consideration of the experience-argument, to remark a few incidental,
but by no means unimportant, consequences of the belief. And, first, let
him weigh for a moment the comparative demands on his credulity of the
theory by which Professor Forbes accounts for the various floras of the
British Islands, and that hypothesis of transmutation which the author of
the “Vestiges” would so fain put in its place, as greatly more simple,
and, of course, more in accordance with the principles of human belief.
In order to the reception of the Professor’s theory, it is necessary to
hold, in the first place, that the creation of each species of plant
took place, not by repetition of production in various widely-separated
centres, but in some single centre, from which the species propagated
itself by seed, bud, or scion, across the special area which it is now
found to occupy. And this, in the first instance, is of course as much an
assumption as any of those assumed numbers or assumed lines with which,
in algebra and the mathematics, it is necessary in so many calculations
to set out, in quest of some required number or line, which, without the
assistance of the assumed ones, we might despair of ever finding. But
the assumption is in itself neither unnatural nor violent; there are
various very remarkable analogies which lend it support; the facts which
seem least to harmonize with it are not wholly irreconcilable, and are,
besides, of a merely exceptional character; and, further, it has been
adopted by botanists of the highest standing.[34] It is necessary to
hold, in the second place, in order to the reception of the theory, that
the area of the earth’s surface occupied by the British Islands and the
neighboring coasts of the Continent once stood fifty fathoms higher, in
relation to the existing sea-level, than it does now,—a belief which,
whatever its specific grounds or standing in this particular case, is
at least in strict accordance with the general geological phenomena of
subsidence and elevation, and which, so far from outraging any experience
founded on observation or testimony, runs in the same track with what
is known of wide areas now in the course of sinking, like that on the
Italian coast, in which the Bay of Baiæ and the ruins of the temple of
Serapis occur, or that in Asia, which includes the Run of Cutch; or of
what is known of areas in the course of rising, like part of the coast
of Sweden, or part of the coast of South America, or in Asia along the
western shores of Aracan. Whereas, in order to close with the _simpler_
antagonistic belief of the author of the “Vestiges,” it is necessary
to hold, _contrary_ to all experience, that _dulce_ and _henware_[35]
became, through a very wonderful metamorphosis, cabbage and spinnage;
that kelp-weed and tangle bourgeoned into oaks and willows; and that
_slack_, _rope-weed_, and _green-raw_,[36] shot up into mangel-wurzel,
rye-grass, and clover. _Simple_, certainly! An infidel on terms such
as these could with no propriety be regarded as an _unbeliever_. It is
well that the New Testament makes no such extraordinary demands on human
credulity.
Let us remark further, at this stage, that, judging from the generally
received geological evidence in the case, very little time seems to be
allowed by the author of the “Vestiges” for that miraculous process of
transmutation through which the low algæ of our sea-shores are held to
have passed into high orders of plants which constitute the prevailing
British flora. The boulder clay, which rises so high along our hills,
and which, as shown by its inferior position on the lower grounds, is
decidedly the most ancient of the country’s superficial deposits, is yet
so modern, geologically, that it contains only recent shells. It belongs
to that cold, glacial, post-Tertiary period, in which what is now Britain
existed as a few groupes of insulated hill-tops, bearing the semi-arctic
vegetation of our fourth flora,—that true _Celtic_ flora of the country
which we now find, like the country’s Celtic races of our own species,
cooped up among the mountains. The fifth or Germanic flora must have
been introduced, it is held, at a later period, when the climate had
greatly meliorated. And if we are to hold that the plants of this last
flora were _developed_ from sea-weed, not propagated across a continuity
of land from the original centre in Germany, or borne by currents from
the mouths of the Germanic rivers,—the theory of Mon. C. Martins,—then
must we also hold that that development took place since the times of
the boulder clay, and that fucoids and confervæ became dicotyledonous
and monocotyledonous plants during a brief period, in which the _Purpura
lapillus_ and _Turritella terebra_ did not alter a single whorl, and
the _Cyprina islandica_ and _Astarte borealis_ retained unchanged each
minute projection of their hinges, and each nicer peculiarity of their
muscular impressions. _Creation_ would be greatly less wonderful than a
sudden transmutative process such as this, restricted in its operation
to groupes of English, Irish, and Manx plants, identical with groupes
in Germany, when all the various organisms around them, such as our
sea-shells, continued to be exactly what they had been for ages before.
