58 Where did Life Begin? 



passing through, and they now constitute, as 

 their predecessors once did, the great zones 

 of temperature — the isothermal Hues encir- 

 cHng the globe and moving forever slowly 

 from the poles to the equator, each bearing 

 with it, developing, and raising in the scale of 

 being its peculiar forms of life. 



Earth's wrinkled crust reveals to us the 

 beginnings of life, and our own age gives 

 plain indications of its ending. The lauren- 

 tian rocks stood god-father to the first-born, 

 and to-day the death-line encircling the poles, 

 drawn where life first began, studded with 

 white pinnacled monuments, guards from in- 

 trusion the cemetery of departed ages. The 

 last life on earth may be as remote in the 

 dim future as the first is in the shadowy past, 

 but the indications are that within the polar 

 regions we have now the beginning of the 

 end. 



Thus the arctic zone, which was earliest 

 in cooling down to the first and hio-hest heat 

 deofree in the o-i'eat life-o^amut, was also first 

 to become fertile, first to bear life> and first 

 to send forth her progeny over the earth. So 



