6.THE AGE OF REPTILES | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

6.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.

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.

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.

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.

5.THE AGE OF THE COAL SWAMPS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

5.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.

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.

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.

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.

4.THE AGE OF FISHES | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

4.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.

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.

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.

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.

3.THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

H. G. WELLS

3.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.

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.

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.

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 neighborhood. 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.

2.THE WORLD IN TIME | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

2.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.

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.

_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 nebula.

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.

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.

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.