The information derived from the parallax of a star by no means halts

with the disclosure of the distance of that body. Distance known, the

proper motion of the star, hitherto only to be reckoned as so many

seconds of arc, may readily be translated into actual speed of progress;

relative brightness becomes absolute lustre, as compared with the sun;

and in the case of the double stars the absolute mass of the components

may be computed from the laws of gravitation. It is found that stars

differ enormously among themselves in all these regards. As to speed,

some, like our sun, barely creep through space--compassing ten or twenty

miles a second, it is true, yet even at that rate only passing through

the equivalent of their own diameter in a day. At the other extreme,

among measured stars, is one that moves two hundred miles a second; yet

even this "flying star," as seen from the earth, seems to change its

place by only about three and a half lunar diameters in a thousand

years. In brightness, some stars yield to the sun, while others surpass

him as the arc-light surpasses a candle. Arcturus, the brightest

measured star, shines like two hundred suns; and even this giant orb is

dim beside those other stars which are so distant that their parallax

cannot be measured, yet which greet our eyes at first magnitude. As to

actual bulk, of which apparent lustre furnishes no adequate test, some

stars are smaller than the sun, while others exceed him hundreds or

perhaps thousands of times. Yet one and all, so distant are they, remain

mere disklike points of light before the utmost powers of the modern

telescope.

Revelations of the Spectroscope

All this seems wonderful enough, but even greater things were in store.

In 1859 the spectroscope came upon the scene, perfected by Kirchhoff

and Bunsen, along lines pointed out by Fraunhofer almost half a century

before. That marvellous instrument, by revealing the telltale lines

sprinkled across a prismatic spectrum, discloses the chemical nature

and physical condition of any substance whose light is submitted to it,

telling its story equally well, provided the light be strong enough,

whether the luminous substance be near or far--in the same room or at

the confines of space. Clearly such an instrument must prove a veritable

magic wand in the hands of the astronomer.

Very soon eager astronomers all over the world were putting the

spectroscope to the test. Kirchhoff himself led the way, and Donati and

Father Secchi in Italy, Huggins and Miller in England, and Rutherfurd in

America, were the chief of his immediate followers. The results exceeded

the dreams of the most visionary. At the very outset, in 1860, it was

shown that such common terrestrial substances as sodium, iron, calcium,

magnesium, nickel, barium, copper, and zinc exist in the form of glowing

vapors in the sun, and very soon the stars gave up a corresponding

secret. Since then the work of solar and sidereal analysis has gone on

steadily in the hands of a multitude of workers (prominent among whom,

in this country, are Professor Young of Princeton, Professor Langley of

Washington, and Professor Pickering of Harvard), and more than half

the known terrestrial elements have been definitely located in the sun,

while fresh discoveries are in prospect.

It is true the sun also contains some seeming elements that are unknown

on the earth, but this is no matter for surprise. The modern chemist

makes no claim for his elements except that they have thus far resisted

all human efforts to dissociate them; it would be nothing strange if

some of them, when subjected to the crucible of the sun, which is seen

to vaporize iron, nickel, silicon, should fail to withstand the test.

But again, chemistry has by no means exhausted the resources of the

earth's supply of raw material, and the substance which sends its

message from a star may exist undiscovered in the dust we tread or in

the air we breathe. In the year 1895 two new terrestrial elements were

discovered; but one of these had for years been known to the astronomer

as a solar and suspected as a stellar element, and named helium because

of its abundance in the sun. The spectroscope had reached out millions

of miles into space and brought back this new element, and it took the

chemist a score of years to discover that he had all along had samples

of the same substance unrecognized in his sublunary laboratory. There

is hardly a more picturesque fact than that in the entire history of

science.

But the identity in substance of earth and sun and stars was not more

clearly shown than the diversity of their existing physical conditions.

It was seen that sun and stars, far from being the cool, earthlike,

habitable bodies that Herschel thought them (surrounded by glowing

clouds, and protected from undue heat by other clouds), are in truth

seething caldrons of fiery liquid, or gas made viscid by condensation,

with lurid envelopes of belching flames. It was soon made clear, also,

particularly by the studies of Rutherfurd and of Secchi, that stars

differ among themselves in exact constitution or condition. There are

white or Sirian stars, whose spectrum revels in the lines of hydrogen;

yellow or solar stars (our sun being the type), showing various metallic

vapors; and sundry red stars, with banded spectra indicative of carbon

compounds; besides the purely gaseous stars of more recent discovery,

which Professor Pickering had specially studied. Zollner's famous

interpretation of these diversities, as indicative of varying stages

of cooling, has been called in question as to the exact sequence it

postulates, but the general proposition that stars exist under widely

varying conditions of temperature is hardly in dispute.

The assumption that different star types mark varying stages of cooling

has the further support of modern physics, which has been unable to

demonstrate any way in which the sun's radiated energy may be restored,

or otherwise made perpetual, since meteoric impact has been shown to

be--under existing conditions, at any rate--inadequate. In accordance

with the theory of Helmholtz, the chief supply of solar energy is held

to be contraction of the solar mass itself; and plainly this must

have its limits. Therefore, unless some means as yet unrecognized is

restoring the lost energy to the stellar bodies, each of them must

gradually lose its lustre, and come to a condition of solidification,

seeming sterility, and frigid darkness. In the case of our own

particular star, according to the estimate of Lord Kelvin, such a

culmination appears likely to occur within a period of five or six

million years.

The Astronomy of the Invisible

But by far the strongest support of such a forecast as this is furnished

by those stellar bodies which even now appear to have cooled to the

final stage of star development and ceased to shine. Of this class

examples in miniature are furnished by the earth and the smaller of its

companion planets. But there are larger bodies of the same type out

in stellar space--veritable "dark stars"--invisible, of course, yet

nowadays clearly recognized.

The opening up of this "astronomy of the invisible" is another of the

great achievements of the nineteenth century, and again it is Bessel

to whom the honor of discovery is due. While testing his stars

for parallax; that astute observer was led to infer, from certain

unexplained aberrations of motion, that various stars, Sirius himself

among the number, are accompanied by invisible companions, and in

1840 he definitely predicated the existence of such "dark stars." The

correctness of the inference was shown twenty years later, when Alvan

Clark, Jr., the American optician, while testing a new lens, discovered

the companion of Sirius, which proved thus to be faintly luminous. Since

then the existence of other and quite invisible star companions has been

proved incontestably, not merely by renewed telescopic observations, but

by the curious testimony of the ubiquitous spectroscope.

One of the most surprising accomplishments of that instrument is the

power to record the flight of a luminous object directly in the line of

vision. If the luminous body approaches swiftly, its Fraunhofer lines

are shifted from their normal position towards the violet end of the

spectrum; if it recedes, the lines shift in the opposite direction. The

actual motion of stars whose distance is unknown may be measured in this

way. But in certain cases the light lines are seen to oscillate on the

spectrum at regular intervals. Obviously the star sending such light

is alternately approaching and receding, and the inference that it is

revolving about a companion is unavoidable. From this extraordinary test

the orbital distance, relative mass, and actual speed of revolution of

the absolutely invisible body may be determined. Thus the spectroscope,

which deals only with light, makes paradoxical excursions into the

realm of the invisible. What secrets may the stars hope to conceal when

questioned by an instrument of such necromantic power?

But the spectroscope is not alone in this audacious assault upon the

strongholds of nature. It has a worthy companion and assistant in

the photographic film, whose efficient aid has been invoked by the

astronomer even more recently. Pioneer work in celestial photography

was, indeed, done by Arago in France and by the elder Draper in America

in 1839, but the results then achieved were only tentative, and it was

not till forty years later that the method assumed really important

proportions. In 1880, Dr. Henry Draper, at Hastings-on-the-Hudson, made

the first successful photograph of a nebula. Soon after, Dr. David

Gill, at the Cape observatory, made fine photographs of a comet, and the

flecks of starlight on his plates first suggested the possibilities of

this method in charting the heavens.

Since then star-charting with the film has come virtually to supersede

the old method. A concerted effort is being made by astronomers in

various parts of the world to make a complete chart of the heavens, and

before the close of our century this work will be accomplished, some

fifty or sixty millions of visible stars being placed on record with a

degree of accuracy hitherto unapproachable. Moreover, other millions of

stars are brought to light by the negative, which are too distant or

dim to be visible with any telescopic powers yet attained--a fact

which wholly discredits all previous inferences as to the limits of

our sidereal system. Hence, notwithstanding the wonderful instrumental

advances of the nineteenth century, knowledge of the exact form and

extent of our universe seems more unattainable than it seemed a century

ago.

The Structure of Nebulae

Yet the new instruments, while leaving so much untold, have revealed

some vastly important secrets of cosmic structure. In particular, they

have set at rest the long-standing doubts as to the real structure and

position of the mysterious nebulae--those lazy masses, only two or

three of them visible to the unaided eye, which the telescope reveals

in almost limitless abundance, scattered everywhere among the stars,

but grouped in particular about the poles of the stellar stream or disk

which we call the Milky Way.

Herschel's later view, which held that some at least of the nebulae are

composed of a "shining fluid," in process of condensation to form stars,

was generally accepted for almost half a century. But in 1844, when

Lord Rosse's great six-foot reflector--the largest telescope ever yet

constructed--was turned on the nebulae, it made this hypothesis seem

very doubtful. Just as Galileo's first lens had resolved the Milky Way

into stars, just as Herschel had resolved nebulae that resisted all

instruments but his own, so Lord Rosse's even greater reflector resolved

others that would not yield to Herschel's largest mirror. It seemed

a fair inference that with sufficient power, perhaps some day to be

attained, all nebulae would yield, hence that all are in reality what

Herschel had at first thought them--vastly distant "island universes,"

composed of aggregations of stars, comparable to our own galactic

system.

