CHAPTER VI 

 THE TREND OF EVOLUTION 1 



EDWIN GRANT CONKLIN 



PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 



If in the manner of the Olympian gods we mortals could 

 have viewed from some exalted place the grandest drama 

 which has ever unfolded itself on this planet, namely, the 

 origin and evolution of life, and if in the manner of the modern 

 "movie" we could have seen this drama speeded up so as to 

 bring the whole of it within the sight and experience of any 

 one person, with what surprise should we have watched the 

 marvelous appearances and transformations which at almost 

 every step have marked its progress, and how utterly impos- 

 sible it would have been to have predicted its future course or 

 from its small and weak beginnings to have foreseen its mag- 

 nificent developments, its tragic failures, its stupendous suc- 

 cesses ! What merely human intellect could have foreseen in 

 those earliest protoplasmic particles "the promise and potency 

 of all life," the million species of animals and plants, the 

 monsters of the deep, the giant saurians, the mighty beasts, 

 and finally man? Who could have predicted the marvelous 

 adaptations for nutrition, locomotion, offense and defense, 

 reproduction, sensation, and coordination? Who could have 

 foretold from the earliest reactions of this primeval proto- 

 plasm the complicated and subtle behavior of plants and ani- 

 mals and men? Who could have foreseen in these reaction; 



1 A portion of this chapter appeared in the Yale Review for July, 1922. 



