for the moment converging is the origin of life. There are some who
believe that under certain chemical conditions living creatures are
continually coming into existence, ungenerated by any living parent,
born as it were without birth, acquiring an animated existence, with
powers of motion, feeding, and reproduction, from substances previously
wanting in one or all of these capacities; such creatures, in short,
as, if asked for their parentage, could but answer, each for itself, my
father was an atom, and my mother a molecule. It should be remembered
that the little animals supposed to arise in the manner described first
become visible, if at all, as the tiniest objects that microscopes
can detect. But whether there is or is not in these days a continual
coming into existence of these infinitesimal pigmies, they are just
such productions as the Theory of Development would suppose to have
arisen originally, constituting the first outburst of life upon the
globe, ancestral to the noblest forms of animated nature now extant,
progenitors in an unbroken line of man himself. As a rule, among living
things we find that offspring bear a tolerably exact resemblance
to their parents. The lower the organism the less easy is it to
distinguish specimens of one generation from those of another; and
even in the most highly organized creatures the points of resemblance
generally far outweigh the points of difference between the parents
and their children. In short, under ordinary circumstances, not one
generation only, but a hundred, may pass away without registering
any perceptible alteration in the character of a species. A hundred
generations of mankind would require a period of about three thousand
years. A hundred generations of less important creatures might not
perhaps require even as large a number of hours. But between the two
extremes the necessary periods would bear a kind of ratio to the
perfection of the organism. Variations might now and then follow one
another in quick succession, and then a pause come of a thousand
generations or so before any further changes in the character of a
species.
Such are the conditions under which Mr. Darwin and his followers
believe it possible for the whole sequence of changes to have been
effected, which have ended in peopling the whole earth with a countless
variety of the most diverse forms of life. Many persons are horrified
at the notion of linking together a man and a monkey even by the most
distant ties of consanguinity; what will they say to a genealogy which
begins with an almost invisible speck and ends with a Patagonian
giant--a genealogy which asserts that, through the slow process of
minute changes occurring for the most part at rare intervals, our
fair humanity has been developed or evolved out of creatures which
no unaided human eye could distinguish from the dust on which we
carelessly trample. To some ears such a theory must sound wild and
preposterous beyond all the boundaries of sane and rational thinking.
And, in truth, no censure could be too severe, no ridicule too keen for
so extravagant a piece of folly as this theory must be, if the old and
still prevailing notions about the age of the world have any foundation
in fact. It only begins to be reasonable, if we can afford to stretch
our notions of history from the narrow margin of six thousand to the
broader field of six hundred thousand years, with an indefinite past in
the background.
This vast lapse of time, as commensurate with the existence of the
inhabited globe, is essential to the Theory of Development. It must be
established, as it has been, by independent evidence of its own, before
it can give to that theory its absolutely necessary support. But the
Theory of Development in its turn helps the mind to believe and realize
this enormous lapse of time, with its seemingly never-ending march and
flow, rank upon rank, wave upon wave, by finding work and employment
for all its almost measureless duration. It explains, as it were, why
the drama of life still goes on, why the play was not long ago played
out, and the curtain let fall upon all the busy multitudinous actors.
Time of itself does nothing; but nothing can be done without time.
It is not a personal agent, but a necessary condition. We cannot
even think, much less reason, of things as occurring out of time
and independently of it, any more than we can think or reason of
matter as existing independent of space. Every occurrence takes
time: and yet we may not leap from this fact to the conclusion that
a countless multitude of occurrences will require a vast duration of
time. Professor Tyndal, in his Lecture on the Scientific Use of the
Imagination, refers to waves of light less than 1/50000 of an inch in
length. How many do you suppose of such waves would be required to
compass a mile? How many to accomplish the 185,000 miles which light
travels in a second? Each undulation is a separate occurrence, so that
we have millions of millions of occurrences following one upon another
in a second of time. In studying, therefore, the complete fabric of
the globe, or even of the whole material universe as far as it comes
within our ken, the problem for solution is not whether these great
results could or could not have been brought to pass in an indefinitely
short space of time, in the twinkling of an eye, as one might say, but
whether the space of time employed in their production has actually and
in fact been indefinitely short or indefinitely long. We ought also to
bear in mind that the terms we use when we speak of _long_ and _short_,
are relative not absolute--relative to the duration of our own lives,
or to some other arbitrary standard which we are pleased to set up for
purposes of comparison. Thus a year is long compared with a minute, but
short compared with a millennium; a thousand years would be an enormous
length for the life of a mortal man, but compared with the ceaseless
flow of ages, which we call eternity, this same thousand years becomes,
as it were, an imperceptible speck, less than a drop of water compared
to the Atlantic, a point of time so inconceivably minute, that no human
mind could grasp it as an intelligible unit of measurement. For time,
we have an inexhaustible past on which to draw. Against any given
theory of production, no objection pure and simple that the theory
makes too large a demand upon time, can be maintained. An objection,
to be valid against the existence of life on the earth a million of
years back, must postulate that there was no earth then in existence,
or none capable of supporting life; for if we choose to stand by the
doctrine of final causes, life upon the earth must have begun as soon
as life upon the earth was possible, otherwise we should have a fair
and perfect design with its purpose unaccomplished; or, if we prefer
the Theory of Development carried out to its legitimate consequences,
equally must we admit, that as soon as the earth was fitted for living
creatures, living creatures would be generated upon it.