But the inference was wrong; for when the spectroscope was first applied

to a nebula in 1864, by Dr. Huggins, it clearly showed the spectrum not

of discrete stars, but of a great mass of glowing gases, hydrogen among

others. More extended studies showed, it is true, that some nebulae give

the continuous spectrum of solids or liquids, but the different types

intermingle and grade into one another. Also, the closest affinity

is shown between nebulae and stars. Some nebulae are found to contain

stars, singly or in groups, in their actual midst; certain condensed

"planetary" nebulae are scarcely to be distinguished from stars of the

gaseous type; and recently the photographic film has shown the presence

of nebulous matter about stars that to telescopic vision differ in no

respect from the generality of their fellows in the galaxy. The familiar

stars of the Pleiades cluster, for example, appear on the negative

immersed in a hazy blur of light. All in all, the accumulated

impressions of the photographic film reveal a prodigality of nebulous

matter in the stellar system not hitherto even conjectured.

And so, of course, all question of "island universes" vanishes, and the

nebulae are relegated to their true position as component parts of the

one stellar system--the one universe--that is open to present human

inspection. And these vast clouds of world-stuff have been found by

Professor Keeler, of the Lick observatory, to be floating through space

at the starlike speed of from ten to thirty-eight miles per second.

The linking of nebulae with stars, so clearly evidenced by all these

modern observations, is, after all, only the scientific corroboration of

what the elder Herschel's later theories affirmed. But the nebulae have

other affinities not until recently suspected; for the spectra of some

of them are practically identical with the spectra of certain comets.

The conclusion seems warranted that comets are in point of fact minor

nebulae that are drawn into our system; or, putting it otherwise, that

the telescopic nebulae are simply gigantic distant comets.

Lockyer's Meteoric Hypothesis

Following up the surprising clews thus suggested, Sir Norman Lockyer,

of London, has in recent years elaborated what is perhaps the most

comprehensive cosmogonic guess that has ever been attempted. His theory,

known as the "meteoric hypothesis," probably bears the same relation

to the speculative thought of our time that the nebular hypothesis of

Laplace bore to that of the eighteenth century. Outlined in a few words,

it is an attempt to explain all the major phenomena of the universe

as due, directly or indirectly, to the gravitational impact of such

meteoric particles, or specks of cosmic dust, as comets are composed

of. Nebulae are vast cometary clouds, with particles more or less widely

separated, giving off gases through meteoric collisions, internal or

external, and perhaps glowing also with electrical or phosphorescent

light. Gravity eventually brings the nebular particles into closer

aggregations, and increased collisions finally vaporize the entire mass,

forming planetary nebulae and gaseous stars. Continued condensation

may make the stellar mass hotter and more luminous for a time, but

eventually leads to its liquefaction, and ultimate consolidation--the

aforetime nebulae becoming in the end a dark or planetary star.

The exact correlation which Lockyer attempts to point out between

successive stages of meteoric condensation and the various types of

observed stellar bodies does not meet with unanimous acceptance. Mr.

Ranyard, for example, suggests that the visible nebulae may not be

nascent stars, but emanations from stars, and that the true pre-stellar

nebulae are invisible until condensed to stellar proportions. But such

details aside, the broad general hypothesis that all the bodies of the

universe are, so to speak, of a single species--that nebulae (including

comets), stars of all types, and planets, are but varying stages in the

life history of a single race or type of cosmic organisms--is accepted

by the dominant thought of our time as having the highest warrant of

scientific probability.

All this, clearly, is but an amplification of that nebular hypothesis

which, long before the spectroscope gave us warrant to accurately judge

our sidereal neighbors, had boldly imagined the development of stars out

of nebulae and of planets out of stars. But Lockyer's hypothesis does

not stop with this. Having traced the developmental process from the

nebular to the dark star, it sees no cause to abandon this dark star to

its fate by assuming, as the original speculation assumed, that this is

a culminating and final stage of cosmic existence. For the dark star,

though its molecular activities have come to relative stability and

impotence, still retains the enormous potentialities of molar motion;

and clearly, where motion is, stasis is not. Sooner or later, in its

ceaseless flight through space, the dark star must collide with some

other stellar body, as Dr. Croll imagines of the dark bodies which his

"pre-nebular theory" postulates. Such collision may be long delayed; the

dark star may be drawn in comet-like circuit about thousands of other

stellar masses, and be hurtled on thousands of diverse parabolic or

elliptical orbits, before it chances to collide--but that matters not:

"billions are the units in the arithmetic of eternity," and sooner

or later, we can hardly doubt, a collision must occur. Then without

question the mutual impact must shatter both colliding bodies into

vapor, or vapor combined with meteoric fragments; in short, into a

veritable nebula, the matrix of future worlds. Thus the dark star, which

is the last term of one series of cosmic changes, becomes the first term

of another series--at once a post-nebular and a pre-nebular condition;

and the nebular hypothesis, thus amplified, ceases to be a mere linear

scale, and is rounded out to connote an unending series of cosmic

cycles, more nearly satisfying the imagination.

In this extended view, nebulae and luminous stars are but the infantile

and adolescent stages of the life history of the cosmic individual; the

dark star, its adult stage, or time of true virility. Or we may think of

the shrunken dark star as the germ-cell, the pollen-grain, of the cosmic

organism. Reduced in size, as becomes a germ-cell, to a mere fraction

of the nebular body from which it sprang, it yet retains within

its seemingly non-vital body all the potentialities of the original

organism, and requires only to blend with a fellow-cell to bring a new

generation into being. Thus may the cosmic race, whose aggregate census

makes up the stellar universe, be perpetuated--individual solar systems,

such as ours, being born, and growing old, and dying to live again in

their descendants, while the universe as a whole maintains its unified

integrity throughout all these internal mutations--passing on, it may

be, by infinitesimal stages, to a culmination hopelessly beyond human

comprehension.

III. THE NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY

WILLIAM SMITH AND FOSSIL SHELLS

Ever since Leonardo da Vinci first recognized the true character of

fossils, there had been here and there a man who realized that the

earth's rocky crust is one gigantic mausoleum. Here and there a

dilettante had filled his cabinets with relics from this monster crypt;

here and there a philosopher had pondered over them--questioning whether

perchance they had once been alive, or whether they were not mere

abortive souvenirs of that time when the fertile matrix of the earth was

supposed to have

"teemed at a birth

Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms,

Limbed and full grown."

Some few of these philosophers--as Robert Hooke and Steno in the

seventeenth century, and Moro, Leibnitz, Buffon, Whitehurst, Werner,

Hutton, and others in the eighteenth--had vaguely conceived the

importance of fossils as records of the earth's ancient history, but the

wisest of them no more suspected the full import of the story written

in the rocks than the average stroller in a modern museum suspects the

meaning of the hieroglyphs on the case of a mummy.

It was not that the rudiments of this story are so very hard to

decipher--though in truth they are hard enough--but rather that the

men who made the attempt had all along viewed the subject through an

atmosphere of preconception, which gave a distorted image. Before this

image could be corrected it was necessary that a man should appear who

could see without prejudice, and apply sound common-sense to what he

saw. And such a man did appear towards the close of the century, in the

person of William Smith, the English surveyor. He was a self-taught man,

and perhaps the more independent for that, and he had the gift, besides

his sharp eyes and receptive mind, of a most tenacious memory. By

exercising these faculties, rare as they are homely, he led the way to

a science which was destined, in its later developments, to shake the

structure of established thought to its foundations.

Little enough did William Smith suspect, however, that any such dire

consequences were to come of his act when he first began noticing the

fossil shells that here and there are to be found in the stratified

rocks and soils of the regions over which his surveyor's duties led him.

Nor, indeed, was there anything of such apparent revolutionary character

in the facts which he unearthed; yet in their implications these facts

were the most disconcerting of any that had been revealed since the days

of Copernicus and Galileo. In its bald essence, Smith's discovery was

simply this: that the fossils in the rocks, instead of being scattered

haphazard, are arranged in regular systems, so that any given stratum

of rock is labelled by its fossil population; and that the order of

succession of such groups of fossils is always the same in any vertical

series of strata in which they occur. That is to say, if fossil A

underlies fossil B in any given region, it never overlies it in any

other series; though a kind of fossils found in one set of strata may

be quite omitted in another. Moreover, a fossil once having disappeared

never reappears in any later stratum.

From these novel facts Smith drew the commonsense inference that the

earth had had successive populations of creatures, each of which in

its turn had become extinct. He partially verified this inference by

comparing the fossil shells with existing species of similar orders,

and found that such as occur in older strata of the rocks had no

counterparts among living species. But, on the whole, being eminently

a practical man, Smith troubled himself but little about the inferences

that might be drawn from his facts. He was chiefly concerned in using

the key he had discovered as an aid to the construction of the first

geological map of England ever attempted, and he left to others the

untangling of any snarls of thought that might seem to arise from his

discovery of the succession of varying forms of life on the globe.

He disseminated his views far and wide, however, in the course of his

journeyings--quite disregarding the fact that peripatetics went out of

fashion when the printing-press came in--and by the beginning of the

nineteenth century he had begun to have a following among the geologists

of England. It must not for a moment be supposed, however, that his

contention regarding the succession of strata met with immediate or

general acceptance. On the contrary, it was most bitterly antagonized.

For a long generation after the discovery was made, the generality of

men, prone as always to strain at gnats and swallow camels, preferred to

believe that the fossils, instead of being deposited in successive ages,

had been swept all at once into their present positions by the current

of a mighty flood--and that flood, needless to say, the Noachian deluge.

Just how the numberless successive strata could have been laid down

in orderly sequence to the depth of several miles in one such fell

cataclysm was indeed puzzling, especially after it came to be admitted

that the heaviest fossils were not found always at the bottom; but to

doubt that this had been done in some way was rank heresy in the early

days of the nineteenth century.

