to have been specially determined by the conditions of correspondence
which the phenomena of his habitation had at length come to assume with
the predestined constitution of his mind. The large reasoning brain would
have been wholly out of place in the earlier ages. It is indubitably the
nature of man to base the conclusions which regulate all his actions
on fixed phenomena,—he reasons from cause to effect, or from effect to
cause; and when placed in circumstances in which, from some lack of the
necessary basis, he cannot so reason, he becomes a wretched, timid,
superstitious creature, greatly more helpless and abject than even the
inferior animals. This unhappy state is strikingly exemplified by that
deep and peculiar impression made on the mind by a severe earthquake,
which Humboldt, from his own experience, so powerfully describes.
“This impression,” he says, “is not, in my opinion, the result of a
recollection of those fearful pictures of devastation presented to our
imagination by the historical narratives of the past, but is rather due
to the sudden revelation of the delusive nature of the inherent faith
by which we had clung to a belief in the immobility of the solid parts
of the earth. We are accustomed from early childhood to draw a contrast
between the mobility of water and the immobility of the soil on which we
tread; and this feeling is confirmed by the evidence of our senses. When,
therefore, we suddenly feel the ground move beneath us, a mysterious
force, with which we were previously unacquainted, is revealed to us as
an active disturber of stability. A moment destroys the illusion of a
whole life; our deceptive faith in the repose of nature vanishes; and
we feel transported into a realm of unknown destructive forces. Every
sound—the faintest motion of the air—arrests our attention, and we no
longer trust the ground on which we stand. There is an idea conveyed
to the mind, of some universal and unlimited danger. We may flee from
the crater of a volcano in active eruption, or from the dwelling whose
destruction is threatened by the approach of the lava stream; but in an
earthquake, direct our flight whithersoever we will, we still feel as
if we trod upon the very focus of destruction.” Not less striking is
the testimony of Dr. Tschudi, in his “Travels in Peru,” regarding this
singular effect of earthquakes on the human mind. “No familiarity with
the phenomenon can,” he remarks, “blunt the feeling. The inhabitant of
Lima, who from childhood has frequently witnessed these convulsions
of nature, is roused from his sleep by the shock, and rushes from his
apartment with the cry of ‘_Misericordia_!’ The foreigner from the
north of Europe, who knows nothing of earthquakes but by description,
waits with impatience to feel the movements of the earth, and longs to
hear with his own ear the subterranean sounds, which he has hitherto
considered fabulous. With levity he treats the apprehension of a coming
convulsion, and laughs at the fears of the natives; but as soon as his
wish is gratified, he is terror-stricken, and is involuntarily prompted
to seek safety in flight.”
Now, a partially consolidated planet, tempested by frequent earthquakes
of such terrible potency, that those of the historic ages would be but
mere ripples of the earth’s surface in comparison, could be no proper
home for a creature so constituted. The fish or reptile,—animals of a
limited range of instinct, exceedingly tenacious of life in most of their
varieties, oviparous, prolific, and whose young immediately on their
escape from the egg can provide for themselves, might enjoy existence in
such circumstances, to the full extent of their narrow capacities; and
when sudden death fell upon them,—though their remains, scattered over
wide areas, continue to exhibit that distortion of posture incident to
violent dissolution, which seems to speak of terror and suffering,—we may
safely conclude there was but little real suffering on the case: they
were happy up to a certain point, and unconscious forever after. Fishes
and reptiles were the proper inhabitants of our planet during the ages of
the earth-tempests; and when, under the operation of the chemical laws,
these had become less frequent and terrible, the higher mammals were
introduced. That prolonged ages of these tempests did exist, and that
they gradually settled down, until the state of things became at length
comparatively fixed and stable, few geologists will be disposed to deny.
