Explore "The Breath of Life" by John Burroughs on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The evolution of life is, of course, bound up with the evolution of the world. As the globe has ripened and matured, life has matured; higher and higher forms -- forms with larger and larger brains and more and more complex nerve mechanisms -- have appeared.
Physicists teach us that the evolution of the primary elements -- hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and the like -- takes place in a solar body as the body cools. As temperature decreases, one after another of the chemical elements makes its appearance, the simpler elements appearing first, and the more complex compounds appearing last, all apparently having their origin in some simple parent element. It appears as if the evolution of life upon the globe had followed the same law and had waited upon the secular cooling of the earth.