THE LONG ROAD 
life in the old seas, how immense they appear to have 
been; then how the age of invertebrates dragged 
on, millions upon millions of years; then the age’ of 
fishes; the Palsozoic age, how vast — put by 
Haeckel at thirty-four millions of years, adding 
rock strata forty-one thousand feet thick; then the 
Mesozoic or third period, the age of reptiles, eleven 
million years, with strata twelve thousand feet thick. 
Then came the Cenozoic age, or age of mammals, 
three million years, with strata thirty-one hundred 
feet thick. The god of life was getting in a hurry 
now; man was not far off. A new device, the pla- 
centa, was hit upon in this age, and probably the 
diaphragm and the brain of animals, all greatly en- 
larged. Finally comes the Anthropozoic or Quater- 
nary age, the age of man, three hundred thousand 
years, with not much addition to the sedimentary 
rocks. 
Man seems to be the net result of it all, of all these 
vast cycles of Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Czenozoic 
life. He is the one drop finally distilled from the 
vast weltering sea of lower organic forms. It looks 
as if it all had to be before he could be — all the 
delay and waste and struggle and pain — all that 
long carnival of sea life, all that saturnalia of gigan- 
tic forms upon the land and in the air, all that rising 
and sinking of the continents, and all that shovel- 
ing to and fro and mixing of the soils, before the 
world was ready for him. 
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