Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/215

Rh is no indication of any adherent or prearranged disposition toward the development of life in any particular direction. It would rather appear that the actual face of Nature is the result of a succession of apparently trivial incidents, which by some very slight alteration of local circumstances might often, it would seem, have been turned in a different direction. Some otherwise unimportant difference in the constitution or sequence of the substrata at any locality might have determined the elevation of mountains where a hollow filled by the sea was actually formed, and thereby the whole of the climatal and other conditions of a large area would have been changed, and an entirely different impulse given to the development of life locally, which might have impressed a new character on the whole face of Nature.

But further, all that we see or know to have existed upon the earth has been controlled to its most minute details by the original constitution of the matter which was drawn together to form our planet. The actual character of all inorganic substances, as of all living creatures, is only consistent with the actual constitution and proportions of the various substances of which the earth is composed. Other proportions than the actual ones in the constituents of the atmosphere would have required an entirely different organization in all air-breathing animals, and probably in all plants. With any considerable difference in the quantity of water either in the sea or distributed as vapor, vast changes in the constitution of living creatures must have been involved. Without oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, or carbon, what we term life would have been impossible. But such speculations need not be extended.

The substances of which the earth is now composed are identical with those of which it has always been made up; so far as is known it has lost nothing and has gained nothing, except what has been added in extremely minute quantities by the fall of meteorites. All that is or ever has been upon the earth is part of the earth, has sprung from the earth, is sustained by the earth, and returns to the earth; taking back thither what it withdrew, making good the materials on which life depends, without which it would cease, and which are destined again to enter into new forms, and contribute to the ever-onward flow of the great current of existence.

The progress of knowledge has removed all doubt as to the relation in which the human race stands to this great stream of life. It is now established that man existed on the earth at a period vastly anterior to any of which we have records in history or otherwise. He was the contemporary of many extinct mammalia at a time when the outlines of land and sea, and the conditions of climate over large parts of the earth, were wholly different from what they now are, and our race has been advancing toward its present condition during a series of ages for the extent of which ordinary conceptions of time