Glass [, / Mk.^j4^^^-^ COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD H Mr. WELLS has also written the follow- ing novels: LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM KIPPS MR. POLLY THE WHEELS OF CHANCE THE NEW MACHIAVELLI ANN VERONICA TONO BUNGAY MARRIAGE BEALBY THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMON THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH THE SOUL OF A BISHOP JOAN AND PETER THE UNDYING FIRE ^ The following fantastic and imaginative romances: THE WAR OF THE WORLDS THE TIME MACHINE THE WONDERFUL VISIT THE ISLAND OP DR. MOREAU THE SEA LADY THE SLEEPER AWAKES THE FOOD OF THE GODS THE WAR IN THE AIR THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET THE WORLD SET FREE And nvimerous Short Stories now collected in One Volume under the title of THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND 1[ A Series of books on Social, Religious, and Political questions: ANTICIPATIONS (1900) MANKIND IN THE MAKING FIRST AND LAST THINGS NEW WORLDS FOR OLD A MODERN UTOPIA THE FUTURE IN AMERICA AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD WHAT IS COMING? WAR AND THE FUTURE IN THE FOURTH YEAR GOD THE INVISIBLE KING THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY WASHINGTON AND THE RIDDLE OF PEACE ^ And two little books about children's play, called FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS A Short History of The World BY H> G. WELLS ILLUSTRATED THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All rights reserved PKJNTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA . >■ ^':^^ Copyright, 1922, By H. G. wells. Set up uud clccLrolyped. Published OcLobcr, l!)iJ2. ©ClAUOOOBft Press of J.. T. Little & Ives Company New York 'VvQ \ PREFACE This Short History of The World is meant to be read straight- forwardly almost as a novel is read. It gives in the most general way an account of our present knowledge of history, shorn of elabora- tions and complications. It has been amply illustrated and every- thing has been done to make it vivid and clear. From it the reader should be able to get that general view of history which is so neces- sary a framework for the study of a particular period or the history of a particular country. It may be found useful as a preparatory excursion before the reading of the author's much fuller and more explicit Outline of History is undertaken. But its especial end is to meet the needs of the busy general reader, too driven to study the maps and time charts of that Outliue in detail, who wishes to refresh and repair his faded or fragmentary conceptions of the great adventure of mankind. It is not an abstract or condensation of that former work. Within its aim the Outline admits of no further condensation. This is a much more generalized History, planned and written afresh. H. G. Wells. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. The World in Space . . . . , II. The World in Time . . , . , III. The Beginnings of Life .... IV. The Age of Fishes ..... V. The Age of the Coal Swamps VI. The Age of Reptiles ..... VII. The First Birds and the First Mammals V^III. The Age of Mammals ..... IX. Monkeys, Apes and Sub-men X. The Neanderthaler and the Rhodesian Man XI. The First True Men XII. Primitive Thought ..... XIII. The Beginnings of Cultivation . XIV. Primitive Neolithic Civilizations XV. SuMERiA, Early Egypt and Writing XVI. Primitive Nomadic Peoples .... XVII. The First Sea-going Peoples XVIII. Egypt, Babylon and Assyria XIX. The Primitive Aryans ..... XX. The Last Babylonian Empire and the Empire of Darius I ...... XXI. The Early History of the Jews . XXII. Priests and Prophets in Judea XXIII. The Greeks XXIV. The Wars of the Greeks and Persians XXV. The Splendour of Greece .... XXVI. The Empire of Alexander the Great . XXVII. The Museum and Library at Alexandria vii 1 5 11 16 21 26 31 37 43 48 53 60 65 71 77 84 91 96 104 109 115 122 127 134 139 145 150 Vlll Contents niAl'TKU XXVIII. XXIX. XXX. XXXI. XXXII. XXXIII. XXXIV. XXXV. XXXVI. XXXVII. XXXVIII. XXXIX. XL. XLI. XLII. XLIII. XLIV. XLV. XLVI. XLVII. XLVIII. XLIX. L. LI. LII. LIII. LIV. LV. PAGE The Life of Gautama Buddha .... 156 King Asoka ........ 163 Confucius and Lao Tse . . . . .167 Rome Comes into History ..... 174 Rome and CARTHAcfE ...... 