Final Causes — Their Bearing on Geologic History. — Conclusion
“Natural History has a principle on which to reason,” says Cuvier, “which is peculiar to it, and which it employs advantageously on many occasions: it is that of the conditions of existence, commonly termed final causes.”
In Geology, which is Natural History extended over all ages, this principle has a still wider scope,—embracing not merely the characteristics and conditions of the beings which now exist, but of all, so far as we can learn regarding them, which have ever existed, and involving the consideration of not merely their peculiarities as races placed before us without relation to time, but also of the history of their rise, increase, decline, and extinction. In studying the biography, if I may so express myself, of an individual animal, we have to acquaint ourselves with the circumstances in which nature has placed it,—its adaptation to these, both in structure and instinct,—the points of resemblance which it presents to the individuals of other races and families, and the laws which determine its terms of development, vigorous existence, and decay. And all Natural History, when restricted to the passing now of the world’s annals, is simply a congeries of biographies. It is when we extend our view into the geological field that it passes from biography into history proper, and that we have to rise from the consideration of the birth and death of individuals, which, in all mere biographies, form the great terminal events that constitute beginning and end, to a survey of the birth and death of races, and the elevation or degradation of dynasties and sub-kingdoms.
We learn from human history that nations are as certainly mortal as men. They enjoy a greatly longer term of existence, but they die at last: Rollin’s History of Ancient Nations is a history of the dead. And we are taught by geological history, in like manner, that species are as mortal as individuals and nations, and that even genera and families become extinct. There is no man upon earth at the present moment whose age greatly exceeds an hundred years;—there is no nation now upon earth (if we perhaps except the long-lived Chinese) that also flourished three thousand years ago;—there is no species now living upon earth that dates beyond the times of the Tertiary deposits. All bear the stamp of death,—individuals,—nations,—species; and we may scarce less safely predicate, looking upon the past, that it is appointed for nations and species to die, than that it “is appointed for man once to die.” Even our own species, as now constituted,—with instincts that conform to the original injunction, “increase and multiply,” and that, in consequence, “marry and are given in marriage,”—shall one day cease to exist: a fact not less in accordance with beliefs inseparable from the faith of the Christian, than with the widely-founded experience of the geologist. Now, it is scarce possible for the human mind to become acquainted with the fact, that at certain periods species began to exist and then, after the lapse of untold ages, ceased to be, without inquiring whether, from the “conditions of existence, commonly termed final causes,” we cannot deduce a reason for their rise or decline, or why their term of being should have been included rather in one certain period of time than another. The same faculty which finds employment in tracing to their causes the rise and fall of nations, and which it is the merit of the philosophic historian judiciously to exercise, will to a certainty seek employment in this department of history also; and that there will be an appetency for such speculations in the public mind, we may infer from the success, as a literary undertaking, of the “Vestiges of Creation,”—a work that bears the same sort of relation, in this special field to sober inquiry, founded on the true conditions of things, that the legends of the old chroniclers bore to authentic history. The progressive state of geologic science has hitherto militated against the formation of theory of the soberer character. Its facts—still merely in the forming—are necessarily imperfect in their classification, and limited in their amount; and thus the essential data continues incomplete. Besides, the men best acquainted with the basis of fact which already exists, have quite enough to engage them in adding to it. But there are limits to the field of palæontological discovery, in its relation to what may be termed the chronology of organized existence, which, judging from the progress of the science in the past, may be well nigh reached in favored localities, such as the British islands, in about a quarter of a century from the present time; and then, I doubt not, geological history, in legitimate conformity with the laws of mind, and from the existence of the pregnant principle peculiar, according to Cuvier, to that science of which Geology is simply an extension, will assume a very extraordinary form. We cannot yet aspire “to the height of this great argument:” our foundations are in parts still unconsolidated and incomplete, and unfitted to sustain the perfect superstructure which shall one day assuredly rise upon them; but from the little which we can now see, “as if in a glass darkly,” enough appears from which to
“Assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.”
The history of the four great monarchies of the world was typified, in the prophetic dream of the ancient Babylonish king, by a colossal image, “terrible in its form and brightness,” of which the “head was pure gold,” the “breast and arms of silver,” the “belly and thighs of brass,” and the legs and feet “of iron, and of iron mingled with clay.” The vision in which it formed the central object was appropriately that of a puissant monarch; and the image itself typified the merely human monarchies of the earth. It would require a widely different figure to symbolize the great monarchies of creation. And yet Revelation does furnish such a figure. It is that which was witnessed by the captive prophet beside “the river Chebar,” when “the heavens were opened, and he saw visions of God.” In that chariot of Deity, glowing in fire and amber, with its complex wheels “so high that they were dreadful,” set round about with eyes, there were living creatures, of whose four faces three were brute and one human; and high over all sat the Son of Man. It would almost seem as if, in this sublime vision,—in which, with features distinct enough to impress the imagination, there mingle the elements of an awful incomprehensibility, and which even the genius of Raffaelle has failed adequately to portray,—the history of all the past and of all the future had been symbolized. In the order of Providence intimated in the geologic record, the brute faces, as in the vision, outnumber the human;—the human dynasty is one, and the dynasties of the inferior animals are three; and yet who can doubt that they all equally compose parts of a well-ordered and perfect whole, as the four faces formed but one cherubim; that they have been moving onward to a definite goal, in the unity of one grand harmonious design,—now “lifted up high” over the comprehension of earth,—now let down to its humble level; and that the Creator of all has been ever seated over them on the throne of his providence,—a “likeness in the appearance of a man,”—embodying the perfection of his nature in his workings, and determining the end from the beginning?
There is geologic evidence, as has been shown, that in the course of creation the higher orders succeeded the lower. We have no good reason to believe that the mollusc and crustacean preceded the fish, seeing that discovery, in its slow course, has already traced the vertebrata in the ichthyic form, down to deposits which only a few years ago were regarded as representatives of the first beginnings of organized existence on our planet, and that it has at the same time failed to add a lower system to that in which their remains occur. But the fish seems most certainly to have preceded the reptile and the bird; the reptile and the bird to have preceded the mammiferous quadruped; and the mammiferous quadruped to have preceded man,—rational, accountable man, whom God created in his own image,—the much-loved Benjamin of the family,—last-born of all creatures. It is of itself an extraordinary fact, without reference to other considerations, that the order adopted by Cuvier, in his animal kingdom, as that in which the four great classes of vertebrate animals, when marshalled according to their rank and standing, naturally range should be also that in which they occur in order of time. The brain which bears an average proportion to the spinal cord of not more than two to one, came first,—it is the brain of the fish; that which bears to the spinal cord an average proportion of two and a half to one succeeded it,—it is the brain of the reptile; then came the brain averaging as three to one,—it is that of the bird; next in succession came the brain that averages as four to one,—it is that of the mammal; and last of all there appeared a brain that averages as twenty-three to one,—reasoning, calculating man had come upon the scene. All the facts of geological science are hostile to the Lamarckian conclusion, that the lower brains were developed into the higher. As if with the express intention of preventing so gross a mis-reading of the record, we find, in at least two classes of animals,—fishes and reptiles,—the higher races placed at the beginning: the slope of the inclined plane is laid, if one may so speak, in the reverse way, and, instead of rising towards the level of the succeeding class, inclines downwards, with at least the effect, if not the design, of making the break where they meet exceedingly well marked and conspicuous. And yet the record does seem to speak of development and progression;—not, however, in the province of organized existence, but in that of insensate matter, subject to the purely chemical laws. It is in the style and character of the dwelling-place that gradual improvement seems to have taken place;—not in the functions or the rank of any class of its inhabitants; and it is with special reference to this gradual improvement in our common mansion-house the earth, in its bearing on the “conditions of existence,” that not a few of our reasonings regarding the introduction and extinction of species and genera must proceed.
That definite period at which man was introduced upon the scene seems to have been specially determined by the conditions of correspondence which the phenomena of his habitation had at length come to assume with the predestined constitution of his mind. The large reasoning brain would have been wholly out of place in the earlier ages. It is indubitably the nature of man to base the conclusions which regulate all his actions on fixed phenomena,—he reasons from cause to effect, or from effect to cause; and when placed in circumstances in which, from some lack of the necessary basis, he cannot so reason, he becomes a wretched, timid, superstitious creature, greatly more helpless and abject than even the inferior animals. This unhappy state is strikingly exemplified by that deep and peculiar impression made on the mind by a severe earthquake, which Humboldt, from his own experience, so powerfully describes. “This impression,” he says, “is not, in my opinion, the result of a recollection of those fearful pictures of devastation presented to our imagination by the historical narratives of the past, but is rather due to the sudden revelation of the delusive nature of the inherent faith by which we had clung to a belief in the immobility of the solid parts of the earth. We are accustomed from early childhood to draw a contrast between the mobility of water and the immobility of the soil on which we tread; and this feeling is confirmed by the evidence of our senses. When, therefore, we suddenly feel the ground move beneath us, a mysterious force, with which we were previously unacquainted, is revealed to us as an active disturber of stability. A moment destroys the illusion of a whole life; our deceptive faith in the repose of nature vanishes; and we feel transported into a realm of unknown destructive forces. Every sound—the faintest motion of the air—arrests our attention, and we no longer trust the ground on which we stand. There is an idea conveyed to the mind, of some universal and unlimited danger. We may flee from the crater of a volcano in active eruption, or from the dwelling whose destruction is threatened by the approach of the lava stream; but in an earthquake, direct our flight whithersoever we will, we still feel as if we trod upon the very focus of destruction.” Not less striking is the testimony of Dr. Tschudi, in his “Travels in Peru,” regarding this singular effect of earthquakes on the human mind. “No familiarity with the phenomenon can,” he remarks, “blunt the feeling. The inhabitant of Lima, who from childhood has frequently witnessed these convulsions of nature, is roused from his sleep by the shock, and rushes from his apartment with the cry of ‘Misericordia!’ The foreigner from the north of Europe, who knows nothing of earthquakes but by description, waits with impatience to feel the movements of the earth, and longs to hear with his own ear the subterranean sounds, which he has hitherto considered fabulous. With levity he treats the apprehension of a coming convulsion, and laughs at the fears of the natives; but as soon as his wish is gratified, he is terror-stricken, and is involuntarily prompted to seek safety in flight.”
