The Foot-prints of the Creator

by Hugh Miller

HIGH STANDING OF THE PLACOIDS.—OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.

We have seen that some of the Silurian Placoids were large of size: the question still remains, Were they high in intelligence and organization?

The Edinburgh Reviewer, in contending with the author of the “Vestiges,” replies in the affirmative, by claiming for them the first place among fishes. “Taking into account,” he says, “the brain and the whole nervous, circulating, and generative systems, they stand at the highest point of a natural ascending scale.” They are fishes, he again remarks, that rank among “the very highest types of their class.”

“The fishes of this early age, and of all other ages previous to the Chalk,” says his antagonist, in reply, “are, for the most part, cartilaginous. The cartilaginous fishes—Chondropterygii of Cuvier—are placed by that naturalist as a second series in his descending scale; being, however, he says, ‘in some measure parallel to the first.’ How far this is different from their being the highest types of the fish class, need not be largely insisted upon. Linnæus, again, was so impressed by the low characters of many of this order, that he actually ranked them with worms. Some of the cartilaginous fishes, nevertheless, have certain peculiar features of organization, chiefly connected with reproduction, in which they excel other fish; but such features are partly partaken of by families in inferior sub-kingdoms, showing that they cannot truly be regarded as marks of grade in their own class. When we look to the great fundamental characters particularly to the framework for the attachment of the muscles, what do we find?—why, that of these Placoids,—‘the highest types of their class,’—it is barely possible to establish their being vertebrata at all, the back-bone having generally been too slight for preservation, although the vertebral columns of later fossil fishes are as entire as those of any other animals. In many of them traces can be observed of the muscles having been attached to the external plates, strikingly indicating their low grade as vertebrate animals. The Edinburgh Reviewer ‘highest types of their class’ are in reality a separate series of that class, generally inferior, taking the leading features of organization of structure as a criterion, but when details of organization are regarded, stretching farther, both downward and upward, than the other series; so that, looking at one extremity, we are as much entitled to call them the lowest, as the Reviewer, looking at another extremity, is to call them the ‘highest of their class.’ Of the general inferiority there can be no room for doubt. Their cartilaginous structure is, in the first place, analogous to the embryonic state of vertebrated animals in general. The maxillary and intermaxillary bones are in them rudimental. Their tails are finned on the under side only,—an admitted feature of the salmon in an embryonic stage; and the mouth is placed on the under side of the head,—also a mean and embryonic feature of structure. These characters are essential and important, whatever the Edinburgh Reviewer may say to the contrary; they are the characters which, above all, I am chiefly concerned in looking to, for they are features of embryonic progress, and embryonic progress is the grand key to the theory of development.”

Such is the ingenious piece of special pleading which this most popular of the Lamarckians directs against the standing and organization of the earlier fishes. Let us examine it somewhat in detail, and see whether the slight admixture of truth which it contains serves to do aught more than to render current, like the gilding of a counterfeit guinea spread over the base metal, the amount of error which lies beneath. I know not a better example than that which it furnishes, of the entanglement and perplexity which the meshes of an artificial classification, when converted, in argumentative processes, into symbols and abstractions, are sure to involve subjects simple enough in themselves.

