“Fairest Lord Jesus,Ruler of all Nature,O Thou of God and man the Son!Thee will I honor,Thee will I cherish,Thou, my soul’s glory, joy, and crown!“Fair are the meadows,Fairer still the woodlands,Robed in the pleasing garb of spring:Jesus shines fairer,Jesus is purerWho makes the woful heart to sing!“Fair is the sunshine,Fairer still the moonlight,And all the twinkling starry host;Jesus shines fairer,Jesus is purer,Than all the angels heaven can boast!”
“Fairest Lord Jesus,Ruler of all Nature,O Thou of God and man the Son!Thee will I honor,Thee will I cherish,Thou, my soul’s glory, joy, and crown!
“Fairest Lord Jesus,
Ruler of all Nature,
O Thou of God and man the Son!
Thee will I honor,
Thee will I cherish,
Thou, my soul’s glory, joy, and crown!
“Fair are the meadows,Fairer still the woodlands,Robed in the pleasing garb of spring:Jesus shines fairer,Jesus is purerWho makes the woful heart to sing!
“Fair are the meadows,
Fairer still the woodlands,
Robed in the pleasing garb of spring:
Jesus shines fairer,
Jesus is purer
Who makes the woful heart to sing!
“Fair is the sunshine,Fairer still the moonlight,And all the twinkling starry host;Jesus shines fairer,Jesus is purer,Than all the angels heaven can boast!”
“Fair is the sunshine,
Fairer still the moonlight,
And all the twinkling starry host;
Jesus shines fairer,
Jesus is purer,
Than all the angels heaven can boast!”
They were singing the second verse, as, emerging from the dark old gate-way of the town, all the distant landscape of silvery olive-orchards, crimson clover-fields, blossoming almond-trees, fig-trees, and grape-vines, just in the tender green of spring, burst upon their view. Agnes felt a kind of inspiration. From the high mountain elevation she could discern the far-off brightness of the sea— all between one vision of beauty,—and the religious enthusiasm which possessed all around her had in her eye all the value of the most solid and reasonable faith. With us, who may look on it from a colder and more distant point of view, doubts may be suggested whether thisnaïveimpressibility to religious influences, this simple, whole-hearted abandonment to their expression, had any real practical value. The fact that any or all of the actors might before night rob or stab or lie quite as freely as if it has not occurred may well give reason for such a question. Be this as it may, the phenomenon is not confined to Italy or the religion of the Middle Ages, but exhibits itself in many a prayer-meeting and camp-meeting of modern days. For our own part, we hold it better to have even transient upliftings of the nobler and more devout element of man’s nature than never to have any at all, and that he who goes on in worldly and sordid courses, without ever a spark of religious enthusiasm or a throb of aspiration, is less of a man than he who sometimes soars heavenward, though his wings be weak and he fall again.
In all this scene Agostino Sarelli took no part. He had simply given orders for the safe-conduct of Agnes, and then retired to his own room. From a window, however, he watched the procession as it passed through the gates of the city, and his resolution was immediately taken to proceed at once by a secret path to the place where the pilgrims should emerge upon the high-road.
He had been induced to allow the departure of Agnes, from seeing the utter hopelessness by any argument or persuasion of removing a barrier that was so vitally interwoven with the most sensitive religious nerves of her being. He saw in her terrified looks, in the deadly paleness of her face, how real and unaffected was the anguish which his words gave her; he saw that the very consciousness of her own love to him produced a sense of weakness which made her shrink in utter terror from his arguments.
“There is no remedy,” he said, “but to let her go to Rome and see with her own eyes how utterly false and vain is the vision which she draws from the purity of her own believing soul. What Christian would not wish that these fair dreams had any earthly reality? But this gentle dove must not be left unprotected to fly into that foul, unclean cage of vultures and harpies. Deadly as the peril may be to me to breathe the air of Rome, I will be around her invisibly to watch over her.”
A vision rises upon us from the land of shadows. We see a wide plain, miles and miles in extent, rolling in soft billows of green, and girded on all sides by blue mountains, whose silver crests gleaming in the setting sunlight tell that the winter yet lingers on their tops, though spring has decked all the plain. So silent, so lonely, so fair is this waving expanse with its guardian mountains, it might be some wild solitude, an American prairie or Asiatic steppe, but that in the midst thereof, on some billows of rolling land, we discern a city, sombre, quaint, and old,—a city of dreams and mysteries,—a city of the living and the dead. And this is Rome,—weird, wonderful, ancient, mighty Rome,—mighty once by physical force and grandeur, mightier now in physical decadence and weakness by the spell of a potent moral enchantment.
