It is well, however, to bear in mind that the Lower Palæozoi_A Short History of the World

A SHORT

HISTORY OF THE WORLD

By H. G. WELLS

New York

THE MACMILLAN & COMPANY

1922

CONTENTS CHAPTER Page

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

I. THE WORLD IN SPACE 1

II. THE WORLD IN TIME 5

III. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE 11

IV. THE AGE OF FISHES 16

V. THE AGE OF THE COAL SWAMPS 21

VI. THE AGE OF REPTILES 26

VII. THE FIRST BIRDS AND THE FIRST MAMMALS 31

VIII. THE AGE OF MAMMALS 37

IX. MONKEYS, APES AND SUB-MEN 43

X. THE NEANDERTHALER AND THE RHODESIAN MAN 48

XI. THE FIRST TRUE MEN 53

XII. PRIMITIVE THOUGHT 60

XIII. THE BEGINNINGS OF CULTIVATION 65

XIV. PRIMITIVE NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATIONS 71

XV. SUMERIA, EARLY EGYPT AND WRITING 77

XVI. PRIMITIVE NOMADIC PEOPLES 84

XVII. THE FIRST SEA-GOING PEOPLES 91

XVIII. EGYPT, BABYLON AND ASSYRIA 96

XIX. THE PRIMITIVE ARYANS 104

XX. THE LAST BABYLONIAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF DARIUS I 109

XXI. THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE JEWS 115

XXII. PRIESTS AND PROPHETS IN JUDEA 122

XXIII. THE GREEKS 127

XXIV. THE WARS OF THE GREEKS AND PERSIANS 134

XXV. THE SPLENDOUR OF GREECE 139

XXVI. THE EMPIRE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 145

XXVII. THE MUSEUM AND LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA 150

XXVIII. THE LIFE OF GAUTAMA BUDDHA 156

XXIX. KING ASOKA 163

XXX. CONFUCIUS AND LAO TSE 167

XXXI. ROME COMES INTO HISTORY 174

XXXII. ROME AND CARTHAGE 180

XXXIII. THE GROWTH OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 185

XXXIV. BETWEEN ROME AND CHINA 196

XXXV. THE COMMON MAN’S LIFE UNDER THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE 201

XXXVI. RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE 208

XXXVII. THE TEACHING OF JESUS 214

XXXVIII. THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINAL CHRISTIANITY 222

XXXIX. THE BARBARIANS BREAK THE EMPIRE INTO EAST AND WEST 227

XL. THE HUNS AND THE END OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE 233

XLI. THE BYZANTINE AND SASSANID EMPIRES 238

XLII. THE DYNASTIES OF SUY AND TANG IN CHINA 245

XLIII. MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 248

XLIV. THE GREAT DAYS OF THE ARABS 253

XLV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM 258

XLVI. THE CRUSADES AND THE AGE OF PAPAL DOMINION 267

XLVII. RECALCITRANT PRINCES AND THE GREAT SCHISM 277

XLVIII. THE MONGOL CONQUESTS 287

XLIX. THE INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS 294

L. THE REFORMATION OF THE LATIN CHURCH 304

LI. THE EMPEROR CHARLES V 309

LII. THE AGE OF POLITICAL EXPERIMENTS; OF GRAND MONARCHY AND

PARLIAMENTS AND REPUBLICANISM IN EUROPE 318

LIII. THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE EUROPEANS IN ASIA AND OVERSEAS 329

LIV. THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 335

LV. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE 341

LVI.

THE UNEASY PEACE IN EUROPE THAT FOLLOWED THE FALL OF NAPOLEON 349

LVII. THE DEVELOPMENT OF MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE 355

LVIII. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 365

LIX. THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS 370

LX. THE EXPANSION OF THE UNITED STATES 382

LXI. THE RISE OF GERMANY TO PREDOMINANCE IN EUROPE 390

LXII. THE NEW OVERSEAS EMPIRES OF THE STEAMSHIP AND RAILWAY 393

LXIII.

