systems: they are the remains of the ancient marine plants of ancient
marine deposits and, as such, lend quite as little support to the
development hypothesis as the recent algæ of our existing seas. The
case, stated in its most favorable form, amounts simply to this,—that
at certain early periods,—represented by the Upper and Lower Silurian
and the Old Red deposits,—the seas produced sea-plants; and that, at
a certain later period,—that of the Carboniferous system,—the land
produced land-plants. But even this, did it stand alone, would be a _too_
favorable statement. I have seen, on one occasion, the fisherman bring
up with his nets, far in the open sea, a wild rose-bush, that, though
it still bore its characteristic thorns, was encrusted with serpula,
and laden with pendulous lobularia. It had been swept from its original
habitat by some river in flood, that had undermined and torn down the
bank on which it grew; and after floating about, mayhap for months, had
become so saturated with water, that it could float no longer. And in
that single rose-bush, dragged up to the light and air from its place
among Sertularia, Flustra, Serpula, and the deep-sea fucoids, I had as
certain an evidence of the existence of the dicotyledonous plant, as if
I had all the families of the Rosaecæ before me. Now, we are furnished
by the more ancient formations with evidence regarding the existence
of a terrestrial vegetation, such as that which the rose-bush in this
case supplied. We cannot expect that the proofs should be numerous. In
the chart of the Pacific attached to the better editions of “Cook’s
Voyages,” there are several notes along the tract of the great navigator,
that indicate where, in mid ocean, trees or fragments of trees had been
picked up. These entries, however, are but few, though they belong to all
the three voyages together: if I remember aright, there are only five
entries in all,—two in the Northern, and three in the Southern Pacific.
The floating shrub or tree, at a great distance from land, is of rare
occurrence in even the present scene of things, though the breadth of
land be great, and trees numerous; and in the times of the Silurian and
Old Red Sandstone systems, when the breadth of land was apparently _not_
great, and trees and shrubs, in consequence, _not_ numerous, it must
have been of rarer occurrence still. We learn, however, from Sir Charles
Lyell, that in the “Hamilton group of the United States,—a series of
beds that corresponds in many of its fossils with the Ludlow rocks of
England,—plants allied to the _Lepidodendra_ of the Carboniferous type
are abundant; and that in the lower Devonian strata of New York the same
plants occur associated with ferns.” And I am able to demonstrate, from
an interesting fossil at present before me, that there existed in the
period of the Lower Old Red Sandstone vegetable forms of a class greatly
higher than either _Lepidodendra_ or ferns.
[Illustration: Fig. 56.
FERN? OF THE LOWER OLD RED SANDSTONE.
(Natural size.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 57.
LIGNITE OF THE LOWER OLD RED SANDSTONE.
(One third nat. size, linear.)]
In my little work on the Old Red Sandstone, I have referred to an
apparent lignite of the Lower Old Red of Cromarty, which presented, when
viewed by the microscope, marks of the internal fibre. The surface,
when under the glass, resembled, I said, a bundle of horse-hairs lying
stretched in parallel lines: and in this specimen alone, it was added,
had I found aught in the Lower Old Red Sandstone approaching to proof of
the existence of dry land. About four years ago I had this lignite put
stringently to the question by Mr. Sanderson, and deeply interesting was
the result. I must first mention, however, that there cannot rest the
shadow of a doubt regarding the place of the organism in the geologic
scale. It is unequivocally a fossil of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. I
found it partially embedded, with many other nodules half-disinterred
by the sea, in an ichthyolitic deposit, a few hundred yards to the
east of the town of Cromarty, which occurs more than four hundred
feet over the Great Conglomerate base of the system. A nodule that
lay immediately beside it contained a well-preserved specimen of the
_Coccosteus Decipiens_; and in the nodule in which the lignite itself
is contained, (fig. 57,) the practised eye may detect a scattered group
of scales of _Diplacanthus_, a scarce less characteristic organism of
the lower formation. And what, asks the reader, is the character of this
very ancient vegetable,—the most ancient, by three whole formations,
that has presented its internal structure to the microscope? Is it as
low in the scale of development as in the geological scale? Does this
venerable Adam of the forest appear, like the Adam of the infidel, as a
squalid, ill-formed savage, with a rugged shaggy nature, which it would
require the suggestive necessities of many ages painfully to lick into
civilization? Or does it appear rather like the Adam of the poet and the
theologian, independent, in its instantaneously-derived perfection, of
all after development?
