THE STORY OF EVOLUTION BY JOSEPH McCABE

1912




PREFACE

An ingenious student of science once entertained his generation
with a theory of how one might behold again all the stirring
chapters that make up the story of the earth. The living scene of
our time is lit by the light of the sun, and for every few rays
that enter the human eye, and convey the image of it to the human
mind, great floods of the reflected light pour out, swiftly and
indefinitely, into space. Imagine, then, a man moving out into
space more rapidly than light, his face turned toward the earth.
Flashing through the void at, let us say, a million miles a
second, he would (if we can overlook the dispersion of the rays
of light) overtake in succession the light that fell on the
French Revolution, the Reformation, the Norman Conquest, and the
faces of the ancient empires. He would read, in reverse order,
the living history of man and whatever lay before the coming of
man.

Few thought, as they smiled over this fairy tale of science, that
some such panoramic survey of the story of the earth, and even of
the heavens, might one day be made in a leisure hour by ordinary
mortals; that in the soil on which they trod were surer records
of the past than in its doubtful literary remains, and in the