180 The Growth of the Roman Empire . . . 185 Between Rome and China ..... 196 The Common Man's Life under the Early Roman Empire . . '201 Religious Developments under the Roman Empire 'iO-i The Teaching of Jesus . . . . .214 The Development of Doctrinal Christianity . 222 The Barbarians Break the Empire into East and West 227 The Huns and the End of the Western Empire . 233 The Byzantine and Sassanid Empires . . . 238 The Dynasties of Suy and Tang in China . . 245 Muhammad and Islam ...... 248 The Great Days of the Arabs .... 253 The Development of Latin Christendom . 258 The Crusades and the Age of Papal Do.minion . 267 Recalcitrant Princes and the Great Schism . 277 The Mongol Conquests ..... 287 The Intellectual Revival of the Europeans . 294 The Reformation of the Latin Church . 30i The Emperor Charles V .... . 30,1 The Age of Political Experiments; of Grand Monarchy and Parliaments and Republicanism IN Europe ....... 318 The New Empires of the Europeans in Asia and Overseas 329 The American War of Independence . . 335 The French Revolution and the Restoration of Monarchy in France ..... 341 Contents ix CHAPTER PAGE LVI. The Uneasy Peace in Europe that followed the Fall of Napoleon ...... 349 LVII. The Development of Material Knowledge . 355 LVIII. The Industrl\l Revolution ..... 365 LIX. The Develop.vient of Modern Political and Social Ide.\s . . . . . . 370 LX. The Expansion of the United States . . . 38'2 LXI. The Rise of Germany to Predominance in Europe 390 LXII. The New Overseas Empires of Steamship and Railway 393 LXIII. European Aggression in Asia, and the Rise of Japan 399 LXIV. The British Empire in 191-1 ..... 405 LXV. The Age of Armament in Europe, and the Great War of 1914-18 409 LXVI. The Revolittion and F.\mine in Russia . . 415 LXVn. The Political and Social Reconstruction of. the World ........ 421 CHRONOLO(iICAL TaBLE ...... 429 Index ....... o . 439 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Luminous Spiral Clouds of Matter Nebula seen Edge-on The Great Spiral Nebula A Dark Nebula Another Spiral Nebula Landscape before Life Marine Life in the Cambrian Period Fossil Trilobite .... Early Palaeozoic Fossils of various Species of Lingula Fossilized Footprints of a Labyrinthodont, Cheirotherium ^terichthys Milleri .... Fossil of Cladoselache Sharks and Ganoids of the Devonian Period A Carboniferous Swamp Skull of a Labyrinthodont, Capitosaurus Skeleton of a Labyrinthodont : The Eryops A Fossil Ichthyosaurus A Pterodactyl ..... The Diplodocus .... Fossil of Archeopteryx Hesperornis in its Native Seas The Ki-wi ..... Slab of Marl Rich in Cainozoic Fossils Titanotherium Robustum . Skeleton of Giraffe-camel Skeleton of Early Horse Comparative Sizes of Brains of Rhinoceros and Dinoceras A Mammoth ..... Flint Implements from Piltdown Region A Pithecanthropean Man The Heidelberg Man .... The Piltdown Skull .... A Neanderthaler .... 2 3 6 7 8 9 12 18 14 15 17 18 19 22 23 24 27 28 29 32 33 34 35 38 40 40 41 44 45 46 46 47 49 XI Xll List of Illustrations Europe and Western Asia .jO^OOO years aj'o . Coniparison of Modern Skull and Rhodesian Skull x-Vltamira Cave Paintings Later PalaK)lithic Carvings . Bust of Cro-niagnon Man . Later Palaeolithic Art Relics of the Stone Age Gray's Inn Lane Plint Implement Somaliland Flint Implement Neolithic Flint Implements Australian Spearheads Neolithic Pottery .... Relationship of Human Races A Maya Stele European Neolithic Warrior Babylonian Brick .... Egyptian Cylinder Seals of First Dynasty The Sakhara Pyramids The Pyramid of Cheops: Scene from Summi The Temple of Hath or Pottery and Implements of the Lake Dwellers A Lake Village ..... Flint Knives of 4500 b.c. Egyptian Wall Paintings of Nomads Egyptian Peasants Going to Work Stele of Naram Sin .... The Treasure House at Mycenie . The Palace at Cnossos Temj)le at Abu Simbel Avenue of Sphinxes at Karnak The Hypo.style Hall at Karnak Frieze of Slaves .... The Temple of Ilorus. Edfu Archaic Amphora .... The Mound of Nippur Median and Chaldean Empires . The Empire of Darius A Persian Monarch .... The Ruins of Persepolis The (Jreat Porch of Xerxes PAGE . Map 50 51 54 55 57 58 G2 G3 ().'? 07 08 09 . Maj 9 7^2 73 75 78 79 80 81 . m 85 86 87 87 88 89 93 95 97 98 99 . 101 ' . 103 105 107 . Ma p 110 Ma p 111 112 113 . 