(Atlantic Monthly for July, August, and October, 1860, reprinted in
1861)
I
Novelties are enticing to most people; to us they are simply annoying.
We cling to a long-accepted theory, just as we cling to an old suit of
clothes. A new theory, like a new pair of breeches (the Atlantic still
affects the older type of nether garment), is sure to have hard-fitting
places; or, even when no particular fault can be found with the
article, it oppresses with a sense of general discomfort. New notions
and new styles worry us, till we get well used to them, which is only
by slow degrees.
Wherefore, in Galileos time, we might have helped to proscribe, or to
burn--had he been stubborn enough to warrant cremation--even the great
pioneer of inductive research; although, when we had fairly recovered
our composure, and bad leisurely excogitated the matter, we might have
come to conclude that the new doctrine was better than the old one,
after all, at least for those who had nothing to unlearn.
Such being our habitual state of mind, it may well be believed that the
perusal of the new book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection" left an uncomfortable impression, in spite of its plausible
and winning ways. We were not wholly unprepared for it, as many of our
contemporaries seem to have been. The scientific reading in which we
indulge as a relaxation from severer studies had raised dim
forebodings. Investigations about the succession of species in time,
and their actual geographical distribution over the earths surface,
were leading up from all sides and in various ways to the question of
their origin. Now and then we encountered a sentence, like Prof. Owens
"axiom of the continuous operation of the ordained becoming of living
things," which haunted us like an apparition. For, dim as our
conception must needs be as to what such oracular and grandiloquent
phrases might really mean, we felt confident that they presaged no good
to old beliefs. Foreseeing, yet deprecating, the coming time of
trouble, we still hoped that, with some repairs and makeshifts, the old
views might last out our days. Apres nous le deluge. Still, not to lag
behind the rest of the world, we read the book in which the new theory
is promulgated. We took it up, like our neighbors, and, as was natural,
in a somewhat captious frame of mind.
Well, we found no cause of quarrel with the first chapter. Here the
author takes us directly to the barn-yard and the kitchen-garden. Like
an honorable rural member of our General Court, who sat silent until,
near the close of a long session, a bill requiring all swine at large
to wear pokes was introduced, when he claimed the privilege of
addressing the house, on the proper ground that he had been "brought up
among the pigs, and knew all about them"--so we were brought up among
cows and cabbages; and the lowing of cattle, the cackle of hens, and
the cooing of pigeons, were sounds native and pleasant to our ears. So
"Variation under Domestication" dealt with familiar subjects in a
natural way, and gently introduced "Variation under Nature," which
seemed likely enough. Then follows "Struggle for Existence"--a
principle which we experimentally know to be true and cogent--bringing
the comfortable assurance, that man, even upon Leviathan Hobbess theory
of society, is no worse than the rest of creation, since all Nature is
at war, one species with another, and the nearer kindred the more
internecine--bringing in thousandfold confirmation and extension of the
Malthusian doctrine that population tends far to outrun means of
subsistence throughout the animal and vegetable world, and has to be
kept down by sharp preventive checks; so that not more than one of a
hundred or a thousand of the individuals whose existence is so
wonderfully and so sedulously provided for ever comes to anything,
under ordinary circumstances; so the lucky and the strong must prevail,
and the weaker and ill-favored must perish; and then follows, as
naturally as one sheep follows another, the chapter on "Natural
Selection," Darwins cheval de bataille, which is very much the
Napoleonic doctrine that Providence favors the strongest
battalions--that, since many more individuals are born than can
possibly survive, those individuals and those variations which possess
any advantage, however slight, over the rest, are in the long-run sure
to survive, to propagate, and to occupy the limited field, to the
exclusion or destruction of the weaker brethren. All this we pondered,
and could not much object to. In fact, we began to contract a liking
for a system which at the outset illustrates the advantages of good
breeding, and which makes the most "of every creatures best."
