the town of Stromness, and walked for several miles along the shores of
the Loch of Stennis,—a large lake about fourteen miles in circumference,
bare and treeless, like all the other lakes and lochs of Orkney, but
picturesque of outline, and divided into an upper and lower sheet of
water by two low, long promontories, that jut out from opposite sides,
and so nearly meet in the middle as to be connected by a thread-like
line of road, half mound, half bridge. “The Loch of Stennis,” says Mr.
David Vedder, the sailor-poet of Orkney, “is a beautiful Mediterranean in
miniature.” It gives admission to the sea by a narrow strait, crossed,
like that which separates the two promontories in the middle, by a
long rustic bridge; and, in consequence of this peculiarity, the lower
division of the lake is salt in its nether reaches and brackish in its
upper ones, while the higher division is merely brackish in its nether
reaches, and fresh enough in its upper ones to be potable. Viewed from
the east, in one of the long, clear, sunshiny evenings of the Orkney
summer, it seems not unworthy the eulogium of Vedder. There are moory
hills and a few rude cottages in front; and in the background, some
eight or ten miles away, the bold, steep mountain masses of Hoy; while
on the promontories of the lake, in the middle distance, conspicuous
in the landscape, from the relief furnished by the blue ground of the
surrounding waters, stand the tall gray obelisks of Stennis—one group on
the northern promontory, the other on the south,—
“Old even beyond tradition’s breath.”
The shores of both the upper and lower divisions of the lake were
strewed, at the time I passed, by a line of _wrack_, consisting, for
the first few miles from where the lower loch opens to the sea, of only
marine plants, then of marine plants mixed with those of fresh-water
growth, and then, in the upper sheet of water, of lacustrine plants
exclusively. And the fauna of the loch is, I was informed, of as mixed a
character as its flora,—the marine and fresh-water animals having each
their own reaches, with certain debatable tracts between, in which each
kind expatiates with more or less freedom, according to its specific
nature and constitution,—some of the sea-fish advancing far on the fresh
water, and others, among the proper denizens of the lake, encroaching
far on the salt. The common fresh-water eel strikes out, I was told,
farthest into the sea-water; in which, indeed, reversing the habits
of the salmon, it is known in various places to deposit its spawn. It
seeks, too, impatient of a low temperature, to escape from the cold of
winter, by taking refuge in water brackish enough, in a climate such
as ours, to resist the influence of frost. Of the marine fish, on the
other hand, I found that the flounder got greatly higher than any of
the others, inhabiting reaches of the lake almost entirely fresh. I
have had an opportunity elsewhere of observing a curious change which
fresh water induces in this fish. In the brackish water of an estuary,
the animal becomes, without diminishing in general size, thicker and
more fleshy than when in its legitimate habitat, the sea: but the flesh
loses in quality what it gains in quantity;—it grows flabby and insipid,
and the margin-fin lacks always its strip of transparent fat. But the
change induced in the two floras of the lake—marine and lacustrine—is
considerably more palpable and obvious than that induced in its two
faunas. As I passed along the strait, through which it gives admission
to the sea, I found the commoner fucoids of our sea-coasts streaming
in great luxuriance in the tideway, from the stones and rocks of the
bottom. I marked, among the others, the two species of kelp-weed, so
well known to our Scotch kelp-burners,—_Fucus nodosus_ and _Fucus
vesiculosus_,—flourishing in their uncurtailed proportions; and the
not inelegant _Halidrys siliquosa_, or “tree in the sea,” presenting
its amplest spread of pod and frond. A little farther in, _Halidrys_
and _Fucus nodosus_ disappear, and _Fucus vesiculosus_ becomes greatly
stunted, and no longer exhibits its characteristic double rows of
bladders. But for mile after mile it continues to exist, blent with some
of the hardier confervæ, until at length it becomes as dwarfish and
nearly as slim of frond as the confervæ themselves; and it is only by
tracing it through the intermediate forms that we succeed in convincing
ourselves that, in the brown stunted tufts of from one to three inches
in length, which continue to fringe the middle reaches of the lake,
we have in reality the well-known Fucus before us. Rushes, flags, and
aquatic grasses may now be seen standing in diminutive tufts out of the
water; and a terrestrial vegetation at least continues to exist, though
it can scarce be said to thrive, on banks covered by the tide at full.
