Fig. 69.Fig. 69.THYLACOTHERIUM PREVOSTI.(Stonisfield Slate.)
With the Stonisfield slates,—a deposit which lies above what is known as the Inferior Oolite,—the remains of mammaliferous animals first appear. As, however, no other mammalian remains occur until after the close of the great Secondary Division, and as certain marked peculiarities attach to these Oolitic ones, it may be well to inquire whether their place, so far in advance of their fellows, may not be indicative of a radical difference of character,—a difference considerable enough to suggest to the zoologist an improvement in his scheme of classification. It has been shown by Professor Owen,—our highest authority in comparative anatomy,—that while one Stonisfield genus unequivocally belonged to the marsupial order, another of its genera bears also certain of the marsupial traits; and that the group which they composed,—a very small one, and consisting exclusively of minute insect-eating animals,—exhibits in its general aspect the characteristics of this pouched family. Even the genus of the group that least resembles them was pronounced by Cuvier to have its nearest affinitieswith the opossums. And let us mark how very much may be implied in this circumstance. In the "Animal Kingdom" of the great naturalist just named, the marsupiata, or pouched animals, are made to occupy the fourth place among the nine orders of the Mammalia; but should they not rather occupy a place intermediate between the placental mammals and the birds? and does not nature indicate their true position by the position which she assigns to them in the geologic scale? The birds are oviparous; and between the extrusion of the egg and the development of the perfect young bird they have to hatch it into life during a long period of incubation. The marsupiata are not oviparous, for theireggswant the enveloping shell or skin; but they, too, are extruded in an exceedingly rudimentary and fœtal state, and have to undergo in the pouch a greatly longer period ofincubationthan that demanded by nature for any bird whatever. The young kangaroo is extruded, after it has remained for little more than a month in the womb, as a foetus scarcely an inch in length by somewhat less than half an inch in breadth: it is blind, exhibiting merely dark eye spots; its limbs are so rudimentary, that even the hinder legs, so largely developed in the genus when mature, exist as mere stumps; it is unable even to suck, but, holding permanently on by a minute dug, has the sustaining fluid occasionally pressed into its mouth by the mother. And, undergoing a peculiar but not the less real process of incubation, the creature that had to remain for little more than a month in the womb,—strictly thirty-nine days,—has to remain in the mother's pouch, ere it is fully developed and able to provide for itself, for a period of eight months. It is found to increase in weight during this hatching process, from somewhat less than an ounce to somewhat more than eight pounds. Now, this surely is a process quite as nearly akin to the incubation of egg-bearingbirds as to the ordinary nursing process of the placental mammals; and on the occult but apparently real principle, that the true arrangement of the animal kingdom is that which we find exemplified by the successive introduction of its various classes and orders in the course of geologic history, should we not anticipate a point of time for the introduction of the marsupiata, intermediate between the widely-distant points at which the egg-bearing birds and the true placental mammals appeared? Ranged at once chronologically, and by their mode of reproduction, the various classes of the vertebrata would run, did we accept the suggested reading, as follows:—First appear cold-blooded vertebrates (fishes), that propagate by eggs or spawn,—chiefly by the latter. Next appear cold-blooded vertebrates (reptiles), that propagate by eggs or spawn,—chiefly by the former. Then appear warm-blooded vertebrates (birds), that propagate by eggs exclusively. Then warm-blooded vertebrates come upon the stage, that produceeggswithout shells, which have to be subjected for months to a species of extra-placental incubation. And last of all the true placental mammals appear. And thus, tried by the test of perfect reproduction, the great vertebral division receives its full development in creation.
Fig. 70.Fig. 70.ANOPLTHERIUM COMMUNE.(Eocene.)
The placental mammals make their appearance, as I have said, in the earliest ages of the great Tertiary division, and exhibit in the group an aspect very unlike that which they at present bear. The Eocene ages were peculiarly the ages of the Palæotheres,—strange animals of that pachydermatous or thick-skinned order to which the elephants, the tapirs, the hogs, and the horses belong. It had been remarked by naturalists, that there are fewer families of this order in living nature than of almost any other, and that, of the existing genera, not a few are widely separated in their analogies from the others. But in the Palæotheresof the Eocene, which ranged in size from a large horse to a hare, not a few of the missing links have been found,—links connecting the tapirs to the hogs, and the hogs to the Palæotheres proper; and there is at least one species suggestive of an union of some of the more peculiar traits of the tapirs and the horses. It was among these extinct Pachydermata of the Paris basin that Cuvier effected his wonderful restorations, and produced those figures in outline which are now as familiar to the geologist as any of the forms of the existing animals. The London Clay and the Eocene of the Isle of Wight have also yielded numerous specimens of those pachyderms, whose identity with the Continental ones has been established by Owen; but they are more fragmentary, and their state of keeping less perfect, than those furnished by the gypsum quarries of Velay and Montmartre. In these the smaller animals occur often in a state of preservation so peculiar and partial as to excite the curiosity of even the untaught workmen. Only half the skeleton is present. The limbs and ribs of the under side are found lying in nearly their proper places; while of the limbs and ribs of the upper side usually not a trace can be detected,—even the upper side of the skull is oftenawanting. It-would almost seem as if some pre-Adamite butcher had divided the carcasses longitudinally, and carried away with him all the upper halves. The reading of the enigma seems to be, that when the creatures lay down and died, the gypsum in which their remains occur was soft enough to permit their under sides to sink into it, and that then gradually hardening, it kept the bones in their places; while the uncovered upper sides, exposed to the disintegrating influences, either mouldered away piecemeal, or were removed by accident. The bones of the larger animals of the basin are usually found detached; and ere they could be reconstructed into perfect skeletons, they taxed the extraordinary powers of the greatest of comparative anatomists. Rather more than twenty different species ofextinct mammals have been detected in the Paris basin,—not a great number, it may be thought; and yet for so limited a locality we may deem it not a very small one, when we take into account the fact that all our native mammals of Britain and Ireland amount (according to Fleming), if we except the Cetaceæ and the seals, to but forty species.
