a wag. It would take a great deal of believing to believe all that.
In the days of my poor old neighbor the infidel weaver, who died of
_delirium tremens_ thirty years ago, I used to read Tom Paine; and, as I
was a little wild at the time, I was, I am afraid, a bit of a sceptic.
It wasn’t easy work always to be as unbelieving as Tom, especially when
the conscience within got queasy; but it would be a vast deal easier,
Master, to _doubt_ with Tom than to _believe_ with you. I am a plain
man, but not quite a fool; and as I have now been looking about me in
this neighborhood for the last forty years, I have come to know that it
gives no assurance that any one thing grew out of any other thing because
it chances to be found atop of it, Master. See, yonder is Dobbin lying
lazily atop of his bundle of hay; and yonder little Jack, with bridle in
hand, and he in a few minutes will be atop of Dobbin. And all I see in
that ditch, Master, from top to bottom, is neither more nor less than a
certain top-upon-bottom order of things. I see sets of bones and dead
plants lying on the top of other sets of bones and dead plants,—things
lying atop of things, as I say, like Dobbin on the hay and Jack upon
Dobbin. I doubt not the sea was once here, Master, just as it was once
where you see the low-lying field yonder, which I won from it ten years
ago. I have carted tangle and kelp-weed where I now cut clover and
rye-grass, and have gathered periwinkles where I now see snails. But it
is _clean against experience_, as my poor old neighbor the weaver used
to say,—against _my_ experience, Master,—that it was the kelp-weed that
became the rye-grass, or that the periwinkles freshened into snails.
The kelp-weed and periwinkles belong to those plants and animals of the
sea that we find growing in _only_ the sea; the rye-grass and snails,
to those plants and animals of the land that we find growing on _only_
the land. It is contrary to all experience, and all testimony too, that
the one passed into the other, and so I cannot believe it; but I do
and must believe, instead,—for it is not contrary to experience, and
much according to testimony,—that the Author of all created both land
productions and sea productions at the ‘times before appointed,’ and
‘determined the bounds of their habitation.’ ‘By faith we understand
that the worlds were framed by the word of God;’ and I find I can be
a believer on God’s terms at a much less expense of credulity than an
infidel on yours.”
But in this form at least it can be scarce necessary that the argument
should be prolonged.
The geological phenomena, I repeat, even had the author of the “Vestiges”
been consulted in their arrangement, and permitted to determine their
sequence, would fail to furnish a single presumption in favor of the
development hypothesis. Does the ditch-side of my illustration furnish it
with a single favoring presumption? The arrangement and sequence of the
various organisms are complete in both the zoological and phytological
branch. The flag and reed succeed the fucoid; the fir and juniper succeed
the flag and reed; and the hazel, birch, and oak succeed the fir and
juniper. In like manner, and with equal regularity, zoophytes, the
radiata, the articulata, mollusca, fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals,
are ranged, the superior in succession over the inferior classes, in
the true ascending order; and yet we at once see that the evidence of
the ditch-side, amounting in the aggregate to no more than this, that
the remains of the higher lie over those of the lower organisms, gives
not a shadow of support to the hypothesis that the lower produced the
higher. For, according to the honest farmer, the fact that any one thing
is found lying on the top of any other thing, furnishes no presumption
whatever that the thing below stands in the relation of parent to
the thing above. And the evidence which the well-ranged organisms of
the ditch-side do not furnish, the organisms of the entire geologic
scale, even were they equally well ranged, would fail to supply. The
fossiliferous portion of the ditch-side of my illustration may be, let us
suppose, some five or six _feet_ in thickness; the fossiliferous portion
of the earth’s crust must be some five or six _miles_ in thickness.
But the mere circumstance of space introduces no new element into
the question. Equally in both cases the fact of superposition is not
_identical_ with the fact of parental relation, nor even in any degree an
_analogous_ fact.
As, however, the succession of remains in the fossiliferous series of
rocks is infinitely less favorable to the development hypothesis than
that of the organisms of the ditch-side, it is not very surprising
that the disciples of the development school should be now evincing a
disposition to escape from the ascertained facts of Geology, and the
legitimate conclusions based upon these, unto unknown and unexplored
provinces of the science; or that they should be found virtually urging,
that though some of the ascertained facts may seem to bear against them,
the facts not yet ascertained may be found telling in their favor.
