"Quant a moi, j'ai ete conduit, dans ma definition de l'espece, a mettre

decidement la ressemblance au-dessus de caracteres de succession. Ce n'est

pas seulement a cause des circonstances propres au regne vegetal, dont je

m'occupe exclusivement; ce n'est pas non plus afin de sortir ma definition

des theories et de la rendre le plus possible utile aux naturalistes

descripteurs et nomenclateurs, c'est aussi par un motif philosophique. En

toute chose il faut aller au fond des questions, quand on le peut. Or,

pourquoi la reproduction est-elle possible, habituelle, feconde

indefiniment, entre des etres organises que nous dirons de la meme espece?

Parce qu'ils se ressemblent et uniquement a cause de cela. Lorsque deux

especes ne peuvent, ou, s'il s'agit d'animaux superieurs, ne peuvent et ne

veulent se croiser, c'est qu'elles sont tres differentes. Si l'on obtient

des croisements, c'est que les individus sont analogues; si ces croisements

donnent des produits feconds, c'est que les individus etaient plus

analogues; si ces produits euxmemes sont feconds, c'est que la ressemblance

etait plus grande; s'ils sont fecond habituellement et indefiniment, c'est

que la ressemblance interieure et exterieure etait tres grande. Ainsi le

degre de ressemblance est le fond; la reproduction en est seulement la

manifestation et la mesure, et il est logique de placer la cause au-dessus

de l'effet."

We are not yet convinced. We still hold that genealogical connection,

rather than mutual resemblance, is the fundamental thing--first on the

ground of fact, and then from the philosophy of the case. Practically, no

botanist can say what amount of dissimilarity is compatible with unity of

species; in wild plants it is sometimes very great, in cultivated races

often enormous. De Candolle himself informs us that the different

variations which the same oak-tree exhibits arc significant indications of a

disposition to set up separate varieties, which becoming hereditary may

constitute a race; he evidently looks upon the extreme forms, say of

Quercus Robur, as having thus originated; and on this ground, inferred from

transitional forms, and not from their mutual resemblance, he includes them

in that species. This will be more apparent should the discovery of

transitions, which he leads us to expect, hereafter cause the four

provisional species which attend Q. Robur to be merged in that species. It

may rightly be replied that this conclusion would be arrived at from the

likeness step by step in the series of forms; but the cause of the likeness

here is obvious. And this brings in our "motif philosophique."

Not to insist that the likeness is after all the variable, not the

constant, element--to learn which is the essential thing, resemblance among

individuals or their genetic connection--we have only to ask which can be

the cause of the other.

In hermaphrodite plants (the normal case), and even as the question is

ingeniously put by De Candolle in the above extract, the former surely

cannot be the cause of the latter, though it may, in case of crossing,

offer occasion. But, on the ground of the most fundamental of all things in

the constitution of plants and animals--the fact incapable of further

analysis, that individuals reproduce their like, that characteristics are

inheritable--the likeness is a direct natural consequence of the genetic

succession; "and it is logical to place the cause above the effect."

We are equally disposed to combat a proposition of De Candolle's about

genera, elaborately argued in the "Geographie Botanique," and incidentally

reaffirmed in his present article, viz., that genera are more natural than

species, and more correctly distinguished by people in general, as is shown

by vernacular names. But we have no space left in which to present some

evidence to the contrary.

V

SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY

THE RELATIONS OF NORTH AMERICAN

TO NORTHEAST ASIAN AND TO

TERTIARY VEGETATION

(A Presidential Address to the American Association for the Advancement of

Science, at Dubuque, August, 1872)

The session being now happily inaugurated, your presiding officer of the

last year has only one duty to perform before he surrenders the chair to

his successor. If allowed to borrow a simile from the language of my own

profession, I might liken the President of this Association to a biennial

plant. He flourishes for the year in which he comes into existence, and

performs his appropriate functions as presiding officer. When the second

year comes round, he is expected to blossom out in an address and disappear.

Each president, as he retires, is naturally expected to contribute something

from his own investigations or his own line of study, usually to discuss

some particular scientific topic.

Now, although I have cultivated the field of North American botany, with

some assiduity, for more than forty years, have reviewed our vegetable

hosts, and assigned to no small number of them their names and their place

in the ranks, yet, so far as our own wide country is concerned, I have been

to a great extent a closet botanist. Until this summer I had not seen the

Mississippi, nor set foot upon a prairie.

To gratify a natural interest, and to gain some title for addressing a body

of practical naturalists and explorers, I have made a pilgrimage across the

continent. I have sought and viewed in their native haunts many a plant and

flower which for me had long bloomed unseen, or only in the hortus siccus.

I have been able to see for myself what species and what forms constitute

the main features of the vegetation of each successive region, and

record--as the vegetation unerringly does--the permanent characteristics of

its climate.

Passing on from the eastern district, marked by its equably distributed

rainfall, and therefore naturally forest-clad, I have seen the trees

diminish in number, give place to wide prairies, restrict their growth to

the borders of streams, and then disappear from the boundless drier plains;

have seen grassy plains change into a brown and sere desert--desert in the

common sense, but hardly anywhere botanically so--have seen a fair growth

of coniferous trees adorning the more favored slopes of a mountain-range

high enough to compel summer showers; have traversed that broad and bare

elevated region shut off on both sides by high mountains from the moisture

supplied by either ocean, and longitudinally intersected by sierras which

seemingly remain as naked as they were born; and have reached at length the

westward slopes of that high mountain-barrier which, refreshed by the

Pacific, bears the noble forests of the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Ranges,

and among them trees which are the wonder of the world. As I stood in their

shade, in the groves of Mariposa and Calaveras, and again under the canopy

of the commoner redwood, raised on columns of such majestic height and

ample girth, it occurred to me that I could not do better than to share

with you, upon this occasion, some of the thoughts which possessed my mind.

In their development they may, perhaps, lead us up to questions of

considerable scientific interest.

I shall not detain you with any remarks--which would now be trite--upon the

size or longevity of these far-famed Sequoia-trees, or of the sugar-pines,

incense-cedar, and firs associated with them, of which even the prodigious

bulk of the dominating Sequoia does not sensibly diminish the grandeur.

Although no account and no photographic representation of either species of

the far-famed Sequoia-trees gives any adequate impression of their singular

majesty--still less of their beauty--yet my interest in them did not

culminate merely or mainly in considerations of their size and age. Other

trees, in other parts of the world, may claim to be older. Certain

Australian gumtrees (Eucalypti) are said to be taller. Some, we are told,

rise so high that they might even cast a flicker of shadow upon the summit

of the Pyramid of Cheops. Yet the oldest of them doubtless grew from seed

which was shed long after the names of the pyramid-builders had been

forgotten. So far as we can judge from the actual counting of the layers of

several trees, no Sequoia now alive sensibly antedates the Christian era.

Nor was I much impressed with an attraction of man's adding. That the more

remarkable of these trees should bear distinguishing appellations seems

proper enough; but the tablets of personal names which are affixed to many

of them

172

in the most visited groves--as if the memory of more or less notable people

of our day might be made enduring by the juxtaposition--do suggest some

incongruity. When we consider that a hand's breadth at the circumference of

any one of the venerable trunks so placarded has recorded in annual lines

the lifetime of the individual thus associated with it, one may question

whether the next hand's breadth may not measure the fame of some of the

names thus ticketed for adventitious immortality. Whether it be the man or

the tree that is honored in the connection, probably either would live as

long, in fact and in memory, without it.

One notable thing about the Sequoia-trees is their isolation. Most of the

trees associated with them are of peculiar species, and some of them are

nearly as local. Yet every pine, fir, and cypress of California is in some

sort familiar, because it has near relatives in other parts of the world.

But the redwoods have none. The redwood--including in that name the two

species of "big-trees"--belongs to the general Cypress family, but is sui

generis. Thus isolated systematically, and extremely isolated

geographically, and so wonderful in size and port, they more than other

trees suggest questions.

Were they created thus local and lonely, denizens of California only; one

in limited numbers in a few choice spots on the Sierra Nevada, the other

along the Coast Range from the Bay of Monterey to the frontiers of Oregon?

Are they veritable Melchizedeks, without pedigree or early relationship,

and possibly fated to be without descent?

Or are they now coming upon the stage--or rather were they coming but for

man's interference--to play a part in the future?

Or are they remnants, sole and scanty survivors of a race that has played a

grander part in the past, but is now verging to extinction? Have they had a

career, and can that career be ascertained or surmised, so that we may at

least guess whence they came, and how, and when?

SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY 173

Time was, and not long ago, when such questions as these were regarded as

useless and vain--when students of natural history, unmindful of what the

name denotes, were content with a knowledge of things as they now are, but

gave little heed as to how they came to be so. Now such questions are held

to be legitimate, and perhaps not wholly unanswerable. It cannot now be

said that these trees inhabit their present restricted areas simply because

they are there placed in the climate and soil of all the world most

congenial to them. These must indeed be congenial, or they would not

survive. But when we see how the Australian Eucalyptus-trees thrive upon

the Californian coast, and how these very redwoods flourish upon another

continent; how the so-called wild-oat (Avena sterilis of the Old World) has

taken full possession of California; how that cattle and horses, introduced

by the Spaniard, have spread as widely and made themselves as much at home

on the plains of La Plata as on those of Tartary; and that the

cardoon-thistle-seeds, and others they brought with them, have multiplied

there into numbers probably much exceeding those extant in their native

lands; indeed, when we contemplate our own race, and our particular stock,

taking such recent but dominating possession of this New World; when we

consider how the indigenous flora of islands generally succumbs to the

foreigners which come in the train of man; and that most weeds (i.e., the

prepotent plants in open soil) of all temperate climates are not "to the

manner born," but are self-invited intruders--we must needs abandon the

notion of any primordial and absolute adaptation of plants and animals to

their habitats, which may stand in lieu of explanation, and so preclude our

inquiring any further. The harmony of Nature and its admirable perfection

need not be regarded as inflexible and changeless. Nor need Nature be

likened to a statue, or a cast in rigid bronze, but rather to an organism,

with play and adaptability of parts, and life and even soul informing the

whole. Under the former view Nature

174

would be "the faultless monster which the world ne'er saw," but inscrutable

as the Sphinx, whom it were vain, or worse, to question of the whence and

whither. Under the other, the perfection of Nature, if relative, is

multifarious and ever renewed; and much that is enigmatical now may find

explanation in some record of the past.

