The Extinction of Man

It is part of the excessive egotism of the human animal that the bare
idea of its extinction seems incredible to it. "A world without _us_!"
it says, as a heady young Cephalaspis might have said it in the old
Silurian sea. But since the Cephalaspis and the Coccostëus many a fine
animal has increased and multiplied upon the earth, lorded it over land
or sea without a rival, and passed at last into the night. Surely it is
not so unreasonable to ask why man should be an exception to the rule.
From the scientific standpoint at least any reason for such exception is
hard to find.

No doubt man is undisputed master at the present time--at least of most
of the land surface; but so it has been before with other animals. Let
us consider what light geology has to throw upon this. The great land
and sea reptiles of the Mesozoic period, for instance, seem to have been
as secure as humanity is now in their pre-eminence. But they passed away
and left no descendants when the new orders of the mammals emerged from
their obscurity. So, too, the huge Titanotheria of the American
continent, and all the powerful mammals of Pleistocene South America,
the sabre-toothed lion, for instance, and the Machrauchenia suddenly
came to a finish when they were still almost at the zenith of their
rule. _And in no case does the record of the fossils show a really
dominant species succeeded by its own descendants._ What has usually
happened in the past appears to be the emergence of some type of animal
hitherto rare and unimportant, and the extinction, not simply of the
previously ruling species, but of most of the forms that are at all
closely related to it. Sometimes, indeed, as in the case of the extinct
giants of South America, they vanished without any considerable rivals,
victims of pestilence, famine, or, it may be, of that cumulative
inefficiency that comes of a too undisputed life. So that the analogy of
geology, at anyrate, is against this too acceptable view of man's
certain tenure of the earth for the next few million years or so.

And, after all, even now man is by no means such a master of the
kingdoms of life as he is apt to imagine. The sea, that mysterious
nursery of living things, is for all practical purposes beyond his
control. The low-water mark is his limit. Beyond that he may do a little
with seine and dredge, murder a few million herrings a year as they come
in to spawn, butcher his fellow air-breather, the whale, or haul now and
then an unlucky king-crab or strange sea-urchin out of the deep water,
in the name of science; but the life of the sea as a whole knows him
not, plays out its slow drama of change and development unheeding him,
and may in the end, in mere idle sport, throw up some new