CUVIER AND FOSSIL VERTEBRATES

But once discovered, William Smith's unique facts as to the succession

of forms in the rocks would not down. There was one most vital point,

however, regarding which the inferences that seem to follow from

these facts needed verification--the question, namely, whether the

disappearance of a fauna from the register in the rocks really implies

the extinction of that fauna. Everything really depended upon the answer

to that question, and none but an accomplished naturalist could answer

it with authority. Fortunately, the most authoritative naturalist of the

time, George Cuvier, took the question in hand--not, indeed, with the

idea of verifying any suggestion of Smith's, but in the course of his

own original studies--at the very beginning of the century, when Smith's

views were attracting general attention.

Cuvier and Smith were exact contemporaries, both men having been born in

1769, that "fertile year" which gave the world also Chateaubriand, Von

Humboldt, Wellington, and Napoleon. But the French naturalist was of

very different antecedents from the English surveyor. He was brilliantly

educated, had early gained recognition as a scientist, and while yet a

young man had come to be known as the foremost comparative anatomist of

his time. It was the anatomical studies that led him into the realm of

fossils. Some bones dug out of the rocks by workmen in a quarry were

brought to his notice, and at once his trained eye told him that they

were different from anything he had seen before. Hitherto such bones,

when not entirely ignored, had been for the most part ascribed to

giants of former days, or even to fallen angels. Cuvier soon showed

that neither giants nor angels were in question, but elephants of an

unrecognized species. Continuing his studies, particularly with material

gathered from gypsum beds near Paris, he had accumulated, by the

beginning of the nineteenth century, bones of about twenty-five species

of animals that he believed to be different from any now living on the

globe.

The fame of these studies went abroad, and presently fossil bones poured

in from all sides, and Cuvier's conviction that extinct forms of animals

are represented among the fossils was sustained by the evidence of many

strange and anomalous forms, some of them of gigantic size. In 1816

the famous Ossements Fossiles, describing these novel objects, was

published, and vertebrate paleontology became a science. Among

other things of great popular interest the book contained the first

authoritative description of the hairy elephant, named by Cuvier the

mammoth, the remains of which bad been found embedded in a mass of

ice in Siberia in 1802, so wonderfully preserved that the dogs of the

Tungusian fishermen actually ate its flesh. Bones of the same species

had been found in Siberia several years before by the naturalist Pallas,

who had also found the carcass of a rhinoceros there, frozen in a

mud-bank; but no one then suspected that these were members of an

extinct population--they were supposed to be merely transported relics

of the flood.

Cuvier, on the other hand, asserted that these and the other creatures

he described had lived and died in the region where their remains were

found, and that most of them have no living representatives upon the

globe. This, to be sure, was nothing more than William Smith had tried

all along to establish regarding lower forms of life; but flesh and

blood monsters appeal to the imagination in a way quite beyond the power

of mere shells; so the announcement of Cuvier's discoveries aroused the

interest of the entire world, and the Ossements Fossiles was accorded a

popular reception seldom given a work of technical science--a reception

in which the enthusiastic approval of progressive geologists was mingled

with the bitter protests of the conservatives.

"Naturalists certainly have neither explored all the continents," said

Cuvier, "nor do they as yet even know all the quadrupeds of those parts

which have been explored. New species of this class are discovered from

time to time; and those who have not examined with attention all the

circumstances belonging to these discoveries may allege also that the

unknown quadrupeds, whose fossil bones have been found in the strata

of the earth, have hitherto remained concealed in some islands not yet

discovered by navigators, or in some of the vast deserts which occupy

the middle of Africa, Asia, the two Americas, and New Holland.

"But if we carefully attend to the kind of quadrupeds that have been

recently discovered, and to the circumstances of their discovery, we

shall easily perceive that there is very little chance indeed of our

ever finding alive those which have only been seen in a fossil state.

"Islands of moderate size, and at a considerable distance from the large

continents, have very few quadrupeds. These must have been carried

to them from other countries. Cook and Bougainville found no other

quadrupeds besides hogs and dogs in the South Sea Islands; and the

largest quadruped of the West India Islands, when first discovered, was

the agouti, a species of the cavy, an animal apparently between the rat

and the rabbit.

"It is true that the great continents, as Asia, Africa, the two

Americas, and New Holland, have large quadrupeds, and, generally

speaking, contain species common to each; insomuch, that upon

discovering countries which are isolated from the rest of the world,

the animals they contain of the class of quadruped were found entirely

different from those which existed in other countries. Thus, when the

Spaniards first penetrated into South America, they did not find it to

contain a single quadruped exactly the same with those of Europe, Asia,

and Africa. The puma, the jaguar, the tapir, the capybara, the llama,

or glama, and vicuna, and the whole tribe of sapajous, were to them

entirely new animals, of which they had not the smallest idea....

"If there still remained any great continent to be discovered, we

might perhaps expect to be made acquainted with new species of large

quadrupeds, among which some might be found more or less similar to

those of which we find the exuviae in the bowels of the earth. But it

is merely sufficient to glance the eye over the maps of the world and

observe the innumerable directions in which navigators have traversed

the ocean, in order to be satisfied that there does not remain any large

land to be discovered, unless it may be situated towards the Antarctic

Pole, where eternal ice necessarily forbids the existence of animal

life."(1)

Cuvier then points out that the ancients were well acquainted with

practically all the animals on the continents of Europe, Asia, and

Africa now known to scientists. He finds little grounds, therefore, for

belief in the theory that at one time there were monstrous animals on

the earth which it was necessary to destroy in order that the present

fauna and men might flourish. After reviewing these theories and beliefs

in detail, he takes up his Inquiry Respecting the Fabulous Animals

of the Ancients. "It is easy," he says, "to reply to the foregoing

objections, by examining the descriptions that are left us by the

ancients of those unknown animals, and by inquiring into their origins.

Now that the greater number of these animals have an origin, the

descriptions given of them bear the most unequivocal marks; as in almost

all of them we see merely the different parts of known animals united by

an unbridled imagination, and in contradiction to every established law

of nature."(2)

Having shown how the fabulous monsters of ancient times and of foreign

nations, such as the Chinese, were simply products of the imagination,

having no prototypes in nature, Cuvier takes up the consideration of the

difficulty of distinguishing the fossil bones of quadrupeds.

We shall have occasion to revert to this part of Cuvier's paper in

another connection. Here it suffices to pass at once to the final

conclusion that the fossil bones in question are the remains of an

extinct fauna, the like of which has no present-day representation on

the earth. Whatever its implications, this conclusion now seemed to

Cuvier to be fully established.

In England the interest thus aroused was sent to fever-heat in 1821 by

the discovery of abundant beds of fossil bones in the stalagmite-covered

floor of a cave at Kirkdale, Yorkshire which went to show that England,

too, had once had her share of gigantic beasts. Dr. Buckland, the

incumbent of the chair of geology at Oxford, and the most authoritative

English geologist of his day, took these finds in hand and showed that

the bones belonged to a number of species, including such alien forms as

elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, and hyenas. He maintained that all

of these creatures had actually lived in Britain, and that the caves in

which their bones were found had been the dens of hyenas.

The claim was hotly disputed, as a matter of course. As late as 1827

books were published denouncing Buckland, doctor of divinity though he

was, as one who had joined in an "unhallowed cause," and reiterating the

old cry that the fossils were only remains of tropical species washed

thither by the deluge. That they were found in solid rocks or in caves

offered no difficulty, at least not to the fertile imagination of

Granville Penn, the leader of the conservatives, who clung to the old

idea of Woodward and Cattcut that the deluge had dissolved the entire

crust of the earth to a paste, into which the relics now called fossils

had settled. The caves, said Mr. Penn, are merely the result of gases

given off by the carcasses during decomposition--great air-bubbles, so

to speak, in the pasty mass, becoming caverns when the waters receded

and the paste hardened to rocky consistency.

But these and such-like fanciful views were doomed even in the day of

their utterance. Already in 1823 other gigantic creatures, christened

ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus by Conybeare, had been found in deeper

strata of British rocks; and these, as well as other monsters whose

remains were unearthed in various parts of the world, bore such strange

forms that even the most sceptical could scarcely hope to find their

counterparts among living creatures. Cuvier's contention that all the

larger vertebrates of the existing age are known to naturalists was

borne out by recent explorations, and there seemed no refuge from the

conclusion that the fossil records tell of populations actually extinct.

But if this were admitted, then Smith's view that there have been

successive rotations of population could no longer be denied. Nor could

it be in doubt that the successive faunas, whose individual remains have

been preserved in myriads, representing extinct species by thousands

and tens of thousands, must have required vast periods of time for the

production and growth of their countless generations.

As these facts came to be generally known, and as it came to be

understood in addition that the very matrix of the rock in which fossils

are imbedded is in many cases one gigantic fossil, composed of the

remains of microscopic forms of life, common-sense, which, after all,

is the final tribunal, came to the aid of belabored science. It was

conceded that the only tenable interpretation of the record in the rocks

is that numerous populations of creatures, distinct from one another and

from present forms, have risen and passed away; and that the geologic

ages in which these creatures lived were of inconceivable length. The

rank and file came thus, with the aid of fossil records, to realize

the import of an idea which James Hutton, and here and there another

thinker, had conceived with the swift intuition of genius long

before the science of paleontology came into existence. The Huttonian

proposition that time is long had been abundantly established, and by

about the close of the first third of the last century geologists had

begun to speak of "ages" and "untold aeons of time" with a familiarity

which their predecessors had reserved for days and decades.

CHARLES LYELL COMBATS CATASTROPHISM

And now a new question pressed for solution. If the earth has been

inhabited by successive populations of beings now extinct, how have

all these creatures been destroyed? That question, however, seemed to

present no difficulties. It was answered out of hand by the application

of an old idea. All down the centuries, whatever their varying phases of

cosmogonic thought, there had been ever present the idea that past times

were not as recent times; that in remote epochs the earth had been the

scene of awful catastrophes that have no parallel in "these degenerate

days." Naturally enough, this thought, embalmed in every cosmogonic

speculation of whatever origin, was appealed to in explanation of the

destruction of these hitherto unimagined hosts, which now, thanks to

science, rose from their abysmal slumber as incontestable, but also as

silent and as thought-provocative, as Sphinx or pyramid. These ancient

hosts, it was said, have been exterminated at intervals of odd millions

of years by the recurrence of catastrophes of which the Mosaic deluge is

the latest, but perhaps not the last.

