Only the wind and the rivers moved over them. But in the sea swarmed myriads of simple plants and animals. The latter wore their skeletons on the outside, like a coat of mail. All major styles of backboneless animals are represented in the rock record, but little of their ancestry is revealed. Many of them, such as the blind mud-groveling crustaceans of the Cambrian sea, were clearly the degenerate survivors of a long line. Others were highly specialized for particular environments and modes of life, the final products of many centuries of racial growth.

The trilobite, distant relative of modern crabs, was the most highly organized animal on earth. We must accept him for what he was, and assume that his ancestors were numerous and the right sort. Although the crab and his kin are no longer considered among the best families, there was a time when no creature could contest the social and political supremacy of the trilobite.

He

tyrannized over the world during the first fifty million years of Paleozoic time. Brachiopods, corals, mollusks and worms were his vassals. When attacked he could roll up and cover his soft belly with the shell of his back. This trick saved him for some millions of years. But alas for earthly vanities! This mighty ruler at last sank into the mud.

Near the peak of his dominance the trilobite blossomed as the rose. His majestic person was adorned with spines and pustules, a Paleozoic version of the skin you love to touch. But such refinement spawns in the decay of a race, even as excessive luxury in a civilization grown rotten. The blood of the trilobite was run

ning thin, and his hour was approaching.

While Nature was blasting this creature from within, a rival was striking him from without. A longbodied mollusk, forefather of the pearly nautilus, was a mighty contender for the throne. Strong, swift and aggressive, he harassed the faltering crustacean. It is interesting to speculate on the outcome of this struggle, had it been allowed to go on. But the gods had other plans. Back in the rivers of the land they had been experimenting with a new body, which when launched into the sea, was immediately successful. The primitive fishes, first animals with backbones, swept all the field before them. And ever since backbone has had its way.

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Life is remarkable for many qualities, but for none so much as the questing energy which drives it ever onward. While the drama of rival dynasties was approaching a climax, a scorpion, the first known air-breathing animal, was quietly born on a Silurian strand. Shortly afterward a few simple spongy plants crept from their ancestral home in the sea and tried life on land. A fish invented a lung that worked crudely. Before the era was over, the land was clothed and peopled, the stage was

set for the second act.

Then came a revolution that profoundly altered the course of events. The theater of the world was swayed. Whole continents were upheaved and mountains rose high in many parts of the earth. Climates were changed. Glaciers crawled to the sea in tropical belts. Northern forests shriveled under a desert sun. Ferns, horsetails,

and club-mosses of the coal swamps were reduced in size and numbers, their glory gone forever. And in the sea, crinoids, bryozoans, brachiopods and cephalopods escaped extinction by a hairbreadth. Graptolites, cystoids, blastoids, eurypterids, and the once lofty trilobite, passed forever from the earth. But the organisms destined to succeed closed up the ranks and marched on.

With the beginning of the Mesozoic era progressive creatures slowly freed themselves from the sea. We might all be swimming about our business if a Devonian fish had not been forced to gulp air when his pool dried up. Once on land the hazards of an uncertain environment stimulated progress; there was no return. to old ways. But emancipation from the water was slow; for millions of years land animals went down to the sea to breed. Creatures who lived a double life were born, who breathed through gills when young and through lungs when mature. They were a mongrel race, a compromise between fish and reptile. Fate has been kind to them for their descendants are alive to-day. With the exception of Mark Twain's jumping frog, they have done nothing to distinguish themselves. But from them sprang the reptiles, the first animals to escape completely the degrading clutch of the sea.

The banner of life was carried high by the reptiles during the Mesozoic era. The revolution at the close of the Paleozoic had given them their opportunity. They conquered every realm. On land the dinosaurs walked supreme. From tiny ones no larger than squirrels to the greatest aggregates of flesh and bone ever as

sembled under the hide of any land animal, they drove all other creatures before them. Sea-going reptiles, the wildest nightmare of a medieval sailor come true, routed the complacent fishes. And in the air pterodactyls flapped their winged fingers at the insects.