The evidence which supports _this_ special theory of the development
of our planet in its capabilities as a scene of organized and sentient
being, seems palpable at every step. Look first at these Grauwacke rocks;
and, after marking how in one place the strata have been upturned on
their edges for miles together, and how in another the Plutonic rock has
risen molten from below, pass on to the Old Red Sandstone, and examine
its significant platforms of violent death,—its faults, displacements,
and dislocations; see, next, in the Coal Measures, those evidences of
sinking and ever-sinking strata, for thousands of feet together; mark in
the Oolite those vast overlying masses of trap, stretching athwart the
landscape, far as the eye can reach; observe carefully how the signs of
convulsion and catastrophe gradually lessen as we descend to the times of
the Tertiary, though even in these ages of the mammiferous quadruped the
earth must have had its oft-recurring ague fits of frightful intensity;
and then, on closing the survey, consider how exceedingly partial and
unfrequent these earth-tempests have become in the recent periods. Yes;
we find every where marks of at once progression and identity,—of
progress made, and yet identity maintained; but it is in the habitation
that we find them,—not in the inhabitants. There is a tract of country in
Hindustan that contains nearly as many square miles as all Great Britain,
covered to the depth of hundreds of feet by one vast overflow of trap;
a track similarly overflown, which exceeds in area all England, occurs
in Southern Africa. The earth’s surface is roughened with such,—mottled
as thickly by the Plutonic masses as the skin of the leopard by its
spots. The trap district which surrounds our Scottish metropolis, and
imparts so imposing a character to its scenery, is too inconsiderable to
be marked on geological maps of the world, that we yet see streaked and
speckled with similar memorials, though on an immensely vaster scale,
of the eruption and overflow which took place in the earthquake ages.
What could man have done on the globe at a time when such outbursts
were comparatively common occurrences? What could he have done where
Edinburgh now stands during that overflow of trap porphyry of which the
Pentland range forms but a fragment, or that outburst of greenstone of
which but a portion remains in the dark ponderous coping of Salisbury
Craigs, or when the thick floor of rock on which the city stands was
broken up, like the ice of an arctic sea during a tempest in spring, and
laid on edge from where it leans against the Castle Hill to beyond the
quarries at Joppa? The reasoning brain would have been wholly at fault
in a scene of things in which it could neither foresee the exterminating
calamity while yet distant, nor control it when it had come; and so the
reasoning brain was not produced until the scene had undergone a slow
but thorough process of change, during which, at each progressive stage,
it had furnished a platform for higher and still higher life. When the
coniferæ could flourish on the land, and fishes subsist in the seas,
fishes and cone-bearing plants were created; when the earth became a
fit habitat for reptiles and birds, reptiles and birds were produced;
with the dawn of a more stable and mature state of things the sagacious
quadruped was ushered in; and, last of all, when man’s house was fully
prepared for him,—when the data on which it is his nature to reason
and calculate had become fixed and certain,—the reasoning, calculating
brain was moulded by the creative finger, and man became a living soul.
Such seems to be the true reading of the wondrous inscription chiselled
deep in the rocks. It furnishes us with no clue by which to unravel the
unapproachable mysteries of creation;—these mysteries belong to the
wondrous Creator, and to Him only. We attempt to theorize upon them,
and to reduce them to law, and all nature rises up against us in our
presumptuous rebellion. A stray splinter of cone-bearing wood,—a fish’s
skull or tooth,—the vertebra of a reptile,—the humerus of a bird,—the jaw
of a quadruped,—all, any of these things, weak and insignificant as they
may seem, become in such a quarrel too strong for us and our theory: the
puny fragment, in the grasp of truth, forms as irresistible a weapon as
the dry bone did in that of Samson of old; and our slaughtered sophisms
lie piled up, “heaps upon heaps,” before it.
