THE WORLD MAKERS.
Our Museum of Natural History, within its too narrow limits, contains
a faëry palace in every part of which we see the genius of
metamorphoses of Lamarck and Geoffroy. In the dark lower hall the
Madrepores serve as the base of the more and more living world that
rises, stage above stage, above. Higher up the superior creatures of
the sea display their energy of organization, and prepare the life of
the terrestrials, and above these, Mammiferæ, over which the lovely
birds spread their wings and almost seem to be still singing! The
multitude of visitors pass quickly and with small show of interest
from the Madrepores, those elder born of the globe, and hasten to the
light and to the presence of things of brightest beauty, mother of
pearl, the richly painted wings of butterflies, and the plumage of
birds. I, who stop longer below, often find myself quite alone in that
dark little gallery.
I love that solemn crypt of the great scientific Church. There I best
can feel the sacred soul, the still present spirit of our great
masters, their great, their sublime effort, and the immortal audacity
of our voyagers and travellers, the intrepid collectors of such a
wealth of whatever is beautiful or instructive. Wherever their bones
may lie they themselves are still present in the Museum by the
treasures which they have bequeathed, treasures which some of them
have paid for with their lives.
On the 15th of last October, having remained in that crypt somewhat
late, I had some difficulty in reading the label on some
Madrepores--that label bore the name of "Lamarck."
A sudden warmth, a religious glow, thrilled through my heart and
brain.
"Lamarck!" Great name, and already antique! It is as though among the
tombs of Saint Denis we should suddenly read the name of Clovis. The
glory, the strifes, the royal triumphs, of his successor, have
obscured somewhat the name of that blind Homer of the Museum, who,
with the instinct of genius created, organized, and named the
previously almost unknown class of Invertebrates; a class, nay, a
whole world, a vast abyss of soft half organized life still destitute
of vertebræ; that bony centralization and essential support of
personality. These are all the more interesting because they are
obviously the earliest of all--those humble and so long neglected
tribes. Réaumur placed the Crocodiles among the insects. The proud
Buffon deigned not to know even the names of humble Invertebrates, he
excluded them altogether from the Olympus at Versailles which he
erected to Nature. These great populations, so obscure, so confused,
which, nevertheless, prepared everything and abound every where,
remained exiled from the world of science until the coming of Lamarck.
It was precisely the elders that were thus excluded, elders so
numerous that to exclude them was, in some sort, to close the eyes and
bar the gate against nature herself.
The genius of the Metamorphoses was emancipated by botany and
chemistry. It was a bold but most precious thing to take Lamarck, from
the Botany in which he had passed his life, and remove him to the vast
world of animality. That ardent genius, trained in miracles by the
transformations of plants, and full of faith in the unity of life,
next drew the animals, and that vast animal, the Globe, from the state
of petrifaction in which they so long had lain. Half blind, he
intrepidly treated a thousand things which the clear sighted scarcely
dared to approach. At least, he infused his fire into them, and
Geoffroy, Cuvier and Blainville found them warm and living.
"All is living, or has been," said Lamarck; "everything is life,
either present or past." Great revolutionary effort, that, against
inert matter; effort proceeding even to suppress and banish the
inorganic! No longer any actual death. That which has lived may sleep;
and yet preserve latent life, the capacity to revive. Who is really
dead? No one. What? Nothing.
This dictum, so novel, and so bold, swelled the sails of our
scientific age with a strong and a favoring gale; it has urged on
enquiries, such as but for it we should never have dreamed of making.
History, or Natural History, we demand of every thing, who are
you--and every where the answer is, "_I am Life_," and, thus, Death
retreats before the bold advance and eagle glance of science, and Mind
moves onward still, conquering and to conquer.
Among these resuscitations, I first note my Madrepores, taking the
interest of life, though previously scorned, or unnoticed, as dead
stone. When Lamarck collected and explained them at the Museum, they
were detected in the mystery of their activity, in their immense
creations, and they exemplified how a world is made. That once known,
it was at once suspected that if the earth makes the animal, the
animal also makes the earth; and that each aids the other in the
office of creation.
