THE LONG ROAD 
with another order of senses — a finer sight, a finer 
touch, wrought in him by the discipline of life, and 
the wonder of the world about him, beginning de 
novo in him only as the wing began de novo in the 
bird, or the color began de novo in the flower — 
struck out from preéxisting potentialities. The fa- 
ther of the eye is the light, and the father of the ear 
is the vibration of the air, but the father of man’s 
higher nature is a question of quite another sort. 
About the only thing in his physical make-up that 
man can call his own is his chin. None of the orders 
below him seem to have what can strictly be called 
a chin. 
Man owes his five toes and five fingers to the 
early amphibians of the sub-carboniferous times. 
The first tangible evidence of these five toes upon 
the earth is, to me, very interesting. The earliest 
record of them that I have heard of is furnished 
by a slab of shale from Pennsylvania, upon which, 
while it was yet soft mud, our first five-toed ances- 
tor had left the imprint of his four feet. He was evi- 
dently a small, short-legged gentleman with a stride 
of only about thirteen inches, and he carried a tail 
instead of a cane. He was probably taking a stroll 
upon the shores of that vast Mediterranean Sea that 
occupied all the interior of the continent when he 
crossed his mud flat. It was raining that morning — 
how many million years ago? — as we know from the 
imprint of the raindrops upon the mud. Probably 
31 