Such, in effect, is the course taken by the author of the “Vestiges,”
in his “Explanations,” when, availing himself of a difference of
opinion which exists among some of our most accomplished geologists
regarding the first epochs of organized existence, he takes part with
the section who hold that we have not yet penetrated to the deposits
representative of the dawn of being, and that fossil-charged formations
may yet be detected beneath the oldest rocks of what is now regarded
as the lowest fossiliferous system. Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Leonard
Hornet represent the abler and better-known assertors of this last view;
while Sir Roderick Murchison and Professor Sedgwick rank among the more
distinguished assertors of the antagonist one. It would be of course
utterly presumptuous in the writer of these pages to attempt deciding
a question regarding which such men differ; but in forming a judgment
for myself, various considerations incline me to hold, that the point
is now very nearly determined at which, to employ the language of Sir
Roderick, “life was first breathed into the waters.” The pyramid of
organized existence, as it ascends in the by-past eternity, inclines
sensibly towards its apex,—that apex of “_beginning_” in which, on
far other than geological grounds, it is our privilege to believe.
The broad base of the superstructure, planted on the existing _now_,
stretches across the entire scale of life, animal and vegetable; but it
contracts as it rises into the past;—man—the quadrumana—the quadrupedal
mammal—the bird—and the reptile—are each in succession struck from off
its breadth, till we at length see it with the vertebrata, represented
by only the fish, narrowing, as it were, to a point; and though the
clouds of the upper region may hide its extreme apex, we infer from the
declination of its sides, that it cannot penetrate much farther into the
profound. When Steele and Addison were engaged in breaking up, piecemeal,
their Spectator Club,—killing off good Sir Roger de Coverly with a
defluction, marrying Will Honeycomb to his tenant’s daughter, and sending
away Captain Sentry and Sir Andrew Freeport to their estates to the
country,—it was shrewdly inferred that the “Spectator” himself was very
soon to quit the field; and the sudden discontinuance of his lucubrations
justified the inference. And a corresponding style of reasoning, based
on the corresponding fact of the breaking up and piecemeal disappearance
of the group of organized being, seems equally admissible. It is
somewhat difficult to conceive how at least _many_ more volumes of the
geologic record than the known ones could be got up without the _club_.
Further,—so far as yet appears, the fish must have lived in advance of
the reptile during the three protracted periods of the Old Red Sandstone,
the two still more protracted periods of the Upper and Lower Silurians,
and the perhaps more protracted period still of the Cambrian deposits;—in
all, apparently, a greatly more extended space than that in which the
reptile lived in advance of the quadrupedal mammal, or the quadrupedal
mammal lived in advance of man. On principles somewhat similar to those
on which, with reference to the average term of life, the genealogist
fixes the probable period of some birth in his chain of succession of
which he cannot determine the exact date, it seems natural to infer that
the _birth_ of the fish should have taken place at least not earlier than
the times of the Cambrian system.
There is another consideration, of at least equal, if not greater
weight. A general correspondence is found to obtain in widely-separated
localities, in the organic contents of that lowest band of the Lower
Silurian or Cambrian system in which fossils have been detected. In
Russia, in Sweden, in Norway, in the Lake district of England, and in
the United States, there are certain rocks which occupy relatively
the same place, and enclose what may be described generally as the
same remains. They occur in Scandinavia as that “fucoidal band” of Sir
Roderick Murchison which forms the base of the vast Palæozoic basin of
the Baltic; they exist in Cumberland and Westmoreland as the Skiddaw
slates of Professor Sedgwick, and bear also their fucoidal impressions,
blent with graptolites; they are present in North America as those
Potsdam sandstones of the States’ geologists in which fucoids so abound,
mixed with a minute lingula, that they impart to some portions of the
strata a carboniferous character. But with these deep-lying beds in
all the several localities, thousands of miles apart, in which their
passage into the inferior deposits has been traced, fossils cease. And
why cease with them? In one locality the ancient ocean may have been of
such a depth in the period immediately _previous_, and represented, in
consequence, by the strata immediately _beneath_, that no animal could
have _lived_ at its bottom,—though I do not well see why the remains
of those animals who, like the shark and pilot-fish, are frequently
seen swimming over the profoundest depths, might not, did such exist
at the time, be notwithstanding _found_ at its bottom; or in another
locality every trace of organization in the nether rocks may have been
obliterated, at some posterior period, by fire. But it is difficult to
imagine that that uniform cessation of organized life at one point, which
seems to have conducted Sir Roderick Murchison and Professor Sedgwick
to their conclusion, should have been thus a mere effect of accident.
Accident has its laws, but uniformity is not one of them; and should the
experience be invariable, as it already seems extensive, that immediately
beneath the fucoidal beds organic remains cease, I do not see how the
conclusion is to be avoided, that they represent the period in which at
least _existences capable of preservation_ were first introduced. Every
case of coincident cessation which has occurred since the determination
of the second case, must be reckoned, not simply as an additional
unit in evidence, but, on the principles which determine mathematical
probability, as a unit multiplied first by the chances against its
occurrence, regarded as a mere contingency in that exact formation, and
second, by the sum of all the previous occurrences at the same point.