This explanation had fullest warrant of scientific authority. Cuvier had

prefaced his classical work with a speculative disquisition whose

very title (Discours sur les Revolutions du Globe) is ominous of

catastrophism, and whose text fully sustains the augury. And Buckland,

Cuvier's foremost follower across the Channel, had gone even beyond

the master, naming the work in which he described the Kirkdale fossils,

Reliquiae Diluvianae, or Proofs of a Universal Deluge.

Both these authorities supposed the creatures whose remains they studied

to have perished suddenly in the mighty flood whose awful current, as

they supposed, gouged out the modern valleys and hurled great blocks of

granite broadcast over the land. And they invoked similar floods for the

extermination of previous populations.

It is true these scientific citations had met with only qualified

approval at the time of their utterance, because then the conservative

majority of mankind did not concede that there had been a plurality of

populations or revolutions; but now that the belief in past geologic

ages had ceased to be a heresy, the recurring catastrophes of the great

paleontologists were accepted with acclaim. For the moment science and

tradition were at one, and there was a truce to controversy, except

indeed in those outlying skirmish-lines of thought whither news from

headquarters does not permeate till it has become ancient history at its

source.

The truce, however, was not for long. Hardly had contemporary

thought begun to adjust itself to the conception of past ages of

incomprehensible extent, each terminated by a catastrophe of the

Noachian type, when a man appeared who made the utterly bewildering

assertion that the geological record, instead of proving numerous

catastrophic revolutions in the earth's past history, gives no warrant

to the pretensions of any universal catastrophe whatever, near or

remote.

This iconoclast was Charles Lyell, the Scotchman, who was soon to be

famous as the greatest geologist of his time. As a young man he had

become imbued with the force of the Huttonian proposition, that present

causes are one with those that produced the past changes of the

globe, and he carried that idea to what he conceived to be its logical

conclusion. To his mind this excluded the thought of catastrophic

changes in either inorganic or organic worlds.

But to deny catastrophism was to suggest a revolution in current

thought. Needless to say, such revolution could not be effected without

a long contest. For a score of years the matter was argued pro and con.,

often with most unscientific ardor. A mere outline of the controversy

would fill a volume; yet the essential facts with which Lyell at last

established his proposition, in its bearings on the organic world, may

be epitomized in a few words. The evidence which seems to tell of past

revolutions is the apparently sudden change of fossils from one stratum

to another of the rocks. But Lyell showed that this change is not always

complete. Some species live on from one alleged epoch into the next. By

no means all the contemporaries of the mammoth are extinct, and numerous

marine forms vastly more ancient still have living representatives.

Moreover, the blanks between strata in any particular vertical series

are amply filled in with records in the form of thick strata in some

geographically distant series. For example, in some regions Silurian

rocks are directly overlaid by the coal measures; but elsewhere this

sudden break is filled in with the Devonian rocks that tell of a great

"age of fishes." So commonly are breaks in the strata in one region

filled up in another that we are forced to conclude that the

record shown by any single vertical series is of but local

significance--telling, perhaps, of a time when that particular sea-bed

oscillated above the water-line, and so ceased to receive sediment until

some future age when it had oscillated back again. But if this be

the real significance of the seemingly sudden change from stratum to

stratum, then the whole case for catastrophism is hopelessly lost; for

such breaks in the strata furnish the only suggestion geology can offer

of sudden and catastrophic changes of wide extent.

Let us see how Lyell elaborates these ideas, particularly with reference

to the rotation of species.(2)

"I have deduced as a corollary," he says, "that the species existing at

any particular period must, in the course of ages, become extinct, one

after the other. 'They must die out,' to borrow an emphatic expression

from Buffon, 'because Time fights against them.' If the views which I

have taken are just, there will be no difficulty in explaining why

the habitations of so many species are now restrained within exceeding

narrow limits. Every local revolution tends to circumscribe the range

of some species, while it enlarges that of others; and if we are led

to infer that new species originate in one spot only, each must require

time to diffuse itself over a wide area. It will follow, therefore, from

the adoption of our hypothesis that the recent origin of some species

and the high antiquity of others are equally consistent with the general

fact of their limited distribution, some being local because they have

not existed long enough to admit of their wide dissemination; others,

because circumstances in the animate or inanimate world have occurred to

restrict the range within which they may once have obtained....

"If the reader should infer, from the facts laid before him, that the

successive extinction of animals and plants may be part of the constant

and regular course of nature, he will naturally inquire whether there

are any means provided for the repair of these losses? Is it possible as

a part of the economy of our system that the habitable globe should to a

certain extent become depopulated, both in the ocean and on the land, or

that the variety of species should diminish until some new era arrives

when a new and extraordinary effort of creative energy is to be

displayed? Or is it possible that new species can be called into being

from time to time, and yet that so astonishing a phenomenon can escape

the naturalist?

"In the first place, it is obviously more easy to prove that a species

once numerously represented in a given district has ceased to be

than that some other which did not pre-exist had made its

appearance--assuming always, for reasons before stated, that single

stocks only of each animal and plant are originally created, and that

individuals of new species did not suddenly start up in many different

places at once.

"So imperfect has the science of natural history remained down to our

own times that, within the memory of persons now living, the numbers

of known animals and plants have doubled, or even quadrupled, in many

classes. New and often conspicuous species are annually discovered in

parts of the old continent long inhabited by the most civilized nations.

Conscious, therefore, of the limited extent of our information, we

always infer, when such discoveries are made, that the beings in

question bad previously eluded our research, or had at least existed

elsewhere, and only migrated at a recent period into the territories

where we now find them.

"What kind of proofs, therefore, could we reasonably expect to find of

the origin at a particular period of a new species?

"Perhaps, it may be said in reply, that within the last two or three

centuries some forest tree or new quadruped might have been observed to

appear suddenly in those parts of England or France which had been most

thoroughly investigated--that naturalists might have been able to show

that no such being inhabited any other region of the globe, and that

there was no tradition of anything similar having been observed in the

district where it had made its appearance.

"Now, although this objection may seem plausible, yet its force will be

found to depend entirely on the rate of fluctuation which we suppose

to prevail in the animal world, and on the proportions which such

conspicuous subjects of the animal and vegetable kingdoms bear to those

which are less known and escape our observation. There are perhaps

more than a million species of plants and animals, exclusive of the

microscopic and infusory animalcules, now inhabiting the terraqueous

globe, so that if only one of these were to become extinct annually, and

one new one were to be every year called into being, much more than a

million of years might be required to bring about a complete revolution

of organic life.

"I am not hazarding at present any hypothesis as to the probable rate

of change, but none will deny that when the annual birth and the annual

death of one species on the globe is proposed as a mere speculation,

this, at least, is to imagine no slight degree of instability in the

animate creation. If we divide the surface of the earth into twenty

regions of equal area, one of these might comprehend a space of land and

water about equal in dimensions to Europe, and might contain a twentieth

part of the million of species which may be assumed to exist in the

animal kingdom. In this region one species only could, according to the

rate of mortality before assumed, perish in twenty years, or only five

out of fifty thousand in the course of a century. But as a considerable

portion of the whole world belongs to the aquatic classes, with which

we have a very imperfect acquaintance, we must exclude them from our

consideration, and, if they constitute half of the entire number, then

one species only might be lost in forty years among the terrestrial

tribes. Now the mammalia, whether terrestrial or aquatic, bear so small

a proportion to other classes of animals, forming less, perhaps, than

a thousandth part of a whole, that, if the longevity of species in the

different orders were equal, a vast period must elapse before it would

come to the turn of this conspicuous class to lose one of their number.

If one species only of the whole animal kingdom died out in forty years,

no more than one mammifer might disappear in forty thousand years, in a

region of the dimensions of Europe.

"It is easy, therefore, to see that in a small portion of such an area,

in countries, for example, of the size of England and France, periods

of much greater duration must elapse before it would be possible

to authenticate the first appearance of one of the larger plants or

animals, assuming the annual birth and death of one species to be the

rate of vicissitude in the animal creation throughout the world."(3)

In a word, then, said Lyell, it becomes clear that the numberless

species that have been exterminated in the past have died out one by

one, just as individuals of a species die, not in vast shoals; if

whole populations have passed away, it has been not by instantaneous

extermination, but by the elimination of a species now here, now there,

much as one generation succeeds another in the life history of any

single species. The causes which have brought about such gradual

exterminations, and in the long lapse of ages have resulted in rotations

of population, are the same natural causes that are still in operation.

Species have died out in the past as they are dying out in the present,

under influence of changed surroundings, such as altered climate, or

the migration into their territory of more masterful species. Past and

present causes are one--natural law is changeless and eternal.

Such was the essence of the Huttonian doctrine, which Lyell adopted and

extended, and with which his name will always be associated. Largely

through his efforts, though of course not without the aid of many other

workers after a time, this idea--the doctrine of uniformitarianism, it

came to be called--became the accepted dogma of the geologic world not

long after the middle of the nineteenth century. The catastrophists,

after clinging madly to their phantom for a generation, at last

capitulated without terms: the old heresy became the new orthodoxy, and

the way was paved for a fresh controversy.

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

The fresh controversy followed quite as a matter of course. For the idea

of catastrophism had not concerned the destruction of species merely,

but their introduction as well. If whole faunas had been extirpated

suddenly, new faunas had presumably been introduced with equal

suddenness by special creation; but if species die out gradually,

the introduction of new species may be presumed to be correspondingly

gradual. Then may not the new species of a later geological epoch be

the modified lineal descendants of the extinct population of an earlier

epoch?

