The long road I have in mind is the long road of evolution,--the
road you and I have traveled in the guise of humbler organisms, from
the first unicellular life in the old Cambrian seas to the complex
and highly specialized creature that rules supreme in the animal
kingdom to-day. Surely a long journey, stretching through
immeasurable epochs of geologic time, and attended by vicissitudes
of which we can form but feeble conceptions.

The majority of readers, I fancy, are not yet ready to admit that
they, or any of their forebears, have ever made such a journey. We
have all long been taught that our race was started upon its career
only a few thousand years ago, started, not amid the warrings of
savage elemental nature, but in a pleasant garden with everything
needed close at hand. This belief has faded a good deal in our time,
especially among thoughtful persons; but in a modified form, as the
special creation theory, it held sway in the minds of the older
naturalists like Agassiz and Dawson, long after Darwin had launched
his revolutionary doctrine of our animal origin, putting man in the
same zoological scheme as the lower orders.

We are slow to adjust our minds to the revelations of science, they
have been so long adjusted to a revelation, so-called, of an
entirely different character. It gives them a wrench more or less
violent when we try to make them at home and at their ease amid
these new and startling disclosures. To many good people evolution