TIME AND CHANGE 
and death of a man, but in doing so they reckon 
with periods of time for which we have no standards 
of measurement. They walk and talk with the 
Eternal. To us the mountains seem as fixed as the 
stars. But the stars, too, are flitting. Look at Orion 
some millions of years hence, and he will have been 
torn limb from limb. The combination of stars that 
forms that striking constellation and all other con- 
stellations is temporary asthe grouping of theclouds. 
The rise of man from the lower orders implies a scale 
of time almost as great. It is unintelligible to us be- 
cause it belongs to a category of facts that tran- 
scends our experience and the experience of the race 
astheinterstellar spaces transcend our earthly meas- 
urements. 
We now gaze upon the order below us across an 
impassable gulf, but that gulf we have crossed and 
without any supernatural means of transportation. 
We may say it has been bridged or filled with the 
humble ancestral forms that carried forward the 
precious evolutionary impulse of the vertebrate 
series till it culminated in man. All vestiges of that 
living bridge are now gone, and the legend of our 
crossing seems like a dream or a miracle. Biological 
evolution has gone hand in hand with geological 
evolution, and both are on a scale of time of which 
our hour-glass of the centuries gives us but a faint 
hint. Our notions of time are not formed on the 
pattern of the cosmic processes, or the geologic 
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