Animality is every where, filling every thing and peopling every
thing. We find the remains or the imprint of it even in the minerals,
as the statuary marble and alabaster, which have passed through the
crucible of the most destructive fires. At every advance, in our
knowledge of the existing, we discover an enormous past of animal
life. As soon as our improvements in Optics enabled us to discover and
to watch the Infusoriæ, we behold them making mountains and paving the
ocean. The hard silex is a mass of animalcules, the sponge is an
animated silex. Our limestones are all animals; Paris is built with
infusoriæ, a part of Germany rests upon a newly buried bed of coral.
Infusoriæ, coral, shells, chalk and lime. They are constantly taking
from the Ocean, but the fish, which devour the coral, restore it as
chalk, and restore it to the waters whence it came. Thus the Coral Sea
in its labor of production, of upheaving, in its constructions
incessantly augmented or diminished, built, ruined, and rebuilt, is an
immense fabric of limestone which is continually oscillating between
its two lives;--the _acting_ life of the day--the other life that
_will act_ to-morrow.
Foster quite justly decides that these circular islands are the
craters of volcanoes, raised up by the polypes. He has been
contradicted, but wrongly so. Upon no other hypothesis can we account
for this identity of figure. There is always the same ring of about a
hundred paces in diameter, very low, beaten on the outside by the
waves, but enclosing a tranquil basin. A few plants of three or four
species, here and there, crown the basin with verdure. The water is of
the most beautiful green. The enclosing ring is of white sand, the
residue of dissolved coral, contrasting with the blue of the Ocean.
Beneath the salt water, our little laborers are at work, the stronger
and bolder at the breakers, the weaker and more timid on the smoother
sides.
This is not a very varied world. But wait. The winds and the currents
are constantly at work to enrich it; come a good tempest, and all the
neighboring isles will be laid under contribution to enrich this
rising one. And in this is one of the most magnificent functions of
the Tempest; the greater, the wilder, and the more sweeping, the more
fecund it is. A water-spout passes over an island; the torrent that it
produces carries with it slime, rubbish, plants, living or dead, and
even whole forests, which the waves carry to the neighboring isles,
raising, and at the same time enriching, their soil.
A great messenger of life, and one of the most transportable, is the
solid cocoanut. Not only does it travel well, but, when thrown upon
shoal or rock, if it find only a little poor white sand, which would
support nothing else, the cocoanut contents itself there, finds
brackish water not a jot less agreeable than the freshest; germinates,
thrives, grows into a robust cocoa tree. A tree being thus planted,
fresh water comes, falling leaves create earth, other trees follow,
and at length we see the noble palm grove, which arrests the vapors,
which at length form a rivulet or river, which, flowing from the
center of the isle, make an opening of fresh water in the cincture of
white sand, and thus keep the polypes, inhabitants only of salt water,
at a respectful distance.
Of the rapidity with which the Polypes do their work, we have some
curious proofs. In forty days' harboring at Rio Janeiro, boats were
wholly destroyed; in a strait near Australia, there were formerly only
twenty-six islets; there are already a hundred and fifty--well
recognized: and the English admiralty believes that there are even
more; and in twenty years hence the whole strait, forty leagues in
length, will be so completely blocked up as to be unnavigable.
The eastern shoal of Australia is three hundred and sixty leagues,
(one hundred and twenty-seven without any interruption,) and that of
New Caledonia one hundred and forty-five leagues; the single shoal of
the Maldives is almost five hundred miles long, and groups of isles in
the Pacific are four hundred leagues long, by a hundred and fifty
wide. To all this work of the Polypes, we must add, that the banks of
the isle of France, and the shallows of the Red Sea, are continually
rising. Tunis and its environs present a wholly animal world; and the
rocks present forms so strange, and colors so splendid, that the
spectator is amazed and dazzled. You see them in a space of several
leagues of shallow sea water--probably not averaging more than a foot
of depth, working calmly, but perseveringly at their business of
creating.
Their first intelligent observer was Forster, companion of Cook, who
found them at work, caught them in the very fact of their great
conspiracy to make, noiselessly and marvellously, whole chains of
islands, to be by degrees converted into a continent.
