of the common white butterfly have disported themselves in England,
yet a man might easily starve if he were allowed no food till he had
found some of their fossil remains. The dodo has not long been extinct,
but nevertheless fossil dodos are extremely rare. It may be thought
that the date of extinction has little to do with the matter, and that
each relic when enshrined in the rock, may claim to be by a sort of
indelible character ‘once a fossil and always a fossil.’ This, however,
is in reality far from its true condition. Let a creature’s remains
escape being devoured, or burnt, or trampled to pieces, or being
dissolved by the rain, or crumbled into dust by rolling waves and mud
and stones gathered upon them, their perils are not yet over. Even in
the grasp of the hard rock, the fossil may be horribly distorted by
pressure, split asunder by cleavage, boiled and baked and crystallized,
till none of its features remain what they were, or till the very fact
of its presence becomes only the question of a dim surmise. The rude
jolt of an earthquake, that splits asunder a mountain, may sometimes be
tender over a butterfly’s wing; but there are chemical agencies which
work without any compassion for what is fine and delicate, and by these
we find great thicknesses of rock apparently stripped of their fossils.
Where the whole stratum consists of remains of once living organisms,
as in seams of coal, it has been shown that we have no reason to
suppose that any complete or adequate memorials are left us of the
whole vegetation of any particular period or any particular area; since
Dr. Lindley has found, by actual experiment, that different vegetables
have very different powers of resisting decay, and that pines and
ferns and lycopodia will be well preserved after long immersion in
water, while the same treatment causes the disappearance of grasses and
sedges, of the oak-tree and the ash[61].
Even those rocks which preserve fossils most carefully may themselves
be crumbled to pieces, fossils and all, by the process of denudation.
Denudation is the laying bare of one stratum, or portion of a stratum,
by the removal of another. It is carried on principally by rains and
rivers and the action of the sea-waves upon the sea-border. To the
last-mentioned agency the geologist is highly indebted; to the others
also he owes a debt: but consider how they all do their work. Much
of the material dealt with they pound into mud or sand, and in these
any fragments that escape the trituration are, sooner or later, again
buried. They may tear open the rocks, and expose for a brief period the
most interesting and unique fossils; but, unfortunately, they carry
on their work by night as well as day, on desolate coasts, in places
where the Palæontographical Society has no missionaries, or when the
missionary, if there be one, is in-doors writing a book; so that a very
small percentage of all that might be discovered is ever actually found.
In the artificial denudation of mining and quarrying, though the
rude forces of Nature are dispensed with, the enlightened hammer of
the geologist can do very little by itself. In most cases it can but
follow where commercial enterprise leads the way, and be grateful for
permission to rummage among the _débris_, when pickaxe and blasting
have done their work.
The chances against a fossil’s being found to any useful purpose in
quarrying are very numerous. The rock must chance to split so as to
disclose it; the workman must chance to notice it; he must chance to
have knowledge enough to think it worth notice; have time enough to
stop from his work and take it; have sense enough to keep it safe; have
memory enough to recollect where he hides it; and, lastly, have the
luck to meet with a customer who knows its scientific value.
Numbers of rare specimens must continually be consigned to the furnace
and the limekiln, or buried under mounds and hills of refuse. Sometimes
the character of the matrix, by its hardness or its softness, makes
it impossible to disengage the fossil without complete disfigurement;
sometimes the fossil itself is so fragmentary as rather to confuse than
to teach. Dr. Hooker gives an instance, in which a geologist assigned
three pieces of fossil-leaf to plants of three different genera, which
a subsequent observer maintained to be merely the separated portions of
a single leaf of one and the same plant[62].
In the slates and limestones of Torquay, full as they are of marine
fossils, no fish-remains have been identified, with one exception. Yet
these rocks have been searched by numerous sharp eyes and clever hands,
professional as well as amateur, with regular investigation, and in
the sometimes more successful trifling of idle moments. It is worthy
of note that the one exception is no scarcely decipherable relic, the
nature of which might remain an open question, but a beautiful and
finely-preserved scale of _phyllolepis concentricus_[63]. Had there
been only one fish in the ‘Devonian’ waters of the neighbourhood, the
one fish must have had more than one scale; yet none of the others are
forthcoming. The science of to-morrow may find them; to the science of
to-day they are lost irrecoverably.
The still-living varieties of the oyster are a miserable remnant of
the 255 fossil species from the chalk described in Coquand’s recent
work. Professor Flower, in reviewing this monograph, remarks, that
‘with these mollusks, numerous as they are, there are no forms that can
fairly be recognized as transitional.’ But inasmuch as the succession
in time of these species is well-established by the different zones of
the chalk in which they are found, we must either accept some nine or
ten successive creations concerned in the production of oysters, or we
must allow the various fossil species to be connected with one another
by descent. Upon the latter alternative, a whole chain of transitional
links must once have existed between the earliest form of oyster and
the latest; and though many of these links have been preserved, still
more must have been lost, or deprived of their distinctive features; so
that here, where the geological record is, to all appearance, unusually
perfect, its actual imperfection is more clearly than ever established.
