The Strange Adventures of a Pebble

by Hallam Hawksworth

CHAPTER XII

(DECEMBER)

"A fire-mist and a planet,

A crystal and a cell,

A jelly fish and a saurian

And caves where the cavemen dwell;

Then a sense of law and beauty

And a face turned from the clod—

Some call it Evolution,

And others call it God."

—William Herbert Carruth.

THE END OF THE WORLD

So the Ice Ages and their glaciers and the Romans and their Cæsars melted away. We know them only by the marks they left on the walls of time. But why this constant doing and undoing of things? We have seen it going on from the very beginning; rock crumbling to dust, dust changing back to rock; rocks raised up into mountains, mountains worn down to plains; then more mountains, and on through the same cycle of endless change; as if always starting the whole thing over again.

What is it all about? Are we getting anywhere? If so, where?

Ever since men looked out upon the world around them and began to think, they have puzzled not only about the causes but the purpose of this endless drama of creation and decay. Some said one thing; some said another. The Persian poet who wrote those fine lines about the lion and the lizard in the ruins of the palaces meant to say that's all that everything comes to; all things, men included, return to the elements of which they were made and that's the end of them. So, said he, what's the use of bothering one's head about it? There's nothing to be learned. One verse of his famous song reads like this:

"Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and saint, and heard great argument

About it and about; but evermore

Came out by the same door wherein I went."

But Science, as we shall now see, has a better answer.

I. Nothing Happens

In the first place you must have noticed as we came along through this little book that nothing happens in this world of ours; everything is under a government of laws. Not only did it turn out that there was method in the apparent madness of the sea but we found method everywhere. It was not chance that made our worlds, whether they were born full-grown or grew up piece by piece. And we see the same forces at work in small things as in the great. The force that keeps the earth in its orbit is just as careful to catch and plant the tiny seeds of the grasses and the pine-trees drifting forward in the wind, so keeping the world clothed with life and verdure.

ALL NATURE UNDER A GOVERNMENT OF LAW

So with the seasons with all that they mean in the life of the world; spring never fails to follow winter. Little things happen that make spring "late," as we say; but spring itself never fails to come and always in its right place in the procession of the year. All this because the earth stays in its orbit and spins on its axis. Watches break their mainsprings, clocks run down. These things "happen"; but we never think of saying that the mainspring or the wheels "happened," or that they "happened" into their places in the watch. The worlds not only make their appointed round as regularly as the wheels of a watch but they never run down, and the power that keeps them going and in their places never breaks. If it ever occurred in any other way—if we should hear of a world flying out of its orbit and going banging around among the other worlds, we could talk of "happening."

NATURE'S ACCIDENT INSURANCE SYSTEM

We might call these laws that make it so certain that nature's business will go on as usual, rain or shine, the Accident Insurance of the Universe. We have nothing quite like it in human insurance systems; for these only make it up to you—the best they can—after some accident has happened. Nature's insurance system, on the other hand, makes it certain that nothing will happen to change the main course of things. The protective insurance of the universe is woven right through Nature itself. The continents, for example, were bound, in due course, to rise in their places, because it is the nature of cooling masses to shrink and for the outside to cool the faster and to harden and to wrinkle up. It doesn't matter whether the cooling mass is a little baked apple or a big hot earth.

THE CLOCK OF THE AGES

By representing the great geologic periods of time in the form of a clock-face a writer in the Scientific American enables us to form a rough conception of their duration, their distinguishing features, and their relations to one another, according to ideas associated with the theory of La Place, but which have been considerably modified in the light of later reasoning and investigation. The view now generally accepted, for example, is that the Azoic era was longer than all subsequent time. But, taking the picture as it stands, each "hour" represents 3,000,000 years. For a quarter of the total period up to the very recent appearance of man "there was darkness upon the face of the deep." Next after the Azoic was the Laurentian Period, when "the dry land appeared." Later came the dawn of life, and this life, like the inanimate matter which preceded it, kept rising and continues to rise, as the ages pass, to higher, more beautiful, and nobler forms.

Nor was it an accident that the continents in their original form grew larger with the fat of the land that was added to them under the action of the chemistry of the air. You see Nature must understand chemistry or things wouldn't come out right in the laboratory, as they always do if you have made no mistakes. Ever think of that, Mr. High School Boy?