Fig 71.Fig 71.ANIMALS OF THE PARIS BASIN.[15](Eocene.)
Fig. 72.Fig. 72.DINOTHERIUM GIGANTEUM.(Miocene.)
In the Middle or Miocene Tertiary, pachyderms, though of a wholly different type from their predecessors, are still the prevailing forms. The Dinotherium, one of the greatest quadrupedal mammals that ever lived, seems to have formed a connecting link in this middle age between the Pachydermata and the Cetaceæ. Each ramus of the under jaw, which in the larger specimens are fully four feet in length, bore at the symphysis a great bent tusk turned downwards, which appears to have been employed as a pickaxe in uprooting the aquatic plants and liliaceous roots on which the creature seems to have lived. The head, which measured about three feet across,—a breadth, sufficient, surely, to satisfy the demands of the most exacting phrenologist,—was provided with muscles of enormous strength, arranged so as to give potent effect to the operations of this strange tool. Thehinder part of the skull not a little resembled that of the Cetaceæ; while, from the form of the nasal bones, the creature was evidently furnished with a trunk like the elephant. It seems not improbable, therefore, that this bulkiest of mammaliferous quadrupeds constituted, as I have said, a sort of uniting tie between creatures still associated in the human mind, from the circumstance of their massive proportions, as the greatest that swim the sea or walk the land,—the whale and the elephant. The Mastodon, an elephantoid animal, also furnished, like the elephant, with tusks and trunk, but marked by certain peculiarities which constitute it a different genus, seems in Europe to have been contemporary with the Dinotherium; but in North America (the scene of its greatest numerical development) it appears to belong to a later age. In height it did not surpass the African elephant, but it considerably exceeded it in length,—a specimen which could not have stood above twelve feet high indicating a length of about twenty-five feet: it had what the elephants want,—tusks fixed in its lower jaw, which the males retained through life, but the females lost when young; its limbs were proportionally shorter, but more massive, and its abdomen more elongated and slim; its grinder teeth too, some of which have been known to weigh from seventeen to twenty pounds, and their cusps elevated into great mammæ-like protuberances, to which the creature owes its name, and wholly differ in their proportions and outline from the grinders of the elephant. The much greater remoteness of the mastodonic period in Europe than in America is a circumstance worthy of notice, as it is one of many facts that seem to indicate a general transposition of at least the later geologic ages on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. Groups of corresponding character on the eastern and western shores of this great ocean were not contemporaneous in time. It has been repeatedly remarked,that the existing plants and trees of the United States, with not a few of its fishes and reptiles, bear in their forms and construction the marks of a much greater antiquity than those of Europe. The geologist who sets himself to discover similar types on the eastern side of the Atlantic would have to seek for them among the deposits of the later Tertiaries. North America seems to be still passing through its later Tertiary ages; and it appears to be a consequence of this curious transposition, that while in Europe the mastodonic period is removed by two great geologic eras from the present time, it is removed from it in America by only one. Even in America, however, that period lies far beyond the reach of human tradition,—a fact borne out by the pseudo-traditions retailed by the aborigines regarding the mastodon. By none of at least the higher naturalists has there been a doubt entertained respecting its herbivorous character; and the discovery of late years of the stomach of an individual charged with decayed herbage and fragments of the succulent branches of trees, some of them of existing species, has demonstrated the solidity of the reasonings founded on its general structure and aspect. The pseudo-traditions, however, represent it in every instance as a carnivorous tyrant, that, had it not been itself destroyed, would have destroyed all the other animals its contemporaries. It is said by the red men of Virginia, "that a troop of these tremendous quadrupeds made fearful havoc for some time among the deer, the buffaloes, and all the other animals created for the use of the Indians, and spread desolation far and wide. At last 'the Mighty Man above' seized his thunder and killed them all, with the exception of the largest of the males, who presenting his head to the thunderbolts, shook them off as they fell; but, being wounded in the side, he betook himself to flight towards the great lakes, where he still resides at the present day."