The lacustrine flora increases, both in extent and luxuriance, as that of
the sea diminishes; and in the upper reaches we fail to detect all trace
of marine plants: the algæ, so luxuriant of growth along the straits of
this “miniature Mediterranean,” altogether cease; and a semi-aquatic
vegetation attains, in turn, to the state of fullest development any
where permitted by the temperature of this northern locality. A memoir
descriptive of the Loch of Stennis, and its productions, animal and
vegetable, such as old Gilbert White of Selborne could have produced,
would be at once a very valuable and curious document, important to the
naturalist, and not without its use to the geological student.
I know not how it may be with others; but the special phenomena connected
with Orkney that most decidedly bore fruit in my mind, and to which
my thoughts have most frequently reverted, were those exhibited in
the neighborhood of Stromness. I would more particularly refer to the
characteristic fragment of _Asterolepis_, which I detected in its lower
flagstones, and to the curiously mixed, semi-marine, semi-lacustrine
vegetation of the Loch of Stennis. Both seem to bear very directly on
that development hypothesis,—fast spreading among an active and ingenious
order of minds, both in Britain and America, and which has been long
known on the Continent,—that would fain transfer the work of creation
from the department of miracle to the province of natural law, and would
strike down, in the process of removal, all the old landmarks, ethical
and religious.
THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.
Every individual, whatever its species or order, begins and increases
until it attains to its state of fullest development, under certain
fixed laws, and _in consequence_ of their operation. The microscopic
monad develops into a fœtus, the fœtus into a child, the child into
a man; and, however marvellous the process, in none of its stages is
there the slightest mixture of miracle; from beginning to end, all is
progressive development, according to a determinate order of things.
Has _Nature_, during the vast geologic periods, been pregnant, in like
manner, with the human race? and is the species, like the individual,
an effect of progressive development, induced and regulated by law? The
assertors of the revived hypothesis of Maillet and Lamarck reply in the
affirmative. Nor, be it remarked, is there positive atheism involved in
the belief. God might as certainly have _originated_ the species by a
law of development, as he _maintains_ it by a law of development; the
existence of a First Great Cause is as perfectly compatible with the
one scheme as with the other; and it may be necessary thus broadly to
state the fact, not only in justice to the Lamarckians, but also fairly
to warn their non-geological opponents, that in this contest the old
anti-atheistic arguments, whether founded on the evidence of design, or
on the preliminary doctrine of final causes, cannot be brought to bear.
