m
lay the spawn, an irritability: then one-celled organisms, to
gradually evolve through the centuries to the many-celled, and more
complex of nature.

But still so primitive! From the shallows of the sea, they spread to
the depths. Questing new environment, they would be ascending the
rivers. Diversifying their kinds. Sea-worms, sea-squirts: and then the
first vertebrates, the lamprey-eels.

Thousands of years. And on the land--this melting landscape at which
I stood gazing--I could mentally picture that a soil had come. There
would be a climate still wracked by storms and violent changes, but
stable enough to allow the soil to bear a vegetation. And in the sky
overhead would be clouds, with rain to renew the land's fertility.

Still no organic life could be on land. But in the warm, dark deeps of
the sea, great monsters now were existing. And in the shallows there
was a teeming life, diversified to a myriad forms. I can fancy the
first organisms of the shallows--strangely questing--adventuring out
of the water--seeking with a restless, nameless urge a new
environment. Coming ashore. Fighting and dying.

And then adapting themselves to the new conditions. Prospering.
Changing, ever changing their organic structure; climbing higher.
Amphibians at first crudely able to cope with both sea and land. Then
the land vertebrates, with the sea wholly abandoned. Great walking and
flying reptiles. Birds, gigantic--the pterodactyls.

And then, at last, the mammals.

The age of the giants! Nature, striving to cope with adverse
environment sought to win the battle by producing bigness. Monster
things roamed the land, flew in the air, and were supreme in the
sea....

* * * * *

We sped through a period when great lush jungles covered the land. The
dials read 350,000,000 B. C. The gray panorama of landscape had loomed
up to envelope our spectral, humming cage, then fallen away again. The
shore of the sea was constantly changing. I thought once it was over
us. For a period of ten million years the blurred apparition of it
seemed around us. And then it dropped once more, and a new shore line
showed.

150,000,000 B. C. I knew that the dinosaurs, the birds and the archaic
mammals were here now. Then, at 50,000,000 B. C., the higher mammals
had been evolved.

The Time, to Mary Atwood and me, was a minute--but in those myriad
centuries the higher numerals had risen to the anthropoids. The apes!