Today, like many millions of years ago, bacteria are busy creating conditions necessary for the growth of plants and animals. Bacteria are responsible for the circulation of carbon and nitrogen in nature. The material of plant and animal bodies is used over and over again, and processes of decay must go on in order that the carbon, nitrogen, sulphur phosphorus, lime and other elements locked up in the bodies of plants and animals may be released for the development of countless generations of living things. It has been truly said that we may have in our bodies today the carbon or the nitrogen which were once in the bodies of the kings of Egypt or of living organisms of whose origin and history we know nothing.
After the lowly bacteria and other miscroscopic forms of life had lived and produced extensive changes on land and in the sea, conditions became more favorable for the growth of plants. The primitive forms of plant life gradually developed into more perfect organisms, until the mosses, ferns, cycads gave way to flowering plants, perhaps 10,000,000 years ago at a very conservative estimate. In some way bacteria learned to establish a partnership with some kinds of plants, such as clover, alfalfa, soy beans, etc. These plants, together with the bacteria, are the important factors in our agriculture as regards the maintenance of a supply of nitrogen in our soils.
Thus plants had to develop both as to quantity and quality in order that there might be sufficient food for the advancing forms of animal life. One may properly speak of the genesis and evolution of soil as one would speak of the genesis and evolution of plants and animals. Man has learned to use this knowledge to improve his condition, and in following the laws laid down by the divine Creator, he has been able to fashion more perfect forms of plant and animal life. The story of Genetics, which deals with the principles of plant and animal breeding, is full of interest. It has to its credit more perfect flowers, fruit of higher yielding qualities and better flavor, fibre crops of superior fibre, sugar crops with a higher content of sugar, crops resistant to plant diseases, crops suitable for dry climates and wet climates, for sour soils and sweet soils and, in general, for a wide range of soil and climatic conditions. In the same way, genetics has made it possible for us to improve on the types of animals of economic importance in our farming industry.
We are indebted to science for a clearer vision of the great laws of nature, and of the methods of the divine Creator. The men of science, carrying on their labors in a spirit of reverence and humility, try to interpret the great book of knowledge in order that the paths of man may fall in more pleasant places, and the ways of human society may be in better keeping with the divine purpose.
With these facts an interpretations of organic evolution left out, the agricultural colleges and experimental service to our great agricultural instations could not render effective dustry.
By Dr. Fay-Cooper Cole,
Anthropologist, University of Chicago.
(Biography—Dr. Fay-Cooper Cole received the degree bachelor of science at Northwestern university. After work as a graduate student at Rush Medical college and the University of Berlin, he took the degree doctor of philosophy at Columbia university. He is now anthropologist at the university of Chicago. Before that he was connected with the Field Museum of natural History at Chicago, one of the three chief museums in America, for nineteen years, for the greater part of that period he was in charge of the museum's work in physical anthropology and Malayan ethnology. He conducted three expeditions covering a period of five and one-half years in the Philippine Islands, Borneo, Java, Madura, Nias, Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, making a particular study of the origin and the migration of the pygmies
