UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
inevitable. Is life inevitable in the same sense? Was 
it predetermined in the constitution of matter and 
its laws? One cannot say that the profile in the rocks 
was predetermined in this sense — only the possi- 
bility of it. The conjunction of circumstances that 
gave life to the globe, the mechanists would say was 
a matter of chance; this specific conjunction might 
never have happened, or might have been vastly 
delayed, or accelerated, as maybe it was. But the 
law of probability would sooner or later have 
brought it about. The law of probability will in 
time, or in eternity, throw our earth into the arms 
of a comet, and our sun against another sun coursing 
in space. If celestial bodies collide once, then they 
will collide twice, and thrice, and ten thousand 
times; so if the conjunction of matter that resulted 
in life happened once, it will happen again, and may 
have happened any number of times in the past 
history of the cosmos. 
It is quite certain that there could have been no 
man and none of the higher forms of vertebrate life, 
had not the land risen above the sea. There is 
enough water on the globe to cover all the land- 
areas at a depth of two miles. With the continents 
thus submerged, of course the present forms of ter- 
restrial life could not have developed, and if we look 
upon this elevation of the land above the sea as a 
matter of chance, — the result of the hit-and-miss 
warring of the purely mechanical forces, — then is 
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