CHAPTER II.THEORIES OF ORGANIC LIFE.
After inquiring into theirorderof succession, therelationwhich organic fossils have to each other, as genera and species, falls naturally to be considered. How have these various families of creatures, brought to light by geology, been formed? In what manner have they become extinct? Have they all proceeded from a few original types, which have been modified by circumstances, increased in variety, and perfected in form, as they advance from the older to the newer formations? And does geology furnish any data on which to build a theory of their extinction as the higher and succeeding kinds emerged into being? A learned author, Professor Pictet of Geneva, has spoken of these speculations in terms of a rule or law, as follows:—“The faunas of the most ancient formations are made up of the less perfectly organized animals, and the degree of perfection increases as we approach the more recent epochs.”
This was long held as a favorite dogma among geologists, when, in proportion to the scantiness of facts, there was an increasing eagerness to magnify their value, and to build upon them the widest generalizations. But now, since accurate observations are more and more multiplied, and the principles of palæontology are better understood, the doctrine of a gradual advance of animal organization toward higher and more perfect forms as we ascend through the successive deposits of the earth’s crust, is daily losing ground among the cultivators of the science. The notion is based upon the theory ofa scale of beings, in which all animals are supposed to form a series, or to constitute links of an unbroken chain, whereof each species is more perfect than that which precedes it, and the varying degrees of perfection constantlyincreasing until they reach their maximum in man, the highest link in the chain. M. Pictet himself regards this theory as vague and unsupported by facts, as well in the organization of the extinct as of the existing races of animals. These beings, he says, are divided into a certain number of groups, each of which exhibits a peculiar type; but while some of the groups are manifestly superior to others when we consider their organization generally, it happens also that the result of a comparison sometimes fails to establish any real superiority. The faunas of the more ancient formations he holds to be far less imperfect than has been often supposed, where the vertebrate type is represented by the fishes, and whose structure is as complicated and finished as the most recent of their kind; while the invertebrate again furnishes numerous examples of fossilized gasteropoda and cephalopoda, the most perfect orders of the molluscous class. As with these, so with the relics of every succeeding epoch, in which all the types, the genera, and species of every family of the animal kingdom, are represented by organic structures as perfect as those of the present day.
We quote the following important cautionary remark by the same author:—“We ought not,” says Professor Pictet, “to be too hasty in assuming the absence of certain more perfect types in the older faunas, merely because we have not yet discovered any remains of them. We hardly know anything of these faunas, except with regard to some of the inhabitants of the sea; and it is well known, that in the present condition of the globe, those animals living on land exhibit the higher forms of structure. Is it not possible that in these first ages of the world, terrestrial animals also existed, more highly organized than their marine cotemporaries, although their remains either have not been preserved, or are still to be discovered? The existence of didelphine mammals in the oolites has been made out by the discovery of a very small number of fragments; and the remains of land animals generally are hardly fossilized, except by sudden deluges and inundations, which are always trifling in their results, compared with the slow but unceasing deposits from the water of the sea. May we not yet expect new discoveries in these ancientstrata, revealing to us the existence of primeval animals at present little suspected?”
The same mode of reasoning may be extended to the ancient floras, or terrestrial plants of the primeval ages. What a revelation, for instance, is made in the recently discovered coal deposits of Oporto and the Upper Douro, where, along with the orthides, trilobites, and graptolites of the lower silurian rocks, are found vegetable impressions strongly resembling the ferns of the carboniferous age? The Cromarty fossil pine, from the lower old red sandstone, has been already noticed. While these pages have been passing through the press we have to record the discovery of a specimen, nearly two feet in length and half a foot in thickness, from the beds of the middle old red and immediately underlying the yellow sandstone of Dura Den. This fossil is considerably flattened and furred with the scars or markings so characteristic of the decorticated trees belonging to the coal formation. Does not this warrant the expectation of a richer harvest to be yet gleaned in these ancient fields than the marine fuci and algæ that have hitherto been mainly gathered in by the geological sickle?
