Snails That Time Forgot

The little snail was gliding across my table-top-a wisp of twisted lime and a pinch of soft flesh

, typifying all the strange personality of his race. He was young-not fully adult, and, like myself, representative of the last, the most recent generation. Shortening the level of my outlook to his, little by little I began to see existence from the eye of a snail. I forgot the common bonds between our phyla-gastronomic, utilitarian, financial, even artistic, and took sheer joy in watching him, trying to pry as deep as I possibly could into his molluscan soul. Life seemed full of purpose to him-a life that, without interruption, extended back to the first snail. This is a truism, applicable to all other living organisms, and far back in the dim early ages of earth life, there lived some creature that today snail and I can call our ancestor.

But the changes that have intervened in the meantime are immeasurably divergent. As my line stretches back my brain contracts, my muscles expand, I drop down on all fours, sprout a tail, develop long ears and snout, my teeth simplify, and insects satisfy my hunger; reptilian characters accrue, my ribs increase; I slip into the water, and looking for the last time upon the land, I sink beneath the surface. Gills mark my rhythm of breath, limbs shrink to fins, and even these vanish, while my backbone, last hold upon the higher life, dissolves to a notochord. At one end of my evolution Roosevelt called me friend-millions of years earlier any passing worm might have hailed me as brother.

My little snail has glided about unchanged through all the ages-through the travails of primitive ape-men, the frightened, nocturnal scurryings of tiny insect-eaters, the splashing of mud-hopping amphibians, the swimming of swift-finned, water creatures, and the wriggling of still more lowly ancestors of the sea. When a nation shuts itself off from other nations behind physical barriers or those of conceit, progress in the best sense ceases; when an individual miser or hermit or egoist lives safe and selfishly, he becomes automatically static. Finally, when a race of creatures develops an ability to clothe itself in impregnable marble palaces, immune to a host of dangers that threaten less armored brethren, there is little need of their changing to meet new conditions.

And so let us compare the past history of man and his mammalian forebears who have fought the fight naked, with the line of gentle, sheltered snails. Ten thousand years have seen the development of what we are pleased to call civilization; ten million years ago man began to be man rather than ape; fifty millions of years saw the first mammals that ever were. Five times this period, or two hundred and fifty million years before 1931, saw genera of snails living and thriving, unchanged from these alive today-at a time when no bird or mammal or flowering plant had yet appeared.

by: David Bunch

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