9.MONKEYS, APES AND SUB-MEN | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 

BY 

H. G. WELLS

9.MONKEYS, APES AND SUB-MEN 

Naturalists divide the class _Mammalia_ into a number of orders. At the head of these is the order _Primates_, which includes the lemurs, the monkeys, apes and man. Their classification was based originally upon anatomical resemblances and took no account of any mental qualities.

Now the past history of the Primates is one very difficult to decipher

in the geological record. They are for the most part animals which

live in forests like the lemurs and monkeys or in bare rocky places

like the baboons. They are rarely drowned and covered up by sediment,

nor are most of them very numerous species, and so they do not figure

so largely among the fossils as the ancestors of the horses, camels and

so forth do. But we know that quite early in the Cainozoic period,

that is to say some forty million years ago or so, primitive monkeys

and lemuroid creatures had appeared, poorer in brain and not so

specialized as their later successors.

The great world summer of the middle Cainozoic period drew at last to

an end. It was to follow those other two great summers in the history

of life, the summer of the Coal Swamps and the vast summer of the Age

of Reptiles. Once more the earth spun towards an ice age. The world

chilled, grew milder for a time and chilled again. In the warm past

hippopotami had wallowed through a lush sub-tropical vegetation, and a

tremendous tiger with fangs like sabres, the sabre-toothed tiger, had

hunted its prey where now the journalists of Fleet Street go to and

fro. Now came a bleaker age and still bleaker ages. A great weeding

and extinction of species occurred. A woolly rhinoceros, adapted to a

cold climate, and the mammoth, a big woolly cousin of the elephants,

the Arctic musk ox and the reindeer passed across the scene. Then

century by century the Arctic ice cap, the wintry death of the great

Ice Age, crept southward. In England it came almost down to the

Thames, in America it reached Ohio. There would be warmer spells of a

few thousand years and relapses towards a bitterer cold.

Geologists talk of these wintry phases as the First, Second, Third and

Fourth Glacial Ages, and of the interludes as Interglacial periods. We

live to-day in a world that is still impoverished and scarred by that

terrible winter. The First Glacial Age was coming on 600,000 years

ago; the Fourth Glacial Age reached its bitterest some fifty thousand

years ago. And it was amidst the snows of this long universal winter

that the first man-like beings lived upon our planet.

By the middle Cainozoic period there have appeared various apes with

many quasi-human attributes of the jaws and leg bones, but it is only

as we approach these Glacial Ages that we find traces of creatures that

we can speak of as “almost human.” These traces are not bones but

implements. In Europe, in deposits of this period, between half a

million and a million years old, we find flints and stones that have

evidently been chipped intentionally by some handy creature desirous of

hammering, scraping or fighting with the sharpened edge. These things

have been called “Eoliths” (dawn stones). In Europe there are no bones

nor other remains of the creature which made these objects, simply the

objects themselves. For all the certainty we have it may have been

some entirely un-human but intelligent monkey. But at Trinil in Java,

in accumulations of this age, a piece of a skull and various teeth and

bones have been found of a sort of ape man, with a brain case bigger

than that of any living apes, which seems to have walked erect. This

creature is now called _Pithecanthropus erectus_, the walking ape man,

and the little trayful of its bones is the only help our imaginations

have as yet in figuring to, ourselves the makers of the Eoliths.

It is not until we come to sands that are almost a quarter of a million

years old that we find any other particle of a sub- human being. But

there are plenty of implements, and they are steadily improving in

quality as we read on through the record. They are no longer clumsy

Eoliths; they are now shapely instruments made with considerable skill.

_And they are much bigger than the similar implements afterwards made

by true man._ Then, in a sandpit at Heidelberg, appears a single

quasi-human jaw-bone, a clumsy jaw-bone, absolutely chinless, far

heavier than a true human jaw-bone and narrower, so that it is

improbable the creature’s tongue could have moved about for articulate

speech. On the strength of this jaw-bone, scientific men suppose this

creature to have been a heavy, almost human monster, possibly with huge

limbs and hands, possibly with a thick felt of hair, and they call it

the Heidelberg Man.

This jaw-bone is, I think, one of the most tormenting objects in the

world to our human curiosity. To see it is like looking through a

defective glass into the past and catching just one blurred and

tantalizing glimpse of this Thing, shambling through the bleak

wilderness, clambering to avoid the sabre- toothed tiger, watching the

woolly rhinoceros in the woods. Then before we can scrutinize the

monster, he vanishes. Yet the soil is littered abundantly with the

indestructible implements he chipped out for his uses.

