It would take a hen, however earnest and diligent, 240,000 years to lay as many eggs as a female oyster will toss into the water on a single midsummer day. No less splendidly fecund is the male who will presently fertilize this brood. A few weeks elapse, and upon some clean, hard rock begins the life-struggle of 60,000,000 infant oysters.
Unchanged has been this ordered routine for 15,000,000 years, unless the Smithsonian Institute is deceived about the age of the shells in its cases. But not until the year 100 B. C. did the world...
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