“Adam, the goodliest man of men since born
His sons.”
Is its tissue vascular or cellular, or, like that of some of the
cryptogamia, intermediate? Or what, in fine, is the nature and bearing
of its mute but emphatic testimony, on that doctrine of progressive
development of late so strangely resuscitated?
In the first place, then, this ancient fossil is a true wood,—a
Dicotyledonous or Polycotyledonous _Gymnosperm_, that, like the pines
and larches of our existing forests, bore naked seeds, which, in their
state of germination, developed either double lobes to shelter the embryo
within, or shot out a fringe of verticillate spikes, which performed
the same protective functions, and that, as it increased in bulk year
after year, received its accessions of growth in outside layers. In
the transverse section the cells bear the reticulated appearance which
distinguish the coniferæ, (fig. 58, _a_;) the lignite had been exposed
in its bed to a considerable degree of pressure; and so the openings
somewhat resemble the meshes of a net that has been drawn a little awry;
but no general obliteration of their original character has taken place,
save in minute patches, where they have been injured by compression or
the bituminizing process. All the tubes indicated by the openings are, as
in recent coniferæ, of nearly the same size; and though, as in many of
the more ancient lignites, there are no indications of annual rings, the
direction of the medullary rays is distinctly traceable. The longitudinal
sections are rather less distinct than the transverse one; in the section
parallel to the radius of the stem or bole the circular disks of the
coniferæ were at first not at all detected; and, as since shown by a
very fine microscope, they appear simply as double and triple lines of
undefined dots, (_b_,) that somewhat resemble the stippled markings
of the miniature painter; nor are the openings of the medullary rays
frequent in the tangental section (_i. e._ that parallel to the bark,)
(_c_;) but nothing can be better defined than the peculiar arrangement
of the woody fibre, and the longitudinal form of the cells. Such is the
character of this, the most ancient of lignites yet found, that yields
to the microscope the peculiarities of its original structure. We find
in it an unfallen _Adam_,—not a half-developed savage.[33]
[Illustration: Fig. 58.
INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF LIGNITE OF LOWER OLD RED SANDSTONE.
a. _Transverse section._
b. _Longitudinal section, (parallel to radius, or medullary rays.)_
c. _Longitudinal section, (tangental, or parallel to the bark.)_
(Mag. forty diameters.)]
The olive leaf which the dove brought to Noah established at least three
important facts, and indicated a few more. It showed most conclusively
that there was dry land, that there were olive trees, and that the
climate of the surrounding region, whatever change it might have
undergone, was still favorable to the development of vegetable life.
And, further, it might be very safely inferred from it, that if olive
trees had survived, other trees and plants must have survived also; and
that the dark muddy prominences round which the ebbing currents were fast
sweeping to lower levels, would soon present, as in antediluvian times,
their coverings of cheerful green. The olive leaf spoke not of merely
a partial, but of a general vegetation. Now, the coniferous lignite of
the Lower Old Red Sandstone we find charged, like the olive leaf, with
a various and singularly interesting evidence. It is something to know,
that in the times of the _Coccosteus_ and _Asterolepis_ there existed dry
land, and that that land wore, as at after periods, its soft, gay mantle
of green. It is something also to know, that the verdant tint was not
owing to a profuse development of the mere immaturities of the vegetable
kingdom,—crisp, slow-growing lichens, or watery spore-propagated fungi
that shoot up to their full size in a night,—nor even to an abundance
of the more highly organized families of the liverworts and the mosses.
These may have abounded then, as now; though we have not a shadow of
evidence that they did. But while we have no proof whatever of _their_
existence, we have conclusive proof that there existed orders and
families of a rank far above them. On the dry land of the Lower Old
Red Sandstone, on which, according to the theory of Adolphe Brogniart,
nothing higher than a lichen or a moss could have been expected, the
ship-carpenter might have hopefully taken axe in hand, to explore the
woods for some such stately pine as the one described by Milton,—
“Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great admiral.”
