A NEW WORLD

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 4, 5 July 1928, Page 18

A NEW WORLD

PEE-CAMBRIAN LIFE SIR E. DAVID'S DISCOVERY (From "The Post's" Rciiresentatl c.) SYDNEY, 12th Juno. At the age of 70, Professor Sir Edgeworth David, the doyen of Australian professors, beloved by all the people for his many kindly acts and his unostentatious character, lias inado a surprising discovery which has crowned his Jifo of stupendous effort. Ho will make geologists, evolutionists, and paleontologists throughout the world readjust their ideas of the antiquity of life upon, the earth. Briefly, he has discovered in rocks taken from Mount Lofty, in the flinders ltanges of South Australia} perfectly preserved remnants of animal life millions of years older than any so far classified by science. The principal scientific! interest of this enormously important discovery is its bearing upon evolution, which, in the light of the new world which Sir Edgeworth David has discovered, must place the birth of life millions of years earlier than science had supposed. In a statement before the Royal Society—a statement typical of the man— Sir Edge worth David said: "I could kick myself to think that I havo overlooked this obvious discovery for so long. It only proves that you are not too old to learn." The discovery demonstrated, too, that a man could be blinded by facing a problem with preconceived views. -Looking for white shells and coral skeletons he had passed over, scores and scores of times, the big fossils, believing them to be some minerals in the rocks. The new world of fossil fauna would, he felt sure, provide paleontologists with material sufficient to absorb them for the next hundred years. In it was to be found the solution of the ancestry of many animals already widely differentiated in in the Cambrian rocks. Sir Edgeworth David admits that his discovery gave him a very definite uprush of emotion. He'had been searching for these remains for "the last thirty years, but only a month ago, working with; a high-powered microscope, did he see any traces of life in the preCambrian period, taking him back GOO,----000,000 years. Ho had been looking for the wrong sort of thing, founding his hopes on what science supposed of the period. While the discovery pushes knowledge of animal life further than ever into the past, one must understand that from evolution's point of view, these new-found organisms, with their highly evolved locomoter appendages and spiral gills for breathing air dissolved in water, are already so complex that, assuming animal life to have commenced in the very simplest of forms, the Adelaide fossil fauna must be about nine-tenths of the way up the column of life. Look at it this way. If one draws a line ten feet long to represent the column of life, the development of life on this earth, one would plot the period at which Professor David's sand worms and crayfish lived and breathed and led their complex lives at a point one foot from the top end, which is this moment in 1925. To show whero the earliest ma of which science has a record— the Piltdown man of 250,000 years ago —appeared., ono would not be able to make a mark visible to the eye. For that mark would be only one two-hun-dredth of an inch from, the end of the line, the point at which 'man now stands. It would bo cveni more difficult to mark the period at which the Australian aboriginal crossed from Asia. That was, say, about 30,000 years ago, and on the ten-foot scale 30,000 years would represent about threo fivethousandths of an inch. The animals which Professor Davis has discovered appear to be entirely new to science, and the most wonderful and most miraculous feature of the remains is their fine preservation. Their limbs and shells were formed almost entirely of a horny substance called ehitin. "Usually this substance decays away in old rocks, but, in many of the specimens Professor David has examined the chitin has scarcely altered since it covered a live organism. The colours \ are exquisitely lovely. Scientists had been wondering what was the form of life in the romantically remote ages 500,000,----000 years, ago. They were left to guesses and it seems that they have guessed wrongly. It is expected that Australia will be visited by dozens of geologists who will be anxious to examine Professor David's discovery at close quarters.