Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1922-10-10
The Outline of History-By H. G. Wells
|. The Romance of Mother Earth

giraffe camels with long necks, gazelle cam
els, llamas and true camels
When America Joined Asia
North America, throughout most of the
Cainozoic period, appears to have been in
open and easy continuation with Asia, and
when at last the glaciers of the Great Ice
Age, and then the Boring Strait, came to sep
arate the two great, continental regions the
last camels were left in the old world and
the llamas in the new.
In the Eocene the first ancestors Of the
elephants appear in northern Africa as smut
ed creatures; the elephants trunk dawned
on the world in the Miocene.
Through millions of simian generations
the spinning world circled about the sun;
slowly its orbit, which may have been nearly
circular during the equable days of the early
Eocene, was drawn by the attraction Of the
circling outer planets into a more elliptical
form. It's axis of rotation, which had al
ways heeled over the plane Of its orbit, as
the mast of yacht under sail heels over to
the level Of the water, heeled over by i'm
perceptible degrees little more and lit
tie more. And each year it's summer point
shifted little further from perihelion round
it's path.
These were small changes to happen to a
one-inch ball. circling at distance of $50
yards from a flaming sun nine feet across
in the course of few milliol years. They
tune, watching the earth from age to age,
would have found almost imperceptible. But
from the point of view of the surviving NAM
malian life of the Miocene, they mattered
profoundly.
The Earth's Increasing Chill
Age by age the winters grew on the whole
colder and harder and few hours longer
relatively to the summers in a thousand
years; age by age the summer grew briefer.
On an average the winter snow lay a little
later in the spring each century, and the
glaciers in the northern mountains gained
an inch this year, receded half and inch next,
came on again a few inches.
The Record Of the Rocks tells of the In
creasing chill. The Pliocene was temper
ate time, and many of the warmth-loving
plants and animals had gone. Then, rather
less deliberately, some feet or some inches
every year. the ice came on.
An Arctic fauna, musk OK woody NAM
moth, woolly rhinoceros, lemming, ushers
in the Pleistocene. Over North America and
Europe and Asia alike, the ice advanced. For
thousands Of years it advanced and then for
thousands of years it receded, to advance
again.
Europe down to the Baltic shores, Britain
down to the Thames, North America down to
New England, and more centrally as far
south as Ohio, lay for ages under the gla-
ciers Enormous volumes of water were with
drawn from the ocean and locked up in those
stupendous ice caps so as to cause a world
wide change in the relative levels of land
and sea. Vast areas were exposed that are
now again sea bottom.
The world today is still coming slowly out
Of the last of four great waves of cold. 1t is
not growing warmer steadily. There have
been fluctuations. Remains of bog oaks, for
example, which grew two or three thousand
years ago, are found in Scotland at ATTITUDES
in which not even a stunted oak will grow
at the present time. And it is amid this cres-
cendo and diminuendo of frost and snow that
we first recognize forms that are like the
forms Of men. The Age Of Mammals cul-
minated in ice and hardship and man.