THE EFFACEMENT OF NATURE BY MAN
Very few people have any idea of the extent to which man since his upgrowth in the late Tertiary period of the geologists—perhaps a million years ago—has actively modified the face of Nature, the vast herds of animals he has destroyed, the forests he has burnt up, the deserts he has produced, and the rivers he has polluted. It is, no doubt, true that changes proceeded, and are proceeding, in the form of the earth's face and in its climate without man having anything to say in the matter. Changes in climate and in the connections of islands and continents across great seas and oceans have gone on, and are going on, and in consequence endless kinds of animals and plants have been, some extinguished, some forced to migrate to new areas, many slowly modified in shape, size, and character, and abundantly produced. But over and above these slow irresistible changes there has been a vast destruction and defacement of the living world by the uncalculating reckless procedure of both savage and civilised man which is little short of appalling, and is all the more ghastly in that the results have been very rapidly brought about, that no compensatory production of new life, except that of man himself and his distorted "breeds" of domesticated animals, has accompanied the destruction of formerly flourishing creatures, and that, so far as we can see, if man continues to act in the reckless way which has characterised his behaviour hitherto, he will multiply to such an enormous extent that only a few kinds of animals and plants which serve him for food and fuel will be left on the face of the globe. It is not improbable that even these will eventually disappear,and man will be indeed monarch of all he surveys. He will have converted the gracious earth, once teeming with innumerable, incomparably beautiful varieties of life, into a desert—or, at best, a vast agricultural domain abandoned to the production of food-stuffs for the hungry millions which, like maggots consuming a carcase, or the irrepressible swarms of the locust, incessantly devour and multiply.
Another glacial period or an overwhelming catastrophe of cosmic origin may fortunately, at some distant epoch, check the blind process of destruction of natural things and the insane pullulation of humanity. But there are, it seems probable, many centuries of what would seem to the men of to-day deplorable ugliness and cramping pressure in store for posterity unless an unforeseen awakening of the human race to the inevitable results of its present recklessness should occur. Whatever may be the ultimate fate of the earth under man's operations, we should endeavour at this moment to delay, as far as possible, the hateful consummation looming ahead of us.
It is interesting to note a few instances of man's destructive action. Even in prehistoric times it is probable that man, by hunting the mammoth—the great hairy elephant—assisted in its extinction, if he did not actually bring it about. At a remote prehistoric period the horses of various kinds which abounded in North and South America rapidly and suddenly became extinct. It has been suggested, with some show of probability, that a previously unknown epidemic disease due to a parasitic organism—such as those which we now see ravaging the herds of South Africa—found its way to the American continent. And it is quite possible that this was brought from the other hemisphere by the first men who crossed the Pacific and populated North America.
To come to matters of certainty and not of speculation, we know that man by clearing the land, as well as by actively hunting and killing it, made an end of the great wild ox of Europe, the aurochs or urus of Cæsar, the last of which was killed near Warsaw in 1627.He similarly destroyed the bison, first in Europe and then (in our own days) in North America. A few hundred, carefully guarded, are all that remain in the two continents. He has very nearly made an end of the elk in Europe, and will soon do so completely in America. The wolf and the beaver were destroyed in these British Islands about 400 years ago. They are rapidly disappearing from France, and will soon be exterminated in Scandinavia and Russia and in Canada. At a remote prehistoric period the bear was exterminated by man in Britain and the lion driven from the whole of Europe, except Macedonia, where it still flourished in the days of the ancient Greeks. It was common in Asia Minor a few centuries ago. The giraffe and the elephant have departed from South Africa before the encroachments of civilised man. The day is not distant when they will cease to exist in the wild state in any part of Africa, and with them are vanishing many splendid antelopes. Even our "nearest and dearest" relatives in the animal world, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and the ourang, are doomed. Now that man has learnt to defy malaria and other fevers the tropical forest will be occupied by the greedy civilised horde of humanity, and there will be no room for the most interesting and wonderful of all animals, the man-like apes, unless (as we may hope in their case, at any rate) such living monuments of human history are made sacred and treated with greater care than are our ancient monuments in stone. Smaller creatures, birds like the dodo and the great auk and a whole troop of others less familiar, have disappeared and are disappearing under the human blight. Even some beautiful insects—the great copper butterfly and the swallow-tail butterfly—have been exterminated in England by human "progress" in the shape of the drainage of the Fen country.
But the most repulsive of the destructive results of human expansion is the poisoning of rivers, and the consequent extinction in them of fish and of well-nigh every living thing, save mould and putrefactive bacteria. In the Thames it will soon be a hundredyears since man, by his filthy proceedings, banished the glorious salmon, and murdered the innocents of the eel-fare. Even at its foulest time, however, the Thames mud was blood-red (really "blood-red," since the colour was due to the same blood-crystals which colour our own blood) with the swarms of a delicate little worm like the earth-worm, which has an exceptional power of living in foul water, and nourishing itself upon putrid mud. In old days I have stood on Hungerford Suspension Bridge and seen the mud-banks as a great red band of colour, stretching for a mile along the picture when the tide was low. In smaller streams, especially in the mining and manufacturing districts of England, progressive money-making man has converted the most beautiful things of nature—trout streams—into absolutely dead corrosive chemical sewers. The sight of one of these death-stricken black filth-gutters makes one shudder as the picture rises, in one's mind, of a world in which all the rivers and the waters of the sea-shore will be thus dedicated to acrid sterility, and the meadows and hill-sides will be drenched with nauseating chemical manures. Such a state of things is possibly in store for future generations of men! It is not "science" that will be to blame for these horrors, but should they come about they will be due to the reckless greed and the mere insect-like increase of humanity.
In the destruction of trees and all kinds of plants man has deliberately done more mischief than in the extermination of animals. By inadvertence he has completely abolished the strange and remarkable trees and shrubs of islands—such as St. Helena—where the herbivorous animals introduced by him have made short work of the wonderful native plants isolated for ages, and have completely exterminated them, so that they are "extinct." We have just had the opportunity of studying one of the few oceanic islands—"Christmas Island" (forty square miles in area)—untouched by man until thirty years ago. It lies 200 miles south of Java. Its native inhabitants,plants and animals were carefully examined, and specimens secured twenty years ago. There were then no human inhabitants, and the island was rarely visited. It was, however, about twelve years ago handed over by its proprietors to some thousand Chinamen to dig and ship the 15,000,000 tons of valuable "phosphate" (at a profit of a guinea a ton), which forms a large part of its surface. And now from time to time we shall have reports of this result of contact with man, and through him with all the plagues and curses of the great world. Already a remarkable shrew-mouse and two native species of rat, peculiar to the island, have disappeared. Dr. Andrews ("Proceedings of the Zoological Society," February 2nd, 1909), who has twice explored the island, gives evidence that this is caused by a parasitic disease (due to a trypanosome like those which cause sleeping-sickness and various horse and cattle diseases) introduced by the common black rats from the ships which now frequent the island. The further progress of destruction will be carefully and minutely observed and recorded—but not arrested!
