A flourishing society can maintain more fools than any savage period could afford. Charlotte Perkins Gilman-Human Work.

God must dearly have loved the fools, otherwise he would not have made so many of them.

Elbert Hubbard.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

Burke.

The world is, to us, the sum of our concepts concerning it; and while the real facts relentlessly affect us, our supposed facts are of deadly importance because they modify our conduct.

Man has stayed alive because he knew enough to plough and sow, to kill wolves and steer a ship, but in later social development he has been as open to destruction as any poor beast below him. In the long lesson of history we may see him again and again killed down to the level of his intelligence. Nations have been conquered, civilisations destroyed, kings decapitated, but the peasant survived.

The problems we have really solved do not have to be done over again; the downfall of past societies is but the wiping off the slate of a mass of elaborate failures. "Rule it all out down to the first line and begin again!" says the teacher.

Ibid.

CHAPTER III

T is now universally admitted by all competent authorities who accept the nebular theory, that many hundreds of thousands of years, probably many millions of years, must have elapsed between the solidification of the earth's surface and the advent of the simplest forms of life. Certain it is that no form of vegetable or animal life, as we know it, could have existed until the earth had cooled to a moderately low temperature. More than this we now know that organic life began upon our planet at a certain definite time. It could not always have existed here. Just when this time was we can tell only within certain limits.

were even

Since the existence of all organic life depends upon water in its fluid state, we can be sure that the organic history of our earth did not begin before water in fluid drops appeared upon its surface. The earliest forms of life contained a considerable amount of water. The tissues of the fully developed human body contain seventy per cent. of water, and only thirty per cent. of solid matter. With the child the per cent. of water is still greater, while the human embryo in its earliest stages of development is more than ninety per cent. water. As we leave the human family and go back to the low forms of marine animals, we find water forming a still larger constituent of their mass. In the case of the Medusæ, the body contains more than ninety-nine per cent. of water, and less than one per cent. of solid matter. We see, therefore, not only that human beings could not exist without water, but that the lower biological forms — those which must inevitably first have come into existence more dependent upon water than the human race would have been had it existed at that time. Without water there can be no life of any kind, whether animal or vegetable. It is, of course, apparent that until the surface of our earth had reached a temperature at which steam could condense upon it, there could have been no water and no life. We are told by Prof. Ernst Haeckel that as soon as the first drop of water was precipitated by cooling from the envelope of steam "it began its geological action, and from that time to this it has effected continual changes in the modification of the hard crust of the earth. The result of this unceasing work of the water, which in the form of rain and hail, of snow and ice, of rushing torrent and surging wave crumbles and dissolves the rocks, is the formation of As Huxley says, in his excellent Lectures on the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature,' the most important fact in the past history of our earth is ooze, and the question as to the history of the past ages of the world resolves itself into a question as to the formation of ooze. All the stratified rocks of our mountainous forma

ooze.

tions were originally deposited as ooze at the bottom of the waters, and only afterwards hardened into solid stone."

In the second volume of his "The Evolution of Man," Prof. Haeckel divides the history of the organic earth into five great divisions, or epochs, as follows:

First Epoch: The Archilithic, or Primordial Epoch. age of skull-less animals and seaweed forests. Second Epoch: The Palæolithic, or Primary Epoch. age of fishes and of fern forests.

Third Epoch: The Mesolithic, or Secondary Epoch. age of reptiles and pine forests, Coniferæ.

Fourth Epoch: The Canolithic, or Tertiary Epoch. age of mammals and leaf forests.

This is the

This is the

This is the

This is the

Fifth Epoch: The Anthropolithic, or Quarternary Epoch. This is the age of man and of cultivated forests.

