LEAF AND TENDRIL 



IV 



What a burden science took upon itself when it 

 sought to explain the origin of man! Religion or 

 theology takes a short cut and makes quick work 

 of it by regarding man as the result of the special 

 creative act of a supernatural Being. But science 

 takes a long and tedious and hazardous way 

 around through the lowest primordial forms of life. 

 It seeks to trace his germ through the abyss of 

 geologic time, where all is dim and mysterious, 

 through countless cycles of waiting and prepara- 

 tion, where the slow, patient gods of evolution 

 cherished it and passed it on, through the fetid 

 carbon, through the birth and decay of continents, 

 through countless interchanges and readjustments 

 of sea and land, through the clash and warring of 

 the cosmic forces, through good and evil report, 

 through the fish and the reptile, through the ape 

 and the orang, up to man — from the slime at the 

 bottom of the primordial ocean up to Jesus of Naz- 

 areth. Surely one may say with Whitman, — 



"Immense have been the preparations for me. 

 Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me." 



It took about one hundred thousand feet of sed- 

 imentary rock, laid down through hundreds of 

 millions of years in the bottom of the old seas, all 

 probably the leavings of minute forms of life, to 

 make a foundation upon which man could appear. 

 226 