It is, however, in cutting down and burning forests of large trees that man has done the most harm to himself and the other living occupants of many regions of the earth's surface. We can trace these evil results from more recent examples back into the remote past. The water supply of the town of Plymouth was assured by Drake, who brought water in a channel from Dartmoor. But the cutting down of the trees has now rendered the great wet sponge of the Dartmoor region, from which the water was drawn all the year, no longer a sponge. It no longer "holds" the water of the rainfall, but in consequence of the removal of the forest and the digging of ditches the water quickly runs off the moor, and subsequently the whole countryside suffers from drought. This sort of thing has occurred wherever man has been sufficiently civilised and enterprising to commit the folly of destroying forests. Forests have an immense effect on climate, causing humidity of both the air and the soil, and giverise to moderate and persistent instead of torrential streams. Spain has been irretrievably injured by the cutting down of her forests in the course of a few hundred years. The same thing is going on, to a disastrous extent, in parts of the United States. Whole provinces of the Thibetan borders of China have been converted into uninhabitable, sandy desert, where centuries ago were fertile and well-watered pastures supporting rich cities, in consequence of the reckless destruction of forest. In fact, whether it is due to man's improvident action or to natural climatic change, it appears that the formation of "desert" is due in the first place to the destruction of forest, the consequent formation of a barren, sandy area, and the subsequent spreading of what we may call the "disease" or "desert ulcer," by the blowing of the fatally exposed sand and the gradual extension, owing to the action of the sand itself, of the area of destroyed vegetation. Sand-deserts are not, as used to be supposed, sea-bottoms from which the water has retreated, but areas of destruction of vegetation—often (though not always) both in Central Asia and in North Africa (Egypt, etc.), started by the deliberate destruction of forest by man, who has either by artificial drainage starved the forest, or by the simple use of the axe and fire cleared it away.
The great art of irrigation was studied and used with splendid success by the ancient nations of the near East. They converted deserts into gardens, and their work was an act of compensation and restitution to be set off against the destructive operations of more barbarous men. But they, too, long ago were themselves destroyed by conquering hordes of more ignorant but more war-like men, and their irrigation works and the whole art of irrigation perished with them. One of the absolutely necessary works to be carried out by civilised man, when he has ceased to build engines of war and destruction, is the irrigation of the great waterless territories of the globe. A little home-work of the kind has been carried on in Italy regularly year by year since the days of Leonardoda Vinci, and our Indian Government is slowly copying the Italian example. In Egypt we have built the great dam of Assouan, whilst in Mesopotamia it is proposed to re-establish the irrigation system by which it once was made rich and fertile. But, as has lately been maintained by Mr. Rose Smith in his book, "The Growth of Nations," the vast possibilities of irrigation have not yet been realised by the business men of the modern world. Millions of acres in the warmer regions of the earth now unproductive can be made to yield food to mankind and rich pecuniary profits to the capitalists who shall introduce modern engineering methods and a scientific system of irrigation into those areas.
The whole problem of the increase of the more civilised races and the necessary accompanying increase of food-production depends for its solution on the speedy introduction of irrigation methods into what are now the great unproductive deserts of the world.
THE EXTINCTION OF THE BISON AND OF WHALES
The almost complete and very sudden disappearance of the bison in North America thirty years ago does not seem to have been due simply to the slaughter of tens of thousands of these creatures by men who made a commerce of so-called "buffalo-rugs." These "hunters" miscalled the unhappy bison, which is not a buffalo, nor at all like that creature, just as they gave the name "elk" to the great red deer (the wapiti), although there was a real elk, the so-called "moose," staring them in the face. The sudden extinction of the bison resulted partly from the slaughter and partly from the breaking up of the herds and the interference with their free migration by the trans-continental railway. An interesting discovery made only this year, in regard to the closely allied European bison, suggests that disease may also have played a part in the destruction of the North American bison. A few hundred individuals of the European bison are all that remain at this day. Some are carefully preserved by the Emperor of Russia in a tract of suitable country in Lithuania and another herd exists in the Caucasus. Some of the Lithuanian bison have lately been dying in an unaccountable way, and on investigating a dead individual a Russian observer has discovered a "trypanosome" parasite in the blood. The trypanosomes are microscopic corkscrew-like creatures, of which many kinds have become known within the last ten or fifteen years. They are "single cells"—that is to say, "protoplasmic" animalcules of the simplest structure—provided witha vibrating crest and tail by means of which they swim with incessant screw-like movement through the blood. They rarely exceed one thousandth of an inch in length exclusive of the tail. The poisons which they produce by their life in the blood are the cause of the sleeping-sickness of man (in tropical Africa), of the horse and cattle disease carried by the tsetze fly, and of many similar deadly diseases—a separate "species" being discovered in each disease. A peculiar species is found in the blood of the common frog, and another in that of the sewer-rat. The last discovery of a "trypanosome" is that of one in the blood of the African elephant, announced to the Royal Society by Sir David Bruce.
It is a matter of great interest that a trypanosome has been found in a death-stricken herd of European bison. It suggests that one of the causes of the disappearance of the bison, both in Europe and America, may be the infection of their blood by trypanosomes, and that possibly, whilst a freely migrating and vigorous herd would not be extensively infected, a dwindled and confined herd may be more liable to infection, and that thus the final destruction of an already decadent animal may be brought about. It would now be a matter of extreme interest to ascertain whether the few dwindled herds of bison in North America are infected by trypanosomes, and no doubt we shall soon receive reports on the subject.
A most interesting branch of this subject of the unthinking extermination of great animals by man is that of the extermination of whales. Man is worrying them out of existence. Some are already beyond saving. It would be interesting to know whether there are trypanosomes or other blood-parasites in whales. I suppose that no one has an ill-feeling towards whales. Most of us have never seen a whale, either alive or in the flesh—only a skeleton. I have seen a live whale or two off the coast of Norway; and I once, in conjunction with my friend Moseley, when we were students at Oxford, cut up one, 18 ft. long, which had been exhibited for three weeks duringthe summer in a tent on the shores of the Bristol Channel, where we purchased it. The skeleton of that whale is now in the museum at Oxford, but happily the smell of it exists only in my memory. The late Mr. Gould, who produced such beautifully illustrated books on birds, told me that he once fell into the heart of a full-sized whale, which he was cutting up. He narrowly escaped drowning in the blood. The whale was not very fresh, and Mr. Gould was unapproachable for a week.