EUROPEAN AGGRESSION IN ASIA, AND THE RISE OF JAPAN 399

LXIV. THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN 1914 405

LXV. THE AGE OF ARMAMENT IN EUROPE, AND THE GREAT WAR OF 1914-18 409

LXVI. THE REVOLUTION AND FAMINE IN RUSSIA 415

LXVII. THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE WORLD 421

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 429

INDEX 439

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Page

Luminous Spiral Clouds of Matter 2

Nebula seen Edge-on 3

The Great Spiral Nebula 6

A Dark Nebula 7

Another Spiral Nebula 8

Landscape before Life 9

Marine Life in the Cambrian Period 12

Fossil Trilobite 13

Early Palæozoic Fossils of various Species of

Lingula 14

Fossilized Footprints of a Labyrinthodont, Cheirotherium 15

Pterichthys Milleri 17

Fossil of Cladoselache 18

Sharks and Ganoids of the Devonian Period 19

A Carboniferous Swamp 22

Skull of a Labyrinthodont, Capitosaurus 23

Skeleton of a Labyrinthodont: The Eryops 24

A Fossil Ichthyosaurus 27

A Pterodactyl 28

The Diplodocus 29

Fossil of Archeopteryx 32

Hesperornis in its Native Seas 33

The Ki-wi 34

Slab of Marl Rich in Cainozoic Fossils 35

Titanotherium Robustum 38

Skeleton of Giraffe-camel 40

Skeleton of Early Horse 40

Comparative Sizes of Brains of Rhinoceros and Dinoceras 41

A Mammoth 44

Flint Implements from Piltdown Region 45

A Pithecanthropean Man 46

The Heidelberg Man 46

The Piltdown Skull 47

A Neanderthaler 49

Europe and Western Asia 50,000 years ago

_Map_ 50

Comparison of Modern Skull and Rhodesian Skull 51

Altamira Cave Paintings 54

Later Palæolithic Carvings 55

Bust of Cro-magnon Man 57

Later Palæolithic Art 58

Relics of the Stone Age 62

Gray’s Inn Lane Flint Implement 63

Somaliland Flint Implement 63

Neolithic Flint Implement 67

Australian Spearheads 68

Neolithic Pottery 69

Relationship of Human Races _Map_ 72

A Maya Stele 73

European Neolithic Warrior 75

Babylonian Brick 78

Egyptian Cylinder Seals of First Dynasty 79

The Sakhara Pyramids 80

The Pyramid of Cheops: Scene from Summit 81

The Temple of Hathor 82

Pottery and Implements of the Lake

Dwellers 85

A Lake Village 86

Flint Knives of 4500 B.C. 87

Egyptian Wall Paintings of Nomads 87

Egyptian Peasants Going to Work 88

Stele of Naram Sin 89

The Treasure House at Mycenæ 93

The Palace at Cnossos 95

Temple at Abu Simbel 97

Avenue of Sphinxes at Karnak 98

The Hypostyle Hall at Karnak 99

Frieze of Slaves 101

The Temple of Horus, Edfu 103

Archaic Amphora 105

The Mound of Nippur 107

Median and Chaldean Empires _Map_ 110

The Empire of Darius _Map_ 111

A Persian Monarch 112

The Ruins of Persepolis 113

The Great Porch of Xerxes 113

The Land of the Hebrews _Map_ 117

Nebuchadnezzar’s Mound at Babylon 118

The Ishtar Gateway, Babylon 120

Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser II 124

Captive Princes making Obeisance 125

Statue of Meleager 128

Ruins of Temple of Zeus 130

The Temple of Neptune, Pæstum 132

Greek Ships on Ancient Pottery 135

The Temple of Corinth 137

The Temple of Neptune at Cape Sunium 138

Frieze of the Parthenon, Athens 140

The Acropolis, Athens 141

Theatre at Epidauros, Greece 141

The Caryatides of the Erechtheum 142

Athene of the Parthenon 143

Alexander the Great 146

Alexander’s Victory at Issus 147

The Apollo Belvedere 148

Aristotle 152

Statuette of Maitreya 153

The Death of Buddha 154

Tibetan Buddha 158

A Burmese Buddha 159

The Dhamêkh Tower, Sarnath 160

A Chinese Buddhist Apostle 164

The Court of Asoka 165

Asoka Panel from Bharhut 165

The Pillar of Lions (Asokan) 166

Confucius 169

The Great Wall of China 171

Early Chinese Bronze Bell 172

The Dying Gaul 175

Ancient Roman Cisterns at Carthage 177

Hannibal 181

Roman Empire and its Alliances, 150 B.C. _Map_ 183

The Forum, Rome 188

Ruined Coliseum in Tunis 189

Roman Arch at Ctesiphon 190

The Column of Trajan, Rome 193

Glazed Jar of Han Dynasty 197

Vase of Han Dynasty 198

Chinese Vessel in Bronze 199

A Gladiator (contemporary representation) 202

A Street in Pompeii 204

The Coliseum, Rome 206

Interior of Coliseum 206

Mithras Sacrificing a Bull 210

Isis and Horus 211

Bust of Emperor Commodus 212

Early Portrait of Jesus Christ 216

Road from Nazareth to Tiberias 217

David’s Tower and Wall of Jerusalem 218

A Street in Jerusalem 219

The Peter and Paul Mosaic at Rome 223

Baptism of Christ (Ivory Panel) 225

Roman Empire and the Barbarians _Map_ 228

Constantine’s Pillar, Constantinople 229

The Obelisk of Theodosius, Constantinople 231

Head of Barbarian Chief 235

The Church of S. Sophia, Constantinople 239

Roof-work in S. Sophia 240

Justinian and his Court 241

The Rock-hewn Temple at Petra 242

Chinese Earthenware of Tang Dynasty 246

At Prayer in the Desert 250

Looking Across the Sea of Sand 251

Growth of Moslem Power _Map_ 254

The Moslem Empire _Map_ 254

The Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem 255

Cairo Mosques 256

Frankish Dominions of Martel _Map_ 260

Statue of Charlemagne 262

Europe at Death of Charlemagne _Map_ 264

Crusader Tombs, Exeter Cathedral 268

View of Cairo 269

The Horses of S. Mark, Venice 271

Courtyard in the Alhambra 273

Milan Cathedral (showing spires) 278

A Typical Crusader 280

Burgundian Nobility (Statuettes) 283

Burgundian Nobility (Statuettes) 284

The Empire of Jengis Khan _Map_ 288

Ottoman Empire before 1453 _Map_ 289

Tartar Horsemen 291

Ottoman Empire, 1566 _Map_ 292

An Early Printing Press 296

Ancient Bronze from Benin 299

Negro Bronze-work 300

Early Sailing Ship (Italian Engraving) 301

Portrait of Martin Luther 305

The Church Triumphant (Italian Majolica work, 1543) 307

Charles V (the Titian Portrait) 311

S. Peter’s, Rome: the High Altar 315

Cromwell Dissolves the Long Parliament 321

The Court at Versailles 323

Sack of a Village, French Revolution 325

Central Europe after Peace of Westphalia,

1648 _Map_ 326

European Territory in America, 1750 _Map_ 330

Europeans Tiger Hunting in India 331