There are, however, beliefs, in no degree less important to the moralist
or the Christian than even that in the being of a God, which seem wholly
incompatible with the development hypothesis. It, during a period so
vast as to be scarce expressible by figures, the creatures now human
have been rising, by _almost_ infinitesimals, from compound microscopic
cells,—minute vital globules within globules, begot by electricity on
dead gelatinous matter,—until they have at length become the men and
women whom we see around us, we must hold either the monstrous belief,
that all the vitalities, whether those of monads or of mites, of fishes
or of reptiles, of birds or of beasts, are individually and inherently
immortal and undying, or that human souls are _not_ so. The difference
between the dying and the undying,—between the spirit of the brute that
goeth downward, and the spirit of the man that goeth upward,—is not a
difference infinitesimally, or even atomically _small_. It possesses
all the breadth of the eternity to come, and is an _infinitely great_
difference. It cannot, if I may so express myself, be shaded off by
infinitesimals or atoms; for it is a difference which—as there can be
no class of beings intermediate in their nature between the dying and
the undying—admits not of gradation at all. What mind, regulated by the
ordinary principles of human belief, can possibly hold that every one
of the thousand vital points which swim in a drop of stagnant water are
inherently fitted to maintain their individuality throughout eternity? Or
how can it be rationally held that a mere progressive step, in itself no
greater or more important than that effected by the addition of a single
brick to a house in the building state, or of a single atom to a body
in the growing state, could ever have produced immortality? And yet,
if the _spirit_ of a monad or of a mollusc be not immortal, then must
there either have been a point in the history of the species at which
a dying brute—differing from its offspring merely by an inferiority of
development, represented by a few atoms, mayhap by a single atom—produced
an undying man, or man in his present state must be a mere animal,
possessed of no immortal soul, and as irresponsible for his actions to
the God before whose bar he is, in consequence, never to appear, as his
presumed relatives and progenitors the beasts that perish. Nor will it
do to attempt escaping from the difficulty, by alleging that God at some
certain link in the chain _might_ have converted a mortal creature into
an immortal existence, by breathing into it a “living soul;” seeing that
a renunciation of any such direct interference on the part of Deity in
the work of creation forms the prominent and characteristic feature of
the scheme,—nay, that it constitutes the very nucleus round which the
scheme has originated. And thus, though the development theory be not
atheistic, it is at least practically tantamount to atheism. For, if man
be a dying creature, restricted in his existence to the present scene of
things, what does it really matter to him, for any one moral purpose,
whether there be a God or no? If in reality on the same religious level
with the dog, wolf, and fox, that are by nature _atheists_,—a nature most
properly coupled with irresponsibility,—to what one practical purpose
should he know or believe in a God whom he, as certainly as they, is
never to meet as his Judge? or why should he square his conduct by
the requirements of the moral code, farther than a low and convenient
expediency may chance to demand?[6]
Nor does the purely Christian objection to the development hypothesis
seem less, but even more insuperable than that derived from the
province of natural theology. The belief which is perhaps of all others
most fundamentally essential to the revealed scheme of salvation, is
the belief that “God created man upright,” and that man, instead of
proceeding onward and upward from this high and fair beginning, to a yet
higher and fairer standing in the scale of creation, sank and became
morally lost and degraded. And hence the necessity for that second
dispensation of recovery and restoration which forms the entire burden
of God’s revealed message to man. If, according to the development
theory, the progress of the “first Adam” was an upward progress, the
existence of the “second Adam”—that “happier man,” according to Milton,
whose special work it is to “restore” and “regain the blissful seat” of
the lapsed race—is simply a meaningless anomaly. Christianity, if the
development theory be true, is exactly what some of the more extreme
Moderate divines of the last age used to make it—an idle and unsightly
excrescence on a code of morals that would be perfect were it away.
I may be in error in taking this serious view of the matter; and, if so,
would feel grateful to the man who could point out to me that special
link in the chain of inference at which, with respect to the bearing of
the theory on the two theologies—natural and revealed—the mistake has
taken place. But if I be in error at all, it is an error into which I
find not a few of the first men of the age,—represented, as a class, by
our Professor Sedgwicks and Sir David Brewsters,—have also fallen; and
until it be shown to _be_ an error, and that the development theory is in
no degree incompatible with a belief in the immortality of the soul—in
the responsibility of man to God as the final Judge—or in the Christian
scheme of salvation—it is every honest man’s duty to protest against any
_ex parte_ statement of the question, that would insidiously represent
it as ethically an indifferent one, or as unimportant in its theologic
bearing, save to “little religious sects and scientific coteries.” In
an address on the fossil flora, made in September last by a gentleman
of Edinburgh to the St. Andrew’s Horticultural Society, there occurs
the following passage on this subject: “Life is governed by external
conditions, and new conditions imply new races; but then as to their
creation, that is the ‘_mystery of mysteries_.’ Are they created by an
immediate fiat and direct act of the Almighty? or has He originally
impressed life with an elasticity and adaptability, so that it shall
take upon itself new forms and characters, according to the conditions
to which it shall be subjected? Each opinion has had, and still has,
its advocates and opponents; but the truth is, that _science_, so far
as it knows, or rather so far as it has had the honesty and courage to
avow, has yet been unable to pronounce a satisfactory decision. _Either
way, it matters little_, _physically or morally_, either mode implies
the same omnipotence, and wisdom, and foresight, and protection; and it
is only your little religious sects and scientific coteries which make
a pother about the matter,—sects and coteries of which it may be justly
said, that they would almost exclude God from the management of his own
world, if not managed and directed in the way that they would have it.”
