ethnologist. The paths or methods, by following which he may hope to
reach his goal, are diverse. He may work at man from the point of view
of the pure zoologist, and investigate the anatomical and physiological
peculiarities of Negroes, Australians, or Mongolians, just as he would
inquire into those of pointers, terriers, and turnspits,--"persistent
modifications" of man's almost universal companion. Or he may seek aid
from researches into the most human manifestation of humanity--Language;
and assuming that what is true of speech is true of the speaker--a
hypothesis as questionable in science as it is in ordinary life--he may
apply to mankind themselves the conclusions drawn from a searching
analysis of their words and grammatical forms.
Or, the ethnologist may turn to the study of the practical life of men;
and relying upon the inherent conservatism and small inventiveness of
untutored mankind, he may hope to discover in manners and customs, or in
weapons, dwellings, and other handiwork, a clue to the origin of the
resemblances and differences of nations. Or, he may resort to that kind
of evidence which is yielded by History proper, and consists of the
beliefs of men concerning past events, embodied in traditional, or in
written, testimony. Or, when that thread breaks, Archaeology, which is
the interpretation of the unrecorded remains of man's works, belonging
to the epoch since the world has reached its present condition, may
still guide him. And, when even the dim light of archaeology fades, there
yet remains Palaeontology, which, in these latter years, has brought to
daylight once more the exuvia of ancient populations, whose world was
not our world, who have been buried in river beds immemorially dry, or
carried by the rush of waters into caves, inaccessible to inundation
since the dawn of tradition.
CLXXXI
The rapid increase of natural knowledge, which is the chief
characteristic of our age, is effected in various ways. The main army of
science moves to the conquest of new worlds slowly and surely, nor ever
cedes an inch of the territory gained. But the advance is covered and
facilitated by the ceaseless activity of clouds of light troops provided
with a weapon--always efficient, if not always an arm of precision--the
scientific imagination. It is the business of these _enfants perdus_ of
science to make raids into the realm of ignorance wherever they see, or
think they see, a chance; and cheerfully to accept defeat, or it may be
annihilation, as the reward of error. Unfortunately the public, which
watches the progress of the campaign, too often mistakes a dashing
incursion of the Uhlans for a forward movement of the main body; fondly
imagining that the strategic movement to the rear, which occasionally
follows, indicates a battle lost by science. And it must be confessed
that the error is too often justified by the effects of the
irrepressible tendency which men of science share with all other sorts
of men known to me, to be impatient of that most wholesome state of
mind--suspended judgment; to assume the objective truth of speculations
which, from the nature of the evidence in their favour, can have no
claim to be more than working hypotheses.
The history of the "Aryan question" affords a striking illustration of
these general remarks.
CLXXXII
Language is rooted half in the bodily and half in the mental nature of
man. The vocal sounds which form the raw materials of language could not
be produced without a peculiar conformation of the organs of speech; the
enunciation of duly accented syllables would be impossible without the
nicest co-ordination of the action of the muscles which move these
organs; and such co-ordination depends on the mechanism of certain
portions of the nervous system. It is therefore conceivable that the
structure of this highly complex speaking apparatus should determine a
man's linguistic potentiality; that is to say, should enable him to use
a language of one class and not of another. It is further conceivable
that a particular linguistic potentiality should be inherited and become
as good a race mark as any other. As a matter of fact, it is not proven
that the linguistic potentialities of all men are the same.
CLXXXIII
Community of language is no proof of unity of race, is not even
presumptive evidence of racial identity. All that it does prove is
that, at some time or other, free and prolonged intercourse has taken
place between the speakers of the same language.
CLXXXIV
The capacity of the population of Europe for independent progress while
in the copper and early bronze stage--the "palaeo-metallic" stage, as it
might be called--appears to me to be demonstrated in a remarkable manner
by the remains of their architecture. From the crannog to the elaborate
pile-dwelling, and from the rudest enclosure to the complex
fortification of the terramare, there is an advance which is obviously a
native product. So with the sepulchral constructions; the stone cist,
with or without a preservative or memorial cairn, grows into the
chambered graves lodged in tumuli; into such megalithic edifices as the
dromic vaults of Maes How and New Grange; to culminate in the finished
masonry of the tombs of Mycenae, constructed on exactly the same plan.
Can anyone look at the varied series of forms which lie between the
primitive five or six flat stones fitted together into a mere box, and
such a building as Maes How, and yet imagine that the latter is the
result of foreign tuition? But the men who built Maes How, without metal
tools, could certainly have built the so-called "treasure-house" of
Mycenae, with them.