Now, a partially consolidated planet, tempested by frequent earthquakes of such terrible potency, that those of the historic ages would be but mere ripples of the earth’s surface in comparison, could be no proper home for a creature so constituted. The fish or reptile,—animals of a limited range of instinct, exceedingly tenacious of life in most of their varieties, oviparous, prolific, and whose young immediately on their escape from the egg can provide for themselves, might enjoy existence in such circumstances, to the full extent of their narrow capacities; and when sudden death fell upon them,—though their remains, scattered over wide areas, continue to exhibit that distortion of posture incident to violent dissolution, which seems to speak of terror and suffering,—we may safely conclude there was but little real suffering on the case: they were happy up to a certain point, and unconscious forever after. Fishes and reptiles were the proper inhabitants of our planet during the ages of the earth-tempests; and when, under the operation of the chemical laws, these had become less frequent and terrible, the higher mammals were introduced. That prolonged ages of these tempests did exist, and that they gradually settled down, until the state of things became at length comparatively fixed and stable, few geologists will be disposed to deny. The evidence which supports this special theory of the development of our planet in its capabilities as a scene of organized and sentient being, seems palpable at every step. Look first at these Grauwacke rocks; and, after marking how in one place the strata have been upturned on their edges for miles together, and how in another the Plutonic rock has risen molten from below, pass on to the Old Red Sandstone, and examine its significant platforms of violent death,—its faults, displacements, and dislocations; see, next, in the Coal Measures, those evidences of sinking and ever-sinking strata, for thousands of feet together; mark in the Oolite those vast overlying masses of trap, stretching athwart the landscape, far as the eye can reach; observe carefully how the signs of convulsion and catastrophe gradually lessen as we descend to the times of the Tertiary, though even in these ages of the mammiferous quadruped the earth must have had its oft-recurring ague fits of frightful intensity; and then, on closing the survey, consider how exceedingly partial and unfrequent these earth-tempests have become in the recent periods. Yes; we find every where marks of at once progression and identity,—of progress made, and yet identity maintained; but it is in the habitation that we find them,—not in the inhabitants. There is a tract of country in Hindustan that contains nearly as many square miles as all Great Britain, covered to the depth of hundreds of feet by one vast overflow of trap; a track similarly overflown, which exceeds in area all England, occurs in Southern Africa. The earth’s surface is roughened with such,—mottled as thickly by the Plutonic masses as the skin of the leopard by its spots. The trap district which surrounds our Scottish metropolis, and imparts so imposing a character to its scenery, is too inconsiderable to be marked on geological maps of the world, that we yet see streaked and speckled with similar memorials, though on an immensely vaster scale, of the eruption and overflow which took place in the earthquake ages. What could man have done on the globe at a time when such outbursts were comparatively common occurrences? What could he have done where Edinburgh now stands during that overflow of trap porphyry of which the Pentland range forms but a fragment, or that outburst of greenstone of which but a portion remains in the dark ponderous coping of Salisbury Craigs, or when the thick floor of rock on which the city stands was broken up, like the ice of an arctic sea during a tempest in spring, and laid on edge from where it leans against the Castle Hill to beyond the quarries at Joppa? The reasoning brain would have been wholly at fault in a scene of things in which it could neither foresee the exterminating calamity while yet distant, nor control it when it had come; and so the reasoning brain was not produced until the scene had undergone a slow but thorough process of change, during which, at each progressive stage, it had furnished a platform for higher and still higher life. When the coniferæ could flourish on the land, and fishes subsist in the seas, fishes and cone-bearing plants were created; when the earth became a fit habitat for reptiles and birds, reptiles and birds were produced; with the dawn of a more stable and mature state of things the sagacious quadruped was ushered in; and, last of all, when man’s house was fully prepared for him,—when the data on which it is his nature to reason and calculate had become fixed and certain,—the reasoning, calculating brain was moulded by the creative finger, and man became a living soul. Such seems to be the true reading of the wondrous inscription chiselled deep in the rocks. It furnishes us with no clue by which to unravel the unapproachable mysteries of creation;—these mysteries belong to the wondrous Creator, and to Him only. We attempt to theorize upon them, and to reduce them to law, and all nature rises up against us in our presumptuous rebellion. A stray splinter of cone-bearing wood,—a fish’s skull or tooth,—the vertebra of a reptile,—the humerus of a bird,—the jaw of a quadruped,—all, any of these things, weak and insignificant as they may seem, become in such a quarrel too strong for us and our theory: the puny fragment, in the grasp of truth, forms as irresistible a weapon as the dry bone did in that of Samson of old; and our slaughtered sophisms lie piled up, “heaps upon heaps,” before it.
There is no geological fact nor revealed doctrine with which this special scheme of development does not agree. To every truth, too, really such, from which the antagonist scheme derives its shadowy analogies, it leaves its full value. It has no quarrel with the facts of even the “Vestiges,” in their character as realities. There is certainly something very extraordinary in that fœtal progress of the human brain on which the assertors of the development hypothesis have founded so much. Nature, in constructing this curious organ, first lays down a grooved cord, as the carpenter lays down the keel of his vessel; and on this narrow base the perfect brain, as month after month passes by, is gradually built up, like the vessel from the keel. First it grows up into a brain closely resembling that of a fish; a few additions more convert it into a brain undistinguishable from that of a reptile; a few additions more impart to it the perfect appearance of the brain of a bird; it then developes into a brain exceedingly like that of a mammiferous quadruped; and, finally, expanding atop, and spreading out its deeply corrugated lobes, till they project widely over the base, it assumes its unique character as a human brain. Radically such from the first, it passes towards its full development, through all the inferior forms, from that of the fish upwards,—thus comprising, during its fœtal progress, an epitome of geologic history, as if each man were in himself, not the microcosm of the old fanciful philosopher, but something greatly more wonderful,—a compendium of all animated nature, and of kin to every creature that lives. Hence the remark, that man is the sum total of all animals,—“the animal equivalent,” says Oken, “to the whole animal kingdom.” We are perhaps too much in the habit of setting aside real facts, when they have been first seized upon by the infidel, and appropriated to the purposes of unbelief, as if they had suffered contamination in his hands. We forget, like the brother “weak in the faith,” instanced by the Apostle, that they are in themselves “creatures of God;” and too readily reject the lesson which they teach, simply because they have been offered in sacrifice to an idol. And this strange fact of the progress of the human brain is assuredly a fact none the less worth looking at from the circumstance that infidelity has looked at it first. On no principle recognizable in right reason can it be urged in support of the development hypothesis;—it is a fact of fœtal development, and of that only. But it would be well should it lead our metaphysicians to inquire whether they have not been rendering their science too insulated and exclusive; and whether the mind that works by a brain thus “fearfully and wonderfully made,” ought not to be viewed rather in connection with all animated nature, especially as we find nature exemplified in the various vertebral forms, than as a thing fundamentally abstract and distinct. The brain built up of all the types of brain, may be the organ of a mind compounded, if I may so express myself, of all the varieties of mind. It would be perhaps over fanciful to urge that it is the creature who has made himself free of all the elements, whose brain has been thus in succession that of all their proper denizens; and that there is no animal instinct, the function of which cannot be illustrated by some art mastered by man: but there can be nothing over fanciful in the suggestion, founded on this fact of fœtal development, that possibly some of the more obscure signs impressed upon the human character may be best read through the spectacles of physical science. The successive phases of the fœtal brain give at least fair warning that, in tracing to its first principles the moral and intellectual nature of man, what is properly his “natural history” should not be overlooked. Oken, after describing the human creature in one passage as “equivalent to the whole animal kingdom,” designates him in another as “God wholly manifested,” and as “God become man;”—a style of expression at which the English reader may start, as that of the “big mouth speaking blasphemy,” but which has become exceedingly common among the nationalists of the Continent. The irreverent naturalist ought surely to have remembered, that the sum total of all the animals cannot be different in its nature from the various sums of which it is an aggregate,—seeing that no summation ever differs in quality from the items summed up, which compose it,—and that, though it may amount in this case to man the animal,—to man, as he may be weighed, and measured, and subjected to the dissecting knife,—it cannot possibly amount to God. Is God merely a sum total of birds and beasts, reptiles and fishes;—a mere Egyptian deity, composed of fantastic hieroglyphics derived from the forms of the brute creation? The impieties of the transcendentalist may, however, serve to illustrate that mode of seizing on terms which, as the most sacred in the message of revelation, have been long coupled in the popular mind with saving truths, and forcibly compelling them to bear some visionary and illusive meaning, wholly foreign to that with which they were originally invested, which has become so remarkable a part of the policy of modern infidelity. Rationalism has learned to sacrifice to Deity with a certain measure of conformity to the required pattern; but it is a conformity in appearance only, not in reality: the sacrifice always resembles that of Prometheus of old, who presented to Jupiter what, though it seemed to be an ox without blemish, was merely an ox-skin stuffed full of bones and garbage.
There is another very remarkable class of facts in geological history, which appear to fall as legitimately within the scope of argument founded on final causes, as those which bear on the appearance of man at his proper era. The period of the mammiferous quadrupeds seems, like the succeeding human period, to have been determined, as I have said, by the earth’s fitness at the time as a place of habitation for creatures so formed. And the bulk to which, in the more extreme cases, they attained, appears to have been regulated, as in the higher mammals now, with reference to the force of gravity at the earth’s surface. The Megatherium and the Mastodon, the Dinotherium and the extinct elephant, increased in bulk, in obedience to the laws of the specific constitution imparted to them at their creation; and these laws bore reference, in turn, to another law,—that law of gravity which determines that no creature which moves in air and treads the surface of the earth should exceed a certain weight or size. To very near the limits assigned by this law some of the ancient quadrupeds arose. It is even doubtful whether the Dinotherium, the most gigantic of mammals, may not have been, like the existing sea-lions and morses, mainly an aquatic quadruped;—an inference grounded on the circumstance that, in at least portions of its framework, it seems to have risen beyond these limits. Now, it does not seem wonderful that, with apparent reference to the point at which the gravity of bodies at the earth’s surface bisects the conditions of texture and matter necessary to existence among the sub-aerial vertebrata, the reptiles of the Secondary periods should have grown up in some of their species and genera to the extreme size. A world of frogs, newts, and lizards would have borne stamped upon it the impress of a tame and miserable mediocrity, that would have harmonized ill with the extent of the earth’s capabilities for supporting life on a large scale. There would be no principle of adaptation or rule of proportion maintained between an animal kingdom composed of so contemptible a group of beings, and either the dynamic laws under which matter exists on our planet, or the luxuriant vegetation which it bore during the Secondary ages. And such was not the character of the group which composed the reptile dynasty. The Iguanodon must have been quite as tall as the elephant,—greatly longer, and, it would seem, at least as bulky. The Megalosaurus must have at least equalled the rhinoceros; the Hylæosaurus would have outweighed the hippopotamus. And when reptiles that rivalled in size our hugest mammals inhabited the land, other reptiles,—Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, and Cetiosaurs,—scarce less bulky than the cetacea themselves, possessed the sea. Not only was the platform of being occupied in all its breadth, but also in all its height; and it is according to our simpler and more obvious ideas of adaptation—simple and obvious because gleaned from the very surface of the universe of life—that such should have been the case. But it does appear strange, because under the regulation, it would seem, of a principle of adaptation more occult, and, if I may so speak, more Providential, that no sooner are the huge mammals introduced as a group, than, with but a few exceptions, the reptiles appear in greatly diminished proportions. They no longer occupy the platform to its full extent of height. Even in tropical countries, in which certain families of mammals still attain to the maximum size, the reptiles, if we except the crocodilean family, a few harmless turtles, and the degraded boas and pythons, are a small and comparatively unimportant race. Nay, the existing giants of the class—the crocodiles and boas—hardly equal in bulk the third-rate reptiles of the ages of the Oolite and the Wealden. So far as can be seen, there is no reason deduceable from the nature of things, why the country that sustains a mammal bulky as the elephant, should not also support a reptile huge as the Iguanodon; or why the Megalosaurus, Hylæosaurus, and Dicynodon, might not have been contemporary with the lion, tiger, and rhinoceros. The change which took place in the reptile group immediately on their dethronement at the close of the Secondary period, seems scarce less strange than that sung by Milton:—
“Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed
In bigness to surpass earth’s giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Thronged numberless; like that pygmean race
Beyond the Indian mount; or fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while, overhead, the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course.”