As the sun is moving westward, the whole air around becomes flooded with a luminousness which seems to transfuse itself with pervading presence through every part of the city, and make all its ruinous and mossy age bright and living. The air shivers with the silver vibrations of hundreds of bells, and the evening glory goes up and down, soft-footed and angelic, transfiguring all things. The broken columns of the Forum seem to swim in golden mist, and luminous floods fill the Coliseum as it stands with its thousand arches looking out into the city like so many sightless eye-holes in the skull of the past. The tender light pours up streets dank and ill-paved,—into noisome and cavernous dens called houses, where the peasantry of to-day vegetate in contented subservience. It illuminates many a dingy court-yard, where the moss is green on the walls, and gurgling fountains fall into quaint old sculptured basins. It lights up the gorgeous palaces of Rome’s modern princes, built with stones wrenched from ancient ruins. It streams through a wilderness of churches, each with its tolling prayer-bell, and steals through painted windows into the dazzling confusion of pictured and gilded glories that glitter and gleam from roof and wall within. And it goes, too, across the Tiber, up the filthy and noisome Ghetto, where, hemmed in by ghostly superstition, the sons of Israel are growing up without vital day, like wan white plants in cellars; and the black mournful obelisks of the cypresses in the villas around, it touches with a solemn glory. The castle of St. Angelo looks like a great translucent, luminous orb, and the statues of saints and apostles on the top of St. John Lateran glow as if made of living fire, and seem to stretch out glorified hands of welcome to the pilgrims that are approaching the Holy City across the soft, palpitating sea of green that lies stretched like a misty veil around it.
Then, as now, Rome was an enchantress of mighty and wonderful power, with her damp, and mud, and mould, her ill-fed, ill-housed populace, her ruins of old glory rising dim and ghostly amid her palaces of to-day. With all her awful secrets of rapine, cruelty, ambition, injustice,—with her foul orgies of unnatural crime,—with the very corruption of the old buried Roman Empire steaming up as from a charnel-house, and permeating all modern life with its effluvium of deadly uncleanness,—still Rome had that strange, bewildering charm of melancholy grandeur and glory which made all hearts cleave to her, and eyes and feet turn longingly towards her from the ends of the earth. Great souls and pious yearned for her as for a mother, and could not be quieted till they had kissed the dust of her streets. There they fondly thought was rest to be found,—that rest which through all weary life ever recedes like the mirage of the desert; there sins were to be shriven which no common priest might forgive, and heavy burdens unbound from the conscience by an infallible wisdom; there was to be revealed to the praying soul the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Even the mighty spirit of Luther yearned for the breast of this great unknown mother, and came humbly thither to seek the repose which he found afterwards in Jesus.
At this golden twilight-hour along the Appian Way come the pilgrims of our story with prayers and tears of thankfulness. Agnes looks forward and sees the saintly forms on St. John Lateran standing in a cloud of golden light and stretching out protecting hands to bless her.
“See, see, grandmother!” she exclaimed,—“yonder is our Father’s house, and all the saints beckon us home! Glory be to God who hath brought us hither!”
Within the church the evening-service is going on, and the soft glory streaming in reveals that dizzying confusion of riches and brightness with which the sensuous and color-loving Italian delights to encircle the shrine of the Heavenly Majesty. Pictured angels in cloudy wreaths smile down from the gold-fretted roofs and over the round, graceful arches; and the floor seems like a translucent sea of precious marbles and gems fused into solid brightness, and reflecting in long gleams and streaks dim intimations of the sculptured and gilded glories above. Altar and shrine are now veiled in that rich violet hue which the Church has chosen for its mourning color; and violet vestments, taking the place of the gorgeous robes of the ecclesiastics, tell the approach of that holy week of sadness when all Christendom falls in penitence at the feet of that Almighty Love once sorrowful and slain for her.
The long-drawn aisles are now full to overflowing with that weird chanting which one hears nowhere but in Rome at this solemn season. Those voices, neither of men nor women, have a wild, morbid energy which seems to search every fibre of the nervous system, and, instead of soothing or calming, to awaken strange yearning agonies of pain, ghostly unquiet longings, and endless feverish, unrestful cravings. The sounds now swell and flood the church as with a rushing torrent of wailing and clamorous supplication,—now recede and moan themselves away to silence in far-distant aisles, like the last faint sigh of discouragement and despair. Anon they burst out from the roof, they drop from arches and pictures, they rise like steam from the glassy pavement, and, meeting, mingle in wavering clamors of lamentation and shrieks of anguish. One might fancy lost souls from out the infinite and dreary abysses of utter separation from God might thus wearily and aimlessly moan and wail, breaking into agonized tumults of desire, and trembling back into exhaustions of despair. Such music brings only throbbings and yearnings, but no peace; and yonder, on the glassy floor, at the foot of a crucifix, a poor mortal lies sobbing and quivering under its pitiless power, as if it had wrenched every tenderest nerve of memory, and torn open every half-healed wound of the soul.
When the chanting ceases, he rises slow and tottering, and we see in the wan face turning towards the dim light the well-remembered features of Father Francesco. Driven to despair by the wild, ungovernable force of his unfortunate love, weary of striving, overborne with a hopeless and continually accumulating load of guilt, he had come to Rome to lay down at the feet of heavenly wisdom the burden which he can no longer bear alone; and rising now, he totters to a confessional where sits a holy cardinal to whom has been deputed the office to hear and judge those sins which no subordinate power in the Church is competent to absolve.
Father Francesco kneels down with a despairing, confiding movement, such as one makes, when, after a long struggle of anguish, one has found a refuge; and the churchman within inclining his ear to the grating, the confession begins.
Could we only be clairvoyant, it would be worth our while to note the difference between the two faces, separated only by the thin grating of the confessional, but belonging to souls whom an abyss wide as eternity must forever divide from any common ground of understanding.
