LIFE IN THE PRIMITIVE OCEAN 29 



give a confident answer. This is hardly surprising. 

 Man is at least half a million years old, but science 

 is only about two centuries old; and to expect it to 

 take a very wonderful and complex change that 

 occurred a hundred million years ago and tell us 

 confidently ' ' all about it " is to expect too much. We 

 can only speculate, and there are two chief lines of 

 speculation. 



It must be quite understood that every scientific 

 authority in the world now believes that life was 

 naturally evolved from the chemicals of the early 

 earth. Everything that we can satisfactorily study 

 was evolved. We have therefore a right to assume 

 that all things were evolved, unless such a natural 

 evolution is in any particular case shown to be impos- 

 sible. No one has ever shown that the natural evolu- 

 tion of the first living things is impossible, or even 

 improbable, so we take it for granted. That is per- 

 fectly sound logic as well as sound science. There 

 is one distinguished scientist, Professor Arrhenius, 

 who thinks that the germs of life came to us from 

 another planet. That is not only difficult to imagine, 

 but it only puts the problem on th e shelf instead of 

 solving it. Life was naturally born in the shallow 

 oceans of our early earth. 



There are many theories of how it was born, and I 

 would recommend the reader who wants to examine 

 them to try to see a valuable work by a group of 

 American professors, called The Evolution of the Earth 



