He left some of his superfluous forty-four teeth with his ancestral quadrumana of Eocene times, and kept thirty-two.  He picked up his brain somewhere on the road, probably far back in Palaeozoic times, but how has he developed and enlarged it, till it is now the one supreme thing in the world!  His fear, his cunning, his anger, his treachery, his hoggishness—­all his animal passions—­he brought with him from his animal ancestors; but his moral and spiritual nature, his altruism, his veneration, his religious emotions, his aesthetic perceptions—­have come to him as a man, supplementing his lower nature, as it were, with another order of senses—­a finer sight, a finer touch, wrought in him by the discipline of life, and the wonder of the world about him, beginning de novo in him only as the wing began de novo in the bird, or the color began de novo in the flower—­struck out from preexisting potentialities.  The father of the eye is the light, and the father of the ear is the vibration of the air, but the father of man’s higher nature is a question of quite another sort.  About the only thing in his physical make-up that man can call his own is his chin.  None of the orders below him seem to have what can strictly be called a chin.

Man owes his five toes and five fingers to the early amphibians of the sub-carboniferous times.  The first tangible evidence of these five toes upon the earth is, to me, very interesting.  The earliest record of them that I have heard of is furnished by a slab of shale from Pennsylvania, upon which, while it was yet soft mud, our first five-toed ancestor had left the imprint of his four feet.  He was evidently a small, short-legged gentleman with a stride of only about thirteen inches, and he carried a tail instead of a cane.  He was probably taking a stroll upon the shores of that vast Mediterranean Sea that occupied all the interior of the continent when he crossed his mud flat.  It was raining that morning—­how many million years ago?—­as we know from the imprint of the raindrops upon the mud.  Probably the shower did not cause him to quicken his pace, as amphibians rather like the rain.  Just what his immediate forbears were like, or what the forms were that connected him with the fishes, we shall probably never know.  Doubtless the great book of the rocky strata somewhere holds the secret, if we are ever lucky enough to open it at the right place.  How many other secrets, that evolutionists would like to know, those torn and crumpled leaves hold!

It is something to me to know that it rained that day when our amphibian ancestor ventured out.  The weather was beginning to get organized also, and settling down to business.  It had got beyond the state of perpetual mist and fog of the earlier ages, and the raindrops were playing their parts.  Yet, from all the evidence we have, we infer that the climate was warm and very humid, like that of a greenhouse, and that vegetation, mostly giant ferns and rushes and lycopods, was very rank, but there was no grass, or moss, no deciduous trees, or flowers, or fruit, as we know these things.