Could we "let by-gones be by-gones," and, beginning now, go on
improving and diversifying for the future by natural selection, could
we even take up the theory at the introduction of the actually
existing species, we should be well content; and so, perhaps, would
most naturalists be. It is by no means difficult to believe that
varieties are incipient or possible species, when we see what trouble
naturalists, especially botanists, have to distinguish between
them--one regarding as a true species what another regards as a
variety; when the progress of knowledge continually increases, rather
than diminishes, the number of doubtful instances; and when there is
less agreement than ever among naturalists as to what is the basis in
Nature upon which our idea of species reposes, or how the word is to be
defined. Indeed, when we consider the endless disputes of naturalists
and ethnologists over the human races, as to whether they belong to one
species or to more, and, if to more, whether to three, or five, or
fifty, we can hardly help fancying that both may be right--or rather,
that the uni-humanitarians would have been right many thousand years
ago, and the multi-humanitarians will be several thousand years later;
while at present the safe thing to say is, that probably there is some
truth on both sides.
"Natural selection," Darwin remarks, "leads to divergence of character;
for the more living beings can be supported on the same area, the more
they diverge in structure, habits, and constitution" (a principle
which, by-the-way, is paralleled and illustrated by the diversification
of human labor); and also leads to much extinction of intermediate or
unimproved forms. Now, though this divergence may "steadily tend to
increase," yet this is evidently a slow process in Nature, and liable
to much counteraction wherever man does not interpose, and so not
likely to work much harm for the future. And if natural selection, with
artificial to help it, will produce better animals and better men than
the present, and fit them better to the conditions of existence, why,
let it work, say we, to the top of its bent There is still room enough
for improvement. Only let us hope that it always works for good: if
not, the divergent lines on Darwin's lithographic diagram of
"Transmutation made Easy," ominously show what small deviations from
the straight path may come to in the end.
The prospect of the future, accordingly, is on the whole pleasant and
encouraging. It is only the backward glance, the gaze up the long vista
of the past, that reveals anything alarming. Here the lines converge as
they recede into the geological ages, and point to conclusions which,
upon the theory, are inevitable, but hardly welcome. The very first
step backward makes the negro and the Hottentot our
blood-relations--not that reason or Scripture objects to that, though
pride may. The next suggests a closer association of our ancestors of
the olden time with "our poor relations" of the quadrumanous family
than we like to acknowledge. Fortunately, however--even if we must
account for him scientifically --man with his two feet stands upon a
foundation of his own. Intermediate links between the Bimana and the
Quadrumana are lacking altogether; so that, put the genealogy of the
brutes upon what footing you will, the four-handed races will not serve
for our forerunners--at least, not until some monkey, live or fossil,
is producible with great-toes, instead of thumbs, upon his nether
extremities; or until some lucky geologist turns up the bones of his
ancestor and prototype in France or England, who was so busy "napping
the chuckie-stanes" and chipping out flint knives and arrow-heads in
the time of the drift, very many ages ago--before the British Channel
existed, says Lyell [III-1]--and until these men of the olden time are
shown to have worn their great-toes in the divergent and thumblike
fashion. That would be evidence indeed: but, until some testimony of
the sort is produced, we must needs believe in the separate and special
creation of man, however it may have been with the lower animals and
with plants.
No doubt, the full development and symmetry of Darwin's hypothesis
strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower
animal races out of some simple primordial animal--that all are equally
"lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the
first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." But, as the author
speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and accepts a
supernatural beginning of life on earth, in some form or forms of being
which included potentially all that have since existed and are yet to
be, he is thereby not warranted to extend his inferences beyond the
evidence or the fair probability. There seems as great likelihood that
one special origination should be followed by another upon fitting
occasion (such as the introduction of man), as that one form should be
transmuted into another upon fitting occasion, as, for instance, in the
succession of species which differ from each other only in some
details. To compare small things with great in a homely illustration:
man alters from time to time his instruments or machines, as new
circumstances or conditions may require and his wit suggest. Minor
alterations and improvements he adds to the machine he possesses; he
adapts a new rig or a new rudder to an old boat: this answers to
Variation. "Like begets like," being the great rule in Nature, if boats
could engender, the variations would doubtless be propagated, like
those of domestic cattle. In course of time the old ones would be worn
out or wrecked; the best sorts would be chosen for each particular use,
and further improved upon; and so the primordial boat be developed into
the scow, the skiff, the sloop, and other species of water-craft--the
very diversification, as well as the successive improvements, entailing
the disappearance of intermediate forms, less adapted to any one
particular purpose; wherefore these go slowly out of use, and become
extinct species: this is Natural Selection. Now, let a great and
important advance be made, like that of steam navigation: here, though
the engine might be added to the old vessel, yet the wiser and
therefore the actual way is to make a new vessel on a modified plan:
this may answer to Specific Creation. Anyhow, the one does not
necessarily exclude the other. Variation and natural selection may
play their part, and so may specific creation also. Why not?