There is no geological fact nor revealed doctrine with which this special
scheme of development does not agree. To every truth, too, really such,
from which the antagonist scheme derives its shadowy analogies, it leaves
its full value. It has no quarrel with the facts of even the “Vestiges,”
in their character as realities. There is certainly something very
extraordinary in that fœtal progress of the human brain on which the
assertors of the development hypothesis have founded so much. Nature, in
constructing this curious organ, first lays down a grooved cord, as the
carpenter lays down the keel of his vessel; and on this narrow base the
perfect brain, as month after month passes by, is gradually built up,
like the vessel from the keel. First it grows up into a brain closely
resembling that of a fish; a few additions more convert it into a brain
undistinguishable from that of a reptile; a few additions more impart
to it the perfect appearance of the brain of a bird; it then developes
into a brain exceedingly like that of a mammiferous quadruped; and,
finally, expanding atop, and spreading out its deeply corrugated lobes,
till they project widely over the base, it assumes its unique character
as a human brain. Radically such from the first, it passes towards its
full development, through all the inferior forms, from that of the fish
upwards,—thus comprising, during its fœtal progress, an epitome of
geologic history, as if each man were in himself, not the _microcosm_ of
the old fanciful philosopher, but something greatly more wonderful,—a
compendium of all animated nature, and of kin to every creature that
lives. Hence the remark, that man is the sum total of all animals,—“the
animal equivalent,” says Oken, “to the whole animal kingdom.” We are
perhaps too much in the habit of setting aside real facts, when they
have been first seized upon by the infidel, and appropriated to the
purposes of unbelief, as if they had suffered contamination in his
hands. We forget, like the brother “weak in the faith,” instanced by
the Apostle, that they are in themselves “creatures of God;” and too
readily reject the lesson which they teach, simply because they have been
offered in sacrifice to an idol. And this strange fact of the progress
of the human brain is assuredly a fact none the less worth looking at
from the circumstance that infidelity has looked at it first. On no
principle recognizable in right reason can it be urged in support of the
development hypothesis;—it is a fact of _fœtal_ development, and of that
only. But it would be well should it lead our metaphysicians to inquire
whether they have not been rendering their science too insulated and
exclusive; and whether the mind that works by a brain thus “fearfully and
wonderfully made,” ought not to be viewed rather in connection with all
animated nature, especially as we find nature exemplified in the various
vertebral forms, than as a thing fundamentally abstract and distinct.
The brain built up of all the types of _brain_, may be the organ of a
mind compounded, if I may so express myself, of all the varieties of
_mind_. It would be perhaps over fanciful to urge that it is the creature
who has made himself free of all the elements, whose brain has been
thus in succession that of all their proper denizens; and that there
is no animal instinct, the function of which cannot be illustrated by
some art mastered by man: but there can be nothing over fanciful in the
suggestion, founded on this fact of fœtal development, that possibly some
of the more obscure signs impressed upon the human character may be best
read through the spectacles of physical science. The successive phases of
the fœtal brain give at least fair warning that, in tracing to its first
principles the moral and intellectual nature of man, what is properly
his “natural history” should not be overlooked. Oken, after describing
the human creature in one passage as “equivalent to the whole animal
kingdom,” designates him in another as “God wholly manifested,” and as
“God become man;”—a style of expression at which the English reader
may start, as that of the “big mouth speaking blasphemy,” but which
has become exceedingly common among the nationalists of the Continent.
The irreverent naturalist ought surely to have remembered, that the
sum total of all the animals cannot be different in its nature from the
various sums of which it is an aggregate,—seeing that _no_ summation ever
differs in _quality_ from the items summed up, which compose it,—and
that, though it may amount in this case to man _the animal_,—to man,
as he may be weighed, and measured, and subjected to the dissecting
knife,—it cannot possibly amount to God. Is God merely a sum total of
birds and beasts, reptiles and fishes;—a mere Egyptian deity, composed
of fantastic hieroglyphics derived from the forms of the brute creation?
The impieties of the transcendentalist may, however, serve to illustrate
that mode of seizing on terms which, as the most sacred in the message
of revelation, have been long coupled in the popular mind with saving
truths, and forcibly compelling them to bear some visionary and illusive
meaning, wholly foreign to that with which they were originally invested,
which has become so remarkable a part of the policy of modern infidelity.
Rationalism has learned to sacrifice to Deity with a certain measure of
conformity to the required pattern; but it is a conformity in appearance
only, not in reality: the sacrifice always resembles that of Prometheus
of old, who presented to Jupiter what, though it seemed to be an ox
without blemish, was merely an ox-skin stuffed full of bones and garbage.