An immense number of whales are killed every year for their oil, and their highly nutritious flesh is wasted. There was an attempt some years ago to make meat extract from it. Some which was brought to me reminded me of the whale on the shores of the Bristol Channel. I do not know if the extract has proved palatable to other people. The Norwegians are specially expert in killing whales. They have been allowed to set up "factories" on the west coast of Ireland and in the Shetlands, where they kill whales with harpoons fired from guns, cut them up, and boil down the fat.
Whales are warm-blooded creatures which suckle their young, and have been developed in past geological times from land animals—the primitive carnivora—which were also the ancestors of dogs, bears, seals and cats. Whales have lost the hind limbs altogether and developed the forelegs into fingerless flippers, whilst the tail is provided with "flukes" like the fins of a fish's tail in shape, but horizontal instead of vertical. The whole form is fish-like, the skin smooth and hairless. It is a remarkable conclusion arrived at by the investigators of the remains of extinct animals that a little four-legged creature the size of a spaniel, and intermediate in character between a hedgehog and a dog, was the common ancestor from which have been derived such widely different creatures as the whale and the bat, the elephant and the man. We can at the present day trace with some certainty the gradual modifications of form by which in the course of many millions of years the change from theprimitive, dog-like hedgehog to each of those four living "types" has proceeded.
The whales of to-day are divided into the toothed whales and the whalebone whales. The great cachalot or sperm whale is captured, chiefly in the Southern Ocean, and killed in large numbers for the sake of the "spermaceti," or "sperm oil," which forms the great mass of its head, but he is so fierce and active that he is not easily captured, and is not in immediate danger of extinction. The smaller toothed whales, the killers, dolphins, and porpoises (though one of them—the bottle-nosed whale—is being killed out), are not as yet seriously threatened by commercial man. But the whalebone whales are in a parlous state. The Right whales, as they are called, are the chief of these. They are huge creatures, 60 ft. in length, with an enormous head: it is as much as one third of the total length in the Greenland whale. Besides the Greenland species there are four other "right whales," which may be considered as four varieties of one species. The head is not quite so large in them. The Biscay whale is one of them, and was hunted until it was exterminated in the Bay of Biscay, when the whalers, extending their operations further and further north, came upon the Greenland whale, which proved to be even more valuable than the Biscay species. The huge mouth in these two whales has hanging from its sides within the lips a series of long bars or planks of wonderfully strong, elastic, horny substance—the "baleen" or "whalebone"—each plank being as much as eight or in rare cases twelve feet long. Following close on one another and having hairy edges, they act as strainers so as to separate the floating food of the whale from the water which rushes through its mouth as it swims. The whalebone is of great value commercially, as is also the fat or oil. A hundred years ago whalebone fetched only £25 a ton, now the same quantity fetches more than £1,500. The Rorquals, or "Finners," have smaller heads and mouths; their whalebone is so short as to be valueless, but they grow to evengreater size than the Right whales and are found on our own coasts and all over the world. The Humpback whale is one of these "Finners," distinguished by its excessively long flippers and huge bulk.
The Biscay whale was the first of these great creatures to be hunted. The Basques began its capture as early as the ninth century. It was exterminated by them in the Bay of Biscay, and only saved from complete extinction elsewhere by the discovery of the more valuable Arctic or Greenland whale. The capture of the Greenland whale began in 1612; and in 200 years the unceasing pursuit of this species had driven it to the remote places of the Arctic Ocean. It is now so rare that it is not worth while to send a ship out for the purpose of hunting it, and it will probably never recover its numbers. An idea of its value and former abundance may be formed from the fact that between 1669 and 1778 it yielded to 1,400 Dutch vessels about 57,000 individuals, of which the baleen and oil produced a money value of four million pounds sterling. Of late years a single large Greenland whale would bring £900 for its whalebone and £300 for its oil. These two great Right whales having been practically exterminated, the merciless hunt has now been turned on to the wilder and less valuable Finback whales or Finners. In these days of steam and electric light the Arctic night is robbed of its terrors, and the whale chase goes on very fast. The shot harpoon was invented in 1870 by Sven Foyn, a Norwegian, and is the most deadly and extraordinary weapon ever devised by man for the pursuit of helpless animals. It is this invention (a commercial, not a scientific, discovery!) which has, in conjunction with swift steamships, rendered the destruction of whales a matter of ease and deadly certainty. It is this which is being used on the Irish as on the Scandinavian coast, resulting in the pollution of the air and water by the carcases of the slaughtered beasts from which the oil has been extracted. This revolting butchery, without foresight or intelligence, is carried on solely for the satisfaction of human greed, and apparently willbe stopped only by the extinction of the yet remaining whales. In forty years in the middle of last century the whale fishery of the United States yielded 300,000 whales to 20,000 voyages, and a value of sixty-million pounds sterling in baleen and oil. It is calculated that in the thousand years during which man has hunted the great whales not less than a million individuals have been captured. Man's skill and capacity have now become such that he will soon have cleared the ocean of these wonderful creatures, since, like the bison, the whales cannot persist when harried and interfered with beyond a certain limited degree.
It appears that the curious musk ox, which now lives on the fringe of the Arctic circle, and in the glacial period existed in the Thames Valley, is doomed. There (as in similar instances in other lands), the comparatively harmless savage race of men (in this case the Eskimo), whose weapons did not enable them seriously to threaten the existence of the animals around them, have now obtained efficient firearms. The musk ox is consequently now between two lines of fire—that of the white hunter on the south, and of the Eskimo on the north.
From regions far remote from the Arctic complaints come of an even more reckless destruction of helpless animals. Perhaps our legislators may feel some personal concern in this case, since it is neither more nor less than the approaching extinction of the turtle, the true green turtle of City fame, to eat which at the invitation of City dignitaries is one of the few duties of a legislator. Both the green turtles and the tortoise-shell turtles are being destroyed indiscriminately on the coast of Florida and in many West Indian Islands by brutal, careless, "white" beach-combers and idlers. By proper care of the eggs and young the turtles could easily be increased enormously in number, and a regulated capture of them be made to yield a legitimate profit. But neither the United States Government nor our own take any steps to restrain promiscuous slaughter of the turtles which come to the shore in order to lay their eggs. Soon the CityFathers will have to do without the "green fat" and their wives without tortoise-shell combs. It will serve them right. Such destitution in these—and, be it noted, in many other matters—will deservedly fall upon those who ignorantly, wilfully, and contentedly neglect to take steps to understand and to control the withering blight created by modern man wherever he sets his foot.
