I was walking one morning down Harrington Street, in Bourne, in Lincolnshire,
it was springtime with flowers, and a warmth in the air as the sun spread a feeling of cheer,
so I started to muse on the earth and its bounty, and how it all came about,
and my thoughts went back to time out of mind when nothing is certain but doubt.
It seems that four billion years ago, stuck in goo, was a carbony cell,
that managed to copy itself exactly, and did it remarkably well.
It did it so well, that it did it again, without any struggle or strife,
and now to that moment, long, long ago, we attribute the start of Life!
Each cell produced, could do the same thing, and soon there were plenty about,
but sometimes the process went slightly awry, and new types began to come out.
Each type was a species, and each type set out, to maximise its distribution,
and thus, in a very small way, in the sea, life started on evolution.
When half a billion years had gone by, some species were clearly superior,
and the best of the lot spread all over the place were some that we call the bacteria.
They'd worked out a trick that was ever so clever—some would say almost 'parfait'
of passing on secrets of how to make copies—encoded in D. N. A.
It was not very long, before life discovered, that it needed food to survive,
and eating your neighbour was quite a good way of ensuring that you stayed alive.
So 'kill or be killed' was a motto bacteria taught to their offspring with care,
and 'look out for yourself' was another good saying they wanted descendants to share.
The name of the game was to keep going on, reproducing in each generation,
and passing your DNA on down the line in a process of self-replication.
If ever you failed to continue the chain of life—i.e. you unlinked—
then that was the end, kaput, goodbye, you simply became extinct!
At that time the earth's atmosphere was austere, and oxygen was a blight,
but then some bacteria made the world cheerier by making their food from sun-light.
The work was frenetic, and photosynthetic, and these species' faeces, I swear,
contained O² as a gas in their poo, and that made a breath of fresh air.
All the above took place at a time that geologists call the Archaean,
and life successfully prospered and thrived because it was tough and protean.
By now we have got to two billion years (or so) in the past—time flies,
and worms and bizarre squidgy squalachy things were starting to be of some size.
This part of earth history, usually is known, by the name of the Proterozoic,
and plants and animals strove to adapt in ways that were truly heroic.
Each living thing, could trace its descent, right back to that carbony cell,
their bodies were soft, bones didn’t exist, and nor did the carbonate shell.
At somewhere around five hundred and forty two million years ago, changes
of early (Precambrian) species occurred, filling more niches and ranges.
For example, the limpets with tough little shells appeared and spread farther and nearer,
today we can find them in limestones as fossils denoting the Cambrian era.
It wasn't long after that vertebrates flourished, like sharks, which persist to this day
—this was in Ordovician time, and Silurian too, so they say.
And then there came the ancestors of fish—such as sea-horses, eels and trout,
and others with such unpronounceable names, that I think that I'll just leave them out
Well now we have reached the Devonian era with deserts all over the place,
and then in the Carboniferous period forests of ferns grew apace
—they gave us our coal, and crawling about in the swamps and the forests and bogs
there were cute little animals getting along that later gave rise to the frogs.
I don't want to imply, that the sole way to die, before reproducing was falling . . .
as prey to some animal bigger than you, a fate that was simply appalling,
for mass-extinctions occurred now and then, perhaps if the climate changed fast,
or a whacking great meteorite smashed into earth, causing death with the force of the blast.
But life is exuberant, never says die, and after disaster moves on,
evolving new species well-able to cope and replace former ones that have gone.
And the chains from the carbony cell continued and link after link they’d make,
and frogs and their kind, saw appear on the continents crocodile, turtle and snake.
After the coal swamps had come and had gone, Permo-Triassic time came,
and deserts, once more, covered much of the land, so survival was quite a tough game.
But then the Jurassic got going, and earth saw the dinosaurs reaching their prime,
and snakes and frogs, and other small animals, had to lie low for a time.
It was while the great dinosaurs held sway on earth that the forebears of mammals appeared, wahey!
—they lived underground, emerging at night, because they were small and afeared.
Perhaps they were friends with frogs and their ilk—or perhaps they competed for space,
The frogs hopped on, but the mammals sped off to give rise to the human race.
The time when the chalk cliffs of Dover were formed, is a period called the Cretaceous,
it began with a bang when a meteorite landed and wiped out some species—good gracious!
It did for the dinosaurs, birds though survived, and happily too so did mammals,
and they quickly evolved, producing new species like mammoths and fruit bats and camels.
Some sixty-five million years ago, was the start of Tertiary time,
when the world took on a familiar look as mammals came into their prime.
But everything living—from monkeys to frogs, and trees and bacteria too,
are linkages made of the unbroken chains that go back to the carbony goo.
So just to remind us, if ever there'd been a break in the long chains of life,
that have run for four billion years or so through convulsions and chaos and strife,
we wouldn't be here—not us, nor the grass, the flowers, the oak or the pine,
and if we don't propagate, while we still can, then that is the end of our line.
Let's take an example and look at the frog. A frog you see hopping today
wouldn’t be here if just one of its forebears had failed to pass on DNA.
It evolved from that carbony cell in the goo, four billions of years in the past
and unless froggy mates to continue the chain, then his link will now be the last.
And as I was musing I saw a fine frog, hop out of a garden gate,
he was heading across to a pond in the park, and hoping to find him a mate.
He hopped off the pavement and into the road, eager for love and romance -
and that’s when a Mini came speeding along, and the bugger stood never a chance!
As froggy came quick to the end of the line, so quickly I'm ending my story,
I'm sorry if it has upset anyone, especially the end—which is gory,
But the business of life is brutish and short—and froggy was slow on his feet,
and that's why his genes became smithereens that were splattered on Harrington Street!