^9 ^® ^°^ there before Coronado 



Is it possible, one may ask, to guess at the identity of 

 the first great pioneer and radical who came to dry land? 

 Or is it, like the song the Sirens sang, "beyond all con- 

 jecture?" Does he have a name and can we honor liim 

 by saying, "But for you and your enterprise I might still 

 be a fish?" At least our own direct amphibious ancestors 

 came to land only because that pioneer's descendants were 

 there to be eaten! 



Well, if the paleontologists are right — and their evi- 

 dence seems pretty good — we can answer this question. 

 As a matter of fact, I met only the day before yesterday 

 one of the almost unchanged relatives of the first air- 

 breathing creatures, and he did not seem especially proud. 

 He crawled on eight legs out from under a board in my 

 storeroom and I confess that, though I do not do such 

 things lightly, I put my foot upon him. Before he was 

 crushed into nothing he was about two inches long and 

 pale straw in color. He carried two pinchers before him 

 and over his back he carried a long tail with a sting at 

 its end. He was, in short, one of the least popular of desert 

 dwellers — a scorpion. 



Finding out about one's ancestors, especially correlative 

 ones, is often a risky business and perhaps most people 

 would rather not know how much all of us are indebted 

 to this rather unattractive creature. But so far as geolo- 

 gists can tell from the fossils they study and date, the 

 first animal actually capable of breathing air was not only 

 a member of the scorpion kind but amazingly like the one 

 we step on when we find him. 



To even the most uninstructed eye a scorpion fossilized 

 during the Silurian or Devonian epoch — say something 

 like three hundred million years ago — is unmistakably a 