Viewed simply in its picturesque aspect, this _olive leaf_ of the Old
Red seems not at all devoid of poetry. We sail upwards into the high
geologic zones, passing from ancient to still more ancient scenes of
being; and, as we voyage along, find ever in the surrounding prospect,
as in the existing scene from which we set out, a graceful intermixture
of land and water, continent, river, and sea. We first coast along the
land of the Tertiary, inhabited by the strange quadrupeds of Cuvier,
and waving with the reeds and palms of the Paris Basin; the land of the
Wealden, with its gigantic iguanodon rustling amid its tree ferns and
its cycadeæ, comes next; then comes the green land of the Oolite, with
its little pouched insectivorous quadruped, its flying reptiles, its
vast jungles of the Brora equisetum, and its forests of the Helmsdale
pine; and then, dimly as through a haze, we mark, as we speed on, the
thinly scattered islands of the New Red Sandstone, and pick up in our
course a large floating leaf, veined like that of a cabbage, which not a
little puzzles the botanists of the expedition. And now we near the vast
Carboniferous continent, and see along the undulating outline, between us
and the sky, the strange forms of a vegetation, compared with which that
of every previously seen land seems stunted and poor. We speed day after
day along endless forests, in which gigantic club-mosses wave in air a
hundred feet over head, and skirt interminable marshes, in which thickets
of reeds overtop the mast-head. And, where mighty rivers come rolling to
the sea, we mark, through the long-retiring vistas which they open into
the interior, the higher grounds of the country covered with coniferous
trees, and see doddered trunks of vast size, like those of Granton
and Craigleith, reclining under the banks in deep muddy reaches, with
their decaying tops turned adown the current. At length the furthermost
promontory of this long range of coast comes full in view: we near it,—we
have come up abreast of it: we see the shells of the Mountain Limestone
glittering white along its further shore, and the green depths under our
keel lightened by the flush of innumerable corals; and then, bidding
farewell to the land forever,—for so the geologists of but five years
ago would have advised,—we launch into the unmeasured ocean of the Old
Red, with its three consecutive zones of animal life. Not a single patch
of land more do those geologic charts exhibit which we still regard as
new. The zones of the Silurian and Cambrian succeed the zones of the Old
Red; and, darkly fringed by an obscure bank of cloud ranged along the
last zone in the series, a night that never dissipates settles down upon
the deep. Our voyage, like that of the old fabulous navigators of five
centuries ago, terminates on the sea in a thick darkness, beyond which
there lies no shore and there dawns no light. And it is in the middle of
this vast ocean, just where the last zone of the Old Red leans against
the first zone of the Silurian, that we have succeeded in discovering
a solitary island unseen before,—a shrub-bearing land, much enveloped
in fog, but with hills that at least look green in the distance. There
are patches of floating sea-weed much comminuted by the surf all around
it; and on one projecting headland we see clear through our glasses a
cone-bearing tree.
This certainly is not the sort of arrangement demanded by the exigencies
of the development hypothesis. A true wood at the base of the Old Red
Sandstone, or a true Placoid in the Limestones of Bala, very considerably
beneath the base of the Lower Silurian system, are untoward misplacements
for the purposes of the Lamarckian; and who that has watched the progress
of discovery for the last twenty years, and seen the place of the
earliest ichthyolite transferred from the Carboniferous to the Cambrian
system, and that of the earliest exogenous lignite from the Lias to the
Lower Devonian, will now venture to say that fossil wood may not yet
be detected as low in the scale as any vegetable organism whatever, or
fossil fish as low as the remains of any animal? But though the response
of the earlier geologic systems be thus unfavorable to the development
hypothesis, may not men such as the author of the “Vestiges” urge, that
the geologic evidence, taken as a whole, and in its bearing on groupes
and periods, establishes the general fact that the lower plants and
animals preceded the higher,—that the conifera, for instance, preceded
our true forest trees, such as the oak and elm,—that, in like manner, the
fish preceded the reptile, that the reptile preceded the bird, that the
bird preceded the mammiferous quadruped and the quadrumana, and that the
mammiferous quadruped and the quadrumana preceded man? Assuredly yes!