Let me here remind you in the passing, that that antiquity of type which characterizes the recent productions of North America is one of many wonders,—not absolutely geological in themselves, but which, save for the revelations of geology, would have forever remained unnoted and unknown,—which have been pressed, during the last half century, on the notice of naturalists. "It is a circumstance quite extraordinary and unexpected," says Agassiz, in his profoundly interesting work on Lake Superior, "that the fossil plants of the Tertiary beds of Oeningen resemble more closely the trees and shrubs which grow at present in the eastern parts of North America, than those of any other parts of the world; thus allowing us to express correctly the difference between the opposite coasts of Europe and America, by saying that the present eastern American flora, and, I may add, the fauna also, have a more ancient character than those of Europe. The plants, especially the trees and shrubs, growing in our days in the United States, are, as it were, old-fashioned; and the characteristic genera Lagomys, Chelydra, and the large Salamanders with permanent gills, that remind us of the fossils of Oeningen, are at least equally so;—they bear the marks of former ages." How strange a fact! Not only are we accustomed to speak of the eastern continents as the Old World, in contradistinction to the great continent of the west, but to speak also of the world before the Flood as the Old World, in contradistinction to the post-diluvian world which succeeded it. And yet equally, if we receive the term in either of its acceptations, is America an older world still,—an older world than that of the eastern continents,—an older world, in the fashion and type of its productions, than the world before the Flood. And when the immigrant settler takes axe amid the deep backwoods, to lay open for the first time what he deems a new country, the great trees that fall before him,—thebrushwood that he lops away with a sweep of his tool,—the unfamiliar herbs which he tramples under foot,—the lazy fish-like reptile that scarce stirs out of his path as he descends to the neighboring creek to drink,—the fierce alligator-like tortoise, with the large limbs and small carpace, that he sees watching among the reeds for fish and frogs, just as he reaches the water,—and the little hare-like rodent, without a tail, that he startles by the way,—all attest, by the antiqueness of the mould in which they are cast, how old a country the seemingly new one really is,—a country vastly older, in type at least, than that of the antediluvians and the patriarchs, and only to be compared with that which flourished on the eastern side of the Atlantic long ere the appearance of man, and the remains of whose perished productions we find locked up in theloessof the Rhine, or amid the lignites of Nassau. America is emphatically theOldWorld. If we accept, however, as sound the ingenious logic by which Colton labors to show, in not inelegant verse, that theModernsare the trueAncients, we may continue to term it the New World still.
"We that on these late days are thrownMust be the oldest Ancients known;TheearliestModern earth hath seenWas Adam in his apron green.He lived when young Creation pealedHer morning hymn o'er flood and field,Till all her infant offspring cameTo that great christening for a name.And he that would the Ancients know,Must forward come, not backward go:The learned lumber of the shelvesShows nothing older than ourselves.But who in older times than weShall live?—That infant on the knee,—See sights to us were never shown,And secrets known to us unknown."
Fig. 73.Fig. 73.ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS.(Mammoth.) Great British Elephant.
Fig. 74.Fig. 74.TROGONTHERIUM CUVIERI.Gigantic Beaver. (Pleistocene.)
Fig. 75.Fig. 75.URSUS SPELÆUS.Cave Bear. (Pleistocene.)
Fig. 76.Fig. 76.HYENA SPELÆA.Cave Hyæna. (Pleistocene.)
The group of mammals which, in Europe, at least, immediately preceded the human period seems to have been everywhere a remarkable one; and nowhere was it more sothan in the British islands. Our present mammaliferous fauna is rather poor; but the contents of the later deposits show that we must regard it as but a mere fragment of a very noble one. Associated with species that still exist in the less cultivated parts of the country, such as the badger, the fox, the wild cat, the roe and the red deer, we find the remains of great animals, whose congeners must now be sought for in the intertropical regions. Britain, during the times of the boulder clay, and for ages previous, had its native elephant, its two species of rhinoceros, its hippopotamus, its hyæna, its tiger, its three species of bears, its twospecies of beavers, its great elk, and its gigantic deer. Forms now found widely apart, and in very different climates, meet within the British area. During at least the earlier times of the group, the temperature of our island seems to have been very much what it is now. As I have already had occasion to remark, the British oak flourished on its plains and lower slopes, and the birch and Scotch fir on its hills. And yet under these familiar trees the lagomys or tailless hare, a form now mainly restricted to Siberia and the wilds of Northern America, and the reindeer, an animal whose proper habitat at the present time is Lapland, were associated with forms that are now only to be found between the tropics, such as that of the hippopotamus and rhinoceros. These last, however, unequivocally of extinct species, seem to have been adapted to live in a temperate climate; and we know from the famous Siberian specimen, that the British elephant, with its covering of long hair and closely-felted wool, was fitted to sustain the rigors of a very severe one. It is surely a strange fact, but not less true than strange, that since hill and dale assumed in Britain their present configuration, and the oak and birch flourished in its woods,there were caves in England haunted for ages by families of hyænas,—that they dragged into their dens with the carcasses of long extinct animals those of the still familiar denizens of our hill-sides, and feasted, now on the lagomys, and now on the common hare,—that they now fastened on the beaver or the reindeer, and now upon the roebuck or the goat. In one of these caves, such of the bones as projected from the stiff soil have been actually worn smooth in a narrow passage where the hyænas used to come in contact with them in passing out and in; and for several feet in depth the floor beneath is composed almost exclusively of gnawed fragments, that still exhibit the deeply indented marks of formidable teeth. In the famous Kirkdale cave alone, parts of the skeletons of from two to three hundred hyænas have been detected, mixed with portions of the osseous framework of the cave-tiger, the cave-bear, the ox, the deer, the mammoth, and the rhinoceros. That cave must have been a den of wild creatures for many ages ere the times of the boulder clay, during which period it was shut up from all access to the light and air by a drift deposit, and lay covered over until again laid open by some workmen little more than thirty years ago. Not only were many of the wild animals of the country which still exist contemporary for a time with its extinct bears, tigers, and elephants, but it seems at least highly probable that several of our domesticated breeds derived their origin from progenitors whose remains we find entombed in the bone-caves and other deposits of the same age; though of course the changes effected by domestication in almost all the tame animals renders the question of their identity with the indigenous breeds somewhat obscure. Cuvier was, however, unable to detect any difference between the skeleton of a fossil horse, contemporary with the elephant, and that of our domestic breed: a fossil goat of the same age cannot bedistinguished from the domesticated animal; and one of our two fossil oxen (Bos longifrons) does not differ more from some of the existing breeds than these have, in the course of time, been made, chiefly by artificial means, to differ among themselves. But of one of our domestic tribes no trace has yet been found in the rocks: like the cod family among fishes, or the Rosaceæ among plants, it seems to have preceded man by but a very brief period. And certainly, if created specially for his use, though the pride of the herald might prevent him from selecting it as in aught typical of the human race, it would yet not be easy to instance a family of animals that has ministered more extensively to his necessities. I refer to the sheep,—that soft and harmless creature, that clothes civilized man everywhere in the colder latitudes with its fleece,—that feeds him with its flesh,—that gives its bowels to be spun into the catgut with which he refits his musical instruments,—whose horns he has learned to fashion into a thousand useful trinkets,—and whose skin, converted into parchment, served to convey to later times the thinking of the first full blow of the human intellect across the dreary gulf of the middle ages.
