There is a tiny planet in the sky,

That circles round a modest, yellow sun,

Midway between worn Mars whose seas are dry,
And staring Venus, whose love-days are done.

Around her moves a pallid, lifeless face,

Her breathless Moon, whose graceful youth has fled,
While, fixed and rigid, his regard betrays
Yon dusty-sandaled Mercury, long dead.

An aging planet, but beyond the count

Of millioned miles lie days that are to come,
Where ruddy Jove guards then De Leon's fount,
And Saturn rings his more abiding home.

There Herschel's star and Neptune's figured place
Entice Earth's poet to a clearer sight
Of life begun in slime to end in grace,

Of paths that lead through darkness into light.

A minor planet, with her sisters seven,

(And yet one more who could not come to birth)

All swiftly speeding through God's boundless heaven. To some far destiny! One lonely Earth,

One unnamed sun's small family, a-swing

Round what vast circle in a universe

That plummets space upon what magic wing?
Toward what abyss of blessing or of curse?

And on this tiny ant-hill hurled through space,
On lines dividing nation's clod from clod,
Men kill to win this great grain for their race;
For that vast beetle shed each other's blood.
And when the slaughter slackens, on the way
Most-frequented, their highest statues rise
To him who most successfully could slay,

That all may look and learn where greatness lies!
So short a distance have they come from that
Warm ocean's shore where atoms learned to love,
And, fellowshipping rudely, first begat

A larger vision of a world above;
Till, at millennial cost of toil and pain,
One wondrous day a cell, completed, lay
In lap of mother Time; till gain sired gain
Past fish, amphibian, reptile-till today!

So staggered they, up out of ancient night;
So fought their way past fin, and fang, and claw;
Enamoured of a dim and flickering light;
Impelled by some deep-moving nameless law.
And ever those who marched a pace ahead
Would draw the struggling masses to their side;
But those, o'er-eager, who too swiftly sped
Were crowned with thorny wreaths and crucified.

O planet, red of hand and bloody-skirted,
By all that thou hast known of weal and woe,
By vermian night, by ichthian heart-blood spurted,
By vertebrated billions' scarlet flow,

By sloped brows of myriad Trinil rivers,
By countless caves Cro-Magnon, by the thin
Set lip of Faith that never, never quivers,

The light shall conquer and the Cross shall win!

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ASCENDING PATHWAY

We have now come to the wonder of wonders. It is the long, long journey of man up out of the invisible, the intangible, the inaudible, the infinitely little, to his present state. It has to do with the most astonishing thing in the universe, the germ of life, the original cell from which individuals and races come. No man can tell the story completely. Many of its chapters will not be written for ages. Doubtless, many will never be written, but we can read enough of it to know that it is perfectly fascinating.

We begin with the simplest known form of life, that of the colorless plants, the bacteria. Apparently, they have none of the marks that distinguish man, no eyes, no ears, no limbs, no brain. Yet all the great human organ systems such as those of digestion, respiration, contraction, are theirs in embryo. Their size, beginning at approximately 1230th of a millimeter in length and 110th that size in width, vanishes into the invisible. The influenza bacillus is from 12 to 15 of a micron in size, and therefore may just barely be distinguished by a microscope. Still smaller are other bacteria which are so tiny that they cannot be seen but can be detected by ultra-microscopes. Some of these are so small that they have been known to pass through a porcelain filter. Doubtless there are others smaller still, bacteria of bacteria. Perhaps some of the new, strange diseases which affect mankind from time to time come up out of this unknown world of the immeasurably small, whose dimensions do not greatly exceed those of a large molecule of starch. Perhaps such life is still being born from such sources and in the course of ages developing. Over this fascinating speculation the veil of mystery is drawn. We only know that there are living things so small that with our most powerful microscopes we cannot see them, and that these living things are different from higher and more elaborately developed living things in possessing only such features and constitution as are common to all protoplasm. They are not plants, they

are not animals. They either are, or are closely related to, that original trunk of life from which the limb of the plants on the one hand and of the animals on the other hand later branched.

