The Home, Its Work and Influence

We have been slow, slow and reluctant, to apply the laws of evolution / to the familiar facts of human life. Whatever else might move, we / surely were stationary; we were the superior onlookers -- not part of the / procession. Ideas which have possessed the racial mind from the oldest / times are not to be dispossessed in a day; and this idea that man is / something extra in the scheme of creation is one of our very oldest. We / have always assumed that we were made by a special order, and that our / manners and customs were peculiarly and distinctively our own, / separated by an immeasurable gap from those of "the lower animals."

Now it appears, in large succeeding waves of proof, that there are no / gaps in the long story of earth's continual creation; some pages may be / lost to us, but they were once continuous. There is no break between us / and the first stir of life upon our planet. Life is an unbroken line, a / ceaseless stream that pours steadily on; or rather, it grows like an / undying tree, some of whose branches wither and drop off, some reach / their limit part way up, but the main trunk rises ever higher. We stand / at the top and continue to grow, but we still carry with us many of the / characteristics of the lower branches.