162 
ORIGIN OF OLDEST FOSSILS 
The fact that a hundred thousand miners and their families are 
now starving in Cornwall is not the saddest feature of the whole 
affair. With strong heart Cornishman will take up his Penates 
and find living in other clime. The end was long foreshadowed. 
For many years tin-mining in England was on the decline and 
unprofitable. The recent lowering price of the metal, the war-high 
price of coal, and other necessary supplies, and the constantly 
diminishing tenor of the ores effectually combined against adequate 
financial returns. 
Unlike the coal miners the tinners never demanded exorbitant 
wages. In marked contrast and with keen business sagacity 
many of the Cornishmen, appreciating the desperate straits of 
their ancestral industry, rose nobly to the occasion and returned 
to the operators thousands and thousands of pounds sterling of 
their wages in vain effort to keep their industry alive. 
Noblest miner of them all is Cornishman! 
Origin or the Oldest Fossils 
Because of the fact that at the beginning of the Cambric 
Period life on our globe appears to have burst forth already nine- 
tenths differentiated it does not necessarily follow, as inference 
is sometimes made, that the span of organic existence reaches 
backwards a ten-fold distance into the abyss of time. Sensational 
claim of this sort emanates not from biologist or paleontologist 
but from those who seem to have little familiarity with either. 
When viewed as an unanswerable realization of the immensity 
of geological time it is a fascinating theme that the conception 
opens up. Measurement is made in billions of years instead of 
the millions or thousands of early calculations. In projecting 
this vast sequence of the years basic factors are entirely over¬ 
looked ; but their calm consideration effectually curbs the flights 
of petrologic fancy. 
Students of the immeasurable past learn that the passage of life 
through the ages is not a simple, even, undisturbed course; but 
that there is rhythmic expansion, as it were. Short stretches 
there are wherein evolution goes on by leaps and bounds, and 
progress is more rapid than ever before or ever afterwards. 
Advancement in brief epochs is sometimes greater than in the 
millions of years that lie between. The sensational intellectual 
development which has taken place since Mid Tertic time, and the 