Another mode of accounting for the succession of organized beings on the surface of the globe, and consequently also their successive extinction and outgoing, as seen in the fossiliferous rocks, is that which is termedthe theory of development, or the doctrine of the transmutation of species. The same has been a very ancient and favorite notion among mankind. Early in this century it assumed the form of a system, under the adaptive principle of Lamarck, who conceived that animals, according to the circumstances in which they are placed, by the use or disuse of certain organs, the frequency and degree of exertion or strain upon particular parts of the body, were themselves the agents in inducing all the variety of structures by which they are distinguished into so many orders and families. The aquatic fowl, for example, is attracted to the waters in quest of food, and so in time becomes web-footed. The heron dislikes to plunge into the flood, or will only venture into the shoals, and hence he becomes a wader, and is equipped with long legs. The woodpeckerrejoices in those little aphides and creatures that nestle under the bark of trees, and thus, from constant exercise, acquires his strength of bill. The eagle seeks the blaze of the sun, and soars to the gates of heaven, and hence his penetrating eye and speed of descent upon his all-unconscious victim beneath. And, in like manner, through the whole range of animated nature, and in all past ages, genera and species have all acquired their adaptive powers, and distinctive forms of organization, arising from a certain plastic character in their different constitutions, and their own voluntary attempts to supply their constantly increasing wants. There were a few great leading stamps or dies of nature’s own molding; but all the rest—even man himself—are merely offsets from the primitive type, with such extension of organs and modification of excrescences as were required in each particular case; succeeding races always retaining a strong affinity to their immediate predecessors, and a tendency to impress their own features on their kindred which succeed them. There is a limit of divergence; but within that limit, the human family have their place assigned them among the monkeys and wild men of the woods.
It is the same extravagant idea,that of a constant progression toward animal perfection, which has become so popularized in “The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.” This author, indeed, has taken a wider and bolder flight than even the French philosopher, M. Lamarck. He brings the rudimentary elements and molecular forms of all creation before him. He expatiates through infinite space, and amidst the original fire-mist of the astral worlds. He finds but one grand law pervading the whole universe of being, operating in the self-same way in the production of planets and suns, as in the germination of insects and animalcules, the life-impregnating principle in the one being only a modification of the aggregating and rotary tendencies that rule in the other—the blind and casual evolution of some agency of a material system, substituted for the creative will of an intelligent ever-active First Cause. “A nucleated vesicle” is the fundamental form of all organization, as nuclei of luminous matter are the sources of the stars; this is the meeting point between the organic and the inorganic, the end of the mineral and beginning of the vegetable and animal kingdoms; whence they start in differentdirections, but in a general parallelism and analogy. Assuming the vast indefinite periods of the geological epochs to be correct, the author makes great account of time, and the mighty changes which will be produced in the lapse of countless ages, and thus rebuts the argument against his theory that is so obviously furnished from the fixed unaltered characters of organization that have prevailed throughout the entire modern epoch. This he argues is merely a point, an infinitesimal fraction, when compared with the epochs of geology. The eye detects not the changes which all specific forms are slowly but unceasingly undergoing within limited portions of time, even as the nicest instruments cannot always enable the astronomer to note the changes of position among the heavenly bodies. Hence theappearanceof so many of the stars as unchangingly fixed in their relations to each other. The whole solar system, too, upon the ground of imperfect unrecording vision,seemsto be anchored in one portion of space. And hence likewise the argument against the motion of the earth itself, which so long prevailed, derived from the fact of there being no sensible parallax, and now so easily accounted for by the insignificant smallness of its orbit, as compared with the remoteness of the stars. Limited, in like manner, to the narrow field of observation afforded within the human period, the modifications of species and their transmutations into the higher grades of animals are not appreciable,becauseits six thousand years are as a moment, in comparison with those incalculable ages of geology which have been concerned in the phenomenon!