This leads us to ask for the reasons which call for this new theory of
transmutation. The beginning of things must needs lie in obscurity,
beyond the bounds of proof, though within those of conjecture or of
analogical inference. Why not hold fast to the customary view, that all
species were directly, instead of indirectly, created after their
respective kinds, as we now behold them--and that in a manner which,
passing our comprehension, we intuitively refer to the supernatural?
Why this continual striving after "the unattained and dim?" why these
anxious endeavors, especially of late years, by naturalists and
philosophers of various schools and different tendencies, to penetrate
what one of them calls "that mystery of mysteries," the origin of
species?
To this, in general, sufficient answer may be found in the activity of
the human intellect, "the delirious yet divine desire to know,"
stimulated as it has been by its own success in unveiling the laws and
processes of inorganic Nature; in the fact that the principal triumphs
of our age in physical science have consisted in tracing connections
where none were known before, in reducing heterogeneous phenomena to a
common cause or origin, in a manner quite analogous to that of the
reduction of supposed independently originated species to a common
ultimate origin--thus, and in various other ways, largely and
legitimately extending the domain of secondary causes. Surely the
scientific mind of an age which contemplates the solar system as
evolved from a common revolving fluid mass--which, through experimental
research, has come to regard light, heat, electricity, magnetism,
chemical affinity, and mechanical power as varieties or derivative and
convertible forms of one force, instead of independent species--which
has brought the so-called elementary kinds of matter, such as the
metals, into kindred groups, and pertinently raised the question,
whether the members of each group may not be mere varieties of one
species--and which speculates steadily in the direction of the ultimate
unity of matter, of a sort of prototype or simple element which may be
to the ordinary species of matter what the Protozoa or what the
component cells of an organism are to the higher sorts of animals and
plants--the mind of such an age cannot be expected to let the old
belief about species pass unquestioned. It will raise the question, how
the diverse sorts of plants and animals came to be as they are and
where they are and will allow that the whole inquiry transcends its
powers only when all endeavors have failed Granting the origin to be
super natural or miraculous even, will not arrest the inquiry All real
origination the philosophers will say, is supernatural, their very
question is, whether we have yet gone back to the origin and can affirm
that the present forms of plants and animals are the primordial, the
miraculously created ones. And, even if they admit that, they will
still inquire into the order of the phenomena, into the form of the
miracle You might as well expect the child to grow up content with what
it is told about the advent of its infant brother Indeed, to learn that
the new comer is the gift of God, far from lulling inquiry, only
stimulates speculation as to how the precious gift was bestowed That
questioning child is father to the man--is philosopher in
short-clothes.
Since, then questions about the origin of species will be raised, and
have been raised--and since the theorizings, however different in
particulars, all proceed upon the notion that one species of plant or
animal is somehow derived from another, that the different sorts which
now flourish are lineal (or unlineal) descendants of other and earlier
sorts--it now concerns us to ask, What are the grounds in Nature, the
admitted facts, which suggest hypotheses of derivation in some :shape
or other? Reasons there must be, and plausible ones, for the persistent
recurrence of theories upon this genetic basis. A study of Darwins
book, and a general glance at the present state of the natural
sciences, enable us to gather the following as among the most
suggestive and influential. We can only enumerate them here, without
much indication of their particular bearing. There is--
1. The general fact of variability, and the general tendency of the
variety to propagate its like--the patent facts that all species vary
more or less; that domesticated plants and animals, being in conditions
favorable to the production and preservation of varieties, are apt to
vary widely; and that, by interbreeding, any variety may be fixed into
a race, that is, into a variety which comes true from seed. Many such
races, it is allowed, differ from each other in structure and
appearance as widely as do many admitted species; and it is practically
very difficult, even impossible, to draw a clear line between races and
species. Witness the human races, for instance. Wild species also
vary, perhaps about as widely as those of domestication, though in
different ways. Some of them apparently vary little, others moderately,
others immoderately, to the great bewilderment of systematic botanists
and zoologists, and increasing disagreement as to whether various forms
shall be held to be original species or strong varieties. Moreover, the
degree to which the descendants of the same stock, varying in different
directions, may at length diverge, is unknown. All we know is, that
varieties are themselves variable, and that very diverse forms have
been educed from one stock.
