TIME AND CHANGE 
thwartings and accidents and delays could have cut 
man off, how could he have escaped? We cannot 
think of man as one; we are compelled to think of 
him as many; and yet in all our experience the many 
come from the one, or the one pair. 
How thick the field of animal life in the past is 
strewn with extinct forms! — as thick as the sidereal 
spaces are strewn with the fragments of wrecked 
worlds! But other worlds and suns are spun out of 
the wrecked worlds and suns through the process of 
cosmic evolution. The world-stuff is worked over 
and over. Extinct animal forms must have given 
rise to other, allied forms before they perished, and 
these to still others, and so on down to our time. 
The image of a tree is misleading from the fact 
that all the different branches of the animal king- 
dom, from the protozoa up to man, have come along 
with what we call the higher branches, the mam- 
mals; the suckers have kept pace with the main stalk, 
so that we have the image of a sheaf of branches 
starting from a common origin and all of equal 
length. Man has brought on his relations along with 
him. 
There is no glamour of romance over that past. 
It was all hard, prosy, terrible fact. The earth’s 
crust was less stable than now, the upheavals and 
subsidences and earthquakes more frequent, the 
warring of the elements more fierce and incessant, 
deluge and inundation in more rapid succession, and 
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