THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 
seems to hang by a single thread —a golden thread, 
we may call it, but, in that terrible maze of clashing 
forces and devouring forms of the vast geologic peri- 
ods, how liable to be broken! It is not now a ques- 
tion of the continuity of a stream, but of the contin- 
uity of a single evolutionary process, or, as Haeckel 
says, the continuity of the morphological chain 
which stretches from the lemurs up through tailed 
and tailless anthropoid apes to man. If the evolu- 
tionary impulse had been checked or extinguished in 
the lemur — that small apelike animal that went 
before the true ape, the fossil remains of which have 
been found on this continent and the survivals of 
which are now found in Madagascar — would man 
have appeared? Again, if the race of lemurs devel- 
oped from a single pair, how precarious seems our 
fate! In fact, if any of the transitional forms be- 
tween species can be reduced to a single pair — as 
the forms that connect the reptiles with the mam- 
mals — our fate would seem to be in the keeping 
of these forms. Over this single frail bridge which 
escaped the floods and the tornadoes and the earth- 
quakes of those terrible ages we must have passed. 
What risky business it all seems! Was it luck or law 
that favored us? Doubtless, if we could penetrate 
the mystery, we should see that there was no chance 
or risk in the matter. We cannot go very far in 
solving these great fundamental questions by ap- 
plying to them the tests of our own experience. 
235 
