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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
prived man of the claim to special crcation. Even in relation to the tiny speck of cosmic dust, which is its own abode, mankind cannot claim much distinction. A ball of flaming gas, cast out by, or torn out of, the sun, cooled down and condensed into our carth. The process took place over a period of astronomical time which is calculated in billions of years. Then began gcological evolution which is estimated to have taken froin fo:!r hun. draci i fire hundred million years. The first signs of lifc-liny specks of primordial slime ficaring on water-appeared on the surface of the carth about one hundred million years ago : that is to say, the carth itself was lifeless for about four hundred minillion vcars. In biological history, which itself covers a small fraction of gcological tiinc, the appearance of mankind is an event of yesterday. Only about a million years ago, the ancestors of man left their arborcal home, and began to cultivate the habit of walking on the two hindlegs. Beforc the birth of the earth and formation of the solar system, the physical Universe, consisting of innumcrable stars and vast ncbulous masses condensing into heavenly bodies, had cxisted for trillions and trillions of vears-over a stretch of time vractically incalculable.
Human vanity, piously clothed in the spiritualist cosmological conception, would perhaps go to the extent of believing that the long processes of astronomical, geological and biological evolution
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