Fall of Tippoo Sultan 332

George Washington 337

The Battle of Bunker Hill 338

The U.S.A., 1790 339

The Trial of Louis XVI 344

Execution of Marie Antoinette 346

Portrait of Napoleon 352

Europe after the Congress of Vienna _Map_ 353

Early Rolling Stock, Liverpool and Manchester

Railway 356

Passenger Train in 1833 356

The Steamboat _Clermont_ 357

Eighteenth Century Spinning Wheel 361

Arkwright’s Spinning Jenny 361

An Early Weaving Machine 363

An Incident of the Slave Trade 367

Early Factory, in Colebrookdale 368

Carl Marx 372

Electric Conveyor, in Coal Mine 376

Constructional Detail, Forth Bridge 378

American River Steamer 385

Abraham Lincoln 387

Europe, 1848-71 _Map_ 391

Victoria Falls, Zambesi 395

The British Empire, 1815 _Map_ 397

Japanese Soldier, Eighteenth Century 401

A Street in Tokio 403

Overseas Empires of Europe, 1914 _Map_ 406

Gibraltar 407

Street in Hong Kong 408

British Tank in Battle 410

The Ruins of Ypres 411

Modern War: War Entanglements 412

A View in Petersburg under Bolshevik Rule 418

Passenger Aeroplane in Flight 423

A Peaceful Garden in England 426

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

THE WORLD IN SPACE

The story of our world is a story that is still very imperfectly known.

A couple of hundred years ago men possessed the history of little more

than the last three thousand years. What happened before that time was

a matter of legend and speculation. Over a large part of the civilized

world it was believed and taught that the world had been created

suddenly in 4004 B.C., though authorities differed as to whether this

had occurred in the spring or autumn of that year. This fantastically

precise misconception was based upon a too literal interpretation of

the Hebrew Bible, and upon rather arbitrary theological assumptions

connected therewith. Such ideas have long since been abandoned by

religious teachers, and it is universally recognized that the universe

in which we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous period

of time and possibly for endless time. Of course there may be

deception in these appearances, as a room may be made to seem endless

by putting mirrors facing each other at either end. But that the

universe in which we live has existed only for six or seven thousand

years may be regarded as an altogether exploded idea.

The earth, as everybody knows nowadays, is a spheroid, a sphere

slightly compressed, orange fashion, with a diameter of nearly 8,000

miles. Its spherical shape has been known at least to a limited number

of intelligent people for nearly 2,500 years, but before that time it

was supposed to be flat, and various ideas which now seem fantastic

were entertained about its relations to the sky and the stars and

planets. We know now that it rotates upon its axis (which is about 24

miles shorter than its equatorial diameter) every twenty-four hours,

and that this is the cause of the alternations of day and night, that

it circles about the sun in a slightly distorted and slowly variable

oval path in a year. Its distance from the sun varies between

ninety-one and a half millions at its nearest and ninety-four and a

half million miles.

LUMINOUS SPIRAL CLOUDS OF MATTER

“LUMINOUS SPIRAL CLOUDS OF MATTER”

(Nebula photographed 1910)

_Photo: G. W. Ritchey_

About the earth circles a smaller sphere, the moon, at an average

distance of 239,000 miles. Earth and moon are not the only bodies to

travel round the sun. There are also the planets, Mercury and Venus,

at distances of thirty-six and sixty-seven millions of miles; and

beyond the circle of the earth and disregarding a belt of numerous

smaller bodies, the planetoids, there are Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,

Uranus and Neptune at mean distances of 141, 483, 886, 1,782, and 1,793

millions of miles respectively. These figures in millions of miles are

very difficult for the mind to grasp. It may help the reader’s

imagination if we reduce the sun and planets to a smaller, more

conceivable scale.

THE NEBULA SEEN EDGE ON

THE NEBULA SEEN EDGE-ON

Note the central core which, through millions of years, is cooling to

solidity

_Photo: G. W. Ritchey_

If, then, we represent our earth as a little ball of one inch diameter,

the sun would be a big globe nine feet across and 323 yards away, that

is about a fifth of a mile, four or five minutes’ walking. The moon

would be a small pea two feet and a half from the world. Between earth

and sun there would be the two inner planets, Mercury and Venus, at

distances of one hundred and twenty-five and two hundred and fifty

yards from the sun. All round and about these bodies there would be

emptiness until you came to Mars, a hundred and seventy-five feet

beyond the earth; Jupiter nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter;

Saturn, a little smaller, two miles off; Uranus four miles off and

Neptune six miles off. Then nothingness and nothingness except for

small particles and drifting scraps of attenuated vapour for thousands

of miles. The nearest star to earth on this scale would be 40,000

miles away.

These figures will serve perhaps to give one some conception of the

immense emptiness of space in which the drama of life goes on.

For in all this enormous vacancy of space we know certainly of life

only upon the surface of our earth. It does not penetrate much more

than three miles down into the 4,000 miles that separate us from the

centre of our globe, and it does not reach more than five miles above

its surface. Apparently all the limitlessness of space is otherwise

empty and dead.

The deepest ocean dredgings go down to five miles. The highest recorded

flight of an aeroplane is little more than four miles. Men have reached

to seven miles up in balloons, but at a cost of great suffering. No

bird can fly so high as five miles, and small birds and insects which

have been carried up by aeroplanes drop off insensible far below that

level.

