CHAPTER XI 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



Let us glance back for a moment at the course of our 

 story. During the first half of it, which we crushed 

 into a few pages, life had not got beyond the stage 

 of the worm, the shell-fish, and the star-fish. Twenty, 

 if not fifty, million years were used up in this poor 

 advance. Let us, for the sake of being clear, give a 

 definite number of years to the story of life — say, 

 fifty million years, though it was probably much more. 

 On that scale it took thirty million years for life to rise 

 to the level of the fern, the beetle, and the fish. Seven 

 or eight million years later life had advanced as far 

 as the first reptile. 



Then a great Ice Age occurred, and the primitive 

 birds and mammals appeared. But there was a 

 reaction, and for seven or eight further million years 

 the reptile was the lord of the earth, and the mammal 

 Made hardly any progress. Forty-five million years 

 out of the fifty million were over when the mammals 

 began to spread. Four out of the five remaining 

 million years were over before the very lowly and 

 primitive thing that we can just call man came on 



the scene. 



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