V



Life had to creep or swim long before it could walk, and it walked
long before it could fly; it had feeling long before it had eyes,
and it no doubt had eyes long before it could hear or smell. It was
capable of motion long before it had limbs; it assimilated food long
before it had a mouth or a stomach. It had a digestive tract long
before it had a spinal cord; it had nerve ganglia long before it had
a well-defined brain. It had sensation long before it had
perception; it was unisexual long before it was bisexual; it had a
shell long before it had a skeleton; it had instinct and reflex
action long before it had self-consciousness and reason. Always from
the lower to the higher, from the simple to the more complex, and
always slowly, gently.

Life has had its foetal stage, its stage of infancy, and childhood,
and maturity, and will doubtless have its old age. It took it
millions upon millions of years to get out of the sea upon dry land;
and it took it more millions upon dry land, or since the
Carboniferous age, when the air probably first began to be
breathable,--all the vast stretch of the Secondary and Tertiary
ages,--to get upright and develop a reasoning brain, and reach the
estate of man. Step by step, in orderly succession, does creation
move. In the rising and in the setting of the sun one may see how
nature's great processes steal upon us, silently and unnoticed, yet
always in sequence, stage succeeding stage, one thing following from