furthermore that it is unnecessary to appeal to other than everyday
processes for an explanation of the present order of things.

Wherever we look we see evidence of nature's change; every rain that falls
washes the earth from the hills and mountains into the valleys and into
the streams to be transported somewhere else; every wind that blows
produces its small or greater effect upon the face of the earth; the
beating of the ocean's waves upon the shore, the sweep of the great
tides,--these, too, have their transforming power. The geologists tell us
that such natural forces have remodeled and recast the various areas of
the earth and that they account for the present structure of its surface.
These men of science and the astronomers and the physicists tell us that
in some early age the world was not a solid globe, with continents and
oceans on its surface, as now; that it was so very hot as to be semi-fluid
or semi-solid in consistency. They tell us that before this time it was
still more fluid, and even a mass of fiery vapors. The earth's molten bulk
was part of a mass which was still more vast, and which included portions
which have since condensed to form the other bodies of the solar
system,--Mars and Jupiter and Venus and the rest,--while the sun remains as
the still fiery central core of the former nebulous materials, which have
undergone a natural history of change to become the solar system. The
whole sweep of events included in this long history is called cosmic
evolution; it is the greater and more inclusive process comprising all the
transformations which can be observed now and which have occurred in the
past.

At a certain time in the earth's history, after the hard outer crust had
been formed, it became possible for living materials to arise and for
simple primitive creatures to exist. Thus began the process of organic
evolution--_the natural history of living things_--with which we are