the apparent simplicity of the 

 fertilized egg-cell onwards. Looking down 

 from the summit of a pass which it has taken 

 us all day to reach, we see the village in 

 the valley from which we started at day- 

 break, and it seems like a great stone's -ihrow 

 off. The dips and ascents, turns and twists, 

 of our path are all lost to sight; only those 

 who have walked over it know what the 

 climb has really been. So it is with a retro- 

 spect on evolution^ 



It is an easy thing- for us to say that the 

 world of life we see around us to-day has 

 evolved ; with equal ease our grandparents 

 said that it had been created. But it is 

 incumbent on the able-minded to give to this 

 doctrine of descent a solid body of fact, so 

 that they may realize something of the 

 grandeur and, let us add, of the difficulty of 

 the proposition. In other volumes of this 

 series the student will be helped to fill in 

 some of the details of the evolution chart, 