To conclude, then, in few words:--The majority of dead creatures never
become fossils at all.
The majority of fossils perish miserably in their hiding-places.
Of those that are saved, the majority cannot be got at by man.
Of those that can be, the majority never are.
Of those that are, a large number prove illegible; a large number are
fragments; a large number duplicates; and, lastly, a large number fall
into hands which again lose or destroy them.
We cannot therefore argue, because fossils of such-and-such forms of
life have never been found, that such-and-such forms never existed.
They may have existed, and left no fossils. The fossils may have been
left, and subsequently destroyed. The fossils may be undestroyed, but
never have been found. The sum-total of acquisitions is small, but
precious; it never can make a complete record, but it may make one
sufficiently ample to establish the Darwinian Theory, or to replace it
by some still wider and still simpler generalization.
DARWINISM.
THE NOACHIAN FLOOD.
Sir,--A friendly correspondent has done me the honour of noticing my
lecture on the Noachian Flood in more than one contribution to your
columns. The easy way in which he admits the possibility of a partial
deluge and of pre-Adamite races, together with other symptoms of
liberal thought and a trust in the conclusions of science, makes me
tremble to think what would have befallen him had he lived ‘in happier
ages of the Church.’ At the same time these dangerous and lamentable
tendencies towards free-thinking make it needless for me to urge upon
him those other and further conclusions towards which he is evidently
of his own accord rapidly finding his way. But there are numerous
persons who may read his pleasantly-written letters without perceiving
how very far gone he himself is from the original simplicity of an
unquestioning faith, and may, therefore, fancy that he is a champion
of orthodoxy putting down an anti-Scriptural disputant, or showing
at least, if he shows nothing more, that the questions in dispute
are still too unsettled and vague for plain folks to meddle with or
understand. Such a result is directly opposed to that which my lecture
aimed at, which was to show plain folks that the subject not only could
be understood, but ought to be; to convince them, if possible, that on
this subject, and perhaps a few others, they were bound by all the laws
of truth and honesty either to learn what there was to be learned, or
for the future to hold their peace. Two striking examples were quoted,
from the lives of Columbus and Galileo, to show that theologians had
dragged the Holy Scriptures through the dirt, by presuming to use their
authority for a purpose for which it was never designed, in a province
to which it never lays claim, namely, the trial of evidence in natural
science. It seems to have escaped the notice of your correspondent,
that geography and astronomy were no more advanced in those days than
geology and palæontology in our own. But will any one presume to tell
us that the Bible is a match for struggling infant sciences, and may be
quoted to contradict, suppress, and crush them, but that when they are
full-grown it must in turn succumb to their dictation? That is indeed
the principle on which, in the old Greek comedy, the son justifies
his thrashing his aged father, because in bygone years, when their
strength was different, his aged father had thrashed him. Only this, we
must remember, is the invention of an incomparable satirist, meant for
avoidance, not for imitation.
It may be remarked, by the way, that in taking objection to the
opening sentence of the lecture, my friendly opponent seems to have
misconceived its purport. ‘Darwinism implies,’ it says, ‘almost
throughout, that no universal deluge has drowned our globe,
either within the last ten thousand years, or even within a period
indefinitely longer.’ Now, since certainly no Darwinian accepts
the old views about the Deluge, this sentence could scarcely have
been written for the benefit of Darwinians; and it would have
been a very unsophisticated piece of rhetoric to say to a popular
audience--‘Darwinism is true, so you see the old views about the Deluge
are false,’ seeing that the popular audience might have disposed of the
argument by the simple plan of interchanging the two adjectives. But
the lecture opens with an acknowledgment that a recent universal deluge
would be an argument sufficient to upset the Darwinian Theory, prior
to showing that so important an objection to the theory is itself on
numerous independent grounds untenable. Some arguments are equally in
harmony with Darwinism, and inconsistent with the universality of the
Noachian Flood. One of these is to be found in the existing diversities
of the human race: but your correspondent appears to suppose that the
element of time has nothing to do with the theory of development, when
he says that ‘to represent the divergence of races as impossible in any
given period, however short, is strange ground for a Darwinian to take
up.’ He might as well require an engineer to believe that an engine had
been driven at six hundred miles an hour, because the engineer himself
believed it to have been driven at the rate of fifty or sixty. He only
half states the argument against a common Noachian descent founded
on the difference between the Papuans and the Malays. The striking
point is, that these two contrasted races are separated by almost the
very same line which separates two great zoological provinces. On the
old supposition of migration from the ark, that the lower animals, as
well as men, should have ‘agreed to differ’ on the opposite sides of a
narrow deep-sea channel, was indeed a remarkable bundle of coincidences.
