TIME AND CHANGE 
ture living in the primordial seas with no more 
brains than a shovel-nosed shark or a gar-pike, puts 
our scientific faith to severe test. 
Think of it. For countless ages, millions upon 
millions of years, we see the earth swarming with 
life, low bestial life, devouring and devoured, myri- 
ads of forms, all in bondage to nature or natural 
forces, living only to eat and to breed, localized, 
dependent upon place and clime, shaped to specific 
ends like machines, — to fly, to swim, to climb, to 
run, to dig, to drill, to weave, to wade, to graze, to 
crush, — knowing not what they do, as void of con- 
scious purpose as the thorns, the stings, the hooks, 
the coils, and the wings in the vegetable world, mak- 
ing no impression upon the face of nature, as much 
a part of it as the trees and the stones, species after 
species having its day, and then passing off the 
stage, when suddenly, in the day before yesterday in 
the geologic year, so suddenly as to give some color 
of truth to the special creation theory, a new and 
strange animal appears, with new and strange pow- 
ers, separated from the others by what appears an 
impassable gulf, less specialized in his bodily powers 
than the others, but vastly more specialized in his 
brain and mental powers, instituting a new order of 
things upon the earth, the face of which he in time 
changes through his new gift of reason, inventing 
tools and weapons and language, harnessing the 
physical forces to his own ends, and putting all 
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