Mr. Clarence King lately delivered an interesting address before the
Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College, New Haven, Conn., under
the title of "Catastrophism, or the Evolution of Environment," which
promises to evoke considerable discussion. We subjoin an abstract of
the principal features of the address, which is quite lengthy. The
full text will be found in our SUPPLEMENTS, Nos. 80, 81.
Mr. King refuted the doctrine of slow evolution as taught by Huxley
and Darwin, and declared that the surface of the earth and climate had
been subject to sudden and catastrophic mutation, which included in
its environment all types of life.
He reasoned that marine fossils are found entombed in rocky beds far
remote from present seas; and that these beds were once sea bottoms
that have been upheaved by convulsions of Nature. The earliest history
of mankind is pregnant with catastrophe, and we have historic story
and biblical record of its sudden and destructive energy. He called
to mind the vast and massive eruptions of the Pliocene basalt as seen
upon our own continent.
The great obvious changes in the rocky crust were referred to a few
processes; the sub-aerial decay of continents, delivery by streams
of land-detritus into the sea, the spreading out of these comminuted
materials upon a pelagic floor, and lastly upheaval, by which oceanic
beds were lifted up into subsequent land masses. All these processes
he declared to have been more rapid in the past than now. Suddenness,
world-wide destructiveness, were the characteristics of geological
changes. Periods of calm, like the present, are suddenly terminated by
brief catastrophic epochs. Successive faunas and floras were created
only to be extinguished by general cataclysms.
He believed in recurrent, abrupt accelerations of crust change, so
violent as to destroy all life on the globe. He declared the idea to
be the survival of a prehistoric terror, and was backed up by breaks
in the great palaeontological record. Of the geologic features of
our continent, he said that beneath our America lies buried another
distinct continent, which he called Archaean America, which was made
up of what was originally ocean beds lifted into the air and locally
crumpled into vast mountain chains, which were in turn eroded by
torrents into mountain peaks. The original coast lines of this
continent we may never be able fully to survey, but its great
features, the lofty chains of the mountains which made its bones, were
very nearly co-extensive with our existing systems, the Appalachians
and Cordilleras. The canon-cutting rivers of the present Western
mountains have dug out the peaks and flanks of those underlying,
primeval uplifts and developed an astonishing topography; peaks rising
in a single sweep 30,000 feet from their bases, precipices lifting
bold, solid fronts 10,000 feet into the air, and profound mountain
valleys. The work of erosion, which has been carried on by torrents
of the quaternary age, brings to light buried primeval chains loftier
than any of the present heights of the globe.
At the close of the Palaezoic age, two enormous masses of what,
probably, were then continents began to sink, and as they disappeared
the present Atlantic and Pacific oceans appeared, while the sea-floor
of a then ocean, emerged, and became the new continent of America.
Dividing this new continent was a sea, but catastrophe removed this
sea and resulted in the folding up of mountain ranges 20,000 and
40,000 feet in height, thereby essentially changing the whole climate
of the continent. Of the land life of the mesozoic age we have
abundant remains. The wonderful reptilian and avian fauna of the
mesozoic age is now familiar to all. But after the catastrophe, and
the change of climate which must necessarily have ensued, this fauna
totally perished.
After criticising the opinions of Huxley, Lyell, Hutton, Darwin, and
others, he recurred to the effects of sudden terrestrial or cosmical
changes, and conceived that the effects of these changes would
be, first, extermination; secondly, destruction of the biological
equilibrium; and thirdly, rapid morphological change on the part of
plastic species. When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of
uniformity, and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words
"Change or die!" plasticity became the sole principle of salvation.
And plasticity is the key to survival and prosperity. Mr. King
remarked in conclusion of his address: "He who brought to bear that
mysterious energy we call life upon primeval matter bestowed at
the same time a power of development by change, arranging that the
interaction of energy and matter, which make up environment should,
from time to time, burst in upon the current of life and sweep it
onward and upward to ever higher and better manifestations. Moments of
great catastrophe, thus translated into the language of life, become
moments of creation, when out of plastic organisms something newer and
nobler is called into being."
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