CLXXXV
Reckoned by centuries, the remoteness of the quaternary, or pleistocene,
age from our own is immense, and it is difficult to form an adequate
notion of its duration. Undoubtedly there is an abysmal difference
between the Neanderthaloid race and the comely living specimens of the
blond longheads with whom we are familiar. But the abyss of time
between the period at which North Europe was first covered with ice,
when savages pursued mammoths and scratched their portraits with sharp
stones in central France, and the present day, ever widens as we learn
more about the events which bridge it. And, if the differences between
the Neanderthaloid men and ourselves could be divided into as many parts
as that time contains centuries, the progress from part to part would
probably be almost imperceptible.
CLXXXVI
I have not been one of those fortunate persons who are able to regard a
popular lecture as a mere _hors d'oeuvre_, unworthy of being ranked
among the serious efforts of a philosopher; and who keep their fame as
scientific hierophants unsullied by attempts--at least of the successful
sort--to be understanded of the people.
On the contrary, I found that the task of putting the truths learned in
the field, the laboratory and the museum, into language which, without
bating a jot of scientific accuracy shall be generally intelligible,
taxed such scientific and literary faculty as I possessed to the
uttermost; indeed my experience has furnished me with no better
corrective of the tendency to scholastic pedantry which besets all those
who are absorbed in pursuits remote from the common ways of men, and
become habituated to think and speak in the technical dialect of their
own little world, as if there were no other.
If the popular lecture thus, as I believe, finds one moiety of its
justification in the self-discipline of the lecturer, it surely finds
the other half in its effect on the auditory. For though various sadly
comical experiences of the results of my own efforts have led me to
entertain a very moderate estimate of the purely intellectual value of
lectures; though I venture to doubt if more than one in ten of an
average audience carries away an accurate notion of what the speaker has
been driving at; yet is that not equally true of the oratory of the
hustings, of the House of Commons, and even of the pulpit?
Yet the children of this world are wise in their generation; and both
the politician and the priest are justified by results. The living voice
has an influence over human action altogether independent of the
intellectual worth of that which it utters. Many years ago, I was a
guest at a great City dinner. A famous orator, endowed with a voice of
rare flexibility and power; a born actor, ranging with ease through
every part, from refined comedy to tragic unction, was called upon to
reply to a toast. The orator was a very busy man, a charming
conversationalist and by no means despised a good dinner; and, I
imagine, rose without having given a thought to what he was going to
say. The rhythmic roll of sound was admirable, the gestures perfect, the
earnestness impressive; nothing was lacking save sense and,
occasionally, grammar. When the speaker sat down the applause was
terrific and one of my neighbours was especially enthusiastic. So when
he had quieted down, I asked him what the orator had said. And he could
not tell me.
That sagacious person John Wesley is reported to have replied to some
one who questioned the propriety of his adaptation of sacred words to
extremely secular airs, that he did not see why the Devil should be left
in possession of all the best tunes. And I do not see why science should
not turn to account the peculiarities of human nature thus exploited by
other agencies: all the more because science, by the nature of its
being, cannot desire to stir the passions, or profit by the weaknesses,
of human nature. The most zealous of popular lecturers can aim at
nothing more than the awakening of a sympathy for abstract truth, in
those who do not really follow his arguments; and of a desire to know
more and better in the few who do.
At the same time it must be admitted that the popularisation of science,
whether by lecture or essay, has its drawbacks. Success in this
department has its perils for those who succeed. The "people who fail"
take their revenge, as we have recently had occasion to observe, by
ignoring all the rest of a man's work and glibly labelling him a mere
populariser. If the falsehood were not too glaring, they would say the
same of Faraday and Helmholtz and Kelvin.
CLXXXVII
Of the affliction caused by persons who think that what they have picked
up from popular exposition qualifies them for discussing the great
problems of science, it may be said, as the Radical toast said of the
power of the Crown in bygone days, that it "has increased, is
increasing, and ought to be diminished." The oddities of "English as she
is spoke" might be abundantly paralleled by those of "Science as she is
misunderstood" in the sermon, the novel, and the leading article; and a
collection of the grotesque travesties of scientific conceptions, in the
shape of essays on such trifles as "the Nature of Life" and the "Origin
of All Things," which reach me, from time to time, might well be bound
up with them.
CLXXXVIII
The essay on Geological Reform unfortunately brought me, I will not say
into collision, but into a position of critical remonstrance with regard
to some charges of physical heterodoxy, brought by my distinguished
friend Lord Kelvin, against British Geology. As President of the
Geological Society of London at that time (1869), I thought I might
venture to plead that we were not such heretics as we seemed to be; and
that, even if we were, recantation would not affect the question of
evolution.
I am glad to see that Lord Kelvin has just reprinted his reply to my
plea, and I refer the reader to it. I shall not presume to question
anything, that on such ripe consideration, Lord Kelvin has to say upon
the physical problems involved. But I may remark that no one can have
asserted more strongly than I have done, the necessity of looking to
physics and mathematics, for help in regard to the earliest history of
the globe.
