00,000 B. C. A fluid Earth; a cauldron of molten
star-dust and flaming gases: it had been that, just a few moments ago.
The core was cooling, so that now a viscous surface was here with the
gas flames dead.

A cooling, congealing surface, with an atmosphere forming over it. At
first that atmosphere had doubtless been a watery, envelope of steam.
What gigantic storms must have lashed it! Boiling rain falling to hiss
against the molten Earth! The congealing surface rent by great
earthquakes; cataclysms rending and tearing....

1,000,000,000 B. C. passed. And upon this torn, hardening surface,
with the cooling fires receding to the inner core, I knew that the
great envelope of steam had cooled and condensed. Into the hollows of
the broken surface, the water settled. The oceans were born. The land
remained upon the heights. What had been the steaming envelope,
remained, and became the atmosphere.

And the world was round because of its rotation. One may put a lump of
heated sealing wax upon a bodkin and twirl it; and the wax will cool
into roundness, bulging at the equator from centrifugal force, and
flattening at the poles.

At 900,000,000 B. C. I could realize by what I saw that this was the
Earth beneath me. Land and water were here, and above was the sky.

We swept from the mist. I became aware of a wide-flung, gray formless
landscape. Its changing outlines were less swiftly moving than before.
And beside it, now quite near where our cage hung poised, a great gray
sea stretched away to a curving horizon. And overhead was the tenuous
gray of the sky.

The young world. Undoubtedly it rotated more swiftly now than in my
later era. The sun was hotter, and closer perhaps: the days and nights
were briefer. And now, upon this new-born world, life was beginning.
The swirling air did not hold it, nor yet the barren rocky land. The
great mystery--this thing organic which we call life--began in the
sea. I gestured for Mary toward that leveled vista of gray water, to
the warm, dark ocean depths, whose surface was now lashed always by
titanic storms. But to us, as we stared, that surface seemed to
stretch almost steady, save where it touched the land with a blur of
changing configurations.

"The sea," I murmured. "Life is beginning there now."

* * * * *

In fancy I pictured it. The shallow shores of the sea, where the water
was warmer. The mother of all life on Earth, these shallows. In the