113 List of Illustrations Xlll The Land of the Hebrews Nebuchadnezzar's Mound at Babylon The Ishtar Gateway, Babylon Bhick ObeHsk of Shahnaneser II . Captive Princes making Obeisance Statue of Meleager Ruins of Temple of Zeus The Temple of Xeptune, Pa^stum Greek Ships on Ancient Pottery . The Temple of Gorinth The Temple of Neptune at Gape Sunium Frieze of the Parthenon, Athens . The Acropolis, Athens Theatre at Epidauros, Greece The Garyatides of the Erechtheum Athene of the Parthenon Alexander the Great . Alexander's Victory at Issus The Apollo Belvedere Aristotle . Statuette of Maitreya The Death of Buddha Tibetan Buddha A Burmese Buddha The Dhamekh Tower, Sarnath A Ghinese Buddhist Apostle The Gourt of Asoka . Asoka Panel from Bharhut The Pillar of Lions (Asokan) Gonfucius .... The Great Wall of Ghina Early Ghinese Bronze Bell . The Dying Gaul Ancient Roman Gisterns at Garthage Hannibal ..... Roman Empire and its Alliances, L50 b. The Forum, Rome Ruined Goli.seum in Tunis . Roman Arch at Gtesiphon . The Golumn of Trajan, Rome Map Map l'\V,V. 117 118 120 124 125 128 LSO 182 13.5 137 138 140 141 141 142 143 146 147 148 152 153 154 158 159 160 164 165 165 166 169 171 172 175 177 181 183 188 189 190 193 XIV List of Illustrations Glazed Jar of Han Dynasty Vase of Han Dynasty Chinese Vessel in Bronze A Gladiator (contemporary representation) A Street in Pompeii . The Coliseum, Rome . Interior of Coliseum . Mithras Sacrificing a Bull . Isis and Horns .... Bust of Emperor Commodus Early Portrait of Jesus Christ Road from Nazareth to Til^erias . David's Tower and Wall of Jerusalem A Street in Jerusalem The Peter and Paul Mosaic at Rome Baptism of Christ (Ivory Panel) . Roman Empire and the Barbarians Constantine's Pillar, Constantinople The Obelisk of Theodosius, Constantinople Head of Barbarian Chief The Church of S. Sophia, Constantinople Roof-work in S. Sophia Justinian and his Court The Rock-hewn Temple at Petra Chinese Earthenware of Tang Dynasty At Prayer in the Desert Looking Across the Sea of Sand . Growth of Moslem Power . The Moslem Empire . The Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem Cairo Mosques .... Prankish Dominions of Martel Statue of Charlemagne Europe at Death of Charlemagne Crusader Tombs, Exeter Cathedral View of Cairo .... The Horses of S. Mark, Venice Courtyard in the Alhambra Milan Cathedral (showing spires) A Typical Crusader . Map Map Map Map Map List of Illustrations XV Burgundian Nobility (Statuettes) The Empire of Jengis Khan Ottoman Empire before 1453 Tartar Horsemen ..... Ottoman Empire, 1566 .... An Early Printing Press .... Ancient Bronze from Benin Negro Bronze-work ..... Early Sailing Ship (Italian Engraving) Portrait of Martin Luther .... The Church Triumphant (Italian Majolica work, Charles V (the Titian Portrait) S. Peter's, Rome: the High Altar Cromwell Dissolves the Long Parliament The Court at Versailles .... Sack of a Village, French Revolution . Central Europe after Peace of Westphalia, 1648 European Territory in America, 1750 . Europeans Tiger Hunting in India Fall of Tippoo Sultan George Washington The Battle of Bunker Hill The U.S.A., 1790 The Trial of Louis XVI Execution of Marie Antoinette Portrait of Napoleon . Europe after the Congress of Vienna Early Rolling Stock, Liverpool and Manchester R Passenger Train in 1833 .... The Steamboat Clermont .... Eighteenth Century Spinning Wheel Arkwright's Spinning Jenny An Early Weaving Machine An Incident of the Slave Trade . Early Factory, in Colebrookdale . Carl Marx ...... Electric Conveyor, in Coal Mine Constructional Detail, Forth Bridge American River Steamer .... Abraham Lincoln ..... 1543) ilway .283-4 Map 288 Map 289 . 291 Map 292 296 299 300 301 305 307 311 315 321 323 325 Map 326 Map 330 . 331 . 332 . 337 . 338 Map 339 . 344 . 346 . 352 Map 353 . 356 . 356 . 357 . 361 . 361 . 363 . 367 . 368 . 372 . 376 . 378 . 385 . 387 XVI List of Illustrations Europe, 1848-71 Victoria Falls, Zambesi The British Empire, 1815 . Japanese Soldier, Eighteenth Ontury A Street in Tokio Overseas Empires of Europe, 1914 (iihraltar ..... Street in Hong Kong . British Tank in Battle The Ruins of Ypres Modern War: War Entanglements A View in Petersburg under Bolshevik Passenger Aeroplane in Flight A Peaceful Garden in England Rule . Map PAGE 391 395 Map 397 401 403 Map 406 407 408 410 411 41^ 418 . 