Mr. Clarence King was probably not a little surprised to learn from
the Tribune that in his most suggestive address on "Catastrophism and
the Evolution of Environment," he had turned the guns of Geology upon
Biology; and that in calling attention to the influence of periods of
accelerated change in environment upon exposed types of life he had
swept away the "fundamental doctrines upon which has been built the
scheme of development by natural selection and the survival of the
fittest." Certainly nothing in the address betrays any consciousness
of possible effects of that sort. And it is quite probable also that
Mr. King will have to suffer some annoyance from seeing his name set
up at gaze, like Joshua's moon in Ajalon, by the unscientific press
generally, as that of the newest champion of orthodoxy against the
leaders of modern scientific thought: a penalty which scientific men
always have to pay for emphasizing neglected truths.
Mr. King certainly deals some telling blows against the position of
the stricter school of Uniformitarians in geology, and brings into
prominence a much neglected element in the struggle for existence; but
there is no scientific revolution threatened, nor are any crumbs of
comfort spread for those endeavoring to arrest the natural drift of
scientific progress.
The issue between Mr. King and the sticklers for uniformity in rates
of geological change is simply this: In the reaction against the
sweeping cataclysms, the sudden wipings out of whole creations and
the sudden introductions of new worlds of life believed in by earlier
geologists, the modern English school has come to look upon time and
the slower modifications of the earth's surface, now observable, with
the struggle for existence under easy conditions, as the chief factors
in geological change and its accompanying variations in the forms of
life. Mr. King, on the other hand, insists that in so doing they have
taken too little account of catastrophic changes, that is, widespread
and sudden movements of sea and land. In other words, he raises rapid
change of environment from the subordinate place it has hitherto
occupied in the scheme of historical development, and gives special
emphasis to the grand geologic movements which have to do with such
changes.
In this Mr. King has unquestionably rendered good service to the
science he has done so much to extend and honor in the field; while
the illustrations from American geology which he brings to bear on the
subject are as likely as his sturdy opinions to attract attention.
Yet we are inclined to think that in some things he has allowed his
enthusiasm to run away with him. The stolid self-confidence of
extreme Uniformitarians has tempted him to exaggerate the periodic
accelerations of geologic and biologic movement, and to overstate
their effects quite as much as others have underestimated them;
and when he charges the followers of Lyell with intellectual
near-sightedness and a lack of "the very mechanism of imagination,"
they may possibly be able to retort not unjustifiably that he has
mistaken the natural foreshortening of the geological vista due to
distance for actual brevity; and that his belief in the abruptness and
suddenness of the great changes which the earth's strata record, may
be due to his own lack of sustained imaginative power for grasping and
interpreting all the evidences of the enormous time really involved.
But this is a question not of imaginative capacity but of logical
deduction from observed facts; and however abrupt the beginning of
some of the great geologic movements may have been, their subsequent
progress cannot in all cases have been so rapid as to allow of their
being called catastrophic in any ordinary acceptation of the term.
Take, for example, the alleged catastrophe which marked the close of
the mesozoic age in the West. Of this movement Mr. King remarks: "In
a quasi-uniformitarian way, 20,000 or 30,000 feet of sediment had
accumulated in the Pacific and 14,000 in the [American] mediterranean
sea; when these regions, which, during the reception of sediment,
had been areas of subsidence, suddenly upheaved, the doming up of the
middle of the continent quite obliterating the mediterranean sea and
uniting the two land masses into one. The catastrophe which removed
this sea 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."
That this great change occurred, and was attended with an obliteration
of the wonderful reptilian and avian fauna of the mesozoic age, is
most true: that it occurred suddenly does not appear. On the contrary,
there is evidence to show that the prodigious folding up of mountain
ranges involved could not have proceeded with sufficient rapidity to
turn the course of a stream of water. It happened that one of those
folds--one which, had no denudation been going on meanwhile,
would have lifted its crest higher than the highest peak of the
Himalayas--lay directly across the course of the Colorado river. The
river held its course uninterruptedly, sawing its way through the
uplift until six vertical miles of rocky strata had risen past it. At
no time, therefore, could the rapidity of motion in the bulging strata
have exceeded the capacity of the river to wear away the obstruction,
and the bulge was fifty miles across! We do not know how rapidly a
river may sink its channel through such a rising barrier; but we do
know that a process of that nature cannot legitimately be described
as swift or sudden. And surely it requires not less intellectual
far-sightedness and imaginative faculty to carry the mind across the
enormous stretch of time involved in such a change slowly wrought--a
period during which at least three vertical miles of the rising
mountain fold was worn down by rain and atmospheric abrasion--as to
mass the continental doming, the mountain folding, and the attendant
life changes together as a convulsive "catastrophe."
Mr. King, however, is not a Catastrophist of a very violent sort. He
shelves among the errors of the past the belief in such cataclysms as
Cuvier believed in, involving world-wide destruction of all life--"the
mere survival of a prehistoric terror, backed up by breaks in the
palaeontological record and protected within those safe cities of
refuge, the Cosmogonies;" though he rejects as equally unsatisfactory
the mild affirmations of the Uniformitarians, that existing rates
of change and indefinite time are enough to account for all the
geological record. With our present light, he holds, geological
history seems to be a dovetailing together of the two ideas. "The ages
have had their periods of geological serenity, when change progressed
in the still, unnoticeable way, and life through vast lapses of
time followed the stately flow of years; drifting on by insensible
gradations through higher and higher forms, and then all at once
a part of the earth suffered short, sharp, destructive revolution
unheralded as an earthquake or volcanic eruptions." Thus stated, his
position does not seem to be radically different from that of
the broader Uniformitarians, except that he marks the periods of
accelerated physical change, and not those of comparative quiescence,
as the dominant ones in their influence on life-change. He takes
high and strong ground, too, in insisting that it is the business
of geology not simply to decipher and map out the changes which have
taken place in the configuration of the globe and in its climatic
conditions, but also to investigate and fix the rates of change. And
when the evolution of environment takes form as a distinct branch of
geology, he expects to witness a marked modification in the dominant
views of biologists. Its few broad laws will include "neither the
absolute uniformitarianism of Lyell and Hutton, Darwin and Haeckel,
nor the universal catastrophism of Cuvier and the majority of
teleogists." "Huxley alone among prominent evolutionists opens the
door for a union of the residue of truth in the two schools, fusing
them in his proposed evolutional geology."
So, on looking back over a trail of thirty thousand miles of
geological travel, Mr. King is impelled to say that Mr. Huxley's
far-sighted view perfectly satisfies his interpretation of the broad
facts of the American continent.
Of Mr. King's observations in regard to plasticity of physical
structure in connection with rapidly changing environment and the
struggle for existence, we propose to speak at another time.
* * * * *
The great stone monuments of England, like Stonehenge, are supposed,
by Mr. James Fergusson, to be military trophies, erected in the time
of King Arthur on the battle fields by the victorious armies.
* * * * *