II. The Strangest Thing of All That Didn't Happen

But the strangest thing of all that didn't happen in this history of the world and its making I'm going to tell you about now.

KINSHIP OF KITTENS AND APPLE-TREES

You remember what I said of the apple-tree in [Chapter V] ([page 93]), how nobody who didn't know it to be true would believe that little Miss Greenleaf and old Mr. Root and rough Mr. Bark and lovely Miss Blossom were not only born under the same roof but were as closely related as a pussy-cat and her nest full of kittens. I didn't mention the kittens then, but just suppose I had done so; and then had gone on to say that kittens are relations of the apple family and that all birds are related to all kittens, and that both are kindred of that terrible Mr. Cetiosaurus that we met in the Bad Lands of Dakota.

Would you have believed it?

No? Well, I don't wonder. It was quite a while before the wise men of science believed it. Now not only is this idea of the origin of all living things—animal and vegetable—universally accepted by men of science, but every educated person is supposed to know about it. It is always, and as a matter of course, put into the school-books dealing with the history of nature; just as in all histories we are sure to see Columbus landing in 1492 and George Washington being inaugurated April 30, 1789.

Most people, including the scientists, used to think that each kind of plant and animal was given its present form in the first place and that this form had never changed. This was known as the "special creation" theory; while the idea that the various kinds of plants and animals we now know gradually developed from quite different forms is called the theory of "evolution." Among the curious facts that finally led educated people everywhere to believe this strangest of all the strange fairy tales of the land of science were these:

AS WE READ THE ROCKS FROM THE BOTTOM UP

The remains and imprints of plant and animal life of long ago which we find in the rocks show successions of related but different forms in the rocks of different ages. At the beginning in the lowest rocks the forms are much alike, but grow more and more unlike as we climb these stairs of time. At first there are no animals with backbones; then there come animals with backbones that resemble each other in general build; and finally such wide varieties of backboned creatures as fish, birds, horses, and men. And so with endless varieties of birds and beasts and creeping things and the trees and the grasses of the field.

Sometimes the differences between these apparently related forms, as we find them in the rocks, are very great; but everything goes to show that this is because there are missing pages, so to speak, in the great stone book. When you remember how long it takes to make one of these layers of stone, and what they go through in cracking and twisting and wearing down on their way back to dust and the sea, and how quickly the remains of big animals—to say nothing of plants and insects—are destroyed, you must agree that the wonder is that we have any records at all. Yet so enormous has been the number of plants and animals that have died in the course of the world's history that there have been found hundreds and thousands of these remains and imprints between the layers of stone. In all cases the fashions in form change from age to age; and the longer the time, as shown by the thickness of the rock, the greater the change.

THE RABBIT THAT TURNED INTO A HORSE

The horse, which has been such a faithful carrier for man since man and horse arrived from the lower ranges of life, also brought with him on the way up one of the most complete of these strange autobiographies that our brother animals have recorded with their bones. The most of this story of the horse was found in the rocks of our Western States, but the first chapter of it saw the light about forty years ago in England. When the bones were found in the rock deposits of that country known as London Clay they looked so unhorselike that a famous paleontologist (as the students of these ancient anatomies are called) gave it a name which means "rabbit-like beast." But in rock of the same age in Wyoming they afterward found the bones of an animal that looked a little more like a horse, but plainly a close relation of the rabbit-like beast. They went on finding different forms, through thirteen successive stages of rock history, and with each new period the form kept getting larger and more horselike until they came to a horse with three toes; and finally to one with the single big toe which we call a hoof. Instead of the other two toes there were those two little lumps that you can feel in any horse's foot just above the hoof. These are the ends of two small splintlike bones that are all there is left of the other two toes.

So there have been found in the rock records more or less complete serial stories of thousands of plants and animals. In the case of man, not only do we find that there were once human beings on earth like the caveman with low forehead and huge jaw, but nothing has ever been found to indicate that there were any higher types of human beings in existence in his day. And both the caveman and the handsomest human beings of to-day—the captain of our football team, for example—have essentially the same bodily framework as the monkey tribe. This does not mean that man—even so low a creature as the caveman—descended from monkeys, any more than the fact that he has a backbone means he descended from humming-birds. But the backbones in humming-birds, monkeys, and men show that all are descended from older types of backboned creatures. As monkeys and men are much more alike than men and birds they are evidently more closely related.

