TIME AND CHANGE 
is easy to believe that the baby is born of woman, 
because it is a matter of daily experience, but it is 
not easy to believe that man is born of the animal 
world below him, and that that is born of inorganic 
Nature, because the fact is too big and tremendous. 
What we call Nature works in no other way; one 
law is over big and little alike. What Nature does 
in a day typifies what she does in an eternity. It is 
when we reach the things done on such an enormous 
scale of time and power and size that we are helpless. 
The almost infinitely slow transformations that the 
theory of evolution demands balk us as do the size 
and distance of the fixed stars. 
No observation or study of evolution on a small 
scale and near at hand in the familiar facts of the 
life about us can prepare us for it, any more than lake 
and river can prepare us for the ocean, or the model- 
ing of miniature valleys and mountains by the rain 
in the clay bank can open our minds to receive the 
tremendous facts of the carving of the face of the 
continent by the same agents. 
We do not see evolution working in one day, or in 
a century, or in many centuries. Neither do we 
catch the gods of erosion at their Herculean tasks. 
They always seem to be having a holiday, or else to 
be merely toying with their work. 
When we see a mound of earth or a bank of clay 
worn into miniature mountain-chains and cafions 
and gulches by the rains of a season, we do not 
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