The Heidelberg Man, as modelled under the supervision of Prof. Rutot

Still more fascinatingly enigmatical are the remains of a creature

found at Piltdown in Sussex in a deposit that may indicate an age

between a hundred and a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, though

some authorities would put these particular remains back in time to

before the Heidelberg jaw- bone. Here there are the remains of a thick

sub-human skull much larger than any existing ape’s, and a

chimpanzee-like jaw-bone which may or may not belong to it, and, in

addition, a bat-shaped piece of elephant bone evidently carefully

manufactured, through which a hole had apparently been bored. There is

also the thigh-bone of a deer with cuts upon it like a tally. That is

all.

What sort of beast was this creature which sat and bored holes in

bones?

Scientific men have named him Eoanthropus, the Dawn Man. He stands

apart from his kindred; a very different being either from the

Heidelberg creature or from any living ape. No other vestige like him

is known. But the gravels and deposits of from one hundred thousand

years onward are increasingly rich in implements of flint and similar

stone. And these implements are no longer rude “Eoliths.” The

archæologists are presently able to distinguish scrapers, borers,

knives, darts, throwing stones and hand axes ....

We are drawing very near to man. In our next section we shall have to

describe the strangest of all these precursors of humanity, the

Neanderthalers, the men who were almost, but not quite, true men.

But it may be well perhaps to state quite clearly here that no

scientific man supposes either of these creatures, the Heidelberg Man

or _Eoanthropus_, to be direct ancestors of the men of to-day. These

are, at the closest, related forms.

8.THE AGE OF MAMMALS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

8.THE AGE OF MAMMALS

The opening of the next great period in the life of the earth, the Cainozoic period, was a period of upheaval and extreme volcanic activity. Now it was that the vast masses of the Alps and Himalayas and the mountain backbone of the Rockies and Andes were thrust up, and that the rude outlines of our present oceans and continents appeared. The map of the world begins to display a first dim resemblance to the map of to-day. It is estimated now that between forty and eighty million years have elapsed from the beginnings of the Cainozoic period to the present time.

At the outset of the Cainozoic period the climate of the world was

austere. It grew generally warmer until a fresh phase of great

abundance was reached, after which conditions grew hard again and the

earth passed into a series of extremely cold cycles, the Glacial Ages,

from which apparently it is now slowly emerging.

But we do not know sufficient of the causes of climatic change at

present to forecast the possible fluctuations of climatic conditions

that lie before us. We may be moving towards increasing sunshine or

lapsing towards another glacial age; volcanic activity and the upheaval

of mountain masses may be increasing or diminishing; we do not know; we

lack sufficient science.

With the opening of this period the grasses appear; for the first time

there is pasture in the world; and with the full development of the

once obscure mammalian type, appear a number of interesting grazing

animals and of carnivorous types which prey upon these.

At first these early mammals seem to differ only in a few characters

from the great herbivorous and carnivorous reptiles that ages before

had flourished and then vanished from the earth. A careless observer

might suppose that in this second long age of warmth and plenty that

was now beginning, nature was merely repeating the first, with

herbivorous and carnivorous mammals to parallel the herbivorous and

carnivorous dinosaurs, with birds replacing pterodactyls and so on.

But this would be an altogether superficial comparison. The variety of

the universe is infinite and incessant; it progresses eternally;

history never repeats itself and no parallels are precisely true. The

differences between the life of the Cainozoic and Mesozoic periods are

far profounder than the resemblances.

The most fundamental of all these differences lies in the mental life

of the two periods. It arises essentially out of the continuing

contact of parent and offspring which distinguishes mammalian and in a

lesser degree bird life, from the life of the reptile. With very few

exceptions the reptile abandons its egg to hatch alone. The young

reptile has no knowledge whatever of its parent; its mental life, such

as it is, begins and ends with its own experiences. It may tolerate the

existence of its fellows but it has no communication with them; it

never imitates, never learns from them, is incapable of concerted

action with them. Its life is that of an isolated individual. But

with the suckling and cherishing of young which was distinctive of the

new mammalian and avian strains arose the possibility of learning by

imitation, of communication, by warning cries and other concerted

action, of mutual control and instruction. A teachable type of life

had come into the world.