Thus does the author of the “Vestiges” revel amidst the sublimities and copious materials of his subject. Time and space, the elements of the astral heavens and the earth, are alike indefinitely in his grasp. That he has failed to frame a better system of things than the one we see actually around us, is a necessary consequence of the restraints imposed on human investigation. Facts will not be supplanted by any heights, or depths, or ingenuities of speculation. And as existing nature is all against the doctrine of transmutation and development, so the discoveries of geology through all its formations are equally opposed to such views of creation. A short sketch of both will abundantly illustrate this.
As to the course of living nature, the development theory is there at once repudiated in the now clearly established fact, that the first germinal vesicles are different in the different tribes of animals. A non-identity of type is discoverable in the minutest microscopical beginnings of organic life. And “by no change of conditions can two ova of animals of the same species be developed into different animal species; neither by any provision of identical conditions can two ova of different species be developed into animals of the same kind.” Corresponding to these differences in their fœtal forms, there are in all the stages toward parturition a similarity of progress in the various organs and appendages in the same kinds of animals. Fishes, birds, quadrupeds, all manifest a divergence from each other in the first action of the respirating organs—in the nervous system—and in all the apparatus connected with the movements of the heart and blood-vessels. There is no structural interchange, in the minutest part, that distinguishes the orders of the perfect animal in any of the antecedent fœtal conditions; the organic contrivances within the egg being as complete and as thoroughly prospective to the future use and habits of the bird, as are the petals of the flower inclosed within the bud, the arms of the giant oak within the acorn, or man in his evolving capacity toward intellectual being.
What is thus true in all the rudimentary stages of organic development is strikingly confirmed by the unalterable condition of all living nature. Plants and animals never diverge, beyond small ascertained limits, from the fixed characters of their families, resisting the effects of every kind of influence, whether proceeding from natural causes or human interference. The lapse of three thousand years has left the embalmed carcasses of men and animals, in Egypt, wrapped and swathed in a material woven from the same species of plants which still flourish on the banks of the Nile. The crocodile and the ibis still drink of its waters. Nothing changed in form or appearance, the swarthy Arab repairs to its cooling fountains to quench his thirst. Nature has been tortured in a thousand ways, to cause her to depart from her long beaten paths; but she is obdurate on every point. Man would improve her kinds, and hybrids are produced; but there the variety ends. Crosses are constantly attempted; but “the hitherto andno farther” is soon approached. Our fruit-bearing trees are coaxed with all the appliances of horticultural skill; and yet in all their seminal and floral organs, the texture of their leaves and bark, the structure of their roots and stem, the rudimentary stock remains one and the same. Domestication has, indeed, wrought wonderful changes and improvements in the breed of many creatures. Horses, oxen, sheep, pigs, dogs, and poultry of all sorts, are increased in bulk, tamed, ameliorated in habit and disposition. But the skeletons of all continue essentially as they were in their natural state; and even the individuals the most widely removed from the primitive type, as exemplified in the canine race, never present any real difference of form in the important organs.—When again abandoned to their own guidance, and the restraints imposed by man are removed, the domesticated animals, one and all, return to their former condition, and speedily resume the instincts and appearance of the jungle and the forest.
If such are the unvarying laws of physiology now, the presumption is that they have been the same in all past ages. Creatures are brought from the extremities of the earth—the polar, temperate, and tropical denizens, all mixed up and crossed with each other—food, climate, and treatment, all changed—and, through all, the type of every species continues as before—no transmutation of one kind into another under all the violent tutoring agencies to which they have been subjected. For thousands of years such has been the unswerving course of nature. Would it not clearly be a solecism in reasoning to argue differently over the geological epochs, however indefinite in extent, because, in the far-off regions of space, our eyes can note no change in the relative position of the stars? The things will not compare. Time and space are not co-ordinate terms. And an appeal from positive knowledge to supposed, assumed ignorance does not meet the question.
