Page:The World's Most Famous Court Trial - 1925.djvu/145

Rh times the different processes in connection with the change upon the earth's surface may have wiped out practically all or wholly certain faunas and floras, and on that account I don't think we are in a position to say when the earliest organisms appeared upon the earth. We do know that there was a very abundant fauna and flora as early as the CambrinCambrian [sic] period.

Q—How long ago was that?

A—Oh, that is an awfully hard question to answer in years. No geologist talks years—it is ages—and they are beginning now in such matters as the changes in the metals especially, the relations between uranium and lead—to get some idea of the numbers of millions of years that have passed since certain strata which contained fossils were formed, but I am not familiar with that field. I am not a chemist and I do not like to answer scientific questions outside of the field where I know a little of what I am talking about. I would have to be answering what I have heard from others, and I don't like to testify to that kind of stuff.

Q—More than 6,000 years ago, wasn't it?

A—Well, 600,000,000 years ago is a very modest guess.

Q—Well, just go on where I interrupted you.

A—Well, at the same time that this tremendous series of plants was developing from a lowly condition into the more or less elaborate condition which we now find, there was also developing alongside them a series of animal forms, or differences between the animals and plants, which caused their divergence in their evolution, being largely due to their different habits in connection with food. The plants standing still and letting the food come to them for the most part, while animals hustled and got their food, and that rather fundamental difference between animals and plants has led to the animals developing locomotor organs and grasping organs and other things which have led to still other things which the plants have not developed. The necessities of life have been different under the two food habits and they have been met by a different series of adaptation. Does that sufficiently answer for a sort of general outline of evolution as a fact, and not of the causes of evolution at all?

A—No, I don't.

Q—No, I don't quite understand the causes—I might ask something about it. Could you tell us something about the order of plant life and animal life?

A—Well, it isn't quite so easy to tell about the order in which plants evolved with certainty, possibly, as it is to tell about some of the higher animals. There is a rather interesting index difficult to explain that tells us something about the different periods in the earth's history when different kinds of animals emerged from the sea and came into the land. I don't know that we have any similar record, any similar index for the plant, so the only thing we can say about the plants is that there is this series of complexities and that that corresponds to the record in the rock.

Q—Can you say where—I mean within a reasonable certainty—where animal life began, whether in the sea or on the land?

A—I think probably that animal life and plant life both began at the border line between the water and land where were conditions a little more complex—a little more likely to be productive of such a remarkable substance as a living substance but for long periods or over long periods in the earth's history there probably was no such thing as land life, either plant or animal, but all living things were marine.

Q—And what about the development of life in the sea—sea animals becoming land animals and land animals coming out of the sea?

A—The conditions of life in the seas are very simple and very easy for an organism which has this green coloring matter in it which we call