And I take the opportunity of repeating the opinion that, whether what
we call geological time has the lower limit assigned to it by Lord
Kelvin, or the higher assumed by other philosophers; whether the germs
of all living things have originated in the globe itself, or whether
they have been imported on, or in, meteorites from without, the problem
of the origin of those successive Faunae and Florae of the earth, the
existence of which is fully demonstrated by palaeontology, remains
exactly where it was.
For I think it will be admitted, that the germs brought to us by
meteorites, if any, were not ova of elephants, nor of crocodiles; not
cocoa-nuts nor acorns; not even eggs of shell-fish and corals; but only
those of the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life. Therefore, since
it is proved that, from a very remote epoch of geological time, the
earth has been peopled by a continual succession of the higher forms of
animals and plants, these either must have been created, or they have
arisen by evolution. And in respect of certain groups of animals, the
well-established facts of palaeontology leave no rational doubt that they
arose by the latter method.
In the second place, there are no data whatever, which justify the
biologist in assigning any, even approximately definite, period of time,
either long or short, to the evolution of one species from another by
the process of variation and selection. In the essay on Geological
Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life I have taken pains to prove
that the change of animals has gone on at very different rates in
different groups of living beings; that some types have persisted with
little change from the palaeozoic epoch till now, while others have
changed rapidly within the limits of an epoch. In 1862 (see Coll. Ess.
viii. pp. 303, 304) in 1863 (vol. ii., p. 461) and again in 1864
(_ibid._, pp. 89-91) I argued, not as a matter of speculation, but from
palaeontological facts, the bearing of which I believe, up to that time,
had not been shown, that any adequate hypothesis of the causes of
evolution must be consistent with progression, stationariness and
retrogression, of the same type at different epochs; of different types
in the same epoch; and that Darwin's hypothesis fulfilled these
conditions.
According to that hypothesis, two factors are at work, variation and
selection. Next to nothing is known of the causes of the former process;
nothing whatever of the time required for the production of a certain
amount of deviation from the existing type. And, as respects selection,
which operates by extinguishing all but a small minority of variations,
we have not the slightest means of estimating the rapidity with which it
does its work. All that we are justified in saying is that the rate at
which it takes place may vary almost indefinitely. If the famous
paint-root of Florida, which kills white pigs but not black ones, were
abundant and certain in its action, black pigs might be substituted for
white in the course of two or three years. If, on the other hand, it was
rare and uncertain in action, the white pigs might linger on for
centuries.
CLXXXIX
A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few
passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming
mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the
truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to
enable you to read, with your own eyes, to-night. Let me add, that few
chapters of human history have a more profound significance for
ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should
know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries
about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is
likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to
have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful
universe, and of man's relation to it, than the most learned student who
is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.
CXC
The examination of a transparent slice gives a good notion of the manner
in which the components of the chalk are arranged, and of their relative
proportions. But, by rubbing up some chalk with a brush in water and
then pouring off the milky fluid, so as to obtain sediments of different
degrees of fineness, the granules and the minute rounded bodies may be
pretty well separated from one another, and submitted to microscopic
examination, either as opaque or as transparent objects. By combining
the views obtained in these various methods, each of the rounded bodies
may be proved to be a beautifully-constructed calcareous fabric, made up
of a number of chambers, communicating freely with one another. The
chambered bodies are of various forms. One of the commonest is something
like a badly-grown raspberry, being formed of a number of nearly
globular chambers of different sizes congregated together. It is called
_Globigerina_, and some specimens of chalk consist of little else than
_Globigerinae_ and granules. Let us fix our attention upon the
_Globigerina_. It is the spoor of the game we are tracking. If we can
learn what it is and what are the conditions of its existence, we shall
see our way to the origin and past history of the chalk.
CXCI
It so happens that calcareous skeletons, exactly similar to the
_Globigerinae_ of the chalk, are being formed, at the present moment, by
minute living creatures, which flourish in multitudes, literally more
numerous than the sands of the sea-shore, over a large extent of that
part of the earth's surface which is covered by the ocean.
The history of the discovery of these living _Globigerinae_, and of the
part which they play in rock building, is singular enough. It is a
discovery which, like others of no less scientific importance, has
arisen, incidentally, out of work devoted to very different and
exceedingly practical interests. When men first took to the sea, they
speedily learned to look out for shoals and rocks; and the more the
burthen of their ships increased, the more imperatively necessary it
became for sailors to ascertain with precision the depth of the waters
they traversed. Out of this necessity grew the use of the lead and
sounding line; and, ultimately, marine-surveying, which is the recording
of the form of coasts and of the depth of the sea, as ascertained by the
sounding-lead, upon charts.