Meanwhile, the amplitude of the current epoch, if we may so speak, gives scope and verge enough for all the requirements of the problem to be solved, the conditions of the argument to be established, the process of reasoning to be employed. An experience not merely of six thousand years, but an experienceembracing a uniformity of results in all the hundreds of thousands of instances into which animate nature is divided, in all the countless species of plants and animals which have existed successively throughout the whole of that period, furnishes proof of such a cumulative kind as approaches, if not to demonstration, at least to the nearest possible degree of certainty. There is no instance of a single transmutation of a vegetable species into another species, of algæ into fuci or conversely, of grasses into cereals, of endogens into exogens, of the pine into the oak; and the same of animal species, where, through all the living tribes, the fixity of family law has maintained its steady, unchanging course since Adam gave names to them, down to the present hour. What link in the chain is wanting? The course of creation is verified and complete. The exception would be a miracle. And we are not at liberty, upon just principles of ratiocination, to refuse our assent, where all the facts, indefinite as to number, are exclusively on one side, and none upon the other. Our belief in the case is defined and restrained by the absolute uniformity of stubborn, unbending nature; and an appeal from the known to the unknown, from the human to the geological epochs, is just to relinquish reason for the dominion of imagination, the evidences of the senses for the visions of fancy. The shark, rapacious as ever, holds the empire of the seas—the lion, the domain of the forest—the eagle, the region of the air—and man, progressive man, alone looks unto the heavens and blesses his Maker.
Hume was so impressed with the force of this argument, as to maintain, upon the ground of it, the absolute impossibility of establishing the truth of a singlemiraculousevent, or of any event that did not harmonize with the existing course of nature. The Laws of Nature have been so uniform, within the entire range of human experience, as that no testimony or reasoning of man, says that subtile dialectitian, can invalidate their authority, or render credible any alleged case of discrepancy or of deviation.—The author of the “Vestiges,” for the first time, has cast the whole weight of this evidence aside, or holds it as even scarcely relevant in a question of proof. And thus outstripping, as he does, both the measure and the requirements of the Christian’sfaith, he may be safely left to the logic of its most merciless adversary in dealing with the phenomenal or imaginary transmutations of the geological epochs.
But the facts of geology, from its remotest periods, are in themselves no less strongly opposed to this extravagant, untenable hypothesis. This might be presumed from the distinct teachings of geology, as already stated, against the theory of a scale of beings becoming more perfect as we ascend from the faunas of the older to those of the newer formations. The families of the various formations are distinct, and consist of real non-interchanging forms of structure, whether they die out and disappear with a particular formation, or are carried forward and intermixed with the fossils of another. The fishes of the silurian rocks, are as perfect after their kind as those of the Devonian, Carboniferous, or Cretaceous deposits; and not less perfect than they are genuine types of all their successors. Thesauroidsof the old red sandstone have reptilian resemblances, but yet thesauriansof the oolite age have no affinities of true kindred descent; while, again, of all the mammalia of the tertiary period, there is not one that boasts a likeness, in habit or organization, to a single creature of an antecedent or posterior epoch. “Thus between thepalæotheriumand the species of our own days,” says Cuvier, “we should be able to discover some intermediate forms: and yet no such discovery has ever been made. Since the bowels of the earth have not preserved monuments of this strange genealogy, we have a right to conclude, that the ancient and now extinct species were as permanent in their forms and characters as those which exist at present: or at least, that the catastrophe which destroyed them did not leave sufficient time for the production of the changes that are alleged to have taken place.” Agassiz, in his own department of fishes, is equally opposed in all his deductions to the transformation of species from one formation to another, which he asserts, “the imagination invents with as much facility as the reason refutes.” Professor Owen, after minutely examining the organic structure of the nine orders of fossil reptiles, declares no less strongly against the theory, and adds—“The nearest approximation to the organization of fishes is made by theIchthyosaurus, an extinct genus which appears to have been introduced into theancient seas subsequent to the deposition of the strata inclosing the remains of the thecodont lizards. But by no known forms of the fossil animals can we diminish the wide interval which divides the most sauroid of fishes from anIchthyosaurus.”[12]
