THE EVOLUTION OK MAN 



Our wanderer would have been still more 

 surprised if he could have compared our present- 

 day maps with the road traveled by him in those 

 primeval days. Where the blue surface of the 

 Mediterranean now extends so widely that a 

 navigator cannot see the shores on either side, 

 he would have advanced over dry ground from 

 horizon to horizon through prairies inhabited 

 by giraffes and forests peopled by monkeys. And 

 where to-day the red rose of the Alps grows 

 upon dizzy heights near the grim ice of the 

 glaciers on mountain passes, there he would have 

 found nothing but wooded hills in which his 

 geologically trained eye might have discovered 

 traces of a slow but irresistible rise. And where 

 to-day the sun is sending its glowing rays down 

 upon bare mountain ranges, as in the heart of 

 France, he could have observed the horizon tinted 

 blood-red, a reflection of the boiling lava of vol- 

 canoes. 



A strange world in an immeasurably far off 

 time! 



A million years is a tremendous period of time 

 for human minds to grasp. If the history of 

 human civilization is traced by written chronicles, 

 it does not take us back beyond six thousand 

 years. One might fill entire libraries with events 



15 