423 426 A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD The World in Space THE story of our world is a story that is still very imperfectly known. A couple of hundred years ago men possessed the history of little more than the last three thousand years. What happened before that time was a matter of legend and specula- tion. Over a large part of the civilized world it was believed and taught that the world had been created suddenly in 4004 B.C., though authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring or autumn of that year. This fantastically precise miscon- ception was based upon a too literal interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, and upon rather arbitrary theological assumptions connected therewith. Such ideas have long since been abandoned by religious teachers, and it is universally recognized that the universe in which we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous period of time and possibly for endless time. Of course there may be decep- tion in these appearances, as a room may be made to seem endless by putting mirrors facing each other at either end. But that the universe in which we live has existed only for six or seven thousand years may be regarded as an altogether exploded idea. The earth, as everybody knows nowadays, is a spheroid, a sphere slightly compressed, orange fashion, with a diameter of nearly 8,000 miles. Its spherical shape has been known at least to a limited number of intelligent people for nearly 2,500 years, but before that time it was supposed to be flat, and various ideas which now seem fantastic were entertained about its relations to the sky and the stars and planets. We know now that it rotates upon its A Short History of the World axis (which is about 24 miles shorter than its equatorial diameter) every twenty-four hours, and that this is the cause of the alterna- tions of day and night, that it circles about the sun in a slightly distorted and slowly variable oval path in a year. Its distance from the sun varies between ninety-one and a half millions at its nearest and ninety-four and a half million miles. About the earth circles a smaller sphere, the moon, at an average distance of 239,- 000 miles. Earth and moon are not the only bodies to travel round the sun. There are also the planets. Mercury and Venus, at dis- tances of thirty- six and sixty- seven millions of miles; and be- yond the circle of the earth and disregarding a belt of numerous smaller bodies, the planetoids, there are Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, U ranus and Fhoto: G. W. Rllchey "LUMINOUS SPIRAL CLOUDS OF MATTER" {Nebula ■photographed 1910) Neptune at mean distances of 141, 483, 886, 1,782, and 1,793 millions of miles respectively. These figures in The World in Space millions of miles are very difficult for the mind to grasp. It may help the reader's imagination if we reduce the sun and planets to a smaller, more conceiv- able scale. If, then, we represent our earth as a little ball of one inch diameter, the sun would be a big globe nine feet across and 323 yards away, that is about a fifth of a mile, four or five min- utes' walking. The moon would be a small pea two feet and a half from the world. Between earth and sun there would be the two inner planets. Mer- cury and Venus, at distances of one hundred and twenty-five and two hundred and fifty yards from the sun. All round and about these bodies there would be emptiness until you came to Mars, a hundred and seventy-five feet beyond the earth; Jupiter Photo: G. W. RUchey THE NEBULA SEEN EDGE-ON Note the central core which, through millions of years, is cooling to solidity 4 A Short History of the World nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter; Saturn, a little smaller, two miles off; Uranus four miles off and Neptune six miles off. Then nothingness and nothingness except for small particles and drifting scraps of attenuated vapour for thousands of miles. The nearest star to earth on this scale would be 4!0,000 miles away. These figures will serve perhaps to give one some conception of the immense emptiness of space in which the drama of life goes on. For in all this enormous vacancy of space we know certainly of life only upon the surface