The development theory is not more at fault in the rudimentary structure and primitive size of animals, as brought to light by the deepest researches of geology, than it is in the perfection and complication of the several organs with which they were endowed. These organs in the earlier types ought, upon the principles of this theory, to have all partaken of the simplicity and sameness of the germinal vesicles; varying, indeed, in their complexity, as in their completeness, in proportion as we ascend among the fossiliferous strata. But the facts are not so. Nay, so far otherwise, that in the very earliest specimens of Nature’s workmanship we find the mechanism of the parts as minute, varied, and multiplied, as in those of her most recent productions. Examine the eye of the Trilobite, the oldest of crustaceans, and the distinguishing type of the lowest of the fossiliferous rocks. These creatures swarmed in the Silurian seas. Their destiny was not fulfilled by the close of the tertiary periods, for they still exist. But in none of her subsequent creations has Nature displayed greater elaboration in the parts, or more skillful adaptive contrivance in their arrangement, than in the visual organ of this palæozoic family. The eye of the trilobite is formed of four hundred spherical lenses, arranged in distinct compartments on the surface of the cornea, which again projects conically upward, so as to enable the animal while resting, or seeking its food at the bottom of the waters, to take in the largest possible field of view—this, as it might require, either for the purpose of defense or attack. Fishes, birds, and mammals, have all, it is well known, an optical apparatus precisely adjusted to their respective habits and the element in which they live. Fishes and fowls have their eyes differently constructed.—Thebat, which preys in the dark,—the eagle, which soars in the blaze of the sun,—and the mole, which burrows in the earth, have each peculiar and appropriate organisms. But in none is there greater complication or perfection, than what is manifested in the eye of these earliest and still living tribes of the waters.
The number of plates or cylinders which compose the eyes of insects, a higher and more gifted class, differs in different species, amounting in the ant, so provident and wise, to only fifty, in the house-fly to eight thousand, and in the mordella to the amazing number of twenty-five thousand and eighty-eight. And yet how much is all this surpassed by the astounding mechanism displayed in the eye of the cod-fish, in whose crystalline lens there have been detected about five million fibers, every fiber containing about twelve thousand five hundred teeth; and the total number of these teeth or processes reaching the numerical, though to us utterly inconceivable, amount of sixty-two billions five hundred thousand millions! But more than all this. Look at the multiplied appliances furnished to the humblest and lowest of all living creatures for performing the functions of an existence scarcely removed above the vegetable. “The tentacula of polypi,” says Dr. Roget, “are exquisitely sensible, and are frequently seen, either singly or altogether, bending their extremities toward the mouth, when any minute floating body comes in contact with them. When a polypi is expanded, a constant current of water is observed to take place, directed toward the mouth. These currents are never produced by the motions of the tentacula themselves; but are invariably the effects of the rapid vibrations of the cilia placed on the tentacula. Now, of these organs a singleflustra foliacæahas been calculated to possess about 400,000,000.” Thus much for the Zoophyte class of animals—placed on the extreme verge of organized bodies—and members of a system of being, according to the development theory, whose primitive productions are of the simplest kind, the monads of a germinating vesicle!
Nor will the development theory do better, when it would account for the diversity of instincts which prevail in the animal kingdom. The instincts, indeed, it assumes as the cause of all their diversity of structural organization. But this is to beg thewhole question. Geology carries us back to the beginnings of organic life, when animals, each after their kind, were already perfected, and endowed with a ready-made apparatus for the particular sphere of existence assigned them. The polypi are still a distinct race, unvarying in their instincts, not the least improved in the building art, still piling up reefs, and doing the same thing which they did when first created. The nautilus has lived through all time, swimming his fragile bark as dextrously over the Silurian seas as he now does amidst the breakers of the Pacific. The cephalopoda and the finny tribes then warred against each other, and ever since they meet in mortal conflict. The same with all the great families which were successively brought upon the stage: species and genera have changed, the old withdrawn, and new ones introduced; but in their respective orders—reptiles, insects, birds, and quadrupeds—the type ever continues, and the instincts remain; and there is no nearer an approximation to or crossing of each other’s domains now, than when first summoned into being. Were the development theory true in nature, and the epochs of geology the myriads of ages assumed, the presumption would be, that the old primitive forms would have been all obliterated and figures of creatures substituted, all of the most remote and indistinct analogies. Themonodalraces, why have they not all passed away? Had the reptiles sprung from fishes, why, upon the principle of progression, should there be fishes still? Had man derived his parentage from the monkey, why are there so many species of the one class, and only a single great family of the other? The vegetable tribes have been equally true to their kind—the fucoids and algæ, still abundant in the seas—the pines of Mar forest, rivaling in coniferous qualities the most gigantic of the oldest relics—and the palms and fern trees of Australia maintaining the very types that flourished in the carboniferous era.