On the one side, with ear close to the grate, is a round, smoothly developed Italian head, with that rather tumid outline of features which one often sees in a Roman in middle life, when easy living and habits of sensual indulgence begin to reveal their signs in the countenance, and to broaden and confuse the clear-cut, statuesque lines of early youth. Evidently, that is the head of an easy-going, pleasure-loving man, who has waxed warm with good living, and performs the duties of his office with an unctuous grace as something becoming and decorous to be gone through with. Evidently, he is puzzled and half-contemptuous at the revelations which come through the grating in hoarse whispers from those thin, trembling lips. That other man, who speaks with the sweat of anguish beaded on his brow, with a mortal pallor on his thin, worn cheeks, is putting questions to the celestial guide within which seem to that guide the ravings of a crazed lunatic; and yet there is a deadly, despairing earnestness in the appeal that makes an indistinct knocking at the door of his heart, for the man is born of woman, and can feel that somehow or other these are the words of a mighty agony.
He addresses him some words of commonplace ghostly comfort, and gives a plenary absolution. The Capuchin monk rises up and stands meekly wiping the sweat from his brow, the churchman leaves his box, and they meet face to face, when each starts, seeing in the other the apparition of a once well-known countenance.
“What! Lorenzo Sforza!” said the churchman. “Who would have thought it? Don’t you remember me?”
“Not Lorenzo Sforza,” said the other, a hectic brilliancy flushing his pale cheek; “that name is buried in the tomb of his fathers; he you speak to knows it no more. The unworthy Brother Francesco, deserving nothing of God or man, is before you.”
“Oh, come, come!” said the other, grasping his hand in spite of his resistance; “that is all proper enough in its place; but between friends, you know, what’s the use? It’s lucky we have you here now; we want one of your family to send on a mission to Florence, and talk a little reason into the citizens and the Signoria. Come right away with me to the Pope.”
“Brother, in God’s name let me go! I have no mission to the great of this world; and I cannot remember or be called by the name of other days, or salute kinsman or acquaintance after the flesh, without a breach of vows.”
“Poh, poh! you are nervous, dyspeptic; you don’t understand things. Don’t you see you are where vows can be bound and loosed? Come along, and let us wake you out of this nightmare. Such a pother about a pretty peasant-girl! One of your rank and taste, too! I warrant me the little sinner practised on you at the confessional. I know their ways, the whole of them; but you mourn over it in a way that is perfectly incomprehensible. If you had tripped a little,—paid a compliment, or taken a liberty or two,—it would have been only natural; but this desperation, when you have resisted like Saint Anthony himself, shows your nerves are out of order and you need change.”
“For God’s sake, brother, tempt me not!” said Father Francesco, wrenching himself away, with such a haggard and insane vehemence as quite to discompose the churchman; and drawing his cowl over his face, he glided swiftly down a side-aisle and out the door.
The churchman was too easy-going to risk the fatigue of a scuffle with a man whom he considered as a monomaniac; but he stepped smoothly and stealthily after him and watched him go out.
“Look you,” he said to a servant in violet livery who was waiting by the door, “follow yonder Capuchin and bring me word where he abides.—He may be cracked,” he said to himself; “but, after all, one of his blood may be worth mending, and do us good service either in Florence or Milan. We must have him transferred to some convent here, where we can lay hands on him readily, if we want him.”
Meanwhile Father Francesco wends his way through many a dark and dingy street to an ancient Capuchin convent, where he finds brotherly admission. Weary and despairing is he beyond all earthly despair, for the very altar of his God seems to have failed him. He asked for bread, and has got a stone,—he asked a fish, and has got a scorpion. Again and again the worldly, almost scoffing, tone of the superior to whom he has been confessing sounds like the hiss of a serpent in his ear.
But he is sent for in haste to visit the bedside of the Prior, who has long been sick and failing, and who gladly embraces this opportunity to make his last confession to a man of such reputed sanctity in his order as Father Francesco. For the acute Father Johannes, casting about for various means to empty the Superior’s chair at Sorrento, for his own benefit, and despairing of any occasion of slanderous accusation, had taken the other tack of writing to Rome extravagant laudations of such feats of penance and saintship in his Superior as in the view of all the brothers required that such a light should no more be hidden in an obscure province, but be set on a Roman candlestick, where it might give light to the faithful in all parts of the world. Thus two currents of worldly intrigue were uniting to push an unworldly man to a higher dignity than he either sought or desired.
When a man has a sensitive or sore spot in his heart, from the pain of which he would gladly flee to the ends of the earth, it is marvellous what coincidences of events will be found to press upon it wherever he may go. Singularly enough, one of the first items in the confession of the Capuchin Superior related to Agnes, and his story was in substance as follows. In his youth he had been induced by the persuasions of the young son of a great and powerful family to unite him in the holy sacrament of marriage with aprotégéeof his mother’s; but the marriage being detected, it was disavowed by the young nobleman, and the girl and her mother chased out ignominiously, so that she died in great misery. For his complicity in this sin the conscience of the monk had often troubled him, and he had kept track of the child she left, thinking perhaps some day to make reparation by declaring the true marriage of her mother, which now he certified upon the holy cross, and charged Father Francesco to make known to one of that kin whom he named. He further informed him, that this family, having fallen under the displeasure of the Pope and his son, Cæsar Borgia, had been banished from the city, and their property confiscated, so that there was none of them to be found thereabouts except an aged widowed sister, who, having married into a family in favor with the Pope, was allowed to retain her possessions, and now resided in a villa near Rome, where she lived retired, devoting her whole life to works of piety. The old man therefore conjured Father Francesco to lose no time in making this religious lady understand the existence of so near a kinswoman, and take her under her protection.—Thus strangely did Father Francesco find himself again obliged to take up that enchanted thread which had led him into labyrinths so fatal to his peace.