2. Species of the same genus are not distinguished from each other by
equal amounts of difference. There is diversity in this respect
analogous to that of the varieties of a polymorphous species, some of
them slight, others extreme. And in large genera the unequal
resemblance shows itself in the clustering of the species around
several types or central species, like satellites around their
respective planets. Obviously suggestive this of the hypothesis that
they were satellites, not thrown off by revolution, like the moons of
Jupiter, Saturn, and our own solitary moon, but gradually and
peacefully detached by divergent variation. That such closely-related
species may be only varieties of higher grade, earlier origin, or more
favored evolution, is not a very violent supposition. Anyhow, it was a
supposition sure to be made.
3. The actual geographical distribution of species upon the earths
surface tends to suggest the same notion. For, as a general thing, all
or most of the species of a peculiar genus or other type are grouped in
the same country, or occupy continuous, proximate, or accessible areas.
So well does this rule hold, so general is the implication that kindred
species are or were associated geographically, that most trustworthy
naturalists, quite free from hypotheses of transmutation, are
constantly inferring former geographical continuity between parts of
the world now widely disjoined, in order to account thereby for certain
generic similarities among their inhabitants; just as philologists
infer former connection of races, and a parent language, to account for
generic similarities among existing languages. Yet no scientific
explanation has been offered to account for the geographical
association of kindred species, except the hypothesis of a common
origin.
4. Here the fact of the antiquity of creation, and in particular of the
present kinds of the earths inhabitants, or of a large part of them,
comes in to rebut the objection that there has not been time enough for
any marked diversification of living things through divergent
variation--not time enough for varieties to have diverged into what we
call species.
So long as the existing species of plants and animals were thought to
have originated a few thousand years ago, and without predecessors,
there was no room for a theory of derivation of one sort from another,
nor time enough even to account for the establishment of the races
which are generally believed to have diverged from a common stock. Not
so much that five or six thousand years was a short allowance for this;
but because some of our familiar domesticated varieties of grain, of
fowls, and of other animals, were pictured and mummified by the old
Egyptians more than half that number of years ago, if not earlier.
Indeed, perhaps the strongest argument for the original plurality of
human species was drawn from the identification of some of the present
races of men upon these early historical monuments and records.
But this very extension of the current chronology, if we may rely upon
the archaeologists, removes the difficulty by opening up a longer
vista. So does the discovery in Europe of remains and implements of
prehistoric races of men, to whom the use of metals was unknown--men of
the stone age, as the Scandinavian archaeologists designate them. And
now, "axes and knives of flint, evidently wrought by human skill, are
found in beds of the drift at Amiens (also in other places, both in
France and England), associated with the bones of extinct species of
animals." These implements, indeed, were noticed twenty years ago; at a
place in Suffolk they have been exhumed from time to time for more than
a century; but the full confirmation, the recognition of the age of the
deposit in which the implements occur, their abundance, and the
appreciation of their bearings upon most interesting questions, belong
to the present time. To complete the connection of these primitive
people with the fossil ages, the French geologists, we are told, have
now "found these axes in Picardy associated with remains of Elephas
primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Equus fossilis, and an extinct
species of Bos."[III-2] In plain language, these workers in flint lived
in the time of the mammoth, of a rhinoceros now extinct, and along with
horses and cattle unlike any now existing--specifically different, as
naturalists say, from those with which man is now associated. Their
connection with existing human races may perhaps be traced through the
intervening people of the stone age, who were succeeded by the people
of the bronze age, and these by workers in iron.[III-3] Now, various
evidence carries back the existence of many of the present lower
species of animals, and probably of a larger number of plants, to the
same drift period. All agree that this was very many thousand years
ago. Agassiz tells us that the same species of polyps which are now
building coral walls around the present peninsula of Florida actually
made that peninsula, and have been building there for many thousand
centuries.
