During the Azoic period, ere life appears to have begun on our planet, the temperature of the earth's crust seems to have been so high, that the strata, at first deposited apparently in water, passed into a semi-fluid state, became strangely waved and contorted, and assumed in its composition a highly crystalline character. Such is peculiarly the case with the fundamental or gneiss deposits of the period. In the overlying mica schist there is still much of contortion and disturbance; whereas the clay slate, which lies over all, gives evidence, in its more mechanical texture, and the regularity of its strata, that a gradual refrigeration of the general mass had been taking place, and that the close of the Azoic period was comparatively quiet and cool. Let us suppose that during the earlier part of this period of excessive heat the waters of the ocean had stood at the boiling point even at the surface, and much higher in theprofounder depths, and further, that the half-molten crust of the earth, stretched out over a molten abyss, was so thin that it could not support, save for a short time, after some convulsion, even a small island above the sea level. What, in such circumstances, would be the aspect of the scene, optically exhibited from some point in space elevated a few hundred yards over the sea? It would be simply a blank, in which the intensest glow of fire would fail to be seen at a few yards' distance. An inconsiderable escape of steam from the safety-valve of a railway engine forms so thick a screen, that, as it lingers for a moment, in the passing, opposite the carriage windows, the passengers fail to discern through it the landscape beyond. A continuous stratum of steam, then, that attained to the height of even our present atmosphere, would wrap up the earth in a darkness gross and palpable as that of Egypt of old,—a darkness through which even a single ray of light would fail to penetrate. And beneath this thick canopy the unseen deep would literally "boil as a pot," wildly tempested from below; while from time to time more deeply seated convulsion would upheave sudden to the surface vast tracts of semi-molten rock, soon again to disappear, and from which waves of bulk enormous would roll outwards, to meet in wild conflict with the giant waves of other convulsions, or return to hiss and sputter against the intensely heated and fast foundering mass, whose violent upheaval had first elevated and sent them abroad. Such would be the probable state of things during the times of the earlier gneiss and mica schist deposits,—times buried deep in that chaotic night or "evening" which must have continued to exist for mayhap many ages after that beginning of things in which God created the heavens and the earth, and which preceded the first day. To a human eye stationed within the cloud, all, as I have said, must have beenthick darkness: to eyes Divine, that could have looked through the enveloping haze, the appearance would have been that described by Milton, as seen by angel and archangel at the beginning of creation, when from the gates of heaven they looked down upon chaos:—
"On heavenly ground they stood, and from the shoreThey viewed the vast immeasurable abyss,Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,Up from the bottom turned by furiousheatAnd surging waves, as mountains to assaultHeaven's height, and with the centre mix the pole."
At length, however, as the earth's surface gradually cooled down, and the enveloping waters sunk to a lower temperature,—let us suppose, during the latter times of the mica schist, and the earlier times of the clay slate,—the steam atmosphere would become less dense and thick, and at length the rays of the sun would struggle through, at first doubtfully and diffused, forming a faint twilight, but gradually strengthening as the latter ages of the slate formation passed away, until, at the close of the great primary period, day and night,—the one still dim and gray, the other wrapped in a pall of thickest darkness,—would succeed each other as now, as the earth revolved on its axis, and the unseen luminary rose high over the cloud in the east, or sunk in the west beneath the undefined and murky horizon. And here again theopticalappearance would be exactly that described by Milton:—
"'Let there be light,' said God, and forthwith lightEthereal, first of things, quintessence pure,Sprung from the deep, and from her native eastTo journey through the airy gloom began,Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sunWas not: she in a cloudy tabernacleSojourned the while. God saw the light was good,And light from darkness by the hemisphereDivided: light the day, and darkness night,He named. This was the first day, even and morn."
The second day's work has been interpreted variously, according to the generally received science of the times of the various commentators who have dealt with it. Even in Milton, though the great poet rejected the earlier idea of a solid firmament, we find prominence given to that of a vast hollow sphere of "circumfluous waters," which, by encircling the atmosphere, kept aloof the "fierce extremes of chaos." Later commentators, such as the late Drs. Kitto and Pye Smith, hold that the Scriptural analogue of thefirmamenthere—by the way, a Greek, not a Hebrew idea, first introduced into the Septuagint—was in reality simply the atmosphere with its clouds. "The historian" [Moses], says Dr. Kitto, "speaks as things would have appeared to a spectator at the time of the creation. A portion of the heavy watery vapor had flown into the upper regions, and rested there in dense clouds, which still obscured the sun; while below, the whole earth was covered with water. Thus we see the propriety with which the firmament is said to have divided the waters from the waters." It is certainly probable that in a vision of creation the atmospheric phenomena of the second great act of the creation drama might have stood out with much greater prominence to the prophetic eye placed in the circumstances of a natural one, than any of its other appearances. The invertebrate life of the Silurian period, or even the ichthyic life of the earlier Old Bed Sandstone period, must have been comparatively inconspicuous from any sub-ærial point of view elevated but a few hundred feet over the sea level. Even the few islets of the latter ages of the period, with their ferns, lepidodendra, and coniferous trees, forming, as they did, an exceptionalfeature in these ages of vast oceans, and of organisms all but exclusively marine, may have well been excluded from a representative diorama that exhibited optically the grand characteristics of the time. Further, it seems equally probable that the introduction of organized existence on our planet was preceded by a change in the atmospheric conditions which had obtained during the previous period, in which the earth had been a desert and empty void. We know that just before the close of the Silurian ages terrestrial plants had appeared, and that before the close of the Old Red Sandstone ages, air-breathing animals had been produced; and infer that the atmosphere in which both could have existed must have been considerably different from that which lay dark and heavy over the bare hot rocks, and tenantless, steam-emitting seas, of the previous time. Under a gray, opaque sky, in which neither sun nor moon appear, we are not unfrequently presented with a varied drapery of clouds,—a drapery varied in form, though not in color: bank often seems piled over bank, shaded beneath and lighter above; or the whole breaks into dappled cloudlets, which bear—to borrow from the poetic description of Bloomfield—the "beauteous semblance of a flock at rest." And if such ærial draperies appeared in this early period, with the clear space between them and the earth which we so often see in gray, sunless days, the optical aspect must have been widely different from that of the previous time, in which a dense vaporous fog lay heavy upon rock and sea, and extended from the earth's surface to the upper heights of the atmosphere.