66

We are told that if the total thickness of all sedimentary strata be placed at an average of a hundred and thirty thousand feet, then more than half of it, or seventy thousand feet, will belong to the first, or Archilithic Epoch, from which it is concluded that this Primordial or Archilithic Epoch must have been considerably longer than the entire period between its close and the present time. Speaking of the Archilithic rocks Prof. Haeckel says: The enormous length of time required for the formation at the bottom of the primordial sea of these gigantic strata, of over 70,000 feet in thickness, must, at all events, have been many millions of years. During that time there came into existence by spontaneous generation the oldest and simplest organisms those in which life began upon our planet - viz., the Monera. From these, one-celled plants and animals first developed the Amoeba and many kinds of Protista. During this same Archilithic Epoch, also, all the invertebrate ancestors of the human race developed from these one-celled organisms."

We may regard the Monera as the primordial ancestors of the human race. These minute animals when seen through the microscope appear to be mere roundish, or irregularly shaped specks of animated jelly (protoplasm), often of about the size of the white corpuscle of the blood, which is to say, about one three-thousandth of an inch in diameter. The chemical composition of this little animal is much the same as that of the white of an egg, indeed, it differs from an extremely small drop of this substance mainly in being alive. That it is alive, is abundantly proved by its movements, the extension of its "false-feet," as they are called, its surrounding and absorbing foreign material which can afford it nourishment, its rejection of waste material that it cannot absorb, and its ability to reproduce itself by self-division.

It is a common misconception that the theory of evolution asserts that all forms of life invariably march in an upward direction. Such is far from the case. Another common error, allied to this, is the assumption that any lower form of life might in due time evolve into any higher form. To take a concrete case, that a snake might evolve ultimately into a man. The evolution of biological forms is often represented by a biological tree with man as the central, top

most branch thereof. To reach this branch there is but one possible route, viz., directly up the trunk. Whatever leaves the trunk and goes out upon a lower branch forever leaves the one path that has the human race as its terminal goal.

Referring to the cut of the biological tree submitted herewith, the reader will perceive two parallel dotted lines running zigzag up the trunk to the topmost branch. These lines are intended to illustrate those root fibres of the tree which are destined to emerge at the topmost branch marked Man. When we say destined we do not mean that it could have been known that those particular fibres would pursue the course they actually did pursue.

Starting below the Monera we note these parallel lines rising somewhat obliquely. Just above the Monera they are sharply deflected to the right as if they were to run out on to the branch marked Infusoria, but just before they reach the Amoeba the drawing requires us to imagine them to be again deflected into a nearly vertical course. We do not mean that these are exactly the deflections which did take place, but what we do mean is that as those fibres which ultimately became the human branch ascended from life form to life form in the trunk of the biological tree, they entered into new life-department with just such a history, expressed in direction of upward traverse, as would combine with the environmental forces of that department to make them approach the next higher department in exactly the line they did actually take. If, now, for example, the imaginary rightwardly deflection above Chorda-Animals had swung the dotted lines out of the trunk, as seemingly threatened, and into the branch marked "Amphioxus," these fibres would never have reached the topmost branch. The point we wish to convey is that every fibre, as it leaves the roots of the tree, becomes more and more charged with a history and this history plus each new environment is the determining force, at any moment, of that particular fibre. What we have said of these fibres which reach the topmost branch as Man, are equally true of all those other fibres which pass into the inferior branches. Every fibre of a tree passes through its trunk to the roots, and whether a fibre leaving the root shall go to one branch or another depends entirely upon the resultant of multitudinous forces acting throughout its entire history. The dotted lines representing the human fibres are shown for convenience as continually ascending, while, as a matter of fact, there might easily have been portions of this sheath of fibres which exhibited temporary descending tendencies.

Starting with the Monera and climbing straight up the trunk of the biological tree we pass through the following forms among primitive animals, or Protozoa, Amoebae, Synamoeba and Planæada. Entering now the domain of invertebrate intestinal animals, or Metazoa Evertebrata, we encounter the Gastreada, the worm (Vermes), primitive worms (Archelminthes), soft worms (Scolecida), and ChordaAnimals.

In the section of the biological tree appropriated by the vertebrates, or Vertebrata, we encounter skull-less animals (Acrania),. jawless animals (Cyclostoma), primitive fishes (Selachii), and Amphibia.