Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 281, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 November 1912 — MAN HEIR OF ALL THE AGES [ARTICLE]

MAN HEIR OF ALL THE AGES

Hla Body and Mind t ho Accumulated Inheritance of Countless Myriads of Forebears. Man is the heir of all the geologio ages; he inherits the earth after countless generations of animals and plants, and the beneficent forces of wind and rain, air and sky, have In the course of millions of years prepared it for him. His body has been built for him through the lives and struggles of the countless beings who are hr4he Hae-of-hls-long-descent; his mind is equally an accumulated inheritance of the mental growth of the myriads of thinking men and unthinking animals that went before him. In the forms of his humbler forebears he has himself lived and died myriads of times to make ready the spil that nurses and sustains him today. He is a debtor to Cambrian and Silurian times, to the dragons and saurians and mastodons that have roamed over the earth. Indeed, what is there or has there been in the universe that he is not indebted to? One vould fain arrive at some concrete belief or image of his life or descent in geologic times as he does In the historic period. ~~ But how hard It is to do so. Can we form any mental picture of the actual animal forms that the manward impulse has traveled through? With all the light that paleontology throws upon the animal life of the past, can we see where amid the revel of these bizarre forms our ancestor hid himself? Can we see him as a reptile In the slime of the jungle or In the waters of the Mesozoic world? What mark or sign was there upon Tilm at that time to the future that was before him? Can we see him as a fish in the old Devonian seas or lakes? The primitive fishes were mostly of the shark kind: Is there any connection between that fact and the human sharks of today? Much less can one picture to one’s self what his ancestor was like in the age of the invertebrates amid the trilobites, for example, of the earlier paleozoic seas.. But we must go back even earlier than that, back to unicellular life and to original protoplasm, and finally back to fiery nebulous matter. What can we make of it all by way of concrete conception what actually took place—of the visible, eating, warring, breeding animal forms In whose safe-keeping our heritage lay? Nothing.—-John Burroughs, In The North Americian Review.