The idea that such might be the case was not new. It had been suggested

when fossils first began to attract conspicuous attention; and such

sagacious thinkers as Buffon and Kant and Goethe and Erasmus Darwin

had been disposed to accept it in the closing days of the eighteenth

century. Then, in 1809, it had been contended for by one of the early

workers in systematic paleontology--Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who

had studied the fossil shells about Paris while Cuvier studied the

vertebrates, and who had been led by these studies to conclude that

there had been not merely a rotation but a progression of life on the

globe. He found the fossil shells--the fossils of invertebrates, as he

himself had christened them--in deeper strata than Cuvier's vertebrates;

and he believed that there had been long ages when no higher forms than

these were in existence, and that in successive ages fishes, and then

reptiles, had been the highest of animate creatures, before mammals,

including man, appeared. Looking beyond the pale of his bare facts,

as genius sometimes will, he had insisted that these progressive

populations had developed one from another, under influence of changed

surroundings, in unbroken series.

Of course such a thought as this was hopelessly misplaced in a

generation that doubted the existence of extinct species, and hardly

less so in the generation that accepted catastrophism; but it had been

kept alive by here and there an advocate like Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire,

and now the banishment of catastrophism opened the way for its more

respectful consideration. Respectful consideration was given it by Lyell

in each recurring edition of his Principles, but such consideration led

to its unqualified rejection. In its place Lyell put forward a modified

hypothesis of special creation. He assumed that from time to time,

as the extirpation of a species had left room, so to speak, for a new

species, such new species had been created de novo; and he supposed that

such intermittent, spasmodic impulses of creation manifest themselves

nowadays quite as frequently as at any time in the past. He did not say

in so many words that no one need be surprised to-day were he to see a

new species of deer, for example, come up out of the ground before him,

"pawing to get free," like Milton's lion, but his theory implied as

much. And that theory, let it be noted, was not the theory of Lyell

alone, but of nearly all his associates in the geologic world. There is

perhaps no other fact that will bring home to one so vividly the advance

in thought of our own generation as the recollection that so crude, so

almost unthinkable a conception could have been the current doctrine of

science less than half a century ago.

This theory of special creation, moreover, excluded the current doctrine

of uniformitarianism as night excludes day, though most thinkers of the

time did not seem to be aware of the incompatibility of the two ideas.

It may be doubted whether even Lyell himself fully realized it. If he

did, he saw no escape from the dilemma, for it seemed to him that

the record in the rocks clearly disproved the alternative Lamarckian

hypothesis. And almost with one accord the paleontologists of the

time sustained the verdict. Owen, Agassiz, Falconer, Barrande, Pictet,

Forbes, repudiated the idea as unqualifiedly as their great predecessor

Cuvier had done in the earlier generation. Some of them did, indeed,

come to believe that there is evidence of a progressive development of

life in the successive ages, but no such graded series of fossils had

been discovered as would give countenance to the idea that one species

had ever been transformed into another. And to nearly every one this

objection seemed insuperable.

But in 1859 appeared a book which, though not dealing primarily with

paleontology, yet contained a chapter that revealed the geological

record in an altogether new light. The book was Charles Darwin's Origin

of Species, the chapter that wonderful citation of the "Imperfections of

the Geological Record." In this epoch-making chapter Darwin shows what

conditions must prevail in any given place in order that fossils shall

be formed, how unusual such conditions are, and how probable it is that

fossils once imbedded in sediment of a sea-bed will be destroyed by

metamorphosis of the rocks, or by denudation when the strata are raised

above the water-level. Add to this the fact that only small territories

of the earth have been explored geologically, he says, and it becomes

clear that the paleontological record as we now possess it shows but

a mere fragment of the past history of organisms on the earth. It is

a history "imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect. Of this

history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three

countries. Of this volume only here and there a short chapter has been

preserved, and of each page only here and there a few lines." For a

paleontologist to dogmatize from such a record would be as rash, he

thinks, as "for a naturalist to land for five minutes on a barren point

of Australia and then discuss the number and range of its productions."

This citation of observations, which when once pointed out seemed almost

self-evident, came as a revelation to the geological world. In the

clarified view now possible old facts took on a new meaning. It was

recalled that Cuvier had been obliged to establish a new order for some

of the first fossil creatures he examined, and that Buckland had noted

that the nondescript forms were intermediate in structure between

allied existing orders. More recently such intermediate forms had been

discovered over and over; so that, to name but one example, Owen had

been able, with the aid of extinct species, to "dissolve by gradations

the apparently wide interval between the pig and the camel." Owen,

moreover, had been led to speak repeatedly of the "generalized forms"

of extinct animals, and Agassiz had called them "synthetic or prophetic

types," these terms clearly implying "that such forms are in fact

intermediate or connecting links." Darwin himself had shown some years

before that the fossil animals of any continent are closely related to

the existing animals of that continent--edentates predominating, for

example, in South America, and marsupials in Australia. Many observers

had noted that recent strata everywhere show a fossil fauna more nearly

like the existing one than do more ancient strata; and that fossils from

any two consecutive strata are far more closely related to each other

than are the fossils of two remote formations, the fauna of each

geological formation being, indeed, in a wide view, intermediate between

preceding and succeeding faunas.

So suggestive were all these observations that Lyell, the admitted

leader of the geological world, after reading Darwin's citations, felt

able to drop his own crass explanation of the introduction of species

and adopt the transmutation hypothesis, thus rounding out the doctrine

of uniformitarianism to the full proportions in which Lamarck had

conceived it half a century before. Not all paleontologists could follow

him at once, of course; the proof was not yet sufficiently demonstrative

for that; but all were shaken in the seeming security of their former

position, which is always a necessary stage in the progress of thought.

And popular interest in the matter was raised to white heat in a

twinkling.

So, for the third time in this first century of its existence,

paleontology was called upon to play a leading role in a controversy

whose interest extended far beyond the bounds of staid truth-seeking

science. And the controversy waged over the age of the earth had not

been more bitter, that over catastrophism not more acrimonious, than

that which now raged over the question of the transmutation of species.

The question had implications far beyond the bounds of paleontology, of

course. The main evidence yet presented had been drawn from quite other

fields, but by common consent the record in the rocks might furnish a

crucial test of the truth or falsity of the hypothesis. "He who rejects

this view of the imperfections of the geological record," said Darwin,

"will rightly reject the whole theory."

With something more than mere scientific zeal, therefore,

paleontologists turned anew to the records in the rocks, to inquire what

evidence in proof or refutation might be found in unread pages of the

"great stone book." And, as might have been expected, many minds being

thus prepared to receive new evidence, such evidence was not long

withheld.

FOSSIL MAN

Indeed, at the moment of Darwin's writing a new and very instructive

chapter of the geologic record was being presented to the public--a

chapter which for the first time brought man into the story. In 1859

Dr. Falconer, the distinguished British paleontologist, made a visit

to Abbeville, in the valley of the Somme, incited by reports that for

a decade before bad been sent out from there by M. Boucher de Perthes.

These reports had to do with the alleged finding of flint implements,

clearly the work of man, in undisturbed gravel-beds, in the midst of

fossil remains of the mammoth and other extinct animals. What Falconer

saw there and what came of his visit may best be told in his own words:

"In September of 1856 I made the acquaintance of my distinguished friend

M. Boucher de Perthes," wrote Dr. Falconer, "on the introduction of M.

Desnoyers at Paris, when he presented to me the earlier volume of his

Antiquites celtiques, etc., with which I thus became acquainted for the

first time. I was then fresh from the examination of the Indian fossil

remains of the valley of the Jumna; and the antiquity of the human race

being a subject of interest to both, we conversed freely about it,

each from a different point of view. M. de Perthes invited me to visit

Abbeville, in order to examine his antediluvian collection, fossil and

geological, gleaned from the valley of the Somme. This I was unable to

accomplish then, but I reserved it for a future occasion.

"In October, 1856, having determined to proceed to Sicily, I arranged

by correspondence with M. Boucher de Perthes to visit Abbeville on my

journey through France. I was at the time in constant communication

with Mr. Prestwich about the proofs of the antiquity of the human race

yielded by the Broxham Cave, in which he took a lively interest; and

I engaged to communicate to him the opinions at which I should arrive,

after my examination of the Abbeville collection. M. de Perthes gave me

the freest access to his materials, with unreserved explanations of all

the facts of the case that had come under his observation; and having

considered his Menchecourt Section, taken with such scrupulous care, and

identified the molars of elephas primigenius, which he had exhumed with

his own hands deep in that section, along with flint weapons, presenting

the same character as some of those found in the Broxham Cave, I arrived

at the conviction that they were of contemporaneous age, although I

was not prepared to go along with M. de Perthes in all his inferences

regarding the hieroglyphics and in an industrial interpretation of the

various other objects which he had met with."(4)

That Dr. Falconer was much impressed by the collection of M. de

Perthes is shown in a communication which he sent at once to his friend

Prestwich:

"I have been richly rewarded," he exclaims. "His collection of wrought

flint implements, and of the objects of every description associated

with them, far exceeds everything I expected to have seen, especially

from a single locality. He has made great additions, since the

publication of his first volume, in the second, which I now have by

me. He showed me flint hatchets which HE HAD DUG UP with his own hands,

mixed INDISCRIMINATELY with molars of elephas primigenius. I examined

and identified plates of the molars and the flint objects which were

got along with them. Abbeville is an out-of-the-way place, very little

visited; and the French savants who meet him in Paris laugh at Monsieur

de Perthes and his researches. But after devoting the greater part of

a day to his vast collection, I am perfectly satisfied that there is

a great deal of fair presumptive evidence in favor of many of his

speculations regarding the remote antiquity of these industrial objects

and their association with animals now extinct. M. Boucher's hotel

is, from the ground floor to garret, a continued museum, filled with

pictures, mediaeval art, and Gaulish antiquities, including antediluvian

flint-knives, fossil-bones, etc. If, during next summer, you should

happen to be paying a visit to France, let me strongly recommend you to

come to Abbeville. I am sure you would be richly rewarded."(5)

This letter aroused the interest of the English geologists, and in the

spring of 1859 Prestwich and Mr. (afterwards Sir John) Evans made a

visit to Abbeville to see the specimens and examine at first hand the

evidences as pointed out by Dr. Falconer. "The evidence yielded by the

valley of the Somme," continues Falconer, in speaking of this visit,

"was gone into with the scrupulous care and severe and exhaustive

analysis which are characteristic of Mr. Prestwich's researches. The

conclusions to which he was conducted were communicated to the Royal

Society on May 12, 1859, in his celebrated memoir, read on May 26th and

published in the Philosophical Transactions of 1860, which, in addition

to researches made in the valley of the Somme, contained an account of

similar phenomena presented by the valley of the Waveney, near Hoxne, in

Suffolk. Mr. Evans communicated to the Society of Antiquaries a memoir

on the character and geological position of the 'Flint Implements in the

Drift,' which appeared in the Archaeologia for 1860. The results arrived

at by Mr. Prestwich were expressed as follows:

"First. That the flint implements are the result of design and the work

of man.

