another, the spectacular moment of sunset following inevitably from
the quiet, unnoticed sinking of the sun in the west, or the
startling flash of his rim above the eastern horizon only the
fulfillment of the promise of the dawn. All is development and
succession, and man is but the sunrise of the dawn of life in
Cambrian or Silurian times, and is linked to that time as one hour
of the day is linked to another.

The more complex life became, the more rapidly it seems to have
developed, till it finally makes rapid strides to reach man. One
seems to see Life, like a traveler on the road, going faster and
faster as it nears its goal. Those long ages of unicellular life in
the old seas, how immense they appear to have been; then how the age
of invertebrates dragged on, millions upon millions of years; then
the age of fishes; the Palaeozoic age, how vast--put by Haeckel at
thirty-four millions of years, adding rock strata forty-one thousand
feet thick; then the Mesozoic or third period, the age of reptiles,
eleven million years, with strata twelve thousand feet thick. Then
came the Caenozoic age, or age of mammals, three million years, with
strata thirty-one hundred feet thick. The god of life was getting in
a hurry now; man was not far off. A new device, the placenta, was
hit upon in this age, and probably the diaphragm and the brain of
animals, all greatly enlarged. Finally comes the Anthropozoic or
Quaternary age, the age of man, three hundred thousand years, with
not much addition to the sedimentary rocks.

Man seems to be the net result of it all, of all these vast cycles
of Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Caenozoic life. He is the one drop
finally distilled from the vast weltering sea of lower organic
forms. It looks as if it all had to be before he could be--all the