ced, what
sort of animals lived while these rocks were being formed, or whether
this preceded entirely the existence of life upon the earth, no man
to-day may surely say. In the oldest of the rocks there are beds of
graphite, from which lead pencils are made. This substance is believed
by the geologists to be, like coal, the remains of vegetable life. But
these early rocks have been so heated and baked, so twisted and bent,
that whatever forms of life they once held are now obliterated, or so
altered as to give us no idea of what may have been their character.

So far as anyone can now see, this past history is wiped out forever
and it will be impossible for men ever to demonstrate the character of
this early life. Speculations, more or less certain, will arise. They
may, after a while, seem so clear as to receive the acceptance of the
scientific mind. Yet the truth remains that the early history of the
earth, so far as animals and plants are concerned, is probably lost
forever.

The most striking feature concerning the earliest layers of rocks in
which good fossils are found abundantly is the complexity of the life.
With the exception of the backboned animals, every important branch of
the animal kingdom is represented, and it is just possible that we
have even earlier forms of the vertebrates themselves. This, to the
evolutionist, is very disconcerting. To find the great groups all well
developed at least twenty-five million years ago and to find only
fossils built on the same lines since almost nonplusses him. When the
geologist tells him what an enormous length of time preceded the rocks
in which he finds these fossils and how absolutely these earlier
strata have been altered by the later geological activities he easily
understands why it is impossible to find fossils in them. As a
consequence, the evolutionist is forced to believe that all the
earliest animals have left no clear traces behind them. Life as he
first surely knows it is already extremely varied and quite well
developed in some of its groups. The early animals were as well
adapted to the times in which they lived as are the great majority of
the animals of to-day. The reader must not infer this to mean that
the animals of those days were like our present animals. They were
not. No one traveling in a far country could find there animals as
strange to him as would be those of the earlier stratified rocks. In
these there were no fishes as we know them t