"Second. That they are found in beds of gravel, sand, and clay, which

have never been artificially disturbed.

"Third. That they occur associated with the remains of land,

fresh-water, and marine testacea, of species now living, and most of

them still common in the same neighborhood, and also with the remains of

various mammalia--a few species now living, but more of extinct forms.

"Fourth. That the period at which their entombment took place was

subsequent to the bowlder-clay period, and to that extent post-glacial;

and also that it was among the latest in geological time--one apparently

anterior to the surface assuming its present form, so far as it regards

some of the minor features."(6)

These reports brought the subject of the very significant human fossils

at Abbeville prominently before the public; whereas the publications of

the original discoverer, Boucher de Perthes, bearing date of 1847, had

been altogether ignored. A new aspect was thus given to the current

controversy.

As Dr. Falconer remarked, geology was now passing through the same

ordeal that astronomy passed in the age of Galileo. But the times were

changed since the day when the author of the Dialogues was humbled

before the Congregation of the Index, and now no Index Librorum

Prohibitorum could avail to hide from eager human eyes such pages of

the geologic story as Nature herself had spared. Eager searchers were

turning the leaves with renewed zeal everywhere, and with no small

measure of success. In particular, interest attached just at this

time to a human skull which Dr. Fuhlrott had discovered in a cave at

Neanderthal two or three years before--a cranium which has ever since

been famous as the Neanderthal skull, the type specimen of what modern

zoologists are disposed to regard as a distinct species of man, Homo

neanderthalensis. Like others of the same type since discovered at Spy,

it is singularly simian in character--low-arched, with receding forehead

and enormous, protuberant eyebrows. When it was first exhibited to the

scientists at Berlin by Dr. Fuhlrott, in 1857, its human character was

doubted by some of the witnesses; of that, however, there is no present

question.

This interesting find served to recall with fresh significance some

observations that had been made in France and Belgium a long generation

earlier, but whose bearings had hitherto been ignored. In 1826 MM.

Tournal and Christol had made independent discoveries of what they

believed to be human fossils in the caves of the south of France; and

in 1827 Dr. Schmerling had found in the cave of Engis, in Westphalia,

fossil bones of even greater significance. Schmerling's explorations

had been made with the utmost care, and patience. At Engis he had

found human bones, including skulls, intermingled with those of extinct

mammals of the mammoth period in a way that left no doubt in his mind

that all dated from the same geological epoch. He bad published a full

account of his discoveries in an elaborate monograph issued in 1833.

But at that time, as it chanced, human fossils were under a ban as

effectual as any ever pronounced by canonical index, though of far

different origin. The oracular voice of Cuvier had declared against the

authenticity of all human fossils. Some of the bones brought him for

examination the great anatomist had pettishly pitched out of the window,

declaring them fit only for a cemetery, and that had settled the matter

for a generation: the evidence gathered by lesser workers could avail

nothing against the decision rendered at the Delphi of Science. But no

ban, scientific or canonical, can longer resist the germinative power of

a fact, and so now, after three decades of suppression, the truth which

Cuvier had buried beneath the weight of his ridicule burst its bonds,

and fossil man stood revealed, if not as a flesh-and-blood, at least as

a skeletal entity.

The reception now accorded our prehistoric ancestor by the progressive

portion of the scientific world amounted to an ovation; but the

unscientific masses, on the other hand, notwithstanding their usual

fondness for tracing remote genealogies, still gave the men of Engis

and Neanderthal the cold shoulder. Nor were all of the geologists quite

agreed that the contemporaneity of these human fossils with the animals

whose remains had been mingled with them had been fully established. The

bare possibility that the bones of man and of animals that long preceded

him had been swept together into the eaves in successive ages, and

in some mysterious way intermingled there, was clung to by the

conservatives as a last refuge. But even this small measure of security

was soon to be denied them, for in 1865 two associated workers,

M. Edouard Lartet and Mr. Henry Christy, in exploring the caves of

Dordogne, unearthed a bit of evidence against which no such objection

could be urged. This momentous exhibit was a bit of ivory, a fragment

of the tusk of a mammoth, on which was scratched a rude but unmistakable

outline portrait of the mammoth itself. If all the evidence as to man's

antiquity before presented was suggestive merely, here at last was

demonstration; for the cave-dwelling man could not well have drawn the

picture of the mammoth unless he had seen that animal, and to admit that

man and the mammoth had been contemporaries was to concede the entire

case. So soon, therefore, as the full import of this most instructive

work of art came to be realized, scepticism as to man's antiquity was

silenced for all time to come.

In the generation that has elapsed since the first drawing of the

cave-dweller artist was discovered, evidences of the wide-spread

existence of man in an early epoch have multiplied indefinitely, and

to-day the paleontologist traces the history of our race back beyond the

iron and bronze ages, through a neolithic or polished-stone age, to

a paleolithic or rough-stone age, with confidence born of unequivocal

knowledge. And he looks confidently to the future explorer of the

earth's fossil records to extend the history back into vastly more

remote epochs, for it is little doubted that paleolithic man, the most

ancient of our recognized progenitors, is a modern compared to those

generations that represented the real childhood of our race.

THE FOSSIL-BEDS OF AMERICA

Coincidently with the discovery of these highly suggestive pages of the

geologic story, other still more instructive chapters were being brought

to light in America. It was found that in the Rocky Mountain region, in

strata found in ancient lake beds, records of the tertiary period, or

age of mammals, had been made and preserved with fulness not approached

in any other region hitherto geologically explored. These records were

made known mainly by Professors Joseph Leidy, O. C. Marsh, and E. D.

Cope, working independently, and more recently by numerous younger

paleontologists.

The profusion of vertebrate remains thus brought to light quite beggars

all previous exhibits in point of mere numbers. Professor Marsh, for

example, who was first in the field, found three hundred new tertiary

species between the years 1870 and 1876. Meanwhile, in cretaceous

strata, he unearthed remains of about two hundred birds with teeth, six

hundred pterodactyls, or flying dragons, some with a spread of wings

of twenty-five feet, and one thousand five hundred mosasaurs of the

sea-serpent type, some of them sixty feet or more in length. In a single

bed of Jurassic rock, not larger than a good-sized lecture-room, he

found the remains of one hundred and sixty individuals of mammals,

representing twenty species and nine genera; while beds of the same age

have yielded three hundred reptiles, varying from the size of a rabbit

to sixty or eighty feet in length.

But the chief interest of these fossils from the West is not their

number but their nature; for among them are numerous illustrations of

just such intermediate types of organisms as must have existed in the

past if the succession of life on the globe has been an unbroken lineal

succession. Here are reptiles with bat-like wings, and others with

bird-like pelves and legs adapted for bipedal locomotion. Here are

birds with teeth, and other reptilian characters. In short, what with

reptilian birds and birdlike reptiles, the gap between modern reptiles

and birds is quite bridged over. In a similar way, various diverse

mammalian forms, as the tapir, the rhinoceros, and the horse, are linked

together by fossil progenitors. And, most important of all, Professor

Marsh has discovered a series of mammalian remains, occurring in

successive geological epochs, which are held to represent beyond cavil

the actual line of descent of the modern horse; tracing the lineage

of our one-toed species back through two and three toed forms, to an

ancestor in the eocene or early tertiary that had four functional toes

and the rudiment of a fifth. This discovery is too interesting and too

important not to be detailed at length in the words of the discoverer.

Marsh Describes the Fossil Horse

"It is a well-known fact," says Professor Marsh, "that the Spanish

discoverers of America discovered no horses on this continent, and that

the modern horse (Equus caballus, Linn.) was subsequently introduced

from the Old World. It is, however, not so generally known that these

animals had formerly been abundant here, and that long before, in

tertiary time, near relatives of the horse, and probably his ancestors,

existed in the far West in countless numbers and in a marvellous variety

of forms. The remains of equine mammals, now known from the tertiary and

quaternary deposits of this country, already represent more than double

the number of genera and species hitherto found in the strata of the

eastern hemisphere, and hence afford most important aid in tracing out

the genealogy of the horses still existing.

"The animals of this group which lived in America during the three

diversions of the tertiary period were especially numerous in the Rocky

Mountain regions, and their remains are well preserved in the old lake

basins which then covered so much of that country. The most ancient

of these lakes--which extended over a considerable part of the present

territories of Wyoming and Utah--remained so long in eocene times that

the mud and sand, slowly deposited in it, accumulated to more than a

mile in vertical thickness. In these deposits vast numbers of tropical

animals were entombed, and here the oldest equine remains occur,

four species of which have been described. These belong to the genus

Orohippus (Marsh), and are all of a diminutive size, hardly bigger than

a fox. The skeletons of these animals resemble that of the horse in many

respects, much more indeed than any other existing species, but, instead

of the single toe on each foot, so characteristic of all modern equines,

the various species of Orohippus had four toes before and three behind,

all of which reached the ground. The skull, too, was proportionately

shorter, and the orbit was not enclosed behind by a bridge of bone.