In this curious question, however, which it must be the part of future
explorers in the geological field definitely to settle, the Lamarckian
can have no legitimate stake. It is but natural that, in his anxiety to
secure an ultimate retreat for his hypothesis, he should desire to see
that darkness in which ghosts love to walk settling down on the extreme
verge of the geological horizon, and enveloping in its folds the first
beginnings of life. But even did the cloud exist, it is, if I may so
express myself, on its nearer side, where there is light,—not within nor
beyond it, where there is none,—that the battle must be fought. It is to
Geology _as it is known to be_, that the Lamarckian has appealed,—not
to Geology as it is _not_ known to be. He has summoned into court
_existing_ witnesses; and, finding their testimony unfavorable, he seeks
to neutralize their evidence by calling from the “vasty deep,” of the
unexamined and the obscure, witnesses that “won’t come,”—that by the
legitimate authorities are not known even to exist,—and with which he
himself is, on his own confession, wholly unacquainted, save in the old
scholastic character of mere possibilities. The _possible_ fossil can
have no more standing in this controversy than the “_possible angel_.”
He tells us that we have not yet got down to that base-line of all the
fossiliferous systems at which life first began; and very possibly we
have not. But what of that? He has carried his appeal to Geology _as it
is_;—he has referred his case to the testimony of the _known_ witnesses,
for in no case can the _unknown_ ones be summoned or produced. It is on
the evidence of the known, and the known only, that the exact value of
his claims must be determined; and his appeal to the unknown serves but
to show how thoroughly he himself feels that the actually ascertained
evidence bears against him. The severe censure of Johnson on reasoners of
this class is in no degree over-severe. “He who will determine,” said the
moralist, “against that which he knows, because there may be something
which he knows not,—he that can set hypothetical possibility against
acknowledged certainty,—is not to be admitted among reasonable beings.”
But the honest farmer’s reminiscences of his deceased neighbor the
weaver, and his use at second-hand of Hume’s experience-argument,
naturally lead me to another branch of the subject.
LAMARCKIAN HYPOTHESIS OF THE ORIGIN OF PLANTS. ITS CONSEQUENCES.
I have said that the curiously-mixed, semi-marine, semi-lacustrine flora
of the Lake of Stennis became associated in my mind, like the ancient
_Asterolepis_ of Stromness, with the development hypothesis. The fossil,
as has been shown, represents not inadequately the geologic evidence in
the question,—the mixed vegetation of the lake may be regarded as forming
a portion of the phytological evidence.
“All life,” says Oken, “is from the sea. Where the sea organism, by
self-elevation, succeeds in attaining into form, there issues forth
from it a higher organism. Love arose out of the sea-foam. The primary
mucus (that in which electricity originates life) was, and is still,
generated in those very parts of the sea where the water is in contact
with earth and air, and thus upon the shores. The first creation of the
organic took place where the first mountain summits projected out of the
water,—indeed, without doubt, in India, if the Himalaya be the highest
mountain. _The first organic forms, whether plants or animals, emerged
from the shallow parts of the sea._” Maillet wrote to exactly the same
effect a full century ago. “In a word,” we find him saying, in his
“Telliamed,” “do not herbs, plants, roots, grains, and all of this kind
that the earth produces and nourishes, come from the sea? Is it not at
least natural to think so, since we are certain that all our habitable
lands came originally from the sea? Besides, in small islands far from
the continent, which have appeared but a few ages ago at most, and where
it is manifest that never any man had been, we find shrubs, herbs, roots,
and sometimes animals. Now, you must be forced to own either that these
productions owed their origin to the sea, or to a new creation, which is
absurd.”