It was an age of glorified dullness. One large dinosaur had so small a brain in his head that kind Nature gave him a branch brain for his hind quarters, to keep that portion of anatomy following along in the right direction. No reptile alive at this time could have known much more than to eat and to run from danger. Yet that was enough since all were equally endowed with stupidity. For one hundred million years, muscle was the measure of success. But Nature is fickle and no sooner had she made the world safe for the reptiles than she began to undermine their strength. Intelligence, a new force, was to have its day.

The Mesozoic enriched the ranks of the living with two gifts, warm blood and large brains. Both came by a roundabout way through the cold-blooded, small-brained reptiles. In the middle of the era, the scales of a fleet-footed dinosaur changed into feathers, and the first bird was born. He possessed the warm blood of higher animals, but not the large brain. Birds have been handicapped by small brains ever since. They just fly along, more ornamental than significant. It was in the mammals that warm blood and intelligence united. The first mammals were small and unable to compete with the reptiles. But most reptiles vanished at the close of the era. With energy from their warm blood and

cunning from their large brains, the mammals rose easily to leadership over all other creatures.

Like the reptiles before them, the mammals filled every realm during the Cenozoic era. Herds of grasseaters thundered over the plains, meat-eaters stalked in the forests, bats hunted in the air, whales, seals and porpoises plundered in the sea. Hair and blubber covered their bodies to keep their blood warm and their energies active. The hazardous old-fashioned habit of egg-laying was abandoned for direct birth and care of the young. Their brains grew larger. But when they had mastered all environments, Nature again changed her mind. Just as mammals had grown from the race they had displaced, so from mammals came man.

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The power of his mind and spirit has placed man on the highest summit of organic evolution. With the characteristic modesty of great rulers, he whispers praises into his own ear. But his point of view is biased, and oysters may hold different opinions. After all, man may not be as secure as he thinks he is. His body is weak and may some day be his undoing. Many of his organs, such as the vermiform appendix, have outlived their usefulness. He is slowly losing his toes, his teeth and his hair. His hearing, smell and sight are growing less acute, because his life no longer depends on them. His hands have lost their adaptability in an age of machinery. Even his mind has not improved noticeably in two thousand years of intensive cultivation. Perhaps Nature is again tiring of her favorite and preparing a new deal.

It is not likely that man himself will give rise to a higher race. A study of past life shows that advances have always come from the ranks of the undistinguished. A simple, generalized amphibian sired the first reptile; a relatively inconspicuous reptile gave birth to the earliest mammal. Specialized types are held in the rut of their specialty. They have lost their plasticity and cannot make any extreme change. Yet it is difficult to admit the probability of the emergence of a higher race from any existing animal. Man conquered the world with his intellect, and no other creature can approach him in this capacity. But Tyrannosaurus conquered the world with brawn. The pitiful little mammals beneath his feet were likewise beneath his consideration. Yet they took his glory.

Life carries on. Uncertain as are the destinies of individual and race, the spark that fires the flesh will not flicker out. Life will go struggling on with restless vigor until the earth grows very hot or very cold, until she loses her atmosphere or collides with a star. Always in the shadow of the great are creatures who remain unchanged while æons roll over their heads. They are the conservative, unambitious ones who only stand and wait. Perhaps some day they will have their chance. The insects have waited long; their fecundity may some day win. But much can be hoped for the animal who, despite grave weaknesses, rules as no creature has ruled before. With intelligence in his head, faith in his heart, and a smile on his lips, he may be able to outwit fickle Nature herself.

L

OOKED at impartially, the proper study of mankind, in these significant, searching times, is not so much man as the American.