There were fifty four teeth in all, and the premolars were larger than

the molars. The crowns of these teeth were very short. The canine teeth

were developed in both sexes, and the incisors did not have the "mark"

which indicates the age of the modern horse. The radius and ulna were

separate, and the latter was entire through the whole length. The tibia

and fibula were distinct. In the forefoot all the digits except the

pollex, or first, were well developed. The third digit is the largest,

and its close resemblance to that of the horse is clearly marked. The

terminal phalanx, or coffin-bone, has a shallow median bone in front,

as in many species of this group in the later tertiary. The fourth digit

exceeds the second in size, and the second is much the shortest of all.

Its metacarpal bone is considerably curved outward. In the hind-foot

of this genus there are but three digits. The fourth metatarsal is much

larger than the second.

"The larger number of equine mammals now known from the tertiary

deposits of this country, and their regular distributions through the

subdivisions of this formation, afford a good opportunity to ascertain

the probable descent of the modern horse. The American representative of

the latter is the extinct Equus fraternus (Leidy), a species almost, if

not wholly, identical with the Old World Equus caballus (Linnaeus), to

which our recent horse belongs. Huxley has traced successfully the later

genealogy of the horse through European extinct forms, but the line in

America was probably a more direct one, and the record is more complete.

Taking, then, as the extreme of a series, Orohippus agilis (Marsh),

from the eocene, and Equus fraternus (Leidy), from the quaternary,

intermediate forms may be intercalated with considerable certainty

from thirty or more well-marked species that lived in the intervening

periods. The natural line of descent would seem to be through the

following genera: Orohippus, of the eocene; Miohippus and Anchitherium,

of the miocene; Anchippus, Hipparion, Protohippus, Phohippus, of the

pliocene; and Equus, quaternary and recent.

"The most marked changes undergone by the successive equine genera are

as follows: First, increase in size; second, increase in speed, through

concentration of limb bones; third, elongation of head and neck, and

modifications of skull. The eocene Orohippus was the size of a fox.

Miohippus and Anchitherium, from the miocene, were about as large as a

sheep. Hipparion and Pliohippus, of the pliocene, equalled the ass in

height; while the size of the quaternary Equus was fully up to that of a

modern horse.

"The increase of speed was equally well marked, and was a direct

result of the gradual formation of the limbs. The latter were slowly

concentrated by the reduction of their lateral elements and enlargement

of the axial bone, until the force exerted by each limb came to act

directly through its axis in the line of motion. This concentration is

well seen--e.g., in the fore-limb. There was, first, a change in the

scapula and humerus, especially in the latter, which facilitated motion

in one line only; second, an expansion of the radius and reduction of

the ulna, until the former alone remained entire and effective; third,

a shortening of all the carpal bones and enlargement of the median ones,

insuring a firmer wrist; fourth, an increase of size of the third digit,

at the expense of those of each side, until the former alone supported

the limb.

"Such is, in brief, a general outline of the more marked changes that

seemed to have produced in America the highly specialized modern Equus

from his diminutive four-toed predecessor, the eocene Orohippus. The

line of descent appears to have been direct, and the remains now known

supply every important intermediate form. It is, of course, impossible

to say with certainty through which of the three-toed genera of the

pliocene that lived together the succession came. It is not impossible

that the latter species, which appear generically identical, are the

descendants of more distinct pliocene types, as the persistent tendency

in all the earlier forms was in the same direction. Considering the

remarkable development of the group through the tertiary period, and

its existence even later, it seems very strange that none of the species

should have survived, and that we are indebted for our present horse to

the Old World."(7)

PALEONTOLOGY OF EVOLUTION

These and such-like revelations have come to light in our own time--are,

indeed, still being disclosed. Needless to say, no index of any sort now

attempts to conceal them; yet something has been accomplished towards

the same end by the publication of the discoveries in Smithsonian

bulletins and in technical memoirs of government surveys. Fortunately,

however, the results have been rescued from that partial oblivion by

such interpreters as Professors Huxley and Cope, so the unscientific

public has been allowed to gain at least an inkling of the wonderful

progress of paleontology in our generation.

The writings of Huxley in particular epitomize the record. In 1862 he

admitted candidly that the paleontological record as then known, so far

as it bears on the doctrine of progressive development, negatives

that doctrine. In 1870 he was able to "soften somewhat the Brutus-like

severity" of his former verdict, and to assert that the results of

recent researches seem "to leave a clear balance in favor of the

doctrine of the evolution of living forms one from another." Six years

later, when reviewing the work of Marsh in America and of Gaudry

in Pikermi, he declared that, "on the evidence of paleontology, the

evolution of many existing forms of animal life from their predecessors

is no longer an hypothesis, but an historical fact." In 1881 he

asserted that the evidence gathered in the previous decade had been so

unequivocal that, had the transmutation hypothesis not existed, "the

paleontologist would have had to invent it."

Since then the delvers after fossils have piled proof on proof in

bewildering profusion. The fossil-beds in the "bad lands" of western

America seem inexhaustible. And in the Connecticut River Valley near

relatives of the great reptiles which Professor Marsh and others

have found in such profusion in the West left their tracks on the

mud-flats--since turned to sandstone; and a few skeletons also have been

found. The bodies of a race of great reptiles that were the lords of

creation of their day have been dissipated to their elements, while the

chance indentations of their feet as they raced along the shores, mere

footprints on the sands, have been preserved among the most imperishable

of the memory-tablets of the world.

Of the other vertebrate fossils that have been found in the eastern

portions of America, among the most abundant and interesting are the

skeletons of mastodons. Of these one of the largest and most complete is

that which was unearthed in the bed of a drained lake near Newburg, New

York, in 1845. This specimen was larger than the existing elephants,

and had tusks eleven feet in length. It was mounted and described by Dr.

John C. Warren, of Boston, and has been famous for half a century as the

"Warren mastodon."

But to the student of racial development as recorded by the fossils all

these sporadic finds have but incidental interest as compared with the

rich Western fossil-beds to which we have already referred. From records

here unearthed, the racial evolution of many mammals has in the past few

years been made out in greater or less detail. Professor Cope has traced

the ancestry of the camels (which, like the rhinoceroses, hippopotami,

and sundry other forms now spoken of as "Old World," seem to have had

their origin here) with much completeness.

A lemuroid form of mammal, believed to be of the type from which man

has descended, has also been found in these beds. It is thought that the

descendants of this creature, and of the other "Old-World" forms

above referred to, found their way to Asia, probably, as suggested by

Professor Marsh, across a bridge at Bering Strait, to continue their

evolution on the other hemisphere, becoming extinct in the land of their

nativity. The ape-man fossil found in the tertiary strata of the island

of Java in 1891 by the Dutch surgeon Dr. Eugene Dubois, and named

Pithecanthropus erectus, may have been a direct descendant of the

American tribe of primitive lemurs, though this is only a conjecture.

Not all the strange beasts which have left their remains in our "bad

lands" are represented by living descendants. The titanotheres, or

brontotheridae, for example, a gigantic tribe, offshoots of the

same stock which produced the horse and rhinoceros, represented the

culmination of a line of descent. They developed rapidly in a geological

sense, and flourished about the middle of the tertiary period; then,

to use Agassiz's phrase," time fought against them." The story of their

evolution has been worked out by Professors Leidy, Marsh, Cope, and H.

F. Osborne.

A recent bit of paleontological evidence bearing on the question of

the introduction of species is that presented by Dr. J. L. Wortman in

connection with the fossil lineage of the edentates. It was suggested by

Marsh, in 1877, that these creatures, whose modern representatives are

all South American, originated in North America long before the two

continents had any land connection. The stages of degeneration by which

these animals gradually lost the enamel from their teeth, coming finally

to the unique condition of their modern descendants of the sloth tribe,

are illustrated by strikingly graded specimens now preserved in the

American Museum of Natural History, as shown by Dr. Wortman.

All these and a multitude of other recent observations that cannot be

even outlined here tell the same story. With one accord paleontologists

of our time regard the question of the introduction of new species as

solved. As Professor Marsh has said, "to doubt evolution today is to

doubt science; and science is only another name for truth."

Thus the third great battle over the meaning of the fossil records has

come to a conclusion. Again there is a truce to controversy, and it may

seem to the casual observer that the present stand of the science of

fossils is final and impregnable. But does this really mean that a full

synopsis of the story of paleontology has been told? Or do we only await

the coming of the twentieth-century Lamarck or Darwin, who shall

attack the fortified knowledge of to-day with the batteries of a new

generalization?

IV. THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN GEOLOGY

JAMES HUTTON

One might naturally suppose that the science of the earth which lies at

man's feet would at least have kept pace with the science of the distant

stars. But perhaps the very obviousness of the phenomena delayed the

study of the crust of the earth. It is the unattainable that allures and

mystifies and enchants the developing mind. The proverbial child spurns

its toys and cries for the moon.

So in those closing days of the eighteenth century, when astronomers had

gone so far towards explaining the mysteries of the distant portions

of the universe, we find a chaos of opinion regarding the structure

and formation of the earth. Guesses were not wanting to explain the

formation of the world, it is true, but, with one or two exceptions,

these are bizarre indeed. One theory supposed the earth to have been at

first a solid mass of ice, which became animated only after a comet had

dashed against it. Other theories conceived the original globe as a mass

of water, over which floated vapors containing the solid elements, which

in due time were precipitated as a crust upon the waters. In a word, the

various schemes supposed the original mass to have been ice, or water,

or a conglomerate of water and solids, according to the random fancies

of the theorists; and the final separation into land and water was

conceived to have taken place in all the ways which fancy, quite

unchecked by any tenable data, could invent.