We are struck with amazement, as we examine this world of bacteria, at the tremendous creative power that they contain within themselves. First of all, they have learned in some way, in many cases, to live from inorganic material by the method previously described as chemosynthesis. Each of them is a little blast furnace in which energy is captured from the chemical substances ammonium sulphate, for example, and devoted to the purposes of the organism. It is generally believed that these bacteria represent the first surviving state of life on earth and that their activities prepared the lifeless world for later organisms. Their capacity for reproduction is astounding. Woodruff, one of our most careful and distinguished biologists, tells us that a single paramecium has the power to reproduce itself at the rate of 3000 generations in five years and that all of its descendants preserved alive would constitute a volume of protoplasm equal to ten thouand times the volume of the earth. By the 9000th generation the mass of protoplasm descended from the original pair, supposing all descendants to have lived and bred normally, "would exceed the bounds of the known universe and the rate of growth would be extending its circumference into space with the velocity of light", 186,000 miles per second. (Lull). Lull further tells us that if all the progeny of an oyster survived until her great, great grandchildren, these would number sixty-six quadrillions of quintillions and the heap of shells would be eight times the size of the earth. They remind us of the calculation by Flammarion of the amount that one penny invested at compound interest at the birth of Christ would come to by 1924. If a mass of gold as large as the earth were to fall from the sky every minute for seventy-five thousand years, it would equal the amount. Sometime ago the papers contained the story of how Dr. Charles E. Mitchell, President of the National City Bank of New York, had purchased a tiny toy bank unearthed at Carthage containing some copper coins worth about six cents. He had his experts calculate the sum to which this little deposit of a Carthaginian child 2500 years ago would have amounted at 5 12% compound interest by the year 1925. The figure, if expressed in dollars, would come to 36, followed by 59

zeros. It would equal a gigantic planet 6212 billion times larger in diameter than our earth, made of solid gold. Such multiplication of life must, necessarily, be curtailed by other laws and hampered by environment, and it is this contest for the materials of living that constitutes the struggle for survival which is at the basis of development.

Remembering our chart of geological time it should be observed that the development of unicellular life seems to have taken place in the Proterozoic era. The second step of advance was the discovery of a way in which to capture the energy of sun-light by means of the green coloring matter known as chlorophyll. Some of the bacteria learned it and others did not, or shall we say that one bacterium learned it and that the discovery was of so great importance to his progeny as to enable them to multiply and survive in the struggle for life. In this stage, therefore, we find the world divided into two types of singlecelled creatures. One of them which we now call plant obtained its energy from the sunlight, and the other by feeding upon other existing organisms, bacteria and the plants themselves. These latter we call animals. And here is a point that we should never forget; countless bacteria "stayed put." And as they were then so they are today. Through countless milleniums many of them have changed but imperceptibly. Many of them have, doubtless, not changed at all. This is a feature of evolution that we will find always present. The new discovery does not come to all. The new power comes to the individual and is appropriated, at first, by only a few. If it is good and useful, those who had it prosper and multiply, but at each stage in the onward march, as each opportunity is presented, there are some who fail to take advantage of it and whose punishment is that they simply remain what they were.

The next advance in the development of man consists in the pathway chosen by animal life as it separated from the plants. Back in the earlier day there seemed to be no difference between them except that one had discovered the use of the chlorophyll and the other had not. Each could move at will through the water. Each was conscious, though dimly, of its surroundings. Each was able to make a choice as to its conduct, each knew the pangs of hunger and the twinges of pain. In each, therefore, was found the rudiments of those upper faculties that we call mem

ory, will, consciousness and habit. Then their paths diverged. One did not need to move from place to place. It learned to settle down in a convenient spot and to harness the sun to work for it. After a while it had discovered how to make a "hold-fast," to anchor it in a specific spot, then it learned to sink roots into the soil, to gather moisture and the chemicals of earth. Eventually it learned to spread out its hands more widely and perfectly to receive the gifts of the sun. It stored up enormous quantities of food-material and pursued its various pathways of adaptation to its surroundings. Today we know it as the vast world of vegetation, a marvelous world of throbbing life which has availed itself of every niche and corner possible for its growth. It is still the foundation upon which animal life is built, and in perfectness of structure and exquisite adjustment to environment it is not surpassed even in the animal world. In short, it illustrates that marvelous principle of the radiation of life wherein we see protoplasm adopting no one pathway, but following every road and occupying every possible field of development, and doing it all with infinite perfection.

The animals chose the other fork in the road. They did not learn how to harness the sun by means of chlorophyll, but they quickly discovered how to devour those plants that had found out so fine a secret. They learned also how to live upon other animals, the weaker, and thus laid the foundation of their being, motile parasitism, which general principle of conduct they have preserved to this day. We, therefore, find the animal world one of intense struggle, perfectly illustrative at all times of the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest, and it is from the necessity of developing ways of protection and methods of offense and means of subsistence that the animal bodies which we know have been created. As in the plant world also we find animal life radiating into every available pathway, into the air, aerial; into the trees of the wood, arboreal; into the rivers, fluviatile; into the marshes, paludal; into the shallow waters, littoral; and into the deeps of the sea, abyssal; and into the earth itself, fossorial.

The next great step in the progress toward manhood was the development of the multi-cellular animal. The long ages of the Proterozoic passed with their infinitude of tiny battles and then one day two cells learned to live together, and then three and four, until a colony had been formed. Again we find that there are still in existence just such