The earliest mammals of the Cainozoic period are but little superior in

brain size to the more active carnivorous dinosaurs, but as we read on

through the record towards modern times we find, in every tribe and

race of the mammalian animals, a steady universal increase in brain

capacity. For instance we find at a comparatively early stage that

rhinoceros-like beasts appear. There is a creature, the Titanotherium,

which lived in the earliest division of this period. It was probably

very like a modern rhinoceros in its habits and needs. But its brain

capacity was not one tenth that of its living successor.

The earlier mammals probably parted from their offspring as soon as

suckling was over, but, once the capacity for mutual understanding has

arisen, the advantages of continuing the association are very great;

and we presently find a number of mammalian species displaying the

beginnings of a true social life and keeping together in herds, packs

and flocks, watching each other, imitating each other, taking warning

from each other’s acts and cries. This is something that the world had

not seen before among vertebrated animals. Reptiles and fish may no

doubt be found in swarms and shoals; they have been hatched in

quantities and similar conditions have kept them together, but in the

case of the social and gregarious mammals the association arises not

simply from a community of external forces, it is sustained by an inner

impulse. They are not merely like one another and so found in the same

places at the same times; they like one another and so they keep

together.

This difference between the reptile world and the world of our human

minds is one our sympathies seem unable to pass. We cannot conceive in

ourselves the swift uncomplicated urgency of a reptile’s instinctive

motives, its appetites, fears and hates. We cannot understand them in

their simplicity because all our motives are complicated; our’s are

balances and resultants and not simple urgencies. But the mammals and

birds have self-restraint and consideration for other individuals, a

social appeal, a self- control that is, at its lower level, after our

own fashion. We can in consequence establish relations with almost all

sorts of them. When they suffer they utter cries and make movements

that rouse our feelings. We can make understanding pets of them with a

mutual recognition. They can be tamed to self-restraint towards us,

domesticated and taught.

That unusual growth of brain which is the central fact of Cainozoic

times marks a new communication and interdependence of individuals. It

foreshadows the development of human societies of which we shall soon

be telling.

As the Cainozoic period unrolled, the resemblance of its flora and

fauna to the plants and animals that inhabit the world to-day

increased. The big clumsy Uintatheres and Titanotheres, the

Entelodonts and Hyracodons, big clumsy brutes like nothing living,

disappeared. On the other hand a series of forms led up by steady

degrees from grotesque and clumsy predecessors to the giraffes, camels,

horses, elephants, deer, dogs and lions and tigers of the existing

world. The evolution of the horse is particularly legible upon the

geological record. We have a fairly complete series of forms from a

small tapir-like ancestor in the early Cainozoic. Another line of

development that has now been pieced together with some precision is

that of the llamas and camels.

7.THE FIRST BIRDS AND THE FIRST MAMMALS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

7.THE FIRST BIRDS AND THE FIRST MAMMALS

In a few paragraphs a picture of the lush vegetation and swarming reptiles of that first great summer of life, the Mesozoic period, has been sketched. But while the Dinosaurs lorded it over the hot selvas and marshy plains and the Pterodactyls filled the forests with their fluttering's and possibly with shrieks and croakings as they pursued the humming insect life of the still flowerless shrubs and trees, some less conspicuous and less abundant forms upon the margins of this abounding life were acquiring certain powers and learning certain lessons of endurance, that were to be of the utmost value to their race when at last the smiling generosity of sun and earth began to fade.

A group of tribes and genera of hopping reptiles, small creatures of

the dinosaur type, seem to have been pushed by competition and the

pursuit of their enemies towards the alternatives of extinction or

adaptation to colder conditions in the higher hills or by the sea.

Among these distressed tribes there was developed a new type of

scale—scales that were elongated into quill-like forms and that

presently branched into the crude beginnings of feathers. These

quill-like scales layover one another and formed a heat-retaining

covering more efficient than any reptilian covering that had hitherto

existed. So they permitted an invasion of colder regions that were

otherwise uninhabited. Perhaps simultaneously with these changes there

arose in these creatures a greater solicitude for their eggs. Most

reptiles are apparently quite careless about their eggs, which are left

for sun and season to hatch. But some of the varieties upon this new

branch of the tree of life were acquiring a habit of guarding their

eggs and keeping them warm with the warmth of their bodies.

