The Ocala evening star. [volume] (Ocala, Fla.) 1895-1943, 1908-04-17
LANGDoN SMITH
AND REVOLUTION

Langdon Smith, the war CORE
spondent and writer, died on Wednes-
day, at his Brooklyn home. No New
York newspaper man was better
known than Smith, who could der
scribe, equally well. battle or a base
ball game, says the New York Post.
But the thing that he wrote which
will live the longest-because it is
worth while-is his poem Evolution"
which has been reprinted all over the
country. The poem follows:
a Fish.
In the Paleiozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and
:. slime,
Or sheltered with many caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian
fen,
Ny heart was rife with the joy of life,
For l loved you, even then.
Mindless we lived and mindless We
loved,
And mindless at last we died:
The world turned on in the lathe Cf
time,
The hot lands heaved amain.
Till we caught our breath from the
womb Of death,
And crept into light again.
We were Amphibians, scaled and tall
ed.
And drab as dead mans hand;
We coiled at ease meath the dripping
trees,
Or trailed through the mud and
sand.
Cracking and blind, with our three
clawed feet,
Writing a language dumb,
With never spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come
Ye happy we lived, and happy we
loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging
Of a Neocomian shore.
The cons came and the cons fled.
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
was riven away in a newer day,
And the night of death was past.
Then light and swift through the jun
gle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the frond.
ed palms,
In the hush of the moonless nights.
And oh! what beautiful years were
these, 4
When our hearts chung each to each;
When life was filled. and our senses
thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.
Thus life by life, and love by love.
We passed through the cycles
strange,
And breath by breath, and death by
death,
We followed the chain of change
TIL there came time in the law of
life
When, over the nursing sod
The shadows broke, and the soul
awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.
1 was thewed like an Auroch bull,
And tusked like the great Cave
Bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet,
Were gowned in your glorious hair
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell DER the plain,
And the moon hung red DER the river
We mumbled the bones of the slain.
q nf fn n
And shaped it with british craft;
l broke a shank from the woodland
dank,
And fitted it, head and haft,
Then hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through Drawn and bone I drove the
stone,
And slew him upon the brink.
Loud I howled through the mooniit
wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west and east to the crimson
feast
The clan came trOoping in.
Ger joint and gristle and padded hoof
We fought and clawed and tore,
And cheek by jowl, with many a growl
We talked the marvel DER.
I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand,
1 pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand
For we lived by blood, and the right Of
might,
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the Age Of Sin did not begin
Till our brutal tusks were gone.