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It is in the search after the true boundaries and characteristics of orders that we may expect the greatest advance by the naturalists of the present day; and yet there is now much discrepancy among them, some mistaking orders for classes, others raising families to the dignity of orders. This want of agreement in their results is not strange, however; for the recognition of orders is indeed exceedingly difficult. If they are, as I have defined them, groups in Nature founded upon a greater or less complication of structure, they must of course form a regular gradation within the limits of their class, since comparative perfection implies comparative rank, and a correct estimate of these degrees of complication requires an intimate and extensive knowledge of structure throughout the class. There would seem to be an arbitrary element here,—that of our individual appreciation of structural character. If one man holds a certain kind of structural characters superior to another, he will establish the rank of the order upon that feature, while some other naturalist, appreciating a different point of the structure more highly, will make that the test character of the group. Let us see whether we can eliminate this arbitrary element in our estimate of these groups, and find any mode of determining orders that shall be unquestionable, and give us results as positive as a chemical analysis according to quantitative elements. I believe that there are such absolute tests of structural relations. It is my conviction, that orders, like all the other groups of the Animal Kingdom, have a positive existence in Nature with definite limits, that no arbitrary element should enter into any part of our classifications, and that we have already the key by which to solve this question about orders.
To illustrate this statement, I must return to the class of Insects. We have seen that they are divided into three orders: the long cylindrical Centipedes, with the body divided throughout in uniform rings, like the Worms; the Spiders, with the body divided into two regions; and the Winged Insects, with head, chest, and hind body distinct from each other, forming three separate regions. In the first group, the Centipedes, the nervous system is scattered through the whole body, as in the Worms; in the Spiders it is concentrated in two nervous swellings, as in the Crustacea, the front one being the largest; and in the Insects there are three nervous centres, the largest in the head, a smaller one in the chest, and the smallest in the hind body. Now according to this greater or less individualization of parts, with the corresponding localization of the nervous centres, naturalists have established the relative rank of these three groups, placing Centipedes lowest, Spiders next, and Winged Insects highest. But naturalists may, and indeed they actually do, differ as to this estimation of the anatomical structure. Have we, then, any means of testing its truth to Nature? Let us look at the development of these animals, taking the highest order as an illustration, that we may have the whole succession of changes. All know the story of the Butterfly with its three lives, as Caterpillar, Chrysalis, and Winged Insect. I speak of its three lives, but we must not forget that they make after all but one life, and that the Caterpillar is as truly the same being with the future Butterfly as the child is the same being with the future man. The old significance of the wordmetamorphosis—the fabled transformation of one individual into another, in which so much of the imagination and poetical culture of the ancients found expression—still clings to us; and where the different phases of the same life assume such different external forms, we are apt to overlook the fact that it is one single continuous life. To a naturalist, metamorphosis is simply growth; and in that sense the different stages of development in animals that undergo their successive changes within the egg are as much metamorphoses as the successive phases of life in those animals that complete their development after they are hatched.
But to return to our Butterfly. In its most imperfect, earliest condition, it is Worm-like, the body consisting of thirteen uniform rings; but when it has completed this stage of its existence, it passes into the Chrysalis state, during which the body has two regions, the front rings being soldered together to form the head and chest, while the hind joints remain distinct; and it is only when it bursts from its Chrysalis envelope, as a complete Winged Insect, that it has three distinct regions of the body. Do not the different periods of growth in this highest order explain the relation of all the orders to each other? The earliest condition of an animal cannot be its highest condition,—it does not pass from a more perfect to a less perfect state of existence. The history of its growth is, on the contrary, the history of its progress in development; and therefore, when we find that the first stage of growth in the Winged Insect transiently represents a structural character that is permanent in the lowest order of its class, that its second stage of growth transiently represents a structural character that is permanent in the second order of its class, and that only in the last stage of its existence does the Winged Insect attain its complete and perfect condition, we may fairly infer that this division of the class of Insects into a gradation of orders placing Centipedes lowest, Spiders next, and Winged Insects highest, is true to Nature.
This is not the only instance in which the embryological evidence confirms perfectly the anatomical evidence on which orders have been distinguished, and I believe that Embryology will give us the true standard by which to test the accuracy of our ordinal groups. In the class of Crustacea, for instance, the Crabs have been placed above the Lobsters by some naturalists, in consequence of certain anatomical features; but there may easily be a difference of individual opinion as to the relative value of these features. When we find, however, that the Crab, while undergoing its changes in the egg, passes through a stage in which it resembles the Lobster much more than it does its own adult condition, we cannot doubt that its earlier state is its lower one, and that the organization of the Lobster is not as high in the class of Crustacea as that of the Crab. While using illustrations of this kind, however, I must guard against misinterpretation. These embryological changes are never the passing of one kind of animal into another kind of animal: the Crab is none the less a Crab during that period of its development in which it resembles a Lobster; it simply passes, in the natural course of its growth, through a phase of existence which is permanent in the Lobster, but transient in the Crab. Such facts should stimulate all our young students to embryological investigation as a most important branch of study in the present state of our science.