A process of development from the lowest to the highest forms, rigidly
restricted to the flora of a country, would be simply the miracle of
Jonah’s gourd several thousand times repeated.
I must here indulge in a few remarks more, which, though they may seem of
an incidental character, have a direct bearing on the general subject.
The geologist infers, in all his reasonings founded on fossils, that a
race or species has existed from some one certain point in the scale
to some other certain point, if he find it occurring at both points
together. He infers on this principle, for instance, that the boulder
clay, which contains only _recent_ shells, belongs to the _recent_ or
post-Tertiary period; and that the Oolite and Lias, which contain _no_
recent shells, represent a period whose existences have all become
extinct. And all experience serves to show that his principle is a sound
one. In creation there are many species linked together, from their
degree of similarity, by the _generic_ tie; but no perfect verisimilitude
obtains among them, unless hereditarily derived from the one, two, or
more individuals, of contemporary origin, with which the race began.
True, there are some races that have spread over very wide circles,—the
circle of the human family has become identical with that of the globe;
and there are certain plants and animals that, from peculiar powers of
adaptation to the varieties of soil and climate,—mayhap also from the
tenacious vitality of their seeds, and their facilities of transport by
natural means,—are likewise diffused very widely. There are plants,
too, such as the common nettle and some of the ordinary grasses, which
accompany civilized man all over the globe, he scarce knows how, and
spring up unbidden where-ever he fixes his habitation. He, besides,
carries with him the common agricultural weeds: there are localities
in the United States, says Sir Charles Lyell, where these _exotics_
outnumber the native plants; but these are exceptions to the prevailing
economy of distribution; and the circles of species generally are
comparatively limited and well defined. The mountains of the southern
hemisphere have, like those of Switzerland and the Scotch Highlands,
their forests of coniferous trees; but they furnish no Swiss pines or
Scotch firs; nor do the coasts of New Zealand or Van Dieman’s Land
supply the European shells or fish. True, there may be much to puzzle
in the identity of what may be termed the exceptional plants, equally
indigenous, apparently, in circles widely separated by space. It has
been estimated that there exist about a hundred thousand vegetable
species, and of these, thirty Antarctic forms have been recognized by
Dr. Hooker as identical with European ones. Had Robinson Crusoe failed
to remember that he had shaken the old corn-bag where he found the wheat
and barley ears springing up on his island, he might have held that he
had discovered a new centre of the European cerealia. And the process
analogous to the shaking of the bag is frequently a process _not_ to be
remembered. There are several minute lochans in the Hebrides and the west
of Ireland in which there occurs a small plant of the cord-rush family,
(_Eriocaulon septangulare_,) which, though common in America, is nowhere
to be found on the European Continent. It is the only British plant
which belongs to no other part of Europe. How was it transported across
the Atlantic? Entangled, mayhap, in the form of a single seed,—for its
seeds are exceedingly light and small,—in the plumage of some water-fowl,
free of both sea and lake, it had been carried in the germ from the
weed-skirted edge of some American swamp or mere, to some mossy lochan of
Connaught or of Skye; and one such seed transported by one such accident,
unique in its occurrence in thousands of years, would be quite sufficient
to puzzle all the botanists forever after. I have seen the seed of one
of our Scotch grasses, that had been originally caught in the matted
fleece of a sheep reared among the hills of Sutherland, and then wrought
into a coarse, ill-dressed woollen cloth, carried about for months in a
piece of underclothing. It might have gone over half the globe in that
time, and, when cast away with the worn vestment, might have originated
a new circle for its species in South America or New Holland. There are
seeds specially contrived by the Great Designer to be carried far from
their original habitats in the coats of animals,—a mode which admits
of transport to much greater distances than the mode, also extensively
operative, of consigning them for conveyance to their stomachs; and when
we see the work in its effects, we are puzzled by the want of a record
of an emigratory process, of which, in the circumstances, no record
could possibly exist. Unable to make out a case for the “shaking of the