of our earth. It does not penetrate much more than three miles down into the 4,000 miles that separate us from the centre of our globe, and it does not reach more than five miles above its surface. Apparently all the limitlessness of space is otherwise empty and dead. The deepest ocean dredgings go down to five miles. The highest recorded flight of an aeroplane is little more than four miles. Men have reached to seven miles up in balloons, but at a cost of great suffering. No bird can fly so high as five miles, and small birds and insects which have been carried up by aeroplanes drop off insensible far below that level. II The World in Time IN the last fifty years there has been much very fine and interest- ing speculation on the part of scientific men upon the age and origin of our earth. Here we cannot pretend to give even a summary of such speculations because they involve the most subtle mathematical and physical considerations. The truth is that the physical and astronomical sciences are still too undeveloped as yet to make anything of the sort more than an illustrative guesswork. The general tendency has been to make the estimated age of our globe longer and longer. It now seems probable that the earth has had an independent existence as a spinning planet flying round and round the sun for a longer period than 2,000,000,000 years. It may have been niuch longer than that. This is a length of time that absolutely overpowers the imagination. Before that vast period of separate existence, the sun and earth and the other planets that circulate round the sun may have been a great swirl of difl^used matter in space. The telescope reveals to us in various parts of the heavens luminous spiral clouds of matter, the spiral nebulae, which appear to be in rotation about a centre. It is supposed by many astronomers that the sun and its planets were once such a spiral, and that their matter has undergone con- centration into its present form. Through majestic seons that con- centration went on until in that vast remoteness of the past for which we have given figures, the world and its moon were distin- guishable. They were spinning then much faster than they are spinning now; they were at a lesser distance from the sun; they travelled round it very much faster, and they were probably incan- descent or molten at the surface. The sun itself was a much greater blaze in the heavens. 5 6 A Short History of the World If we could go back through that Infinitude of time and see the earth in this earlier stage of its history, we should behold a scene more like the interior of a blast furnace or the surface of a lava flow before it cools and cakes over than any other contemporary scene. Photo: G. ^y. mtchev THE GREAT SPIRAL NEBULA No water would be visible because all the water there was would still be superheated steam in a stormy atmosphere of sulphurous and metallic vapours. Beneath this would swirl and boil an ocean of molten rock substance. Across a sky of fiery clouds the glare of the hurrying sun and moon would sweep swiftly like hot breaths of flame. Slowly by degrees as one million of years followed another, this Photo: Prof. Hale A DARK NEBULA Taken in 1920 with the aid of the largest telescope in the vorld. One of the first photographs taken by the Moimt Wilson telescope There are dark nebulae and bright nebulae. Prof. Henry Norris Russell, against the British theory, holds that the dark nebulae preceded the bright nebulae 7 8 A Short History of the World fiery scene would lose its eruptive incandescence. The vapours in the sky would rain down and become less dense overhead; great slaggy cakes of solidifying rock would appear upon the surface of the molten sea, and sink under it, to be replaced by other floating masses. The sun and moon growing now each more distant and each smaller, would rush with diminishing swiftness across the heavens. The moon now, because of its smaller size, would be already cooled far below incandescence, and would be alternately obstructing and reflecting the sunlight in a series of eclipses and full moons. And so with a tremendous slowness through the vastness of time, the earth would grow more and more like the earth on which we live, until at last an age would come when, in the cooling air, steam would