There is another very remarkable class of facts in geological history,
which appear to fall as legitimately within the scope of argument founded
on final causes, as those which bear on the appearance of man at his
proper era. The period of the mammiferous quadrupeds seems, like the
succeeding human period, to have been determined, as I have said, by the
earth’s fitness at the time as a place of habitation for creatures so
formed. And the bulk to which, in the more extreme cases, they attained,
appears to have been regulated, as in the higher mammals now, with
reference to the force of gravity at the earth’s surface. The Megatherium
and the Mastodon, the Dinotherium and the extinct elephant, increased
in bulk, in obedience to the laws of the specific constitution imparted
to them at their creation; and these laws bore reference, in turn, to
another law,—that law of gravity which determines that no creature which
moves in air and treads the surface of the earth should exceed a certain
weight or size. To very near the limits assigned by this law some of the
ancient quadrupeds arose. It is even doubtful whether the Dinotherium,
the most gigantic of mammals, may not have been, like the existing
sea-lions and morses, mainly an aquatic quadruped;—an inference grounded
on the circumstance that, in at least portions of its framework, it seems
to have risen beyond these limits. Now, it does not seem wonderful that,
with apparent reference to the point at which the gravity of bodies
at the earth’s surface _bisects_ the conditions of texture and matter
necessary to existence among the sub-aerial vertebrata, the _reptiles_
of the Secondary periods should have grown up in some of their species
and genera to the extreme size. A world of frogs, newts, and lizards
would have borne stamped upon it the impress of a tame and miserable
mediocrity, that would have harmonized ill with the extent of the
earth’s capabilities for supporting life on a large scale. There would
be no principle of adaptation or rule of proportion maintained between
an animal kingdom composed of so contemptible a group of beings, and
either the dynamic laws under which matter exists on our planet, or the
luxuriant vegetation which it bore during the Secondary ages. And such
was not the character of the group which composed the reptile dynasty.
The Iguanodon must have been quite as tall as the elephant,—greatly
longer, and, it would seem, at least as bulky. The Megalosaurus must have
at least equalled the rhinoceros; the Hylæosaurus would have outweighed
the hippopotamus. And when reptiles that rivalled in size our hugest
mammals inhabited the land, other reptiles,—Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs,
and Cetiosaurs,—scarce less bulky than the cetacea themselves, possessed
the sea. Not only was the platform of being occupied in all its
_breadth_, but also in all its _height_; and it is according to our
simpler and more obvious ideas of adaptation—simple and obvious because
gleaned from the very surface of the universe of life—that such should
have been the case. But it does appear strange, because under the
regulation, it would seem, of a principle of adaptation more occult,
and, if I may so speak, more _Providential_, that no sooner are the huge
mammals introduced _as a group_, than, with but a few exceptions, the
reptiles appear in greatly diminished proportions. They no longer occupy
the platform to its full extent of _height_. Even in tropical countries,
in which certain families of mammals still attain to the maximum size,
the reptiles, if we except the crocodilean family, a few harmless
turtles, and the degraded boas and pythons, are a small and comparatively
unimportant race. Nay, the existing giants of the class—the crocodiles
and boas—hardly equal in bulk the third-rate reptiles of the ages of
the Oolite and the Wealden. So far as can be seen, there is no reason
deduceable from the nature of things, why the country that sustains a
mammal bulky as the elephant, should not also support a reptile huge
as the Iguanodon; or why the Megalosaurus, Hylæosaurus, and Dicynodon,
might not have been contemporary with the lion, tiger, and rhinoceros.
The change which took place in the reptile group immediately on their
dethronement at the close of the Secondary period, seems scarce less
strange than that sung by Milton:—
“Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed
In bigness to surpass earth’s giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Thronged numberless; like that pygmean race
Beyond the Indian mount; or fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while, overhead, the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course.”
But though we cannot assign a _cause_ for this general reduction of the
reptile class, save simply the will of the all-wise Creator, the _reason_
why it should have taken place seems easily assignable. It was a bold
saying of the old philosophic heathen, that “God is the soul of brutes;”
but writers on instinct in even our own times have said less warrantable
things. God _does_ seem to do for many of the inferior animals of the
lower divisions, which, though devoid of brain and vertebral column, are
yet skilful chemists and accomplished architects and mathematicians,
what he enables man, through the exercise of the reasoning faculty,
to do for himself; and the ancient philosopher meant no more. And in
clearing away the giants of the reptile dynasty, when their kingdom had
passed away, and then re-introducing the class as much shrunken in their
proportions as restricted in their domains, the Creator seems to have
been doing for the mammals what man, in the character of a “mighty hunter
before the Lord,” does for himself. There is in nature very little of
what can be called war. The cities of this country cannot be said to be
in a state of war, though their cattle-markets are thronged every week
with animals for slaughter and the butcher and fishmonger find their
places of business thronged with customers. And such, in the main, is the
condition of the animal world;—it consists of its two classes,—animals
of prey, and the animals upon which they prey: its wars are simply those
of the butcher and fisher, lightened by a dash of the enjoyments of the
sportsman.