THE WORLD IN TIME

In the last fifty years there has been much very fine and interesting

speculation on the part of scientific men upon the age and origin of

our earth. Here we cannot pretend to give even a summary of such

speculations because they involve the most subtle mathematical and

physical considerations. The truth is that the physical and

astronomical sciences are still too undeveloped as yet to make anything

of the sort more than an illustrative guesswork. The general tendency

has been to make the estimated age of our globe longer and longer. It

now seems probable that the earth has had an independent existence as a

spinning planet flying round and round the sun for a longer period than

2,000,000,000 years. It may have been much longer than that. This is a

length of time that absolutely overpowers the imagination.

Before that vast period of separate existence, the sun and earth and

the other planets that circulate round the sun may have been a great

swirl of diffused matter in space. The telescope reveals to us in

various parts of the heavens luminous spiral clouds of matter, the

spiral nebulæ, which appear to be in rotation about a centre. It is

supposed by many astronomers that the sun and its planets were once

such a spiral, and that their matter has undergone concentration into

its present form. Through majestic æons that concentration went on

until in that vast remoteness of the past for which we have given

figures, the world and its moon were distinguishable. They were

spinning then much faster than they are spinning now; they were at a

lesser distance from the sun; they travelled round it very much faster,

and they were probably incandescent or molten at the surface. The sun

itself was a much greater blaze in the heavens.

THE GREAT SPIRAL NEBULA

_Photo: G. W. Ritchey_

If we could go back through that infinitude of time and see the earth

in this earlier stage of its history, we should behold a scene more

like the interior of a blast furnace or the surface of a lava flow

before it cools and cakes over than any other contemporary scene. No

water would be visible because all the water there was would still be

superheated steam in a stormy atmosphere of sulphurous and metallic

vapours. Beneath this would swirl and boil an ocean of molten rock

substance. Across a sky of fiery clouds the glare of the hurrying sun

and moon would sweep swiftly like hot breaths of flame.

A DARK NEBULA

_Taken in 1920 with the aid of the largest telescope in the world. One

of the first photographs taken by the Mount Wilson telescope._

There are dark nebulæ and bright nebulæ. Prof. Henry Norris Russell,

against the British theory, holds that the dark nebulæ preceded the

bright nebulæ.

_Photo: Prof. Hale_

Slowly by degrees as one million of years followed another, this fiery

scene would lose its eruptive incandescence. The vapours in the sky

would rain down and become less dense overhead; great slaggy cakes of

solidifying rock would appear upon the surface of the molten sea, and

sink under it, to be replaced by other floating masses. The sun and

moon growing now each more distant and each smaller, would rush with

diminishing swiftness across the heavens. The moon now, because of its

smaller size, would be already cooled far below incandescence, and

would be alternately obstructing and reflecting the sunlight in a

series of eclipses and full moons.

ANOTHER SPIRAL NEBULA

_Photo: G. W. Ritchey_

And so with a tremendous slowness through the vastness of time, the

earth would grow more and more like the earth on which we live, until

at last an age would come when, in the cooling air, steam would begin

to condense into clouds, and the first rain would fall hissing upon the

first rocks below. For endless millenia the greater part of the

earth’s water would still be vaporized in the atmosphere, but there

would now be hot streams running over the crystallizing rocks below and

pools and lakes into which these streams would be carrying detritus and

depositing sediment.

LANDSCAPE BEFORE LIFE

“Great lava-like masses of rock without traces of soil”

At last a condition of things must have been attained in which a man

might have stood up on earth and looked about him and lived. If we

could have visited the earth at that time we should have stood on great

lava-like masses of rock without a trace of soil or touch of living

vegetation, under a storm-rent sky. Hot and violent winds, exceeding

the fiercest tornado that ever blows, and downpours of rain such as our

milder, slower earth to-day knows nothing of, might have assailed us.

The water of the downpour would have rushed by us, muddy with the

spoils of the rocks, coming together into torrents, cutting deep gorges

and canyons as they hurried past to deposit their sediment in the

earliest seas. Through the clouds we should have glimpsed a great sun

moving visibly across the sky, and in its wake and in the wake of the

moon would have come a diurnal tide of earthquake and upheaval. And

the moon, which nowadays keeps one constant face to earth, would then

have been rotating visibly and showing the side it now hides so

inexorably.

The earth aged. One million years followed another, and the day

lengthened, the sun grew more distant and milder, the moon’s pace in

the sky slackened; the intensity of rain and storm diminished and the

water in the first seas increased and ran together into the ocean

garment our planet henceforth wore.

But there was no life as yet upon the earth; the seas were lifeless,

and the rocks were barren.

III

THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE

As everybody knows nowadays, the knowledge we possess of life before

the beginnings of human memory and tradition is derived from the

markings and fossils of living things in the stratified rocks. We find

preserved in shale and slate, limestone, and sandstone, bones, shells,

fibres, stems, fruits, footmarks, scratchings and the like, side by

side with the ripple marks of the earliest tides and the pittings of

the earliest rain-falls. It is by the sedulous examination of this

Record of the Rocks that the past history of the earth’s life has been

pieced together. That much nearly everybody knows to-day. The

sedimentary rocks do not lie neatly stratum above stratum; they have

been crumpled, bent, thrust about, distorted and mixed together like

the leaves of a library that has been repeatedly looted and burnt, and

it is only as a result of many devoted lifetimes of work that the

record has been put into order and read. The whole compass of time

represented by the record of the rocks is now estimated as

1,600,000,000 years.