Now, this is surely a most unfair representation of the consequences,
ethical and religious involved in the development hypothesis. It is not
its compatibility with belief in the existence of a First Great Cause
that has to be established, in order to prove it harmless; but its
compatibility with certain other all-important beliefs, without which
simple Theism is of no moral value whatever—a belief in the immortality
and responsibility of man, and in the scheme of salvation by a Mediator
and Redeemer. Dissociated from these beliefs, a belief in the existence
of a God is of as little _ethical_ value as a belief in the existence of
the great sea-serpent.
Let us see whether we cannot determine what the testimony of Geology,
on this question of creation by development, really is. It is always
perilous to under-estimate the strength of an enemy; and the danger from
the development hypothesis to an ingenious order of minds, smitten with
the novel fascinations of physical science, has been under-estimated
very considerably indeed. Save by a few studious men, who to the
cultivation of Geology and the cognate branches add some acquaintance
with metaphysical science, the general correspondence of the line of
assault taken up by this new school of infidelity, with that occupied
by the old, and the consequent ability of the assailants to bring, not
only the recently forged, but also the previously employed artillery into
full play along its front, has not only not been marked, but even not
so much as suspected. And yet, in order to show that there actually is
such a correspondence, it can be but necessary to state, that the great
antagonist points in the array of the opposite lines, are simply the
_law_ of development _versus_ the _miracle_ of creation. The evangelistic
Churches cannot, in consistency with their character, or with a due
regard to the interests of their people, slight or overlook a form of
error at once exceedingly plausible and consummately dangerous, and which
is telling so widely on society, that one can scarce travel by railway or
in a steamboat, or encounter a group of intelligent mechanics, without
finding decided trace of its ravages.
But ere the Churches can be prepared competently to deal with it, or with
the other objections of a similar class which the infidelity of an age so
largely engaged as the present in physical pursuits will be from time to
time originating they must greatly extend their educational walks into
the field of physical science. The mighty change which has taken place
during the present century, in the direction in which the minds of the
first order are operating, though indicated on the face of the country in
characters which cannot be mistaken, seems to have too much escaped the
notice of our theologians. Speculative theology and the metaphysics are
cognate branches of the same science; and when, as in the last and the
preceding ages, the higher philosophy of the world was metaphysical, the
Churches took ready cognizance of the fact, and, in due accordance with
the requirements of the time, the battle of the Evidences was fought on
metaphysical ground. But, judging from the preparations made in their
colleges and halls, they do not now seem sufficiently aware—though the
low thunder of every railway, and the snort of every steam engine, and
the whistle of the wind amid the wires of every electric telegraph,
serve to publish the fact—that it is in the departments of physics, not
of metaphysics, that the greater minds of the age are engaged,—that the
Lockes, Humes, Kants, Berkeleys, Dugald Stewarts, and Thomas Browns,
belong to the past,—and that the philosophers of the present time, tall
enough to be seen all the world over, are the Humboldts, the Aragos, the
Agassizes, the Liebigs, the Owens, the Herschels, the Bucklands, and the
Brewsters. In that educational course through which, in this country,
candidates for the ministry pass, in preparation for their office,
I find every group of great minds which has in turn influenced and
directed the mind of Europe for the last three centuries, represented,
more or less adequately, save the last. It is an epitome of all kinds
of learning, with the exception of the kind most imperatively required,
because most in accordance with the genius of the time. The restorers of
classic literature—the Buchanans and Erasmuses—we see represented in our
Universities by the Greek and what are termed the Humanity courses; the
Galileos, Boyles, and Newtons, by the Mathematical and Natural Philosophy
courses; and the Lockes, Kants, Humes, and Berkeleys, by the Metaphysical
course. But the Cuviers, the Huttons, the Cavendishes, and the Watts,
with their successors, the practical philosophers of the present age,—men
whose achievements in physical science we find marked on the surface of
the country in characters which might be read from the moon,—are _not_
adequately represented. It would be perhaps more correct to say, that
they are not represented at all;[7] and the clergy, as a class, suffer
themselves to linger far in the rear of an intelligent and accomplished
laity—a full age behind the requirements of the time. Let them not shut
their eyes to the danger which is obviously coming. The battle of the
Evidences will have as certainly to be fought on the field of physical
science, as it was contested in the last age on that of the metaphysics.