“The creatures see of flood and field,
And those that travel on the wind,
With them no strife can last; they live
In peace and peace of mind.”
Generally speaking, the carnivorous mammalia respect one another: lion
does not war with tiger, nor the leopard contend with the hyena. But
the carnivorous reptiles manifest no such respect for the carnivorous
mammals. There are fierce contests in their native jungles, on the banks
of the Ganges, between the gavial and the tiger; and in the steaming
forests of South America, the boa-constrictor casts his terrible coil
scarce less readily round the puma than the antelope. A world which,
after it had become a home of the higher herbivorous and more powerful
carnivorous mammals, continued to retain the gigantic reptiles of
its earlier ages, would be a world of horrid, exterminating war, and
altogether rather a place of torment than a scene of intermediate
character, in which, though it sometimes reëchoes the groans of
suffering nature, life is, in the main, enjoyment. And so,—save in a few
exceptional cases, that, while they establish the rule as a fact, serve
also as a key to unlock that principle of the Divine government on which
it appears to rest,—no sooner was the reptile removed from his place in
the fore-front of creation, and creatures of a higher order introduced
into it the consolidating and fast-ripening planet of which he had been
so long the monarch, than his bulk shrank and his strength lessened,
and he assumed a humility of form and aspect at once in keeping with
his reduced circumstances, and compatible with the general welfare. But
though the _reason_ of the reduction appears obvious, I know not that it
can be referred to any other _cause_ than simply the will of the All-Wise
Creator.
There hangs a mystery greatly more profound over the fact of the
_degradation_ than over that of the _reduction_ and _diminution_ of
classes. We can assign what at least _seems_ to be a sufficient _reason_
why, when reptiles formed as a class the highest representatives of the
vertebrata, they should be of imposing bulk and strength, and altogether
worthy of that post of precedence which they then occupied among the
animals. We can also assign a _reason_ for the strange reduction which
took place among them in strength and bulk immediately on their removal
from the first to the second place. But why not only _reduction_,
but also _degradation_? Why, as division started up in advance of
division,—first the reptiles in front of the fishes, then the quadrupedal
mammals in front of the reptiles, and, last of all, man in front of
the quadrupedal mammals,—should the supplanted classes,—two of them at
least,—fishes and reptiles,—for there seem to have been no additions
made to the mammals since man entered upon the scene,—why should they
have become the receptacles of orders and families of a degraded
character, which had no place among them in their monarchical state? The
fishes removed beyond all analogy with the higher vertebrata, by their
homocercal tails,—the fishes (_Acanthopterygii_ and _Sub-brachiati_) with
their four limbs slung in a belt round their necks,—the flat fishes,
(_Pleuronectidæ_,) that, in addition to this deformity, are so twisted
to a side, that while the one eye occupies a single orbit in the
middle of the skull, the other is thrust out to its edge,—the irregular
fishes generally (sun-fishes, frog-fishes, hippocampi, &c.) were not
introduced into the ichthyic division until after the full development
of the reptile dynasty; nor did the hand that makes no slips in its
working “form the crooked serpent,” footless, grovelling, venom-bearing,
the authorized type of a fallen and degraded creature, until after the
introduction of the mammals. What can this fact of degradation mean?
Species and genera seem to be greatly more numerous in the present age
of the world than in any of the geologic ages. Is it not possible that
the extension of the chain of being which has thus taken place—not only,
as we find, through the addition of the higher divisions of animals to
its upper end, but also through the interpolations of _lower links_
into the previously existing divisions—may have borne reference to some
predetermined scheme of well-proportioned gradation, or, according to the
poet,
“Of general ORDER since the whole began?”