THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 
and smaller bodies, is a very significant fact, and 
one quite beyond the range of the mechanistic con- 
ception of life. 
Our own immediate line of descent leads down 
through the minor forms of Tertiary and Mesozoic 
times — forms that probably skulked and dodged 
about amid the terrible and gigantic creatures of 
‘ those ages as the small game of to-day hide and flee 
from the presence of their arch-enemy, man; and 
that the frail line upon which the fate of the human 
race hung should not have been severed during the 
wild turmoil of those ages is, to me, a source of per- 
petual wonder. 
baa 
The hazards of the future of the race must be 
quite different from those I have been considering. 
They are the hazards incident to an exceptional 
being upon this earth — a being that takes his fate 
in his own hands in a sense that no other creature 
does. 
Man has partaken of the fruit of the Tree of 
Good and Evil, which all the lower orders have es- 
caped. He knows, and knows that he knows. Will 
this knowledge, through the opposition in which it 
places him to elemental nature and the vast system 
of artificial things with which it has enabled him to 
surround himself, cut short his history upon this 
planet? Will Nature in the end be avenged for the 
secrets he has forced from her? His civilization has 
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