Time and the Geological Record 291 



time, when something is to be done, because our time is 

 limited; but all things done in evolution, are done without 

 prevision or regard for the next deed, or the next need, 

 or the time for it. Each cause does its own work, and no 

 day is considered, and no morrow is provided for, and no 

 future is foreseen. There is a common error in the suppo- 

 sition that by evolution, nature in one age prepares for the 

 next. No bit of evolution ever appeared except to meet 

 already existing circumstances. In this there is no anticipa- 

 tion. To produce a white or a black man was no part of 

 nature's scheme until those colors arose in the circumstances 

 which made those colors beneficial. A man is black today, 

 not because it is now best for him, but because in the past 

 it has been good for him. 



Now if these details of color and so on are the work of 

 ages, enduring hundreds of thousands of years; how long 

 has it taken to settle, in each slow changing type, the bone 

 structure, the muscle plan, the digestive organs, the skin 

 and the hair coverings of man. We may fairly say it must 

 have been many hundred times as long. 



The chief obstacle to a clear conception of evolution is 

 the misunderstanding of time. The human mind in ordinary 

 habit measures time by a scale so small that it is incapable 

 of expressing the periods in which evolution works. It is 

 as if an ant should describe the Atlantic in terms of its own 

 foot lengths. The Mundane Era of seven or eight thousand 

 years is a mere foot length of the geological. Wise men 

 have said in many languages, that a thousand years are but 

 as yesterday, in the work of creation, and we all repeat it 

 with poetic concession, while we let its meaning slip awaj. 