That the two species of redwood we are contemplating originated as they are

and where they are, and for the part they are now playing, is, to say the

least, not a scientific supposition, nor in any sense a probable one. Nor

is it more likely that they are destined to play a conspicuous part in the

future, or that they would have done so, even if the Indian's fires and the

white man's axe had spared them. The redwood of the coast (Sequoia

sempervirens) had the stronger hold upon existence, forming as it did large

forests throughout a narrow belt about three hundred miles in length, and

being so tenacious of life that every large stump sprouts into a copse. But

it does not pass the bay of Monterey, nor cross the line of Oregon,

although so grandly developed not far below it. The more remarkable Sequoia

gigantea of the Sierra exists in numbers so limited that the separate

groves may be reckoned upon the fingers, and the trees of most of them have

been counted, except near their southern limit, where they are said to be

more copious. A species limited in individuals holds its existence by a

precarious tenure; and this has a foothold only in a few sheltered spots,

of a happy mean in temperature, and locally favored with moisture in

summer. Even there, for some reason or other, the pines with which they are

associated (Pinus Lambertiana and P. ponderosa), the firs (Abies grandis

and A. amabilis), and even the incense-cedar (Libocedrus decurrens), possess

a great advantage, and, though they strive in vain to emulate their size,

wholly overpower the Sequoias in numbers. "To him that hath shall be

given." The force of numbers eventually wins. At least in the

commonly-visited groves Sequoia gigantea is invested in its

SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY 175

last stronghold, can neither advance into more exposed positions above, nor

fall back into drier and barer ground below, nor hold its own in the

long-run where it is, under present conditions; and a little further drying

of the climate, which must once have been much moister than now, would

precipitate its doom. Whatever the individual longevity, certain if not

speedy is the decline of a race in which a high death-rate afflicts the

young. Seedlings of the big trees occur not rarely, indeed, but in meagre

proportion to those of associated trees; T small indeed is the chance that

any of these will attain to "the days of the years of their fathers." "Few

and evil" are .: the days of all the forest likely to be, while man, both

bar-barian and civilized, torments them with fires, fatal at once to

seedlings, and at length to the aged also. The forests of California, proud

as the State may be of them, are already too scanty and insufficient for her

uses. Two lines, such as may be drawn with one sweep of a brush over the

map, would cover them all. The coast redwood--the most important tree in

California, although a million times more numerous than its relative of the

Sierra--is too good to live long. Such is its value for lumber and its

accessibility, that, judging the future by the past, it is not likely, in

its primeval growth, to outlast its rarer fellow-species.

Happily man preserves and disseminates as well as destroys. The species

will doubtless be preserved to science, and for ornamental and other uses,

in its own and other lands; and the more remarkable individuals of the

present day are likely to be sedulously cared for, all the more so as they

become scarce.

Our third question remains to be answered: Have these famous Sequoias

played in former times and upon a larger stage a more imposing part, of

which the present is but the epilogue? We cannot gaze high up the huge and

venerable trunks, which one crosses the continent to behold, without

wishing that these patriarchs of the grove were able, like the

176

long-lived antediluvians of Scripture, to hand down to us, through a few

generations, the traditions of centuries, and so tell us somewhat of the

history of their race. Fifteen hundred annual layers have been counted, or

satisfactorily made out, upon one or two fallen trunks. It is probable that

close to the heart of some of the living trees may be found the circle that

records the year of our Saviour's nativity. A few generations of such trees

might carry the history a long way back. But the ground they stand upon, and

the marks of very recent geological change and vicissitude in the region

around, testify that not very many such generations can have flourished

just there, at least in an unbroken series. When their site was covered by

glaciers, these Sequoias must have occupied other stations, if, as there is

reason to believe, they then existed in the land.

I have said that the redwoods have no near relatives in the country of

their abode, and none of their genus anywhere else. Perhaps something may

be learned of their genealogy by inquiring of such relatives as they have.

There are only two of any particular nearness of kin; and they are far

away. One is the bald cypress, our Southern cypress, Taxodium, inhabiting

the swamps of the Atlantic coast from Maryland to Texas, thence

extending--with, probably, a specific difference--into Mexico. It is well

known as one of the largest trees of our Atlantic forest-district, and,

although it never--except perhaps in Mexico, and in rare instances--attains

the portliness of its Western relatives, yet it may equal them in

longevity. The other relative is Glyptostrobus, a sort of modified

Taxodium, being about as much like our bald cypress as one species of

redwood is like the other.

Now, species of the same type, especially when few, and the type peculiar,

are, in a general way, associated geographically, i.e., inhabit the same

country, or (in a large sense) the same region. Where it is not so, where

near relatives are separated, there is usually something to be explained.

Here is an instance. stance. These four trees, sole representatives of

their tribe, dwell almost in three separate quarters of the world: the two

redwoods in California, the bald cypress in Atlantic North America, its

near relative, Glyptostrobus, in China.

It was not always so. In the Tertiary period, the geological botanists

assure us, our own very Taxodium or bald cypress, and a Glyptostrobus,

exceedingly like the present Chinese tree, and more than one Sequoia,

coexisted in a fourth quarter of the globe, viz., in Europe! This brings up

the question, Is it possible to bridge over these four wide intervals of

space and the much vaster interval of time, so as to bring these

extraordinarily separated relatives into connection? The evidence which may

be brought to bear upon this question is various and widely scattered. I

bespeak your patience while I endeavor to bring together, in an abstract,

the most important points of it.

Some interesting facts may come out by comparing generally the botany of

the three remote regions, each of which is the sole home of one of these

genera, i.e., Sequoia in California, Taxodium in the Atlantic United

States,[V-1] and Glyptostrobus in China, which compose the whole of the

peculiar tribe under consideration.

Note then, first, that there is another set of three or four peculiar

trees, in this case of the yew family, which has just the same peculiar

distribution, and which therefore may have the same explanation, whatever

that explanation be. The genus Torreya, which commemorates our botanical

Nestor and a former president of this Association, Dr. Torrey, was founded

upon a tree rather lately discovered (that is, about thirty-five years ago)

in Northern Florida. It is a noble, yew like tree, and very local, being, so

far as known, nearly confined to a few miles along the shores of a single

river. It seems as if it had somehow been crowded down out of the

Alleghanies into its present limited southern quarters; for in cultivation

it evinces a northern hardiness. Now, another species of Torreya is a

characteristic tree of Japan; and one very like it, if not the same,

inhabits the mountains of Northern China--belongs, therefore, to the Eastern

Asiatic temperate region, of which Northern China is a part, and Japan, as

we shall see, the portion most interesting to us. There is only one more

species of Torreya, and that is a companion of the redwoods in California.

It is the tree locally known under the name of the California nutmeg. Here

are three or four near brethren, species of the same genus, known nowhere

else than in these three habitats.

Moreover, the Torreya of Florida is associated with a yew; and the trees of

this grove are the only yew-trees of Eastern North America; for the yew of

our Northern woods is a decumbent shrub. A yew-tree, perhaps the same, is

found with Taxodium in the temperate parts of Mexico. The only other yews

in America grow with the redwoods and the other Torreya in California, and

extend northward into Oregon. Yews are also associated with Torreya in

Japan; and they extend westward through Mantchooria and the Himalayas to

Western Europe, and even to the Azores Islands, where occurs the common yew

of the Old World.

So we have three groups of coniferous trees which agree in this peculiar

geographical distribution, with, however, a notable extension of range in

the case of the yew: 1. The redwoods, and their relatives, Taxodium and

Glyptostrobus, which differ so as to constitute a genus for each of the

three regions; 2. The Torreyas, more nearly akin, merely a different

species in each region; 3. The yews, still more closely related while more

widely disseminated, of which it is yet uncertain whether they constitute

seven, five, three, or only one species. Opinions differ, and can hardly

be brought to any decisive test. However it be determined, it may still be

said that the extreme differences among the yews do not surpass those of

the recognized variations of the European yew, the cultivated races

included.

It appears to me that these several instances all raise the very same

question, only with different degrees of emphasis, and, if to be explained

at all, will have the same kind of explanation.

Continuing the comparison between the three regions with which we are

concerned, we note that each has its own species of pines, firs, larches,

etc., and of a few deciduous-leaved trees, such as oaks and maples; all of

which have no peculiar significance for the present purpose, because they

are of genera which are common all round the northern hemisphere. Leaving

these out of view, the noticeable point is that the vegetation of

California is most strikingly unlike that of the Atlantic United States.

They possess some plants, and some peculiarly American plants, in

common--enough to show, as I imagine, that the difficulty was not in the

getting from the one district to the other, or into both from a common

source, but in abiding there. The primordially unbroken forest of Atlantic

North America, nourished by rainfall distributed throughout the year, is

widely separated from the western region of sparse and discontinuous

tree-belts of the same latitude on the western side of the continent (where

summer rain is wanting, or nearly so), by immense treeless plains and

plateaux of more or less aridity, traversed by longitudinal mountain-ranges

of a similar character. Their nearest approach is at the north, in the

latitude of Lake Superior, where, on a more rainy line, trees of the

Atlantic forest and that of Oregon may be said to intermix. The change of

species and of the aspect of vegetation in crossing, say on the

forty-seventh parallel, is slight in comparison with that on the

thirty-seventh or near it. Confining our attention to the lower latitude,

and under the exceptions already specially noted, we may say that almost

every characteristic form in the vegetation of the Atlantic States is

wanting in California, and the characteristic plants and trees of California

are wanting here.

California has no magnolia nor tulip trees, nor star-anise tree; no

so-called papaw (Asimina); no barberry of the common single-leaved sort; no

Podophyllum or other of the peculiar associated genera; no nelumbo nor

white water-lily; no prickly ash nor sumach; no loblolly-bay nor Stuartia;

no basswood nor linden-trees; neither locust, honey-locust, coffeetrees

(Gymnocladus) nor yellow-wood (Cladrastis); nothing answering to Hydrangea

or witch-hazel, to gum-trees (Nyssa and Liquidambar), Viburnum or Diervilla;

it has few asters and golden-rods; no lobelias; no huckleberries and hardly

any blueberries; no Epigaea, charm of our earliest Eastern spring,

tempering an icy April wind with a delicious wild fragrance; no Kalmia nor

Clethra, nor holly, nor persimmon; no catalpa-tree, nor trumpet-creeper

(Tecoma); nothing answering to sassafras, nor to benzoin-tree, nor to

hickory; neither mulberry nor elm; no beech, true chestnut, hornbeam, nor

iron-wood, nor a proper birch-tree; and the enumeration might be continued

very much further by naming herbaceous plants and others familiar only to

botanists.