The third day's vision seems to be more purely geological in its character than either of the previous two. Extensive tracts of dry land appear, and there springs up over them, at the Divine command, a rank vegetation. And we know that what seems to be the corresponding Carboniferousperiod, unlike any of the preceding ones, was remarkable for its great tracts of terrestrial surface, and for its extraordinary flora. For the first time dry land, and organized bodies at once bulky enough, and exhibited in a medium clear enough, to render them conspicuous objects in a distant prospect, appear in the Mosaic drama; and we still find at once evidence of the existence of extensive though apparently very flat lands, and the remains of a wonderfully gigantic and abundant vegetation, in what appear to be the rocks of this period. The vision of the fourth day, like that of the second, pertained not to the earth, but to theheavens; the sun, moon, and stars become visible, and form the sole subjects of the prophetic description. And just as, during the second period, the earth would in all probability have failed to furnish any feature of mark enough to divert a human eye placed on a commanding station from the conspicuousatmosphericphenomena of the time, so it seems equally probable that during this fourth period it would have failed to furnish any feature of mark enough to divert a human eye from the still more conspicuouscelestialphenomena of the time. As has been already incidentally remarked, the Permian and Triassic periods were "epochs"—to employ the language of the late Professor Edward Forbes—"of great poverty of production of generic types." On the other hand, the appearance for the first time of sun, moon, and stars, must have formed a scene well suited to divert the attention of the seer from every other. Nor (as has been somewhat rashly argued by Dr. Kitto and several others) does it seem irrational to hold that three very extendedperiodsshould have elapsed ere the sidereal heavens became visible on earth. Addison's popular illustration, drawn from one of the calculations of Newton, made in an age when comets were believed to be solidbodies, rendered the reading public familiar, considerably more than a century ago, with the vast time which large bodies greatly heated would take in cooling. "According to Sir Isaac Newton's calculation," said the exquisitely classical essayist, "the comet that made its appearance in 1680 imbibed so much heat by its approaches to the sun, that it would have been two thousand times hotter than red hot iron had it been a globe of that metal; and that, supposing it as big as the earth, and at the same distance from the sun, it would be fifty thousand years in cooling before it recovered its natural temper." Such was an estimate of the philosopher, that excited no little wonder in the days of our great grandfathers, for the vast time which it demanded; and, now that the data on which such a calculation ought to be founded are better known than in the age of Newton, yet more time would be required still. It is now ascertained, from the circumstance that no dew is deposited in our summer evenings save under a clear sky, that even a thin covering of cloud,—serving as a robe to keep the earth warm,—prevents the surface heat of the planet from radiating into the spaces beyond. And such a cloud, thick and continuous, as must have wrapped round the earth as with a mantle during the earlier geologic periods, must have served to retard for many ages the radiation, and consequently the reduction, of that internal heat of which it was itself a consequence. Further, the rocks and soils that form the surface of our globe would be much more indifferent conductors of heat than the iron superficies of Newton's ball, and would serve yet more to lengthen out the cooling process. Nor would a planet covered over for ages with a thick screen of vapor be a novelty even yet in the universe. It is doubtful whether astronomers have ever yet looked on the face of Mercury: it is at least very generally held thathitherto only his clouds have been seen. Even Jupiter, though it is thought his mountains have been occasionally detected raising their peaks through openings in his cloudy atmosphere, is known chiefly by the dark shifting bands that, streaking his surface in the line of his trade winds, belong not to his body, but to his thick dark covering. It is questionable whether a human eye on the surface of Mercury would ever behold the sun, notwithstanding his near proximity; nor would he be often visible, if at all, from the surface of Jupiter. Nor, yet further, would a warm steaming atmosphere muffled in clouds have been unfavorable to a rank, flowerless vegetation like that of the Coal Measures. There are moist, mild, cloudy days of spring and early Summer that rejoice the heart of the farmer, for he knows how conducive they are to the young growth on his fields. The Coal Measure climate would have consisted of an unbroken series of these, with mayhap a little more of cloud and moisture, and a great deal more of heat. The earth would have been a vast greenhouse covered with smoked glass; and a vigorous though mayhap loosely knit and faintly colored vegetation would have luxuriated under its shade.
The fifth and sixth days,—that of winged fowl and great sea monsters, and that of cattle and beasts of the earth,—I must regard as adequately represented by those Secondary ages, Oolitic and Cretaceous, during which birds were introduced, and reptiles received their greatest development, and those Tertiary ages during which the gigantic mammals possessed the earth and occupied the largest space in creation. To the close of this latter period,—the evening of the sixth day,—man belongs,—at once the last created of terrestrial creatures, and infinitely beyond comparison the most elevated in the scale; and with man's appearance on the scene the days of creation end, and the Divine Sabbathbegins,—that Sabbath of rest from creative labor of which the proper work is the moral development and elevation of the species, and which will terminate only with the full completion of that sublime task on the full accomplishment of which God's eternal purposes and the tendencies of man's progressive nature seem alike directed. Now, I am greatly mistaken if we have not in the six geologic periods all the elements, without misplacement or exaggeration, of the Mosaic drama of creation.
I have referred in my brief survey to extended periods. It is probable, however, that the prophetic vision of creation, if such was its character, consisted of only single representative scenes, embracing each but a point of time; it was, let us suppose, a diorama, over whose shifting pictures the curtain rose and fell six times in succession,—once during the Azoic period, once during the earlier or middle Palæozoic period, once during the Carboniferous period, once during the Permian or Triassic period, once during the Oolitic or Cretaceous period, and finally, once during the Tertiary period. Dr. Kurtz holds, taking the Sabbath into the series, that the division intosevenscenes or stages may have been regulated with reference to the importance and sacredness of the mythic number seven,—the symbol of completeness or perfection; but the suggestion will perhaps not now carry much weight among the theologians of Britain, whatever it might have done two centuries ago. It is true, that creationmighthave been exhibited, not by seven, but by seven hundred, or even by seven thousand scenes; and that the accomplished man of science, skilled in every branch of physics, might have found something distinct in them all. But not the less do the seven, or rather the six, exhibited scenes appear to be not symbolic or mystical, at least not exclusively symbolic or mystical, but truly representative of successive periods, strongly distinctive in their character,and capable, with the three geologic days as given points in the problem, of being treated geologically. Another of the questions raised, both by the German doctor and the writer in our own country, must be recognized as eminently suggestive. "We treat the history of creation," says Dr. Kurtz, "with its six days' work, as a connected series of so many prophetic visions. The appearance and evanishing of each such vision seem to the seer as a morning and an evening, apparently because these were presented to him as an increase and decrease of light, like morning and evening twilight." And we find the Scottish writer taking essentially the same view. "Each day contains," he says, "the description of what he [Moses] beheld in a single vision, and when it faded it was twilight. There is nothing forced in supposing that, after the vision had for a time illumined the fancy of the seer, it was withdrawn from his eyes, in the same way that the landscape becomes dim on the approach of evening.... From this point of view, a 'day' can only mean the period during which the Divinely enlightened fancy of the seer was active. When all continued bright and manifest before his entranced but still conscious soul, it was 'day' or 'light.' When the dimness of departing enlightenment fell upon the scene, it was the evening twilight." Thedays, then, are removed, we find, by the holders of this view, altogether from the province of chronology to the province of prophetic vision; they are represented simply as parts of the exhibited scenery, or rather as forming the measures of the apparent time during which the scenerywasexhibited. We must also hold, however, that in the character of symbolic days they were as truly representative of the lapse of foregone periods of creation as the scenery itself was representative of the creative work accomplished in these periods. For if the apparent days occurred in only the vision, and were not symbolic of foregone periods, theycould not have been transferred with any logical propriety from the vision itself to that which the vision represented, as we find done in what our Shorter Catechism terms "the reason annexed to the Fourth Commandment."[18]The days must have been prophetic days, introduced, indeed, into the panorama of creation as mayhap mere openings and droppings of the curtain, but not the less symbolic of that series of successive periods, each characterized by its own productions and events, in which creation itself was comprised. Nothing more probable, however, than that even Moses himself may have been unacquainted with theextentof the periods represented in the vision; nay, he may have been equally unconscious of the actual extent of the seeming days by which they were symbolized. "Visions without dark speeches,"—visions, not of symbolic apparitions, but of actual existences and events, past or present,—may, nay must, have differed from what may be termed the dark hieroglyphic visions; but we find in all visions an element of mere representative value introduced when they deal with time, and that they occur as if wholly outside its pale. These creation "days" seem, in relation to what they typify, to have been, if I may so express myself, the meremodulesof a graduated scale.