The earliest rocks in the record are called by geologists the Azoic

rocks, because they show no traces of life. Great areas of these Azoic

rocks lie uncovered in North America, and they are of such a thickness

that geologists consider that they represent a period of at least half

of the 1,600,000,000 which they assign to the whole geological record.

Let me repeat this profoundly significant fact. Half the great interval

of time since land and sea were first distinguishable on earth has left

us no traces of life. There are ripplings and rain marks still to be

found in these rocks, but no marks nor vestiges of any living thing.

MARINE LIFE IN THE CAMBRIAN PERIOD

1 and 8, Jellyfishes; 2, Hyolithes (swimming snail); 3, Humenocaris;

4, Protospongia; 5, Lampshells (Obolella); 6, Orthoceras; 7,

Trilobite (Paradoxides) — see fossil on page 13; 9, Coral

(Archæocyathus); 10, Bryograptus; 11, Trilobite (Olenellus); 12,

Palesterina

Then, as we come up the record, signs of past life appear and increase.

The age of the world’s history in which we find these past traces is

called by geologists the Lower Palæozoic age. The first indications

that life was astir are vestiges of comparatively simple and lowly

things: the shells of small shellfish, the stems and flowerlike heads

of zoophytes, seaweeds and the tracks and remains of sea worms and

crustacea. Very early appear certain creatures rather like plant-lice,

crawling creatures which could roll themselves up into balls as the

plant-lice do, the trilobites. Later by a few million years or so come

certain sea scorpions, more mobile and powerful creatures than the

world had ever seen before.

FOSSIL TRILOBITE (SLIGHTLY MAGNIFIED)

_Photo: John J. Ward, F.E.S._

None of these creatures were of very great size. Among the largest

were certain of the sea scorpions, which measured nine feet in length.

There are no signs whatever of land life of any sort, plant or animal;

there are no fishes nor any vertebrated creatures in this part of the

record. Essentially all the plants and creatures which have left us

their traces from this period of the earth’s history are shallow-water

and intertidal beings. If we wished to parallel the flora and fauna of

the Lower Palæozoic rocks on the earth to-day, we should do it best,

except in the matter of size, by taking a drop of water from a rock

pool or scummy ditch and examining it under a microscope. The little

crustacea, the small shellfish, the zoophytes and algæ we should find

there would display a quite striking resemblance to these clumsier,

larger prototypes that once were the crown of life upon our planet.

EARLY PALÆOLITHIC FOSSILS OF VARIOUS SPECIES OF LINGULA

Species of this most ancient genus of shellfish still live to-day

_(In Natural History Museum, London)_

It is well, however, to bear in mind that the Lower Palæozoic rocks

probably do not give us anything at all representative of the first

beginnings of life on our planet. Unless a creature has bones or other

hard parts, unless it wears a shell or is big enough and heavy enough

to make characteristic footprints and trails in mud, it is unlikely to

leave any fossilized traces of its existence behind. To-day there are

hundreds of thousands of species of small soft-bodied creatures in our

world which it is inconceivable can ever leave any mark for future

geologists to discover. In the world’s past, millions of millions of

species of such creatures may have lived and multiplied and flourished

and passed away without a trace remaining. The waters of the warm and

shallow lakes and seas of the so-called Azoic period may have teemed

with an infinite variety of lowly, jelly-like, shell-less and boneless

creatures, and a multitude of green scummy plants may have spread over

the sunlit intertidal rocks and beaches. The Record of the Rocks is no

more a complete record of life in the past than the books of a bank are

a record of the existence of everybody in the neighbourhood. It is

only when a species begins to secrete a shell or a spicule or a

carapace or a lime-supported stem, and so put by something for the

future, that it goes upon the Record. But in rocks of an age prior to

those which bear any fossil traces, graphite, a form of uncombined

carbon, is sometimes found, and some authorities consider that it may

have been separated out from combination through the vital activities

of unknown living things.

FOSSILIZED FOOTPRINTS OF A LABYRINTHODONT CHEIROTHERIUM

_(In Natural History Museum, London)_

THE AGE OF FISHES

In the days when the world was supposed to have endured for only a few

thousand years, it was supposed that the different species of plants

and animals were fixed and final; they had all been created exactly as

they are to-day, each species by itself. But as men began to discover

and study the Record of the Rocks this belief gave place to the

suspicion that many species had changed and developed slowly through

the course of ages, and this again expanded into a belief in what is

called Organic Evolution, a belief that all species of life upon earth,

animal and vegetable alike, are descended by slow continuous processes

of change from some very simple ancestral form of life, some almost

structureless living substance, far back in the so-called Azoic seas.

This question of Organic Evolution, like the question of the age of the

earth, has in the past been the subject of much bitter controversy.

There was a time when a belief in organic evolution was for rather

obscure reasons supposed to be incompatible with sound Christian,

Jewish and Moslem doctrine. That time has passed, and the men of the

most orthodox Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Mohammedan belief are

now free to accept this newer and broader view of a common origin of

all living things. No life seems to have happened suddenly upon earth.

Life grew and grows. Age by age through gulfs of time at which

imagination reels, life has been growing from a mere stirring in the

intertidal slime towards freedom, power and consciousness.

Life consists of individuals. These individuals are definite things,

they are not like the lumps and masses, nor even the limitless and

motionless crystals, of non-living matter, and they have two

characteristics no dead matter possesses. They can assimilate other

matter into themselves and make it part of themselves, and they can

reproduce themselves. They eat and they breed. They can give rise to

other individuals, for the most part like themselves, but always also a

little different from themselves. There is a specific and family

resemblance between an individual and its offspring, and there is an

individual difference between every parent and every offspring it

produces, and this is true in every species and at every stage of life.