MORE ABOUT WHALES
The possibility of protecting whales from wanton slaughter by man is, no doubt, a matter open to discussion. Protection has, however, been accorded to one particular whale in an exceptional instance. Passenger steamers along the coast of New Zealand used to call at a station in a narrow inlet of the coast, called Pelorus Sound. A black whale, said to be of the kind known as Risso's Grampus, of about 14 ft. in length, was apparently a settled inhabitant of this channel, and used to follow the steamers and accompany them through the sound. He became famous and popular, and was known as "Pelorus Jack." He was always looked for and recognised by the sailors and passengers. Certain savagely destructive persons on one of these steamers—to the horror and disgust of the New Zealand world—made an attempt to shoot "Pelorus Jack." It is stated, and believed by sailors, that ill-luck consequently fell on that steamer. On its next voyage it was avoided by the whale, who had never failed to welcome friendly and non-aggressive steamships, and on a third voyage the steamer was wrecked. The feeling about "Pelorus Jack" was so strong that his Excellency the Governor of New Zealand, Lord Plunket, signed, on September 26th, 1904, an Order in Council, protecting "Pelorus Jack" by name for five years, and any person interfering with him was made liable to a fine of £100.
It appears that under the New Zealand Sea Fisheries Act of 1894 the Governor in Council is empowered to make regulations protecting any fish. Although zoologically not belonging to the class of fishes, whales are, technically and for all legal and commercialpurposes "fishes," since they are "fished" and are the booty of "fisheries." I believe that no Governor, Council, or Secretary of State has power in the British Islands similar to that conferred on the Governor of New Zealand by a modern State which desires good and effective government. Such power is needed in all parts of the British Empire.
The whales, as compared with their dog-like ancestors, are modified to a more extreme degree and in more special ways than is the case in any other group of which we can trace the history over a similar period of development. This is connected with the complete change of conditions of life to which these mammals ("warm-blooded, air-breathing quadrupeds which suckle their young") have become adapted in passing from a terrestrial to a marine existence. Other mammalian ancestors have independently taken to a marine life and given rise to strange-looking adaptations, namely, the seals and also the Manatee and Dugong known as the Sirenians (so-called because they give rise to sailors' stories of mermaids and sirens), but these are far less changed, less modified than the whales. The whales have acquired a completely fish-like form. They frequently have a large back fin, and have lost the hind legs altogether. The horizontally spread flukes of the whale's tail have nothing to do with the hind legs, whereas the common seal's hind legs are tied together so as to form a sort of tail. In the bigger whales, sunk deep in the muscle and blubber, we find on each side well forward in the body (not near the tail) a pair of isolated, unattached bony pieces, which are the hip-bone and thigh-bone—all that remains of the hind limbs. The neck is so short that in many whales the seven neck-bones, or "vertebræ," are all fused into one solid piece not longer than a single ordinary vertebra, and showing six grooves marking off the seven vertebræ which have united into one.
The head is more strangely altered than any other part of the whale. The jaws are greatly elongated—so as to give a beak-like form in all—but this regionis specially long and narrow in the "beaked whales" known to zoologists by the name Ziphius, in which it consists of a solid piece of ivory-like bone, which we find in a fossil state in the bone-bed of the Suffolk Crag. Farther back the bones of the face are suddenly widened in all whales and porpoises, and in many these bones grow up into enormous crests and ridges. The nostrils, instead of being placed, as in other animals, at the free end of the snout or beak, lie far back, so as to form the "blow-hole," which is near the middle of the head.
The circulation of the blood and the breathing of whales (including in that term the smaller kinds known as dolphins and porpoises) is still a matter which is not properly understood. When a Greenland whale is struck by the harpoon it dives vertically downward to a depth of 400 fathoms and more (nearly half a mile), and occasionally wounds the skin and bones of its snout by violently striking it on the sea-bottom. It remains below as long as forty minutes. Physiologists wish to know how the sudden compression of the air in the lungs in plunging to this depth and the equally sudden expansion of it in rising from such a depth is dealt with in the whale's economy, so as to prevent the absolutely deadly results which would ensue were any ordinary air-breathing animal subjected to such changes of pressure. Man can endure without suffering an increase of pressure of the gases in his body amounting to three or four times that to which he is accustomed, as, for instance, when working in the compressed air of "caissons." But the whale goes suddenly to a depth at which the pressure is eighty times that at the surface! Then, too, man (and other terrestrial animals), after being subjected (for instance, in a caisson) to a pressure of four times that which exists on the free surface of the earth, is liable to be killed by suddenly passing from that high pressure into the ordinary air. The gases dissolved in his blood expand like the gas in a bottle of soda-water when the cork is drawn, and the bubbles interfere with the circulation of the blood in the finerblood-vessels (of especial importance being those of the brain and spinal cord), and the serious illness and the death of workmen has frequently resulted from this cause. Accordingly, the men who work in such "compressed atmospheres" are now made to pass slowly through a series of three chambers, in each of which the pressure is diminished and brought nearer to that of the normal atmosphere. By spending twenty minutes in each chamber successively, the workman is gradually brought to the pressure of the outer world, and his blood prevented from "effervescing." But what must be the condition of the gases in the blood of a whale which suddenly rises from 400 fathoms to the surface? The whale suddenly goes, not from a pressure of four times the normal ("four atmospheres," as it is called), but from eighty times the normal, to the normal pressure.
Whales, and also seals, are provided with remarkable special networks of blood-vessels in various parts of the body (called "retia mirabilia" by the old anatomists,) and also with a thick layer of fat under the skin, the "blubber" (some feet deep in a large whale), full of blood-vessels. It has been suggested that these networks of blood-vessels are related in some way both to the power of keeping long (forty minutes!) under water without breathing, and also to the freedom of these marine monsters from the deadly effects of rapid passage from great to little gas-pressure. But it is only a suggestion; no one has shown how the networks can act so as to effect these results, and I am quite unable to say how they do so. Another suggestion worth considering is that the whale completely empties the gas out of its lungs by muscular compression of the body-wall before diving, so that there is no gas left in the body to be acted on by the increased pressure resulting from its sinking into deep water. I am unable to deal with this puzzle myself, and I have not been able to find any naturalist or physiologist who can throw light on the matter.
The toothed whales are nearer to the ancestralprimitive whales than are the whalebone whales. The latter are the more peculiar, and specially adapted with their huge heads and mouths (a third the length of the whole animal in the Greenland whale), and their palisades of 350 whalebone planks, some 12 ft. long, on each side of the mouth. I may mention in parenthesis that, whilst whalebone has been largely superseded by light steel in the making of umbrellas and corsets, its value remains, or rather increases, on account of its being the only material for making certain kinds of large brushes which are used in cleaning machinery. The whalebone whales have, when first born, very minute teeth hidden in their jaws; they disappear. Some of the toothed whales have teeth only in the lower jaw (the cachalot), others (the beaked whales, Ziphius, etc.) have only one pair or two pairs of teeth. These are tusk-like, and placed in the lower jaw. Others (the dolphins and porpoises) have very numerous peg-like teeth in each jaw. Some of them feed on fish, pursuing the shoals of fish in parties or "schools."