In tracing back the duration of the globe, the first demand of the
uninitiated will be for the written evidence of historical records. The
popular impression claims to be founded upon such evidence of the most
authoritative description. Little do the upholders of this impression
in general understand that they are building their faith, not upon the
Book of Genesis, or the inspiration of the Hebrew lawgiver, but on
the arithmetical speculations of an Irish archbishop, who lived in the
seventeenth century.
Before we can accept the Hebrew genealogies as competent data for
historical chronology, we must understand the principles on which they
were framed. In ancient languages we have abundant evidence to show
that the ties of blood were not as sharply distinguished as among
ourselves. The same word sufficed to designate son and grandson, and
even the most remote descendant. A man’s heir was called his son;
an usurping successor might receive the same title[43]; and, beyond
all this, it has been shown to have been ‘a common practice with
the Jews to distribute genealogies into divisions, each containing
some favourite or mystical number; and that, in order to do this,
generations were either repeated or left out.’ Some persons, perhaps,
will say, ‘We don’t believe it, or we don’t believe it in regard to
any of the biblical genealogies.’ And yet the very first chapter of
the New Testament is the most conclusive and incontrovertible proof of
the statement; for our Lord’s genealogy[44] is there expressly divided
into three periods of fourteen generations each, and the middle period
has been stripped of three generations in order to bring it down to the
pre-determined number. The names of three well-known princes (Ahaziah,
Joash, Amaziah), whose histories occupy several chapters in the Second
Book of Kings, are omitted, and Amaziah’s son is described, without
further note or comment, as a son begotten by one who was really his
father’s great-grandfather. In a matter so obvious, there cannot attach
to the compiler of the genealogy the very faintest suspicion of bad
faith. He was following the custom of his country, for reasons then
deemed, and perhaps in those days actually being, good and sufficient.
Can we make as satisfactory an apology for men in the present day,
who shut their eyes to the nature of the evidence on which they build
opinions about the age of the world opposed to the discoveries of
science? If in the first century of the Christian era, in times of
comparative enlightenment, by men of approved truth and uprightness,
genealogies could be compiled without the smallest regard being paid
to the actual number of successive generations, it becomes impossible
to attach any value as chronological evidence to Hebrew genealogies
fifteen hundred, or, for all that we can tell, fifteen thousand
years more ancient. Had the genealogy on which this conclusion rests
admitted a chance of error, had there been any motive for fraud in its
construction, did any suspicion lie against its authenticity, the case
would be weakened. But just because there neither was nor could have
been error in the mind of the writer, or deceit in his intention, just
because what he wrote, he wrote deliberately and of set purpose, it is
certain that his record is not, and was never meant to be, a measure
of time; and that those who persist in measuring time by similar
records, are the victims of a manifest delusion, ensnared, it may be
feared in too many cases, with their eyes open.
