From such shrill bandying of total prejudice, assertion and bland counter-assertion of progress or decay integral, small help is to be had.
The dourer optimists shift their ground. Life, they say, may not be in any clear sense on the upgrade, but it is the most adaptable thing in the universe. Plants have weathered the dank warmth of the Coal Age and the hard cold of the Ice Age; while pole has swung to equator and equator to pole, they have flourished like the bay tree or Arctic shrub, becoming deciduous or evergreen, evergreen or deciduous, as the fashion vagaries of the climate demanded. Microbes take potluck; whether it freezes or boils over. Fishes are at home in the pilchard shallows of Cornwall or the one-foot tarns of Cumberland, and in the abysmal depths of the unplumbed Pacific. They have passed from water to land and land to air, putting off fishhood for snakehood and then birdhood; or, remaining fish, bird or mammal, have suited their fins, wings or coats to the requirements of each changing age. Just now the elephant is hairless, but (if we spare him so long) will turn hairy again when the next ice age counsels a coat. Man their slaughterer is the supplest. That he ever evolved, that he survived the wild beast rivals of his long childhood, with only his brain to defend him and defy them till he ruled them all, that he surmounted every change of cold and heat, damp and drought, dearth and plenty, is itself the chief miracle of the past, chief earnest of the ascendant future. The hardest days are over; but should the planet turn Eskimo snowfield or Dyak forest again tomorrow, that will suit him, and he survive them. The wild creatures will be gone in another century, the tame ones are our slaves, and now we have made us new creatures, steel children of our brains, who will help the children of our bodies to new heights of resistance and new depths of subtlety against the worst that the stars and the years can do.
Life is not the most but one of the least adaptable of phenomena. The stones have survived; how many of the beasts? Where, for all his name, is Titanotherium Robustum? Or Diplodocus Carnegii? Where now is Pterosaur, flying reptile with massy head, bone-cased eyes and hopeful leer; made cunning enough, one would have thought, for victory over time? Where is Pythonomorph, sea-serpent double the size and horror of all silly-season and all silly-sailor tales? Ichthyosaurus, giant ocean-lizard; Iguanadon, giant ostrich-reptile; Clepsydrops, Dimetrodon; Mylodon, Megatherium, Glyptodon? Or, in ascending Jurassic rhythm of towering horror, where Brontosaurus, Megalosaurus, Gigantosaurus, Atlantosaurus? All went. They were herbivorous; Tyrannosaurus the flesh-eater devoured them. Where is he? Arch-rodent has shrunk from nine feet to not nine inches; Taxodon is become rat. Labyrinthodont or mastodont, dinosaurs or dromosaurs, all are gone, those mighty beasts are gone; as extinct as the dodo, if far longer ago than she. Who should believe in that delirium world of bird-dragons, elephant-tigers, fish-lizards, rhinoceros-seals, armadillo-monkeys, were it not for beholding their skeletons, their footprints, their dagger-like dragon-like teeth that fastened into the writhing frames of our own fathers and mothers and of those who might have been fathers and mothers of a higher race than ours? Pithecanthropus might have done better than Homo Sapiens; but he died, as all but a tiny minority of species died or are dying. All are gone; not only they whom for bulk and terror we gape at, but hundreds of thousands of species less spectacular—insects, fishes, mammals, primates—have gone with them. Lemuria is lost; the Missing Link is missing. Man has contrived to hold out for one or two brief geological periods. But the higher the organism, the harder its survival; whom the gods love die young. Now, become stereotyped and lazy, a degenerate who has specialized in a few nerves and a few brain-tracks as the dinosaurs specialized in this or that piece of defensive armour or in size or amphibian aptitude, like them, decayed and dislaurelled, he will go. Who will observe his human skeleton in what inhuman South Kensington of the future?
The survivalists try again. Man, they say, unlike all other phenomena, is moving in a known direction. His road may show ups and downs, yield stretches of hard going, moments even of standstill, lead now and then sheer backwards through countries of failure and evil; sometimes he loses his way, sometimes the guides go wrong, anon the standard-bearer fainteth. But the drift and net movement is onward—each heart of us knows it,