In their place California is filled with plants of other types--trees,

shrubs, and herbs, of which I will only remark that they are, with one or

two exceptions, as different from the plants of the Eastern Asiatic region

with which we are concerned (Japan, China, and Mantchooria), as they are

from those of Atlantic North America. Their near relatives, when they have

any in other lands, are mostly southward, on the Mexican plateau, or many

as far south as Chili. The same may be said of the plants of the

intervening great Plains, except that northward in the subsaline vegetation

there are some close alliances with the flora of the steppes of Siberia.

And

181

along the crests of high mountain-ranges the Arctic-Alpine . flora has sent

southward more or less numerous representatives through the whole length of

the country.

If we now compare, as to their flora generally, the Atlantic United States

with Japan, Mantchooria, and Northern China--i.e., Eastern North America

with Eastern North Asia, half the earth's circumference apart--we find an

astonishing similarity. The larger part of the genera of our own region,

which I have enumerated as wanting in California, are present in Japan or

Mantchooria, along with many other peculiar plants, divided between the

two. There are plants enough of the one region which have no representatives

in the other. There are types which appear to have reached the Atlantic

States from the south; and there is a larger infusion of subtropical

Asiatic types into temperate China and Japan; among these there is no

relationship between the two countries to speak of. There are also, as I

have already said, no small number of genera and some species which, being

common all round or partly round the northern temperate zone, have no

special significance because of their occurrence in these two antipodal

floras, although they have testimony to bear upon the general question of

geographical distribution. The point to be remarked is, that many, or even

most, of the genera and species which are peculiar to North America as

compared with Europe, and largely peculiar to Atlantic North America as

compared with the Californian region, are also represented in Japan and

Mantchooria, either by identical or by closely-similar forms! The same rule

holds on a more northward line, although not so strikingly. If we compare

the plants, say of New England and Pennsylvania (latitude 450_470), with

those of Oregon, and then with those of Northeastern Asia, we shall find

many of our own curiously repeated in the latter, while only a small number

of them can be traced along the route even so far as the western slope of

the Rocky Mountains. And these repetitions of East American types in Japan

182

and neighboring districts are in all degrees of likeness. Sometimes the one

is undistinguishable from the other; sometimes there is a difference of

aspect, but hardly of tangible character; sometimes the two would be termed

marked varieties if they grew naturally in the same forest or in the same

region; sometimes they are what the botanist calls representative species,

the one answering closely to the other, but with some differences regarded

as specific; sometimes the two are merely of the same genus, or not quite

that, but of a single or very few species in each country; in which case the

point which interests us is, that this peculiar limited type should occur

in two antipodal places, and nowhere else.

It would be tedious, and, except to botanists, abstruse, to enumerate

instances; yet the whole strength of the case depends upon the number of

such instances. I propose therefore, if the Association does me the honor

to print this discourse, to append in a note a list of the more remarkable

ones.[V-2] But I would here mention certain cases as specimens.

Our Rhus Toxicodendron, or poison-ivy, is very exactly repeated in Japan,

but is found in no other part of the world, although a species much like it

abounds in California. Our other poisonous Rhus (R. venenata), commonly

called poison-dogwood, is in no way represented in Western America, but has

so close an analogue in Japan that the two were taken for the same by

Thunberg and Linnaeus, who called them both R. vernix.

Our northern fox-grape, Vitis Labrusca, is wholly confined to the Atlantic

States, except that it reappears in Japan and that region.

The original Wistaria is a woody leguminous climber with showy blossoms,

native to the middle Atlantic States; the other species, which we so much

prize in cultivation, W. Sinensis, is from China, as its name denotes, or

perhaps only from Japan, where it is certainly indigenous.

Our yellow-wood (Cladrastis) inhabits a very limited district on the

western slope of the Alleghanies. Its only and very near relative, Maackia,

is confined to Mantchooria.

The Hydrangeas have some species in our Alleghany region: all the rest

belong to the Chino-Japanese region and its continuation westward. The same

may be said of Philadelphus, except that there are one or two mostly very

similar species in California and Oregon.

Our May-flower (Epigaea) and our creeping snowberry, otherwise peculiar to

Atlantic North America, recur in Japan.

Our blue cohosh (Caulophyllum) is confined to the woods of the Atlantic

States, but has lately been discovered in Japan. A peculiar relative of it,

Diphylleia, confined to the higher Alleghanies, is also repeated in Japan,

with a slight difference, so that it may barely be distinguished as another

: species. Another relative is our twin-leaf (Jeffersonia) of the Alleghany

region alone: a second species has lately turned up in Mantchooria. A

relative of this is Podophyllum, our mandrake, a common inhabitant of the

Atlantic United States, but found nowhere else. There is one other species

of it, and that is in the Himalayas. Here are four most peculiar genera of

one family, each of a single species in the Atlantic United States, which

are duplicated on the other side of the world, either in identical or

almost identical species, or in an analogous species, while nothing else of

the kind is known in any other part of the world.

I ought not to omit ginseng, the root so prized by the Chinese, which they

obtain from their northern provinces and Mantchooria, and which is now

known to inhabit Corea and Northern Japan. The Jesuit Fathers identified

the plant in Canada and the Atlantic States, brought over the Chinese name

by which we know it, and established the trade in it, which was for many

years most profitable. The exportation of ginseng to China probably has not

yet entirely ceased. Whether the Asiatic and the Atlantic American ginsengs

are to be regarded as of the same species or not is somewhat uncertain, but

they are hardly, if at all, distinguishable.

There is a shrub, Elliottia, which is so rare and local that it is known

only at two stations on the Savannah River in Georgia. It is of peculiar

structure, and was without near relative until one was lately discovered in

Japan (Tripetaleia), so like it as hardly to be distinguishable except by

having the parts of the blossom in threes instead of fours--a difference

not uncommon in the same genus, or even in the same species.

Suppose Elliottia had happened to be collected only once, a good while ago,

and all knowledge of the limited and obscure locality were lost; and

meanwhile the Japanese form came to be known. Such a case would be parallel

with an actual one. A specimen of a peculiar plant (Shortia galacifolia)

was detected in the herbarium of the elder Michaux, who collected it (as

his autograph ticket shows) somewhere in the high Alleghany Mountains, more

than eighty years ago. No one has seen the living plant since or knows

where to find it, if haply it still flourishes in some secluded spot. At

length it is found in Japan; and I had the satisfaction of making the

identification.[V-3] A relative is also known in Japan; and a less near one

has just been detected in Thibet.

Whether the Japanese and the Alleghanian plants are exactly the same or

not, it needs complete specimens of the two to settle. So far as we know,

they are just alike; and, even if some difference were discerned between

them, it would not appreciably alter the question as to how such a result

came to pass. Each and every one of the analogous cases I have been

detailing--and very many more could be mentioned--raises the same question,

and would be satisfied with the same answer.

These singular relations attracted my curiosity early in the course of my

botanical studies, when comparatively few of them were known, and my serious

attention in later years, when I had numerous and new Japanese plants to

study in the collections made, by Messrs. Williams and Morrow, during

Commodore Perry's visit in 1853, and especially, by Mr. Charles Wright, of

Commodore Rodgers's expedition in 1855. I then discussed this subject

somewhat fully, and tabulated the facts within my reach.[V-4]

This was before Heer had developed the rich fossil botany of the arctic

zone, before the immense antiquity of existing species of plants was

recognized, and before the publication of Darwin's now famous volume on the

"Origin of Species" had introduced and familiarized the scientific world

with those now current ideas respecting the history and vicissitudes of

species with which I attempted to deal in a moderate and feeble way.

My speculation was based upon the former glaciation of the northern

temperate zone, and the inference of a warmer period preceding and perhaps

following. I considered that our own present vegetation, or its proximate

ancestry, must have occupied the arctic and subarctic regions in pliocene

times, and that it had been gradually pushed southward as the temperature

lowered and the glaciation advanced, even beyond its present habitation;

that plants of the same stock and kindred, probably ranging round the arctic

zone as the present arctic species do, made their forced migration southward

upon widely different longitudes, and receded more or less as the climate

grew warmer; that the general difference of climate which marks the eastern

and the western sides of the continents--the one extreme, the other

mean--was doubtless even then established, so that the same species and the

same sorts of species would be likely to secure and retain foothold in the

similar climates of Japan and the Atlantic United States, but not in

intermediate regions of different distribution of heat and moisture; so that

different species of the same genus, as in Torreya, or different genera of

the same group, as redwood, Taxodium, and Glyptostrobus, or different

associations of forest-trees, might establish themselves each in the region

best suited to the particular requirements, while they would fail to do so

in any other. These views implied that the sources of our actual vegetation

and the explanation of these peculiarities were to be sought in, and

presupposed, an ancestry in pliocene or earlier times, occupying the higher

northern regions. And it was thought that the occurrence of peculiar North

American genera in Europe in the Tertiary period (such as Taxodium, Carya,

Liquidambar, sassafras, Negundo, etc.) might be best explained on the

assumption of early interchange and diffusion through North Asia, rather

than by that of the fabled Atlantis.

The hypothesis supposed a gradual modification of species in different

directions under altering conditions, at least to the extent of producing

varieties, sub-species, and representative species, as they may be

variously regarded; likewise the single and local origination of each type,

which is now almost universally taken for granted.

The remarkable facts in regard to the Eastern American and Asiatic floras

which these speculations were to explain have since increased in number,

especially through the admirable collections of Dr. Maximowicz in Japan and

adjacent countries, and the critical comparisons he has made and is still

engaged upon.