They may and do urge that Geology furnishes evidence of such a succession
of existences; and the arrangement seems at once a very wonderful and
very beautiful one. Of that great and imposing procession of being of
which this world has been the scene, the programme has been admirably
marshalled. But the order of the arrangement in no degree justifies the
inference based upon it by the Lamarckian. The fact that fishes and
reptiles were created on an earlier day than the beasts of the field
and the human family, gives no ground whatever for the belief that “the
peopling of the earth was one of a natural kind, requiring time,” or that
the reptiles and fishes have been not only the predecessors, but also the
progenitors of the beasts and of man. The geological phenomena, even had
the author of the “Vestiges” been consulted in their arrangement, and
permitted to determine their sequence, would yet have failed to furnish,
not merely an adequate foundation for the development hypothesis,
but even the slightest presumption in its favor. In making good the
assertion, may I ask the reader to follow me through the details of a
simple though somewhat lengthened illustration?
SUPERPOSITION NOT PARENTAL RELATION. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE.
Several thousand years ago, ere the upheaval of the last of our raised
beaches, there existed somewhere on the British coast a submarine bed,
rich in sea-weed and the less destructible zoophytes, and inhabited by
the commoner crustaceæ and molluscs. Shoals of herrings frequented it
every autumn, haunted by their usual enemies the dog-fish, the cod, and
the porpoise; and, during the other seasons of the year, it was swum
over by the ling, the hake, and the turbot. A considerable stream, that
traversed a wide extent of marshy country, waving with flags and reeds,
and in which the frog and the newt bred by millions, entered the sea
a few hundred yards away, and bore down, when in flood, its modicum
of reptilian remains, some of which, sinking over the submarine bed,
found a lodgment at the bottom. Portions of reeds and flags were also
occasionally entombed, with now and then boughs of the pine and juniper,
swept from the higher grounds. Through frequent depositions of earthy
matter brought down by the streamlet, and of sand thrown up by the sea,
a gradual elevation of the bottom went on, till at length the deep-sea
bed came to exist as a shallow bank, over which birds of the wader family
stalked mid-leg deep when plying for food; and on one occasion a small
porpoise, losing his way, and getting entangled amid its shoals, perished
on it, and left his carcass to be covered up by its mud and silt. That
elevation of the land, or recession of the sea, to which the country owes
its last acquired marginal strip of soil, took place, and the shallow
bank became a flat meadow, raised some six or eight feet above the
sea-level. Herbs, shrubs, and trees, in course of time covered it over;
and then, as century succeeded century, it gathered atop a thick stratum
of peaty mould, embedding portions of birch and hazel bushes, and a few
doddered oaks. When in this state, at a comparatively recent period,
an Italian boy, accompanied by his monkey, was passing over it, when
the poor monkey, hard-wrought and ill-fed, and withal but indifferently
suited originally for braving the rigors of a keen northern climate,
lay down and died, and his sorrowing master covered up the remains. Not
many years after, the mutilated corpse of a poor shipwrecked sailor was
thrown up, during a night-storm, on the neighboring beach: it was a mere
fragment of the human frame,—a mouldering unsightly mass, decomposing
in the sun; and a humane herd-boy, scooping out a shallow grave for it,
immediately over that of the monkey, buried it up. Last of all, a farmer,
bent on agricultural improvement, furrowed the flat meadow to the depth
of some six or eight feet, by a broad ditch, that laid open its organic
contents from top to bottom. And then a philosopher of the school of
Maillet and Lamarck, chancing to come that way, stepped aside to examine
the phenomena, and square them with his theory.
First, along the bottom of the deep ditch he detects marine organisms of
a low order, and generally of a small size There are dark indistinct
markings traversing the gray silt which he correctly enough regards
as the remains of fucoids and blent with these, he finds the stony
cells of flustra, the calcareous spindles of the sea-pen, the spines
of echinus, and the thin granular plates of the crustacea. Layers of
mussel and pecten shells come next, mixed up with the shells of buccinum,
natica, and trochus. Over the shells there occur defensive spines of
the dog-fish, blent with the button-like, thornset boucles of the ray.