There is an old jest that, in the pride of antiquity, a Welshman
generally traces back his lineage not only as far as Adam, but a
great deal further. Nothing was easier, before the age of historical
criticism, than for men or nations, whose real origin was lost in
obscurity, to link their names to an illustrious past. Nothing was
easier than to develope the obscurity itself into a long line of remote
ancestors, whose names and virtues could be invented and multiplied
at pleasure. What the poet was only too willing to imagine, the
mathematician seemed able to confirm, by registering astronomical
occurrences in far-distant long-past ages with as much precision as
those which he predicted, and predicted truly, for his own and future
times. The Hindoo chronology reckons the age of the world by millions
of years. The Egyptians twenty centuries ago used to tell of 330
kings of whom they knew no more than the names. There were Greeks who
claimed to be older than the moon; others who anticipated the theory of
_abiogenesis_ by claiming to be sprung from the earth itself without
the intervention of parents; and yet others, who with more modesty
or more pride, as we please to regard it, derived their origin from
gods and demigods. None were willing to be thought new people. The man
of yesterday, the _novus homo_, the upstart, the parvenu, has ever
been disliked and laughed at by society. And in like manner, among
nations, a new rival excites the fears and encounters the ridicule
of the established clique. Claims to antiquity, therefore, were as
advantageous to possess as they were easy to forge. Those that have
been mentioned, being unattested by any corroborative facts, and,
where they are not obviously false, being unsusceptible of proof, are
worthless in themselves. One thing they tend to show, namely, that all
remembrance of the real origin of mankind, and of the date of that
origin, had been absolutely lost to those ancient peoples. From over
the sea, from beyond the mountains, from the bright east or the frozen
north, they might know that their forefathers had made pilgrimage
in distant ages--or they might know of no time, however far back,
when the seat of their habitation had not been occupied by their own
progenitors. In either case their ignorance of primeval history is as
absolute as it is conspicuous. One prevailing tradition, it is true,
is current alike in sacred and profane literature, of a far-off golden
time, an age of simplicity, when man conversed with the beasts of the
field, when the earth brought forth her fruits spontaneously, with
her bosom as yet unvexed by the ploughshare, ere the knowledge or the
discrimination of good and evil had come into the world--the record,
in one word, as all these details tend to prove, of a time before man
had become a moral being; a dim mysterious recollection, almost like a
dream, of a time before the animal nature had been decisively exalted
into humanity.
Some persons believe, against all probability of evidence, that spoken
language was a sudden original inspiration instead of a gradual
invention. None, however, assert the right of believing the same thing
in regard to letters or written language. The progressive origin of
alphabetical signs is admitted on all sides, so that there must have
been a time when man had to trust to his fallible memory instead of
written memoranda. The growth of picture-writing itself must have been
extremely slow, from the difficulty of establishing an agreement as to
the meaning of particular representations. What this difficulty amounts
to may to some extent be tested any day in a picture-gallery, where all
the appliances and skill of modern art are at our service. Without the
aid of a descriptive catalogue, it is but seldom that any two accounts
of the meaning of the same picture would be found to agree. The art of
drawing, it may well be supposed, was not an inspiration. It had to be
invented. The very idea of transmitting a record to future ages would
only occur with the advance of civilization. The crumbling surface of
the rock, the decaying bark of trees, would be the first perishable and
soon obliterated manuscripts. Before account could be taken of months
and years, astronomy must have made some progress. Before the flow of
centuries could be accurately noted, arithmetic must have advanced
far beyond the stage at which we still find it among numerous savage
nations. An Esquimaux couple, it is said, find it difficult to count
their own children, even when they are no more than four or five[45].
From these considerations alone we may feel perfectly certain that
numbers of ages elapsed before men acquired the means of recording
the duration of time by any definite measurements. Unconsciously and
without set purpose, perhaps the very earliest tribes and the most
untutored have left behind them traces not only of their existence but
of the date and era at which they lived; traces which we are only now
beginning to decipher, and to read with faltering lips.
All around us in England, in Devonshire, in Torquay, and all over the
globe, lie the memorials of human beings, of whose day and generation
the oldest historical records we possess know absolutely nothing. Here
and there the tale is told by a heap of shells. From such heaps we know
what dishes were served at the Dane’s dinner-table, at a time when
cereal crops were unknown in Denmark, and sea-weed was used instead of
salt[46]. Oysters and cockles, mussels and periwinkles, seem to have
been _ad libitum_; the stag, the roe-deer, and the wild boar were at
the service of that ancient Dane as often as he could catch them with
his weapons of wood, stone, horn, or bone[47]; when pork and venison
were scarce, his palate could content itself with dog or fox. From the
waters of the mountain-lake, from the centre of the high-piled barrow,
in the circles of giant stones upon broad-stretching plain or wild
moorland, from peat-moss and railway-cutting and limestone cavern,
we obtain, as Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Pengelly and others have so
well shown, the unwritten records of prehistoric man, of human beings
unnoticed in any credible history, and preceding all well-established
definite historical dates whether of sacred or profane literature.
Who reared the Titanic monuments of Stonehenge and Abury we know
not. We know not who constructed the extraordinary animal-mounds of
Wisconsin in North America--mounds hundreds of feet long, reared a
few feet above the level plains, in the figures of men and beasts and
birds and reptiles. These monuments, if such they were intended to be,
must have demanded prodigious industry for their construction. They
imply a considerable population, and some advance in artistic skill.
