The quotation from the second sentence of the first chapter of Genesis tells us more in eight words than could very well be said in as many chapters. Not only have we biblical authority for this early absence of life on the earth, but all the accumulated knowledge of the ages points in the same direction. We have already seen that plants, because they can take inorganic substances from the earth and air and transform them into organic food, must in all probability have come on the earth before animals which, directly or indirectly, all rely upon plants for their food. Even those animals that eat only flesh devour other animals which depend upon plants for food. It may safely be repeated, then, that upon plants all animal life depends, and that, in the dim beginnings of things on the earth, it must have been some form of plants that were the first living things. Extremely simple unicellular animals, however, are known to date from early times. In the volume devoted to that subject in this series, you will find that at the very earliest stages of what we know as our globe there was a segregation of land and water somewhat different from our great oceans and continents to-day in extent and area, but differing mostly in this--that much of the water was fresh and very nearly boiling hot. We have still the remnants of those great reservoirs of hot water, as our hot springs and shooting geysers only too well prove. And if all plants were as quickly killed by hot or boiling water as the common garden geranium, we should not expect any plant life to have developed upon the earth until all those great bodies of water had cooled. To have waited for that would have been to delay the appearance of plants for no one knows how many millions of years, and there is some fairly good evidence that long before normal conditions of heat and cold were established there already flourished certain kinds of plants. What those plants were is something of a speculation, and indeed exactly what they were no one knows. But in our present hot springs grow certain plants, microscopic in size, but quite obviously related to the algæ or to certain bacterialike organisms. They live with apparent comfort and reproduce themselves freely in water so hot that no other form of life will maintain itself. While there is no proof that these present plant inhabitants of hot springs, common in the West, are descended from infinitely ancient progenitors, it is a fair assumption that some organism capable of growing in warm or hot water was the first living thing to appear in a world otherwise “without form and void.”