That traditions of a deluge are wide-spread is acknowledged. That they
are traditions of a universal deluge neither is nor can be proved.
That with all their local variations and discrepancies they point
to one and the same deluge, is a question of probability, much more
proper to follow than to lead the main argument. We shall not gain much
for science or religion out of the story of Deucalion’s flood, which
attributes the origin of the new stock of men and women to the pebbles
that Deucalion and his wife threw over their shoulders; an ancestry
surely less dignified even than that from the orang-outang and the
gorilla with which Mr. Pengelly and Professor Huxley are supposed to
have mortified the dignity of mankind.
It is surprising that so many good Christian people should feel touchy
on this question of an enormously remote ancestry, although they
would, upon occasion, join with earnestness and true humility in the
confession that ‘dust we are, and unto dust shall we return.’ In their
reluctance even to examine the real truth of the question, they fail
to perceive that the true sons of the Prophets are not their lineal
descendants, but those who inherit their wisdom; and that ‘a man’s a
man for a’ that,’ although his great-grandfather should prove to have
been a lob-worm or a toad-stool.
Too much injury to religion has been done already by confounding false
science with Scriptural truth, to make it either ‘fair or reverent’
to hold back from protesting, whenever occasion offers, against the
mischief. Persons accustomed with presumptuous or careless ignorance
to denounce geology and Darwinism, and the results connected with
them, may have had their consciences soothed and encouraged by your
correspondent. My charitable object is to make those consciences uneasy
again[64].
March 23rd, 1870.
SCIENCE AND RELIGION.
Sir,--One of your correspondents has pithily observed, that if he
has denounced Darwinism, it is simply because he believes it to be
untrue. Could you not, Sir, in the interests of science and Christian
charity, prevail upon him to recall his denunciation, by showing him
that intellectual error requires not to be denounced, but to be set
right? The prejudice against Darwinism has undoubtedly arisen from
a conflict--real or apparent--between its conclusions and certain
passages of Scripture. Such a prejudice arose against the earlier
advancement of astronomy and geology, and the new conclusions arrived
at were ‘denounced in the interests of Christian orthodoxy,’ _simply
because those who denounced them believed them to be untrue._ It is
a little sad, though withal a little amusing, to observe how many
persons, eminent at once for piety and Protestantism, inveigh against
the Papal assumption of infallibility, while assuming an infallibility
of their own. They know precisely what is Scripture doctrine and what
is not. They know exactly what measure of inspiration God has been
pleased to give to this writer or the other. At one time they are
sure that a science is not true, because the Bible does not speak in
accordance with the language of the science; at another time they
discover that the science had all along been very clearly revealed in
the Bible under a disguise. It unfortunately escapes their notice that
by this means, while they are reverently denouncing the science ‘in the
interests of Christian orthodoxy,’ they are under a disguise denouncing
the Bible.
‘In my view,’ says your correspondent above referred to, ‘the Mosaic
writers were divinely taught, and knew what they wrote about with
a most perfect knowledge.’ In one sense, no doubt, they _did_ know
what they were writing about--they knew that it was religion, and,
therefore, they never pretended to ‘enunciate’ science, whether false
or true; but in any other sense to say that they knew what they wrote
about with a most perfect knowledge, is to assert what is highly
improbable, and cannot be proved. Either it makes every writer a
kind of god, so far as the attribute of infallibility is concerned,
or it destroys all independence of testimony. To claim for them a
perfect knowledge of which they made no use, except to mislead the
world for thousands of years, is surely to commit the capital offence
of ‘inciting to hatred and contempt’ of their writings. How alien,
moreover, is it to the spirit of the writers themselves--men who are
constantly confessing their own errors, doubts, and perplexities; men
whose path in moral, let alone intellectual excellence, was not always
direct and straightforward, and who knew and owned their infirmity of
nature. How contrary, too, to every analogy of life is this notion of a
Book, written in perfect language by men of perfect knowledge in every
subject that may be even incidentally referred to in its pages. For
not only is man an imperfect being, but his language is an imperfect
instrument of his imperfect thoughts. His conscience is fallible;
his understanding is fallible; let the Book which guides him be as
infallible as you please, he will still bring it back to the inherent
imperfection of things human by misreading and misconceiving it. That
the law of God is perfect, follows from the very thought of God; that
any particular exposition of that law to finite minds either is or can
be perfect, is almost, or altogether, a contradiction in terms. Far
from knowing all about modern systems of Botany, Moses did not even
know all about religion as the later prophets knew; nor did _they_
know as we know. Their mission would probably have been hidden rather
than forwarded, had they been able to ‘enunciate’ scientific truths in
advance of their age. Their new views in religion were often roundly
abused; their new views in science would hardly have escaped denouncing.