At length the human period begins. A creature appears upon the scene unlike all that had preceded him, and whose nature it equally is to look back upon the events of the past,—among other matters, on that succession of beings upon the planet which he inhabits, with which we are this evening attempting to deal,—and to anticipate at least one succession more, in that still future state in which he himself is again to appear, in happier circumstances than now, and in a worthier character. We possess another history of the primeval age and subsequent chronology of the human family than that which we find inscribed in the rocks. And it is well that we do so. From various causes, the geologic evidence regarding the period of man's firstappearance on earth is singularly obscure. That custom of "burying his dead out of his sight," which obtained, we know, in the patriarchal times, and was probably in use ever since man came first under the law of death, has had the effect of mingling his remains with those of creatures that were extinct for ages ere he began to be. The cavern, once a haunt of carnivorous animals, that in the first simple ages of his history had furnished him with a shelter when living, became his burying-place when dead; and thus his bones, and his first rude attempts in pottery and weapon-making, have been found associated with the remains of the cave-hyæna and cave-tiger, with the teeth of the ancient hippopotamus, and the tusks of the primeval elephant. The evidence on the point, too,—from the great paucity of human remains of a comparatively remote period, and from the circumstance that they are rarely seen by geologists in the stratum in which they occur,—is usually very imperfect in its details. Further, it is an evidence obnoxious to suspicion, from the fact that a keen controversy has arisen on the subject of man's antiquity, that such fragments of man himself or of his works as manifest great age have been pressed to serve as weapons in the fray,—that, occurring always in superficial and local deposits, their true era may be greatly antedated, under the influence of prejudice, by men who have no design wilfully to deceive,—and that while, respecting the older formations, with their abundant organisms, the conclusions of any one geologist may be tested by all the others, the geologist who once in a lifetime picks up in a stratified sand or clay a stone arrow-head or a human bone, finds that the data on which he founds his conclusions may be received or rejected by his contemporaries, but not re-examined. It may be safely stated, however, that that ancient record in which man is represented as the lastborn of creation, is opposedby no geologic fact; and that if, according to Chalmers, "the Mosaic writings do not fix the antiquity of the globe," they at leastdofix—making allowance, of course, for the varying estimates of the chronologer—"the antiquity of the human species." The great column of being, with its base set in the sea, and inscribed, like some old triumphal pillar, with many a strange form,—at once hieroglyphic and figure,—bears, as the ornately sculptured capital, which imparts beauty and finish to the whole, reasoning, responsible man. There is surely a very wonderful harmony manifested in the proportions of that nice sequence in which the invertebrates—the fishes, the reptiles, the birds, the marsupials, the placental mammals, and, last of all, man himself—are so exquisitely arranged. It reminds us of the fine figure employed by Dryden in his first Ode for St. Cecilia's Day,—a figure which, viewed in the light cast on it by the modern science of Palæontology, stands out in bolder relief than that in which it could have appeared to the poet himself:—
"From harmony, from heavenly harmony,This universal frame began;From harmony to harmony,Through all the compass of the notes it ran,Thediapasonclosing full in man."
Fig. 77.Fig. 77.ASAPHUS CAUDATUS.(Silurian.)Fig. 78.Fig. 78.ORTHOCERAS LATERALE.(Mountain Limestone.)Fig. 79.Fig. 79.SPIRIGERINA RETICULARIS.(Old Red Sandstone.)
Fig. 77.Fig. 77.ASAPHUS CAUDATUS.(Silurian.)
Fig. 78.Fig. 78.ORTHOCERAS LATERALE.(Mountain Limestone.)
Fig. 79.Fig. 79.SPIRIGERINA RETICULARIS.(Old Red Sandstone.)
Fig. 80.Fig. 80.A. MARGARITATUS.(Lias.)Fig. 81.Fig. 81.A. BISULCATUS.(Lias.)
Fig. 80.Fig. 80.A. MARGARITATUS.(Lias.)
Fig. 81.Fig. 81.A. BISULCATUS.(Lias.)
Fig. 82.Fig. 82.BELEMNITELLA MUCRONATA.(Chalk.)Fig. 83.Fig. 83.BELEMNITES SULCATUS.(Oolite.)
Fig. 82.Fig. 82.BELEMNITELLA MUCRONATA.(Chalk.)
Fig. 83.Fig. 83.BELEMNITES SULCATUS.(Oolite.)
