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Everything on earth made and prepared for man

Everything in this wonderful planet of ours seems to have been made for us, arid, in wise, far-seeing ways,. prepared for us. Think of glass,’ and what it means to us ! Think what the microscope and telescope have revealed to us ! Think what eyeglasses mean to so many! Yet silicon, the element essential for glass, was collected for us in sea-water by countless myriads of tiny sea organisms which made of it little glassy shells, often of delicate beauty.

Wonderful changes have taken place in our world since it first became the home of living creatures. Its crust has been broken, and cracked and crumpled; its ocean beds have been puckered up into mountain ranges; continents have sunk beneath the seas. Most of the chalk of England was formed in the bottom of the sea; and the granite of Scotland is the remnants of mighty volcanoes. Even the Himalayas rose from the ocean; the Dolomites were once coral reefs; and many parts of the Earth’s surface have been alternately land and ‘ocean floor. Earth has′ had its tropical periods, too, when great forests and jungles grew in the Polar regions, and it has had its Ice Ages, when almost all Europe was under glaciers. It has had its Age of Insects, its Age of Reptiles, its Age of Mammals, its Age of Man.

Yet evermore the Earth has gone spinning round the Sun, and evermore Life has blossomed more richly. At first its most wonderful blossom achievement, Man, hardty knew where he was, and it was many ages till he discovered that the Earth was a round ball spinning on its axis and revolving round the Sun. At first he naturally thought the Earth was flat, and that the Sun went round it; but bold men who sailed about the w′orld proved it to be round, and other clever men discovered the revolution of the planets.