With these adaptations to cold other internal modifications were going

on that made these creatures, the primitive birds, warm-blooded and

independent of basking. The very earliest birds seem to have been

seabirds living upon fish, and their fore limbs were not wings but

paddles rather after the penguin type. That peculiarly primitive bird,

the New Zealand Ki-Wi, has feathers of a very simple sort, and neither

flies nor appears to be descended from flying ancestors. In the

development of the birds, feathers came before wings. But once the

feather was developed the possibility of making a light spread of

feathers led inevitably to the wing. We know of the fossil remains of

one bird at least which had reptilian teeth in its jaw and a long

reptilian tail, but which also had a true bird’s wing and which

certainly flew and held its own among the pterodactyls of the Mesozoic

time. Nevertheless birds were neither varied nor abundant in Mesozoic

times. If a man could go back to typical Mesozoic country, he might

walk for days and never see or hear such a thing as a bird, though he

would see a great abundance of pterodactyls and insects among the

fronds and reeds.

And another thing he would probably never see, and that would be any

sign of a mammal. Probably the first mammals were in existence

millions of years before the first thing one could call a bird, but

they were altogether too small and obscure and remote for attention.

The earliest mammals, like the earliest birds, were creatures driven by

competition and pursuit into a life of hardship and adaptation to cold.

With them also the scale became quill-like, and was developed into a

heat-retaining covering; and they too underwent modifications, similar

in kind though different in detail, to become warm-blooded and

independent of basking. Instead of feathers they developed hairs, and

instead of guarding and incubating their eggs they kept them warm and

safe by retaining them inside their bodies until they were almost

mature. Most of them became altogether vivaparous and brought their

young into the world alive. And even after their young were born they

tended to maintain a protective and nutritive association with them.

Most but not all mammals to-day have mammæ and suckle their young. Two

mammals still live which lay eggs and which have not proper mammæ,

though they nourish their young by a nutritive secretion of the under

skin; these are the duck-billed platypus and the echidna. The echidna

lays leathery eggs and then puts them into a pouch under its belly, and

so carries them about warm and safe until they hatch.

But just as a visitor to the Mesozoic world might have searched for

days and weeks before finding a bird, so, unless he knew exactly where

to go and look, he might have searched in vain for any traces of a

mammal. Both birds and mammals would have seemed very eccentric and

secondary and unimportant creatures in Mesozoic times.

The Age of Reptiles lasted, it is now guessed, eighty million years.

Had any quasi-human intelligence been watching the world through that

inconceivable length of time, how safe and eternal the sunshine and

abundance must have seemed, how assured the wallowing prosperity of the

dinosaurs and the flapping abundance of the flying lizards! And then

the mysterious rhythms and accumulating forces of the universe began to

turn against that quasi-eternal stability. That run of luck for life

was running out. Age by age, myriad of years after myriad of years,

with halts no doubt and retrogressions, came a change towards hardship

and extreme conditions, came great alterations of level and great

redistributions of mountain and sea. We find one thing in the Record

of the Rocks during the decadence of the long Mesozoic age of

prosperity that is very significant of steadily sustained changes of

condition, and that is a violent fluctuation of living forms and the

appearance of new and strange species. Under the gathering threat of

extinction the older orders and genera are displaying their utmost

capacity for variation and adaptation. The Ammonites for example in

these last pages of the Mesozoic chapter exhibit a multitude of

fantastic forms. Under settled conditions there is no encouragement

for novelties; they do not develop, they are suppressed; what is best

adapted is already there. Under novel conditions it is the ordinary

type that suffers, and the novelty that may have a better chance to

survive and establish itself....

There comes a break in the Record of the Rocks that may represent

several million years. There is a veil here still, over even the

outline of the history of life. When it lifts again, the Age of

Reptiles is at an end; the Dinosaurs, the Plesiosaurs and Ichthyosaurs,

the Pterodactyls, the innumerable genera and species of Ammonite have

all gone absolutely. In all their stupendous variety they have died

out and left no descendants. The cold has killed them. All their

final variations were insufficient; they had never hit upon survival

conditions. The world had passed through a phase of extreme conditions

beyond their powers of endurance, a slow and complete massacre of

Mesozoic life has occurred, and we find now a new scene, a new and

hardier flora, and a new and hardier fauna in possession of the world.

It is still a bleak and impoverished scene with which this new volume

of the book of life begins. The cycads and tropical conifers have given

place very largely to trees that shed their leaves to avoid destruction

by the snows of winter and to flowering plants and shrubs, and where

there was formerly a profusion of reptiles, an increasing variety of

birds and mammals is entering into their inheritance.

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.