TIME AND CHANGE 
law of steady increase in size has been operative, 
as seen in the Felid@, the stag, and the antelope. 
Man himself has, no doubt, been under the same 
law, and is probably a much larger animal than any 
of his Tertiary ancestors. In the vegetable world 
this process, in many cases, at least, has been re- 
versed, and the huge treelike club-mosses and horse- 
tails of Carboniferous times have dwindled in our 
time to very insignificant herbaceous forms. 
Animals of overweening size are handicapped in 
many ways, so that nature in most cases finally 
abandons the gigantic and sticks to the medium 
and the small. 
1m 
Can we fail to see the significance of the order in 
which life has appeared upon the globe — the as- 
cending series from the simple to the more and more 
complex? Can we doubt that each series is the out- 
come’ of the one below it — that there is a logical 
sequence from the protozoa up through the inver- 
tebrates, the vertebrates, to man? Is it not like all 
that we know of the method of nature? Could we 
substitute the life of one period for that of another 
without doing obvious violence to the logic of na- 
ture? Is there no fundamental reason for the gra- 
dation we behold? 
All animal life lowest in organization is earliest in 
time, and vice versa, the different classes of a sub- 
kingdom, and the different orders of a class, suc- 
18 
