delay and waste and struggle and pain--all that long carnival of sea
life, all that saturnalia of gigantic forms upon the land and in the
air, all that rising and sinking of the continents, and all that
shoveling to and fro and mixing of the soils, before the world was
ready for him.

In the early Tertiary, millions of years ago, the earth seems to
have been ripe for man. The fruits and vegetables and the forest
trees were much as we know them, the animals that have been most
serviceable to us were here, spring and summer and fall and winter
came and went, evidently birds sang, insects hummed, flowers
bloomed, fruits and grains and nuts ripened, and yet man as man was
not.

Under the city of London is a vast deposit of clay in which
thousands of specimens of fossil fruit have been found like our
date, cocoanut, areca, custard-apple, gourd, melon, coffee, bean,
pepper, and cotton plant, but no sign of man. Why was his
development so tardy? What animal profited by this rich vegetable
life? The hope and promise of the human species at that time
probably slept in some lowly marsupial. Man has gathered up into
himself, as he traveled his devious way, all the best powers of the
animal kingdom he has passed through. His brain supplies him with
all that his body lacks, and more. His specialization is in this
highly developed organ. It is this that separates him so widely from
all other animals.

Man has no wings, and yet he can soar above the clouds; he is not
swift of foot, and yet he can out-speed the fleetest hound or horse;
he has but feeble weapons in his organization, and yet he can slay