s no ocean? When was this time? How came they there?

When the lisping lips of my young child asked me, "Papa, who made me?"
I told him "God," and he knew enough and was content with his
knowledge. After a while he grew older and his inquisitive spirit
began to puzzle with the question of how God had made him. When his
growing mind was ready for the new knowledge I took him to my side and
told him the great mystery of life. I told him how he owed to his
father and to his mother the beginnings of his life, how God gave him
to us. Now a new era opened in his childish mind. As he grows on to
greater maturity he cannot help wondering how the first man was made,
how the trees, and the world came to be. He is no longer satisfied
with the simple statement that God made them. His eager mind wants to
know, if may be, how God made them.

So, in the distant past, in the childhood of our race, the question
was asked, "Who made us?" and the answer was "God." Men formed their
simple conception at that time of how He did it. As the centuries
rolled by and the children of men have learned from creation the story
of its origin a riper and richer knowledge has given them a broader
and finer conception. No less does the reverent student believe that
God created the earth, but he no longer thinks of God as working, as
man works. He no longer feels that it is impious to attempt to read
God's plan in His work; to see how this work has arisen, to see, if
may be, what there is ahead.

This is one of the tasks to which science is now giving itself. The
answer is uncertain and halting. A few things seem clear; others seem
to be nearly certain; of still others we can only say that for the
present we must be content with the knowledge we have. But if we take
the best we have and work over it thoughtfully and carefully, the
better will slowly come, and in time we shall know far more than we
now suspect. Meanwhile, it is the attempt of this book to give to
people whose training is other than scientific some conception of this
great story of creation. Without dogmatic certainty but without
indecision it tries to tell what modern science thinks as to the great
problems of life. It tries to describe the possible origin of animals
and plants, their slow advance, the length of their steady uplift, the
forces that brought it about. It tries to tell a little of the men
who have helped to develop the great idea of evolution, of the great
men who persuade