A truly terrible toothed whale is the large porpoise called the killer (known to zoologists asOrca gladiator). He is the wolf of the sea, far more active and formidable than any shark, about 10 ft. long, and strangely marked in black, white, and yellow. He has jaws bigger than those of the largest Mugger crocodile, and a tremendous array of fang-like teeth. These killers hunt the Right (or whalebone) whales in all parts of the world, in parties of three to twelve. They hang on to the lips of their enormous "quarry," and once they get a hold, in twenty minutes tear it into pieces. Often they satisfy themselves with tearing out and devouring the gigantic tongue of their victim, leaving the carcase untouched.
The narwhal and the white whale, or Beluga, which furnishes "porpoise-hide" for boots and laces, are both caught in northern seas, and form a closely allied pair, similar to one another in shape and colour (the one white, the other grey), and of moderate size, about 12 ft. long. They both feed on cuttle-fish and minute shrimps, but the Beluga has many teethand the narwhal (with the exception of some rudimentary ones) only a single pair, and these in the front of the upper jaw. In the female narwhal their pair of teeth remain permanently concealed in the jaw bone, and so does the right side one of the male. But the left side tooth of the male grows to an enormous size, projecting horizontally in front of the narwhal to a length of seven or eight feet. It is a powerful weapon, and is formed of ivory spirally grooved on the surface. The narwhal was called "the unicorn fish" or "Monoceras" in ancient times, and its spirally marked tooth was confused with the horn of the terrestrial unicorn—the rhinoceros. Very rarely the right tooth of the male narwhal grows to full size side by side with the left tooth. A specimen showing this double-toothed condition is in the Natural History Museum. A most curious fact, quite unexplained as yet, is that the spiral grooving on both the teeth turns in the same direction; in both it is like a spiral staircase in mounting which (starting from the base implanted in the jaw) you continually turn to the right. Now, in all other animal structures which have a spiral growth and are paired—one belonging to the right side of the animal, the other to the left, as, for instance, the spirally marked horns of antelopes and the more loosely coiled horns of sheep and cattle—one of the pair forms a right-handed and the other a left-handed spiral. They are "complementary"; one is the reflection, as in a mirror, of the other. Why the narwhal's tooth does not conform to this rule is a mystery.
It is a remarkable fact that only a few whales and porpoises eat fish or the flesh of other whales. The large toothed-whales, including the cachalot or sperm whale, and also the Ziphius-like beaked whales, live upon cuttle-fish. And it seems that they know where to hunt for this special article of diet and how to find it in quantity (probably at great depths in the ocean), which naturalists do not. Many new kinds of cuttle-fish have been discovered by examining the contents of the stomach of captured whales. The spermwhale feeds on monster squid and poulp such as we rarely, if ever, see alive or washed up on the shore. The hide of these cuttle-fish-eating whales and porpoises is scratched and scarred by the hooks attached to the suckers on the arms of the great cuttle-fish, and a test of the genuine character of ambergris which forms as a concretion in the intestine of the sperm-whale is that it contains fragments of the horny beaks and hooks of the cuttle-fish digested by the whale. The food of the whalebone whales consists of minute crustacea and of the little floating molluscs known asClio borealis, as big as the last joint of one's little finger, which float by millions in the Arctic Ocean. The whalebone whales, after letting their huge mouths fill with the sea-water in which these creatures are floating, squeeze it out through the strainer formed by the whalebone palisade on each side—by raising the tongue and floor of the mouth. The water passes out through the strainer, and the nourishing morsels remain.
Some fossil jaws and skulls of whales from miocene and older tertiary strata are known which tend to connect the toothed whales with those mammals not modified for marine life. But the approach in that direction does not go very far. The extinct whales called Squalodon have tusk-like front teeth and molars which have the outline of a leaf with a coarsely "serrated" edge. The bones of the face are also, in them, more like those of an ordinary mammal than is the case with modern toothed whales. The snout is not so long, and the bones which form it are a little more like those of a fox's snout than are those of the dolphin's "beak." But on the whole it is astonishing how little we know of fossil whales. We have yet to discover ancestral forms possessing small hind legs, but whale-like in other features. Some day a lucky "fossil-hunter" will come upon the remains of a series of whale-ancestors probably of Eocene age, and we shall know the steps by which a quadruped was changed into a cetacean—just as we have recently learned the history of the development of elephants. We knoweven less about the ancestry of bats and the steps by which they acquired their wings than we do about the history of whales. These discoveries await future generations of men when "cuttings" and "pits" and quarries shall have been made in the rest of the earth's surface to the same extent as they have been in Europe and in parts of the American continent.
MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SCIENCE
I submit, as the final chapter of this little volume of miscellaneous diversions, a few words intended to meet what has become a recurrent misrepresentation and absurdity for which the annual congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science furnishes the opportunity. Glib writers in various journals regularly seize this occasion to pour forth their lamentations concerning the incapacity of "science" and the disappointment which they experience in finding that it does not do what it never professed to do. They deplore that those engaged in the making of that new knowledge of nature which we call "science" do not discover things which they never set out to discover or thought it possible to discover, although the glib gentlemen who write, with a false assumption of knowledge, pretend that these things are what the investigations of scientific inquirers are intended to ascertain. We read, at that season of the year, articles upon "What Scientists do not know" and "The Bankruptcy of Science," in which it is pretended that the purpose of science is to solve the mystery, or, as it has been called, the "riddle," of the universe, and it is pointed out, with something like malicious satisfaction, that, to judge by the proceedings of the congress of scientific investigators just concluded, we are no nearer a solution of that mystery than men were in the days of Aristotle: and it is added that false hopes have been raised, and that matters which were once considered settled have again passed into the melting-pot!
This kind of lamentation is not only (if I may use an expressive term) "twaddle," but is injuriousmisrepresentation, dangerous to the public welfare. The actual attitude of the investigators and makers of new knowledge of nature is stated in a few words which I wrote ten years ago: "The whole order of nature, including living and lifeless matter—from man to gas—is a network of mechanism, the main features and many details of which have been made more or less obvious to the wondering intelligence of mankind by the labour and ingenuity of scientific investigators. But no sane man has ever pretended, since science became a definite body of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope to know or conceive of the possibility of knowing, whence this mechanism has come, why it is there, whither it is going, and what there may or may not be beyond and beside it which our senses are incapable of appreciating. These things are not 'explained' by science and never can be."
So much for those who reproach science with the non-fulfilment of their own unwarranted and perfectly gratuitous expectations.