But though we cannot assign a cause for this general reduction of the reptile class, save simply the will of the all-wise Creator, the reason why it should have taken place seems easily assignable. It was a bold saying of the old philosophic heathen, that “God is the soul of brutes;” but writers on instinct in even our own times have said less warrantable things. God does seem to do for many of the inferior animals of the lower divisions, which, though devoid of brain and vertebral column, are yet skilful chemists and accomplished architects and mathematicians, what he enables man, through the exercise of the reasoning faculty, to do for himself; and the ancient philosopher meant no more. And in clearing away the giants of the reptile dynasty, when their kingdom had passed away, and then re-introducing the class as much shrunken in their proportions as restricted in their domains, the Creator seems to have been doing for the mammals what man, in the character of a “mighty hunter before the Lord,” does for himself. There is in nature very little of what can be called war. The cities of this country cannot be said to be in a state of war, though their cattle-markets are thronged every week with animals for slaughter and the butcher and fishmonger find their places of business thronged with customers. And such, in the main, is the condition of the animal world;—it consists of its two classes,—animals of prey, and the animals upon which they prey: its wars are simply those of the butcher and fisher, lightened by a dash of the enjoyments of the sportsman.
“The creatures see of flood and field,
And those that travel on the wind,
With them no strife can last; they live
In peace and peace of mind.”
Generally speaking, the carnivorous mammalia respect one another: lion does not war with tiger, nor the leopard contend with the hyena. But the carnivorous reptiles manifest no such respect for the carnivorous mammals. There are fierce contests in their native jungles, on the banks of the Ganges, between the gavial and the tiger; and in the steaming forests of South America, the boa-constrictor casts his terrible coil scarce less readily round the puma than the antelope. A world which, after it had become a home of the higher herbivorous and more powerful carnivorous mammals, continued to retain the gigantic reptiles of its earlier ages, would be a world of horrid, exterminating war, and altogether rather a place of torment than a scene of intermediate character, in which, though it sometimes reëchoes the groans of suffering nature, life is, in the main, enjoyment. And so,—save in a few exceptional cases, that, while they establish the rule as a fact, serve also as a key to unlock that principle of the Divine government on which it appears to rest,—no sooner was the reptile removed from his place in the fore-front of creation, and creatures of a higher order introduced into it the consolidating and fast-ripening planet of which he had been so long the monarch, than his bulk shrank and his strength lessened, and he assumed a humility of form and aspect at once in keeping with his reduced circumstances, and compatible with the general welfare. But though the reason of the reduction appears obvious, I know not that it can be referred to any other cause than simply the will of the All-Wise Creator.
There hangs a mystery greatly more profound over the fact of the degradation than over that of the reduction and diminution of classes. We can assign what at least seems to be a sufficient reason why, when reptiles formed as a class the highest representatives of the vertebrata, they should be of imposing bulk and strength, and altogether worthy of that post of precedence which they then occupied among the animals. We can also assign a reason for the strange reduction which took place among them in strength and bulk immediately on their removal from the first to the second place. But why not only reduction, but also degradation? Why, as division started up in advance of division,—first the reptiles in front of the fishes, then the quadrupedal mammals in front of the reptiles, and, last of all, man in front of the quadrupedal mammals,—should the supplanted classes,—two of them at least,—fishes and reptiles,—for there seem to have been no additions made to the mammals since man entered upon the scene,—why should they have become the receptacles of orders and families of a degraded character, which had no place among them in their monarchical state? The fishes removed beyond all analogy with the higher vertebrata, by their homocercal tails,—the fishes (Acanthopterygii and Sub-brachiati) with their four limbs slung in a belt round their necks,—the flat fishes, (Pleuronectidæ,) that, in addition to this deformity, are so twisted to a side, that while the one eye occupies a single orbit in the middle of the skull, the other is thrust out to its edge,—the irregular fishes generally (sun-fishes, frog-fishes, hippocampi, &c.) were not introduced into the ichthyic division until after the full development of the reptile dynasty; nor did the hand that makes no slips in its working “form the crooked serpent,” footless, grovelling, venom-bearing, the authorized type of a fallen and degraded creature, until after the introduction of the mammals. What can this fact of degradation mean? Species and genera seem to be greatly more numerous in the present age of the world than in any of the geologic ages. Is it not possible that the extension of the chain of being which has thus taken place—not only, as we find, through the addition of the higher divisions of animals to its upper end, but also through the interpolations of lower links into the previously existing divisions—may have borne reference to some predetermined scheme of well-proportioned gradation, or, according to the poet,
“Of general Order since the whole began?”
May not, in short, what we term degradation be merely one of the modes resorted to for filling up the voids in creation, and thereby perfecting a scale which must have been originally not merely a scale of narrow compass, but also of innumerable breaks and blanks, hiatuses and chasms? Such, certainly, would be the reading of the enigma which a Soame Jenyns or a Bolingbroke would suggest; but the geologist has learned from his science, that the completion of a chain of at least contemporary being, perfect in its gradations, cannot possibly have formed the design of Providence. Almost ever since God united vitality to matter, the links in this chain of animated nature, as if composed of a material too brittle to bear their own weight when stretched across the geologic ages, have been dropping one after out, from his hand, and sinking, fractured and broken, into the rocks below. It is urged by Pope, that were “we to press on superior powers,” and rise from our own assigned place to the place immediately above all, we would, in consequence of the transposition,
“In the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroyed.
From nature’s chain whatever link we strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.”
The poet could scarce have anticipated that there was a science then sleeping in its cradle, and dreaming the dreams of Whiston, Leibnitz, and Burnet, which was one day to rise and demonstrate that both the tenth and the ten thousandth link in the chain had been already broken and laid by, with all the thousands of links between; and that man might laudably “press on superior powers,” and attain to a “new nature,” without in the least affecting the symmetry of creation by the void which his elevation would necessarily create; that, in fine, voids and blanks in the scale are exceedingly common things; and that, if men could, by rising into angels, make one blank more, they might do so with perfect impunity. Further, even were the graduated chain of Bolingbroke a reality, and not what Johnson well designates it, an “absurd hypothesis,” and were what I have termed the interpolation of links necessary to its completion, the mere filling up of the original blanks and chasms would not necessarily involve the fact of degradation, seeing that each blank could be filled up, if I may go express myself, from its lower end. Each could be as certainly occupied to the full by an elevation of lower forms, as by a humiliation of the higher. We might receive the hypothesis of Bolingbroke, and yet find the mysterious fact of degradation remain an unsolved riddle in our hands.
But though I can assign neither reason nor cause for the fact, I cannot avoid the conclusion, that it is associated with certain other great facts in the moral government of the universe, by those threads of analogical connection which run through the entire tissue of Creation and Providence, and impart to it that character of unity which speaks of the single producing Mind. The first idea of every religion on earth which has arisen out of what may be termed the spiritual instincts of man’s nature, is that of a Future State; the second idea is, that in this state men shall exist in two separate classes,—the one in advance of their present condition, the other far in the rear of it. It is on these two great beliefs that conscience every where finds the fulcrum from which it acts upon the conduct; and it is, we find, wholly inoperative as a force without them. And in that one religion among men that, instead of retiring, like the pale ghosts of the others, before the light of civilization, brightens and expands in its beams, and in favor of whose claim as a revelation from God the highest philosophy has declared, we find these two master ideas occupying a still more prominent place than in any of those merely indigenous religions that spring up in the human mind of themselves. The special lesson which the Adorable Saviour, during his ministry on earth, oftenest enforced, and to which all the others bore reference, was the lesson of a final separation of mankind into two great divisions,—a division of God-like men, of whose high Standing and full-orbed happiness man, in the present scene of things, can form no adequate conception; and a division of men finally lost, and doomed to unutterable misery and hopeless degradation. There is not in all Revelation a single doctrine which we find oftener or more clearly enforced than that there shall continue to exist, throughout the endless cycles of the future, a race of degraded men and of degraded angels.
