280 THE WORLD OF LIFE 



CHAP. 



defacement and destruction, and virtual massacre of the 

 ignorant and defenceless workers. 



The nineteenth century saw the rise, the development, 

 and the culmination of these crimes against God and man. 

 Let us hope that the twentieth century will see the rise of a 

 truer religion, a purer Christianity ; that the conscience of 

 our rulers will no longer permit a single man, woman, or 

 child to have its life shortened or destroyed by any 

 preventable cause, however profitable the present system may 

 be to their employers ; that no one shall be allowed to 

 accumulate wealth by the labour of others unless and until 

 every labourer shall have received sufficient, not only for 

 a bare subsistence, but for all the reasonable comforts and 

 enjoyments of life, including ample recreation and provision 

 for a restful and happy old age. Briefly, the support of the 

 labourers without any injury to health or shortening of life 

 should be a first charge upon the products of labour. Every 

 kind of labour that will not bear this charge is immoral and 

 is unworthy of a civilised community. 



The Teaching of the Geological Record 



But this is a digression. Let us now return to a 

 consideration of the main features of the course of life- 

 development. 



The first point to which our attention may be directed 

 is, that the necessary dependence of animal life upon 

 vegetation is the cause of some of the most prominent and 

 perhaps the most puzzling features of the early life-world 

 as presented to us by the geological record. In the 

 Palaeozoic age we already meet with a very abundant and 

 very varied aquatic life, in which all the great classes of 

 the animal kingdom sponges, zoophytes, echinoderms 

 worms, Mollusca, and vertebrates were already fully 

 differentiated from each other as we now find them, and 

 existed in considerable variety and in great numbers. It is 

 quite possible that the seas and oceans of those remote ages 

 were nearly as full of life as they are now, though the forms 

 of life were less varied and generally of a lower type. But, 

 at the same time, the animal life of the land was very scanty, 

 the only vertebrates that occupied it being a few Amphibia 



