TIME AND CHANGE 
to-day? Much less can one picture to one’s self 
what his ancestor was like in the age of the inverte- 
brates, amid the trilobites, etc., of the earlier Palzeo- 
zoic seas. But we must go back even earlier than 
that, back to unicellular life and to original proto- 
plasm, and finally back to fiery nebulous matter. 
What can we make of it all by way of concrete 
conception of what actually took place — of the 
’ visible, eating, warring, breeding animal forms in 
whose safekeeping our heritage lay? Nothing. We 
are not merely at sea, we are in abysmal depths, 
and the darkness is so thick we can cut it. 
We meet the same difficulty when we try to figure 
to ourselves the line of descent of any of the animal 
forms of to-day. How did they escape the world- 
wild catastrophe of earlier geologic times? Or did 
the creative impulse bank upon life as a whole and 
never become bankrupt, no matter what special 
lines or forms failed? 
The first appearance of the primates is in Eocene 
times and the anthropoid apes in the Miocene, 
probably five millions of years ago. The form which 
may have been in our line of descent, the Dryopithe- 
cus, later appears to have become extinct. Did our 
fate hang upon the success of any of these forms? 
The monkeys and anthropoid apes appeared at the 
same time in different countries. Nature seems to 
have been making preliminary studies of man in 
these various forms, but when and where she hit 
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