In the limits to which I have restricted myself, I have been able to do little more than simply to chronicle the successive eras in which the various classes and divisions of the organic kingdom, vegetable and animal, make their appearance in creation. I have produced merely a brief record of the various births, in their order, of that great family whose father is God. And in pursuing such a plan, much, of necessity, must have been omitted. I ought perhaps to have told you, that very rarely, if ever, do the master forms of a period constitute the prevailing or typicalorganisms of its deposits. Of the three great divisions of which the geologic scale consists,—Palæozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary,—the first, or ichthyic period, is marked chiefly, not by its great fishes, but by the peculiar character of its brachipodous and cephalopodous mollusca, and in its earlier stages by its three-lobed crustaceæ; the second orreptilian period was emphatically the period of the ammonite and belemnite; while the third and last, or mammalian period, was that of gastropodous and conchiferous molluscs, impressed, generically at least, by all the features of the group which still exists in our seas. Save in a few local deposits, fishes do not form the prevailing organisms in the formations of the age of fishes; nor reptiles in the formations of the age of reptiles; nor yet mammals in the formations of the age of mammals. Nay, it is not improbable that the recent or human period may be marked most prominently in the future, when it comes to exist simply as a geologic system, by a still humbler organism than most of these molluscs. On almost all rocky shores a line of pale gray may be seen at low water, running for mile after mile along the belt that has been laid bare at the bases of the cliffs by the fall of the tide. It owes its pale color to millions of millions of a small balanus (B. balanoides), produced in such amazing abundance in the littoral zone as to cover with a rough crust every minute portion of rock and every sedentary shell. Other species of the same genus (B. crenatusandB. porcatus) occupy the depths of the sea beyond; and their remains, washed ashore by the waves, and mingled with those of the littoral species, formoften great accumulations of shell sand. I have seen among the Hebrides a shell sand accumulated along the beach to the depth of many feet, of which fully two thirds was composed of the valves and compartments of balanidæ; and a similar sand on the east coast of Scotland, a little to the south of St. Andrews, formed in still larger proportions of the fragments of a single species,—Balanus crenatus. Now, this genus, so amazingly abundant at the present time in every existing sea, and whose accumulated remains bid fair to exist as great limestone rocks in the future, had no existence in the Palæozoic or Secondary ages. It first appears in the times of the earlier Tertiary, in, however, only a single species; and, becoming gradually of more and more importance as a group, it receives its fullest numerical development in the present time. And thus the remains of a sub-class of animals, low in their standing among the articulata, may form one of the most prominent Palæontological features of the human period. But enough for the present of circumstance and detail.
Fig. 84.Fig. 84.MUREX ALVEOLATUS.Fig. 85.Fig. 85.ASTARTE OMALII.(Red Crag.)
Fig. 84.Fig. 84.MUREX ALVEOLATUS.
Fig. 85.Fig. 85.ASTARTE OMALII.
Fig. 86.Fig. 86.BALANUS CRASSUS.(Red Crag.)
Such, so far as the geologist has yet been able to read the records of his science, has been the course of creation, from the first beginnings of vitality upon our planet, until the appearance of man. And very wonderful, surely, has that course been! How strange a procession! Never yet on Egyptian obelisk or Assyrian frieze,—where long lines of figures seem stalking across the granite, each charged with symbol and mystery,—have our Layards or Rawlinsons seen aught so extraordinary as that long procession of being which, starting out of the blank depths of the bygone eternity, is still defiling across the stage, and of which we ourselves form some of the passing figures. Who shall declare the profound meanings with which thesegeologic hieroglyphics are charged, or indicate the ultimate goal at which the long procession is destined to arrive?
The readings already given, the conclusions already deduced, are as various as the hopes and fears, the habits of thought, and the cast of intellect, of the several interpreters who have set themselves,—some, alas! with but little preparation and very imperfect knowledge,—to declare in their order the details of this marvellous, dream-like vision, and, with the dream, "the interpretation thereof." One class of interpreters may well remind us of the dim-eyed old man,—the genius of unbelief so poetically described by Coleridge,—who, sitting in his cold and dreary cave, "talked much and vehemently concerning an infinite series of causes and effects, which he explained to be a string of blind men, the last of whom caught hold of the skirt of the one before him, he of the next, and so on, till they were all out of sight, and that they all walked infallibly straight, without making one false step, though all were alike blind." With these must I class those assertors of the development hypothesis who can see in the upward progress of being only the operations of an incomprehending and incomprehensible law, through which, in the course of unreckoned ages, the lower tribes and families have risen into the higher, and inferior into superior natures, and in virtue of which, in short, the animal creation has grown, in at least its nobler specimens, altogether unwittingly, without thought or care on its own part, and without intelligence on the part of the operating law, from irrational to rational, and risen in the scale from the mere promptings of instinct to the highest exercise of reason,—from apes and baboons to Bacons and Newtons. The blind lead the blind;—the unseeing law operates on the unperceiving creatures; and they go, not together into the ditch, butdirect onwards, straight as an arrow, and higher and higher at every step.
Another class look with profound melancholy on that great city of the dead,—the burial-place of all that ever lived in the past,—which occupies with its ever-extending pavements of gravestones, and its ever-lengthening streets of tombs and sepulchres, every region opened up by the geologist. They see the onward procession of being as if but tipped with life, and nought but inanimate carcasses all behind,—dead individuals, dead species, dead genera, dead creations,—a universe of death; and ask whether the same annihilation which overtook in turn all the races of all the past, shall not one day overtake our own race also, and a time come when men and their works shall have no existence save as stone-pervaded fossils locked up in the rock forever? Nowhere do we find the doubts and fears of this class more admirably portrayed than in the works of perhaps the most thoughtful and suggestive of living poets:—
"Are God and Nature then at strife,That Nature lends such evil dreams,So careful of the type she seems,So careless of the single life?'So careful of the type!' but no,From scarped cliff and quarried stone,She cries, 'A thousand types are gone;I care for nothing; all shall go:Thou makest thine appeal to me;I bring to life, I bring to death;The spirit does but mean the breath.I know no more.' And he,—shall he,Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,Such splendid purpose in his eyes,Who rolled the psalm to wintry skiesAnd built him fanes of fruitless prayer,Who trusted God was love indeed,And love creation's final law,Though Nature, red in tooth and claw,With ravine shrieked against his creed,—Who loved, who suffered countless ills,Who battled for the true, the just,—Be blown about the desert dust,Or sealed within the iron hills?No more!—a monster then, a dream,A discord. Dragons of the prime,That tore each other in their slime,Were mellow music matched with him.O, life, as futile then as frail,—O for thy voice to soothe and bless!What hope of answer or redress,Behind the vail, behind the vail!"