Such a description of the creative vision of Moses as the one given by Milton of that vision of the future, which he represents as conjured up before Adam by the archangel, would be a task rather for the scientific poet than for the mere practical geologist or sober theologian. Let us suppose that it took place far from man, in an untrodden recess of the Midian desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush had been vouchsafed; and that, as in the vision of St. Johnin Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as certainly addressed as the eye. A "great darkness" first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the "horror;" and, as the Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildly troubled waters, as a visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision into a few brief moments, pass away; the creative voice is again heard, "Let there be light," and straightway a gray diffused light springs up in the east, and, casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming, vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the west. One heavy, sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint light waxes fainter,—it sinks beneath the dim, undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits awhile on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night.
The light again brightens,—it is day; and over an expanse of ocean without visible bound the horizon has become wider and sharper of outline than before. There is life in that great sea,—invertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic, life; but, from the comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. That lower stratum of the heavens occupied in the previous vision by seething steam, or gray, smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the previously invisible vapor of the tepid sea has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere they lie, thick andmanifold,—an upper sea of great waves, separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament, and, like them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty advance has taken place in creation; but its most conspicuous optical sign is the existence of a transparent atmosphere,—of a firmament, stretched out over the earth, that separates the waters above from the waters below. But darkness descends for the third time upon the seer, for the evening and the morning have completed the second day.
Yet again the light rises under a canopy of cloud; but the scene has changed, and there is no longer an unbroken expanse of sea. The white surf breaks, at the distant horizon, on an insulated reef, formed mayhap by the Silurian or Old Red coral zoophytes ages before, during the bygone yesterday; and beats in long lines of foam, nearer at hand, against a low, winding shore, the seaward barrier of a widely spread country. For at the Divine command the land has arisen from the deep,—not inconspicuously and in scattered islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive though flat and marshy continents, little raised over the sea level; and a yet further fiat has covered them with the great carboniferous flora. The scene is one of mighty forests of cone-bearing trees,—of palms, and tree-ferns, and gigantic club mosses, on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. There is deep gloom in the recesses of the thicker woods, and low thick mists creep along the dank marsh or sluggish stream. But there is a general lightening of the sky over head; as the day declines, a redder flush than had hitherto lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern covered bank and long withdrawing glade. And while the fourth evening has fallen on the prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears on, and the fourth dawn approaches, that yet another change has taken place. The Creator has spoken, and the starslook out from openings of deep unclouded blue; and as day rises, and the planet of morning pales in the east, the broken cloudlets are transmuted from bronze into gold, and anon the gold becomes fire, and at length the glorious sun arises out of the sea, and enters on his course rejoicing. It is a brilliant day; the waves, of a deeper and softer blue than before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with little else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of brighter green; and as the sun declines amid even richer glories than those which had encircled his rising, the moon appears full orbed in the east,—to the human eye the second great luminary of the heavens,—and climbs slowly to the zenith as night advances, shedding its mild radiance on land and sea.
Again the day breaks; the prospect consists, as before, of land and ocean. There are great pine woods, reed-covered swamps, wide plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines over all. But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening, over the narrower seas, or brighten with the sunlit gleam of their wings the thick woods. And ocean has its monsters: great "tanninim" tempest the deep, as they heave their huge bulk over the surface, to inhale the life-sustaining air; and out of their nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a "seething pot or cauldron." Monstrous creatures, armed in massive scales, haunt the rivers, or scour the flat rank meadows; earth, air, and water are charged with animal life; and the sun sets on a busy scene, in which unerring instinct pursues unremittingly its few simple ends,—the support and preservation of the individual, the propagationof the species, and the protection and maintenance of the young.
Again the night descends, for the fifth day has closed; and morning breaks on the sixth and last day of creation. Cattle and beasts of the fields graze on the plains; the thick-skinned rhinoceros wallows in the marshes; the squat hippopotamus rustles among the reeds, or plunges sullenly into the river; great herds of elephants seek their food amid the young herbage of the woods; while animals of fiercer nature,—the lion, the leopard, and the bear,—harbor in deep caves till the evening, or lie in wait for their prey amid tangled thickets, or beneath some broken bank. At length, as the day wanes and the shadows lengthen, man, the responsible lord of creation, formed in God's own image, is introduced upon the scene, and the work of creation ceases forever upon the earth. The night falls once more upon the prospect, and there dawns yet another morrow,—the morrow of God's rest,—that Divine Sabbath in which there is no more creative labor, and which, "blessed and sanctified" beyond all the days that had gone before, has as its special object the moral elevation and final redemption of man. And overitno evening is represented in the record as falling, for its special work is not yet complete. Such seems to have been the sublime panorama of creation exhibited in vision of old to
"The shepherd who first taught the chosen seed,In the beginning how the heavens and earthRose out of chaos;"
and, rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth that militates against even the minutest or least prominent of its details.
GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES.
PART I.
