CREATION.

Hokitika Guardian, 29 December 1925, Page 1

CREATION.

TUB ASCENT OF LIVING THINGS.

Although geology teaches us that life has been on the earth for many hundreds of millions of years, tho oldest fossils which can lie found are not relics of the earliest forms of life. In order that a fossil may he formed in a .sedirnuitary deposit, it is necessary that the living organism, whether plant or animal, .should possess some part sufficiently hard to endure itself or to make an endurable impression in the soft mud or sand beneath it. But we believe that the earliest types of life on our globe were little more than small, jelly-like creatures, something like tho amoeba of to-day. 'I hey were vegetable feeders, and so tho various means of offence and defence developed amidst carnivorous creatures, were entirely absent. Thus no fossils have remained to us from, these progenitors of animal life upon our earth. But although fossils are noticeably absent from the earliest, the pre-Cam-brian strata, the great extent ot those deposits tells us that they took very long periods for their formation, and that conditions suitable for life existed on the earth for many ages after the globe had cooled down from its original molten condition. It is surely not unjustifiable, then, to assume that the great Creator of all things did place life on the earth early in that time, setting it on tho path along which, by its own efforts, it would travel upwards through the ages to higher and higher types, under unseen guidance perhaps, but working out its destiny through the lessons of its conquests and its defeats. The earliest fossils are of marine origin, and are the remains of invertebrate creatures, which, although possessed of jelly-like bodies, had succeeded in building protecting cases around themselves with limestone and other minerals extracted from the sea water in which she lived. The animals lived mostly in colonies completely armoured for mutual protect ion, a distinct advance on the single, unprotected unit. Graptolites (whose fossils are merely streaks left on hardened shale), corals, and sponges, represent those early forms of life. The highest type of life in the Palaoozie era were the crustaceans, as represented by tho tribolites. Although Crustacea, these did not resemble, to any great extent, our present-day lobsters or crabs ; rather do their fossils hear a grotesque likeness to a very large “slater” or wood-louse which lias been divided longitudinally into three divisions. Some of the tribolites reached a length of over 2ft, while Eurypterid, not unlike, our scorpion, gained a length of (ift. Shells of the present-day typo wore not common in Palaeozic times; their place was taken by the brachiopods or lamp shells, some of which survive even to-dav. They are of a lower typo of life than the ordinary bi-valve. Next in the progress of life we find

tlie fishes. More active and much more fierce than the lower creatures which evolved them, they gradually brought about ilio extinction of bumbler trilobites and some of the oilier forms of earlier life. These early fishes differed. however, from modern types in that they did not- have bony skeletons, tint were armoured with external bony plates or a tough, leathery skin. Tho shark is an example of a pre-historie fish.

From the fish there evolved tho first land creatures, animals of the amphibian type, which spent the early part of their lives as fish, breathing by gills, but the later part as air breathers on land, which would drown if kept under water. Small at first, species as large as bullocks eventually developed ; the remains of one of these (Lnhyrintliodoui) were discovered at St Peters, Sydney. Thus this creature lived at the time when the present sandstones of Sydney were being laid down under water.

Following I lie amphibians ('nine reptilt's of Llio lizard type, up to 4ft in length. From those came the gigantic and grotesque reptiles, (he dinosaurs, the flying reptiles (pterodactyls), and types like the ichthyosaurus, the fishlizard, with jaws like a crocodile, paddles like a whale, and eyes one, and a half feet across. Snakes are more modern, and are degenerate lizards, while birds hare evolved from the old (lying reptiles. The first bird, Archaeopteryx. was practically a reptile, with fierce teeth, hut supplied with a covering of feathers. From another reptilian branch came the mammals, the original mammals being not unlike the present Australian ant-eater (echidna). Slow development evolved the placental mammals, until at last through the ages came a type from which progress evolved along two lines or branches. At the end of one of these branches we find the apes; at the end of other is man. They day of hulk lias gone: the dav of the brain has arrived.