But while there is this structural gradation among orders, establishing a relative rank between them, are classes and branches also linked together as a connected chain? That such a chain exists throughout the Animal Kingdom has long been a favorite idea, not only among naturalists, but also in the popular mind. Lamarck was one of the greatest teachers of this doctrine. He held not only that branches and classes were connected in a direct gradation, but that within each class there was a regular series of orders, families, genera, and species, forming a continuous chain from the lowest animals to the highest, and that the whole had been a gradual development of higher out of lower forms. I have already alluded to his division of the Animal Kingdom into the Apathetic, Sensitive, and Intelligent animals. The Apathetic were those devoid of all sensitiveness except when aroused by the influence of some external agent. Under this head he placed five classes, including the Infusoria, Polyps, Star-Fishes, Sea-Urchins, Tunicata, and Worms,—thus bringing together indiscriminately Radiates, Mollusks, and Articulates. Under the head of Sensitive he had also a heterogeneous assemblage, including Winged Insects, Spiders, Crustacea, Annelids, and Barnacles, all of which are Articulates, and with these he placed in two classes the Mollusks, Conchifera, Gasteropoda, and Cephalopoda. Under the head of Intelligent he brought together a natural division, for he here united all the Vertebrates. He succeeded in this way in making out a series which seemed plausible enough, but when we examine it, we find at once that it is perfectly arbitrary; for he has brought together animals built on entirely different structural plans, when he could find characters among them that seemed to justify his favorite idea of a gradation of qualities. Blainville attempted to establish the same idea in another way. He founded his series on gradations of form, placing together, in one division, all animals that he considered vague and indefinite in form, and in another all those that he considered symmetrical. Under a third head he brought together the Radiates; but his symmetrical division united Articulates, Mollusks, and Vertebrates in the most indiscriminate manner. He sustained his theory by assuming intermediate groups,—as, for instance, the Barnacles between the Mollusks and Articulates, whereas they are as truly Articulates as Insects or Crabs. Thus, by misplacing certain animals, he arrived at a series which, like that of Lamarck, made a strong impression on the scientific world, till a more careful investigation of facts exposed its fallacy.
Oken, the great German naturalist, also attempted to establish a connected chain throughout the Animal Kingdom, but on an entirely different principle; and I cannot allude to this most original investigator, so condemned by some, so praised by others, so powerful in his influence on science in Germany, without attempting to give some analysis of his peculiar philosophy. For twenty years his classification was accepted by his countrymen without question; and though I believe it to be wrong, yet, by the ingenuity with which he maintained it, he has shed a flood of light upon science, and has stimulated other naturalists to most important and interesting investigations. This famous classification was founded upon the idea that the system of man, the most perfect created being, is the measure for the whole Animal Kingdom, and that in analyzing his organization we have the clue to all organized beings. The structure of man includes two systems of organs: those which maintain the body in its integrity, and which he shares in some sort with the lower animals,—the organs of digestion, circulation, respiration, and reproduction; and that higher system of organs, the brain, spinal marrow, and nerves, with the organs of sense, on which all the manifestations of the intelligent faculties depend, and by which his relations to the external world are established and controlled: the whole being surrounded by flesh, muscles, and skin. On account of this fleshy envelope of the hard parts in all the higher animals, Oken divided the Animal Kingdom into two groups, the Vertebrates and Invertebrates, or, as he called them, the “Eingeweide und Fleisch Thiere”—which we may translate as theIntestinal Animals, or those that represent the intestinal systems of organs, and theFlesh Animals, or those that combine all the systems of organs under one envelope of flesh. Let us examine a little more closely this singular theory, by which each branch of the Invertebrates becomes, as it were, the exponent of a special system of organs, while the Vertebrates, with man at their head, include all these systems.
According to Oken, the Radiates, the lowest type of the Animal Kingdom, embody digestion. They all represent a stomach, whether it is the simple sac of the Polyps, or the cavity of the Acalephs, with its radiating tubes traversing the gelatinous mass of the body, or the cavity and tubes of the Echinoderms, inclosed within walls of their own.
The Mollusks represent circulation; and his division of this type into classes, according to what he considers the higher or lower organization of the heart, agrees with the ordinary division into Acephala, Gasteropoda, and Cephalopoda.
The Articulates are the respiratory animals in this classification: they represent respiration. The Worms, breathing, as he asserts, through the whole surface of the skin, without special breathing organs, are the lowest; the Crustacea, with gills, or aquatic breathing organs, come next; and he places the Insects highest, with their branching tracheæ, admitting air to all parts of the body. The Vertebrates, or Flesh Animals, with their four classes, represent the Bones, the Muscles, the Nerves, and the Organs of Sense.
This theory, according to which there are as many great divisions as there are structural systems or combinations of systems in the Animal Kingdom, seemed natural and significant, and there was something attractive in the idea that man represents, as it were, the synthetic combination of all these different systems. Oken also, in his exposition of his mode of classification, showed an insight into the structure and relations of animals that commended it to the interest of all students of Nature, and entitles him to their everlasting gratitude. Nevertheless, his theory fails, when it is compared with facts. For instance, there are many Worms that have no respiration through the skin, while his appreciation of the whole class is founded on that feature; and in his type representing circulation, the Mollusks, there are those that have no heart at all. It would carry me too far into scientific details, were I to explain all the points at which this celebrated classification fails. Suffice it to say that there is no better proof of the discrepancy between the system and the facts than the constant changes in the different editions of Oken’s own works and in the publications of his followers founded upon his views, showing that they were themselves conscious of the shifting and unstable character of their scientific ground.