Thescience of the geologist seems destined to exert a marked influence on that of the natural theologian. For not only does it greatly add to the materials on which the natural theologian founds his deductions, by adding to the organisms, plant and animal, of the present creation the extinct organisms of the creations of the past, with all their extraordinary display of adaptation and design; but it affords him, besides, materials peculiar to itself, in the history which it furnishes both of the appearance of these organisms in time, and of the wonderful order in which they were chronologically arranged. Not only—to borrow from Paley's illustration—does it enable him to argue on the old grounds, from the contrivance exhibited in thewatchfound on the moor, that the watch could not have lain upon the moor forever; but it establishes further, on different and more direct evidence, that there was a time when absolutely the watch was not there; nay, further, so to speak, that there was a previous time in which no watches existed at all, but only water clocks; yet, further, that there was a time in which there were not even water clocks, but only sundials; and further, an earlier time still in which sundials were not, nor any measurers of time of any kind. And this is distinct ground from that urged by Paley. For, besides holding that each of these contrivancesmust have had in turn an originator or contriver, it adds historic fact to philosophic inference. Geology takes up the master volume of the greatest of the natural theologians, and, after scanning its many apt instances of palpable design, drawn from the mechanism of existing plants and animals, authoritatively decides that not one of these plants or animals had begun to be in the times of the Chalk; nay, that they all date their origin from a period posterior to that of the Eocene. And the fact is, of course, corroborative of the inference. "That well constructed edifice," says the natural theologian, "cannot be a merelusus naturæ, or chance combination of stones and wood; it must have been erected by a builder." "Yes," remarks the geologist, "it was erected some time during the last nine years. I passed the way ten years ago, and saw only a blank space where it now stands." Nor does the established fact of an absolute beginning of organic being seem more pregnant with important consequences to the science of the natural theologian than the fact of the peculiar order in which they begin to be.
The importance of the now demonstrated fact, that all the living organisms which exist on earth had a beginning, and that a time was when they were not, will be best appreciated by those who know how much, and, it must be added, how unsuccessfully, writers on the evidences have labored to convict of an absurdity, on this special head, the atheistic assertors of an infinite series of beings. Even Robert Hall (in his famous Sermon on Modern Infidelity) could but play, when he attempted grappling with the subject, upon the wordstimeandeternity, and strangely argue, that as each member of an infinite series must have begun intime, while the succession itself waseternal, it was palpably absurd to ask us to believe in asuccessionof beings that was thus infinitely earlier thanany of the beings themselves which composed the succession. And Bentley, more perversely ingenious still, could assert, that as each of the individuals in an infinite series must have consisted of many parts,—that as each man in such a series, for instance, must have had ten fingers and ten toes,—it was palpably absurd to ask us to believe in an infinity which thus comprised many infinities,—ten infinities of fingers, for example, and ten infinities of toes. The infidels had the better in this part of the argument. It was surely easy enough to show against the great preacher, on the one hand, thattimein such a question is but a mere word that means simply a certain limited or definite period which had a beginning, whereas eternity means an unlimited and undefinable period which had no beginning;—that his seeming argument was no argument, but merely a sort of verbal play on this difference of signification in the words;—further, that man could conceive of an infinite series, whether extended in infinite space, or subsisting in infinite time, just as well as he could conceive of any other infinity, and in the same way; and that the only mode of disproving the possibility of such a series would be to show, what of course cannot be shown, that in conceiving of it in the progressive mode in which, according to Locke, man can alone conceive of the infinite or the eternal, there would be a point reached at which it would be impossible for him to go on adding millions on millions to the previous sum. The symbolic "ad infinitum" could be made as adequately representative in the case of an infinite series of men or animals in unlimited time, as of an infinite series of feet or inches in unlimited space, or of an infinite series of hours or minutes in the past eternity. And as for Bentley, on the other hand, he ought surely to have known that all infinities are not equal, seeing that Newton had expressly told him so in the second of hisfour famous letters; but that, on the contrary, one infinity may be not only ten times greater than another infinity, but even infinitely greater than another infinity; and that so the conception of an infinity of men possessed of ten infinities of fingers and toes is in no respect an absurdity. Of the three infinities possible in space, the second is infinitely greater than the first, and the third infinitely greater than the second. A line infinitely produced is capable of being divided into—that is, consists of—an infinity of given parts; a plane infinitely extended is capable of being divided into an infinity of infinitely divisible lines; and a cube, that is, a solid, infinitely expanded, is capable of being divided into an infinity of infinitely divisible planes. In fine, metaphysic theology furnishes no argument against the infinite series of the atheist. But geology does. Every plant and animal that now lives upon earth began to be during the great Tertiary period, and had no place among the plants and animals of the great Secondary division. We can trace several of our existing quadrupeds, such as the badger, the hare, the fox, the red deer, and the wild cat, up till the earlier times of the Pleistocene; and not a few of our existing shells, such as the great pecten, the edible oyster, the whelk, and the Pelican's-foot shell, up till the greatly earlier times of the Coraline Crag. But at certain definite lines in the deposits of the past, representative of certain points in the course of time, the existing mammals and molluscs cease to appear, and we find their places occupied by other mammals and molluscs. Even such of our British shells as seem to have enjoyed as species the longest term of life cannot be traced beyond the times of the Pliocene deposits. We detect their remains in a perfect state of keeping in almost every shell-bearing bed, till we reach the Red and Coraline Crags, where we find them for the last time; and,on passing into older and deeper lying beds, we see their places taken by other shells, of species altogether distinct. The very common shellPurpura lapillus, for instance, is found in our raised beaches, in our Clyde beds, in our boulder clays and mammaliferous crags, and, finally, in the Red Crag, beyond which it fails to appear. And such also is the history of the common edible mussel and common periwinkle; whereas the common edible cockle, and common edible pecten (P. opercularis) occur not only in all these successive beds, but in the Coral Crag also. They are older by a whole deposit than their present contemporaries, the mussel and periwinkle; and these, in turn, seem of older standing than shells such asMurex erinaceus, that has not been traced beyond the times of the mammaliferous crag, or than shells such asScrobicularia piperata, that has not been detected in more ancient deposits than raised sea beaches of the later periods, and the elevated bottoms of old estuaries and lagoons. We thus know, that in certain periods, nearer or more remote, all our existing molluscsbeganto exist, and that they had no existence during the previous periods; which were, however, richer in animals of the same great molluscan group than the present time. Our British group of recent marine shells falls somewhat short offourhundred species;[19]whereas the group characteristic of the older Miocene deposits, largely developed in those districts of France which border on the Bay of Biscay, and more sparingly in the south of England, near Yarmouth, comprises more than six hundred species. Nearly an equal number of still older shells have been detected in a single deposit of the Parisbasin,—theCalcaire grossier; and a good many more in a more ancient formation still, the London Clay. On entering the Chalk, we find a yet older group of shells, wholly unlike any of the preceding ones; and in the Oolite and Lias yet other and different groups. And thus group preceded group throughout all the Tertiary, Secondary, and Palæozoic periods; some of them remarkable for the number of species which they contained, others for the profuse abundance of their individual specimens, until, deep in the rocks at the base of the Silurian system, we detect what seems to be the primordial group, beneath which only a single animal organism is known to occur,—theOldhamia antiqua,—a plant-like zoophyte, akin apparently to some of our recent sertularia, (See fig. 5, page 48.) Each of the extinct groups had, we find, a beginning and an end;—there is not in the wide domain of physical science a more certain fact; and every species of the group which now exists had, like all their predecessors on the scene, their beginning also. The "infinite series" of the atheists of former times can have no place in modern science: all organic existences, recent or extinct, vegetable or animal, have had their beginning;—there was a time when they were not. The geologist can indicate that time, if not by years, at least by periods, and show what its relations were to the periods that went before and that came after; and as it is equally a recognized truth on both sides of the controversy, that as something now exists, something must have existed forever, and as it must now be not less surely recognized, that that something was not the race of man, nor yet any other of the many races of man's predecessors or contemporaries, the question, What then was that something? comes with a point and directness which it did not possess at any former time. By what, or through whom, did these races ofnicely organized plants and animals begin to be? Hitherto at least there has been but one reply to the question originated on the skeptical side. All these races, it is said, have beendeveloped, in the long course of ages, into what they now are, as the young animal is developed in the womb, or the young plant is developed from the seed. Topsy, in the novel, "'spected that she was not made, but growed;" and the only class of opponents which the geological theist finds in the field which his science has laid open to the world is a class that hold by the philosophy of Topsy.