When, however, having created in their readers' minds an unreasonable sense of failure and a mistrust of science, such writers go on to make use of the want of confidence thus produced, in order to throw doubt upon the real conquests of science—the new knowledge actually made and established by the investigators of the last century—it becomes necessary to say a little more. The public is told by these false witnesses that science has "dogmas," and that men of science are less satisfied than they were with the "dogmas" of the last century. Science has no dogmas; all its conclusions are open to revision by experiment and demonstration, and are continually so revised. But science takes no heed of empty assertion unaccompanied by evidence which can be weighed and measured. "Nullius in verba" is the motto of one of the most famous Societies for the promotion of the knowledge of nature—the Royal Society of London.
It is especially in the area of biology—the knowledge of living things—that the enemies of sciencemake their most audacious attempts to discredit well-ascertained facts and conclusions. They tell their readers that those greater problems of the science (as they erroneously term them), such as the nature of variation among individuals, the laws of heredity, the nature of growth and reproduction, the peculiarities of sex, the characteristics of habits, instinct, and intelligence, and the meaning of life itself, have advanced very little beyond the standpoint of the first and greatest biologist, Aristotle. This statement is vague and indefinite; the conclusion which it suggests is absolutely untrue. Aristotle knew next to nothing about the mechanism of the processes in living things above cited. At the present day we know an enormous amount about it in detail. But when men of science are told that they do not know the "nature" of this and the "meaning" of that, they frankly admit that they do not know the real "nature" (for the expression is capable of endless variety of significance) of anything nor the real "meaning" not only of life, but of the existence of the universe, and they say, moreover, that they have no intention or expectation of knowing the ultimate "nature" or the ultimate "meaning" (in a philosophical sense) of any such things. These are not problems of science—and it is misleading and injurious to pretend that they are.
I recently read an essay in which the writer is good enough to say that, owing to the work of Darwin, the fact that the differences which we see between organisms have been reached by a gradual evolution, is not now disputed. That, at any rate, seems to be a solid achievement. But he went on to declare that when we inquire by what method this evolution was brought about biologists can return no answer. That appears to me to be a most extraordinary perversion of the truth. The reason why the gradual evolution of the various kinds of organisms is not now disputed is that Darwin showed the method by which that evolution can and must be brought about. So far from "returning no answer," Darwin and succeedinggenerations of biologists do return a very full answer to the question, "By what method has organic evolution been brought about?" Our misleading writer proceeds as follows: "The Darwinian theory of natural selection acting on minute differences is generally considered nowadays to be inadequate, but no alternative theory has taken its place." This is an entirely erroneous statement. Though Darwin held that natural selection acted most widely and largely on minute differences, he did not suppose that its operation was confined to them, and he considered and gave importance to a number of other characteristics of organisms which have an important part in the process of organic evolution. The assertion that the theory of natural selection as left by Darwin "is now generally held to be inadequate" is fallacious. Darwin's conclusions on this matter are generally held to be essentially true. It is obvious that his argument is capable of further elaboration and development by additional knowledge, and always was regarded as being so by its author and by every other competent person. But that is a very different thing from holding Darwin's theory of natural selection to be "inadequate." It is adequate, because it furnishes the foundation on which we build, and it is so solid, complete and far-reaching that what has been added since Darwin's death is very small by comparison with his original structure.
Lastly, we are told by the anonymous writer already quoted that at the present time discussion is chiefly concentrated on the question as to whether life is dependent only on the physical and chemical properties of the living substance, protoplasm, or whether there is at work an independent vital principle which sharply separates living from non-living matter! And the obvious and common-place conclusion is announced that "the ultimate problems of biology are as inscrutable as of old." All ultimate problems are, I admit, inscrutable. It is, on the other hand, the business, and has been the glory and triumph, of science, to examine and solve problems which are scrutable!It is certainly not the case that, at the present time, discussion is concentrated on the question of the existence of a vital principle. There is absolutely no discussion in progress on the subject. No one even knows or attempts to state what is meant by "a vital principle." It is a phrase which belongs to "the dead past," when men of science had not discovered that you get no nearer to understanding a difficult subject by inventing a name to cover your ignorance. Thirty-five years ago the word "vitality" was used as some few philosophising writers are now using the term "vital principle." Huxley at that time attacked the views of Dr. Lionel Beale, who called in the aid of a mystical "principle," which he named "vitality," in order to "account for" some of the remarkable properties of protoplasm. As Huxley pointed out, this supposed principle "accounted for" nothing, since it was merely a name for the phenomena for which it was supposed to account. Huxley pointed out that many chemical compounds have remarkable properties—as assuredly have the chemical compounds which are present in protoplasm—but men of science have not found it to help them in investigating the mechanism of those properties to ascribe them to mystical intangible "principles" differing from the agencies at work in other less exceptional substances.
Thus, for instance, water, though a very common and abundant chemical compound formed by the union of two chemical elements, hydrogen and oxygen, which, at the temperature and pressure of the earth's surface, are gaseous, offers many strange properties to our consideration not shared by other compounds of gaseous elements. For instance, hydrogen, when it combines with gaseous elements other than oxygen, does not form a compound which is liquid at the temperature and pressure of the earth's surface. Its combinations with nitrogen, with chlorine, with fluorine, and even some with the solid element carbon, are under those conditions gaseous. What a special character, therefore, has water! Moreover, water, though a liquid, yet behaves in a most peculiar waywhen either cooled below ordinary temperatures or heated above them. It becomes solid when cooled, but expands at the same time, so that it is less dense when solid than when liquid—a most unusual proceeding! And when heated it is converted into vapour, but with a loss or "making latent" of heat, which, like its behaviour when solidifying, indicates that water is endowed with a very peculiar structure or mechanism in the putting together of its molecules. We might call these combined peculiarities of water "aquosity," and as we certainly cannot say why water should possess the lot of them, whilst other compounds of either hydrogen or of oxygen, or, in fact, of any other elements, do not possess this combination, we might say that their presence is due to "the aqueous principle," or "aquosity," which enters into water when it is formed, but does not exist in other natural bodies, and, indeed, "sharply separates aqueous from non-aqueous matter."