The scheme of creation, moreover, implied in the development theory, proceeds, as it appears to us, upon an inconsistency of assumption that is completely at variance with its own leading cardinal principle, namely, a continuous progression from the less to the more perfect forms of organic existence. If this be true with theparticulars, why not also in thegeneralsof all that is endowed with the mystery of life? Every great type or class ofbeing, whose remains are detected in the most ancient rocks of the earth, has still its representatives in living nature. The two ends of the chain, the infusorial and mammalian families, are still produced distinct, and each perfect after its kind. The course of creation is thus always, through indefinite time, returning upon itself like the fallacy in dialectics of reasoning in a circle, instead of advancing from the successively higher standards of the perfected models to still more varied and perfect degrees of excellence. The circumstances and conditions, too, of the planet are different from what they were in the palæozoic times, and yet the tribes developed then are all developed still; different in the species and genera, but of the same forms and families; not larger, but more frequently less, in size, and not of better or more complex workmanship. The principle is, therefore, inconsistent with itself, while it leaves unexplained its own assumption of progression inoneparticular direction only, instead, as it ought to be, in all the primitive types of organic existence. The theory is imperfect beside, in attempting no explanation of the inorganic structures of creation; for the original molecules of matter which assimilated, aggregated, and produced the primary rocks of granite, gneiss, schist, limestone, should have had their law in this direction as well as in the other, of progressive perfection. But these rocks, in no such sense as this, have been repeated or reproduced: matter, essentially the same, according to the theory of the “Vestiges,” whether organic or inorganic, has here retrograded rather than progressed; and if we would contemplate its most elaborate and beautiful forms, either igneous or sedimentary, we must go, not to the secondary and tertiary formations for our specimens, but to the crystalline groups of the primary epoch.
Whatever it may have been with Lamarck, it is certain, in the case of the author of the “Vestiges,” that the speculations originating in the nebular hypothesis lie at the foundation of all his philosophy. This Essay would never have been executed, as it could not even have been imagined, but for the data so abundantly supplied by a universal star-dust lettering, filling all space and inscribed over all time. But change the names, and it is only the atoms of Democritus and the vortices of Descartes that constitutethe elements, one and all, of the modern cosmogony. Cicero in his first and second books “De Natura Deorum,” has given a full and ample refutation of the former; and his merit is the greater, when it is considered that the inductive methods of philosophizing were not in use nor even guessed at in his time. The argument, as quaintly translated in Ray’s “Wisdom of Creation,” is thus stated—“If the works of nature are better, more exact and perfect, than the works of art, and art effects nothing without reason, neither can the works of nature be thought to be effected without reason; for is it not absurd and incongruous, that when thou beholdest a statue or curious picture, thou shouldst acknowledge that art was used to the making of it; or, when thou seest the course of a ship upon the waters thou shouldst not doubt but the motion of it is regulated and directed by reason and art; or, when thou considerest asun-dialorclock, thou shouldst understand presently, that the hours are shown by art and not by chance; and yet imagine or believe, that the world, which comprehends all these arts and artificers, was made without counsel or reason? If one should carry into Scythia or Britain such a sphere as our friend Posidonius lately made, each of whose conversions did the same thing in the sun and moon and other five planets, which we see effected every night and day in the heavens, who among those barbarians would doubt that that sphere was composed by reason and art?”