Now, it is truly wonderful how thoroughly, in its general scope, the revealed pieces on to the geologic record. We know, as geologists, that the dynasty of the fish was succeeded by that of the reptile,—that the dynasty of the reptile was succeeded by that of the mammiferous quadruped,—and that the dynasty of the mammiferous quadruped was succeeded by that of man as man now exists,—a creature of mixed character, and subject, in all conditions, to wide alternations of enjoyment and suffering. We know, further—so far at least as we have yet succeeded in deciphering the record,—that the several dynasties were introduced, not in their lower, but in their higher forms;—that, in short, in the imposing programme of creation it was arranged, as a general rule, that in each of the great divisions of the procession the magnates should walk first. We recognize yet further the fact of degradation specially exemplified in the fish and the reptile. And then, passing on to the revealed record, we learn that the dynasty of man in the mixed state and character is not the final one, but that there is to be yet another creation, or, more properly, re-creation, known theologically as the Resurrection, which shall be connected in its physical components, by bonds of mysterious paternity, with the dynasty which now reigns, and be bound to it mentally by the chain of identity, conscious and actual; but which, in all that constitutes superiority, shall be as vastly its superior as the dynasty of responsible man is superior to even the lowest of the preliminary dynasties. We are further taught, that at the commencement of this last of the dynasties, there will be a re-creation of not only elevated, but also of degraded beings,—a re-creation of the lost. We are taught yet further, that though the present dynasty be that of a lapsed race, which at their first introduction were placed on higher ground than that on which they now stand, and sank by their own act, it was yet part of the original design, from the beginning of all things, that they should occupy the existing platform; and that Redemption is thus no after-thought, rendered necessary by the fall, but, on the contrary, part of a general scheme, for which provision had been made from the beginning; so that the Divine Man, through whom the work of restoration has been effected, was in reality, in reference to the purposes of the Eternal, what he is designated in the remarkable text, “the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world.” Slain from the foundations of the world! Could the assertors of the stony science ask for language more express? By piecing the two records together,—that revealed in Scripture and that revealed in the rocks,—records which, however widely geologists may mistake the one, or commentators misunderstand the other, have emanated from the same great Author—we learn that in slow and solemn majesty has period succeeded period, each in succession ushering in a higher end yet higher scene of existence,—that fish, reptiles, mammiferous quadrupeds, have reigned in turn,—that responsible man, “made in the image of God,” and with dominion over all creatures, ultimately entered into a world ripened for his reception; but, further, that this passing scene, in which he forms the prominent figure, is not the final one in the long series, but merely the last of the preliminary scenes; and that that period to which the bygone ages, incalculable in amount, with all their well-proportioned gradations of being, form the imposing vestibule, shall have perfection for its occupant, and eternity for its duration. I know not how it may appear to others; but for my own part, I cannot avoid thinking that there would be a lack of proportion in the series of being, were the period of perfect and glorified humanity abruptly connected, without the introduction of an intermediate creation of responsible imperfection, with that of the dying irresponsible brute. That scene of things in which God became Man, and suffered, seems, as it no doubt is, a necessary link in the chain.
I am aware that I stand on the confines of a mystery which man, since the first introduction of sin into the world till now, has “vainly aspired to comprehend.” But I have no new reading of the enigma to offer. I know not why it is that moral evil exists in the universe of the All-Wise and the All-Powerful; nor through what occult law of Deity it is that “perfection should come through suffering.” The question, like that satellite, ever attendant upon our planet, which presents both its sides to the sun, but invariably the same side to the earth, hides one of its faces from man, and turns it to but the Eye from which all light emanates. And it is in that God-ward phase of the question that the mystery dwells. We can map and measure every protuberance and hollow which roughens the nether disk of the moon, as, during the shades of night, it looks down upon our path to cheer and enlighten; but what can we know of the other? It would, however, seem, that even in this field of mystery the extent of the inexplicable and the unknown is capable of reduction, and that the human understanding is vested in an ability of progressing towards the central point of that dark field throughout all time, mayhap all eternity, as the asymptote progresses upon its curve. Even though the essence of the question should forever remain a mystery, it may yet in its reduced and defined state, serve as a key for the laying of other mysteries open. The philosophers are still as ignorant as ever respecting the intrinsic nature of gravitation; but regarded simply as a force, how many enigmas has it not served to unlock! And that moral gravitation towards evil, manifested by the only two classes of responsible beings of which there is aught known to man, and of which a degradation linked by mysterious analogy with a class of facts singularly prominent in geologic history is the result, occupies apparently a similar place, as a force, in the moral dynamics of the universe, and seems suited to perform a similar part. Inexplicable itself, it is yet a key to the solution of all the minor inexplicabilities in the scheme of Providence.
In a matter of such extreme niceness and difficulty, shall I dare venture on an illustrative example?
So far as both the geologic and the Scriptural evidence extends, no species or family of existences seems to have been introduced by creation into the present scene of being since the appearance of man. In Scripture the formation of the human race is described as the terminal act of a series, “good” in all its previous stages, but which became “very good” then; and geologists, judging from the modicum of evidence which they have hitherto succeeded in collecting on the subject,—evidence still meagre, but, so far as it goes, independent and distinct,—pronounce “post-Adamic creations” at least “improbable.” The naturalist finds certain animal and vegetable species restricted to certain circles, and that in certain foci in these circles they attain to their fullest development and their maximum number. And these foci he regards as the original centres of creation, whence, in each instance in the process of increase and multiplication, the plant or creature propagated itself outwards in circular wavelets of life, that sank at each stage as they widened till at length, at the circumference of the area, they wholly ceased. Now we find it argued by Professor Edward Forbes that “since man’s appearance, certain geological areas, both of land and water, have been formed, presenting such physical conditions as to entitle us to expect within their bounds one, or in some instances more than one, centre of creation, or point of maximum of a zoological or botanical province. But a critical examination renders evident,” the Professor adds, “that instead of showing distinct foci of creation, they have been in all instances peopled by colonization, i. e. by migration of species from pre-existing, and in every case pre-Adamic, provinces. Among the terrestrial areas the British isles may serve as an example; among marine, the Baltic, Mediterranean, and Black Seas. The British islands have been colonized from various centres of creation in (now) continental Europe; the Baltic Sea from the Celtic region, although it runs itself into the conditions of the Boreal one; and the Mediterranean, as it now appears, from the fauna and flora of the more ancient Lusitanian province.” Professor Forbes, it is stated further, in the report of his paper to which I owe these details,—a paper read at the Royal Institution in March last,—“exhibited, in support of the same view, a map, showing the relation which the centres of creation of the air-breathing molluscs in Europe bear to the geological history of the respective areas, and proving that the whole snail population of its northern and central extent (the portion of the Continent of newest and probably post-Adamic origin) had been derived from foci of creation seated in pre-Adamic lands. And these remarkable facts have induced the Professor,” it was added, “to maintain the improbability of post-Adamic creations.”
With the introduction of man into the scene of existence, creation, I repeat, seems to have ceased. What is it that now takes its place, and performs its work? During the previous dynasties, all elevation in the scale was an effect simply of creation. Nature lay dead in a waste theatre of rock, vapor, and sea, in which the insensate laws, chemical; mechanical, and electric, carried on their blind, unintelligent processes: the creative fiat went forth; and, amid waters that straightway teemed with life in its lower forms, vegetable and animal, the dynasty of the fish was introduced. Many ages passed, during which there took place no further elevation: on the contrary, in not a few of the newly introduced species of the reigning class there occurred for the first time examples of an asymmetrical misplacement of parts, and, in at least one family of fishes, instances of defect of parts: there was the manifestation of a downward tendency towards the degradation of monstrosity, when the elevatory fiat again went forth, and, through an act of creation, the dynasty of the reptile began. Again many ages passed by, marked, apparently, by the introduction of a warm-blooded oviparous animal, the bird, and of a few marsupial quadrupeds, but in which the prevailing class reigned undeposed, though at least unelevated. Yet again, however, the elevatory fiat went forth, and through an act of creation the dynasty of the mammiferous quadruped began. And after the further lapse of ages, the elevatory fiat went forth yet once more in an act of creation; and with the human, heaven-aspiring dynasty, the moral government of God, in its connection with at least the world which we inhabit, “took beginning.” And then creation ceased. Why? Simply because God’s moral government had begun,—because in necessary conformity with the institution of that government, there was to be a thorough identity maintained between the glorified and immortal beings of the terminal dynasty, and the dying magnates of the dynasty which now is; and because, in consequence of the maintenance of this identity as an essential condition of this moral government, mere acts of creation could no longer carry on the elevatory process. The work analogous in its end and object to those acts of creation which gave to our planet its successive dynasties of higher and yet higher existences, is the work of Redemption. It is the elevatory process of the present time,—the only possible provision for that final act of re-creation “to everlasting life,” which shall usher in the terminal dynasty.
I cannot avoid thinking that many of our theologians attach a too narrow meaning to the remarkable reason “annexed to the Fourth Commandment” by the Divine Lawgiver. “God rested on the seventh day,” says the text, “from all his work which He had created and made; and God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.” And such is the reason given in the Decalogue why man should also rest on the seventh day. God rested on the Sabbath, and sanctified it; and therefore man ought also to rest on the Sabbath, and keep it holy. But I know not where we shall find grounds for the belief that that Sabbath-day during which God rested was merely commensurate in its duration with one of the Sabbaths of short-lived man,—a brief period, measured by a single revolution of the earth on its axis. We have not, as has been shown, a shadow of evidence that He resumed his work of creation on the morrow: the geologist finds no trace of post-Adamic creation,—the theologian can tell us of none. God’s Sabbath of rest may still exist;—the work of Redemption may be the work of his Sabbath day. That elevatory process through successive acts of creation which engaged Him during myriads of ages, was of an ordinary week-day character; but in when the term of his moral government began, the elevatory process proper to it assumed the Divine character of the Sabbath. This special view appears to lend peculiar emphasis to the reason embodied in the commandment. The collation of the passage with the geologic record seems, as if by a species of re-translation, to make it enunciate as its injunction, “Keep this day, not merely as a day of memorial related to a past fact, but also as a day of coöperation with God in the work of elevation in relation both to a present fact and a future purpose. God keeps his Sabbath,” it says, “in order that He may save; keep yours also, in order that ye may be saved.” It serves, besides, to throw light on the prominence of the Sabbatical command, in a digest of law of which no part or tittle can pass away until the fulfilment of all things. During the present dynasty of probation and trial, that special work of both God and man on which the character of the future dynasty depends, is the Sabbath-day work of saving and being saved.41
It is in this dynasty of the future that man’s moral and intellectual faculties will receive their full development The expectation of any very great advance in the present scene of things—great, at least, when measured by man’s large capacity of conceiving of the good and fair—seems to be, like all human hope when restricted to time, an expectation doomed to disappointment. There are certain limits within which the race improves;—civilization is better than the want of it, and the taught superior to the untaught man. There is a change, too, effected in the moral nature, through that Spirit which, by working belief in the heart, brings its aspirations into harmony with the realities of the unseen world, that, in at least its relation to the future state, cannot be estimated too highly. But conception can travel very far beyond even its best effects in their merely secular bearing; nay, it is peculiarly its nature to show the men most truly the subjects of it, how miserably they fall short of the high standard of conduct and feeling which it erects, and to teach them, more emphatically than by words, that their degree of happiness must of necessity be as low as their moral attainments are humble. Further,—man, though he has been increasing in knowledge ever since his appearance on earth, has not been improving in faculty;—a shrewd fact, which they who expect most from the future of this world would do well to consider. The ancient masters of mind were in no respect inferior in calibre to their predecessors. We have not yet shot ahead of the old Greeks in either the perception of the beautiful, or in the ability of producing it; there has been no improvement in the inventive faculty since the Iliad was written, some three thousand years ago; nor has taste become more exquisite, or the perception of the harmony of numbers more nice, since the age of the Æneid. Science is cumulative in its character; and so its votaries in modern times stand on a higher pedestal than their predecessors. But though nature produced a Newton some two centuries ago, as she produced a Goliath of Gath at an earlier period, the modern philosophers, as a class, do not exceed in actual stature the worse informed ancients,—the Euclids, Archimedeses, and Aristotles. We would be without excuse if, with the Bacon, Milton, and Shakspeare of these latter ages of the world full before us, we recurred to the obsolete belief that the human race is deteriorating; but then, on the other hand, we have certain evidence, that since genius first began unconsciously to register in its works its own bulk and proportions, there has been no increase in the mass or improvement in the quality of individual mind. As for the dream that there is to be some extraordinary elevation of the general platform of the race achieved by means of education, it is simply the hallucination of the age,—the world’s present alchemical expedient for converting farthings into guineas, sheerly by dint of scouring. Not but that education is good; it exercises, and, in the ordinary mind, developes, faculty. But it will not anticipate the terminal dynasty. Yet further,— man’s average capacity of happiness seems to be as limited and as incapable of increase as his average reach of intellect: it is a mediocre capacity at best; nor is it greater by a shade now, in these days of power-looms and portable manures, than in the times of the old patriarchs. So long, too, as the law of increase continues, man must be subject to the law of death, with its stern attendants, suffering and sorrow; for the two laws go necessarily together; and so long as death reigns, human creatures, in even the best of times, will continue to quit this scene of being without professing much satisfaction at what they have found either in it or themselves. It will no doubt be a less miserable world than it is now, when the good come, as there is reason to hope they one day shall, to be a majority; but it will be felt to be an inferior sort of world even then, and be even fuller than now of wishes and longings for a better. Let it improve as it may, it will be a scene of probation and trial till the end. And so Faith, undeceived by the mirage of the midway desert, whatever form or name, political or religious, the phantasmagoria may bear, must continue to look beyond its unsolid and tremulous glitter,—its bare rocks exaggerated by the vapor into air-drawn castles, and its stunted bushes magnified into goodly trees,—and, fixing her gaze upon the re-creation yet future,—the terminal dynasty yet unbegun,—she must be content to enter upon her final rest—for she will not enter upon it earlier—“at return”
“Of Him, the Woman’s Seed,
Last in the clouds, from heaven to be revealed
In glory of the Father, to dissolve
Satan with his perverted world, then raise
From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,
New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date,
Founded in righteousness, and peace, and love,
To bring forth fruits,—joy and eternal bliss.”