5. The overlapping of existing and extinct species, and the seemingly
gradual transition of the life of the drift period into that of the
present, may be turned to the same account. Mammoths, mastodons, and
Irish elks, now extinct, must have lived down to human, if not almost
to historic times. Perhaps the last dodo did not long outlive his huge
New Zealand kindred. The aurochs, once the companion of mammoths, still
survives, but owes his present and precarious existence to mans care.
Now, nothing that we know of forbids the hypothesis that some new
species have been independently and supernaturally created within the
period which other species have survived. Some may even believe that
man was created in the days of the mammoth, became extinct, and was
recreated at a later date. But why not say the same of the aurochs,
contemporary both of the old man and of the new? Still it is more
natural, if not inevitable, to infer that, if the aurochs of that olden
time were the ancestors of the aurochs of the Lithuanian forests, so
likewise were the men of that age the ancestors of the present human
races. Then, whoever concludes that these primitive makers of rude
flint axes and knives were the ancestors of the better workmen of the
succeeding stone age, and these again of the succeeding artificers in
brass and iron, will also be likely to suppose that the Equus and Bos
of that time, different though they be, were the remote progenitors of
our own horses and cattle. In all candor we must at least concede that
such considerations suggest a genetic descent from the drift period
down to the present, and allow time enough--if time is of any account--
for variation and natural selection to work out some appreciable
results in the way of divergence into races, or even into so-called
species. Whatever might have been thought, when geological time was
supposed to be separated from the present era by a clear line, it is
now certain that a gradual replacement of old forms by new ones is
strongly suggestive of some mode of origination which may still be
operative. When species, like individuals, were found to die out one by
one, and apparently to come in one by one, a theory for what Owen
sonorously calls "the continuous operation of the ordained becoming of
living things" could not be far off.
That all such theories should take the form of a derivation of the new
from the old seems to be inevitable, perhaps from our inability to
conceive of any other line of secondary causes in this connection. Owen
himself is apparently in travail with some transmutation theory of his
own conceiving, which may yet see the light, although Darwins came
first to the birth. Different as the two theories will probably be,
they cannot fail to exhibit that fundamental resemblance in this
respect which betokens a community of origin, a common foundation on
the general facts and the obvious suggestions of modern science.
Indeed--to turn the point of a pungent simile directed against
Darwin--the difference between the Darwinian and the Owenian hypotheses
may, after all, be only that between homoeopathic and heroic doses of
the same drug.
If theories of derivation could only stop here, content with explaining
the diversification and succession of species between the teritiary
period and the present time, through natural agencies or secondary
causes still in operation, we fancy they would not be generally or
violently objected to by the savants of the present day. But it is
hard, if not impossible, to find a stopping-place. Some of the facts or
accepted conclusions already referred to, and several others, of a more
general character, which must be taken into the account, impel the
theory onward with accumulated force. Vires (not to say virus) acquirit
eundo. The theory hitches on wonderfully well to Lyells uniformitarian
theory in geology--that the thing that has been is the thing that is
and shall be--that the natural operations now going on will account for
all geological changes in a quiet and easy way, only give them time
enough, so connecting the present and the proximate with the farthest
past by almost imperceptible gradations--a view which finds large and
increasing, if not general, acceptance in physical geology, and of
which Darwins theory is the natural complement.
So the Darwinian theory, once getting a foothold, marches; boldly on,
follows the supposed near ancestors of our present species farther and
yet farther back into the dim past, and ends with an analogical
inference which "makes the whole world kin." As we said at the
beginning, this upshot discomposes us. Several features of the theory
have an uncanny look. They may prove to be innocent: but their first
aspect is suspicious, and high authorities pronounce the whole thing to
be positively mischievous. In this dilemma we are going to take advice.
Following the bent of our prejudices, and hoping to fortify these by
new and strong arguments, we are going now to read the principal
reviews which undertake to demolish the theory--with what result our
readers shall be duly informed.