CHAPTER VI 
LIFE IN THE Past 
ANYONE who earnestly studies plants and animals 
as they exist in the world to-day cannot help wonder- 
ing how the earth began and where it got its life. 
This is the true end and aim of geological study. The 
history of man seems to run back into a far distant 
and gloomy past. Except for the poetical account in 
Genesis and the traditions of various peoples through- 
out the world, real history fades away into an earlier 
time of which there are no written records. When 
the delvers in the Mesopotamian plain talk to us of 
kingdoms running back through seven or eight or 
nine thousand years, we seem to be getting back to 
the beginnings of things. But seven or eight or nine 
thousand years are as nothing in comparison with the 
age of the earth, which runs back into a past so lim- 
itless that no man can safely assign any set figure to 
it. In a recent paper, Dr. Walcott, of the Smith- 
sonian Institution, says that the antiquity of the earth 
must be measured not in millions, for they are too 
short, nor hundreds of millions, for this carries us too 
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