But why they were designed, and who designed them, are circumstances
alike unknown. It is necessary to press home this argument founded
upon our ignorance, and to dwell upon it with some emphasis, because
numbers of persons are pleased to imagine and assert that, within two
or three thousand years before the Christian era, the whole human
population of the globe was as it were still in the bud, and that from
a single family, not mustering a dozen members to start with, all its
tribes have since then been derived, with their endless diversities of
features, hair, complexion, customs, tastes, and other qualities both
of mind and body. According to the old chronology we are to suppose
that within this limited space of time, from under a single roof, the
children went forth, spreading over all lands, not only miraculously
forgetting the common ancestral language, but forgetting the arts, the
traditions, the sentiments, which they had in common, retrograding in
some cases into a savage ferocity or an almost imbecile simplicity,
in others retaining or developing forms of an advanced civilization.
Esquimaux and Hottentots, Japanese and Red Indians, the Negro and
the Greek, are thus united in ties of cousinship by no means remote.
Arts, monuments, and modes of life essentially different in spirit and
character are supposed, within these narrow bounds of time, to have
sprung up; nor only to have sprung up, but to have passed away, leaving
only a few faint vestiges to recall the artists, the heroes, the
lawgivers, the national temper, the genius of the time, whereunto they
owed their existence. It must surely be allowed that marriage customs
change with slow reluctance; an alteration of the sentiment with which
women are regarded is not easily or quickly produced. Yet on no subject
are the practices and opinions of mankind more widely diversified.
One wife to one husband is in some places the rule; but in others,
one husband to many wives, one wife to many husbands, or husbands
and wives without any special appropriation, which some societies
consider a selfish infringement of the general right. According to the
customs of different nations, wives must be fought for, or stolen,
or purchased, or caught in a race, or wooed and won with pin-money
and other endearments. According to the feeling of different races,
the wife is a chattel, a beast of burden, a slave, a stewardess, a
domestic ornament, an equal, or a master[48]. Let it be granted that
many of these customs and sentiments may have been contemporaneous in
their growth or development, the same thing cannot be admitted of the
different centres of colonization in which they grew and developed. Men
do not without cause quit their ancestral homes to found colonies in
remote parts of the world; and the causes only arise at intervals. When
the cause has arisen, and the new settlement been occupied, the exiles
retain for the most part, and long retain in affectionate remembrance
the manners and customs, the religion and laws, of the mother-country;
or when the remembrance is other than affectionate, they retain them
from the want of an alternative, from the conservatism in which all men
to a greater or less degree participate, from the incapacity of the
human mind to strike out new customs, or revolutionize ideas, except by
a gradual and half-unconscious progression.
Among the visible and tangible proofs of man’s and the earth’s
antiquity, few are more interesting than those presented in the
section, well known to geologists, cut by the railway through the delta
of the Tinière, a torrent flowing into the Lake of Geneva[49]. Three
layers of vegetable soil appear in the section, at depths of four and
ten and nineteen feet respectively below the present surface. These
layers contained distinctive relics. In the first were found ‘Roman
tiles and a coin,’ in the second ‘fragments of unvarnished pottery,
and a pair of tweezers in bronze;’ in the third, ‘fragments of rude
pottery, pieces of charcoal, broken bones, and a human skeleton having
a small, round, and very thick skull.’ The thick-headed owner of that
skull is computed to have lived, at the lowest estimate, about five
thousand years ago. But the cone of the delta began to be formed long
before the man was buried in it, and higher up the stream another cone
is found about twelve times as large, requiring therefore a time for
its formation about twelve times as long, unless we have recourse to
that miserable refuge for the destitute in argument, which consists in
supposing that causes now slow and comparatively regular, operated in
former times with an incomparably greater speed and a more spasmodic
violence, of which no trace remains, nor likelihood appears in the
record. In a word, we may infer that, so far from the shapely order and
decorous arrangement of the earth’s surface being only six thousand
years old, it has taken no less than fifty or a hundred thousand years
to pile up this one little heap of mud and gravel. The age of human
works buried under the fertilizing sediment of the stately Nile is much
disputed, but there can be little doubt, if we take into consideration
the ancient fluviatile deposits in terraces sometimes hundreds of
feet above the present alluvial plain, that the long-unknown sources
of the mysterious river have produced ten myriad repetitions of the
annual overflow, pouring down its waters to the sea through a thousand
centuries.[50]