The world now knows—at least, the scientific part of it knows—that these things are not true, that they are but the solemn fancies of honest but simple-minded ancients who did the best they could in that twilight age to explain to their inquiring instincts the wilderness of phenomena in which they found themselves. The universe is a process. It is not petrified, but flowing. It is going somewhere. Everything is changing and evolving, and will always continue to do so. The forms of life, of continents and oceans, and of streams and systems, which we perceive as we open our senses upon the world to-day, are not the forms that have always existed, and they are not the forms of the eternal future. There was a time, away in the inconceivable, when there was no life upon the earth, no solids, and no seas. The world was an incandescent lump, lifeless and alone, in the cold solitudes of the spaces. There was a time—there must have been a time—when life appeared for the first time upon the earth, simple cellules without bones or blood, and without a suspicion of their immense and quarrelsome posterity. There was a time when North America was an island, and the Alleghany Mountains were the only mountains of the continent. The time was—in the coal-forming age—when the Mississippi Valley, from the Colorado Islands to the Alleghanies, was a vast marsh or sea, choked with forests of equisetum and fern, and swarming with gigantic reptiles now extinct. There was a time when palms grew in Dakota, and magnolias waved in the semi-tropical climate of Greenland and Spitzbergen. There was a time when there were no Rocky Mountains in existence, no Andes, no Alps, no Pyrenees, and no Himalayas. And that time, compared with the vast stretches of geological duration, was not so very long ago, for these mountains are all young mountains. The time was when Jurassic saurians—those repulsive ruffians of that rude old time—represented the highest intelligence and civilisation of the known universe. There were no men and women in the world, not even savages, when our ape-like forefathers wandered and wondered through the awesome silences of primeval wilds; there were no railroads, steamboats, telegraphs, telephones, typewriters, harvesters, electric lights, nor sewing machines; no billionaires nor bicycles, no socialists nor steam-heat, no ‘watered stock’ nor ‘government by injunction,’ no women’s clubs, captains of industry, labour unions, nor ‘yellow perils’—there was none of these things on the earth a hundred years ago. All things have evolved to be what they are—the continents, oceans, and atmospheres, and the plants and populations that live in and upon them.