LIFE THE TRAVELER 



scheme of life. If the invertebrate gave rise to the 

 vertebrate, or the reptile gave rise to the bird, or 

 the lower mammals gave rise to the higher, it was 

 not because the former were unfit to survive; they 

 did survive, and still survive, but because the 

 evolutionary impulse is inherent in the first forms 

 of life, and was stimulated, rather than stamped 

 out, by the vicissitudes of time. "No statement of 

 the universe," says the wise Emerson, "can have 

 any soundness that does not admit of its ascending 

 effort." Is it thinkable that man could have arisen 

 from the manlike apes by the mere clash and fric- 

 tion of an irrational environment alone? Is one 

 man superior to another by reason of outward 

 conditions, and the discipline of life alone? Is the 

 secret of Plato or Paul or Shakespeare or Lincoln 

 in the keeping of pans and pots? Man arose from 

 his humbler ancestors because the manward im- 

 pulse, in some way beyond our ken, was inherent 

 in the evolutionary impulse. Man was potential 

 in the monkey. He might never have arrived had 

 the race of apes, or some kindred tree-living form, 

 been cut off, say in Oligocene times. But it was not 

 cut off, and here we are, and rather ashamed of our 

 forebears. One has to say that all other forms of 

 life, down to the flea and the cockroach, were also 

 potential in the life-impulse the enemies of man 

 as well as his friends. 



The three-toed woodpecker evidently gets on as 

 275 