The inhabitants of this island are no longer the “barbarians.” The Scythians still are so, and have ever been. Upon the development hypothesis, might we not pause to ask, has our intellectual, and moral, and social progress affected our physical condition so as in aught to change the organic relation of the two nations, barbarous both in the time of Cicero?
But we proceed:—“A wonder then it must needs be,” continues the philosopher, “that there should be any man found so stupid and forsaken of reason, as to persuade himself that this most beautiful and adorned world was or could be produced by the fortuitous concourse of atoms. He that can prevail with himself to believe this, I do not see why he may not as well admit, that if there were made innumerable figures of the one-and-twenty letters,—in gold suppose or any other metal,—and these well shaken and mixedtogether, and thrown down from some high place to the ground, they, when they lighted upon the earth, would be so disposed and ranked, that a man might see and read in them Ennius’s Annals; whereas, it were a great chance if he should find one verse thereof among them all: for if this concourse of atoms could make awhole world, why may it not sometimes make, and hath it not somewhere or other in the earth made, a temple, or a gallery, or a portico, or a house, or a city? which yet it is so far from doing, and every man so far from believing, that should any one of us be cast, suppose upon a desolate island, and find there a magnificent palace, artificially contrived according to the exactest rules of architecture, and curiously adorned and furnished, it would never once enter into his head that this was done by an earthquake, or the fortuitous shuffling together of its component materials, or that it had stood there ever since the construction of the world, or first cohesion of atoms; but would presently conclude that there had been some intelligent architect there, the effect of whose art and skill it was. Or, should he find there but one single sheet of parchment or paper, an epistle or oration written full of profound sense, expressed in proper and significant words, illustrated and adorned with elegant phrase,—it were beyond the possibility of the wit of man to persuade him that this was done by the temerarious dashes of an unguided pen, or by the rude scattering of ink upon the paper, or by the lucky projection of so many letters at all adventures; but he would be convinced, by the evidence of the thing at first sight, that there had been not only some man, but some scholar, there.”
Now, here let there be but the substitution of a few terms—“fortuitous concourse” for the “nucleated vesicle”—“atoms” that whirl in mazy dance through indefinite time, for the “stardust” revolving through infinite space—“transmutation of species” for “the lucky projection of so many letters”—and the overthrow of the one hypothesis is as ruinously complete as the demolition of the other.
Thus geology, while it reveals a succession of animal types, pronounces each after its kind perfect in its own degree and measure of organic development. The oldest known fossil fish(the Onchus Murchisoni, and inhumed in the lowest fossiliferous beds), belongs to the highest type of the Cestraciont division of the vertebrata. What they were made at first, they all vindicate their capacity of continuing to the end. The various tribes and orders had their own limits of organization, their own sphere within which the functions of each were to be performed, and adapted to the condition in which they were placed, each reaped the full enjoyment that divine benevolence had appointed. Man was the last in the course of successive creation, endowed with the highest and most enlarged capacities, and, allied to none, was constituted the priest of nature, that he might collect the silent praises of the universe, and offer them to the Creator in intelligent devotion.
But here it is, when we have reached this link of the chain, that the most vitiating element in the whole doctrine of progressive development is manifested. The anti-theism and materialism, involved inevitably and undisguisedly in the noxious dogma, are brought out in bold relief. This dogma implies, that the cosmical arrangements and all the organic transmutations of living types, are none of them directly the result of any personal, immediate creative actings on the part of Deity. These arrangements, from the beginning, are all dependent on one unchanging law, applicable alike to organic and inorganic bodies, to the mysterious principle of life, and to things inanimate,—to mind as to matter. The simple effect of this may appear to be, the removal of the Creator merely a step farther from his own works, which he can still hold in the hollow of his hand, and bend whither He will. But the statement goes a great deal farther. It strikes directly at the root of all moral distinctions as well as of all revealed truth. The creature man, upon this hypothesis, the last link in the terrestrial chain, comes not from his Maker’s hands “made in his own likeness.” He too is the product of a natural law, evolved after a long series of metamorphoses, to whose operation the moral and the physical are equally subject,—the soul and the body alike the result of its rigid inflexible agency. Front the fire-mist and electro-nebulous matter, which is assumed to have originally filled all space, Man, along with suns and stars, and all planetary bodies, derived the first germ of his being. At first gaseous, itbecame in process of time concrete. There was no life until the electric spark, struck in some mysterious way from the dance of atoms and wild whirl of the elements, vivified the germ with this newly-developed principle. Then the germinal vesicle became a self-moving, self-acting thing—not at first, but after a series of changes, adapted into the type of the human family, whose life was but the life for ages of the animals that have perished, and are now fossilized in their various formations.The principle of life, in short, as implied in this account of its origin, is the same essentially with the light and heat that sparkle and glow in the rolling orbs which deck the firmament!