bag,” we bethink us, in the emergency, of repetition of creation. But
in circles separated by _time_, not space,—by _time_, across whose dim
gulfs no voyager sails, and no bird flies, and over which there are
no means of transport from the point where a race once fails, to any
other point in the future,—we find no repetition of species. If the
production of perfect duplicates or triplicates in independent centres
were a law of nature, our works of physical science could scarce fail
to tell us of identical species found occurring in widely-separated
systems,—Scotch firs and larches, for instance, among the lignites of
the Lias, or _Cyprina islandica_ and _Ostrea edulis_ among the shells
of the Mountain Limestone. But never yet has the geologist found in his
systems or formations any such evidence as facts such as these might be
legitimately held to furnish, of the independent _de novo_ production of
individual members of any single species. On the contrary, the evidence
lies so entirely the other way, that he reasons on the existence of a
family relation obtaining between all the members of each species, as
one of his best established principles. If members of the same species
may exist through _de novo_ production, without hereditary relationship,
so thoroughly, in consequence, does the fabric of geological reasoning
fall to the ground, that we find ourselves incapacitated from regarding
even the bed of common cockle or mussel shells, which we find lying a few
feet from the surface on our raised beaches, as of the existing creation
at all. Nay, even the human remains of our moors may have belonged, if
our principle of relationship in each species be not a true one, to
some former creation, cut off from that to which we ourselves belong,
by a wide period of death. All palæontological reasoning is at an end
forever, if identical species can originate in independent centres,
widely separated from each other by periods of time; and if they fail to
originate in periods separated by time, how or why in centres separated
by space?
Let the reader remark further, the bearing of those facts from which this
principle of geological reasoning has been derived, on the development
hypothesis. We find species restricted to circles and periods; and though
stragglers are occasionally found outside the circle in the existing
state of things, never are they found beyond their period among the
remains of the past. It was profoundly argued by Cuvier, that _life_
could not possibly have had a chemical origin. “In fact,” we find him
remarking, “life exercising upon the elements which at every instant
form part of the living body, and upon those which it attracts to it, an
action contrary to that which would be produced without it by the usual
chemical affinities, it is inconsistent to suppose that it can itself
be produced by these affinities.” And the phenomena of restriction to
circle and period testify to the same effect. Nothing, on the one hand,
can be more various in character and aspect than the organized existences
of the various circles and periods; nothing more invariable, on the
other, than the results of chemical or electrical experiment. And yet,
to use almost the words of Cuvier, “we know of no other power in nature
capable of reuniting previously separated molecules,” than the electric
and the chemical. To these agents, accordingly, all the assertors of the
development hypothesis have had recourse for at least the _origination_
of life. Air, water, earth existing as a saline mucus, and an active
persistent electricity, are the creative ingredients of Oken. The
author of the “Vestiges” is rather less explicit on the subject: he
simply refers to the fact, that the “basis of all vegetable and animal
substances consists of nucleated cells,—that is, of cells having granules
within them;” and states that globules of a resembling character “can
be produced in albumen by electricity;” and that though albumen itself
has not yet been produced by artificial means,—the only step in the
process of creation which is wanting,—it is yet known to be a chemical
composition, the mode of whose production may “be any day discovered in
the laboratory.” Further, he adopts, as part of the foundation of his
hypothesis, the pseudo-experiment of Mr. Weekes, who holds that out of
certain saline preparations, acted upon by electricity, he can produce
certain living animalcula of the mite family;—the vital and the organized
out of the inorganic and the dead. In all such cases, electricity, or
rather, according to Oken, galvanism, is regarded as the vitalizing
principle. “_Organism_,” says the German, “is _galvanism_ residing in
a thoroughly homogeneous mass.... A galvanic pile pounded into atoms
must become alive. In this manner nature brings forth organic bodies.”
I have even heard it seriously asked whether electricity be not God!