The sagacity of the poet here,—that strange sagacity which seems so nearly akin to the prophetic spirit,—suggests in this noble passage the true reading of the enigma. The appearance of man upon the scene of being constitutes a new era in creation; the operations of a newinstinctcome into play,—thatinstinctwhich anticipates a life after the grave, and reposes in implicit faith upon a God alike just and good, who is the pledged "rewarder of all who diligently seek Him." And in looking along the long line of being,—ever rising in the scale from higher to yet higher manifestations, or abroad on the lower animals, whom instinct never deceives,—can we hold that man, immeasurably higher in his place, and infinitely higher in his hopes and aspirations, than all that ever went before him, should be, notwithstanding, the one grand error in creation,—the one painful worker, in the midst of present trouble, for a state into which he is never to enter,—the befooled expectant of a happy future, which he is never to see? Assuredly no. He who keeps faith with all his humbler creatures,—who gives to even the bee and the dormouse the winter for which they prepare,—will to a certainty not break faith with man,—with man, alike the deputed lord of the present creation, and the chosen heir of all the future.We have been looking abroad on the old geologic burying-grounds, and deciphering the strange inscriptions on their tombs; but there are other burying-grounds, and other tombs,—solitary churchyards among the hills, where the dust of the martyrs lies, and tombs that rise over the ashes of the wise and good; nor are there awanting, on even the monuments of the perished races, frequent hieroglyphics, and symbols of high meaning, which darkly intimate to us, that whiletheirburial-yards contain but the debris of the past, we are to regard the others as charged with the sown seed of the future.
THE TWO RECORDS, MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL.
Itis now exactly fifty years since a clergyman of the Scottish Church, engaged in lecturing at St. Andrews, took occasion in enumerating the various earths of the chemist, to allude to the science, then in its infancy, that specially deals with the rocks and soils which these earths compose. "There is a prejudice," he remarked, "against the speculations of the geologist, which I am anxious to remove. It has been said that they nurture infidel propensities. It has been alleged that geology, by referring the origin of the globe to a higher antiquity than is assigned to it by the writings of Moses, undermines our faith in the inspiration of the Bible, and in all the animating prospects of the immortality which it unfolds. This is a false alarm.The writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe."
The bold lecturer on this occasion,—for it needed no small courage in a divine of any Established Church to take up, at the beginning of the present century, a position so determined on the geologic side,—was at the time an obscure young man, characterized, in the small circle in which he moved, by the ardor of his temperament and the breadth and originality of his views; but not yet distinguished in the science or literature of his country, and of comparatively little weight in the theological field. He was marked, too, by what his sobereracquaintance deemed eccentricities of thought and conduct. When the opposite view was all but universal, he held and taught that free trade would be not only a general benefit to the people of this country, but would inflict permanent injury on no one class or portion of them; and further, at a time when the streets and lanes of all the great cities of the empire were lighted with oil burnt in lamps, he held that the time was not distant when a carburetted hydrogen gas would be substituted instead; and, on getting his snug parsonage-house repaired, he actually introduced into the walls a system of tubes and pipes for the passage into its various rooms of the gaseous fluid yet to be employed as the illuminating agent. Time and experience have since impressed their stamp on these supposed eccentricities, and shown them to be the sagacious forecastings of a man who saw further and more clearly than his contemporaries; and fame has since blown his name very widely, as one of the most comprehensive and enlightened, and, withal, one of the most thoroughly earnest and sincere, of modern theologians. The bold lecturer of St. Andrews was Dr. Thomas Chalmers,—a divine whose writings are now known wherever the English language is spoken, and whose wonderful eloquence lives in memory as a vanished power, which even his extraordinary writings fail adequately to represent. And in the position which he took up at this early period with respect to geology and the Divine Record, we have yet another instance of the great sagacity of the man, and of his ability of correctly estimating the prevailing weight of the evidence with which, though but partially collected at the time, the geologist was preparing to establish the leading propositions of his science. Even in this late age, when the scientific standing of geology is all but universally recognized, and the vast periods of time which it demands fully conceded,neither geologist nor theologian, could, in any new scheme of reconciliation, shape his first proposition more skilfully than it was shaped by Chalmers a full half century ago. It has formed since that time the preliminary proposition of those ornaments of at once science and the English Church, the present venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Bird Sumner, with Doctors Buckland, Conybeare, and Professor Sedgwick; of eminent evangelistic Dissenters too, such as the late Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. John Harris, Dr. Robert Vaughan, Dr. James Hamilton, and the Rev. Mr. Binney,—enlightened and distinguished men, who all came early to the conclusion, with the lecturer of St. Andrews, that "the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe."