Much of the development theory is built upon the influence of the instincts as manifested in the lower tribes. Let its abettors listen to the indignant cry ofthe whole family of managainst this theory of his origin; and say, if there is not an instinct here, peculiar and distinct, to vindicate his claim to a separate and distinct position in the great system of being. “Quanta ad eam rem vis,” says Cicero, “ut in suo quoque genere permaneat.”
The continental philosophy, at no time for the last century, has partaken of a religious, healthy tone. It has been profoundly subtile in its speculations and analysis, but never truly spiritual. The author of the “Vestiges,” from his own turn of mind, has been all the more enamored of it, and, unwittingly dragged into its vortex, has been carried far beyond the ken of all rightful philosophies. These are not the subjects of legitimate investigation. Man has no plummet-line, in all his armory of science, wherewith to sound them. Grant that in the manner now described, the human race originated, and became living creatures—destined, it may be, to undergo new changes and to ascend into new orders of being—the animal nature to be perfected in the progressive modifications of his type. But the divine ethereal spark, as men vulgarly dream of themselves, what account is given of this? The soul, what? and whence derived? The thinking principle of mind,—where its place, and what provision made for its efflux, in the nebulous ether? The inference unquestionably is, that if such be its source, the humanunderstandingmust be of the essence of matter out of which it evolved,—glorious as the sun and fair as the moon,—but not the heavenly element, animatewith the immaterial, incorruptible being of Divinity. But this is not the teaching of geology. Through all the story of its undefinable epochs, and in the myriad sarcophagi of its extinct generations, there is no record, no trace of man. He stands, utterly and far apart, from every fossilized thing, while—
“The most distant star’s invisible beam,Or comet on his farthest journeyings,Or all the extent which philosophic kenHas given to infinite space, the elastic soulSprings over”——
“The most distant star’s invisible beam,Or comet on his farthest journeyings,Or all the extent which philosophic kenHas given to infinite space, the elastic soulSprings over”——
“The most distant star’s invisible beam,Or comet on his farthest journeyings,Or all the extent which philosophic kenHas given to infinite space, the elastic soulSprings over”——
“The most distant star’s invisible beam,
Or comet on his farthest journeyings,
Or all the extent which philosophic ken
Has given to infinite space, the elastic soul
Springs over”——
and claims kindred with the image of the heavenly, whence it came, and whither it seeks and aspires to return.
While, therefore, to wild speculations like these nature and geology give no countenance, but demonstrate the reverse to have been the course of creation in all the present, and in every past epoch,—that races, like individuals, have their terms of existence,—that all die out or are violently exterminated,—and that new families are created, adapted to the changes which have taken place, and organically distinct from all that preceded them,—there is, at the same time, a theory of progression and development distinctly traceable in all the divine actings in this world. This view of things is in every stage of it visibly dependent upon His will, as it emanates directly from His appointment, and stands in pleasing contrast to the rationalist phasis of creation.
“Wisdom’s artful aimDisposing every part, and gaining stillBy means proportioned, her benignant end.”
“Wisdom’s artful aimDisposing every part, and gaining stillBy means proportioned, her benignant end.”
“Wisdom’s artful aimDisposing every part, and gaining stillBy means proportioned, her benignant end.”
“Wisdom’s artful aim
Disposing every part, and gaining still
By means proportioned, her benignant end.”