Alas! could such a god, limited in its capacity of action, like those
“gods of the plains” in which the old Syrian trusted, have wrought, in
the character of Creator, with a variety of result so endless, that in
no geologic period has repetition taken place? In all that purports to
be experiment on the development side of the question, we see nothing
else save repetition. The _Acarus Crossi_ of Mr. Weekes is not a new
species, but the _repetition_ of an old one, which has been long known
as the _Acarus horridus_, a little bristle-covered creature of the mite
family, that harbors in damp corners among the debris of outhouses, and
the dust and dirt of neglected workshops and laboratories. Nay, even a
change in the chemical portion of the experiment by which he believed the
creature to be produced, failed to secure variety. A powerful electric
current had been sent, in the first instance, through a solution of
silicate of potash, and, after a time, the _Acarus horridus_ crawled out
of the fluid. The current was then sent through a solution of nitrate of
copper, and after a due space, the _Acarus horridus_ again creeped out.
A solution of ferro-cyanate of potash was next subjected to the current,
and yet again, and in greater numbers than on the two former occasions,
there appeared, as in virtue, it would seem, of its extraordinary
appetency, _to be_ the same ever-recurring _Acarus horridus_. How, or
in what form, the little creature should have been introduced into the
several experiments, it is not the part of those who question their
legitimacy to explain; it is enough for us to know, that individuals of
the family to which the _Acarus_ belongs are so remarkable for their
powers of life, even in their fully developed state, as to resist, for
a time, the application of boiling water, and to live long in alcohol.
We know, further, that the _germs_ of the lower animals are greatly
more tenacious of vitality than the animals themselves; and that they
may exist in their state of embryonism in the most unthought of and
elusive forms; nay,—as the recent discoveries regarding alterations of
generation have conclusively shown,—that the germ which produced the
parent may be wholly unlike the germ that produces its offspring, and
yet identical with that which produced the parent’s parent. Save on
the theory of a quiescent vitality, maintained by seeds for centuries
within a few inches of the earth’s surface, we know not how a layer of
shell, sand, or marl, spread over the bleak moors of Harris, should
produce crops of white clover, where only heath had grown before; nor
how brakes of doddered furze burnt down on the slopes of the Cromarty
Sutors should be so frequently succeeded by thickets of raspberry. We
are not, however to give up the _unknown_,—that illimitable province in
which science discovers,—to be a wild region of dream, in which fantasy
may invent. There are many dark places in the field of human knowledge
which even the researches of ages may fail wholly to enlighten; but no
one derives a right from that circumstance to people them with chimeras
and phantoms. They belong to the philosophers of the future,—not to the
visionaries of the present. But while it is not our part to explain
_how_, in the experiments of Mr. Weekes, the chain of life from life has
been maintained unbroken, we can most conclusively show, that that world
of organized existence of which we ourselves form part, is, and ever has
been, a world, not of tame repetition, but of endless variety. It is
palpably not a world of _Acaridæ_ of one species, nor yet of creatures
developed from these, under those electric or chemical laws of which
the grand characteristic is invariability of result. The vast variety
of its existences speak not of the operation of _unvarying laws_, that
represent, in their uniformity of result, the unchangeableness of the
Divinity, but of _creative acts_, that exemplify the infinity of His
resources.
Let the reader yet further remark, if he has followed me through these
preliminary observations, what is really involved in the hypothesis of
the author of the “Vestiges,” regarding the various floras common to
the British islands and the Continent. If it was upon his scheme that
England, Ireland, and the mainland of Europe came to possess an identical
flora, production _de novo_ and by repetition of the same species must
have taken place in thousands of instances along the shores of each
island and of the mainland. His hypothesis demands that the sea-weed on
the coast of Ireland should have been developed, first through lower, and
then higher forms, into thousands of terrestrial plants,—that exactly
the same process of development from sea-weed into terrestrial plants of
the same species should have taken place on the coast of England, and
again on the coasts of the Continent generally,—and that identically
the same vegetation should have been originated in this way in at least
three great centres. And if plants of the same species could have had
three distinct centres of organization and development, why not three
hundred, or three thousand, or three hundred thousand? Nor will it do
to attempt escaping from the difficulty, by alleging that there is the
groundwork in the case of at least a common marine vegetation to start
from; and that thus, if we have not properly the existence of the direct
hereditary tie among the various individuals of each species, we may yet
recognize at least a sort of collateral relationship among them, derived
from the relationship of their marine ancestry. For relationship, in even
the primary stage, the author of the “Vestiges” virtually repudiates, by
adopting, as one of the foundations of his hypothesis, with, of course,
all the legitimate consequences, the experiments of Mr. Weekes. The
animalculæ-making process is instanced as representative of the first
stage of being,—that in which dead inorganic matter assumes vitality;
and it corresponds, in the zoological branch, to the production of a
low marine vegetation in the phytological one. A certain semi-chemical,
semi-electrical process, originates, time after time, certain numerous
low forms of life, identical in species, but connected by no tie of
relationship: such is the presumed result of the Weekes experiment.
