292 The Morality of Nature 



Now the newest revelations of modern wisdom tend to make 

 emphatic repetion of this old truth in its most extreme 

 form as a Hteral fact. 



In order to understand the scheme of the world evolu- 

 tion a thinker must get an emancipation from the day and 

 year and century and epoch in which he lives, and review 

 time as a ground or matrix in whose infinity a period of 

 great length and a period of small length are alike infinitely 

 little.* 



The time of geological record taxes the comprehension. 

 In a serial list of the species of life which have been found 

 in fossils preserved in the earth, man appears only as the 

 occupant of a single period in a single recent group. His 

 period of presence is so small comparatively, that varying 

 phases of it are ignored, and below him are ranged, in space 

 many times the size of his space, a series of many hundreds 

 or preceding species of animals and plants. These fossil 

 remains all lie in the earth in their order, so that the older 

 beds of earth have older and simpler forms of animals ; that 

 is to say the beds of earth which must have preceded new 

 beds, because they lie underneath, and because they contain 

 the material out which new beds were evidently made; also 

 contain the animals out of which the newer animals were 

 made. The more simple in evolution lie beneath and the 

 more complex above. 



The facts of evolution are accessible, and they are too 

 important and too amazing to be carried in a mere sum- 



* Recent estimates of the age of the existing archaean rock structure 

 of the earth place it at fourteen hundred million years, and the dura- 

 tion of life at eight hundred million years; and the age of mammals 

 at sixty-five million years. 