I am bound to state that, in a recent general work[V-5] by a distinguished

European botanist, Prof. Grisebach, of Jotting, these facts have been

emptied of all special significance, and the relations between the Japanese

and the Atlantic United States flora declared to be no more intimate than

might be expected from the situation, climate, and present opportunity of

interchange. This extraordinary conclusion is reached by regarding as

distinct species all the plants common to both countries between which any

differences have been discerned, although such differences would probably

count for little if the two inhabited the same country, thus transferring

many of my list of identical to that of representative species; and then by

simply eliminating from consideration the whole array of representative

species, i.e., all cases in which the Japanese and the American plant are

not exactly alike. As if, by pronouncing the cabalistic word species, the

question were settled, or rather the greater part of it remanded out of the

domain of science; as if, while complete identity of forms implied

community of origin, anything short of it carried no presumption of the

kind; so leaving all these singular duplicates to be wondered at, indeed,

but wholly beyond the reach of inquiry.

Now, the only known cause of such likeness is inheritance; and as all

transmission of likeness is with some difference in individuals, and as

changed conditions have resulted, as is well known, in very considerable

differences, it seems to me that, if the high antiquity of our actual

vegetation could be rendered probable, not to say certain, and the former

habitation of any of our species or of very near relatives of them in high

northern regions could be ascertained, my whole case would be made out. The

needful facts, of which I was ignorant when my essay was published, have now

been for some years made known--thanks, mainly, to the researches of Heer

upon ample collections of arctic fossil plants. These are confirmed and

extended by new investigations, by Heer and Lesquereux, the results of

which have been indicated to me by the latter.[V-6]

The Taxodium, which everywhere abounds in the miocene formations in Europe,

has been specifically identified, first by Goeppert, then by Heer, with our

common cypress of the Southern States. It has been found fossil in

Spitzbergen, Greenland, and Alaska--in the latter country along with the

remains of another form, distinguishable, but very like the common species;

and this has been identified by Lesquereux in the miocene of the Rocky

Mountains. So there is one species of tree which has come down essentially

unchanged from the Tertiary period, which for a long while inhabited both

Europe and North America, and also, at some part of the period, the region

which geographically connects the two (once doubtless much more closely

than now), but which has survived only in the Atlantic United States and

Mexico.

The same Sequoia which abounds in the same miocene formations in Northern

Europe has been abundantly found in those of Iceland, Spitzbergen,

Greenland, Mackenzie River, and Alaska. It is named S. Langsdorfii, but is

pronounced to be very much like S. sempervirens, our living redwood of the

Californian coast, and to be the ancient representative of it. Fossil

specimens of a similar, if not the same, species have recently been

detected in the Rocky Mountains by Hayden, and determined by our eminent

palaeontological botanist, Lesquereux; and he assures me that he has the

common redwood itself from Oregon in a deposit of tertiary age. Another

Sequoia (S. Sternbergii), discovered in miocene deposits in Greenland, is

pronounced to be the representative of S. gigantea, the big tree of the

Californian Sierra. If the Taxodium of the tertiary time in Europe and

throughout the arctic regions is the ancestor of our present bald

cypress--which is assumed in regarding them as specifically identical-- then

I think we may, with our present light, fairly assume that the two redwoods

of California are the direct or collateral descendants of the two ancient

species which so closely resemble them.

The forests of the arctic zone in tertiary times contained at least three

other species of Sequoia, as determined by their remains, one of which,

from Spitzbergen, also much resembles the common redwood of California.

Another, "which appears to have been the commonest coniferous tree on

Disco," was common in England and some other parts of Europe. So the

Sequoias, now remarkable for their restricted station and numbers, as well

as for their extraordinary size, are of an ancient stock; their ancestors

and kindred formed a large part of the forests which flourished throughout

the polar regions, now desolate and ice-clad, and which extended into low

latitudes in Europe. On this continent one species, at least, had reached

to the vicinity of its present habitat before the glaciation of the region.

Among the fossil specimens already found in California, but which our

trustworthy palaeontological botanist has not yet had time to examine, we

may expect to find evidence of the early arrival of these two redwoods upon

the ground which they now, after much vicissitude, scantily occupy.

Differences of climate, or circumstances of migration, or both, must have

determined the survival of Sequoia upon the Pacific, and of Taxodium upon

the Atlantic coast. And still the redwoods will not stand in the east, nor

could our Taxodium find a congenial station in California. Both have

probably had their opportunity in the olden time, and failed.

As to the remaining near relative of Sequoia, the Chinese Glyptostrobus, a

species of it, and its veritable representative, was contemporaneous with

Sequoia and Taxodium, not only in temperate Europe, but throughout the

arctic regions from Greenland to Alaska. According to Newberry, it was

abundantly represented in the miocene flora of the temperate zone of our

own continent, from Nebraska to the Pacific.

Very similar would seem to have been the fate of a more familiar

gymnospermous tree, the Gingko or Salisburia. It is now indigenous to Japan

only. Its ancestor, as we may fairly call it--since, according to Heer, "it

corresponds so entirely with the living species that it can scarcely be

separated from it"--once inhabited Northern Europe and the whole arctic

region round to Alaska, and had even a representative farther south, in our

Rocky Mountain district. For some reason, this and Glyptostrobus survive

only on the shores of Eastern Asia.

Libocedrus, on the other hand, appears to have cast in its lot with the

Sequoias. Two species, according to Heer, were with them in Spitzbergen. L.

decurrens, the incense cedar, is one of the noblest associates of the

present redwoods. But all the rest are in the southern hemisphere, two at

the southern extremity of the Andes, two in the South-Sea Islands. It is

only by bold and far-reaching suppositions that they can be geographically

associated.

The genealogy of the Torreyas is still wholly obscure; yet it is not

unlikely that the yew-like trees, named Taxites, which flourished with the

Sequoias in the tertiary arctic forests, are the remote ancestors of the

three species of Torreya, now severally in Florida, in California, and in

Japan.

As to the pines and firs, these were more numerously associated with the

ancient Sequoias of the polar forests than with their present

representatives, but in different species, apparently more like those of

Eastern than of Western North America. They must have encircled the polar

zone then, as they encircle the present temperate zone now.

I must refrain from all enumeration of the angiospermous or ordinary

deciduous trees and shrubs, which are now known, by their fossil remains,

to have flourished throughout the polar regions when Greenland better

deserved its name and enjoyed the present climate of New England and New

Jersey. Then Greenland and the rest of the north abounded with oaks,

representing the several groups of species which now inhabit both our

Eastern and Western forest districts; several poplars, one very like our

balsam poplar or balm-of-Gilead tree; more beeches than there are now, a

hornbeam, and a hop-hornbeam, some birches, a persimmon, and a planer-tree,

near representatives of those of the Old World, at least of Asia, as well

as of Atlantic North America, but all wanting in California; one Juglans

like the walnut of the Old World, and another like our black walnut; two or

three grapevines, one near our Southern fox grape or muscadine, another

near our Northern frostgrape; a Tilia, very like our basswood of the

Atlantic States only; a Liquidambar; a magnolia, which recalls our M.

grandiflora; a Liriodendron, sole representative of our tulip-tree; and a

sassafras, very like the living tree.

Most of these, it will be noticed, have their nearest or their only living

representatives in the Atlantic States, and when elsewhere, mainly in

Eastern Asia. Several of them, or of species like them, have been detected

in our tertiary deposits, west of the Mississippi, by Newberry and

Lesquereux. Herbaceous plants, as it happens, are rarely preserved in a

fossil state, else they would probably supply additional testimony to the

antiquity of our existing vegetation, its wide diffusion over the northern

and now frigid zone, and its enforced migration under changes of

climate.[V-7] Concluding, then, as we must, that our existing vegetation is

a continuation of that of the tertiary period, may we suppose that it

absolutely originated then? Evidently not. The preceding Cretaceous period

has furnished to Carruthers in Europe a fossil fruit like that of the

Sequoia gigantea of the famous groves, associated with pines of the same

character as those that accompany the present tree; has furnished to Heer,

from Greenland, two more Sequoias, one of them identical with a tertiary

species, and one nearly allied to Sequoia Langsdorfii, which in turn is a

probable ancestor of the common California redwood; has furnished to

Newberry and Lesquereux in North America the remains of another ancient

Sequoia, a Glyptostrobus, a Liquidambar which well represents our

sweet-gum-tree, oaks analogous to living ones, leaves of a plane-tree, which

are also in the Tertiary, and are scarcely distinguishable from our own

Platanus occidentalis, of a magnolia and a tulip-tree, and "of a sassafras

undistinguishable from our living species." I need not continue the

enumeration. Suffice it to say that the facts justify the conclusion which

Lesquereux--a scrupulous investigator--has already announced: that "the

essential types of our actual flora are marked in the Cretaceous period, and

have come to us after passing, without notable changes, through the

Tertiary formations of our continent."

According to these views, as regards plants at least, the adaptation to

successive times and changed conditions has been maintained, not by absolute

renewals, but by gradual modifications. I, for one, cannot doubt that the

present existing species are the lineal successors of those that garnished

the earth in the old time before them, and that they were as well adapted

to their surroundings then, as those which flourish and bloom around us are

to their conditions now. Order and exquisite adaptation did not wait for

man's coming, nor were they ever stereotyped. Organic Nature--by which I

mean the system and totality of living things, and their adaptation to each

other and to the world--with all its apparent and indeed real stability,

should be likened, not to the ocean, which varies only by tidal

oscillations from a fixed level to which it is always returning, but rather

to a river, so vast that we can neither discern its shores nor reach its

sources, whose onward flow is not less actual because too slow to be

observed by the ephemerae which hover over its surface, or are borne upon

its bosom.

Such ideas as these, though still repugnant to some, and not long since to

many, have so possessed the minds of the naturalists of the present day

that hardly a discourse can be pronounced or an investigation prosecuted

without reference to them. I suppose that the views here taken are little,

if at all, in advance of the average scientific mind of the day. I cannot

regard them as less noble than those which they are succeeding. An able

philosophical writer, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, has recently and truthfully

said:[V-8]

"It is a singular fact that, when we can find out how anything is done, our

first conclusion seems to be that God did not do it. No matter how

wonderful, how beautiful, how intimately complex and delicate has been the

machinery which has worked, perhaps for centuries, perhaps for millions of

ages, to bring about some beneficent result, if we can but catch a glimpse

of the wheels its divine character disappears."

I agree with the writer that this first conclusion is premature and

unworthy--I will add, deplorable. Through what faults or infirmities of

dogmatism on the one hand, and skepticism on the other, it came to be so

thought, we need not here consider. Let us hope, and I confidently expect,

that it is not to last; that the religious faith which survived without a

shock the notion of the fixity of the earth itself may equally outlast the

notion of the fixity of the species which inhabit it; that, in the future

even more than in the past, faith in an order, which is the basis of

science, will not--as it cannot reasonably--be dissevered from faith in an

Ordainer, which is the basis of religion.

