LIFE THE TRAVELER 
scheme of life. If the invertebrate gave rise to the 
vertebrate, or the reptile gave rise to the bird, or 
the lower mammals gave rise to the higher, it was 
not because the former were unfit to survive; they 
did survive, and still survive, but because the 
evolutionary impulse is inherent in the first forms 
of life, and was stimulated, rather than stamped 
out, by the vicissitudes of time. “No statement of 
the universe,’ says the wise Emerson, “can have 
any soundness that does not admit of its ascending 
effort.” Is it thinkable that man could have arisen 
from the manlike apes by the mere clash and fric- 
tion of an irrational environment alone? Is one 
man superior to another by reason of outward 
conditions, and the discipline of life alone? Is the 
secret of Plato or Paul or Shakespeare or Lincoln 
in the keeping of pans and pots? Man arose from 
his humbler ancestors because the manward im- 
pulse, in some way beyond our ken, was inherent 
in the evolutionary impulse. Man was potential 
in the monkey. He might never have arrived had 
the race of apes, or some kindred tree-living form, 
been cut off, say in Oligocene times. But it was not 
cut off, and here we are, and rather ashamed of our 
forebears. One has to say that all other forms of 
life, down to the flea and the cockroach, were also 
potential in the life-impulse — the enemies of man 
as well as his friends. 
The three-toed woodpecker evidently gets on as 
Q75 