Let me briefly remark regarding this development hypothesis, with which I have elsewhere dealt at considerable length, that while the facts of the geologist are demonstrably such, that is, truths capable of proof, the hypothesis is a mere dream, unsupported by a shadow of evidence. A man of a lively imagination could no doubt originate many such dreams; nay, we know that in the dark ages dreams of the kind were actually originated. TheAnser Bernicla, or barnacle goose, a common winter visitant of our coasts, was once believed to be developed out of decaying wood long submerged in sea water: and one of our commonest cirripedes or barnacles,Lepas anatifera, still bears, in its specific name of the goose-producinglepas, evidence that it was the creature specially recognized by our ancestors as the half-developed goose. As if in memory of this old development legend, the bird still bears the name of the barnacle, and the barnacle of the bird; and we know further, that very intelligent men for their age, such as Gerardes the herbalist (1597), and Hector Boece the historian (1524), both examined these shells, and, knowing but little of comparative anatomy, were satisfied that the animal within was the partially developed embryo of a fowl. Such was one of the fables gravely credited as apiece of natural history in Britain about three centuries ago, and such was the kind of evidence by which it was supported. And we know that the followers of Epicurus received from their master, without apparent suspicion, fables still more extravagant, and that wanted even such a shadow of proof to support them as satisfied the herbalist and the historian. The Epicureans at least professed to believe that the earth, after spontaneously producing herbs and trees, began to produce in great numbers mushroom-like bodies, that, when they came to maturity, burst open, giving egress each to a young animal, which proved the founder of a race; and that thus, in succession, all the members of the animal kingdom were ushered into existence. But whether the dream be that of the Epicureans of classic times, or that of the naturalists of the middle ages, or that of the Lamarckians of our own days, it is equally a dream, and can have no place assigned to it among either the solid facts or the sober deductions of science. Nay, the dream of the Lamarckians labors under a special disadvantage, from which the dreams of the others are free. If some modern Boece or Epicurus were to assert that at certain definite periods, removed from fifteen to fifty thousand years from the present time, all our existing animals were developed from decaying wood, or from a wonderful kind of mushrooms that the earth produced only once every ten thousand years, the assertion, if incapable of proof, would be at least equally incapable of beingdis-proven. But when the Lamarckian affirms that all our recent species of plants and animals were developed out of previously existing plants and animals of species entirely different, he affirms what, if true,wouldbe capable of proof; and so, if it cannot be proven, it is only because it is not true. The trilobites have been extinct ever since the times of the Mountain Limestone; and yet, by seriesof specimens, the individual development of certain species of this family, almost from the extrusion of the animal from the egg until the attainment of its full size, has been satisfactorily shown. By specimen after specimen has every stage of growth and every degree of development been exemplified; and the Palæontologist has come as thoroughly to know the creatures, in consequence, under their various changes from youth to age, as if they had been his contemporaries, and had grown up under his eye. And had our existing species, vegetable and animal, been derived from other species of the earlier periods, it would have been equally possible to demonstrate, by a series of specimens,theirrelationship. Let us again instance the British shells. Losing certain species in each of the older and yet older deposits at which we successively arrive, we at length reach the Red and Coraline Crags, where we find, mingled with the familiar forms, a large per centage of forms now extinct; then going on to the shells of the lower Miocene, more than six hundred species appear, almost all of which are strange to us; and then, passing to the Eocene shells of theCalcaire grossier, we find ourselves among well nigh as large a group of yet other and older strangers, not one of which we are able to identify with any shell now living in the British area. There would be thus no lack of materials for forming such a genealogy of the British shells, had they been gradually developed out of the extinct species, as that which M. Barrande has formed of the trilobites. But no such genealogy can be formed. We cannot link on a single recent shell to a single extinct one.Upto a certain point we find the recent shells exhibiting all their present specific peculiarities, and beyond that point they cease to appear.Downto a certain point the extinct shells also exhibit alltheirspecific peculiarities, and then they disappear forever. There are no intermediate species,—noconnecting links,—no such connected series of specimens to be found as enables us to trace a trilobite through all its metamorphoses from youth to age. All geologic history is full of the beginnings and the ends of species,—of their first and their last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of development. The Lamarckian sets himself to grapple, in his dream, with the history of all creation: we awaken him, and ask him to grapple, instead, with the history of but a few individual species,—with that of the mussel or the whelk, the clam or the oyster; and we find from his helpless ignorance and incapacity what a mere pretender he is.
But while no hypothesis of development can neutralize or explain away the great geologic fact, that every true species had a beginning independently, apparently, of every preceding species, there was demonstrably a general progress, in the course of creation, from lower to higher forms, which seems scarce less fraught with important consequences to the natural theologian than this fact ofbeginningitself. For while the one fact effectually disposes of the "infinite series" of the atheist, the other fact disposes scarce less effectually of those reasonings on the skeptical side which, framed on the assumption that creation is a "singular effect,"—an effect without duplicate,—have been employed in urging, that from that one effect only can we know aught regarding the producing cause. Knowing of the cause from but the effect, and having experience of but one effect, we cannot rationally hold, it has been argued, that the producing cause could have originated effects of a higher or more perfect kind. The creation which it produced we know; but, having no other measure of its power, we cannot regard it, it has been contended, as equal to the production of a better or nobler creation, or of course hold that itcouldoriginate such a state of thingsas that perfect future state which faith delights to contemplate. It has been well said of the author of this ingenious argument,—by far the most sagacious of the skeptics,—that if we admit his premises we shall find it difficult indeed to set aside his conclusions. And how, in this case, does geology deal with his premises? By opening to us the history of the remote past of our planet, and introducing us, through the present, to former creations, it breaks down thatsingularityof effect on which he built, and for one creation gives us many. It gives us exactly that which, as he truly argued, his contemporaries had not,—anexperiencein creations. And let us mark how, applied to each of these in succession, his argument would tell.