What, then, is the relation of these larger groups to each other, if they do not stand in a connected series from the lowest to the highest? How far are each of the branches and each of the classes superior or inferior one to another? All agree, that, while Vertebrates stand at the head of the Animal Kingdom, Radiates are lowest. There can be no doubt upon this point; for, while the Vertebrate plan, founded upon a double symmetry, includes the highest possibilities of animal organization, there is a certain monotony of structure in the Radiate plan, in which the body is divided into a number of identical parts, bearing definite relations to a central vertical axis. But while all admit that Vertebrates are highest and Radiates lowest, how do the Articulates and Mollusks stand to these and to each other? To me it seems, that, while both are decidedly superior to the Radiates and inferior to the Vertebrates, we cannot predicate absolute superiority or inferiority of organization of either of these groups as compared with each other; they stand on one structural level, though with different tendencies,—the body in Mollusks having always a soft, massive, concentrated character, with great power of contraction and dilatation, while the body in Articulates has nothing of this compactness and concentration, but on the contrary is usually marked by a conspicuous external display of limbs and other appendages, and by a remarkable elongation of the body,—that feature characterized by Baer when he called them the Longitudinal type. There is in the Articulates an extraordinary tendency toward outward expression, singularly in contrast to the soft, contractile bodies of the Mollusks. We need only remember the numerous Insects with small bodies and enormously long wings, or the Spiders with little bodies and long legs, or the number and length of the claws in the Lobsters and Crabs, as illustrations of this statement for the Articulates, while the soft compact body of the Oyster or of the Snail is equally characteristic of the Mollusks; and though it may seem that this assertion cannot apply to the highest class of Mollusks, the Cephalopoda, including the Cuttle-Fishes with their long arms or feelers, yet even these conspicuous appendages have considerable power of contraction and dilatation, and in the Nautili may even be drawn completely within the shell. If this view be correct, these two types occupy an intermediate position between the highest and the lowest divisions of the Animal Kingdom, but are on equal ground when compared with each other.
But is there a transition from Radiates to Mollusks, or from Articulates to Vertebrates, or from any one of these divisions into any other? Let us first consider the classes as they stand within their divisions. We have seen that there are three classes of Radiates,—Polyps, Acalephs, and Echinoderms; three classes of Mollusks,—Acephala, Gasteropoda, and Cephalopoda; three classes of Articulates,—Worms, Crustacea, and Insects; and, according to the usually accepted classification, four classes of Vertebrates,—Fishes, Reptiles, Birds, and Mammalia. If there is indeed a transition between all these classes, it must become clear to us, when we have accurately interpreted their relative standing. Taking first the lowest branch, how do the classes stand within the limits of the type of Radiates? I think I have said enough of these different classes to show that Polyps as a whole are inferior to Acalephs as a whole, and that Acalephs as a whole are inferior to Echinoderms as a whole. But if they are linked together as a connected series, then the lowest Acaleph should stand next in structure above the highest Polyp, and the lowest Echinoderm next above the highest Acaleph. So far from this being the case, there are, on the contrary, many Acalephs which, in their specialization, are unquestionably lower in the scale of life than some Polyps, while there are some Echinoderms lower in the same sense than many Acalephs. This remark applies equally to the classes within the other types; they stand, as an average, relatively to each other, lower and higher, but considered in their diversified specification, there are some members of the higher classes that are inferior in organization to some members of the lower classes. The same is true of the great divisions as compared with each other. Instead of the highest Radiates being always lower in organization than the lowest Mollusks, there are many Star-Fishes and Sea-Urchins higher in organization than some Mollusks; and so when we pass from this branch to the Articulates, if we assume for the moment, as some naturalists believe, that the Mollusks are the inferior type, the Cuttle-Fishes are certainly very superior animals to most of the Worms; and passing from Articulates to Vertebrates, not only are there Insects of a more complex organization than the lowest Fishes, but we bring together two kinds of animals so remote from each other in structure that the wildest imagination can scarcely fancy a transition between them. A comparison may make my meaning clearer as to the relative standing of these groups. The Epic Poem is a higher order of composition than the Song,—yet we may have an Epic Poem which, from its inferior mode of execution, stands lower than a Song that is perfect of its kind. So the plan of certain branches is more comprehensive and includes higher possibilities than that of others, while at the same time there may be species in which the higher plan is executed in so simple a manner that it places their organization below some more highly developed being built on a lower plan. It is a poor comparison, because everything that God has made is perfect of its kind and in its place, though relatively lower or higher; yet it is only by comparison of what is after all akin,—of mind with mind,—even though so far apart as the works of the divine and the human reason, that we may arrive at some idea, however dim, of the mental operations of the Creative Intellect.
It is, then, in their whole bulk that any one of these groups is above any other. We may represent the relative positions of the classes by a diagram in which each successive class in every type starts at a lower point than that at which the preceding class closes. Taking the Polyps as the lowest class of Radiates, for instance, its highest animals rise above the lowest members of the Acalephs, but then the higher members of the class of Acalephs reach a point far above any of the Polyps,—and so on.
If this view be correct, it sets aside the possibility of any uninterrupted series based on absolute superiority or inferiority of structure, on which so much ingenuity and intellectual power have been wasted.
