our animal origin, that gives us pause. To believe that our remote
ancestor, no matter how remote in time or space, was a lowly
organized creature living in the primordial seas with no more brains
than a shovel-nosed shark or a gar-pike, puts our scientific faith
to severe test.

Think of it. For countless ages, millions upon millions of years, we
see the earth swarming with life, low bestial life, devouring and
devoured, myriads of forms, all in bondage to nature or natural
forces, living only to eat and to breed, localized, dependent upon
place and clime, shaped to specific ends like machines,--to fly, to
swim, to climb, to run, to dig, to drill, to weave, to wade, to
graze, to crush,--knowing not what they do, as void of conscious
purpose as the thorns, the stings, the hooks, the coils, and the
wings in the vegetable world, making no impression upon the face of
nature, as much a part of it as the trees and the stones, species
after species having its day, and then passing off the stage, when
suddenly, in the day before yesterday in the geologic year, so
suddenly as to give some color of truth to the special creation
theory, a new and strange animal appears, with new and strange
powers, separated from the others by what appears an impassable
gulf, less specialized in his bodily powers than the others, but
vastly more specialized in his brain and mental powers, instituting
a new order of things upon the earth, the face of which he in time
changes through his new gift of reason, inventing tools and weapons
and language, harnessing the physical forces to his own ends, and
putting all things under his feet,--man the wonder-worker, the
beholder of the stars, the critic and spectator of creation itself,
the thinker of the thoughts of God, the worshiper, the devotee, the
hero, spreading rapidly over the earth, and developing with