But it may be judged that I am trespassing on a field into which I have no right to enter. Save, however, for its close proximity with that in which the geologist expatiates as properly his own, this little volume would never have been written. It is the fact that man must believingly coöperate with God in the work of preparation for the final dynasty, or exist throughout its never-ending cycles as a lost and degraded creature, that alone renders the development hypothesis formidable. But inculcating that the elevatory process is one of the natural law, not of moral endeavor,—by teaching, inferentially at least, that in the better state of things which is coming there is to be an identity of race with that of the existing dynasty, but no identity of individual consciousness,—that, on the contrary, the life after death which we are to inherit is to be merely a horrid life of wriggling impurities, originated in the putrefactive mucus,—and that thus the men who now live possess no real stake in the kingdom of the future,—it is its direct tendency, so far as its influence extends, to render the required coöperation with God an impossibility. For that coöperation cannot exist without belief as its basis. The hypothesis involves a misreading of the geologic record, which not merely affects its meaning in relation to the mind, and thus, in a question of science, substitutes error for truth, but which also threatens to affect the record itself, in relation to the destiny of every individual perverted and led astray. It threatens to write down among the degraded and the lost, men who, under the influence of an unshaken faith, might have risen at the dawn of the terminal period, to enjoy the fulness of eternity among the glorified and the good.
Footnotes
1 Mr. Miller is the author also of Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, one vol. 8vo.; A Letter from one of the Scotch people to the Right Honorable Lord Brougham and Vaux, on the opinions expressed by his Lordship in the Auchterarder Case; and The Whiggism of the Old School, as exemplified in the Past History and Present Position of the Church of Scotland. The second of these works is well characterized by Mr. Gladstone as “an able, elegant, and masculine production.”
2 London, 1847, pp. 409
3 Since the above sentence was written and set in type, I have learned that my ingenious friend, Mr. Charles Peach of the Customs, Fowey, so well known for his palæontological discoveries, has just found in the Devonian system of Cornwall, fragments of what seem to be dermal plates of Asterolepis. It is a somewhat curious circumstance, that the two farthest removed extremities of Great Britain—Cornwall and Caithness—should be tipped by fossiliferous deposits of the same ancient system, and that organisms which, when they lived, were contemporary, should be found embedded in the rocks which rise over the British Channel on the one extremity, and overhang the Pentland Frith on the other.
4 Figured from a Thurso specimen, slightly different in its proportions from the Stromness specimen described.
5 Dr. George Garson, Stromness, and Mr. William Watt, jun. Skaill.
6 The Continental assertors of the development hypothesis are greatly more frank than those of our own country regarding the “life after death,” and what man has to expect from it. The individual, they tell us, perishes forever; but, then, out of his remains there spring up other vitalities. The immortality of the soul is, it would seem, an idle figment, for there really exists no such things as souls; but is there no comfort in being taught, instead, that we are to resolve into monads and maggots? Job solaced himself with the assurance that, even after worms had destroyed his body, he was in the flesh to see God. Had Professor Oken been one of his comforters, he would have sought to restrict his hopes to the prospect of living in the worms. “If the organic fundamental substance consist of infusoria,” says the Professor, “so must the whole organic world originate from infusoria. Plants and animals can only be metamorphoses of infusoria. This being granted, so also must all organizations consist of infusoria, and, during their destruction, dissolve into the same. Every plant, every animal, is converted by maceration into a mucous mass; this putrefies, and the moisture is stocked with infusoria. Putrefaction is nothing else than a division of organisms into infusoria,—a reduction of the higher to the primary life.... Death is no annihilation, but only a change. One individual emerges out of another. Death is only a transition to another life,—not into death. This transition from one life to another takes place through the primary condition of the organic, or the mucus.”—Physio-Philosophy, pp. 187-189.
7 I trust that at least by and by there may be an exception claimed, from the general, but, I am sure, well-meant, censure of this passage, in favor of the Free Church of Scotland. It has got as its Professor of Physical Science—thanks to the sagacity of Chalmers—Dr. John Fleming, a man of European reputation, and all that seems further necessary, in order to secure the benefits contemplated in the appointment, is, that attendance on his course should be rendered imperative on all Free Church candidates for the ministry.
8 Agassiz’s description of the Pterichthys, as quoted by Humboldt, in his Cosmos.
9 From Murchison’s Silurian System.
10 These scales, which occur in a detached state, in a stratified clay of the Old Red Sandstone, near Cromarty, present for their size a larger extent of cover than the scales of any other Ganoid.
11 A peculiarity which also occurs in the anterior dorsal of the Dipterus.
12 From the head of Raja clavata.
13 The darker, upper patch in this figure indicates a portion in which the scales of the fins in the fossil still retain their enamel;—the lighter, a portion from which the enamel has disappeared.
14 The Acanths of the Coal Measures possess the cranial buckler.
15 Professor Owen, in fixing the homologies of the ichthyic head, differs considerably from Cuvier; but his view seems to be demonstrably the correct one. It will, however, be seen, that in my attempted comparison of the divisions of the ancient ganoid cranium with those of the craniums of existing fishes, the points at issue between the two great naturalists are not involved, otherwise than as mere questions of words. The matter to be determined, for instance, is not whether plate A in the skulls of the cod and Coccosteus be the homologue of a part of the occipital or that of a part of the parietal bones, but whether plate A in the Coccosteus be the homologue of plate A in the cod. The letters employed I have borrowed from Agassiz’s restoration of the Coccosteus; whereas the figures intimate divisions which the imperfect keeping of the specimens on which the ichthyologist founded did not enable him to detect.
16 The jaws (10, 10) which exhibit in the print their greatest breadth, would have presented in the animal, seen from beneath, their narrow under-edges, and have nearly fallen into the line of the sub-opercular plates, (13, 13.)
17 In all probability it is likewise the principle of the placoid skull. The numerous osseous points by which the latter is encrusted, each capable of increase at the edges, seem the minute bricks of an ample dome. It is possible, however, that new points may be formed in the interstices between the first formed ones, as what anatomists term the triquetra or Wormiana form between the serrated edges of the lambdoidal suture in the human skull; and that the osseous surface of the cerebral dome may thus extend, as the dome itself increases in size, not through the growth of the previously existing pieces,—the minute bricks of my illustration,—but through the addition of new ones. Equally, in either case, however, that essential difference between the placoid skull and the placoid vertebra, to which I have referred, appears to hinge on the circumstance, that while the osseous nucleus of each vertebral centrum could form, in even its most complicated shape, from a single point, the osseous walls of the cranium had to be formed from hundreds. The accompanying diagram serves to show after what manner the vertebral centrum in the Ray enlarges with the growth of the animal, by addition of bony matter external to the point in the middle, at which ossification first begins. The horizontal lines indicate the lines of increment in the two internal cones which each centrum comprises, and the vertical ones the lines of increment in the lateral pillars.
18 One of the Thurso coprolites in my possession is about one fourth longer than the larger of the two specimens figured here, and nearly thrice as broad.
19 In two of these, in a collection of several score, I have failed to detect the spiral markings, though their state of keeping is decidedly good. There are other appearances which lead me to suspect that the Asterolepis was not the only large fish of the Lower Old Red Sandstone; but my facts on the subject are too inconclusive to justify aught more than sedulous inquiry.
20 The shaded plate, (a,) accidentally presented in this specimen, belongs to the upper part of the head. It is the posterior frontal plate F, which half-encircled the eye orbit, (see fig. 29;) and I have introduced it into the print here, as in none of the other prints, or of any other specimens, is its upper surface shown.
21 The late Mr. John Thurston.
22 “Mr. Phillips proceeded to describe some remains of a small fish, resembling the Cheiracanthus of the Old Red Sandstone, scales and spines of which he had found in a quarry at Hales End, on the western side of the Malverns. The section presented beds of the Old Red Sandstone inclined to the west; beneath these were arenaceous beds of a lighter color, forming the junction with Silurian shales; these, again, passing on to calcareous beds in the lower part of the quarry, containing the corals and shells of the Aymestry Limestone, of their agreement with which stronger evidence might be obtained elsewhere. He had found none of these scales in the junction beds or in the Upper Ludlow Shales; but about sixty or one hundred feet lower, just above the Aymestry Limestone, his attention had been attracted to discolored spots on the surface of the beds, which, upon microscopic examination, proved to be the minute scales and spines before mentioned. These remains were only apparent on the surface, whilst the ’fish-bed’ of the Upper Ludlow rock, as it usually occurred, was an inch thick, consisting of innumerable small teeth and spines.”—Report, in “Athenæum” for 1842, of the Proceedings of the Twelfth Meeting of British Association, (Manchester.)
