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เนื้อหาย่อ : The Encyclopaedia of Prehistoric Life comes before a world in which the frontiers of knowledge are forever expanding. Within these covers is the ory of Planet Earth, with all the changes that have taken place, most of ich no man has ever seen occur. This is the wonder of our age, that we visualize and understand the evolution of Earth and even life itself h a new certainty and by a technology, only recently available, that pletely supplants the old individual virtuosity which lasted so long d raised so many questions. We must not forget the allegories of Genesis and Archbishop Ussher's chronology based upon them), or the genius of the medical practitioner Copernicus who doubted their astronomy, or the genius of the medical student, Galileo, who was led by the swaying of lamp in a cathedral to devise the pendulum for measuring time. Others, qually great in mind, argued over the formation of the Earth's crust, hether it was by sedimentation from foods or by a more uniform, clical, process of erosion and deposit, with uplift from subterranean eat and outpourings of lava. Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, saw e foundation of geology by the medical doctor James Hutton, whose ly recorded patient was the Earth. He took its pulse and tried to take temperature. In the streets of Edinburgh another individual tried to eigh the Earth, using the volcanic mound of Arthur's Seat for his purpose. Geological time came with the knowledge of radioactivity and isotopes; radioastronomy with the new use of electromagnetic waves; and men in satellites and on the Moon saw the world from afar for the first time. The Earth is now believed to be 4,600 million years old and life must nearly as old. The new tectonic theories show how continents have split and moved and how mountains have arisen. Climate, environment, and the ravages of time have moulded a changing world and its ever- changing life. They are part of a unity of Nature, a universal evolutionary process that was not, alas, created only for man That man can observe and question has only slowly been realized, but the reflections in this volume are those of renowned observers and thinkers of great ability. To read the past in their words is to see the shadows of the future; to realize, as Whitehead, the philosopher, ealized, that "Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious echanism of the universe" - a universe whose purpose and immensity annot be wholly grasped by us. The story here unfolded is that of our ackground; emerging from the rise and fall of animal dynasties. We see heir faults and failures. Can we appreciate the evidence? Here is the urpose of the work: to create a reverence for life and to learn to survive an indifferent immensity of space and time. With the new knowledge and the new technology we can do so, but only if a new unity of purpose is ngendered in our society now. We must learn the lessons of prehistoric life quickly, for time, even geological time, is on the wing.