As a caution to the unwary, it should be remarked that the opposition
supposed to exist between Mr. Darwin’s phrase ‘Natural Selection,’ and
Mr. Herbert Spencer’s ‘Survival of the Fittest,’ is purely imaginary.
The latter, no doubt, is the more philosophically accurate, the former
is a convenient, popular, and telling metaphor. They both express
the same conception of a large and wonderful group of facts. Perhaps
it will be scarcely necessary to caution the unwary against taking
for granted that ‘vestigiform structures are proofs of a typical
formation;’ but if they are, they prove that in the typical formation
of man a tail was included, which would be such a disgrace to the
typical formation as would prevent all worthy and decorously-minded
persons from believing in typical formations for a moment.
DARWINISM, AND THE FIRST VERTEBRATE.
Sir,--Your amiable and earnest correspondent does not seem to
understand that men like Darwin and Wallace, who have spent years of
patient labour and thought in amassing observations of nature, and
grouping together the facts out of which their theories have been
formed, have a right to ‘an air of philosophical superiority,’ if they
choose to display it, when questions are asked or arguments put forward
which imply ignorance or misconception of all they have been doing in
the interests of science. When Mr. Wallace ‘very coolly’ asserts that
he sees no force in an argument, it will as a rule be advisable for the
argument either to withdraw itself from the public gaze, or get itself
stated a little more lucidly. Again, when Mr. Darwin ‘rashly affirms
that he has distinct evidence’ of a thing, it would perhaps be a good
plan to get the Commissioners in Lunacy to examine the astonishing
number of hard-headed men whom he induces to believe his unfounded
assertion.
But now that I have prevailed with your correspondent to give up
‘denouncing’ Darwinism, I wish further to press upon him the advantage
of ceasing to ‘deny’ it, and, above all, of ceasing to deny it with
any admixture of religious phraseology in his denial. He has himself
allowed that sciences, seemingly most at variance with the language of
Scripture, have come to be reconciled with it; he must see, therefore,
that the appearances of Scriptural language can be no objection to
Darwinism or to any other scientific theory whatever. Darwinism is
founded on the comparison of an enormous number of well-ascertained
facts issuing in a few generalizations of extreme importance if
true, but also of considerable importance, even if far short of
the truth. Every hypothesis which will explain a large number of
hitherto disconnected facts, though it may be in itself erroneous,
helps and guides men in the end towards the true explanation. To
‘deny,’ or, in other words, to make a public protest against such
hypotheses without having anything better or equal, or a tenth part
as good to offer in their stead, is to be a hinderer of science, and,
instead of being really pious and reverent, is a very pretty, though
doubtless unconscious imitation of that rhetoric which, because of the
acknowledged difficulties in every form of religion, ‘denies’ religion
altogether.
That your correspondent _does_ lay just a little tiny claim to
infallibility is clear from the very letter in which he modestly
disowns it: for he therein prays always to be enabled to think and act
about the interpretation of Scripture as he now thinks and acts, which
would be a foolish prayer, if his present thoughts and actions might
possibly be wrong or misguided. And yet he differs from a very large
number of divines, in supposing that the prophets, for instance, knew
all that their own prophecies portended; so that if all those worthy
divines be right in assuming that the inspired writers did not always
‘know what they wrote about,’ then your correspondent, who makes the
contrary supposition, must be wrong,--and there will still be some hope
for Darwinism.
It is scarcely fair to ask for space to answer his momentous challenge
about the first vertebrate, or to explain the thoroughly sceptical
form which the challenge assumes. When the Apostle Thomas said,
‘except I see the print of the nails, I will not believe,’ he had
no logical claim to receive the proof of the resurrection which he
demanded, because _a priori_ it would have been quite fair to suppose
our Lord’s resurrection-body would retain no such signs of previous
outrage; and it is a kindred mistake to suppose that the truth of
the development-theory in any way hinges upon the possibility of
constructing an effigy of the first vertebrate either as it actually
was, or to suit an anti-Darwinian’s notions of what it ought to have
been. According to the development-theory, it must have been the
product of innumerable antecedent factors, itself the heir of many
far-descended and often modified characters; and yet, for all that, it
will probably have been a far simpler organism than the simplest modern
vertebrate. It is well known by what insensible gradations the natural
kingdoms and the classes in those great divisions pass, so to speak,
into one another; it need, therefore, cause no surprise if the primary
vertebrate of all the vertebrates should prove neither to have been
fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring; but for an actual specimen
of a living vertebrate that can neither ‘swim, crawl, fly, nor walk,’
I cannot do better than refer my philosophical opponent to a new-born
baby.
THE FIRST VERTEBRATE, AND THE BEGINNING OF REASON.