Life began in a very small way: there were none of the great land animals we have now; but these seemingly insignificant builders were at work so long that they made the immense rocks I have told you of. But this is not all. About this time some very simple plants grew on the land, and were carried down by the rivers and formed deep beds. After a long time these became covered up with different earths and were turned into the substance called “black-lead,” which you use in drawing pencils. But this is not really lead; it is almost pure carbon—in fact, the oldest kind of coal—so old that it will not now burn like coal, and is entirely made up of fossil plants crushed out of shape, so that we cannot now trace their forms, as we can the plants of the coal. When then you next take up a drawing pencil it will be easy to remember that the black substance which marks the paper was once a living plant, now changed by heat and pressure into almost pure carbon. As the name eozöon has been given to the “life-dawn animal,” I will give this black-lead the name of _Eodendron_, or the “dawn-plant.”[2] Two very simple forms of life then occupied the earth and sea at the earliest time when anything at all was living, and strangely enough we use the dead bodies of both of them. We build houses of the rocks the eozöon laid down at the bottom of the sea, and the beautiful art of drawing is carried on with the carbon from the first plant life of the world—the eodendron. I must take you away presently to the coal, and sandstone, and chalk, and show you how plants and animals gradually increased in number and size, and fishes began to inhabit the seas, and all living things were slowly going on to greater perfection; for as time went on there was a steady progress from creatures like the eozöon, which had scarcely any power of moving about, to the active, quarrelsome and greedy things like crabs and lobsters which came after them, and the gigantic ferns of the coal beds. The peaceful “life-dawn animals” drew their food from the vegetable substances dissolved in the waters, though they perhaps also lived on animals still smaller than themselves; but, by-and-by, creatures, which must have been monsters to them, swarmed in the seas and devoured their smaller companions wholesale; and in time the Earth became very much the same as it is now, a place where the struggle for life is always going on. It is certain that animals have fed upon one another from the very beginning; but this is no doubt a wise law of the Creator to prevent them from increasing too fast, as they would do if all that were born lived, and none were destroyed.