The lesson of evolution Author:Frederick Wollaston Hutton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: isms collected ; and here, in still water, they lived and increased for a long time. Slowly they invaded -the rough waters of the coast-line, and, at last, gaine... more »d a footing on the land. It was plants which formed the army of invasion that conquered the land. This army was followed by a mob of camp-followers and ragamuffins, in the shape of cockroaches and scorpions, who fed and fattened on the plants; but who, notwithstanding their boasted superiority, were quite incapable of reclaiming a single acre of desert. The real victory belongs to the plants, who, with undaunted courage, left the congenial water to dare the vicissitudes of temperature and moisture on land, and thus made civilisation possible. Plants left the ocean to live on land once only, in the Cambrian or early Ordovician. Several times, in later days, land plants—both Cryptogams and Angio- sperms—went back to the water; but never again did water plants succeed in gaining the land. And, even at the present day, every seed-bearing plant passes, in its development, through a spore-bearing stage. And every bird and mammal passes through a gill-bearing stage, which they have inherited from their marine ancestors. Part II.—Later Life On The Earth The commencement of the Deutozoic, or newer Palaeozoic era, forms a very convenient division in the progress of life; for before that time biological development took place almost entirely in the ocean, and it is not until we come near the close of the olderPalaeozoic that we find any trace of land animals. But when we pass to the second half, embracing the time from the commencement of the Devonian to the Pleistocene, we shall find that our attention will be almost entirely directed to the land. Of course, during this time organic evolution went on steadily in the o...« less