VI

THE ATTITUDE OF

WORKING NATURALISTS

TOWARD DARWINISM [VI-1]

(The Nation, October 16, 1873)

That homely adage, "What is one man's meat is another man's poison," comes

to mind when we consider with what different eyes different naturalists

look upon the hypothesis of the derivative origin of actual specific forms,

since Mr. Darwin gave it vogue and vigor and a raison d'être for the

present day. This latter he did, not only by bringing forward a vera causa

in the survival of the fittest under changing circumstances--about which

the question among naturalists mainly is how much it will explain, some

allowing it a restricted, others an unlimited operation--but also by

showing that the theory may be made to do work, may shape and direct

investigations, the results of which must in time tell us whether the

theory is likely to hold good or not. If the hypothesis of natural

selection and the things thereto appertaining had not been capable of being

put to useful work, although, like the "Vestiges of the Natural History of

Creation," it might have made no little noise in the world, it would hardly

have engaged the attention of working naturalists as it has done. We have

no idea even of opening the question as to what work the Darwinian theory

has incited, and in what way the work done has reacted upon the theory; and

least of all do we like to meddle with the polemical literature of the

subject, already so voluminous that the German bibliographers and

booksellers make a separate class of it. But two or three treatises before

us, of a minor or incidental sort, suggest a remark or two upon the

attitude of mind toward evolutionary theories taken by some of the working

naturalists.

Mr. Darwin's own expectation, that his new presentation of the subject

would have little or no effect upon those who had already reached

middle-age, has--out of Paris--not been fulfilled. There are, indeed, one

or two who have thought it their duty to denounce the theory as morally

dangerous, as well as scientifically baseless; a recent instance of the

sort we may have to consider further on. Others, like the youth at the

river's bank, have been waiting in confident expectation of seeing the

current run itself dry. On the other hand, a notable proportion of the more

active-minded naturalists had already come to doubt the received doctrine

of the entire fixity of species, and still more that of their independent

and supernatural origination. While their systematic work all proceeded

implicitly upon the hypothesis of the independence and entire permanence of

species, they were perceiving more or less clearly that the whole question

was inevitably to be mooted again, and so were prepared to give the

alternative hypothesis a dispassionate consideration. The veteran Lyell set

an early example, and, on a reconsideration of the whole question, wrote

anew his famous chapter and reversed his former and weighty opinion. Owen,

still earlier, signified his adhesion to the doctrine of derivation in some

form, but apparently upon general, speculative grounds; for he repudiated

natural selection, and offered no other natural solution of the mystery of

the orderly incoming of cognate forms. As examples of the effect of

Darwin's "Origin of Species" upon the minds of naturalists who are no

longer young, and whose prepossessions, even more than Lyell's, were likely

to bias them against the new doctrine, two from the botanical side are

brought to our notice through recent miscellaneous writings which are now

before us.[VI-2]

Before the publication of Darwin's first volume, M. Alphonse de Candolle

had summed up the result of his studies in this regard, in the final

chapter of his classical "Geographie Botanique Raisonnee," in the

conclusion, that existing vegetation must be regarded as the continuation,

through many geological and geographical changes, of the anterior

vegetations of the world; and that, consequently, the present distribution

of species is explicable only in the light of their geological history. He

surmised that, notwithstanding the general stability of forms, certain

species or quasi-species might have originated through diversification

under geographical isolation. But, on the other hand, he was still disposed

to admit that even the same species might have originated independently in

two or more different regions of the world; and he declined, as unpractical

and unavailing, all attempts to apply hypotheses to the elucidation of the

origin of species. Soon after Darwin's book appeared, De Candolle had

occasion to study systematically a large and wide-spread genus-- that of

the oak. Investigating it under the new light of natural selection, he came

to the conclusion that the existing oaks are all descendants of earlier

forms, and that no clear line can be drawn between the diversification whic

h has resulted in species and that which is exhibited in races and minor

varieties.

And now, in the introductory chapter of the volume of essays before us, he

informs us that the idea which pervades them all, and in some sort connects

very diverse topics, is that of considering this principle of selection. Of

the principle itself, he remarks that it is neither a theory nor an

hypothesis, but the expression of a necessary fact; that to deny it is very

much like denying that round stones will roll downhill faster and farther

than flat ones; and that the question of the present day in natural history

is not whether there be natural selection, or even whether forms are derived

from other forms, but to comprehend how, in what proportions, and by what

means hereditary deviations take place, and in what ways an inevitable

selection takes effect upon these. In two of these essays natural selection

is directly discussed in its application to the human race; the larger one

dealing ably with the whole subject, and with results at first view

seemingly in a great degree negative, but yet showing that the supposed

"failure of natural selection in the case of man" was an unwarrantable

conclusion from too limited a view of a very complicated question. The

article abounds in acute and fertile suggestions, and its closing chapter,

"on the probable future of the human species" under the laws of selection,

is highly interesting and noteworthy. The other and shorter essay discusses

a special point, and brings out a corollary of the law of heredity which may

not have been thought of before, but which is perfectly clear as soon as it

is stated. It explains at once why contagious or epidemic diseases are most

fatal at their first appearance, and less so afterward: not by the dying

out of a virus--for, when the disease reaches a new population, it is as

virulent as ever (as, for instance, the smallpox among the Indians)--but by

the selection of a race less subject to attack through the destruction of

those that were more so, and the inheritance of the comparative immunity by

the children and the grandchildren of the survivors; and how this immunity

itself, causing the particular disease to become rare, paves the way to a

return of the original fatality; for the mass of such population, both in

the present and the immediately preceding generation, not having been

exposed to the infection, or but little exposed, has not undergone

selection, and so in time the proportion liable to attack, or to fatal

attack, gets to be as large as ever. The greater the fatality, especially in

the population under marriageable age, the more favorable the condition of

the survivors; and, by the law of heredity, their children should share in

the immunity. This explanation of the cause, or of one cause, of the return

of pests at intervals no less applies to the diminution of the efficacy of

remedies, and of preventive means, such as vaccination. When Jenner

introduced vaccination, the small-pox in Europe and European colonies must

have lost somewhat of its primitive intensity by the vigorous weeding out

of the more susceptible through many generations. Upon the residue,

vaccination was almost complete protection, and, being generally practised,

small-pox consequently became rare. Selection thus ceasing to operate, a

population arises which has not been exposed to the contagion, and of which

a considerable proportion, under the common law of atavism, comes to be

very much in the condition of a people invaded for the first time by the

disease. To these, as we might expect, vaccination would prove a less

safeguard than to their progenitors three or four generations before.

Mr. Bentham is a veteran systematic botanist of the highest rank and widest

knowledge. He had not, so far as we know, touched upon questions of

origination in the ante-Darwinian era. The dozen of presidential addresses

delivered at anniversary meetings of the Linnean Society, from his

assumption of the chair in the year 1862 down to the current year--each

devoted to some topic of interest--and his recent "Memoir on Compositae,"

summing up the general results of a revision of an order to which a full

tenth of all higher plants belong, furnish apt examples both of cautious

criticism, conditional assent (as becomes the inaugurator of the

quantification of the predicate), and of fruitful application of the new

views to various problems concerning the classification and geographical

distribution of plants. In his hands the hypothesis is turned at once to

practical use as an instrument of investigation, as a means of

interrogating Nature. In the result, no doubt seems to be left upon the

author's mind that the existing species of plants are the result of the

differentiation of previous species, or at least that the derivative

hypothesis is to be adopted as that which offers the most natural, if not

the only, explanation of the problems concerned. Similar conclusions

reached in this country, from a study of the relations of its present flora

with that which in earlier ages occupied the arctic zone, might also be

referred to. (See preceding article.)

An excellent instance of the way in which the derivative hypothesis is

practically applied in these days, by a zoologist, is before us in Prof.

Flower's modest and admirable paper on the Ungulata, or hoofed animals, and

their geological history. We refer to it here, not so much for the

conclusions it reaches or suggests, as to commend the clearness and the

impartiality of the handling, and the sobriety and moderation of the

deductions. Confining himself "within the region of the known, it is shown

that, at least in one group of animals, the facts which we have as yet

acquired point to the former existence of various intermediate forms, so

numerous that they go far to discredit the view of the sudden introduction

of new species. . . . The modern forms are placed along lines which

converge toward a common centre." The gaps between the existing forms of

the odd-toed group of ungulates (of which horses, rhinoceroses, and tapirs,

are the principal representatives) are most bridged over by palaeontology,

and somewhat the same may be said of the even-toed group, to which the

ruminants and the porcine genus belong. "Moreover, the lines of both groups

to a certain extent approximate, but, within the limits of our knowledge,

they do not meet. . - . Was the order according to which the introduction

of new forms seems to have taken place since the Eocene then entirely

changed, or did it continue as far back as the period when these lines would

have been gradually fused in a common centre?"

Facts like these, which suggest grave diversification under long lapse of

time, are well supplemented by those which essentially demonstrate a

slighter diversification of many species over a wide range of space;

whether into species or races depends partly upon how the naturalist uses

these terms, partly upon the extent of the observations, or luck in getting

together intermediate forms. The researches of Prof. Baird upon the birds

of this continent afford a good illustration. A great number of our birds

which have been, and must needs have been, regarded as very distinct

species, each mainly with its own geographical area, are found to mingle

their characters along bordering lines; and the same kinds of differences

(of coloration, form, or other) are found to prevail through the species of

each region, thus impressing upon them a geographical facies. Upon a

submergence of the continent, reducing these several regions to islands

sufficiently separated, these forms would be unquestioned species.

Considerations such as these, of which a few specimens have now been

adduced (not general speculations, as the unscientific are apt to suppose),

and trials of the new views to see how far they will explain the problems

or collocate the facts they are severally dealing with, are what have

mainly influenced working naturalists in the direction of the provisional

acceptance of the derivative hypothesis. They leave to polemical

speculators the fruitless discussion of the question whether all species

came from one or two, or more; they are trying to grasp the thing by the

near, not by the farther end, and to ascertain, first of all, whether it is

probable or provable that present species are descendants of former ones

which were like them, but less and less like them the farther back we go.