By all accounts, this puzzling person tends more and more to the baffling and mysterious. The world has long made note of some of his phenomena and spoken of them without enthusiasm. How, for example, whenever it had with confidence classified him as harder than nails, relentless as a grappling-hook, colder than a glacier, he has suddenly stood forth with some strange great generosity for far-away victims of earthquake, plague or famine. How when it had perceived clearly that he cared for nothing on earth but a frenetic pursuit of trade and profits, he belied himself with some exhibition of quixotic or unreasonable emotion. How when his unkempt cities and disordered affairs had been savagely denounced by some judicious alien, he took his critic lovingly to his bosom and purchased great quantities of the denunciation, done into book or lecture. How he seemed to the onlooker at times about half Pistol and at times more than half Shylock; and then how, whenever the world, bemused by these gyrations, was ready to be convinced that after all he might be good at heart, he sent

a fleet to solicit a debt or filched a country to build a canal.

To these vagaries he is now adding another. If we are to understand how, we must remember that about one phase of his complicated being, all visitors have been of one mind. He had no art. God in his wisdom had so fashioned the American that he was congenitally incapable of art. Besides, in the barren and stricken soil of a counting-house, what art would ever grow? Life in America, according to the flawless judgment of the best observers, was of such a nature that not only was art negligible now, but would be so forever

more.

Since the World War, this depressing outlook seems to have darkened. More than ever we have been immersed in the two national pursuits of money-grubbing and money-wasting. Nearly all our guests from foreign parts have been constrained to rebuke us for life led in a wild tarantella of extravagance to the strains of a jazz band and the twirlings of a million electric-light signs. The madness of much wealth, added to a notorious incapacity for the refinements of civilization, was regarded as signalling a long expected and perhaps deserved downfall.

But scarcely had this been de

termined by eminent authorities than the incomprehensible and irrational American suddenly appears before the world as incontestably the supreme achiever in one of the arts to which he was well known to be all barbarian, and that one the art most directly expressive of the noblest and purest emotions of man.

That is to say, the loftiest forms of musical composition, adequately interpreted by an adequate orchestra. Without a trace of boasting or chestpuffing, we can say this; what what Europe admits about it we may set down coldly as historical and sociological fact. The American grand orchestra in the average excellence of its performances, is unequalled by an average excellence elsewhere. Truly if Uncle Shylock turns to play the rôle of Orpheus and plays it rather well, here is something to make men stare and mutter.

Not because of our exceeding great merit have we attained to this summit, but for other reasons. Indeed, in sheer numbers of grand orchestras, reasonably considered, we are not so wonderful as in some other ways in a nation of 120,000,000 inhabitants there are fifty-one of these organizations discoursing heavenly harmony. But what goes beyond this line of great or notable groups of musicians stretched across the continent is that the interest in orchestral music is so widely spread, so evenly developed, so rapidly increasing in every part of the country, and that at present it sustains, appreciates and encourages this genuine merit of accomplishment. Even Germany, whence came originally all our orchestral inspiration, makes by comparison an inferior showing.

Many persons that have not taken the trouble to note the culturai revolution in America, will scout this as an extravagance-so hard upon us is the force of accepted tradition! Turn therefore to the records. We will take as the criterion a regularly constituted orchestra containing all the instruments needed to render competently the standard classical symphonies and played by musicians capable of interpreting such works; an orchestra, moreover, giving an ordered season of public concerts.

Of such organizations in this world, the Music Year Book for 1927-28 gives the following totals: United States, 60; Austria, 21; England, 19; Germany, 19; Paris, 11; Belgium, 12; Spain, 12; Russia, 7; Holland, 6; Czechoslovakia, 5; Italy, 7; Denmark, 2; Norway, 2; Scotland, 2.

This list is not pretended to be either strictly accurate or complete, for the difficulties of gathering international facts about music are great; but it is a trustworthy indication of relative development. Errors in it are usually to the advantage of the foreign field. For example, it counts as among the grand orchestras of England the organizations maintained by broadcasting companies, the pump-room "band" of Bath, and other irregularities. One English conductor reappears as the leader of five orchestras listed as separate, another as the leader of four, another as the leader of three. Two of the most conspicuous orchestras in the kingdom, the London Symphony and the London Philharmonic, have no regular conductors. Outside of London, the English orchestra ordinarily consists of teachers and amateurs