THE COMING OF MAN 



THE COMING OF LIFE 



IT was very long ago, far longer than we can possibly 

 conceive. The everlasting hills were not yet born, the 

 continents hardly sketched. We may stimulate our 

 imagination to attempt the task by putting it in a somewhat 

 different form. 



Let us take a measuring rod a little more than eight feet 

 long; let every inch correspond roughly to 100,000 years. 

 The uppermost tenth of an inch representing 10,000 years 

 would cover the whole historical period, the epochs of the dis- 

 covery of metals, and overlap the New Stone Age. One inch 

 carries us far back in Palaeolithic time. Osborn places the 

 appearance of pithecaifthropus, the ape-man, at about 

 500,000 B. c, fi.ve inches from the top of our scale. ^ The be- 

 ginning of the Cenozoic period, or Age of ]Mammals, the last 

 and shortest of the gfeat geological periods, some 3,000,000 

 years, carries us down two and one-half feet. The Mesozoic 

 period, the Age of Reptiles, occupying 9,000,000 years, would 

 require ninety inches and cover nearly the whole of our rod, 

 on which all human history occupied a part of one-tenth of 

 an inch. The Palaeozoic period was, perhaps, twice as long 

 as the Mesozoic, about 18,000,000 years. 

 'This is Schuchert's reckoning, giving a total of some 



1 24:41. (i>-/ = Number in Bibliography: 4i = Page of Book.) 



H. 85. 



I 



