THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



76 



between the scorpion and man himself the distance is not 

 nearly so great as it is between the scorpion and anything 

 which does not live at all. The difference between seeing, 

 no matter how dimly, and not seeing at all is greater than 

 the difference between the scorpion's vision and ours. It is 

 easier to imagine how, given time enough, a scorpion 

 could become a man than it is to imagine how sea water 

 and mineral substances could have become a scorpion. 

 Primitive as his eye is, it is indubitably an eye. Its ov^nier 

 can see with it — however dimly. And seeing itself is a 

 process beyond comprehension. It involves awareness of 

 some sort. Perhaps the difference between the scorpion's 

 courage and what is possible for us is no greater than that 

 between his eyesight and ours. Yet who would refuse to 

 use the word "seeing" to describe what even a scorpion 

 can do? Why should we not assume that his courage and 

 ours are no less essentially, though remotely, the same? 



Granting all this it is, however, stiU possible to wonder 

 why this once so adventurous creature became so soon a 

 very paragon of conservatism. As the first air-breather he 

 may very well have been the remote ancestor of all the in- 

 sects who were to proceed from originality to originality 

 until they became capable of achievements which even 

 man cannot wholly grasp. But this prototype of the insect 

 himself continues to crawl upon the desert and to poison 

 human beings with his ancient venom milhons of years 

 after almost all the other creatures which were even his 

 near contemporaries gave up their effort to survive in 

 their original forais. Like the horseshoe crab and the 

 gingko tree, he should have become extinct eons ago. But 

 he has changed even less than they and become one of the 

 most striking examples not of evolution but of a refusal to 



