3i8 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP 



analyse himself and recreant enough to pick their 

 bones might come into the world. 



There are supposed to be something like a 

 million (maybe there are several million) species 

 of inhabitants living on the earth. The human 

 species is one of these. Not more than a few 

 thousand of these species are seriously advan- 

 tageous to men. The harmful and useless species 

 are many times more numerous than the helpful. 

 Now, if the 999,999 non-human species were made 

 for the human species, why were the hundreds of 

 thousands of species made that are of no possible 

 human importance, and the hundreds of thousands 

 of other species that are a positive injury ? And 

 if by some miraculous stretch of imagination the 

 999,999 species now living on the earth are con- 

 ceived to have been made for man, why were the 

 10,000,000 or 15,000,000 of species made that lived 

 and passed away before there was a human being 

 in existence. Perhaps the traditionist will say — 

 accustomed as he is to treat syllogisms with con- 

 tempt — that they were made to invigorate human 

 ' faith.' 



If the age of the human species be estimated at 

 50,000 years and the age of the life-process at 

 100,000,000 years, the time during which man 

 has been on the earth is, when compared with 

 the entire period during which the planet has 

 been tenanted, as i to 2,000. And the time 

 during which the earth has been inhabited — 

 immense as that time is when compared with the 

 little span of human history — is also insignificant 