begin to condense into clouds, and the first rain would fall hissing upon the first rocks below. For endless millenia the greater part of the earth's water would still be vaporized in the atmosphere, but there would now be hot streams running over the crystallizing P}wlo: G. ^y. Rilchey ANOTHER SPIRAL NEBULA The World in Time LANDSCAPE BEFORE LIFE "Great lava-like masses of rock without traces of soil' rocks below and pools and lakes into which these streams would be carrying detritus and depositing sediment. At last a condition of things must have been attained in which a man might have stood up on earth and looked about him and lived. If we could have visited the earth at that time we should have stood on great lava-like masses of rock without a trace of soil or touch of living vegetation, under a storm-rent sky. Hot and violent winds, exceeding the fiercest tornado that ever blows, and downpours of rain such as our milder, slower earth to-day knows nothing of, might have assailed us. The water of the downpour would have rushed by us, muddy with the spoils of the rocks, coming together into torrents, cutting deep gorges and canyons as they hurried past to deposit their sediment in the earliest seas. Through the clouds we should have glimpsed a great sun moving visibly across the sky, and in its wake and in the wake of the moon would have come a diurnal tide of earthquake and upheaval. And lO A Short History of the World the moon, which nowadays keeps one constant face to earth, would then have been rotating visibly and showing the side it now hides so inexorably. The earth aged. One million years followed another, and the day lengthened, the sun grew more distant and milder, the moon's pace in the sky slackened; the intensity of rain and storm dimin- ished and the water in the first seas increased and ran together into the ocean garment our planet henceforth wore. But there was no life as yet upon the earth; the seas were life- less, and the rocks were barren. Ill The Beginnings of Life A S everybody knows nowadays, the knowledge we possess of /\ life before the beginnings of human memory and tradition y V is derived from the markings and fossils of living things in the stratified rocks. We find preserved in shale and slate, lime- stone, and sandstone, bones, shells, fibres, stems, fruits, footmarks, scratchings and the like, side by side with the ripple marks of the earliest tides and the pittings of the earliest rain-falls. It is by the sedulous examination of this Record of the Rocks that the past history of the earth's life has been pieced together. That much nearly everybody knows to-day. The sedimentary rocks do not lie neatly stratum above stratum; they have been crumpled, bent, thrust about, distorted and mixed together like the leaves of a library that has been repeatedly looted and burnt, and it is only as a result of many devoted lifetimes of work that the record has been put into order and read. The whole compass of time represented by the record of the rocks is now estimated as 1,600,000,000 years. The earliest rocks in the record are called by geologists the Azoic rocks, because they show no traces of life. Great areas of these Azoic rocks lie uncovered in North America, and they are of such a thickness that geologists consider that they represent a period of at least half of the 1,600,000,000 which they assign to the whole geological record. Let me repeat this profoundly significant fact. Half the great interval of time since land and sea were first distinguishable on earth has left us no traces of life. There are ripplings and rain marks still to be found in these rocks, but no marks nor vestiges of any living thing. Then, as we come up the record, signs of past life appear and in- crease. The age of the world's history in which we find these past .-'Witt'.b^^ V!» .«VAy%r /A.?