And on this new arena the combatants will have to employ new weapons,
which it will be the privilege of the challenger to choose. The old,
opposed to these, would prove but of little avail. In an age of muskets
and artillery, the bows and arrows of an obsolete school of warfare
would be found greatly less than sufficient, in the field of battle, for
purposes either of assault or defence.
“There are two kinds of generation in the world,” says Professor Lorenz
Oken, in his “Elements of Physio-philosophy;” “the creation proper, and
the propagation that is sequent thereupon—or the _generatio originaria_
and _secundaria_. Consequently, no organism has been created of larger
size than an infusorial point. No organism is, nor ever has one been
created, which is not microscopic. Whatever is larger has not been
created, but developed. Man has not been created, but developed.” Such,
in a few brief dogmatic sentences, is the development theory. What,
in order to establish its truth, or even to render it in some degree
probable, ought to be the geological evidence regarding it? The reply
seems obvious. In the first place, the earlier fossils ought to be very
_small_ in size; in the second, very _low_ in organization. In cutting
into the stony womb of nature, in order to determine what it contained
mayhap millions of ages ago, we must expect, if the development theory
be true, to look upon mere embryos and fœtuses. And if we find, instead,
the full grown and the mature, then must we hold that the testimony of
Geology is not only _not in accordance_ with the theory, but in positive
opposition to it. Such, palpably, is the _principle_ on which, in this
matter, we ought to decide. What are the _facts_?
The oldest organism yet discovered in the most ancient geological
system of Scotland in which vertebrate remains occur, _seems_ to be the
_Asterolepis_ of Stromness. After the explorations of many years over a
wide area, I have detected none other equally low in the system; nor have
I ascertained that any brother-explorer in the same field has been more
fortunate. It is, up to the present time, the most ancient Scotch witness
of the great class of fishes that can in this case be brought into court;
nay, it is in all probability the oldest _ganoid_ witness the world has
yet produced; for there appears no certain trace of this order of fishes
in the great Silurian system which lies underneath, and in which, so far
as geologists yet know, organic existence first began. How, then, on the
two relevant points—bulk and organization—does it answer to the demands
of the development hypothesis? Was it a mere fœtus of the finny tribe,
of minute size, and imperfect, embryonic faculty? Or was it of at least
the ordinary bulk, and, for its class, of the average organization?
May I solicit the forbearance of the non-geological reader, should my
reply to these apparently simple questions seem unnecessarily prolix and
elaborate? Peculiar opportunities of observation, and the possession of
a set of unique fossils, enable me to submit to our palæontologists a
certain amount of information regarding this ancient ganoid, which they
will deem at once interesting and new; and the bearing of my statements
on the general argument will, I trust, become apparent as I proceed.
THE RECENT HISTORY OF THE ASTEROLEPIS. ITS FAMILY.