23 “This is the lowest position” (that of the Onondago Limestone) “in the State of New York in which any remains have been found higher in the scale of organized beings than Crustacea, with the exception of an imperfectly preserved fish-bone discovered by Hall in the Oriskany Sandstone. That specimen, together with the defensive fish-bone found in this part of the New York system, furnishes evidences of the existence of animals belonging to the class vertebrata during the deposition of the middle part of the protozoic strata.”—American Journal of Science and Arts for 1846, p. 63.
24 “The shales alternating with the Wenlock Limestone.” (Edinburgh Review.)
25 The Silurian Placoids are most adequately represented by the Cestracion of the southern hemisphere; but I know not that of the peculiar character and instincts of this interesting Placoid,—the last of its race,—there is any thing known. For its form and general appearance see fig. 49, page 177.
26 Such as the dog-fishes, picked and spotted.
27 The twelfth in Spinax Acanthius, and the fourteenth in Scyllium Stellare.
28 It will scarce be urged against the degradation theory, that those races which, tried by the tests of defect or misplacement of parts, we deem degraded, are not less fitted for carrying on what in their own little spheres is the proper business of life, than the non-degraded orders and families. The objection is, however, a possible one, and one which a single remark may serve to obviate. It is certainly true that the degraded families are thoroughly fitted for the performance of all the work given them to do. They greatly increase when placed in favorable circumstances, and, when vigorous and thriving, enjoy existence. But then the same may be said of all animals, without reference to their place in the scale;—the mollusc is as thoroughly adapted to its circumstances and as fitted to accomplish the end proper to its being, as the mammiferous quadruped, and the mammiferous quadruped as man himself; but the fact of perfect adaptation in no degree invalidates the other not less certain fact of difference of rank, nor proves that the mollusc is equal to the quadruped, or the quadruped to man. And, of course, the remark equally bears on the reduced as on the unelevated,—on lowness of place when a result of degradation in races pertaining to a higher division of animals, as on lowness of place when a result of the humble standing of the division to which the races belong.
29 The vertebral column in the genus Diplopterus ran, as in the placoid genus Scyllium, nearly through the middle of the caudal fin.
30 In the following diagram a few simple lines serve to exhibit the progress of degradation. Fig. a represents the symmetrical Placoids of the Silurian period, consisting of head, neck, body, tail, fore limbs and hinder limbs; fig. b represents those heterocercal Ganoids of the Old Red Sandstone, Coal Measures, and Permian System, in which the neck is extinguished, and the fore limbs stuck on to the occiput; fig. c, those homocercal Ganoids of the Trias Lias, Oolite, and Wealden, whose tails spread out into broad terminal processes, without homologue in the higher animals; fig. d, those Acanthopterygii of the Chalk that, in addition to the non-homological processes, have both fore limbs and hinder limbs stuck round the head; while fig. e represents the asymmetrical Platessa, of the same period, with one of its eyes in the middle of its head, and the other thrust out to the side.
31 I would, however, respectfully suggest, that that theory of cerebral vertebræ, on which, in this question, the comparative anatomists proceed as their principle, and which finds as little support in the geologic record from the actual history of the fore limbs as from the actual history of the bones of the cranium, may be more ingenious than sound. It is a shrewd circumstance, that the rocks refuse to testify in its favor. Agassiz, I find, decides against it on other than geological grounds; and his conclusion is certainly rendered not the less worthy of careful consideration by the fact that, yielding to the force of evidence, his views on the subject underwent a thorough change. He had first held, and then rejected it. “I have shared,” he says, “with a multitude of other naturalists, the opinion which regards the cranium as composed of vertebræ; and I am consequently in some degree called upon to point out the motives which have induced me to reject it.”
“M. Oken,” he continues, “was the first to assign this signification to the bones of the cranium. The new doctrine he expounded was received in Germany with great enthusiasm by the school of the philosophers of nature. The author conceived the cranium to consist of three vertebræ, and the basal occipital, the sphenoid, and the ethmoid, were regarded as the central parts of these cranial vertebræ. On these alleged bodies of vertebræ, the arches enveloping the central parts of the nervous system were raised, while on the opposite side were attached the inferior pieces, which went to form the vegetative arch destined to embrace the intestinal canal and the large vessels. It would be too tedious to enumerate in this place the changes which each author introduced, in order to modify this matter so as to make it suit his own views. Some went the length of affirming that the vertebræ of the head were as complete as those of the trunk; and, by means of various dismemberments, separations, and combinations, all the forms of the cranium were referred to the vertebræ, by admitting that the number of pieces was invariably fixed in every head, and that all the vertebrata, whatever might be their organization in other respects, had in their heads the same number of points of ossification. At a later period, what was erroneous in this manner of regarding the subject was detected; but the idea of the vertebral composition of the head was still retained. It was admitted as a general law, that the cranium was composed of three primitive vertebræ, as the embryo is of three blastodermic leaflets; but that these vertebræ, like the leaflets, existed only ideally, and that their presence, although easily demonstrated in certain cases, could only be slightly traced, and with the greatest difficulty, in other instances. The notion thus laid down of the virtual existence of cranial vertebræ did not encounter very great opposition; it could not be denied that there was a certain general resemblance between the osseous case of the brain and the rachidian canal; the occipital, in particular, had all the characteristic features of a vertebra. But whenever an attempt was made to push the analogy further, and to determine rigorously the anterior vertebræ of the cranium, the observer found himself arrested by insurmountable obstacles, and he was obliged always to revert to the virtual existence.
“In order to explain my idea clearly, let me have recourse to an example. It is certain that organized bodies are sometimes endowed with virtual qualities, which, at a certain period of the being’s life, elude dissection, and all our means of investigation. It is thus that at the moment of their origin, the eggs of all animals have such a resemblance to each other, that it would be impossible to distinguish, even by the aid of the most powerful microscope, the ovarial egg of a craw-fish, for example, from that of true fish. And yet who would deny that beings in every respect different from each other exist in these eggs? It is precisely because the difference manifests itself at a later period, in proportion as the embryo develops itself, that we are authorized to conclude, that, even from the earliest period, the eggs were different,—that each had virtual qualities proper to itself, although they could not be discovered by our senses. If, on the contrary, any one should find two eggs perfectly alike, and should observe two beings perfectly identical issue from them, he would greatly err if he ascribed to these eggs different virtual qualities. It is therefore necessary, in order to be in a condition to suppose that virtual properties peculiar to it are concealed in an animal, that these properties should manifest themselves once, in some phase or other of its development. Now, applying this principle to the theory of cranial vertebræ, we should say, that if these vertebræ virtually exist in the adult, they must needs show themselves in reality, at a certain period of development. If, on the contrary, they are found neither in the embryo nor the adult, I am of opinion that we are entitled likewise to dispute their virtual existence.
“Here, however, an objection may be made to me, drawn from the physiological value of the vertebræ, the function of which, as is well known, is, on the one hand, to furnish a solid support to the muscular contractions which determine the movements of the trunk, and, on the other, to protect the centres of the nervous system, by forming a more or less solid case completely around them. The bodies of the vertebræ are particularly destined to the first of these offices; the neurapophyses to the second. What can be more natural than to admit, from the consideration of this, that in the head, the bodies of the vertebræ diminish in proportion as the moving function becomes lost, while the neurapophyses are considerably developed for protecting the brain, the volume of which is very considerable, when compared with that of the spinal marrow? Have we not an example of this fact in the vertebræ of the tail, where the neurapophyses become completely obliterated, and a simple cylindrical body alone remains? Now, may it not be the case, that in the head, the bodies of the vertebræ have disappeared; and that, in consequence, there is a prolongation of the cord only as far as the moving functions of the vertebræ extend? There is some truth in this argument, and it would be difficult to refute it a priori. But it loses all its force the moment that we enter upon a detailed examination of the bones of the head. Thus, what would we call, according to this hypothesis, the principal sphenoid, the great wings of the sphenoid, and the ethmoid, which form the floor of the cerebral cavity? It may be said they are apophyses. But the apophyses protect the nervous centres only on the side and above. It may be said that they are the bodies of the vertebræ. But they are formed without the concurrence of the dorsal cord; they cannot, therefore, be the bodies of the vertebræ. It must therefore be allowed, that these bones at least do not enter into the vertebral type; that they are in some measure peculiar. And if this be the case with them, why may not the other protective plates be equally independent of the vertebral type; the more so, because the relations of the frontals and parietals vary so much, that it would be almost impossible to assign to them a constant place?”
32 It is stated by Mr. Witham, that, “except in a few instances, he had ineffectually tried, with the aid of the microscope, to obtain some insight into the structure of coal. Owing,” he adds, “to its great opacity, which is probably due to mechanical pressure, the action of chemical affinity, and the percolation of acidulous waters, all traces of organization appear to have been obliterated.” I have heard the late Mr. Sanderson, who prepared for Mr. Witham most of the specimens figured in his well-known work on the “Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables,” and from whom the materials of his statement on this point seem to have been derived, make a similar remark. It was rare, he said, to find a bit of coal that exhibited the organic structure. The case, however, is far otherwise; and the ingenious mechanic and his employer were misled, simply by the circumstance, that it is rare to find pieces of coal which exhibit the ligneous fibre, existing in a state of keeping solid enough to stand the grinding of the lapidary’s wheel. The lignite usually occurs in thin layers of a substance resembling soft charcoal, at which, from the loose adhesion of the fibres, the coal splits at a stroke; and as it cannot be prepared as a transparency, it is best examined by a Stanhope lens. It will be found, tried in this manner, that so far is vegetable fibre from being of rare occurrence in coal,—our Scotch coal at least,—that almost every cubic inch contains its hundreds, nay, its thousands, of cells.
33 On a point of such importance I find it necessary to strengthen my testimony by auxiliary evidence. The following is the judgment, on this ancient petrifaction, of Mr. Nicol of Edinburgh,—confessedly one of our highest living authorities in that division of fossil botany which takes cognizance of the internal structure of lignites, and decides, from their anatomy, their race and family:—
“Edinburgh, 19th July, 1845.
