THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 
slits yet in our early foetal life, and it is quite certain 
that in some way weowe our backbones to the fishes. 
When the rocks that form my native Catskills 
were being laid down in the Devonian waters, I 
fancy that my aquatic embryo was swimming about 
somewhere and slowly waxing strong. Up and up I 
climbed across the sandstone steps, across the lime- 
stone, the conglomerate, the slate, up into Carbon- 
iferous times. The upper and nether millstones of the 
“ millstone grit”’ did not crush me, neither did the 
floods and the convulsions of Carboniferous times 
that buried the vast vegetable growths that re- 
sulted in our coal measures engulf or destroy me. 
About that time probably, I emerged from the water 
and became an amphibian, and maybe got my five 
fingers and five toes on each side. 
Nor did the wholesale destruction of animal life 
at the end of Palseozoic time cut off my line of de- 
scent. The monstrous reptiles of the succeeding or 
Mesozoic age, the petrified remains of one of which 
was recently found in the sandstone rocks near the 
_Tiver’s edge under the Palisades of the Hudson, do 
not seem to have endangered the golden thread by 
which our fate hung. Still “‘I mount and mount.” 
The stairs by which I climb were rent by earth- 
quakes and volcanoes, the strata were squeezed up 
and overturned and folded in the great mountain- 
chains; the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, the 
Coast Range were born; the earth-throes must have 
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