There was a time when life, animal or vegetable, did not exist on our planet, and when all creation, from its centre to its circumference, was but a creation of dead matter. What, in that early age, would have been the effect of the argument of Hume? Simply this,—that though the producing Cause of all that appeared was competent to the formation of gases and earths, metals and minerals, it would be unphilosophic to deem him adequate to the origination of a single plant or animal, even to that of a spore or of a monad. Ages pass by, and the Palæozoic creation is ushered in, with its tall araucarians and pines, its highly organized fishes, and its reptiles of comparatively low standing. And how now, and with what effect, does the argument apply? It is now rendered evident, that in the earlier creation the producing Cause had exerted but a portion of his power, and that he could have done greatly more than he actually did, seeing that we now find him adequate to the origination of vitality and organization in its two great kingdoms, plant and animal. But, still confining ourselves with cautious skepticism within the limits of our argument, we continue to hold that, asfishes of a high and reptiles of a low order, with trees of the cone-bearing family, are the most perfect specimens of their respective classes which the producing Cause has originated, it would be rash to hold, in the absence of proof, that hecouldoriginate aught higher or more perfect. And now, as yet other ages pass away, the creation of the great Secondary division takes the place of that of the vanished Palæozoic; and we find in its few dicotyledonous plants, in its reptiles of highest standing, in its great birds, and in its some two or three humble marsupial mammals, that in the previous, as in the earlier creation, the producing Cause had been, if I may so express myself, working greatly under his strength, and that in this third creation we have a still higher display of his potency. With some misgivings, however, we again apply our argument. And now yet another creation,—that of the Tertiary period, with its noble forests of dicotyledonous trees and its sagacious and gigantic mammals,—rises upon the scene; and as our experience in creations has now become very considerable, and as we have seen each in succession higher than that which preceded it, we find that, notwithstanding our assumed skepticism, we had, compelled by one of the most deeply seated instincts of our nature, been secretly anticipating the advance which the new state of things actually realizes. But applying the argument once more, we at least assume to hold, that as the sagacious elephant is the highest example of animal life yet produced by the originating Cause, it would be unphilosophic to deem him capable of producing a higher example. And, while we are thus reasoning, man appears upon creation,—a creature immeasurably superior to all the others, and whose very nature it is to make use of his experience of the past for his guidance in the future. And if that only be solid experience or just reasoning which enables us trulyto anticipate the events which are to come, and so to make provision for them; and if that experience be not solid, and that reasoning not just, which would serve but to darken our discernment, and prevent us from correctly predicating the cast and complexion of coming events; what ought to be our decision regarding an argument which, had it been employed in each of the vanished creations of the past, would have had but the effect of arresting all just anticipation regarding the immediately succeeding creation, and which, thus reversing the main end and object of philosophy, would render the philosopher who clung to it less sagacious in divining the future than even the ordinary man? But, in truth, the existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The footprint on the sand—to refer to his happy illustration—does not now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a higher level; and, founding at once on an acquaintance with the past, extended throughout all the periods of the geologist, and on that instinct of our nature whose peculiar function it is to anticipate at least one creation more, we must regard the expectation of "new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness," as not unphilosophic, but as, on the contrary, altogether rational and according to experience.
Such is the bearing of geological science on two of the most important questions that have yet been raised in the field of natural theology. Nor does it bear much less directly on a controversy to which, during the earlier half of the last century, there was no little importance attached in Britain, and which engaged on its opposite sides some of the finest and most vigorous intellects of the age and country.
The school of infidelity represented by Bolingbroke, and, in at least his earlier writings, by Soame Jenyns, and which, in a modified form, attained to much popularity through Pope's famous "Essay," assigned to man a comparatively inconsiderable space in the system of the universe. It regarded him as but a single link in a chain of mutual dependency,—a chain which would be no longer an entire, but a broken one, were he to be struck out of it, but as thus more important from his position than from his nature or his powers. You will remember that one of the sections of Pope's first epistle to his "good St. John" is avowedly devoted to show what he terms the "absurdity of man's supposing himself the final cause of the creation;" and though this great master of condensed meaning and brilliant point is now less read than he was in the days of our grandfathers, you will all remember the elegant stanzas in which he states the usual claims of the species only to ridicule them. It is human pride personified that he represents as exclaiming,—
"For me kind Nature wakes her genial power,Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower,Annual for me the grape, the rose, renewThe juice nectarious and the balmy dew.For me the mine a thousand treasures brings;For me health gushes from a thousand springs;Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;My footstool earth, my canopy the skies."
You will further remember how the poet, after thus reducing the claims and lowering the position of the species, set himself to show that man, viewed in relation to the place which he occupies, ought not to be regarded as an imperfect being. Man is, he said, as perfect as he ought to be. And, such being the case, the Author of all, looking, it would seem, very little after him, has just left him to take care ofhimself. A cold, unfeeling abstraction, like the gods of the old Epicurean, the Great First Cause of this school is a being
"Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,A hero perish or a sparrow fall;Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,And now a bubble burst, and now a world."
Such, assuredly, was not that God of the New Testament whom the Saviour of mankind revealed to his disciples as caring for all his creatures of the dust, but as caring most for the highest of all. "Are not two sparrows," he said, "sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father. Fear ye not, therefore; ye are of more value than many sparrows."
It was the error of this ingenious but very unsolid school, that it regarded the mereorderof the universe as itself an end or final cause. It reasoned respecting creation, as if it would be true philosophy to account for the origin and existence of some great city, such as the city of Washington in the United States, built, as we know, for purely political purposes, by showing that,—as it was remarkable for its order, for the rectilinear directness of its streets, and the rectangularity of its squares,—it must have been erected simply to be a perfect embodiment of regularity; and to urge further that, save in their character as component parts of a perfect whole, the House of Representatives and the mansion of the President were of no more intrinsic importance, or no more decidedly theendof the whole, than any low tavern or outhouse in the lesser streets or lanes. The destruction of either the outhouse or the House of Representatives would equally form a void in the general plan of the city, regarded as an admirably arranged whole. And it was thus with the grand scheme of creation; for,
"From nature's chain whatever link we strike,Tenth or tenth thousand, breaks the chain alike."
Nor is it in other than due keeping with such a view of creation, that its great Author should be represented as a cold abstraction, without love or regard, and equally indifferent to the man and the sparrow, to the atom and the planet. Order has respect to but therelationsof things or of beings,—not to the things or beings themselves; order is thefigurewhich, as mere etched points or strokes, they compose,—the legend which, as signs or characters, they form; and who cares anything for the component strokes or dots irrespective of the print, or for the component letters or words apart from the writing? The "equal eye," in such a scheme, would of necessity be an indifferent one. Against this strange doctrine, though in some measure countenanced by the glosses of Warburton in his defence of Pope, the theologians protested,—none of them, however, more vigorously than Johnson, in his famous critique on the "Free Inquiry" of Soame Jenyns. Nor is it uninteresting to mark with what a purely instinctive feeling of the right some of the better poets, whose "lyre," according to Cowper, was their "heart," protested against it too. Poor Goldsmith, when sitting a homeless vagabond on the slopes of the Alps, could exclaim in a greatly truer tone than that of his polished predecessor,—
"Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine!"