“Dear Sir,—I have examined the structure of the fossil wood which you found in the Old Red Sandstone at Cromarty, and have no hesitation in stating, that the reticulated texture of the transverse sections, though somewhat compressed, clearly indicates a coniferous origin; but as there is not the slightest trace of a disc to be seen in the longitudinal sections parallel to the medullary rays, it is impossible to say whether it belongs to the Pine or Araucarian division. I am, &c.,
“William Nicol.”
It will be seen that Mr. Nicol failed to detect what I now deem the discs of this conifer,—those stippled markings to which I have referred, and which the engraver has indicated in no exaggerated style, in one of the longitudinal sections (b) of the wood-cut given above. But even were this portion of the evidence wholly wanting, we would be left in doubt, in consequence, not whether the Old Red lignite formed part of a true gymnospermous tree, but whether that tree is now represented by the pines of Europe and America, or by the araucarians of Chili and New Zealand. Were I to risk an opinion in a department not particularly my province it would be in favor of an araucarian relationship.
34 The following digest from Professor Balfour’s very admirable “Manual of Botany,” of what is held on this curious subject, may be not unacceptable to the reader. “It is an interesting question to determine the mode in which the various species and tribes of plants were originally scattered over the globe. Various hypotheses have been advanced on the subject. Linnæus entertained the opinion that there was at first only one primitive centre of vegetation, from which plants were distributed over the globe. Some, avoiding all discussions and difficulties, suppose that plants were produced at first in the localities where they are now seen vegetating. Others think that each species of plant originated in, and was diffused from, a single primitive centre; and that there were numerous such centres situated in different parts of the world, each centre being the seat of a particular number of species. They thus admit great vegetable migrations, similar to those of the human races. Those who adopt the latter view recognize in the distribution of plants some of the last revolutions of our planet, and the action of numerous and varied forces, which impede or favor the dissemination of vegetables in the present day. They endeavor to ascertain the primitive flora of countries, and to trace the vegetable migrations which have taken place. Daubeny says, that analogy favors the supposition that each species of plant was originally formed in some particular locality, whence it spread itself gradually over a certain area, rather than that the earth was at once, by the fiat of the Almighty, covered with vegetation in the manner we at present behold it. The human race rose from a single pair; and the distribution of plants and animals over a certain definite area would seem to imply that the same was the general law. Analogy would lead us to believe that the extension of species over the earth originally took place on the same plan on which it is conducted at present, when a new island starts up in the midst of the ocean, produced either by a coral reef or a volcano. In these cases the whole surface is not at once overspread with plants, but a gradual progress of vegetation is traced from the accidental introduction of a single seed, perhaps, of each species, wafted by winds or floated by currents. The remarkable limitation of certain species to single spots on the globe seems to favor the supposition of specific centres.”
35 Rhodomenia palmata and Alaria esculenta.
36 Porphyra laciniata, Chorda filum, and Enteromorpha compressa.
37 “Dr. Neill mentions,” says the Rev. Mr. Landsborough, in his complete and very interesting “History of British Sea-Weeds,” “that on our shores algæ generally occupy zones in the following order, beginning from deep water:—F. Filum; F. esculentus and bulbosus, F. digitatus, saccharinus, and loreus; F. serratus and crispus; F. nodosus and vesiculosus; F. canaliculatus; and, last of all, F. pygmæus; which is satisfied if it be within reach of the spray.”
38 We are supplied with a curious example of that ever-returning cycle of speculation in which the human mind operates, by not only the introduction of the principle of Epicurus into the “Vestiges,” but also by the unconscious employment of even his very arguments, slightly modified by the floating semi-scientific notions of the time. The following passages, taken, the one from the modern work, the other from Fénélon’s life of the old Greek philosopher, are not unworthy of being studied, as curiously illustrative of the cycle of thought. Epicurus, I must, however, first remind the reader, in the words of his biographer, “supposed that men, and all other animals, were originally produced by the ground. According to him, the primitive earth was fat and nitrous; and the sun, gradually warming it, soon covered it with herbage and shrubs: there also began to arise on the surface of the ground a great number of small tumors like mushrooms, which having in a certain time come to maturity, the skin burst, and there came forth little animals, which, gradually retiring from the place where they were produced, began to respire.” And there can be little doubt, that had the microscope been a discovery of early Greece, the passage here would have told us, not of mushroom-like tumors, but of monads. Save that the element of microscopic fact is awanting in the one and present in the other, the following are strictly parallel lines of argument:—
“To the natural objection that the earth does not now produce men, lions, and dogs, Epicurus replies that the fecundity of the earth is now exhausted. In advanced age a woman ceases to bear children; a piece of land never before cultivated produces much more during the few first years than it does afterwards; and when a forest is once cut down, the soil never produces trees equal to those which have been rooted up. Those which are afterwards planted become dwarfish, and are perpetually degenerating. We are, however, he argues, by no means certain but there may be at present rabbits, hares, foxes, bears, and other animals, produced by the earth in their perfect state. The reason why we are backward in admitting it is, that it happens in retired places, and never falls under our view; and, never seeing rats but such as have been produced by other rats, we adopt the opinion that the earth never produced any.” (Fénélon’s Lives of the Ancient Philosophers.)
“In the first place, there is no reason to suppose that, though life had been imparted by natural means, after the first cooling of the surface to a suitable temperament, it would continue thereafter to be capable of being imparted in like manner. The great work of the peopling of this globe with living species is mainly a fact accomplished: the highest known species came as a crowning effort thousands of years ago. The work being thus to all appearance finished, we are not necessarily to expect that the origination of life and of species should be conspicuously exemplified in the present day. We are rather to expect that the vital phenomena presented to our eyes should mainly, if not entirely, be limited to a regular and unvarying succession of races by the ordinary means of generation. This, however, is no more an argument against a time when phenomena of the first kind prevailed, than it would be a proof against the fact of a mature man having once been a growing youth, that he is now seen growing no longer..... Secondly, it is far from being certain that the primitive imparting of life and form to inorganic elements is not a fact of our times.” (Vestiges of Creation.)
39 “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,” and “Explanations, being a Sequel to the Vestiges.”
40 The chapter in which this passage occurs originally appeared, with several of the others, in the Witness newspaper, in a series of articles, entitled “Rambles of a Geologist,” and drew forth the following letter from a correspondent of the Scottish Press, the organ of a powerful and thoroughly respectable section of the old Dissenters of Scotland. I present it to the reader merely to show, that if, according to the author of the “Vestiges,” geologists assailed the development hypothesis in the fond hope of “purchasing impunity for themselves,” they would succeed in securing only disappointment for their pains:—
“THE PRE-ADAMITE EARTH.
“To the Editor of the Scottish Press.
“Sir,—I occasionally observe articles in your neighbor and contemporary the Witness, characteristically headed ‘Rambles of a Geologist,’ wherein the writer with great zeal once more ‘slays the slain’ heresies of the ‘Vestiges of Creation.’ This writer (of the ‘Rambles,’ I mean) nevertheless, and at the same time, announces his own tenets to be much of the same sort, as applied to mere dead matter, that those of the ‘Vestiges’ are with regard to living organisms. He maintains that the world, during the last million of years, has been of itself rising or developing, without the interposition of a miracle, from chaos into its present state; and, of course, as it is still, as a world, confessedly far below the acme of physical perfection, that it must be just now on its passage, self-progressing, towards that point, which terminus it may reach in another million of years hence.[!!!] The author of the ‘Vestiges,’ as quoted by the author of the ‘Rambles,’ in the last number of the Witness, complains that the latter and his allies are not at all so liberal to him as, from their present circumstances and position, he had a right to expect. He (the author of the ‘Vestiges’) reminds his opponents that they have themselves only lately emerged from the antiquated scriptural notions that our world was the direct and almost immediate construction of its Creator,—as much so, in fact, as any of its organized tenants,—and that it was then created in a state of physical excellence, the highest possible, to render it a suitable habitation for these tenants, and all this only about six or seven thousand years ago,—to the new light of their present physico-Lamarckian views; and he asks, and certainly not without reason, why should these men, so circumstanced, be so anxious to stop him in his attempt to move one step further forward in the very direction they themselves have made the last move?—that is, in his endeavor to extend their own principles of self-development from mere matter to living creatures. Now, Sir, I confess myself to be one of those (and possibly you may have more readers similarly constituted) who not only cannot see any great difference between merely physical and organic development,[!!] but who would be inclined to allow the latter, absurd as it is, the advantage in point of likelihood.[!!!] The author of the ‘Rambles,’ however, in the face of this, assures us that his views of physical self-development and long chronology belong to the inductive sciences. Now, I could at this stage of his rambles have wished very much that, instead of merely saying so, he had given his demonstration. He refers, indeed, to several great men, who, he says, are of his opinion. Most that these men have written on the question at issue I have seen, but it appeared far from demonstrative, and some of them, I know, had not fully made up their mind on the point.[!!!] Perhaps the author of the ‘Rambles’ could favor us with the inductive process that converted himself; and, as the attainment of truth, and not victory, is my object, I promise either to acquiesce in or rationally refute it.[?] Till then I hold by my antiquated tenets, that our world, nay, the whole material universe, was created about six or seven thousand years ago, and that in a state of physical excellence of which we have in our present fallen world only the ’vestiges of creation.’ I conclude by mentioning that this view I have held now for nearly thirty years, and, amidst all the vicissitudes of the philosophical world during that period, I have never seen cause to change it. Of course, with this view I was, during the interval referred to, a constant opponent of the once famous, though now exploded, nebular hypothesis of La Place; and I yet expect to see physical development and long chronology wither also on this earth, now that their root (the said hypothesis) has been eradicated from the sky.[!!!]—I am, Sir, your most obedient servant,
“Philalethes.”