And it is worth noting that they all seem to be utterly unconscious of

wrong-doing. Their repugnance to novel hypotheses is only the natural and

healthy one. A change of a wonted line of thought is not made without an

effort, nor need be made without adequate occasion. Some courage was

required of the man who first swallowed an oyster from its shell; and of

most of us the snail would still demand more. As the unaccustomed food

proves to be good and satisfying, and also harmless, we may come to like

it. That, however, which many good and eminent naturalists find to be

healthful and reasonable, and others innocuous, a few still regard as most

unreasonable and harmful. At present, we call to mind only two who not only

hold to the entire fixity of species as an axiom or a confirmed principle,

but also as a dogma, and who maintain, either expressly or implicitly, that

the logical antithesis to the creation of species as they are, is not by

law (which implies intention), but by chance. A recent book by one of these

naturalists, or rather, by a geologist of eminence, the "Story of the Earth

and Man," by Dr. Dawson,4 is now before us. The title is too near that of

Guyot's "Earth and Man," with the publication of which popular volume that

distinguished physical naturalist commenced his career in this country; and

such catch-titles are a sort of trade-mark. As to the nature and merits of

Dr. Dawson's work, we have left ourselves space only to say: 1. That it is

addressed ad populum, which renders it rather the more than less amenable

to the criticisms we may be disposed to make upon it. 2. That the author is

thoroughly convinced that no species or form deserving the name was ever

derived from another, or originated from natural causes; and he maintains

this doctrine with earnestness, much variety of argument and illustration,

and no small ability; so that he may be taken as a representative of the

view exactly opposed to that which is favored by those naturalists whose

essays we have been considering--to whom, indeed, he stands in marked

contrast in spirit and method, being greatly disposed to argue the question

from the remote rather than the near end. 3. And finally, he has a

conviction that the evolutionary doctrines of the day are not only untrue,

but thoroughly bad and irreligious. This belief, and the natural anxiety

with which he contemplates their prevalence, may excuse a certain vehemence

and looseness of statement which were better avoided, as where the

geologists of the day are said to be "broken up into bands of specialists,

little better than scientific banditti, liable to be beaten in detail, and

prone to commit outrages on common-sense and good taste which bring their

otherwise good cause into disrepute;" and where he despairingly suggests

that the prevalence of the doctrines he deprecates "seems to indicate that

the accumulated facts of our age have gone altogether beyond its capacity

for generalization, and, but for the vigor which one sees everywhere, might

be taken as an indication that the human mind has fallen into a state of

senility."

This is droll reading, when one considers that the "evolutionist" is the

only sort of naturalist who has much occasion to employ his "capacity for

generalization" upon "the accumulated facts" in their bearing upon the

problem of the origin of species; since the "special creationist," who

maintains that they were supernaturally originated just as they are, by the

very terms of his doctrine places them out of the reach of scientific

explanation. Again, when one reflects upon the new impetus which the

derivative hypothesis has given to systematic natural history, and reads

the declaration of a master in this department (the President of the

Linnean Society) that Mr. Darwin "has in this nineteenth century brought

about as great a revolution in the philosophic study of organic Nature as

that which was effected in the previous century by the immortal Swede," it

sounds oddly to hear from Dr. Dawson that "it obliterates the fine

perception of differences from the mind of the naturalist, . . . . destroys

the possibility of a philosophical classification, reducing all things to a

mere series, and leads to a rapid decay in systematic zoology and botany,

which is already very manifest among the disciples of Spencer and Darwin in

England." So, also, "it removes from the study of Nature the ideas of final

cause and purpose"--a sentence which reads curiously in the light of

Darwin's special investigations, such as those upon the climbing of plants,

the agency of insects in the fertilization of blossoms, and the like, which

have brought back teleology to natural science, wedded to morphology and

already fruitful of discoveries. The difficulty with Dr. Dawson here is

(and it need not be underrated) that apparently he cannot as yet believe an

adaptation, act, or result, to be purposed the apparatus of which is

perfected or evolved in the course of Nature--a common but a crude state of

mind on the part of those who believe that there is any originating purpose

in the universe, and one which, we are sure, Dr. Dawson does not share as

respects the material world until he reaches the organic kingdoms, and

there, possibly, because he sees man at the head of them--of them, while

above them. However that may be, the position which Dr. Dawson chooses to

occupy is not left uncertain. After concluding, substantially, that those

"evolutionists" who exclude design from Nature thereby exclude theism, which

nobody will deny, he proceeds (on page 348) to give his opinion that the

"evolutionism which professes to have a creator somewhere behind it . . . .

is practically atheistic," and, "if possible, more unphilosophical than

that which professes to set out from absolute and eternal nonentity," etc.

There are some sentences which might lead one to suppose that Dr. Dawson

himself admitted of an evolution "with a creator somewhere behind it." He

offers it (page 320) as a permissible alternative that even man "has been

created mediately by the operation of forces also concerned in the

production of other animals;" concedes that a just theory "does not even

exclude evolution or derivation, to a certain extent" (page 341); and that

"a modern man of science" may safely hold "that all things have been

produced by the Supreme Creative Will, acting either directly or through

the agency of the forces and materials of his own production." Well, if

this be so, why denounce the modern man of science so severely upon the

other page merely for accepting the permission? At first sight, it might be

thought that our author is exposing himself in one paragraph to a share of

the condemnation which he deals out in the other. But the permitted views

are nowhere adopted as his own; the evolution is elsewhere restricted

within specific limits; and as to "mediate creation," although we cannot

divine what is here meant by the term, there is reason to think it does not

imply that the several species of a genus were mediately created, in a

natural way, through the supernatural creation of a remote common ancestor.

So that his own judgment in the matter is probably more correctly gathered

from the extract above referred to and other similar deliverances, such as

that in which he warns those who "endeavor to steer a middle course, and to

maintain that the Creator has proceeded by way of evolution," that "the

bare, hard logic of Spencer, the greatest English authority on evolution,

leaves no place for this compromise, and shows that the theory, carried out

to its legitimate consequences, excludes the knowledge of a Creator and the

possibility of his work."

Now, this is a dangerous line to take. Those defenders of the faith are

more zealous than wise who must needs fire away in their catapults the very

bastions of the citadel, in the defense of outposts that have become

untenable. It has been and always will be possible to take an atheistic

view of Nature, but far more reasonable from science and philosophy only to

take a theistic view. Voltaire's saying here holds true: that if there were

no God known, it would be necessary to invent one. It is the best, if not

the only, hypothesis for the explanation of the facts. Whether the

philosophy of Herbert Spencer (which is not to our liking) is here fairly

presented, we have little occasion and no time to consider. In this regard,

the close of his article No. 12 in the Contemporary Review shows, at least,

his expectation of the entire permanence of our ideas of cause, origin, and

religion, and predicts the futility of the expectation that the "religion

of humanity" will be the religion of the future, or "can ever more than

temporarily shut out the thought of a Power, of which humanity is but a

small and fugitive product, which was in its course of ever-changing

manifestation before humanity was, and will continue through other

manifestations when humanity has ceased to be." If, on the one hand, the

philosophy of the unknowable of the Infinite may be held in a merely

quasi-theistic or even atheistic way, were not its ablest expounders and

defenders Hamilton and Dean Mansel? One would sup-pose that Dr. Dawson

might discern at least as much of a divine foundation to Nature as Herbert

Spencer and Matthew Arnold; might recognize in this power that "something

not ourselves that makes" for order as well as "for righteousness," and

which he fitly terms supreme creative will; and, resting in this, endure

with more complacency and faith the inevitable prevalence of evolutionary

views which he is powerless to hinder. Although he cannot arrest the stream,

he might do something toward keeping it in safe channels.

We wished to say something about the way in which scientific men, worthy of

the name, hold hypotheses and theories, using them for the purpose of

investigation and the collocation of facts, yielding or withholding assent

in degrees or provisionally, according to the amount of verification or

likelihood, or holding it long in suspense; which is quite in contrast to

that of amateurs and general speculators (not that we reckon Dr. Dawson in

this class), whose assent or denial seldom waits, or endures qualification.

With them it must on all occasions be yea or nay only, according to the

letter of the Scriptural injunction, and whatsoever is less than this, or

between the two, cometh of evil.

VII

EVOLUTION AND

THEOLOGY [VII-1]

(The Nation, January 15, 1874)

The attitude of theologians toward doctrines of evolution, from the nebular

hypothesis down to "Darwinism," is no less worthy of consideration, and

hardly less diverse, than that of naturalists. But the topic, if pursued

far, leads to questions too wide and deep for our handling here, except

incidentally, in the brief notice which it falls in our way to take of the

Rev. George Henslow's recent volume on "The Theory of Evolution of Living

Things." This treatise is on the side of evolution, "considered as

illustrative of the wisdom and beneficence of the Almighty." It was

submitted for and received one of the Actonian prizes recently awarded by

the Royal Institution of Great Britain. We gather that the staple of a part

of it is worked up anew from some earlier discourses of the author upon

"Genesis and Geology," "Science and Scripture not antagonistic," etc.

In coupling with it a chapter of the second volume of Dr. Hodge's

"Systematic Theology (Part II, Anthropology)," we call attention to a

recent essay, by an able and veteran writer, on the other side of the

question. As the two fairly enough represent the extremes of Christian

thought upon the subject, it is convenient to review them in connection.

Theologians have a short and easy, if not wholly satisfactory, way of

refuting scientific doctrines which they object to, by pitting the authority

or opinion of one savant against another. Already, amid the currents and

eddies of modern opinion, the savants may enjoy the same advantage at the

expense of the divines-- we mean, of course, on the scientific arena; for

the mutual refutation of conflicting theologians on their own ground is no

novelty. It is not by way of offset, however, that these divergent or

contradictory views are here referred to, but only as an illustration of the

fact that the divines are by no means all arrayed upon one side of the

question in hand. And indeed, in the present transition period, until some

one goes much deeper into the heart of the subject, as respects the

relations of modern science to the foundations of religious belief, than

either of these writers has done, it is as well that the weight of opinion

should be distributed, even if only according to prepossessions, rather than

that the whole stress should bear upon a single point, and that perhaps the

authority of an interpretation of Scripture. A consensus of opinion upon

Dr. Hodge's ground, for instance (although better guarded than that of Dr.