SPECIMEN OF THE PTERICHTHYS MILLERI OR SEA SCORPION SHOWING BODY ARMOUR

Now scientific men are not able to explain to us either why offspring

should resemble nor why they should differ from their parents. But

seeing that offspring do at once resemble and differ, it is a matter

rather of common sense than of scientific knowledge that, if the

conditions under which a species live are changed, the species should

undergo some correlated changes. Because in any generation of the

species there must be a number of individuals whose individual

differences make them better adapted to the new conditions under which

the species has to live, and a number whose individuals whose

individual differences make it rather harder for them to live. And on

the whole the former sort will live longer, bear more offspring, and

reproduce themselves more abundantly than the latter, and so generation

by generation the average of the species will change in the favourable

direction. This process, which is called Natural Selection, is not so

much a scientific theory as a necessary deduction from the facts of

reproduction and individual difference. There may be many forces at

work varying, destroying and preserving species, about which science

may still be unaware or undecided, but the man who can deny the

operation of this process of natural selection upon life since its

beginning must be either ignorant of the elementary facts of life or

incapable of ordinary thought.

Many scientific men have speculated about the first beginning of life

and their speculations are often of great interest, but there is

absolutely no definite knowledge and no convincing guess yet of the way

in which life began. But nearly all authorities are agreed that it

probably began upon mud or sand in warm sunlit shallow brackish water,

and that it spread up the beaches to the intertidal lines and out to

the open waters.

FOSSIL OF THE CLADOSELACHE, A DEVONIAN SHARK

_Nat. Hist. Mus._

That early world was a world of strong tides and currents. An

incessant destruction of individuals must have been going on through

their being swept up the beaches and dried, or by their being swept out

to sea and sinking down out of reach of air and sun. Early conditions

favoured the development of every tendency to root and hold on, every

tendency to form an outer skin and casing to protect the stranded

individual from immediate desiccation. From the very earliest any

tendency to sensitiveness to taste would turn the individual in the

direction of food, and any sensitiveness to light would assist it to

struggle back out of the darkness of the sea deeps and caverns or to

wriggle back out of the excessive glare of the dangerous shallows.

Probably the first shells and body armour of living things were

protections against drying rather than against active enemies. But

tooth and claw come early into our earthly history.

We have already noted the size of the earlier water scorpions. For

long ages such creatures were the supreme lords of life. Then in a

division of these Palæozoic rocks called the Silurian division, which

many geologists now suppose to be as old as five hundred million years,

there appears a new type of being, equipped with eyes and teeth and

swimming powers of an altogether more powerful kind. These were the

first known backboned animals, the earliest fishes, the first known

Vertebrata.

SHARKS AND GANOIDS OF THE DEVONIAN PERIOD

_By Alice Woodward_

These fishes increase greatly in the next division of rocks, the rocks

known as the Devonian system. They are so prevalent that this period

of the Record of the Rocks has been called the Age of Fishes. Fishes

of a pattern now gone from the earth, and fishes allied to the sharks

and sturgeons of to-day, rushed through the waters, leapt in the air,

browsed among the seaweeds, pursued and preyed upon one another, and

gave a new liveliness to the waters of the world. None of these were

excessively big by our present standards. Few of them were more than

two or three feet long, but there were exceptional forms which were as

long as twenty feet.

We know nothing from geology of the ancestors of these fishes. They do

not appear to be related to any of the forms that preceded them.

Zoologists have the most interesting views of their ancestry, but these

they derive from the study of the development of the eggs of their

still living relations, and from other sources. Apparently the

ancestors of the vertebrata were soft-bodied and perhaps quite small

swimming creatures who began first to develop hard parts as teeth round

and about their mouths. The teeth of a skate or dogfish cover the roof

and floor of its mouth and pass at the lip into the flattened toothlike

scales that encase most of its body. As the fishes develop these teeth

scales in the geological record, they swim out of the hidden darkness

of the past into the light, the first vertebrated animals visible in

the record.

THE AGE OF THE COAL SWAMPS

The land during this Age of Fishes was apparently quite lifeless. Crags

and uplands of barren rock lay under the sun and rain. There was no

real soil—for as yet there were no earthworms which help to make a

soil, and no plants to break up the rock particles into mould; there

was no trace of moss or lichen. Life was still only in the sea.

Over this world of barren rock played great changes of climate. The

causes of these changes of climate were very complex and they have

still to be properly estimated. The changing shape of the earth’s

orbit, the gradual shifting of the poles of rotation, changes in the

shapes of the continents, probably even fluctuations in the warmth of

the sun, now conspired to plunge great areas of the earth’s surface

into long periods of cold and ice and now again for millions of years

spread a warm or equable climate over this planet. There seem to have

been phases of great internal activity in the world’s history, when in

the course of a few million years accumulated upthrusts would break out

in lines of volcanic eruption and upheaval and rearrange the mountain

and continental outlines of the globe, increasing the depth of the sea

and the height of the mountains and exaggerating the extremes of

climate. And these would be followed by vast ages of comparative

quiescence, when frost, rain and river would wear down the mountain

heights and carry great masses of silt to fill and raise the sea

bottoms and spread the seas, ever shallower and wider, over more and

more of the land. There have been “high and deep” ages in the world’s

history and “low and level” ages. The reader must dismiss from his

mind any idea that the surface of the earth has been growing steadily

cooler since its crust grew solid. After that much cooling had been

achieved, the internal temperature ceased to affect surface conditions.

