Lanterna Rally

Author: John Howard Moore

Publisher: Theclassics.Us

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9781230251813

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ... A large part of the life of the earth has "remained steadfastly where it was cradled, beneath the waves. But more restless portions have left the sea and crept forth upon the land, or swarmed into the air. One migration, the most numerous, is represented by the insects. Another, the most enterprising, was the amphibian. After ages of evolution the amphibian branch divided. One branch acquired wings and sailed off into the air. The other divided and subdivided. One of these subdivisions entered the forests, climbed and clambered among the trees, acquired perpendicularity and hands, descended and walked upon the soil, invented agriculture, built cities and states, and imagined itself immortal. Human society is but the van--the hither terminus--of an evolutional process which had its beginning away back in the protoplasm of primeval waters. There is not a form that creeps beneath the sea but can claim kinship with the eagle. The philosopher is the remote posterity of the meek and lowly amoeba. xi. Conclusion. The resemblances, homologies, and metamorphoses existing everywhere among animal forms are, therefore, evidence of the most logical consanguinities. It is all so perfectly plain. The structures of organic beings have come about as a result of the action and reaction of environment upon these structures. Every being--and not only every being, but every species, the whole organic world--has come to be what it is as a result of the incessant hammerings of its surroundings, the hammerings not only of the present, but of the long-stretching past. By surroundings is meant, of course, the rest of the universe. Those animals belonging to the same stock resemble each other because they have been subjected to the same experiences, the same...