Evo 1

The living world is both the soil in which we are rooted and the rich humus into which our results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons.

The plotting is labyrinthine, the pace almost slow.

In the midst of a roaring, upheaving ocean of fire there is a fountain of lava of dazzling brilliancy.

The warm and equable climate fills the ocean with soft, calcareous ooze destined to become chalk.

So high is the temperature of this boiling sea that no aquatic beings inhabit its waters.

Then monera originate in the waves by spontaneous generation.

Imagine a shady cove where increasingly concentrated mixtures of organic molecules accumulate and react, protected by a rocky ledge from the sun’s radiation.

Plateaus, soon after they are uplifted, begin to be dissected by numerous streams.

By the Oridovician our ancestors are jawless armored fish moving slowly by tail propulsion.

Events accumulate through time—a cephalopod washes up on a gray Silurian beach, no plants, little oxygen.

Amidst the din of rushing waters, the noise from the stones, as they rattle one over the other.

Plants and animals soon arrive, showering down as aerial plankton, or blown ashore by storms.

From the bosom of the still soft clay rise gigantic palm trees, poisonous spurge, and acanthus coiling about cacti.

About the shores great multitudes of Crabs are everywhere to be found, belonging both to the land and the sea.

In some parts tiger beetles run or fly with great swiftness.

The huge iguanadon appears in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the waves, while the pterodactyl flits through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.

Sometimes comets wander into our solar system, out from the vast darkness beyond Pluto.

Suddenly mastodons occupy all continents.

Stability is not an end result; it is a state that nature is forever falling into.

The Himalayas still are rising.

armatur111@verizon.net for bibliography