TIME AND CHANGE 
The first horns appear to have been crude, 
heavy, uncouth, but long before we reach our own 
geologic era they appear in various species of quad- 
rupeds, and become graceful and ornamental. How 
beautiful they are in many of the African antelope 
tribe! Nature’s workmanship nearly always im- 
proves with time, like that of man’s, and sooner 
or later takes on an ornamental phase. 
The early uncouth, bizarre forms seem to be the 
result of the excess or surplus of life. Life in remote 
biologic times was rank and riotous, as it is now, 
in a measure, in tropical lands. One reason may be 
that the climate of the globe during the middle 
period, and well into the third period, appears to 
have been of a tropical character. The climatic and 
seasonal divisions were not at all pronounced, and 
both animal and vegetable life took on gigantic 
and grotesque forms. In the ugliness of alligator 
and rhinoceros and hippopotamus of our day we get 
some hint of what early reptilian and mammalian 
life was like. 
That Nature should have turned out better and 
better handiwork as the ages passed; that she either 
should have improved upon every model or else dis- 
carded it; that she should have progressed from the 
bird, half-dragon, to the sweet songsters of our day 
and to the superb forms of the air that we know; 
that evolution should have entered upon a refining 
and spiritualizing phase, developing larger brains 
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