In 1814, ten years after the date of the St. Andrews' lectures, Dr. Chalmers produced his more elaborate scheme of reconciliation between the Divine and the Geologic Records, in a "Review of Cuvier's Theory of the Earth;" and that scheme, perfectly adequate to bring the Mosaic narrative into harmony with what was known at the time of geologic history, has been very extensively received and adopted. It may, indeed, still be regarded as the most popular of the various existing schemes. It teaches, and teaches truly, that between the first act of creation, which evoked out of the previous nothing thematterof the heavens and earth, and the first act of the first day's work recorded in Genesis, periods of vast duration may have intervened; but further, it insists that the days themselves were but natural days of twenty-four hours each; and that, ere they began, the earth, though mayhap in the previous period a fair residence of life, had become void and formless, and the sun, moon, and stars, though mayhap they had before given light, had been, at least in relation to our planet, temporarily extinguished. In short, while it teaches that the successive creations ofthe geologist may all have found ample room in the period preceding that creation to which man belongs, it teaches also that the record in Genesis bears reference to but the existing creation, and that there lay between it and the preceding ones a chaotic period of death and darkness. The scheme propounded by the late Dr. Pye Smith, and since adopted by several writers, differs from that of Chalmers in but one circumstance, though an important one. Dr. Smith held, with the great northern divine, that the Mosaic days were natural days; that they were preceded by a chaotic period; and that the work done in them related to but that last of the creations to which the human species belongs. Further, however, he held in addition, that the chaos of darkness and confusion out of which that creation was called was of but limited extent, and that outside its area, and during the period of its existence, many of our present lands and seas may have enjoyed the light of the sun, and been tenanted by animals and occupied by plants, the descendants of which still continue to exist. The treatise of Dr. Pye Smith was published exactly a quarter of a century posterior to the promulgation, through the press, of the argument of Dr. Chalmers; and this important addition,—elaborated by its author between the years 1837 and 1839,—seems to have been made to suit the more advanced state of geological science at the time. The scheme of reconciliation perfectly adequate in 1814 was found in 1839 to be no longer so; and this mainly through a peculiarity in the order in which geological fact has been evolved and accumulated in this country, and the great fossiliferous systems studied and wrought out; to which I must be permitted briefly to advert.
William Smith, the "Father of English Geology," as he has been well termed (a humble engineer and mineral surveyor, possessed of but the ordinary education of men ofhis class and profession), was born upon the English Oolite,—that system which, among the five prevailing divisions of the great Secondary class of rocks, holds exactly the middle place. The Triassic system and the Lias lie beneath it; the Cretaceous system and the Weald rest above. Smith, while yet a child, had his attention attracted by the Oolitic fossils; and it was observed, that while his youthful contemporaries had their garnered stores of marbles purchased at the toy shop, he had collected, instead, a hoard of spherical fossil terebratulæ, which served the purposes of the game equally well. The interest which he took in organic remains, and the deposits in which they occur, influenced him in the choice of a profession; and, when supporting himself in honest independence as a skilful mineral surveyor and engineer, he travelled over many thousand miles of country, taking as his starting point the city of Bath, which stands near what is termed the Great Oolite: and from that centre he carefully explored the various Secondary formations above and below. He ascertained that these always occur in a certain determinate order; that each contains fossils peculiar to itself; and that they run diagonally across the kingdom in nearly parallel lines from north-east to south-west. And, devoting every hour which he could snatch from his professional labors to the work, in about a quarter of a century, or rather more, he completed his great stratigraphical map of England. But, though a truly Herculean achievement, regarded as that of a single man unindebted to public support, and uncheered by even any very general sympathy in his labors, it was found to be chiefly valuable in its tracings of the Secondary deposits, and strictly exact in only that Oolitic centre from which his labors began. It was remarked at an early period that he ought to have restricted his publication to the formations which lie between the Chalk and the Red Marl inclusive;or, in other words, to the great Secondary division. The Coal Measures had, however, been previously better known, from their economic importance, and the number of the workings opened among them, than the deposits of any other system; and ere the publication of the map of Smith, Cuvier and Brogniart had rendered famous all over the world the older Tertiary formations of the age of the London Clay. But both ends of the geological scale, comprising those ancient systems older than the Coal, and representative of periods in which, so far as is yet known, life, animal and vegetable, first began upon our planet, and those systems of comparatively modern date, representative of the periods which immediately preceded the human epoch, were equally unknown. The light fell strongly on only that middle portion of the series on which the labors of Smith had been mainly concentrated. The vast geologic bridge, which, like that in the exquisite allegory of Addison, strode across a "part of the great tide of eternity," "had a black cloud hanging at each end of it." And such was the state of geologic science when, in 1814, Dr. Chalmers framed his scheme of reconciliation.