A certain further process of development matures low forms of life,
thus originated, into higher species, also identical, and also wholly
unconnected by the family tie: such are the consequences legitimately
involved in that island-vegetation theory promulgated by the author of
the “Vestiges.” And be it remembered that Mr. Weekes’ process, so far as
it is simply electrical and chemical, is a process which is as capable
of having been gone through in all times and all places, as that other
process of strewing marl upon a moor, through which certain rustic
experimenters have held that they produced white clover. It could have
been gone through during the Carboniferous or the Silurian period; for
all truly chemical and electrical experiments would have resulted in
manifestations of the same phenomena then as now:—an acid would have
effervesced as freely with an alkali; and each fibre of an electrified
feather—had feathers then existed—would have stood out as decidedly apart
from all its neighbors. We must therefore hold, if we believe with the
author of the “Vestiges,” first, from the Weekes experiment, that in all
times, and in all places, every centre of a certain chemical and electric
action would have become a new centre of creation to certain _recent_
species of low, but not _very_ low, organization; and, second, from his
doctrine regarding the identity of the British and Continental floras,
that in the course of subsequent development from these low forms, the
process in each of many widely-separated centres,—widely separated both
by space and time,—would be so nicely correspondent with the process in
all the others, that the same higher _recent_ forms would be matured in
all. And to doctrines such as these, the experience of all Geologists,
all Phytologists, all Zoologists, is diametrically opposed. If these
doctrines be true, _their_ sciences are false in their facts, and idle
and unfounded in their principles.
THE TWO FLORAS, MARINE AND TERRESTRIAL. BEARING OF THE EXPERIENCE
ARGUMENT.
Is the reader acquainted with the graphic verse, and scarce less
graphic prose, in which Crabbe describes the appearances presented by
a terrestrial vegetation affected by the waters of the sea? In both
passages, as in all his purely descriptive writings, there is a solidity
of truthful observation exhibited, which triumphs over their general
homeliness of vein.
“On either side
Is level fen, a prospect wild and wide,
With dykes on either hand, by ocean self-supplied.
Far on the right the distant sea is seen,
And salt the springs that feed the marsh between;
Beneath an ancient bridge the straitened flood
Rolls through its sloping banks of slimy mud;
Near it a sunken boat resists the tide,
That frets and hurries to the opposing side;
The rushes sharp, that on the borders grow,
Bend their brown florets to the stream below,
Impure in all its course, in all its progress slow.
Here a grave Flora scarcely deigns to bloom,
Nor wears a rosy blush, nor sheds perfume.
The few dull flowers that o’er the place are spread,
Partake the nature of their fenny bed;
Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom,
Grows the salt lavender, that lacks perfume;
Here the dwarf sallows creep, the septfoil harsh,
And the soft slimy mallow of the marsh.
Low on the ear the distant billows sound,
And just in view appears their stony bound.”
“The ditches of a fen so near the ocean,” says the poet, in the note
which accompanies this passage, “are lined with irregular patches of a
coarse-stained laver; a muddy sediment rests on the horse-tail and other
perennial herbs which in part conceal the shallowness of the stream; a
fat-leaved, pale-flowering scurvy-grass appears early in the year, and
the razor-edged bullrush in the summer and autumn. The fen itself has a
dark and saline herbage: there are rushes and _arrow-head_; and in a few
patches the flakes of the cotton-grass are seen, but more commonly the
_sea-aster_, the dullest of that numerous and hardy genus; a _thrift_,
blue in flower, but withering, and remaining withered till the winter
scatters it; the _salt-wort_, both simple and shrubby; a few kinds of
grass changed by the soil and atmosphere; and low plants of two or three
denominations, undistinguished in the general view of scenery;—such is
the vegetation of the fen where it is at a small distance from the ocean.”