Dawson), if it were still possible, would--to say the least--probably not

at all help to reconcile science and religion. Therefore, it is not to be

regretted that the diversities of view among accredited theologians and

theological naturalists are about as wide and as equably distributed between

the extremes (and we may add that the views themselves are quite as

hypothetical) as those which prevail among the various naturalists and

natural philosophers of the day.

As a theologian, Mr. Henslow doubtless is not to be compared with the

veteran professor at Princeton. On the other hand, he has the advantage of

being a naturalist, and the son of a naturalist, as well as a clergyman:

consequently he feels the full force of an array of facts in nature, and of

the natural inferences from them, which the theological professor, from his

Biblical standpoint, and on his implicit assumption that the Old Testament

must needs teach true science, can hardly be expected to appreciate.

Accordingly, a naturalist would be apt to say of Dr. Hodge's exposition of

"theories of the universe" and kindred topics--and in no captious spirit--

that whether right or wrong on particular points, he is not often right or

wrong in the way of a man of science.

Probably from the lack of familiarity with prevalent ideas and their

history, the theologians are apt to suppose that scientific men of the

present day are taking up theories of evolution in pure wantonness or mere

superfluity of naughtiness; that it would have been quite possible, as well

as more proper, to leave all such matters alone. Quieta non movere is

doubtless a wise rule upon such subjects, so long as it is fairly

applicable. But the time for its application in respect to questions of the

origin and relations of existing species has gone by. To ignore them is to

imitate the foolish bird that seeks security by hiding its head in the

sand. Moreover, the naturalists did not force these questions upon the

world; but the world they study forced them upon the naturalists. How these

questions of derivation came naturally and inevitably to be revived, how

the cumulative probability that the existing are derived from preexisting

forms impressed itself upon the minds of many naturalists and thinkers, Mr.

Henslow has briefly explained in the introduction and illustrated in the

succeeding chapters of the first part of his book. Science, he declares,

has been compelled to take up the hypothesis of the evolution of living

things as better explaining all the phenomena. In his opinion, it has

become "infinitely more probable that all living and extinct beings have

been developed or evolved by natural laws of generation from preexisting

forms, than that they, with all their innumerable races and varieties,

should owe their existences severally to Creative fiats." This doctrine,

which even Dr. Hodge allows may possibly be held in a theistic sense, and

which, as we suppose, is so held or viewed by a great proportion of the

naturalists of our day, Mr. Henslow maintains is fully compatible with

dogmatic as well as natural theology; that it explains moral anomalies, and

accounts for the mixture of good and evil in the world, as well as for the

merely relative perfection of things; and, finally, that "the whole scheme

which God has framed for man's existence, from the first that was created

to all eternity, collapses if the great law of evolution be suppressed."

The second part of his book is occupied with a development of this line of

argument. By this doctrine of evolution he does not mean the Darwinian

hypothesis, although he accepts and includes this, looking upon natural

selection as playing an important though not an unlimited part. He would be

an evolutionist with Mivart and Owen and Argyll, even if he had not the

vera causa which Darwin contributed to help him on. And, on rising to man,

he takes ground with Wallace, saying:

"I would wish to state distinctly that I do not at present see any evidence

for believing in a gradual development of man from the lower animals by

ordinary natural laws; that is, without some special interference, or, if

it be preferred, some exceptional conditions which have thereby separated

him from all other creatures, and placed him decidedly in advance of them

all. On the other hand, it would be absurd to regard him as totally severed

from them. It is the great degree of difference I would insist upon,

bodily, mental, and spiritual, which precludes the idea of his having been

evolved by exactly the same processes, and with the same limitations, as,

for example, the horse from the palaeotherium."

In illustrating this view, he reproduces Wallace's well-known points, and

adds one or two of his own. We need not follow up his lines of argument.

The essay, indeed, adds nothing material to the discussion of evolution,

although it states one side of the case moderately well, as far as it goes.

Dr. Hodge approaches the subject from the side of systematic theology, and

considers it mainly in its bearing upon the origin and original state of

man. Under each head he first lays down "the Scriptural doctrine," and then

discusses "anti-Scriptural theories," which latter, under the first head,

are the heathen doctrine of spontaneous generation, the modern doctrine of

spontaneous generation, theories of development, specially that of Darwin,

the atheistic character of the theory, etc. Although he admits "that there

is a theistic and an atheistic form of the nebular hypothesis as to the

origin of the universe, so there may be a theistic interpretation of the

Darwinian theory," yet he contends that "the system is thoroughly

atheistic," notwithstanding that the author "expressly acknowledges the

existence of God." Curiously enough, the atheistic form of evolutionary

hypotheses, or what he takes for such, is the only one which Dr. Hodge

cares to examine. Even the "Reign of Law" theory, Owen's "purposive route of

development and chance . . . . by virtue of inherent tendencies thereto," as

well as other expositions of the general doctrine on a theistic basis, are

barely mentioned without a word of comment, except, perhaps, a general

"protest against the arraying of probabilities against the teachings of

Scripture."

Now, all former experience shows that it is neither safe nor wise to

pronounce a whole system "thoroughly atheistic" which it is conceded may be

held theistically, and which is likely to be largely held, if not to

prevail, on scientific grounds. It may be well to remember that, "of the

two great minds of the seventeenth century, Newton and Leibnitz, both

profoundly religious as well as philosophical, one produced the theory of

gravitation, the other objected to that theory that it was subversive of

natural religion; also that the nebular hypothesis--a natural consequence

of the theory of gravitation and of the subsequent progress of physical and

astronomical discovery--has been denounced as atheistical even down to our

day." It has now outlived anathema.

It is undeniable that Mr. Darwin lays himself open to this kind of attack.

The propounder of natural selection might be expected to make the most of

the principle, and to overwork the law of parsimony in its behalf. And a

system in which exquisite adaptation of means to ends, complicated

inter-dependencies, and orderly sequences, appear as results instead of

being introduced as factors, and in which special design is ignored in the

particulars, must needs be obnoxious, unless guarded as we suppose Mr.

Darwin might have guarded his. ground if he had chosen to do so. Our own

opinion, after long consideration, is, that Mr. Darwin has no atheistical

intent; and that, as respects the test question of design in Nature, his

view may be made clear to the theological mind by likening it to that of

the "believer in general but not in particular Providence." There is no

need to cull passages in support of this interpretation from his various

works while the author--the most candid of men--retains through all the

editions of the "Origin of Species" the two mottoes from Whewell and Bishop

Butler.[VII-2]

The gist of the matter lies in the answer that should be rendered to the

questions--1. Do order and useful-working collocation, pervading a system

throughout all its parts, prove design? and, 2. Is such evidence negatived

or invalidated by the probability that these particular collocations belong

to lineal series of such in time, and diversified in the course of

Nature--grown up, so to say, step by step? We do not use the terms

"adaptation, "arrangement of means to ends," and the like, because they beg

the question in stating it.

Finally, ought not theologians to consider whether they have not already,

in principle, conceded to the geologists and physicists all that they are

asked to concede to the evolutionists; whether, indeed, the main natural

theological difficulties which attend the doctrine of evolution--serious as

they may be--are not virtually contained in the admission that there is a

system of Nature with fixed laws. This, at least, we may say, that, under a

system in which so much is done "by the establishment of general laws," it

is legitimate for any one to prove, if he can, that any particular thing in

the natural world is so done; and it is the proper business of scientific

men to push their enquiries in this direction.

It is beside the point for Dr. Hodge to object that, "from the nature of

the case, what concerns the origin of things cannot be known except by a

supernatural revelation;" that "science has to do with the facts and laws

of Nature: here the question concerns the origin of such facts." For the

very object of the evolutionists, and of Mr. Darwin in particular, is to

remove these subjects from the category of origination, and to bring them

under the domain of science by treating them as questions about how things

go on, not how they began. Whether the succession of living forms on the

earth is or is not among the facts and laws of Nature, is the very matter

in controversy.

Moreover, adds Dr. Hodge, it has been conceded that in this matter "proofs,

in the proper sense of the word, are not to be had; we are beyond the

region of demonstration, and have only probabilities to consider."

Wherefore "Christians have a right to protest against the arraying of

probabilities against the clear teachings of Scripture." The word is

italicized, as if to intimate that probabilities have no claims which a

theologian is bound to respect. As to arraying them against Scripture, there

is nothing whatever in the essay referred to that justifies the statement.

Indeed, no occasion offered; for the writer was discussing evolution in its

relations to theism, not to Biblical theology, and probably would not be

disposed to intermix arguments so different in kind as those from natural

science and those from revelation. To pursue each independently, according

to its own method, and then to compare the results, is thought to be the

better mode of proceeding. The weighing of probabilities we had regarded as

a proper exercise of the mind preparatory to forming an opinion.

Probabilities, hypotheses, and even surmises, whatever they may be worth,

are just what, as it seems to us, theologians ought not to be foremost in

decrying, particularly those who deal with the reconciliation of science

with Scripture, Genesis with geology, and the like. As soon as they go

beyond the literal statements even of the English text, and enter into the

details of the subject, they find ample occasion and display a special

aptitude for producing and using them, not always with very satisfactory

results. It is not, perhaps, for us to suggest that the theological army in

the past has been too much encumbered with impedimenta for effective

aggression in the conflict against atheistic tendencies in modern science;

and that in resisting attack it has endeavored to hold too much ground, so

wasting strength in the obstinate defense of positions which have become

unimportant as well as untenable. Some of the arguments, as well as the

guns, which well served a former generation, need to be replaced by others

of longer range and greater penetration.

If the theologians are slow to discern the signs and exigencies of the

times, the religious philosophical naturalists must be looked to. Since the

above remarks were written, Prof. Le Conte's "Religion and Science," just

issued, has come to our hands. It is a series of nineteen Sunday lectures

on the relation of natural and revealed religion, prepared in the first

instance for a Bible-class of young men, his pupils in the University of

South Carolina, repeated to similar classes at the University of

California, and finally delivered to a larger and general audience. They are

printed, the preface states, from a verbatim report, with only verbal

alterations and corrections of some redundancies consequent upon

extemporaneous delivery. They are not, we find, lectures on science under a

religious aspect, but discourses upon Christian theology and its

foundations from a scientific layman's point of view, with illustrations

from his own lines of study. As the headings show, they cover, or, more

correctly speaking, range over, almost the whole field of theological

thought, beginning with the personality of Deity as revealed in Nature, the

spiritual nature and attributes of Deity, and the incarnation; discussing

by the way the general relations of theology to science, man, and his place

in Nature; and ending with a discussion of predestination and free-will, and

of prayer in relation to invariable law--all in a volume of three hundred

and twenty-four duodecimo pages! And yet the author remarks that many

important subjects have been omitted because he felt unable to present them

in a satisfactory manner from a scientific point of view. We note, indeed,

that one or two topics which would naturally come in his way--such,

especially, as the relation of evolution to the human race--are somewhat

conspicuously absent. That most of the momentous subjects which he takes up

are treated discursively, and not exhaustively, is all the better for his

readers. What they and we most want to know is, how these serious matters

are viewed by an honest, enlightened, and devout scientific man. To solve

the mysteries of the universe, as the French lady required a philosopher to

explain his new system, "dans un mot," is beyond rational expectation.

