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The puzzle of life and how it has been put together cover

The puzzle of life and how it has been put together

Chapter 28: CONCLUSION.
By Arthur Nicols
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About This Book

This volume offers a concise, illustrated account of Earth's physical formation and successive life forms, explaining geological strata, fossil evidence, and deep‑time processes such as uplift, subsidence, and deposition. It surveys major plant and animal groups preserved in the rocks, sketches transitions from ancient marine and reptilian forms to mammals, and discusses prehistoric human remains, implements, and art to trace technological and cultural progression. Emphasis is placed on reading museum specimens and field signs to reconstruct past environments, with accessible explanations of scientific reasoning and references to exploratory findings and archaeological sites. Pedagogical notes and illustrations support younger readers in recognizing fossils, tools, and earthwork monuments.

CONCLUSION.

I have now put “The Puzzle of Life” together as well as I can, and there is not much more to say. You must do the rest for yourselves by going to the Museums, where all the pieces are collected, and seeing them with your own eyes. When you stand before these silent witnesses to the great age of our Earth, and all that is on it, you will feel how wonderful the story they tell is. They have no words to speak to you, but there is a power in your own minds which interprets their history through your own thoughts. They are only lumps of rock and lifeless bones, but they seem to say to you, “We are living again now, because we are teaching you a lesson which the great Builder of this Universe wishes you to learn from us. There is not a stone or fossil among us but it has its tale to tell—a tale of time and tide, and long past ages, and innumerable changes, and a life that was, and progress from a lower to a higher existence. We have obeyed the same eternal laws of one Creator from the beginning, as all things will to the end of time. We have opened the great Book of Nature from the first page of the ‘life-dawn animal’ to the last, on which the hand of the Almighty has written the name of Man—his most perfect work. We, you, and all things which have lived and will live, have bodies made of particles which will be returned to the Earth, no single atom of which has been destroyed since the first, but has been fashioned over and over again into innumerable forms of tree and flower, of gossamer-winged insect and towering mammoth, throughout the long ages in which our Globe has known day and night, cold and heat, summer and winter.”

There is nothing sad, if we look at it rightly, in this constant succession of life and death. It is

A moulding
Of forms, and a wondrous birth,
And a growing and fair unfolding
Of life from life, and life from death.
For death, a mother benign,
Transformeth but destroyeth not,
And the new thing fair of the old is wrought.

G. F. Armstrong.

Is it not worth while then to listen to these stories of the Earth—to spell them out for ourselves? They are written everywhere,—in the mountains and valleys, the rivers and seas, on the hard faces of granite cliffs, on the rounded pebbles of the sea beach, and even in the finest dust of the roads. We have not to go far to hear them: every foot-step on the ground covers a chapter great or small in the universal history, and the stone walls of our houses could speak with ten thousand tongues of all they witnessed in their long life on the floor of an ancient ocean.

We can scarcely have a more pleasant occupation and greater interest than in searching for and putting together the pieces of this wonderful and beautiful puzzle, and in doing our utmost to “Summon from the shadowy Past the forms that once have been.”