But it is not merely upon the structural relations established between these groups by anatomical features in the adult that we must decide this question. We must examine it also from the embryological point of view. Every animal in its growth undergoes a succession of changes: is there anything in these changes implying a transition of one type into another? Baer has given us the answer to this question. He has shown that there are four distinct modes of development, as well as four plans of structure; and though we have seen that higher animals of one class pass through phases of growth in which they transiently resemble lower animals of the same class, yet each one of these four modes of development is confined within the limits of the type, and a Vertebrate never resembles, at any stage of its growth, anything but a Vertebrate, or an Articulate anything but an Articulate, or a Mollusk anything but a Mollusk, or a Radiate anything but a Radiate.
Yet, although there is no embryological transition of one type into another, the gradations of growth within the limits of the same type and the same class, already alluded to, are very striking throughout the Animal Kingdom. There are periods in the development of the germs of the higher members of all the types, when they transiently resemble in their general outline the lower representatives of the same type, just as we have seen that the higher orders of one class pass through stages of development in which they transiently resemble lower orders of the same class. This gradation of growth corresponds to the gradation of rank in adult animals, as established upon comparative complication of structure. For instance, according to their structural character, all naturalists have placed Fishes lowest in the scale of Vertebrates. Now all the higher Vertebrates have a Fish-like character at first, and pass successively through phases in which they vaguely resemble other lower forms of the same type before they assume their own characteristic form; and this is equally true of the other great divisions, so that the history of the individual is, in some sort, the history of its type.
There is still another aspect of this question,—that of time. If neither the gradation of structural rank among adult animals, nor the gradation of growth in their embryological development gives us any evidence of a transition between types, does not the sequence of animals in their successive introduction upon the globe afford any proof of such a connection? In this relation, I must briefly allude to the succession of geological formations that compose the crust of our globe. The limits of this article will not allow me to enter at any length into the geological details connected with this question; but I will, in the most cursory manner, give a sketch of the great geological periods, as generally accepted now by geologists. The first of these periods has been called the Azoic or lifeless period, because it is the only one that contains no remains of organic life, and it is therefore supposed that at that early stage of the world’s history the necessary conditions for the maintenance of animals and plants were not yet established. After this, every great geological period that follows has been found to be characterized by a special set of animals and plants, differing from all that follow and all that precede it, till we arrive at our own period, when Man, with the animals and plants that accompany him on earth, was introduced.
There is, then, an order of succession in time among animals; and if there has been any transition between types and classes, any growth of higher out of lower forms, it is here that we should look for the evidence of it. According to this view, we should expect to find in the first period in which organic remains are found at all only the lowest type, and of that type only the lowest class, and, indeed, if we push the theory to its logical consequences, only the lowest forms of the lowest class. What are now the facts? This continent affords admirable opportunities for the investigation of this succession, because, in consequence of its mode of formation, we have, in the State of New York, a direct, unbroken sequence of all the earliest geological deposits.
The ridge of low hills, called the Laurentian Hills, along the line of division between Canada and the States was the first American land lifted above the ocean. That land belongs to the Azoic period, and contains no trace of life. Along the base of that range of hills lie the deposits of the next great geological period, the Silurian; and the State of New York, geologically speaking, belongs almost entirely to this Silurian period, with its lowest Taconic division, and the Devonian period, the third in succession of these great epochs. I need hardly remind those of my readers who have travelled through New York, and have visited Niagara or Trenton, or, indeed, any of the localities where the broken edges of the strata expose the buried life within them, how numerous this early population of the earth must have been. No one who has held in his hand one of the crowded slabs of sand—or lime-stone, full of Crustacea, Shells, and Corals, from any of the old Silurian or Devonian beaches which follow each other from north to south across the State of New York, can suppose that the manifestation of life was less multitudinous then than now. Now, what does this fossil creation tell us? It says this: that, in the Silurian period, the first in which organic life is found at all, there were the three classes of Radiates, the three classes of Mollusks, two of the classes of Articulates, and one class of Vertebrates. In other words, at the dawn of life on earth, the plan of the animal creation with its four fundamental ideas was laid out,—Radiates, Mollusks, Articulates, and Vertebrates were present at that first representation of life upon our globe. If, then, all the primary types appeared simultaneously, one cannot have grown out of another,—they could not be at once contemporaries and descendants of each other.
The diagram on the opposite page represents the geological periods in their regular succession, and the approximate time at which all the types and all the classes of the Animal Kingdom were introduced; for there is still some doubt as to the exact period of the introduction of several of the classes, though all geologists are agreed respecting them, within certain limits, not very remote from each other, according to geological estimates of time.
If such discussions were not inappropriate here from their technical character, I think I could show upon combined geological and zoological evidence that the classes which are not present with the others at the beginning, such as Insects among Articulates, or Reptiles, Birds, and Mammalia among Vertebrates, are always introduced at the time when the conditions essential to their existence are established,—as, for instance, Reptiles, at the period when the earth was not fully redeemed from the waste of waters, and extensive marshes afforded means for the half-aquatic, half-terrestrial life even now characteristic of all our larger Reptiles, while Insects, so dependent on vegetable growth, make their appearance with the first forests; so that we need not infer, because these and other classes come in after the earlier ones, that they are therefore a growth out of them, since it is altogether probable that they would not be created till the conditions necessary for their maintenance on earth were established. From a merely speculative point of view it seems to me natural to suppose that the physical and the organic world have progressed together, and that there is a direct relation between the successive creations and the condition of the earth at the time of those creations. We know that all the beings of the Silurian and Devonian periods were marine; the land, so far as it existed in their time, was a great beach, and along those shores, wherever any part of the continents was lifted above the level of the waters, the Silurian and Devonian animals lived. Later, in the marshes and the fern-forests of the Carboniferous period, Reptiles and Insects found their place; and only when the earth was more extensive, when marshes had become dry land, when islands had united to form continents, when mountain-chains had been thrown up to make the inequalities of the surface, were the larger quadrupeds introduced, to whose mode of existence all these circumstances are important accessories.