Since that time, however, a light not less strong than the one thrown by William Smith on the formations of the Lias and the Oolite has been cast on both the older and the newer fossiliferous systems. Two great gaps still remain to be filled up,—that which separates the Palæozoic from the Secondary division, and that which separates the Secondary from the Tertiary one. But they occur at neither end of the geological scale. Mainly through the labors of two distinguished geologists, who, finding the geologic school of their own country distracted by a fierce and fruitless controversy, attached themselves to the geologic school of England, and have since received the honor of knighthood in acknowledgment of theirlabors, both ends of the geologic scale have been completed. Sir Roderick Murchison addressed himself to the formations older than the Coal, more especially to the Upper and Lower Silurian systems, from the Ludlow rooks to the Llandeilo flags. The Old Red Sandstone too, a system which lies more immediately beneath the Coal, has also been explored, and its various deposits, with their peculiar organic remains, enumerated and described. And Sir Charles Lyell, setting himself to the other extremity of the scale, has wrought out the Tertiary formations, and separated them into the four great divisions which they are now recognized as forming. And of these, the very names indicate that certain proportions of their organisms still continue to exist. It is a great fact, now fully established in the course of geological discovery, that between the plants which in the present time cover the earth, and the animals which inhabit it, and the animals and plants of the later extinct creations, there occurred no break or blank, but that, on the contrary, many of the existing organisms were contemporary during the morning of their being, with many of the extinct ones during the evening of theirs. We know further, that not a few of the shells which now live on our coasts, and several of even the wild animals which continue to survive amid our tracts of hill and forest, were in existence many ages ere the human age began. Instead of dating their beginning only a single natural day, or at most two natural days, in advance of man, they must have preceded him by many thousands of years. In fine, in consequence of that comparatively recent extension of geologic fact in the direction of the later systems and formations, through which we are led to know that the present creation was not cut off abruptly from the preceding one, but that, on the contrary, it dovetailed into it at a thousand different points, we are led also to know, thatany scheme of reconciliation which would separate between the recent and the extinct existences by a chaotic gulf of death and darkness, is a scheme which no longer meets the necessities of the case. Though perfectly adequate forty years ago, it has been greatly outgrown by the progress of geological discovery, and is, as I have said, adequate no longer; and it becomes a not unimportant matter to determine the special scheme that would bring into completest harmony the course of creation, as now ascertained by the geologist, and that brief but sublime narrative of its progress which forms a meet introduction in Holy Writ to the history of the human family. The first question to which we must address ourselves in any such inquiry is of course a very obvious one,—What are the facts scientifically determined which now demand a new scheme of reconciliation?
There runs around the shores of Great Britain and Ireland a flat terrace of unequal breadth, backed by an escarpment of varied height and character, which is known to geologists as the old coast-line. On this flat terrace most of the seaport towns of the empire are built. The subsoil which underlies its covering of vegetable mould consists usually of stratified sands and gravels, arranged after the same fashion as on the neighboring beach, and interspersed in the same manner with sea shells. The escarpment behind, when formed of materials of no great coherency, such as gravel or clay, exists as a sloping, grass-covered bank,—at one place running out into promontories that encroach upon the terrace beneath,—at another receding into picturesque, bay-like recesses; and where composed, as in many localities, of rock of an enduring quality, we find it worn, as if by the action of the surf,—in some parts relieved into insulated stacks, in others hollowed into deep caverns,—in short, presenting all theappearance of a precipitous coast-line, subjected to the action of the waves. Now, no geologist can or does doubt that this escarpment was at one time the coast-line of the island,—the line against which the waves broke at high water in some distant age, when either the sea stood from twenty to thirty feet higher along our shores than it does now, or the land sat from twenty to thirty feet lower. Nor can the geologist doubt, that along the flat terrace beneath, with its stratified beds of sand and gravel, and its accumulations of sea shells, the tides must have risen and fallen twice every day, as they now rise and fall along the beach that at present girdles our country. But, in reference to at least human history, the age of the old coast-line and terrace must be a very remote one. Though geologically recent, it lies far beyond the reach of any written record. It has been shown by Mr. Smith of Jordanhill, one of our highest authorities on the subject, that the wall of Antoninus, erected by the Romans as a protection against the Northern Caledonians, was made to terminate at the Firths of Forth and Clyde, with relation, not to the level of the old coast-line, but to that of the existing one. And so we must infer that, ere the year A.D. 140 (the year during which, according to our antiquaries, the greater part of the wall was erected) the old coast-line had attained to its present elevation over the sea. Further, however, we know from the history of Diodorus the Sicilian, that at a period earlier by at least two hundred years, St. Michael's Mount, in Cornwall, was connected with the mainland at low water, just as it is now, by a flat isthmus, across which, upon the falling of the tide, the ancient Cornish miners used to carry over their tin in carts. Had the relative levels of sea and land been those of the old coast-line at the time, St. Michael's Mount, instead of being accessible at low ebb would have been separatedfrom the shore by a strait from three to five fathoms in depth. It would not have been then as now, as described in the verse of Carew,—
"Both land and island twice a day."
But even the incidental notice of Diodorus Siculus represents very inadequately the antiquity of the existing coast-line. Some of its caves, hollowed in hard rock in the line of faults and shifts by the attrition of the surf, are more than a hundred feet in depth; and it must have required many centuries to excavate tough trap or rigid gneiss to a depth so considerable, by a process so slow. And yet, however long the sea may have stood against the present coast-line, it must have stood for a considerably longer period against the ancient one. The latter presents generally marks of greater attrition than the modern line, and its wave-hollowed caves are of a depth considerably more profound. In determining, on an extensive tract of coast, the average profundity of both classes of caverns from a considerable number of each, I ascertained that the proportional average depth of the modern to the ancient is as two to three. For every two centuries, then, during which the waves have been scooping out the caves of the present coast-line, they must have been engaged for three centuries in scooping out those of the old one. But we knowhistorically, that for at least twenty centuries the sea has been toiling in these modern caves; and who shall dare affirm that it has not been toiling in them for at least ten centuries more? But if the sea has stood for but even two thousand six hundred years against the present coast-line (and no geologist would dare fix his estimate lower), then must it have stood against the old line, ere it could have excavated caves one third deeper, three thousand nine hundred years. And both periods united (six thousandfive hundred years) more than exhaust the Hebrew chronology. Yet what a mere beginning of geologic history does not the epoch of the old coast-line form! It is but a mere starting point from the recent period. Not a single shell seems to have become extinct during the last six thousand five hundred years! The shells which lie embedded in the subsoils beneath the old coast-line are exactly those which still live in our seas.