Excerpt from Furze the Cruel Was it the same piece of jelly? What a long time it lived! Cried the little round-eyed ones. They didn't believe a word of the story, and they were going to say so presently. Well, my pretties, it was, and it wasn't. You see, little bits of it kept breaking off all those years, and they had, become hairy creatures with long legs and a tail. Part of the original piece of jelly was in them all, for that was what is called the origin of life, which is a thing you don't understand anything about, and you mustn't worry your heads about it until you grow up. The little hairy creature stood beside the Tavy, and scratched its ear with its foot just like a dog. A million years later it used its hand because it couldn't get its foot high enough, and the wise men said that was a sign of civilisa tion. It was raining and blowing, and presently a drop of rain trickled down the nose of the little hairy creature and made it sneeze. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.