But while all the types and most of the classes were introduced upon the earth simultaneously at the beginning, these types and classes have nevertheless been represented in every great geological period by different sets or species of animals. In this sense, then, there has been a gradation in time among animals, and every successive epoch of the world’s physical history has had its characteristic population. We have found that there is a correspondence between the gradation of structural complication among adult animals as known to us to-day, which we may call the Series of Rank, and the gradation of embryological changes in the same animals, which we may call the Series of Growth; and there is also a correspondence between these two series and the order of succession in time, that establishes a certain gradation in the introduction of animals upon earth, and which we may call the Series of Time. Take as an illustration the class of Echinoderms. The first representatives of this class were a sort of Star-Fishes on stems; then were introduced animals of the same order without stems; in later periods come in the true Star-Fishes and Sea-Urchins; and the highest order of the class, the Holothurians, are introduced only in the present geological epoch. Compare now with this the ordinal division of the class as it exists today. The present representative of those earliest Echinoderms on stems is an animal that upon structural evidence stands lowest in the class; next above it are the Comatulæ, corresponding to the early Echinoderms without stems; next in our classification are the Star-Fishes and Sea-Urchins; and the Holothurians stand highest, on account of certain structural features that place them at the head of their class. The Series of Time and the Series of Rank, then, accord perfectly, and investigations of the embryological development of these animals have shown that the higher Echinoderms pass through changes in the egg that indicate the same kind of gradation, for the young in some of them have a stem which is gradually dropped, and their successive phases of development recall the adult forms of the lower orders. Take as another illustration the class of Polyps. First in time we find a kind of Polyp Coral, one among the early Reef-Builders, who built their myriad lives into the solid crust of our globe then as their successors do now. These old Corals have their representatives among the present Polyps, and from their structure they are placed lowest in their class, while the embryological development of the higher ones recalls in the younger condition of the germ the same peculiar character. I might multiply examples, and draw equally striking illustrations from the other classes; and though these correspondences cannot be fully established while our knowledge of the embryological growth of animals is so scanty, and information about their geological succession, yet wherever we have been able to trace the connected history of any group of animals in time, and to compare it with the history of their embryological development and their structural relations as they exist to-day, the correspondence is found to be so complete that we are justified in believing that it will not fail in other instances. I may add that a gradation of exactly the same character controls the geographical distribution of animals over the surface of the globe. Here again I must beg my readers to take much of the evidence, which, if expanded, would fill a volume, for granted, since it would be entirely inappropriate here. But I may briefly state that animals are not scattered over the surface of our globe at random, but that they are associated together in what are calledfaunæ, and that these faunæ have their homes within certain districts—called by naturalistszoölogical provinces. The limits of these provinces are absolutely fixed, in the ocean as well as on the land, by certain physical conditions connected with climate, with altitude, with the pressure of the atmosphere, the weight of the water, etc.; and this is true even for animals of migratory habits, for all such migrations are periodical, and have boundaries as definite and impassable as those that limit the permanent homes of animals. There is a certain series established by the relations between different kinds of animals, as thus distributed over the globe, which agrees with the gradation in their rank, their growth, and their succession in time;—the law which distributes animals in successive faunæ, and in accordance both with their relative superiority or inferiority, and with the physical conditions essential to their existence, being the same as that which controls their structural relations, their embryological development, and their succession in time.
What, then, does this correspondence between the Series of Rank, the Series of Growth, the Series of Time, and the Series of Geographical Distribution in the life of animals teach us? Surely not that the connection between animals is a material one; for the same kind of relation exists between lower and higher animals of one type or one class to-day, in their structural features, in their embryological growth, and in their geographical distribution, as we trace in their order of succession in time; and therefore, if this kind of evidence proves that the later animals are the descendants of the earlier in any genealogical sense, it should also prove that the animals living in one part of the earth at present grow out of animals living in another part, and that the higher animals of one class as it exists now are developed out of the lower ones. The first of these propositions needs no refutation; and with regard to the second, all our investigations go to show that every being born into the world to-day adheres to its individual law of life, and though it passes through transient phases of growth that resemble other beings of its own kind, never pauses at a lower stage of development, or passes on to a higher condition than the one it is bound to fill. If, then, this connection is not a material one, what is it?—for that such a connection does exist throughout the Animal Kingdom, as intimate, as continuous, as complex as any series which the development theorists have ever contended for, is not to be denied. What can it be but an intellectual one? These correspondences are correspondences of thought,—of a thought that is always the same, whether it is expressed in the history of the type through all time, or in the life of the individuals that represent the type at the present moment, or in the growth of the germ of every being born into that type to-day. In other words, the same thought that spans the whole succession of geological ages controls the structural relations of all living beings as well as their distribution over the surface of the earth, and is repeated within the narrow compass of the smallest egg in which any being undergoes its growth.
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