All this passed before his eyes, as it might have done in the first
days of the world. From the submarine depths, the central fire throws
up a dome or cone, which opens, and its lava forms a circular crater.
But the volcanic strength becomes exhausted, and the cooling lava
becomes covered with a living jelly, an animal multitude, whose
perpetual exudation of mucus continually raises the circle higher and
higher, to low water mark; no higher, or they would be dry; no lower,
because they would lack the light. If they have no special organ with
which to perceive the light, it circumfuses, penetrates, permeates
their whole being. The glowing sun of the tropics, which traverses
right through their transparent little frames, seems to have for them
all the irresistible attraction of magnetism. When the tide ebbs and
leaves them uncovered, they, nevertheless, remain open, and drink in
the vivid light.
Dumont d'Urville, who so often coasted among their little isles,
says:--"It is a real pain to see, so near by the peace of that
interior basin, and to see all around shallow waters, beneath which
are the shelving rocks, tenanted by the coral insects, in perfect
security, while we are enduring all the shocks of a raging tempest."
But this amiable community and its edifice are a shoal, a terrible lee
shore, scarcely hidden by the shallow waters; touch upon that shoal
and you will be crushed. Trust not to anchors among those peaked and
jagged rocks; your cables, however good, would soon wear and snap. The
seaman's anxiety is extreme, in those long nights when the Southern
surges drive him among these shoals, at once so rugged and yet as
cutting as razors.
To such accusations as these, our innocent shoal-makers
reply--"Time--give us only time, and these rocks will become
hospitable, tenanted, fruitful. These banks, joined on to their
neighboring banks, will no longer have these terrible threatenings for
the seaman. We are preparing a spare world to replace your old one
should it perish. Ingrates! Come some great and overwhelming
catastrophe to your old world, if, as some one among you has said, the
sea turns from one pole to the other in every ten thousand years, and
you perchance will bless us, and hail with joy these southern isles
which we are making, this huge southern continent that we are
preparing. Confess, now, that if, unhappily, ships do occasionally
perish on these shoals, our work here, nevertheless, is useful, and
good, and great. Our improvised world may not unjustly be proud. To
say nothing about the beauty of its triumphant colors, before which
those of your earth grow pale; to say nothing about the graceful
curves and circles on which we pride ourselves,--how many are the
problems, which, insolvable to you, find their solution among us! The
division of labor, a charming variety combined with a great
regularity, a geometrical order, softened and made graceful and
gracious by a rising liberty--where, among you men, will you find
these so combined as from the beginning we have combined them among
us? Our incessant labor in relieving the sea-water of its salts,
creates those currents which give it life and healthful power. We are
the very spirits of the Sea, giving, as we do, her motion."
"And the sea is not ungrateful; she nourishes us at fixed periods; and
not less punctually comes the glowing sun to caress us and dower us
with brilliant colors. We are the beloved, the favored workers of the
Deity, entrusted by him with the first rude sketches and outlines of
his worlds, and all our juniors upon this globe, need us, and are
indebted to us. Our friend the Cocoa tree, that inaugurates
terrestrial life upon our isle, could not do so but from our dust. In
its far back origin, vegetable life is our liberal gift, and, made
rich by us, it nourishes the superior creation."
"But what need of other animals? We are within our own circle
complete, harmonious and sufficing; with us the circle of creation
might be closed. For as God crowns his isle on his old volcano of
fire, he has created a volcano of life, and expansion of that living
paradise. He has created all that he needs, and now He may repose."
Not yet, not yet. A creation must rise above yours, a thing which you
do not fear. That rival is not the tempest, you would brave it; nor
the fresh water, you would build beside it. It is not even the earth,
which by degrees is invading your constructions. What, then, is that
other power? In yourself, in Polypes, there is an ambition to cease to
be one. In your Republic there is a certain creature who in constant
anxiety and yearning, repeats that the perfection of this vegetating
existence is not real life. It constantly dreams of a freer and more
expanded life, navigating hither and thither, penetrating and viewing
the unknown world even at the hazard of shipwreck;--that thing is--the
Soul.