And the minute skeletons of herrings, with the vertebral and cerebral
bones of cod, rest over these in turn. He finds, also, well-preserved
bits of reed, and a fragment of pine. Higher up, the well-marked bones
of the frog occur, and the minute skeleton of a newt; higher still, the
bones of birds of the diver family; higher still, the skeleton of a
porpoise; and still higher, he discovers that of a monkey, resting amid
the decayed boles and branches of dicotyledonous plants and trees. He
pursues his search, vastly delighted to find his doctrine of progressive
development so beautifully illustrated; and last of all he detects, only
a few inches from the surface, the broken remains of the poor sailor. And
having thus collected his facts, he sets himself to collate them with
his hypothesis. To hold that the zoophytes had been created zoophytes,
the molluscs molluscs, the fishes fishes, the reptiles reptiles, or the
man a man, would be, according to our philosopher, alike derogatory to
the Divine wisdom and to the acumen and vigor of the human intellect: it
would be “_distressing to him to be compelled to picture the power of
God, as put forth in any other manner than in those slow, mysterious,
universal laws, which have so plainly an eternity to work in_;” nor,
with so large an amount of evidence before him as that which the ditch
furnishes,—evidence conclusive to the effect that creation is but
development,—does he find it necessary either to cramp his faculties or
outrage his taste, by a weak yielding to the requirements of any such
belief.
Meanwhile the farmer,—a plain, observant, elderly man, comes up, and
he and the philosopher enter into conversation. “I have been reading
the history of creation in the side of your deep ditch,” says the
philosopher, “and find the record really very complete. Look there,” he
adds, pointing to the unfossiliferous strip that runs along the bottom
of the bank; “there, life, both vegetable and animal, first began. It
began, struck by electricity out of albumen, as a congeries of minute
globe-shaped atoms,—each a hollow sphere within a sphere, as in the
well-known Chinese puzzle; and from these living atoms were all the
higher forms progressively developed. The ditch, of course, exhibits
none of the atoms with which being first commenced; for the atoms don’t
keep;—we merely see their place indicated by that unfossiliferous band
at the bottom; but we may detect immediately over it almost the first
organisms into which—parting thus early into the two great branches of
organic being—they were developed. _There_ are the fucoids, first-born
among vegetables,—and _there_ the zoophytes, well nigh the lowest of the
animal forms. The fucoids are marine plants; for, according to Oken,
‘all life is from the sea,—none from the continent;’ but _there_, a few
feet higher, we may see the remains of reeds and flags,—semi-aqueous,
semi-aerial plants of the comparatively low monocotyledonous order into
which the fucoids were developed; higher still we detect fragments
of pines, and, I think, juniper,—trees and shrubs of the land of an
intermediate order, into which the reeds and flags were developed
in turn; and in that peaty layer immediately beneath the vegetable
mould, there occur boughs and trunks of blackened oak,—a noble tree
of the dicotyledonous division,—the highest to which vegetation in its
upward course has yet attained. Nor is the progress of the other great
branch of organized being—that of the animal kingdom—less distinctly
traceable. The zoophytes became crustacea and molluscs,—the crustacea
and molluscs, dog-fishes and herrings,—the dog-fish, a low placoid,
shot up chiefly into turbot, cod, and ling; but the smaller osseous
fish was gradually converted into a batrachian reptile; in short,
the herring became a frog,—an animal that still testifies to its
ichthyological origin, by commencing life as a fish. Gradually, in
the course of years, the reptile, expanding in size and improving in
faculty, passed into a warm-blooded porpoise; the porpoise at length,
tiring of the water as he began to know better, quitted it altogether,
and became a monkey, and the monkey by slow degrees improved into
man,—yes, into man, my friend, who has still a tendency, especially
when just shooting up to his full stature, and studying the ‘Vestiges,’
to resume the monkey. Such, Sir, is the true history of creation, as
clearly recorded in the section of earth, moss, and silt, which you have
so opportunely laid bare. Where that ditch now opens, the generations
of the man atop lived, died, and were developed. _There_ flourished
and decayed his great-great-great-great-grandfather the sea-pen,—his
great-great-great-grandfather the mussel,—his great-great-grandfather
the herring,—his great-grandfather the frog,—his grandfather the
porpoise,—and his father the monkey. And _there_ also lived, died, and
were developed, the generations of the oak, from the kelp-weed and tangle
to the reed and the flag, and from the reed and the flag, to the pine,
the juniper, the hazel, and the birch.”