The Story of Evolution

The story of man before the discovery of metal and the attainment of civilisation is notoriously divided into a Palaeolithic (Old Stone) Age, and a Neolithic (New Stone) Age. Ea...

We have reserved for a closer inquiry that order of the placental mammals to which we ourselves belong, and on which zoologists have bestowed the very proper and distinguishing...

In our study of the evolution of the plant, the insect, and the bird we were seriously thwarted by the circumstance that their frames, somewhat frail in themselves, were rarely...

In the preceding chapters I have endeavoured to show how, without invoking any "definitely directed variations," which we seem to have little chance of understanding, we may obt...

AS we approach the last part of the geological record we must neglect the lower types of life, which have hitherto occupied so much of our attention, so that we may inquire more...

The long Archaean period, into which half the story of the earth is so unsatisfactorily packed, came to a close with a considerable uplift of the land. We have seen that the ear...

The greater part of this volume will be occupied with the things that have happened on one small globe in the universe during a certain number of millions of years. It cannot be...

In discussing the development of plants and animals during the Tertiary Era we have already perceived the shadow of the approaching Ice-Age. We found that in the course of the T...

In an earlier chapter it was stated that the story of life is a story of gradual and continuous advance, with occasional periods of more rapid progress. Hitherto it has been, in...

In accordance with the view of the later story of the earth which was expressed on an earlier page, we now come to the second of the three great revolutions which have quickened...

The story of the evolution of our solar system is, it will now be seen, a local instance of the great cosmic process we have studied in the last chapter. We may take one of the...

In one of his finest stories, Sur La Pierre Blanche, Anatole France has imagined a group of Roman patricians discussing the future of their Empire. The Christians, who are about...

There is, perhaps, no other chapter in the chronicle of the earth that we approach with so lively an interest as the chapter which should record the first appearance of life. Un...

From one point of view the advance of life on the earth seems to proceed not with the even flow of a river, but in the successive waves of an oncoming tide. It is true that we h...

With the beginning of life on land we open a new and more important volume of the story of life, and we may take the opportunity to make clearer certain principles or processes...

Slender as our knowledge is of the earlier evolution of the Invertebrate animals, we return to our Cambrian population with greater interest. The uncouth Trilobite and its livel...

We have already traversed nearly nine-tenths of the story of terrestrial life, without counting the long and obscure Archaean period, and still find ourselves in a strange and u...

The story of the earth from the beginning of the Cambrian period to the present day was long ago divided by geologists into four great eras. The periods we have already covered-...

We have next to see that when this period of searching adversity comes--as it will in the next chapter--the animal world also offers a luxuriant variety of forms from which the...

The beginning of the victorious career of modern science was very largely due to the making of two stimulating discoveries at the close of the Middle Ages. One was the discovery...

To the mind of the vast majority of earlier observers the phrase "foundations of the universe" would have suggested something enormously massive and solid. From what we have alr...