There are traces of periods of superabundant ice and snow, of “Glacial

Ages,” that is, even in the Azoic period.

It was only towards the close of the Age of Fishes, in a period of

extensive shallow seas and lagoons, that life spread itself out in any

effectual way from the waters on to the land. No doubt the earlier

types of the forms that now begin to appear in great abundance had

already been developing in a rare and obscure manner for many scores of

millions of years. But now came their opportunity.

A CARBONIFEROUS SWAMP

_A Coal Seam in the Making_

Plants no doubt preceded animal forms in this invasion of the land, but

the animals probably followed up the plant emigration very closely. The

first problem that the plant had to solve was the problem of some

sustaining stiff support to hold up its fronds to the sunlight when the

buoyant water was withdrawn; the second was the problem of getting

water from the swampy ground below to the tissues of the plant, now

that it was no longer close at hand. The two problems were solved by

the development of woody tissue which both sustained the plant and

acted as water carrier to the leaves. The Record of the Rocks is

suddenly crowded by a vast variety of woody swamp plants, many of them

of great size, big tree mosses, tree ferns, gigantic horsetails and the

like. And with these, age by age, there crawled out of the water a

great variety of animal forms. There were centipedes and millipedes;

there were the first primitive insects; there were creatures related to

the ancient king crabs and sea scorpions which became the earliest

spiders and land scorpions, and presently there were vertebrated

animals.

SKULL OF A LABYRINTHODONT, CAPITOSAURUS

_Nat. Hist. Mus._

Some of the earlier insects were very large. There were dragon flies in

this period with wings that spread out to twenty-nine inches.

In various ways these new orders and genera had adapted themselves to

breathing air. Hitherto all animals had breathed air dissolved in

water, and that indeed is what all animals still have to do. But now in

divers fashions the animal kingdom was acquiring the power of supplying

its own moisture where it was needed. A man with a perfectly dry lung

would suffocate to-day; his lung surfaces must be moist in order that

air may pass through them into his blood. The adaptation to air

breathing consists in all cases either in the development of a cover to

the old-fashioned gills to stop evaporation, or in the development of

tubes or other new breathing organs lying deep inside the body and

moistened by a watery secretion. The old gills with which the

ancestral fish of the vertebrated line had breathed were inadaptable to

breathing upon land, and in the case of this division of the animal

kingdom it is the swimming bladder of the fish which becomes a new,

deep-seated breathing organ, the lung. The kind of animals known as

amphibia, the frogs and newts of to-day, begin their lives in the water

and breathe by gills; and subsequently the lung, developing in the same

way as the swimming bladder of many fishes do, as a baglike outgrowth

from the throat, takes over the business of breathing, the animal comes

out on land, and the gills dwindle and the gill slits disappear. (All

except an outgrowth of one gill slit, which becomes the passage of the

ear and ear-drum.) The animal can now live only in the air, but it

must return at least to the edge of the water to lay its eggs and

reproduce its kind.

SKELETON OF A LABYRINTHODONT: THE ERYOPS

_Nat. Hist. Mus._

All the air-breathing vertebrata of this age of swamps and plants

belonged to the class amphibia. They were nearly all of them forms

related to the newts of to-day, and some of them attained a

considerable size. They were land animals, it is true, but they were

land animals needing to live in and near moist and swampy places, and

all the great trees of this period were equally amphibious in their

habits. None of them had yet developed fruits and seeds of a kind that

could fall on land and develop with the help only of such moisture as

dew and rain could bring. They all had to shed their spores in water,

it would seem, if they were to germinate.

It is one of the most beautiful interests of that beautiful science,

comparative anatomy, to trace the complex and wonderful adaptations of

living things to the necessities of existence in air. All living

things, plants and animals alike, are primarily water things. For

example all the higher vertebrated animals above the fishes, up to and

including man, pass through a stage in their development in the egg or

before birth in which they have gill slits which are obliterated before

the young emerge. The bare, water-washed eye of the fish is protected

in the higher forms from drying up by eyelids and glands which secrete

moisture. The weaker sound vibrations of air necessitate an ear-drum.

In nearly every organ of the body similar modifications and adaptations

are to be detected, similar patchings-up to meet aerial conditions.

This Carboniferous age, this age of the amphibia, was an age of life in

the swamps and lagoons and on the low banks among these waters. Thus

far life had now extended. The hills and high lands were still quite

barren and lifeless. Life had learnt to breathe air indeed, but it

still had its roots in its native water; it still had to return to the

water to reproduce its kind.

THE AGE OF REPTILES

The abundant life of the Carboniferous period was succeeded by a vast

cycle of dry and bitter ages. They are represented in the Record of

the Rocks by thick deposits of sandstones and the like, in which

fossils are comparatively few. The temperature of the world fluctuated

widely, and there were long periods of glacial cold. Over great areas

the former profusion of swamp vegetation ceased, and, overlaid by these

newer deposits, it began that process of compression and mineralization

that gave the world most of the coal deposits of to-day.

But it is during periods of change that life undergoes its most rapid

modifications, and under hardship that it learns its hardest lessons.

As conditions revert towards warmth and moisture again we find a new

series of animal and plant forms established, We find in the record

the remains of vertebrated animals that laid eggs which, instead of

hatching out tadpoles which needed to live for a time in water, carried

on their development before hatching to a stage so nearly like the

adult form that the young could live in air from the first moment of

independent existence. Gills had been cut out altogether, and the gill

slits only appeared as an embryonic phase.

