Statement by Wilbur A. Nelson

Nelson - 5.

periods passed and life developed over the earth.

And even when this Carboniferous period in the development of the earth has been reached, we are still many millions of years back from the age of man; We must still pass thru many geological time periods, thru that age known as the Permian, when land vertebrates first arose; thru the Triassic, when [ reptillian ] mammals arose; thru the Jurassic, [ whey ] flying reptiles were in existence. This was the Age of Reptiles. Then into the Cretaceous, when flowering plants came into existence, and a great group of the reptiles known as [ dinnosaurs ], became extinct.

And then we come to that period in the earth’s history, at the beginning of which the ancient mammals and birds were first known to exist. Fossil remains show clearly that birds evolved from flying reptiles. This is the Great Age of Mammals. Thru this period, the modern life forms developed. A period of glacial activity [ too ] place, during which five distinct glacial stages existed, one after the other, with four interglacial intervals, and manlike beings came into being at least the beginning of this time. Such, very briefly, is an account of the evolution of the earth from Cambrian time to the present, with a brief outline of the life forms which existed during these different periods. We know that this took many millions of years, and yet we also know that the earth existed untold millions of years before Cambrian time.

For the formation of the earth and its early stages we must turn to the science of Astronomy. The relations of the earth to the stars and the planets are shown in the depths of the heavens, and there must exist in the heavens those cosmic