We might suppose, to be sure, that men and all other forms of life which they resemble in any way were so made from the beginning; that is, if we hadn't learned from the records of the rocks that they weren't so made from the beginning. Yet, even after that, we might go on supposing that each species was created separately, but that the form was changed from age to age. But in that case what are you going to say to this:

In man's body are several organs that are useless and often harmful. Other animals, also, contain among useful organs some that are "out-of-date," as we would say if we were speaking of some old machines in a machine-shop. Why, in making a brand-new species, shouldn't Nature have all the latest improvements from the start, just as man does in building a brand-new home? If each species was separately created it is hard to understand why these useless or harmful organs should be kept; but if one species grew out of another, by gradual improvement, just as cities grow out of villages, this is exactly what we might expect.

One of these useless organs in man is called the "vermiform appendix." It is always getting its name in the papers by giving trouble to some prominent man. Now this appendix, while a perfect nuisance to human beings, is just the thing for cows and other grass-eating animals. In them it is very large and of great use in digestion, while in the case of man and the monkey family it has shrunk into a little affair that puts in all its time either doing nothing or getting out of fix.

III. Upward; Always Upward

These are some of the reasons why the various varieties of animals are supposed to have descended from common ancestors and to have undergone endless changes of form; changes as strange as anything that was ever written into a fairy story or acted out in a Christmas pantomime. There are other things quite as convincing and even more thrilling to read about, such as the little theatre in the chicken's egg where strange, changing shadows re-enact the drama of ancient life; but these I am here passing by because my pages are running out and I want the rest of them to speak of what seems to me to be the greatest lesson of this whole book; the greatest and most useful and happiest lesson Science or any kind of book can teach; namely, that not only is the universe governed by Laws and Mind, but that all these laws act together as one Great Law and are working out one general result, the constant advance of all things toward a higher life.

HOW MAN HAS RISEN AS HE DESCENDED

As there was a period in human history when there were no human beings on earth higher than the cave-dweller, so there was a time when the highest forms of animal and vegetable life were minute creatures and plants consisting only of a single cell. It is such low forms of vegetable life that make the scum on the still waters of a pond. Step by step, in both the animal and vegetable world, rose the higher forms. The descent of man from lower forms of life used to be considered by many people as a thought that degraded humanity, but it is the most promising fact in all nature. The striking thing is, not that we are related in some way to the apes and the cavemen but that such a creature as an ape or a caveman should have helped develop such a beautiful thing as a little child.

This progress has not been steadily upward. The world of life, like the surface of the globe itself, has had its ups and downs. Wonderful nations like Greece and Rome have risen and flourished and passed away, but they left the best of themselves, the part that time cannot destroy. The Greeks taught us literature and art and the grace of life. The Romans gave us a science of government and a solid way of doing practical things, such as the building of good roads and bridges. The great lesson of history is that civilization and human liberty and all the things that make life worth living have not only survived the fall of empires but stand to-day on higher and firmer ground than they ever did before.

THE WORLD THAT MOTHER MADE

But do you know who was at the bottom of it all? Mother! All the things that men have done in the development of national life, with its arts and industries, everything we call civilization, grew out of the life and industry of the home, and it was mother who finally made the home. The mother idea came into the world with the first seed that ever started out to make its own way; for the mother plant had provided it with food enough to keep it going until it could get well-established in business. But the kind of mothers we know, mothers who stay with their babies and feed them, came very late in the long story of life. In the early days the world was not only without flowers and birds and the beautiful trees and varied landscapes we know, but it was motherless, in the sense that we understand mothers. In the lowest forms of life, such as the insects, the mothers and children never saw each other at all; for among the insects just as it is to-day the mother simply laid the eggs and then, before the little insects were born, passed away. Even among the fish, who are much closer relations of ours than the insects—since fish belong to the great brotherhood of the backbone—the sense of motherhood doesn't get beyond looking after the eggs. So with the next higher group to which the frogs belong; and the next, the reptiles. Only with the birds, the next group above the reptiles, do we begin to see what motherhood means. Then at the very top of the list come the class of animals whose very name has "mamma" in it; the "mammalia." Among these, even outside the human race, we find very striking examples of family love and devotion. The gorillas, for instance, although they haven't what one would call an attractive face, are good to their folks. Not only does Mamma Gorilla nurse her babies and carry them in her arms much as a human mother does, and fight and die for them, but a famous African traveller tells of a Mamma Gorilla who stayed safe with the babies in their humble home of sticks in the fork of a tree while Papa Gorilla sat all night at the foot of it, with his back against the trunk, to protect them from a leopard that had been seen prowling around.