It is a curious fact, to which, in the passing, I must be permitted to
call the attention of the reader, that all the leading assertors of the
development hypothesis have been bad geologists. Maillet had for his
errors and deficiencies the excellent apology that he wrote more than
a hundred years ago, when the theory of a universal ocean, promulgated
by Leibnitz nearly a century earlier, was quite as good as any of the
other theories of the time, and when Geology, as a science, had no
existence. And so we do not wonder at an ignorance which was simply that
of his age, when we find him telling his readers that plants _must_
have originated in the sea, seeing that “all our habitable lands came
originally from the sea;” meaning, of course, by the statement, not at
all what the modern geologist would mean were he to employ even the same
words, but simply that there was a time when the universal ocean covered
the whole globe, and that, as the waters gradually diminished, the
loftier mountain summits and higher table-lands, in appearing in their
new character as islands and continents, derived their flora from what,
in a universal ocean could be the only possible existing flora,—that
of the sea. But what shall we say of the equally profound ignorance
manifested by Professor Oken, a living authority, whom we find prefacing
for the Ray Society, in 1847, the English translation of his “Elements
of Physio-philosophy?” “The first creation of the organic took place,”
we find him saying, “where the first mountain summits projected out
of the sea,—_indeed, without doubt, in India, if the Himalaya be the
highest mountain_.” Here, evidently, in this late age of the world, in
which Geology _does_ exist as a science, do we find the ghost of the
universal ocean of Leibnitz walking once more, as if it had never been
laid. Is there now in all Britain even a tyro geologist so unacquainted
with geological fact as not to know that the richest flora which the
globe ever saw had existed for myriads of ages, and then, becoming
extinct, had slept in the fossil state for myriads of ages more, ere
the highest summits of the Himalayan range rose over the surface of the
deep? The Himalayas disturbed, and bore up along with them in their
upheaval, vast beds of the Oolitic system. Belemnites and ammonites have
been dug out of their sides along the line of perpetual snow, seventeen
thousand feet over the level of the sea. What in the recent period form
the loftiest mountains of the globe, existed as portions of a deep-sea
bottom, swum over by the fishes and reptiles of the great Secondary
period, when what is now Scotland had its dark forests of stately
pine,—represented in the present age of the world by the lignites of
Helmsdale, Eathie, and Eigg,—and when the plants of a former creation
lay dead and buried deep beneath, in shales and fire-clay,—existing as
vast beds of coal, or entombed in solid rock, as the brown massy trunks
of Granton and Craigleith. And even ere these last existed as living
trees, the coniferous lignite of the Lower Old Red Sandstone found at
Cromarty had passed into the fossil state, and lay as a semi-calcareous,
semi-bituminous mass, amid perished _Dipterians_ and extinct _Coccostei_.
So much for the Geology of the German Professor. And be it remarked,
that the _actualities_ in this question can be determined by only the
geologist. The mere naturalist may indicate from the analogies of his
science, what possibly _might_ have taken place, but what really _did_
take place, and the true order in which the events occurred, it is the
part of the geologist to determine. It cannot be out of place to remark,
further, that geological discovery is in no degree responsible for the
infidelity of the development hypothesis; seeing that, in the first
place, the hypothesis _is greatly more ancient than the discoveries_,
and, in the second, that its more prominent assertors are _exactly the
men who know least of geological fact_. But to this special point I shall
again refer.
The author of the “Vestiges” is at one, regarding the supposed marine
origin of terrestrial plants, with Maillet and Oken; and he regards the
theory, we find him stating in his “Explanations,” as the true key to
the well-established fact, that the vegetation of groupes of islands
generally corresponds with that of the larger masses of land in their
neighborhood. Marine plants of the same kinds crept out of the sea, it
would seem, upon the islands on the one hand, and upon the larger masses
of land on the other, and thus produced the same flora in each; just as
tadpoles, after passing their transition state, creep out of their canal
or river on the opposite banks, and thus give to the fields or meadows on
the right-hand side a supply of frogs, of the same appearance and size
as those poured out upon the fields and meadows of the left. “Thus, for
example,” we find him saying, “the Galapagos exhibit general characters
in common with South America; and the Cape de Verd islands, with Africa.
They are, in Mr. Darwin’s happy phrase, satellites to those continents,
in respect of natural history. Again,” he continues, “when masses of
land are only divided from each other by narrow seas, there is usually a
community of forms. The European and African shores of the Mediterranean
present an example. Our own islands afford another of far higher value.
It appears that the flora of Ireland and Great Britain is various, or
rather that we have five floras or distinct sets of plants, and that
each of these is partaken of by a portion of the opposite continent.
There are, first, a flora confined to the west of Ireland, and imparted
likewise to the north-west of Spain; second, a flora in the south-west
promontory of England and of Ireland, extending across the Channel to
the north-west coast of France; third, one common to the south-east
of England and north of France; fourth, an Alpine flora developed in
the Scottish and Welsh Highlands, and intimately related to that of
the Norwegian Alps; fifth, a flora which prevails over a large part of
England and Ireland, ‘mingled with other floras, and diminishing slightly
as we proceed westward:’ this bears intimate relation with the flora
of Germany. Facts so remarkable would force the meanest fact-collector
or species-demonstrator into generalization. The really ingenious man
who lately brought them under notice (Professor Edward Forbes) could
only surmise, as their explanation, that the spaces now occupied by the
intermediate seas must have been dry land at the time when these floras
were created. In that case, either the original arrangement of the
floras, or the selection of land for submergence, must have been apposite
to the case in a degree far from usual. The necessity for a simpler cause
is obvious, and it is found in the hypothesis of a _spread of terrestrial
vegetation from the sea into the lands adjacent_. The community of forms
in the various regions opposed to each other merely indicates a distinct
marine creation in each of the oceanic areas respectively interposed, and
which would naturally advance into the lands nearest to it, as far as
circumstances of soil and climate were found agreeable.”
Such, regarding the origin of terrestrial vegetation, are the views
of Maillet, Oken, and the author of the “Vestiges.” They all agree in
holding that the plants of the land existed in their first condition as
weeds of the sea.