mental and spiritual lines. Nature, as I have said, began to tend
more and more to brains in the early Tertiary,--the autumn of the
great year; her best harvest began to mature then, her grain began
to ripen. Indeed, this increased cephalization of animal life in the
fall of the great year does suggest a kind of ripening process, the
turning of the sap and milk, which had been so abundant and so
riotous in the earlier period, into fibre and fruit and seed.

May it not be that that long and sultry spring and summer of the
earth's early history, a time probably longer than has since
elapsed, played a part in the development of life analogous to that
played by our spring and summer, making it opulent, varied,
gigantic, and making possible the condensation and refinement that
came with man in the recent period?

The earth is a pretty big apple, and the solar tree upon which it
hangs is a pretty big tree, but why may it not have gone through a
kind of ripening process for all that? its elements becoming less
crude and acrid, and better suited to sustain the higher forms, as
the eons passed?

At any rate, the results seem to justify such a fancy. The earth has
slowly undergone a change that may fairly be called a ripening
process; its soil has deepened and mellowed, its harsher features
have softened, more and more color has come to its surface, the
flowers have bloomed, the more succulent fruits have developed, the
air has cleared, and love and benevolence and altruism have been
born in the world.