Among most animals below man the babies are soon able to leave mother and shift for themselves, but in the case of human beings the baby is helpless for a much longer time. So, even among the lowest savages, it was necessary for father and mother to keep together and look after their children. Thus grew up family life; and out of the family the tribe; and out of many tribes living together and closely related, grew first small and then larger nations. Yet, always at the beginning, it was the mother, more than the father, who looked after the children and taught them, so bringing before the world the idea of doing things, not for one's self alone but for others. From this came the mutual giving and helping which made national life possible, and that is making this a better and better world to live in.

IV. The Great Unseen

So it is very plain not only that the end, the purpose of all this machinery and march of things that we have been going through since the beginning of [Chagter I], is to make life better, more beautiful both in form and character, but to show that "all nature is on the side of those who try to rise."[59] It is plain also that this end must have been foreseen and intended from the beginning; for, from the very start each change in the world and in life was a preparation for another and a greater change. The change from rock to soil made plant life possible; the growth of plants made animal life possible, and so on up through the long succession of changes in this tree of life by which all things are related and which gave us the infinite variety of good things we already have—fruit, homes, churches, schools, art galleries, books, railroads and steamships that make the whole world neighbors; the telegraph, the newspapers, and the magazines that carry thought and knowledge and plans for the common good so fast and far that already it is as if a whole nation with its millions had a heart and brain in common.

[59] Drummond: "The Ascent of Man."

Man himself, you see, has become one of the great forces of nature in the evolution of nature, in the blossoming out and fruit-bearing of things. But now notice this: Back of all that man does and all that the rest of nature does is the great controlling force called Mind; and this Mind is invisible. If I should say of some great man that he had a powerful mind you would know just what I meant; but if anybody should ask "What did his mind look like?" you would think that was an odd question, wouldn't you?

From the painting by Burne-Jones

THE FIRST DAY OF CREATION

THE MYSTERIOUS PRINCESS HIDDEN IN THE BUD

So it is and has been from the beginning. We can see the results of changes of one thing into another but never just how the changing is done. While it is no longer believed that species were given a certain form in the beginning and that they have always kept that form, it is still true that each species comes into being from some unseen cause—"all of a sudden," as it were. Because species thus seem to vary of themselves, and not for any reason that we can see these changes are called "spontaneous variations." Always back of the material nature we can see is a nature that is not material; a part of nature that, like the mind of man, we can neither see nor hear nor feel nor know by any of our five senses. Some Unseen Power forms the baby plant out of the seed; some power changes the leaves hidden away in the bud into the petals of the flower. When the leaves gather to form the bud, like little hands playing "button, button, who's got the button," where do you suppose the flower is? It isn't. It has not yet begun to be. But soon, as if some magician had waved his wand and said "Presto! Change!" the pink petals begin to form there in the dark of the cup and, first thing we know, out steps Miss Blossom, all in her pink and gold like a princess dressed for a ball!

But always hidden in a mystery these changes take place. We can peep into the growing bud as often as we like and we will never catch the fairies making the dress, nor the princess putting it on. We always see the thing after it is done!

WONDERFUL ART BUT WHERE IS THE ARTIST?

Another thing: How do the fairies of Roseland remember every spring just how a rose looked, when the roses of last year have been dead and gone so long? You see they work without a model, something great artists seldom do; and in some kinds of work, as busts and portraits and landscapes, never do at all. Even the most powerful microscope doesn't show any pattern in the seed for the seed to go by in growing into the finished plant; or in an egg to tell it what kind of a bird it is expected to be. No, not the trace of a pattern. What then, guides the growth of the seed; of an oak, say, so that it finally and always takes the family form? Some Power, evidently, as intelligent as the power that moves the hand of the human artist when he paints that oak into his landscape. How many of us have stopped to think that not only in the world of mind but in the material world itself, all forms of power are as invisible as the fairies that work unseen in the rosebud and the little birds' egg and the big rock? All power—what we call steam power, wind power, electric power and the rest—are not only unseen but unseeable, unfeelable, untastable. We know steam power only when heat gets into the water and makes steam; electric power only when it gets into a wire or a dynamo; or, passing by unseen ways through the air, moves the wireless telegraph receiver; gravity power only when it moves something as the water of a waterfall; or when it is helping to hold things—the earth and the other worlds—in their appointed paths.

HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY

You can easily see why evolution is the most talked about of all phases of science—of the study of this wonderful world we live in. One reason is it's such an astonishing thing in itself, this relationship of all forms of life, trees, kittens, birds, and everything; another reason is that in reading the books on evolution you're taken into every field of knowledge and into the most curious and striking aspect of things in those fields. Could anything be stranger, for example, than a little theatre in a chicken's egg, over which pass strange shadowy forms that seem to retell, in a kind of moving picture show, the story of how one form of life developed out of another?

Drummond's "Ascent of Man" tells about that and covers the whole subject of evolution. It is one of the books which no one who has heard of this wonderful story of life should fail to read. Doctor Drummond's way of telling the story is very attractive. Readers from the Eighth Grade up to the Eightieth will delight in it, and they won't stop until they read it from cover to cover. I'll guarantee that!

Then take such a book as "The World of Life," by Wallace. "Alice in Wonderland" is nothing to it. Here are some of the things you will find in it:

How there got to be different kinds of rabbits and what islands have to do with it.

(Islands are almost as prominent in the story of evolution as they are in the story of adventure. There are Robinson Crusoes until you can't rest!)

How the pig in the struggle of life won out as usual.

Why the peacock has such a fine tail and how he overdid it.

How the elephant saved his life by lengthening his nose.

How the birds traded their teeth for feathers.

How shelled creatures coiled and uncoiled their shells.

Why we miss the "missing links." (As you go into this subject of evolution you will hear a good deal about missing links.)

How they know butterfly wings are made first and the coloring and patterns laid on afterward.

How much of a butterfly's beauty is probably known to the butterflies themselves.

How Nature seems to make things just to be pretty.

And these are just a few of the things in one of Doctor Wallace's books.[60]

[60] In addition to all this curious and absolutely reliable information that ought to be interesting to every one is the fact that Wallace shows in "The World of Life" how there must have been Mind and Purpose back of it all. Doctor Wallace was a great traveller as well as a great student of nature—one of the most famous in the history of science. His works include: "Travels on the Amazon and the Rio Negro," "The Malay Archipelago," "Natural Selection," "Darwinism," "Island Life and the Geographic Distribution of Animals."

There are so many books on this biggest of all nature topics—Evolution—that they make quite a library in themselves. The most famous of these books is Darwin's "Origin of Species," and it is not at all hard to understand. Other books bearing directly or indirectly on evolution are "Animals of the Past," by Lucas, "Creatures of Other Days," by Hutchinson, Fiske's "Destiny of Man," and "Evolution and Religion." A book for older readers—one of the latest and most comprehensive treatments of the subject—is Osborn's "Origin and Evolution of Life."

Then he was such a fine man personally. Why, what do you think he did? Although he thought out the principle of evolution independently of Darwin, and wrote an essay on it before Darwin had ever given his views to the world, yet after Darwin's "Origin of Species"[61] came out Wallace gave Darwin all the credit, and in his own autobiography always referred to the theory of evolution as the "Darwinian Theory." Yet Wallace had a very good reason for taking this generous attitude, as you will see from his autobiography and other writings, and you are quite likely to find the reason in articles on Darwin or Wallace or Evolution.

[61] Of "The Origin of Species" it has been said that no work ever produced so profound a change in the opinions of mankind.

The relations of Darwin and Wallace furnish one of the finest examples in history of the best thing in the world—human friendship.

Of course, like so many other great men, Wallace was one of those boys whose minds never grow old. Read in his autobiography how on the day he first discovered a new species of butterfly it gave him a violent headache, and he had to go to bed to get rid of it and quiet his nerves—he was that worked up!

Darwin was much the same sort of a man. Everything in the world was interesting to him. He wrote a whole book about "Fish Worms," for example. And although probably the most famous man in the history of natural science he was as humble as could be, always looking for the truth and ready to accept criticisms no matter how much they might upset his own previous conclusions, provided these opposing views were supported by evidence. Of course you will want to know more about his life, and you will find more in the "Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," edited by his son.

How do you suppose this boy began being a great man—by collecting beetles! Beetles and outdoor sport were his chief delight.