THE VOICE OF THE DESERT ^^ 



shall never know vv^hat Prometheus first dared snatch a 

 bit from some forest fire or some erupting volcano. But 

 when he put it down in the middle of the domestic circle 

 he must have said, "This I can tame and use/' 



Long before even his day, courage of some sort must 

 have been a characteristic of living things and even the 

 tamer of fire was not the first hero. Perhaps the first and 

 greatest of all was whatever little blob of jelly — not yet 

 either plant or animal but a little of both— first consented 

 to take on the responsibility of being alive at all. And 

 surely the second greatest was that plant or animal which 

 first dared leave the water where, ever since the very 

 dsLwn of creation, every other organism before it had been 

 born and died. Men are talking now about journeys to the 

 moon or to Mars, but neither is more unsuited to human 

 life than the bare earth was to the first creatures who 

 risked it. 



For millions of years only the submerged areas of the 

 earth had been habitable. It was in water that the first 

 hypothetical one-celled creatures, too insubstantial to leave 

 fossil remains, must have been generated. None ventured 

 out of it during millions of years while stony skeletons 

 were evolved and became the earliest sure evidence of 

 life in some of the oldest rocks. In water also stayed all 

 the wormlike and squidlike and shrimplike creatures 

 which represented, in their day, the highest development 

 of life. Meanwhile, during the major part of the earth's 

 history, during considerably more than half the time since 

 life began, aU dry land was desert to a degree almost in- 

 conceivable — without soil of any kind, as bare as the 

 moon, and subject to no changes except those produced 

 by geological forces. Volcanoes flowed and mountains 



