TIME AND CHANGE 
leather.” ‘Give us time,” say the dews and the 
rains and the snowflakes, ‘‘and we will make you 
a garden out of those same stubborn rocks and 
frowning ledges.” “Give us time,” says Life, start- 
ing with her protozoans in the old Cambrian seas, 
“and I will not stop till I have peopled the earth 
with myriad forms and crowned them all with 
man.” 
Dana thinks that had “‘a man been living during 
the changes that produced the coal, he would not 
have suspected their progress,” so slow and quiet 
were they. It is probable that parts of our own sea- 
coast are sinking and other parts rising as rapidly as 
the oscillation of the land and sea went on that re- 
sulted in the laying down of the coal measures. 
An eternity to man is but a day in the cosmic pro- 
cess. In the face of geologic time, man’s appearance 
upon the earth as man, with a written history, is 
something that has just happened; it was in this 
morning’s paper, we read of it at breakfast. As 
evolution goes, it will not be old news yet for a hun- 
dred thousand years or so, and by that time, what 
will he have done, if he goes on at his present rate 
of accelerated speed? Probably he will not have 
caught the gods of evolution at their work, or wit- 
nessed the origin of species by natural descent, these 
things are too slow for him; but he will certainly 
have found out many things that we are all eager 
to know. 
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