The Sentinel=record., 1911-02-26
A NOTABLE POEM.
Lanqdon Smiths "Evoution" Has Been
 Very Widely Copied.


 Very Widely Copied.
 LanRdon Smith the war correspondent and writer died in 1908 at his Brooklyn, N. '. home. No New York news paper man was better known than smith, who could describe. equally we'll a battle or baseball game. But the thing that he wrote that will live the longest-be- cause it Is worth while--is his poem Evolution, which has been reprinted all over the country. The poem follows; When you were Tadpole and was~a Fish. In the Paieozoie time, And side by side on the ebbing tide | We sprawIed through the ooze and slime.
 Or skittered with many eaudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
 My 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; And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift | We slumbered side by side. The world turned on in the lathe of time. The hot lands heaved amain. rill we caught our breath from the womb of death And crept into light again. We were Amphibians, scaled and tailed And drab as a dead mans hand: I Or trailed through the mud and sand croaking and blind, with our three | clawed feet | Writing a language dumb With never a spark in the empty dark To hint at life to come. Yet happy we lived, and happy we loved. And happy we died once more; Our forms were rolled in the clinging
 mold Of a Neocomian shore. The cons came and the cons fled, | And the sleep that wrapped us fast Was driven away in a newer day.
 And the night Of death was past. Then light and swift through the jungle We swung in our airy flights. Or breathed in the balms of the fronded
 palms. In the hush of the moonless nights And ohl what beautiful years were these. | When our hearts clung 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, Till there came a time in the law of life When over the nursing sod The shadows broke, and the soul awoke In strange, dim dream of God. l 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 freless cave, I When the night fell OCT the plain, | And the moon hung red OCT the river bed. We mumbled the bones of the slain. haked flint to a cutting edge,
 And shaped it with brutish craft; broke shank from the woodland dank, And fitted it. head and haft, Then l hid me close to the reedy tarn
 Where the Mammoth came to drink; Through brawn and bone I draYe the
 stone,
 And slew him upon the brink. Loud I howled through the moonlit
 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 growl,
 We talked the marvel o'er. I carved that fight on reindeer bone
 With rude and hairy hand. I 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 And that was a million years ago,
 In a time that no man knows. Yet here tonight in the mellow light
 We sit at Delnponicos
 Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs, Your hair is as dark as jet; Your years are few, your life Is new,
 Your soul untried, and yet Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay. We have left our bones in the Bagshot
 stones,
 And deep in the CoraAne crags; Our love is old, our lives are old
 And death shall come aman, Should it come today, what man may say
 We shall not live again? God wrought our souls from the Trema-
 doc beds
 And furnished them wings to fly; He sowed our spawn in the worlds dim
 dawn.
 And I know that it shall not die. Though cities have sprung above the
 graves
 Where the crook boned men made war, And the ox-wain creaks OCT the buried
 caves
 Where the mummied mammoths are. Then. as we finger at luncheon here
 Der many a dainty dish Let us drink anew to the time when you rt-a. T. -N. I La.