THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE 



peculiarity of the bacillus. The oak always 

 goes through our winter cold, a frog can be 

 frozen up in a block of ice without dying. A 

 marmot develops no further in spite of its win- 

 ter sleep. When, however, the earth sinks more 

 and more into the ice of what use shall even this 

 gift be in the end. First the higher forms of 

 life will disappear, the higher organisms will 

 transform themselves again by adjustment into 

 the lower ones, the artificial cell states will final- 

 ly be dissolved once more into loose swarms of 

 bacteria. The butterfly pines away again to 

 the primitive insect and becomes a glacier fly 

 such as today inhabits the Alpine ice fields and 

 the eternal glaciers of the South polar land. 

 Soon there would remain only red patches* of 

 small algae hanging on the edges of the ice and 

 at last even the toughest bacteria would sink in- 

 to eternal spore sleep. So the earth would lose 

 its life at last in the icy world space. Perhaps 

 it would be sown on some other warmer star. 

 Upon the earth itself it might never awake. 



But this time it did not proceed so far, these 

 glaciers did not cover the earth. They only 

 drove the life into the Southern Zones pressing 

 the temperate zones together and gradually nar- 

 rowing a great portion of the field of life. The 

 melted water ran. This ice must some day be 



*The appearance known as red snow is due to the presence 

 of an alga of the class Chlorophyceae. — Trans. 



147 