*-, MARINE LIFE IN THE CAMBRIAN TERIOD 1 and 8, Jellyfishes; 2, Hyolithes (swimming snail); 3, Hymenocaris; 4, Proto- spongia; 5, Lampshells (Obolclla); 6, Orthoceras; 7, Trilobite (Paradoxides) — see fossil on page 13: 9, Coral ( Archaeocyathus) ; 10, Bryograptus; 11, Tri- lobite (Olenellus); 12, Palesterina 12 The Beginnings of Life 13 traces is called by geologists the Lower Palaeozoic age. The first indications that life was astir are vestiges of comparatively simple and lowly things: the shells of small shellfish, the stems and flower- like heads of zoophytes, seaweeds and the tracks and remains of sea worms and Crustacea. Very early appear certain creatures rather like plant-lice, crawling creatures wliich could roll themselves up into balls as the plant-lice do, the trilobites. Later by a few million years or so come certain sea scorpions, more mobile and powerful creatures than the world had ever seen before. None of these creatures were of very great size. Among the largest were certain of the sea scorpions, which measured nine feet in length. There are no signs whatever of land life of any sort, plant or animal; there are no fishes nor any vertebrated creatures in this part of the record. Essentially all the plants and creatures which have left us their traces from this period of the earth's history are shallow-water and intertidal beings. If we wished to parallel the flora and fauna of the Lower Palaeozoic rocks on the earth to-day, we should do it best, except in the matter of size, by taking a drop of water from a rock pool or scummy ditch and ex- amining it under a microscope. The little Crustacea, the small shellfish, the zoophytes and algte we should find there would display a quite striking resemblance to these clumsier, larger prototypes that once were the crown of life upon our planet. It is well, however, to bear in mind that the Lower Palaeozoic rocks probably do not give us anything at all representative of the first beginnings of life on our planet. LTnless a creature has bones Photo: yohn y. Ward, F.E.S. FOSSIL TRILOBITE (SLIGHTLY MAGNIFIED) 14 A Short History of the World or other hard parts, unless it wears a shell or is big enough and heavy enough to make characteristic footprints and trails in mud, it is unlikely to leave any fossilized traces of its existence behind. To-day there are hundreds of thousands of species of small soft- bodied creatures in our world which it is inconceivable can ever EARLY PALEOZOIC FOSSILS OF VARIOUS SPECIES OF LINGULA Species of this most ancient genus of shellfish still live to-day (hi Natural History Museum, London) leave any mark for future geologists to discover. In the world's past, millions of millions of species of such creatures may have lived and multiplied and flourished and passed away without a trace remaining. The waters of the warm and shallow lakes and seas of the so-called Azoic period may have teemed with an infinite variety The Beginnings of Life 15 FOSSILIZED FOOTPRINTS OF A LABYRINTHODONT CHEIROTHERIUM {In Naltiral History Museum, London) of lowly, jelly-like, shell-less and boneless creatures, and a multi- tude of green scummy plants may have spread over the sunlit inter- tidal rocks and beaches. The Record of the Rocks is no more a complete record of life in the past than the books of a bank are a record of the existence of everybody in the neighbourhood. It is only when a species begins to secrete a shell or a spicule or a cara- pace or a lime-supported stem, and so put by something for the future, that it goes upon the Record. But in rocks of an age prior to those which bear any fossil traces, graphite, a form of uncom- bined carbon, is sometimes found, and some authorities consider that it may have been separated out from combination through the vital activities of unknown living things. IV The Age of Fishes IN the days when the world was supposed to have endured for only a few thousand years, it was supposed that the different species of plants and animals were fixed and final; they had all been created exactly as they are to-day, each species by itself. But as men began to discover and study the Record of the Rocks this belief gave place to the suspicion that many species had changed and developed slowly through the course of ages, and this again expanded into a belief in what is called Organic Evolution, a belief that all species of life upon earth, animal and vegetable alike, are descended by slow continuous processes of change from some very simple ancestral form of life, some almost structureless living sub- stance, far back in the so-called Azoic seas. This question of Organic Evolution, like the question of the age of the earth, has in the past been the subject of much