I am afraid there is little hope of converting a man who has held so stoutly by his notions “for nearly thirty years;” especially as, during that period, he has been acquainting himself with what writers such as Drs. Chalmers, Buckland, and Pye Smith have written on the other side. But for the demonstration which he asks, as I have conducted it, I beg leave to refer him to the seventeenth chapter of my little work, “First Impressions of England and its People.” I am, however, inclined to suspect that he is one of a class whose objections are destined to be removed rather by the operation of the laws of matter than of those of mind. For it is a comfortable consideration, that in this controversy the geologists have the laws of matter on their side;—“the stars in their courses fight against Sisera.” Their opponents now, like the opponents of the astronomer in the ages gone by, are, in most instances, men who have been studying the matter “for nearly thirty years.” When they study it for a few years longer they disappear; and the men of the same cast and calibre who succeed them are exactly the men who throw themselves most confidently into the arms of the enemy, and look down upon their poor silent predecessors with the loftiest commiseration. It is, however, not uninstructive to remark how thoroughly, in some instances, the weaker friends and the wilier enemies of Revelation are at one in their conclusions respecting natural phenomena. The correspondent of the Scottish Press merely regards the views of the author of the “Vestiges” as possessing “the advantage, in point of likelihood,” over those of the geologists his antagonists: his ally the Dean of York goes greatly further, and stands up as stoutly for the transmutation of species as Lamarck himself. Descanting, in his New System of Geology, on the various forms of trilobites, ammonites, belemnites, &c. Dean Cockburn says,—
“These creatures appear to have possessed the power of secreting from the stone beneath them a limy covering for their backs, and perhaps, fed partly on the same solid material. Supposing, now that the first trilobites were destroyed by the Llandeilo Slates, some spawn of these creatures would arise above these flags, and, after a time, would be warmed into existence. These molluscs,[!!] then, having a better material from which to extract their food and covering, would probably expand in a slightly different form, and with a more extensive mantle than what belonged to the parent species. The same would be still more the case with a new generation, fed upon a new deposit from some deeper volcano, such as the Caradoc or Wenlock Limestone, in which lime more and more predominates. Now, if any one will examine the various prints of trilobites in Sir R. Murchison’s valuable work, he will find but very trifling differences in any of them,[!!] and those differences only in the stony covering of their backs. I knew two brothers once much alike: the one became a curate with a large family; the other a London alderman. If the skins of these two pachydermata had been preserved in a fossil state, there would have been less resemblance between them than between an Asaphus tyrannus and an Asaphus caudatus.... A careful and laborious investigation has discovered, as in the trilobites, a difference in the ammonites of different strata; but such differences, as in the former case, exist only in the form of the external shell, and may be explained in the same manner.[!!]... As to the scaphites, baculites, belemnites, and all the other ites which learned ingenuity has so named, you find them in various strata the same in all important particulars, but also differing slightly in their outward coverings, as might be expected from the different circumstances in which each variety was placed.[!!] The sheep in the warm valleys of Andalusia have a fine covering like to hair; but remove them to a northern climate, and in a few generations the back is covered with shaggy wool. The animal is the same,—the covering only is changed.... The learned have classed those shells under the names of terebratula, orthis, atrypa, pecten, &c. They are all much alike.[!!!] It requires an experienced eye to distinguish them one from another: what little differences have been pointed out may readily be ascribed, as before, to difference of situation.”[!!!]
The author of the “Vestiges,” with this, the fundamental portion of his case, granted to him by the Dean, will have exceedingly little difficulty in making out the rest for himself. The passage is, however, not without its value, as illustrative of the darkness, in matters of physical science, “even darkness which may be felt,” that is suffered to linger, in this the most scientific of ages, in the Church of Buckland, Sedgwick, and Conybeare.
41 The common objection to that special view which regards the days of creation as immensely protracted periods of time, furnishes a specimen, if not of reasoning in a circle, at least of reasoning from a mere assumption. It first takes for granted, that the Sabbath day during which God rested was a day of but twenty-four hours; and then argues, from the supposition, that in order to keep up the proportion between the six previous working days and the seventh day of rest, which the reason annexed to the fourth commandment demands, these previous days must also have been days of twenty-four hours each. It would, I have begun to suspect, square better with the ascertained facts, and be at least equally in accordance with Scripture, to reverse the process, and argue that, because God’s working days were immensely protracted periods, his Sabbath must also be an immensely protracted period. The reason attached to the law of the Sabbath seems to be simply a reason of proportion;—the objection to which I refer is an objection palpably founded on considerations of proportion. And certainly, were the reason to be divested of proportion, it would be divested also of its distinctive character as a reason. Were it to run as follows, it could not be at all understood:—“Six days shalt thou labor, &c., but on the seventh day shalt thou do no labor, &c.; for in six immensely protracted periods of many thousand years each did the Lord make the heavens and earth, &c., and then rested during a brief day of twenty-four hours; therefore the Lord blessed the brief day of twenty-four hours, and hallowed it.” This, I repeat, would not be reason. All, however, that seems necessary to the integrity of the reason, in its character as such, is, that the proportion of six parts to seven should be maintained. God’s periods may be periods expressed algebraically by letters symbolical of unknown quantity, and man’s periods by letters symbolical of quantities well known; but if God’s Sabbath be equal to one of his six working days, and man’s Sabbath equal to one of his six working days, the integrity of proportion is maintained. When I see the palpable absurdity of such a reading of the reason as the one given above, I can see no absurdity whatever in the reading which I subjoin:—“Six periods (a=a=a=a=a=a) shalt thou labor, &c., but on the seventh period (b=a) shalt thou do no labor, &c.; for in six periods (x=x=x=x=x=x) the Lord made heaven and earth, &c., and rested the seventh period, (y=x;) therefore the Lord blessed the seventh period, and hallowed it” The reason, in its character as a reason of proportion, survives here in all its integrity. Man, when in his unfallen estate, bore the image of God, but it must have been a miniature image at best;—the proportion of man’s week to that of his Maker may, for aught that appears, be mathematically just in its proportions, and yet be a miniature image too,—the mere scale of a map, on which inches represent geographical degrees. All those week days and Sabbath days of man which have come and gone since man first entered upon this scene of being, with all which shall yet come and go, until the resurrection of the dead terminates the work of Redemption, may be included, and probably are included, in the one Sabbath day of God.
Valuable Works
PUBLISHED BY
GOULD AND LINCOLN,
59 Washington Street, Boston.
HAMILTON’S LECTURES, embracing the Metaphysical and Logical Courses; with Notes, from Original Materials, and an Appendix, containing the Author’s Latest Development of his New Logical Theory. Edited by Rev. Henry Longueville Mansel, B. D., Prof. of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy in Magdalen College, Oxford, and John Veitch, M. A., of Edinburgh. In two royal octavo volumes, viz.,
☞ G. & L., by a special arrangement with the family of the late Sir William Hamilton, are the authorized, and only authorized, American publishers of this distinguished author’s matchless Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic.
The above have already been introduced into nearly all our leading colleges.
“It is surpassed by no work before the American public.”—M. B. Anderson, LL. D., President Rochester University.
A masterly production, distinguished for its acuteness and earnestness, its force of logic and fairness of statement, written in a style of singular accuracy and beauty.
YOUNG LADIES’ CLASS BOOK: a Selection of Lessons for Reading of Prose and Verse. By Ebenezer Bailey, A. M. Cloth, embossed, 1.25.
It is believed this work will be found preëminently distinguished for the Completeness with which it presents the whole subject.
It is eminently scientific in method, and thorough in discussion, and its views on unsettled questions in morals are discriminating and sound.
☞ An important work from the pen of one of the most profound thinkers of the age.
WAYLAND’S MORAL SCIENCE ABRIDGED, and adapted to the use of Schools and Academies, by the Author. Half mor., 70 cts.
The same, Cheap School Edition, boards, 45 cts.
WAYLAND’S POLITICAL ECONOMY ABRIDGED, and adapted to the use of Schools and Academies, by the Author. Half mor., 70 cents.
All the above works by Dr. Wayland are used as text-books in most of the colleges and higher schools throughout the Union, and are highly approved.
AGASSIZ AND GOULD’S PRINCIPLES OF ZOÖLOGY; Touching the Structure, Development, Distribution, and Natural Arrangement, of the Races of Animals, living and extinct, with numerous Illustrations. For the use of Schools and Colleges. Part I. Comparative Physiology. By Louis Agassiz and Augustus A. Gould. Revised edition. 1.50.
PART II. Systematic Zoölogy. In preparation.
“It is simple and elementary in its style, full in its illustrations, comprehensive in its range, yet well condensed, and brought into the narrow compass requisite for the purpose intended.”—Silliman’s Journal.
This volume contains the grand generalizations of Ritter’s life-work, the Erdkünde, in eighteen volumes; his lectures on the Relations of Geography and History, and a number of important papers on Physical Geography.
PROGRESSIVE PENMANSHIP, Plain and ornamental, for the use of Schools. By N. D. Gould, author of “Beauties of Writing,” “Writing Master’s Assistant,” etc. In five parts, each, 20 cts.
ROGET’S THESAURUS OF ENGLISH WORDS AND PHRASES, so classified and arranged as to facilitate the expression of ideas, and assist in literary composition. New and improved edition. By Peter Mark Roget, late Secretary of the Royal Society, London, etc. Revised and edited, with a List of Foreign Words defined in English, and other additions, by Barnas Sears, D. D., President of Brown University. A New American Edition, with Additions and Improvements. 12mo, cloth, 2.00.
The first American edition having been prepared by Prof. Sears for strictly educational purposes, those words and phrases properly termed “vulgar,” incorporated in the original work, were omitted. These expurgated portions have, in the present edition, been restored, but by such an arrangement of the matter as not to interfere with the educational purposes of the American editor. Besides this it contains important additions not in the English edition, of words and phrases, and also an alphabetical list of “Foreign Words and Phrases”—Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, etc.—which most frequently occur in works of general literature, defined in English, making it in all respects more full and perfect than the author’s edition.
GUYOT’S MURAL MAPS. A series of elegant Colored Maps, projected on a large scale for the Recitation Room, consisting of a Map of the World, North and South America, Geographical Elements, &c., exhibiting the Physical Phenomena of the Globe. By Professor Arnold Guyot, viz.,
GUYOT’S MAP OF THE WORLD, mounted, 12.00.
GUYOT’S MAP OF NORTH AMERICA, mounted, 11.00.
GUYOT’S MAP OF SOUTH AMERICA, mounted, 11.00.
GUYOT’S GEOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS, mounted, 11.00.
☞ These elegant and entirely original Mural Maps are projected on a large scale, so that when suspended in the recitation room they may be seen from any point, and the delineations without difficulty traced distinctly with the eye. They are beautifully printed in colors, and neatly mounted for use.
Designed as a Sequel to the Author’s New System of English Grammar, which forms a gradual introduction to the first principles of composition.
The above works by Prof. Barton, designed as text-books for the use of schools and academies, are the result of long experience, and will be found to possess many and peculiar merits.
Among the subjects are: Recollections of Ferguson—Burns—The Salmon Fisher of Udoll—The Widow of Dunskaith—The Lykewake—Bill Whyte—The Young Surgeon—George Ross, the Scotch Agent—M’Culloch, the Mechanician—A True Story of the Life of a Scotch Merchant of the Eighteenth Century.
HUGH MILLER’S WORKS. Ten volumes, uniform style, in an elegant box, embossed cloth, 17; library sheep, 20; half calf, 34; antique, 34.