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Time and Change by John Burroughs
page 28 of 224 (12%)
probably in Carboniferous times; when the first pair of lungs grew
out of a fish's air-bladder, probably in Triassic times; when the
first four-chambered heart was developed and double circulation
established, probably with the first warm-blooded animal in Mesozoic
times.

These humble forms started the brain, the nervous system, the
circulation, sight, hearing, smell; they invented the liver, the
kidneys, the lungs, the heart, the stomach, and led the way to every
organ and power my body and mind have to-day. They were the
pioneers, they were the dim remote forebears, they conserved and
augmented the fund of life and passed it along.

All their struggles, their discipline, their battles, their
failures, their successes, were for you and me. Man has had the
experience of all the animals below him. He has suffered and
struggled as a fish, he has groveled and devoured as a reptile, he
has fought and triumphed as a quadruped, he has lived in trees as a
monkey, he has inhabited caves with the wolf and the bear, he has
roamed the forests and plains as a savage, he has survived without
fire or clothes or weapons or tools, he has lived with the mastodon
and all the saurian monsters, he has held his own against great
odds, he has survived the long battles of the land and the sea, he
weathered the ice-sheet that overrode both hemispheres, he has seen
many forms become extinct. In the historic period he has survived
plague and pestilence, and want and famine. What must he have
survived in prehistoric times! What must he have had to contend with
as a cave-dweller, as a tree-dweller, as a river-drift man! Before
he had tools or weapons what must he have had to contend with!

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