All that we have time and need to say of this little book upon great

subjects relates to its spirit and to the view it takes of evolution. Its

theology is wholly orthodox; its tone devotional, charitable, and hopeful;

its confidence in religious truth, as taught both in Nature and revelation,

complete; the illustrations often happy, but often too rhetorical; the

science, as might be expected from this author, unimpeachable as regards

matters of fact, discreet as to matters of opinion. The argument from

design in the first lecture brings up the subject of the introduction of

species. Of this, considered "as a question of history, there is no witness

on the stand except geology."

"The present condition of geological evidence is undoubtedly in favor of

some degree of suddenness--is against infinite gradations. The evidence may

be meagre . . . but whether meagre or not, it is all the evidence we have.

. . . Now, the evidence of geology to-day is, that species seem to come in

suddenly and in full perfection, remain substantially unchanged during the

term of their existence, and pass away in full perfection. Other species

take their place apparently by substitution, not by transmutation. But you

will ask me, 'Do you, then, reject the doctrine of evolution? Do you accept

the creation of species directly and without secondary agencies and

processes?' I answer, No! Science knows nothing of phenomena which do not

take place by secondary causes and processes. She does not deny such

occurrence, for true Science is not dogmatic, and she knows full well that,

tracing up the phenomena from cause to cause, we must somewhere reach the

more direct agency of a First Cause. . . . It is evident that, however

species were introduced, whether suddenly or gradually, it is the duty of

Science ever to strive to understand the means and processes by which

species originated. . . . Now, of the various conceivable secondary causes

and processes, by some of which we must believe species originated, by far

the most probable is certainly that of evolution from other species."

(We might interpose the remark that the witness on the stand, if subjected

to cross-examination by a biologist, might be made to give a good deal of

testimony in favor of transmutation rather than substitution.) After

referring to different ideas as to the cause or mode of evolution, he

concludes that it can make no difference, so far as the argument of design

in Nature is concerned, whether there be evolution or not, or whether, in

the case of evolution, the change be paroxysmal or uniform. We may infer

even that he accepts the idea that "physical and chemical forces are

changed into vital force, and vice versa." Physicists incline more readily

to this than physiologists; and if what is called vital force be a force in

the physicists' sense, then it is almost certainly so. But the illustration

on page 275 touches this point only seemingly. It really concerns only the

storing and the using of physical force in a living organism. If, for want

of a special expression, we continue to use the term vital force to

designate that intangible something which directs and governs the

accumulation and expenditure of physical force in organisms, then there is

as yet no proof and little likelihood that this is correlate with physical

force.

"A few words upon the first chapter of Genesis and the Mosaic cosmogony,

and I am done," says Prof. Le Conte, and so are we:

"It might be expected by many that, after speaking of schemes of

reconciliation, I should give mine also. My Christian friends, these

schemes of reconciliation become daily more and more distasteful to me. I

have used them in times past; but now the deliberate construction of such

schemes seems to me almost like trifling with the words of Scripture and

the teachings of Nature. They seem to me almost irreverent, and quite

foreign to the true, humble, liberal spirit of Christianity; they are so

evidently artificial, so evidently mere ingenious human devices. It seems

to me that if we will only regard the two books in the philosophical spirit

which I have endeavored to describe, and then simply wait and possess our

souls in patience, the questions in dispute will soon adjust themselves as

other similar questions have already done."

VIII

WHAT IS DARWINISM? [VIII-1]

The Nation, May 28, 1874)

The question which Dr. Hodge asks he promptly and decisively answers: "What

is Darwinism? it is atheism."

Leaving aside all subsidiary and incidental matters, let us consider--1.

What the Darwinian doctrine is, and 2. How it is proved to be atheistic.

Dr. Hodge's own statement of it cannot be very much bettered:

"His [Darwin's] work on the 'Origin of Species' does not purport to be

philosophical. In this aspect it is very different from the cognate works of

Mr. Spencer. Darwin does not speculate on the origin of the universe, on

the nature of matter or of force. He is simply a naturalist, a careful and

laborious observer, skillful in his descriptions, and singularly candid in

dealing with the difficulties in the way of his peculiar doctrine. He set

before himself a single problem--namely, How are the fauna and flora of our

earth to be accounted for? . . . To account for the existence of matter and

life, Mr. Darwin admits a Creator. This is done explicitly and repeatedly. .

. . He assumes the efficiency of physical causes, showing no disposition to

resolve them into mind-force or into the efficiency of the First Cause. . .

. He assumes, also, the existence of life in the form of one or more

primordial germs. . . . How all living things on earth, including the

endless variety of plants and all the diversity of animals, . . . have

descended from the primordial animalcule, he thinks, may be accounted for

by the operation of the following natural laws, viz.: First, the law of

Heredity, or that by which like begets like--the offspring are like the

parent. Second, the law of Variation; that is, while the offspring are in

all essential characteristics like their immediate progenitor, they

nevertheless vary more or less within narrow limits from their parent and

from each other. Some of these variations are indifferent, some

deteriorations, some improvements--that is, such as enable the plant or

animal to exercise its functions to greater advantage. Third, the law of

Over-Production. All plants and animals tend to increase in a geometrical

ratio, and therefore tend to overrun enormously the means of support. If

all the seeds of a plant, all the spawn of a fish, were to arrive at

maturity, in a very short time the world could not contain them. Hence, of

necessity, arises a struggle for life. Only a few of the myriads born can

possibly live. Fourth, here comes in the law of Natural Selection, or the

Survival of the Fittest; that is, if any individual of a given species of

plant or animal happens to have a slight deviation from the normal type

favorable to its success in the struggle for life, it will survive. This

variation, by the law of heredity, will be transmitted to its offspring,

and by them again to theirs. Soon these favored ones gain the ascendency,

and the less favored perish, and the modification becomes established in

the species. After a time, another and another of such favorable variations

occur, with like results. Thus, very gradually, great changes of structure

are introduced, and not only species, but genera, families, and orders, in

the vegetable and animal world, are produced" (pp. 26-29).

Now, the truth or the probability of Darwin's hypothesis is not here the

question, but only its congruity or incongruity with theism. We need take

only one exception to this abstract of it, but that is an important one for

the present investigation. It is to the sentence which we have italicized

in the earlier part of Dr. Hodge's own statement of what Darwinism is. With

it begins our inquiry as to how he proves the doctrine to be atheistic.

First, if we rightly apprehend it, a suggestion of atheism is infused into

the premises in a negative form: Mr. Darwin shows no disposition to resolve

the efficiency of physical causes into the efficiency of the First Cause.

Next (on page 48) comes the positive charge that "Mr. Darwin, although

himself a theist," maintains that "the contrivances manifested in the

organs of plants and animals . . . are not due to the continued cooperation

and control of the divine mind, nor to the original purpose of God in the

constitution of the universe." As to the negative statement, it might

suffice to recall Dr. Hodge's truthful remark that Darwin "is simply a

naturalist," and that "his work on the origin of species does not purport

to be philosophical." In physical and physiological treatises, the most

religious men rarely think it necessary to postulate the First Cause, nor

are they misjudged by the omission. But surely Mr. Darwin does show the

disposition which our author denies him, not only by implication in many

instances, but most explicitly where one would naturally look for it,

namely--at the close of the volume in question: "To my mind, it accords

better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator,"

etc. If that does not refer the efficiency of physical causes to the First

Cause, what form of words could do so? The positive charge appears to be

equally gratuitous. In both Dr. Hodge must have overlooked the beginning as

well as the end of the volume which he judges so hardly. Just as

mathematicians and physicists, in their systems, are wont to postulate the

fundamental and undeniable truths they are concerned with, or what they

take for such and require to be taken for granted, so Mr. Darwin

postulates, upon the first page of his notable work, and in the words of

Whewell and Bishop Butler: 1. The establishment by divine power of general

laws, according to which, rather than by insulated interpositions in each

particular case, events are brought about in the material world; and 2.

That by the word ':natural" is meant "stated, fixed, or settled," by this

same power, "since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an

intelligent agent to render it so--i.e., to effect it continually or at

stated times--as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for

once.[VIII-2] So when Mr. Darwin makes such large and free use of "natural

as antithetical to supernatural" causes, we are left in no doubt as to the

ultimate source which he refers them to. Rather let us say there ought to

be no doubt, unless there are other grounds for it to rest upon.

Such ground there must be, or seem to be, to justify or excuse a veteran

divine and scholar like Dr. Hodge in his deduction of pure atheism from a

system produced by a confessed theist, and based, as we have seen, upon

thoroughly orthodox fundamental conceptions. Even if we may not hope to

reconcile the difference between the theologian and the naturalist, it may

be well to ascertain where their real divergence begins, or ought to begin,

and what it amounts to. Seemingly, it is in their proximate, not in their

ultimate, principles, as Dr. Hodge insists when he declares that the whole

drift of Darwinism is to prove that everything "may be accounted for by the

blind operation of natural causes, without any intention, purpose, or

cooperation of God." "Why don't he say," cries the theologian, "that the

complicated organs of plants and animals are the product of the divine

intelligence? If God made them, it makes no difference, so far as the

question of design is concerned, how he made them, whether at once or by

process of evolution." But, as we have seen, Mr. Darwin does say that, and

he over and over implies it when he refers the production of species "to

secondary causes," and likens their origination to the origination of

individuals; species being series of individuals with greater difference.

It is not for the theologian to object that the power which made individual

men and other animals, and all the differences which the races of mankind

exhibit, through secondary causes, could not have originated congeries of

more or less greatly differing individuals through the same causes.