CXCII
Lieut. Brooke, of the American Navy, some years ago invented a most
ingenious machine, by which a considerable portion of the superficial
layer of the sea-bottom can be scooped out and brought up from any depth
to which the lead descends. In 1853, Lieut. Brooke obtained mud from the
bottom of the North Atlantic, between Newfoundland and the Azores, at a
depth of more than 10,000 feet, or two miles, by the help of this
sounding apparatus. The specimens were sent for examination to Ehrenberg
of Berlin, and to Bailey of West Point, and those able microscopists
found that this deep-sea mud was almost entirely composed of the
skeletons of living organisms--the greater proportion of these being
just like the _Globigerinae_ already known to occur in the chalk.
Thus far, the work had been carried on simply in the interests of
science, but Lieut. Brooke's method of sounding acquired a high
commercial value, when the enterprise of laying down the telegraph-cable
between this country and the United States was undertaken. For it became
a matter of immense importance to know, not only the depth of the sea
over the whole line along which the cable was to be laid, but the exact
nature of the bottom, so as to guard against chances of cutting or
fraying the strands of that costly rope. The Admiralty consequently
ordered Captain Dayman, an old friend and shipmate of mine, to ascertain
the depth over the whole line of the cable, and to bring back specimens
of the bottom. In former days, such a command as this might have sounded
very much like one of the impossible things which the young Prince in
the Fairy Tales is ordered to do before he can obtain the hand of the
Princess. However, in the months of June and July, 1857, my friend
performed the task assigned to him with great expedition and precision,
without, so far as I know, having met with any reward of that kind. The
specimens of Atlantic mud which he procured were sent to me to be
examined and reported upon.
CXCIII
The result of all these operations is, that we know the contours and the
nature of the surface-soil covered by the North Atlantic for a distance
of 1,700 miles from east to west, as well as we know that of any part of
the dry land. It is a prodigious plain--one of the widest and most even
plains in the world. If the sea were drained off, you might drive a
waggon all the way from Valentia, on the west coast of Ireland, to
Trinity Bay in Newfoundland. And, except upon one sharp incline about
200 miles from Valentia, I am not quite sure that it would even be
necessary to put the skid on, so gentle are the ascents and descents
upon that long route. From Valentia the road would lie down-hill for
about 200 miles to the point at which the bottom is now covered by 1,700
fathoms of sea-water. Then would come the central plain, more than a
thousand miles wide, the inequalities of the surface of which would be
hardly perceptible, though the depth of water upon it now varies from
10,000 to 15,000 feet; and there are places in which Mont Blanc might be
sunk without showing its peak above water. Beyond this, the ascent on
the American side commences, and gradually leads, for about 300 miles,
to the Newfoundland shore.
CXCIV
When we consider that the remains of more than three thousand distinct
species of aquatic animals have been discovered among the fossils of the
chalk, that the great majority of them are of such forms as are now met
with only in the sea, and that there is no reason to believe that any
one of them inhabited fresh water--the collateral evidence that the
chalk represents an ancient sea-bottom acquires as great force as the
proof derived from the nature of the chalk itself. I think you will now
allow that I did not overstate my case when I asserted that we have as
strong grounds for believing that all the vast area of dry land, at
present occupied by the chalk, was once at the bottom of the sea, as we
have for any matter of history whatever; while there is no justification
for any other belief.
No less certain it is that the time during which the countries we now
call south-east England, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, Egypt, Arabia,
Syria, were more or less completely covered by a deep sea, was of
considerable duration. We have already seen that the chalk is, in
places, more than a thousand feet thick. I think you will agree with me
that it must have taken some time for the skeletons of animalcules of a
hundredth of an inch in diameter to heap up such a mass as that.
CXCV
If the decay of the soft parts of the sea-urchin; the attachment, growth
to maturity, and decay of the _Crania_; and the subsequent attachment
and growth of the coralline, took a year (which is a low estimate
enough), the accumulation of the inch of chalk must have taken more than
a year: and the deposit of a thousand feet of chalk must, consequently,
have taken more than twelve thousand years.
CXCVI
There is a writing upon the wall of cliffs at Cromer, and whoso runs may
read it. It tells us, with an authority which cannot be impeached, that
the ancient sea-bed of the chalk sea was raised up, and remained dry
land, until it was covered with forest, stocked with the great game the
spoils of which have rejoiced your geologists. How long it remained in
that condition cannot be said; but "the whirligig of time brought its
revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land, with the bones and
teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away among the
gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the
bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of drift and
boulder clay. Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now restricted to the
extreme north, paddled about where birds had twittered among the topmost
twigs of the fir-trees. How long this state of things endured we know
not, but at length it came to an end. The upheaved glacial mud hardened
into the soil of modern Norfolk. Forests grew once more, the wolf and
the beaver replaced the reindeer and the elephant; and at length what we
call the history of England dawned.
CXCVII