And in Cowper himself we find all Goldsmith's intense feeling of appropriation, that "calls the delightful scenery all its own," associated
"With worthy thoughts of that unvaried loveThat planned, and built, and still upholds, a worldSo clothed with beauty, for rebellious man."
Strange to say, however, it is to the higher exponents of natural science, and in especial to the geologists, that it hasbeen left to deal most directly with the sophistries of Bolingbroke and Pope.
Oken, a man quite as far wrong in some points as either the poet or his master, was the first to remark, and this in the oracular, enigmatical style peculiar to the German, that "man is the sum total of all the animals." Gifted, as all allow, with a peculiarly nice eye for detecting those analogies which unite the animal world into a harmonious whole, he remarked, that in one existence or being all these analogies converge. Even the humbler students of the heavens have learned to find for themselves the star of the pole, by following the direction indicated by what are termed the two pointer stars in the Great Bear. And to the eye of Oken all the groups of the animal kingdom formed a sphere of constellations, each of which has its pointer stars, if I may so speak, turned towards man. Man occupies, as it were, the central point in the great circle of being; so that those lines which pass singly through each of the inferior animals stationed at its circumference, meet in him; and thus, as the focus in which the scattered rays unite, he imparts by his presence a unity and completeness to creation which it would not possess were he away. You will be startled, however, by the language in which the German embodies his view; though it may be not uninstructive to refer to it in evidence of the fact that a man may beintellectuallyon the very verge of truth, and yet for every moral purpose infinitely removed from it. "Man," he says, "is God manifest in the flesh." And yet it may be admitted that there is a certain loose sense in which manis"God manifest in the flesh." As may be afterwards shown, he is God'simagemanifested in the flesh; and an image or likenessisa manifestation or making evident of that which it represents, whether it be an image or likeness of body or of mind.
Not less extraordinary, but greatly more sound in their application, are the views of Professor Owen,—supreme in his own special walk as a comparative anatomist. We find him recognizing man as exemplifying in his structure the perfection of that type in which, from the earliest ages, nature had been working with reference to some future development, and asthereforea foreordained existence. "The recognition of an ideal exemplar for the vertebrated animals proves," he says, "that the knowledge of such a being as man must have existed before man appeared. For the Divine mind that planned the archetype also foreknew all its modifications. The archetypal idea was manifested in the flesh under divers modifications, upon this planet, long prior to the existence of those animal species that actually exemplify it." So far Owen. And not less wonderful is the conclusion at which Agassiz has arrived, after a survey of the geologic existences, more extended and minute, in at least the ichthyic department, than that of any other man. "It is evident," we find him saying, in the conclusion of his recent work, "The Principles of Zoology,"[20]"that there is a manifest progress in the succession of beings on the surface of the earth. This progress consists in an increasing similarity to the living fauna, and among the vertebrates, especially in their increasing resemblance to man. But this connection is not the consequence of a direct lineage between the faunas of different ages. There is nothing like parental descent connecting them. The fishes of the Palæozoic age are in no respect the ancestors of the reptiles of the Secondary age, nor does man descend fromthe mammals which preceded him in the Tertiary age. The link by which they are connected is of a higher and immaterial nature; and their connection is to be sought in the view of the Creator himself, whose aim in forming the earth, in allowing it to undergo the successive changes which geology has pointed out, and in creating successively all the different types of animals which have passed away,was to introduce man upon the surface of our globe.Man is the end towards which all the animal creation has tended from the first appearance of the first Palæozoic fishes." These, surely, are extraordinary deductions. "In thy book," says the Psalmist, "all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of them." And here is natural science, by the voice of two of its most distinguished professors, saying exactly the same thing.
Of the earliest known vertebrates,—the placoidal fishes of the Upper Silurian rocks,—we possess only fragments, which, however, sufficiently indicate, from their resemblance to the corresponding parts of an existing shark,—the cestracion,—that they belonged to fishes furnished with the two pairs of fins now so generally recognized as the homologues of the fore and hinder limbs in quadrupeds. With the second earliest vertebrates,—the ganoids of the Old Red Sandstone,—we are more directly acquainted, and know that they exhibited the true typical form,—a vertebral column terminating in a brain-protecting skull; and that, in at least the acanth, celacanth, and dipterian families, they had the limb-like fins. In the upper parts of the system the earliest reptiles leave the first known traces of the typical foot, with its five digits. Higher still in one of the deposits of the Trias we are startled by what seems to be the impression of a human hand of an uncouth massive shape, but with the thumb apparently set in opposition,as in man, to the other fingers; we next trace the type upwards among the wonderfully developed reptiles of the Secondary periods; then among the mammals of the Tertiary ages, higher and yet higher forms appear; the mute prophecies of the coming being become with each approach clearer, fuller, more expressive, and at length receive their fulfilment in the advent of man. A double meaning attaches to the term type; and hence some ambiguity in the writings which have appeared on this curious subject. Type means a prophecy embodied in symbol; it means also what Sir Joshua Reynolds well terms "one of the general forms of nature,"—a pattern form, from which all others in the same class or family, however numerous, are recognized as mere exceptions and aberrations. But in the geologic series both meanings converge and become one. The form or number typical as thegeneralform or number, is found typical also as aprophecyof the form or number that came at length to be exemplified in the deputed lord of creation. Let us in our examples take typical numbers, as more easily illustrated without diagrams than typical forms.
