THE DIVINE SOIL 77 



the thunderbolt is a huge spark. So life, no doubt, 

 slept in the inorganic, and was started by the 

 reverse of friction, namely, by brooding. 



When the earth becomes lifeless again, as it surely 

 must in time, then the cycle will be repeated, a col- 

 lision will develop new energy and new worlds, 

 and out of this newness will again come life. 



It is highly probable that a million years elapsed 

 between the time when the ancestor of man began 

 to assume the human form and the dawn of history. 

 Try to think of that time and of the struggle of 

 this creature upward; of the pain, the suffering, 

 the low bestial life, the warrings, the defeats, the 

 slow, infinitely slow gains, of his deadly enemies in 

 other animals, of the repeated changes of climate 

 of the northern hemisphere from subtropical to 

 subarctic — the land at one time for thousands of 

 years buried beneath an ice sheet a mile or more 

 thick, followed by a cycle of years of almost trop- 

 ical w r armth even in Greenland — and all of this 

 before man had yet got off of " all fours," and stood 

 upright and began to make rude tools and rude 

 shelters from the storms. The Tertiary period, early 

 in which the first rude ancestor of man seems to 

 have appeared, is less than one week of the great 

 geologic year of the earth's history — a week of 

 about five days. These days the geologists have 

 named Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, and 

 Pleistocene, each one of these days covering, no 