These new creatures without a tadpole stage were the Reptiles.

Concurrently there had been a development of seed-bearing trees, which

could spread their seed, independently of swamp or lakes. There were

now palmlike cycads and many tropical conifers, though as yet there

were no flowering plants and no grasses. There was a great number of

ferns. And there was now also an increased variety of insects. There

were beetles, though bees and butterflies had yet to come. But all the

fundamental forms of a new real land fauna and flora had been laid down

during these vast ages of severity. This new land life needed only the

opportunity of favourable conditions to flourish and prevail.

A FOSSIL ICHTHYOSAURUS, A MESOZOIC FISH-LIZARD

Found in the Lower Lias in Somersetshire

_Nat. Hist. Mus._

Age by age and with abundant fluctuations that mitigation came. The

still incalculable movements of the earth’s crust, the changes in its

orbit, the increase and diminution of the mutual inclination of orbit

and pole, worked together to produce a great spell of widely diffused

warm conditions. The period lasted altogether, it is now supposed,

upwards of two hundred million years. It is called the Mesozoic

period, to distinguish it from the altogether vaster Palæozoic and

Azoic periods (together fourteen hundred millions) that preceded it,

and from the Cainozoic or new life period that intervened between its

close and the present time, and it is also called the Age of Reptiles

because of the astonishing predominance and variety of this form of

life. It came to an end some eighty million years ago.

In the world to-day the genera of Reptiles are comparatively few and

their distribution is very limited. They are more various, it is true,

than are the few surviving members of the order of the amphibia which

once in the Carboniferous period ruled the world. We still have the

snakes, the turtles and tortoises (the Chelonia), the alligators and

crocodiles, and the lizards. Without exception they are creatures

requiring warmth all the year round; they cannot stand exposure to

cold, and it is probable that all the reptilian beings of the Mesozoic

suffered under the same limitation. It was a hothouse fauna, living

amidst a hothouse flora. It endured no frosts. But the world had at

least attained a real dry land fauna and flora as distinguished from

the mud and swamp fauna and flora of the previous heyday of life upon

earth.

A PTERODACTYL

_Nat. Hist. Mus._

All the sorts of reptile we know now were much more abundantly

represented then, great turtles and tortoises, big crocodiles and many

lizards and snakes, but in addition there was a number of series of

wonderful creatures that have now vanished altogether from the earth.

There was a vast variety of beings called the Dinosaurs. Vegetation was

now spreading over the lower levels of the world, reeds, brakes of fern

and the like; and browsing upon this abundance came a multitude of

herbivorous reptiles, which increased in size as the Mesozoic period

rose to its climax. Some of these beasts exceeded in size any other

land animals that have ever lived; they were as large as whales. The

_Diplodocus Carnegii_ for example measured eighty-four feet from snout

to tail; the Gigantosaurus was even greater; it measured a hundred

feet. Living upon these monsters was a swarm of carnivorous Dinosaurs

of a corresponding size. One of these, the Tyrannosaurus, is figured

and described in many books as the last word in reptilian

frightfulness.

A BIG SWAMP-INHABITING DINOSAUR, THE DIPLODOCUS, OVER EIGHTY FEET FROM

SNOUT TO TAIL-TIP

A BIG SWAMP-INHABITING DINOSAUR, THE DIPLODOCUS, OVER EIGHTY FEET FROM

SNOUT TO TAIL-TIP

_Nat. Hist. Mus._

While these great creatures pastured and pursued amidst the fronds and

evergreens of the Mesozoic jungles, another now vanished tribe of

reptiles, with a bat-like development of the fore limbs, pursued

insects and one another, first leapt and parachuted and presently flew

amidst the fronds and branches of the forest trees. These were the

Pterodactyls. These were the first flying creatures with backbones;

they mark a new achievement in the growing powers of vertebrated life.

Moreover some of the reptiles were returning to the sea waters. Three

groups of big swimming beings had invaded the sea from which their

ancestors had come: the Mososaurs, the Plesiosaurs, and Ichthyosaurs.

Some of these again approached the proportions of our present whales.

The Ichthyosaurs seem to have been quite seagoing creatures, but the

Plesiosaurs were a type of animal that has no cognate form to-day. The

body was stout and big with paddles, adapted either for swimming or

crawling through marshes, or along the bottom of shallow waters. The

comparatively small head was poised on a vast snake of neck, altogether

outdoing the neck of the swan. Either the Plesiosaur swam and searched

for food under the water and fed as the swan will do, or it lurked

under water and snatched at passing fish or beast.

Such was the predominant land life throughout the Mesozoic age. It was

by our human standards an advance upon anything that had preceded it.

It had produced land animals greater in size, range, power and

activity, more “vital” as people say, than anything the world had seen

before. In the seas there had been no such advance but a great

proliferation of new forms of life. An enormous variety of squid-like

creatures with chambered shells, for the most part coiled, had appeared

in the shallow seas, the Ammonites. They had had predecessors in the

Palæozoic seas, but now was their age of glory. To-day they have left

no survivors at all; their nearest relation is the pearly Nautilus, an

inhabitant of tropical waters. And a new and more prolific type of

fish with lighter, finer scales than the plate-like and tooth-like

coverings that had hitherto prevailed, became and has since remained

predominant in the seas and rivers.

VII

THE FIRST BIRDS AND THE FIRST MAMMALS