Mastery (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene Book 1)

by Robert Greene

A year into the voyage, on a beach some 400 miles south of Buenos Aires, Darwin discovered something that would set his mind to thinking for many years to come. He came upon a cliff with streaks of white amid the rock. Seeing that they were enormous bones of some sort, he began to chip away at the rock, extracting as many of these remains as possible. They were of a size and kind he had never seen before—the horns and armor of what seemed to be a giant armadillo, the huge teeth of a mastodon, and then, most surprisingly, the tooth of a horse. When the Spaniards and Portuguese had first arrived in South America there were no horses to be found, and yet this tooth was quite old and predated their arrival. He began to wonder—if such species had died off long ago, the idea of all of life being created at once and for good seemed illogical. More important, how could so many species become extinct? Could life on the planet be in a state of constant flux and development?