Happily, though such a view would have been considered high philosophy 200 years ago, no one is deluded at the present day into the belief that by calling the remarkable properties of water "aquosity" you have added anything to our knowledge of them. Yet those who invoke "a vital principle" or "vitality" in connection with protoplasm should, if they were consistent, apply their method to the mystery of water. Let us see how it would run. Though we may (the "vitalists" or "aquosists" would say) experiment with water, determine exactly the temperature and pressure at which these remarkable phenomena are exhibited, though we may determine its surface tension and its crystalline form, and even though we may weigh exactly the proportion of hydrogen to oxygen in its composition, yet when we look at a drop of water, there it is, a wonder of wonders, endowed with "aquosity," the ultimate nature of which is as inscrutable now as it was to Aristotle! It is perfectly true (we concede to the "aquosists") that the properties of water are not accounted for by science; that is to say that, though we can imaginethe molecular and atomic mechanism necessary for their exhibition, we cannot offer any suggestion as to how it is that that particular mechanism is present in the chemical compound which the chemist denotes as H2O, and is not present in other compounds, still less can we say "why" these remarkable properties are present—that is to say, for what purpose, although we know that if they were not present the whole history and economy of our globe would be utterly different from what it is. Nevertheless, in spite of their ignorance about the real nature of water, men of science do not invent an "aqueous principle" or "aquosity" with the notion of "explaining" water. And I have yet to hear of any duly trained and qualified biologist who is prepared at the present moment to maintain the existence of a "vital principle," or of a force to be called "vitality," supposed to be something different in character and quality from the recognised physical forces, and having its existence alongside, yet apart from, the manifestations of those forces.
Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton recently said: "The advance in science takes the workers in science more and more beyond the ken of the ordinary public, and their work grows to be a little understood and much misunderstood; and I have felt that, as in many other cases, the need would come for interpreters between those who are carrying on scientific research and the public, in order to explain and justify their work." Probably everyone will agree with the Lord Justice: but what are we to say of those responsible owners of great journals who not only abstain from providing such interpretation but allow anonymous and incompetent writers to mislead the public? Is the literary critic of a prosperous journal employed to write the City article?
There has been a repetition this year (1912) of the usual misrepresentation on the occasion of the meeting of the British Association. The President, Professor Schäfer, had let it be known that his address would be concerned with the chemistry of living processes,the gradual passage of chemical combinations into the condition which we call "living," and the possibility of bringing about this passage in the chemical laboratory without the use of materials already elaborated by previously existing "living" material. The announcement was immediately made in some "newspapers" that "startling revelations" were to be made by the President, that he was "to throw a bomb-shell" into the camp, etc. He did nothing of the kind. He gave an admirable and clear statement of the progress during recent years towards the realisation of the construction in the laboratory by chemical methods of the complex chemical combination which exhibits those "activities"—essentially movements, unions, disruptions and re-unions of extremely minute particles—which we call "living." The conclusion that such a gradual building up has taken place in past ages of the history of our earth was formulated more than forty years ago by Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Haeckel, and others, and has not been seriously attacked in the interval, but, on the contrary, generally accepted as a legitimate inference from the facts ascertained and the theory of the evolution or gradual development of what we call the material universe.
Professor Schäfer expressed the opinion, anticipated and shared by many other investigators, that the progress of chemical experiment renders it probable that further steps, culminating in the successful construction of "living" matter in the laboratory, are not beset by any insurmountable obstacles and will sooner or later be accomplished. There was no "bomb-shell" in this statement, and no excitement as its result among scientific workers nor amongst those who do not neglect to study the writings of the "interpreters" desired by Lord Justice Moulton. There are still some such interpreters carrying on the work of Huxley and of Tyndall, those great interpreters whose writings should be studied and treasured as classics.
The most interesting result of the attempt to treatthe discussions at Dundee as a newspaper "sensation," comparable to the reports relating to motor-car bandits or the pronouncements of political factions, has been its complete failure. Serious thinkers of all schools seem to have adjusted themselves to the more modern way of regarding natural processes even when these relate to matters of such age-long interest to mankind as the inception of "living" organisms and of conscious humanity itself. There are fewer now than there were forty years ago who insist on the older barbaric "explanations" of these marvels. Few indeed venture to assert the existence of "spirits"—ghostly essences of various grades and capacities which enter the bodies of living things and escape from them like so much gas when they die.[10]The vegetable soul, the animal soul and the human soul are no longer imagined and described to us as definite "things" supposed to "explain" the complex processes which go on respectively in plants, animals and men.
Seventy years ago the facts which were known as to that changing state of material substances which we describe by the words "hot" and "cold," were held to be "explained" by the existence of a ghostly thing called "caloric," which was believed to enter various bodies and make them hot and then to escape from them and so make them cold. Primitive man multiplied such ways of explaining each and every process going on in the world around him and in himself. Mere words or names lost their first simple signification and acquired permanent association with imaginary spirits, demons, and haunting intangible ghosts, by reference to which our ancestors in theirearliest "reasoning" explained to their own satisfaction the strange and sudden events fraught to them with the daily experience of pain or pleasure. The whole world was held by them to be "bewitched," and it was only by slow and painful steps that some knowledge of the persistent order of Nature was obtained, whilst the phantastic imagery which had served in its place, bit by bit disappeared. "Caloric" was a late lingerer, and was only got rid of when what had been so called was shown to be a vibration of particles—a mode or kind of motion—a "state," and not a mysterious fluid existing as a thing in itself.
Just as "caloric" no longer serves and is no longer possible as the supposed "explanation" of the behaviour of bodies in the hot or the cold state, so we no longer require the supposition of "spirits" of one kind or another as "explanations" of the living state of those products of our mother earth which are called plants, animals and men. In neither case do such "spirits" really "explain" the state in question; they are only names for the activity which it was imagined that they served to explain. These states or affections of matter remain as wonderful and important to us as they were before. But by giving up the prehistoric notions about them which have been handed on until the present day we can think of them in a more satisfactory way—a way which avoids the multiplication of unnecessary imaginary agencies and the conception of an intermittent and hesitating Creative Power, and substitutes for it the operation of continuous orderly and preordained forces.
It is true that we can neither ascertain nor imagine either the beginning or the end of the orderly process which we discover in operation to-day. We can trace it back by well-established inference into a remote past, but a beginning of it is not within the possibilities of human thought. We can, with reasonable probability of being correct, foretell the changes and developments which time will bring in many combinations and dispositions which are the manifestationsof that process at this moment of time, but we cannot even think of a cessation of that process.
Should we ask, "Why does this process exist?" there is no answer. Nature does not reply; an awful silence meets our inquiry. The reproach is often urged against science—the knowledge of the order of nature—that it does not tell us "why we are here." Man inevitably desires to know why he is here; but "science," as that word is now understood, does not profess or even seek to answer that question, although the false hope has been raised in ignorant minds, sometimes by knavery, sometimes by honest delusion, that it could do so. By knowledge of nature mankind can escape much suffering and gain the highest happiness, but that is all that we can hope for from it. We shall never satisfy our curiosity; we shall never know in the same way as we know the order of nature, why—to what end, for what purpose—that order and not another order exists.