bitter con- troversy. There was a time when a belief in organic evolution was for rather obscure reasons supposed to be incompatible with sound Christian, Jewish and Moslem doctrine. That time has passed, and the men of the most orthodox Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Mohammedan belief are now free to accept this newer and broader view of a common origin of all living things. No life seems to have happened suddenly upon earth. Life grew and grows. Age by age through gulfs of time at which imagination reels, life has been growing from a mere stirring in the intertidal slime towards free- dom, power and consciousness. Life consists of individuals. These individuals are definite things, they are not like the lumps and masses, nor even the limit- less and motionless crystals, of non-living matter, and they have two characteristics no dead matter possesses. They can assimilate other matter into themselves and make it part of themselves, and i6 The Age of Fishes 17 they can reproduce themselves. They eat and they breed. They can give rise to other individuals, for the most part like themselves, but always also a little different from themselves. There is a spe- cific and family resemblance be- tween an individual and its off- spring, and there is an individual difference between every parent and every offspring it produces, and this is true in every species and at every stage of life. Now scientific men are not able to explain to us either why off- spring should resemble nor why they should differ from their par- ents. But seeing that offspring do at once resemble and differ, it is a matter rather of common sense than of scientific knowledge that, if the conditions under which a species live are changed, the species should undergo some correlated changes. Because in any genera- tion of the species there must be a number of individuals whose indi- vidual differences make them better adapted to the new conditions under which the species has to live, and a number whose individ- ual differences make it rather harder for them to live. And on the whole the former sort will live longer, bear more offspring, and reproduce themselves more abun- dantly than the latter, and so generation by generation the average of the species will change in the favourable direction. This process, which is called Natural Selection, is not so much a scientific theory as a necessary deduc- SPECIMEN OF THE PTERICHTHYS MILLERI OR SEA SCORPION SHOW- ING BODY ARMOUR i8 A Short History of the World tioii from the facts of reproduction and individual difference. There may be many forces at work varying, destroying and preserving species, about which science may still be unaware or undecided, but the man who can deny the operation of this process of natural selection upon life since its beginning must be either ignorant of the elementary facts of life or incapable of ordinary thought. Many scientific men have speculated about the first beginning of life and their speculations are often of great interest, but there is absolutely no definite knowledge and no convincing guess yet of the way in which life began. But nearly all authorities are agreed that it probably began upon mud or sand in warm sunlit shallow brackish water, and that it spread up the beaches to the intertidal lines and out to the open waters. That early world was a world of strong tides and currents. An incessant destruc- tion of individuals must have been going on through their being swept up the beaches and dried, or by their being swept out to sea and sinking down out of reach of air and sun. Early conditions favoured the development of every tendency to root and hold on, every tendency to form an outer skin and casing to protect the stranded individual from immediate desic- cation From the very earliest any ten- dency to sensitiveness to tasle would turn the individual in the direction of food, and any S'insitiveness to light would assist it to struggle back out of the dp.rkness of the sea deeps and caverns or to wriggle back out of the "xcessive glare of the dangerous shallows. Probably the first shells and body armour of living things were protections against dry' ng rather than against active enemies. But tooth and claw com<^ early into our earthly history. We have already ncl