Whatever important changes in the general character of the surface of

the globe were conceived to have taken place since its creation were

generally associated with the Mosaic: deluge, and the theories which

attempted to explain this catastrophe were quite on a par with

those which dealt with a remoter period of the earth's history. Some

speculators, holding that the interior of the globe is a great abyss

of waters, conceived that the crust had dropped into this chasm and had

thus been inundated. Others held that the earth had originally revolved

on a vertical axis, and that the sudden change to its present position

bad caused the catastrophic shifting of its oceans. But perhaps the

favorite theory was that which supposed a comet to have wandered near

the earth, and in whirling about it to have carried the waters, through

gravitation, in a vast tide over the continents.

Thus blindly groped the majority of eighteenth-century philosophers in

their attempts to study what we now term geology. Deluded by the old

deductive methods, they founded not a science, but the ghost of a

science, as immaterial and as unlike anything in nature as any other

phantom that could be conjured from the depths of the speculative

imagination. And all the while the beckoning earth lay beneath the feet

of these visionaries; but their eyes were fixed in air.

At last, however, there came a man who had the penetration to see that

the phantom science of geology needed before all else a body corporeal,

and who took to himself the task of supplying it. This was Dr.

James Hutton, of Edinburgh, physician, farmer, and manufacturing

chemist--patient, enthusiastic, level-headed devotee of science.

Inspired by his love of chemistry to study the character of rocks and

soils, Hutton had not gone far before the earth stood revealed to him

in a new light. He saw, what generations of predecessors had blindly

refused to see, that the face of nature everywhere, instead of being

rigid and immutable, is perennially plastic, and year by year is

undergoing metamorphic changes. The solidest rocks are day by day

disintegrated slowly, but none the less surely, by wind and rain and

frost, by mechanical attrition and chemical decomposition, to form the

pulverized earth and clay. This soil is being swept away by perennial

showers, and carried off to the oceans. The oceans themselves beat on

their shores, and eat insidiously into the structure of sands and rocks.

Everywhere, slowly but surely, the surface of the land is being worn

away; its substance is being carried to burial in the seas.

Should this denudation continue long enough, thinks Hutton, the entire

surface of the continents must be worn away. Should it be continued LONG

ENOUGH! And with that thought there flashes on his mind an inspiring

conception--the idea that solar time is long, indefinitely long. That

seems a simple enough thought--almost a truism--to the twentieth-century

mind; but it required genius to conceive it in the eighteenth. Hutton

pondered it, grasped its full import, and made it the basis of his

hypothesis, his "theory of the earth."

MODERN GEOLOGY

The hypothesis is this--that the observed changes of the surface of

the earth, continued through indefinite lapses of time, must result in

conveying all the land at last to the sea; in wearing continents away

till the oceans overflow them. What then? Why, as the continents wear

down, the oceans are filling up. Along their bottoms the detritus of

wasted continents is deposited in strata, together with the bodies of

marine animals and vegetables. Why might not this debris solidify to

form layers of rocks--the basis of new continents? Why not, indeed?

But have we any proof that such formation of rocks in an ocean-bed has,

in fact, occurred? To be sure we have. It is furnished by every bed

of limestone, every outcropping fragment of fossil-bearing rock, every

stratified cliff. How else than through such formation in an ocean-bed

came these rocks to be stratified? How else came they to contain the

shells of once living organisms imbedded in their depths? The ancients,

finding fossil shells imbedded in the rocks, explained them as mere

freaks of "nature and the stars." Less superstitious generations had

repudiated this explanation, but had failed to give a tenable solution

of the mystery. To Hutton it is a mystery no longer. To him it seems

clear that the basis of the present continents was laid in ancient

sea-beds, formed of the detritus of continents yet more ancient.

But two links are still wanting to complete the chain of Hutton's

hypothesis. Through what agency has the ooze of the ocean-bed been

transformed into solid rock? and through what agency has this rock been

lifted above the surface of the water to form new continents? Hutton

looks about him for a clew, and soon he finds it. Everywhere about us

there are outcropping rocks that are not stratified, but which give

evidence to the observant eye of having once been in a molten state.

Different minerals are mixed together; pebbles are scattered through

masses of rock like plums in a pudding; irregular crevices in otherwise

solid masses of rock--so-called veinings--are seen to be filled with

equally solid granite of a different variety, which can have gotten

there in no conceivable way, so Hutton thinks, but by running in while

molten, as liquid metal is run into the moulds of the founder. Even

the stratified rocks, though they seemingly have not been melted, give

evidence in some instances of having been subjected to the action of

heat. Marble, for example, is clearly nothing but calcined limestone.

With such evidence before him, Hutton is at no loss to complete his

hypothesis. The agency which has solidified the ocean-beds, he says,

is subterranean heat. The same agency, acting excessively, has produced

volcanic cataclysms, upheaving ocean-beds to form continents. The rugged

and uneven surfaces of mountains, the tilted and broken character

of stratified rocks everywhere, are the standing witnesses of these

gigantic upheavals.

And with this the imagined cycle is complete. The continents, worn away

and carried to the sea by the action of the elements, have been made

over into rocks again in the ocean-beds, and then raised once more into

continents. And this massive cycle, In Hutton's scheme, is supposed

to have occurred not once only, but over and over again, times without

number. In this unique view ours is indeed a world without beginning

and without end; its continents have been making and unmaking in endless

series since time began.

Hutton formulated his hypothesis while yet a young man, not long after

the middle of the century. He first gave it publicity in 1781, in a

paper before the Royal Society of Edinburgh:

"A solid body of land could not have answered the purpose of a habitable

world," said Hutton, "for a soil is necessary to the growth of plants,

and a soil is nothing but the material collected from the destruction of

the solid land. Therefore the surface of this land inhabited by man, and

covered by plants and animals, is made by nature to decay, in dissolving

from that hard and compact state in which it is found; and this soil

is necessarily washed away by the continual circulation of the water

running from the summits of the mountains towards the general receptacle

of that fluid.

"The heights of our land are thus levelled with our shores, our fertile

plains are formed from the ruins of the mountains; and those travelling

materials are still pursued by the moving water, and propelled along the

inclined surface of the earth. These movable materials, delivered into

the sea, cannot, for a long continuance, rest upon the shore, for by the

agitation of the winds, the tides, and the currents every movable thing

is carried farther and farther along the shelving bottom of the sea,

towards the unfathomable regions of the ocean.

"If the vegetable soil is thus constantly removed from the surface of

the land, and if its place is then to be supplied from the dissolution

of the solid earth as here represented, we may perceive an end to this

beautiful machine; an end arising from no error in its constitution as

a world, but from that destructibility of its land which is so necessary

in the system of the globe, in the economy of life and vegetation.

"The immense time necessarily required for the total destruction of

the land must not be opposed to that view of future events which is

indicated by the surest facts and most approved principles. Time, which

measures everything in our idea, and is often deficient to our schemes,

is to nature endless and as nothing; it cannot limit that by which alone

it has existence; and as the natural course of time, which to us seems

infinite, cannot be bounded by any operation that may have an end, the

progress of things upon this globe that in the course of nature cannot

be limited by time must proceed in a continual succession. We are,

therefore, to consider as inevitable the destruction of our land, so far

as effected by those operations which are necessary in the purpose of

the globe, considered as a habitable world, and so far as we have

not examined any other part of the economy of nature, in which other

operations and a different intention might appear.

"We have now considered the globe of this earth as a machine,

constructed upon chemical as well as mechanical principles, by which its

different parts are all adapted, in form, in quality, and quantity, to a

certain end--an end attained with certainty of success, and an end from

which we may perceive wisdom in contemplating the means employed.

"But is this world to be considered thus merely as a machine, to last no

longer than its parts retain their present position, their proper forms

and qualities? Or may it not be also considered as an organized body

such as has a constitution, in which the necessary decay of the machine

is naturally repaired in the exertion of those productive powers by

which it has been formed?

"This is the view in which we are now to examine the globe; to see if

there be, in the constitution of the world, a reproductive operation

by which a ruined constitution may be again repaired and a duration of

stability thus procured to the machine considered as a world containing

plants and animals.

"If no such reproductive power, or reforming operation, after due

inquiry, is to be found in the constitution of this world, we should

have reason to conclude that the system of this earth has either been

intentionally made imperfect or has not been the work of infinite power

and wisdom."(1)

This, then, was the important question to be answered--the question of

the constitution of the globe. To accomplish this, it was necessary,

first of all, to examine without prejudice the material already in hand,

adding such new discoveries from time to time as might be made, but

always applying to the whole unvarying scientific principles and

inductive methods of reasoning.

"If we are to take the written history of man for the rule by which we

should judge of the time when the species first began," said Hutton,

"that period would be but little removed from the present state of

things. The Mosaic history places this beginning of man at no great

distance; and there has not been found, in natural history, any document

by which high antiquity might be attributed to the human race. But

this is not the case with regard to the inferior species of animals,

particularly those which inhabit the ocean and its shores. We find

in natural history monuments which prove that those animals had long

existed; and we thus procure a measure for the computation of a period

of time extremely remote, though far from being precisely ascertained.

"In examining things present, we have data from which to reason with

regard to what has been; and from what actually has been we have

data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen hereafter.

Therefore, upon the supposition that the operations of nature are

equable and steady, we find, in natural appearances, means for

concluding a certain portion of time to have necessarily elapsed in the

production of those events of which we see the effects.

"It is thus that, in finding the relics of sea animals of every kind

in the solid body of our earth, a natural history of those animals

is formed, which includes a certain portion of time; and for the

ascertaining this portion of time we must again have recourse to the

regular operations of this world. We shall thus arrive at facts which

indicate a period to which no other species of chronology is able to

remount.