that a vastly greater evaporation must have gone on then than now, and that a welkin of cloud must thus inevitably have been formed.
Now put the two facts together, and you have the solution. The climate was warm and equable over the whole globe because a thick cloud envelope shut off the Sun's heat, the heat being wholly supplied from the steamy seas. At the same time, by the same means the light was necessarily so tempered as to produce exactly that half-light the ferns so dearly love. One and the same cause thus answers the double riddle of greater warmth and less light in those old days than is now the case.
And here comes in the second find I spoke of above, in the person of some old trilobites who stepped in unexpectedly in corroboration. It has long been known—though its full significance seems to have escaped notice—that in 1872 M. Barrande made the discovery that many species of trilobites of the Cambrian and lower Silurian, the two lowest, and therefore the oldest, strata of paleozoic times, and distant relative of our horseshoe crabs, were blind. What is yet more significant, the most antediluvian were the least provided with eyes. Thus in the primordial strata, one-fourth of the whole number of species were eyeless, in the next above one-fifth, and in the latest of all one two-hundredth only.[1] Furthermore, they testify to the difficulty of