It is very generally supposed that it is the business and profession of science "to explain" things—that is to say, to show how this or that must and does come about in consequence of the operation of the great general properties of matter, known as the "laws" of chemistry and physics. This is true enough, but it is equally the work of science to assert that of many things for which mankind demands "an explanation," there is no explanation. It is further the work and the service of science to destroy and to remove from men's minds the baseless and pretended "explanations" which are no explanations but causes of error, blindness, and suffering.
Science, the destroyer of "explanations," is the purifier of the human mind, its cleanser from the crippling infection of prehistoric error and from domination by the terrifying nightmares of our half-animal ancestry.
Finally, in reference to the very ancient attempt to "explain" life and consciousness by the assertion that they are due to "spirits" which enter the bodies of animals and men, I must caution the reader againstsupposing that—for those who do not accept the belief that such spirits exist—the gravity and mystery of the manifestations of life and consciousness are in any way lessened. Those who reject the belief in "spirits" do not in consequence reject the ethical and moral doctrines which have too long been rendered "suspect" by the shadow cast over them by ancient superstition. The disappearance of that shadow will reveal friends where enemies were supposed to be entrenched.
At the meeting of the British Association in 1879 I delivered an address on "Degeneration: a Chapter in Darwinism." In the printed version of that address, published in the same year, there are some statements bearing on the matter above discussed which I reproduce here, since I can still make them with conviction.
"Assuredly it cannot lower our conception of man's dignity if we have to regard him as 'the flower of all the ages' bursting from the great stream of life which has flowed on through countless epochs with one increasing purpose, rather than as an isolated miraculous being, put together abnormally from elemental clay, and cut off by such portentous origin from his fellow animals and from that gracious nature to whom he yearns with filial instinct, knowing her, in spite of fables, to be his dear mother."
"A certain number of thoughtful persons admit the development of man's body by natural processes from ape-like ancestry, but believe in the non-natural intervention of a Creator at a certain definite stage in that development, in order to introduce into the animal which was at that moment a man-like ape, something called 'a conscious soul' in virtue of which he became an ape-like man."
"No one ventures to deny, at the present day, that every human being grows from the eggin utero, just as a dog or a monkey does; the facts are before us and can be scrutinised in detail. We may ask of those who refuse to admit the gradual and natural development of man's consciousness in the ancestral series, passing from ape-like forms into indubitable man,'How do you propose to divide the series presented by every individual man in his growth from the egg? At what particular phase in the embryonic series is the soul with its consciousness implanted? Is it in the egg? in the fœtus of this month or that? in the new-born infant? or at five years of age?' This, it is notorious, is a point upon which churches have never been able to agree; and it is equally notorious that the unbroken series exists—that the egg becomes the fœtus, the fœtus the child, and the child the man. On the other hand we have the historical series—the series, the existence of which is inferred by Darwin and his adherents. This is a series leading from simple egg-like organisms to ape-like creatures, and from these to man. Will those who cannot answer our previous inquiries undertake to assert dogmatically in the present case at what point in the historical series there is a break or division? At what step are we to be asked to suppose that the order of nature was stopped, and a non-natural soul introduced?... The theologian is content in the case of individual development of the egg to admit the fact of individual evolution, and to make assumptions which lie altogether outside the region of scientific inquiry. So, too, it would seem only reasonable that he should deal with the historical series, and frankly accept the natural evolution of man from lower animals, declaring dogmatically, if he so please, but not as an inference of the same order as are the inferences of science, that something called the soul arrived at any point in the series which he may think suitable. At the same time, it would appear to be sufficient even for the purposes of the theologian, to hold that whatever the two above-mentioned series of living thing contain or imply, they do so as the result of a natural and uniform process of development, that there has been one 'miracle' once and for all time....
"The difficulties which the theologian has to meet when he is called upon to give some account of the origin and nature of the soul certainly cannot be said to have been increased by the establishment ofthe Darwinian theory. For from the earliest days of the Church, ingenious speculation has been lavished on the subject.
"St. Augustine says (I give a translation of the Latin original): 'With regard to the four following opinions concerning the soul—viz. (1) whether souls are handed on from parent to child by propagation; or (2) are suddenly created in individuals at birth; or (3) existing already elsewhere are divinely sent into the bodies of the new-born; or (4) slip into them of their own motion—it is undesirable for anyone to make a rash pronouncement, since up to the present time the question has never been discussed and decided by catholic writers of holy books on account of its obscurity and perplexity—or, if it has been dealt with, no such treatises have hitherto come into my hands.'"
There must be many who will be glad to shake off the illusion of explanation which is no explanation, and to escape from the futile discussion of the possible behaviour of spirits and ghosts born in the dreams of primæval savages. They will gladly accept the conclusion that the marvellous qualities and activities of living things and that inscrutable wonder, the mind of man, are outcomes of the orderly process of Nature no less than are the miracles which we call a buttercup, a rock crystal, a glacier, the noon-day sun! We can trace, by observation and inference, the orderly growth and development of these things from simpler things; we can discover continuity and common properties determining their diverse existence. But we find no explanation of them; we cannot account for the properties of matter which determine them, nor for the existence of anything—whether it be a drop of water, or human thought and consciousness. There are no special and exceptional "incomprehensibles" requiring us to assume that special "principles" or "spirits" are concerned with them whilst the rest are to be accounted for and explained in a more general way. Wherever we push our inquiries we come equally and inevitably, as did primæval man,to that of which there is no explanation—the perpetual miracle, the miracle of the nature of things, of existence itself. The man of science bows his head in the presence of this all-pervading mystery. He is called arrogant by those who arrogate to themselves the right to "explain" things and to deal in vital spirits and metaphysical nostrums for that purpose. From time to time they fill with their proclamations the great silence which he has learnt to accept with reverence and humility. As the years roll on their hollow phrases are less frequent, and acquire the pathetic interest which belongs to all such decaying remnants of the thought and effort of the childhood of man.
It seems still to be necessary to insist that it is not reasonable to assume as an indisputable fact that man can arrive at an "explanation" of existence and the nature of things. This assumption has been made in the past, and, by a well-known trick of advocacy, it has been argued that since science fails to "explain" these things, the old prehistoric fancies as to spirits—even though they "explain" nothing and have themselves to be "explained"—hold the field and must be accepted as true. There is an alternative, and that is to admit our ignorance. No man has ever seen or knows what is on the other side of the moon, that which does not face our earth. There are few amongst us who, in this admitted and complete state of ignorance, would persist in declaring that we must accept as true the suppositions of ancient races of men as to the existence there of men-like creatures, or would be deluded by the argument that since we do not know what is there the suppositions in question must be accepted as true. We cannot, as a matter of observation, assert that these supposed beings are not there, but we can find no reason to make it appear even probable, nor any means of proving by experiment, that they are. We refuse to entertain such suppositions.