There are vertebrate animals of the second age of ichthyic existence, that, like thePterichthysandCoccosteus, were furnished with but two limbs. The murænidæ of recent times have no more; at least one of their number, the muræna proper, wants limbs altogether; so also do the lampreys. The snakes are equally limbless, save that the boas and pythons possess the rudiments of a single pair; and such also is the condition, among the amphibia, of all the known species of Cœcilia. And yet, notwithstanding these exceptional cases, the true typical number of limbs, as shown by a preponderating majority of the vertebrates of all ages of the world, is four. And this typical number is the human number. There is as certainly a typical numberof digits too, as of the limbs which bear them. The exceptions are many. All the species of the horse genus possess but a single digit; the cattle family possess but two digits, the rhinoceros three digits, the hippopotamus four digits; many animals, such as the dog and cat, have but four digits on one pair of limbs and five on the other; whereas in some of the fishes the number of digits is singularly great,—from ten to twenty in most species, and in the rays from eighty to a hundred. And yet, as shown in the rocks, in which, however, the aberrations appear early, the true typical number is five on both the fore and hinder limbs. And such is the number in man. There is also, in at least the mammalia, a typical number of vertebræ in the neck. The three-toed sloth has nine cervical vertebræ; the manati only six; but seven is the typical number. And seven is the human number also. Man, in short, is pre-eminently what a theologian would term the antetypical existence,—the being in whom the types meet and are fulfilled. And not only do typical forms and numbers of the exemplified character meet in man, but there are not a few parts of his framework which in the inferior animals exist as but mere symbols, of as little importance as dugs in the male animal, though they acquire significancy and use in him. Such, for instance, are the many-jointed but moveless and unnecessary bones of which the stiff inflexiblefinof the dugong and the fore paw of the mole consist, and which exist in his arm as essential portions, none of which could be wanted, of an exquisitely flexible instrument. In other cases, the old types are exemplified serially in the growth and development of certain portions of his frame. Such is specially the case with that all important portion of it, the organ of thought and feeling. The human brain is built up by a wonderful process, during which it assumes in succession the form of the brain of afish, of a reptile, of a bird, of a mammiferous quadruped; and, finally, it takes upon it its unique character as a human brain. Hence the remark of Oken, that "man is the sum total of all the animals;" hence, too, a recognition of type in thehistoryof the successive vertebral periods of the geologist, symbolical of the history of every individual man. It is not difficult to conceive how, on a subject of such complexity, especially if approached in an irreverent spirit, grave mistakes and misconceptions should take place. Virgil knew just enough of Hebrew prophecy to misapply, in hisPollio, to his great patron Octavius, those ancient predictions which foretold that in that age the Messiah was to appear. And I am inclined to hold, that in the more ingenious speculations of the Lamarckians we have just a similar misapplication of what, emboldened by the views of Owen and Agassiz, I shall venture to term theGeologic Prophecies.
The term is new, but the idea which it embodies, though it at first existed rather as a nice poetic instinct than as a scientifically based thought, is at least as old as the times of Herder and Coleridge. In a passage quoted from the former writer by Dr. M'Cosh, in his very masterly work on typical forms, I find the profound German remarking of the strange resemblances which pervade all nature, and impart a general unity to its forms, that it would seem "as if on all our earth the form-abounding mother had proposed to herself but one type,—one proto-plasma,—according to which, and for which, she formed them all. Know, then," he continues, "what this form is. It is the identical one which man also wears." And the remark of Coleridge, in his "Aids to Reflection," is still more definite. "Let us carry us back in spirit," he says, "to the mysterious week, the teeming work days of the Creator (asthey rose inVISIONbefore the eye of the inspired historian) of theoperations of the heavens and of the earth, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And who that watched their ways with an understanding heart could, as the vision evolved still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee, the home-building, wedded, and divorceless swallow, and, above all, the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealths and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband folk that fold in their tiny flocks on the honey leaf, and the virgin sister with the holy instincts of maternal love detached and in selfless purity, and not say in himself, Behold the shadow of approaching humanity, the sun rising from behind in the kindling morn of creation?" There is fancy here; but it is that sagacious fancy, vouchsafed to only the true poet, which has so often proved the pioneer of scientific discovery, and which is in reality more sober and truthful, in the midst of its apparent extravagance, than the gravest cogitations of ordinary men. It is surely no incredible thing, that He who, in the dispensations of the human period, spake by type and symbol, and who, when He walked the earth in the flesh, taught in parable and allegory, should have also spoken in the geologic ages by prophetic figures embodied in the form and structure of animals. Nay, what the poet imagined, though in a somewhat extreme form, the philosophers seem to be on the very eve of confirming. The foreknown "archetypal idea" of Owen,—"the immaterial link of connection" of all the past with all the present, which Agassiz resolves into the foreordained design of the Creator,—will be yet found, I cannot doubt, to translate themselves into one great general truth, namely, that the Palæozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary dispensations of creation were charged, like the patriarchal and Mosaic dispensations of grace, with the"shadows of better things to come." The advent of man simply as such was the great event prefigured during the old geologic ages. The advent of that Divine Man "who hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light," was the great event prefigured during the historic ages. It is these two grand events, equally portions of one sublime scheme, originated when God took counsel with himself in the depths of eternity, that bind together past, present, and future,—the geologic with the Patriarchal, the Mosaic, and the Christian ages, and all together with that new heavens and new earth, the last of many creations, in which there shall be "no more death nor curse, but the throne of God and the Lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall serve him."
"There is absurdity," said Pope, "in man's conceiting himself the final cause of creation." Unless, however, man had the entire scheme of creation before him, with the further partially known scheme of which but a part constitutes the grand theme of revelation, how could he pronounce on the absurdity? The knowledge of the geologist ascends no higher than man. He sees all nature in the pre-Adamic past, pointing with prophetic finger towards him; and on even the argument of Hume,—just and solid within its proper limits,—he refuses to acquiesce in the unfounded inference of Pope. In order to prove the absurdity of "man's conceiting himself the final cause of creation," proof of an ulterior cause,—of a higher end and aim,—must he adduced; and of aught higher than man, the geologist, as such, knows nothing. The long vista opened up by his science closes with the deputed lord of creation,—with man as he at present exists; and when, casting himself full upon revelation, the vail is drawn aside, and an infinitely grander vista stretchesout before him into the future, he sees man—no longer, however, the natural, but the Divine man—occupying what is at once its terminal point and its highest apex. Such are some of the bearings of geologic science on the science of natural theology. Geology has disposed effectually and forever of the oft-urged assumption of an infinite series; it deals as no other science could have dealt with the assertion of the skeptic, that creation is a "singular effect;" it casts a flood of unexpected light on the somewhat obsolete plausibilities of Bolingbroke and Jenyns, that exhibits their utterly unsolid character; yet further, it exhibits in a new aspect the argument founded on design, and invests the place and standing of man increationwith a peculiar significancy and importance, from its relation to the future. But on this latter part of my subject—necessarily of considerable extent and multiplicity, and connected rather with revealed than with natural religion—I must not now expatiate. I shall, however, attempt laying before you, on some future evening, a few thoughts on this portion of the general question, which you may at least find suggestive of others, and which, if they fail to elicit new truths, may have the effect of opening up upon an old truth or two a few fresh avenues through which to survey them. The character of man as a fellow-worker with his Creator in the material province has still to be considered in the light of geology. Man was the first, and is still the only creature of whom we know anything, who has set himself to carry on and improve the work of the world's original framer,—who is a planter of woods, a tiller of fields, and a keeper of gardens,—and who carries on his work of mechanical contrivance on obviously the same principles as those on which the Divine designer wrought of old, and on whichhe works still. It may not be wholly unprofitable to acquaint ourselves, through evidence furnished by the rocks, with the remarkable fact, that the Creator imparted to man the Divine image before he united to man's the Divine nature.