Fishes, according to the classification of a preponderating majority of the ichthyologists that have flourished from the earliest times down to those of Agassiz, have been divided into two great series, the Ordinary or osseous, and the Chondropterygii or cartilaginous. And these two divisions of the class, instead of being ranged consecutively in a continuous line, the one in advance of the other, have been ranged in two parallel lines, the one directly abreast of the other. There is this further peculiarity in the arrangement, that the line of the cartilaginous series, from the circumstance that some of its families rise higher and some sink lower in the scale than any of the ordinary fishes, outflanks the array of the osseous series at both ends. The front which it presents contains fewer genera and species than that of the osseous division; but, like the front of an army drawn out in single file, it extends along a greater length of ground. And to this long-fronted series of the cartilaginous, or, according to Cuvier, chondropterygian fishes, the Placoid families of Agassiz belong,—among the rest, the Placoids of the Silurian formations, Upper and Lower. But though all the Placoids of this latter naturalist be cartilaginous fishes, all cartilaginous fishes are not Placoids. The Sturionidæ are cartilaginous, and are, as such, ranked by Cuvier among the Chondropterygii, whereas Agassiz places them in his Ganoid order. Many of the extinct fishes, too, such as the Acanthodei, Dipteridæ, Cephalaspidæ, were, as we have seen, cartilaginous in their internal framework, and yet true Ganoids notwithstanding. The principle of Agassiz’s classification wholly differs from that of Cuvier and the older ichthyologists; for it is a classification founded, not on the character of the internal but on that of the cuticular or dermal skeleton. And while to the geologist it possesses great and obvious advantages over every other,—for of the earlier fishes very little more than the cuticular skeleton survives,—it has this further recommendation to the naturalist, that, (in so far at least as its author has been true to his own principles,) instead of anomalously uniting the highest and lowest specimens of their class,—the fishes that most nearly approximate to the reptiles on the one hand, and the fishes that sink furthest towards the worms on the other,—it gathers into one consistent order all the individuals of the higher type, distinguished above their fellows by their development of brain, the extensive range of their instincts, and the perfection of their generative systems. Further, the history of animal existences, as recorded in the sedimentary rocks of our planet, reads a recommendation of this scheme of classification which it extends to no other. We find that in the progress of creation the fishes began to be by groupes and septs, arranged according to the principle on which it erects its orders. The Placoids came first, the Ganoids succeeded them, and the Ctenoids and Cycloids brought up the rear. The march has been marshalled according to an appointed programme, the order of which it is peculiarly the merit of Agassiz to have ascertained.

Now, may I request the reader to mark, in the first place that what we have specially to deal with at the present stage of the argument are the Placoid fishes of the Silurian formations, Upper and Lower. May I ask him to take note, in the second, that the long-fronted chondropterygian series of Cuvier, though it includes, as has already been said, the Placoid order of Agassiz,—just as the red-blooded division of animals includes the bimana and quadrumana,—is no more to be regarded as identical with the Placoids, than the red-blooded animals are to be regarded as identical with the apes or with the human family. It simply includes them in the character of one of the three great divisions into which it has been separated,—the division ranged, if I may so express myself, on the extreme right of the line; its middle portion, or main body, being composed of the Sturiones, a family on the general level of the osseous fishes; while, ranged on the extreme left, we find the low division of the Suctorii, i. e. Cyclostomi, or Lampreys. But with the middle and lower divisions we have at present nothing to do; for of neither of them, whether Sturiones or Suctorii, does the Silurian System exhibit a trace. Further be it remarked, that the scheme of classification which gives an abstract standing to the Chondropterygii, is in itself merely a certain perception of resemblance which existed in certain minds, having cartilage for its general idea; just as another certain perception of resemblance in one other certain mind had cuticular skeleton for its general idea, and as yet another perception of resemblance in yet other certain minds had red blood for its general idea. As shown by the disparities which obtain among the section which the scheme serves to separate from the others, it no more determines rank or standing than that greatly more ancient scheme of classification into “ring-streaked and spotted,” which served to distinguish the flocks of the patriarch Jacob from those of Laban his father-in-law, but which did not distinguish goats from sheep, nor sheep from cattle.

The effect of introducing, after this manner, generalizations made altogether irrespective of rank, and avowedly without reference to it, into what are inherently and specifically questions of rank, admits of a simple illustration.

Let us suppose that it was not with the standing of the Silurian Placoids that we had to deal, but with that of the mammals of the recent period, including the quadrumana, and even the bimana, and that we had ventured to describe them, in the words of the Edinburgh Reviewer, as “the very highest types of their class.” What would be thought of the reasoner who, in challenging the justice of the estimate, would argue that these creatures, men as well as monkeys, belonged simply to that division of red-blooded animals which includes, with the bimana and quadrumana, the frog, the gudgeon, and the earthworm?—a division, he might add, “which, when details of organization are regarded, stretches farther, both downward and upward,” than that division of the white-blooded animals to which the crab, the spider, the cuttle-fish, and the dragon fly belong; “so that, looking at one extremity, any one is as much entitled to call the red-blooded animals the lowest division, as any other, looking at another extremity, is to call them the highest division, of animals.” What, it might well be asked in reply, has the earthworm, with its red-blood to do in a question respecting the place and standing of the bimana? Or what, in the parallel case, have the Suctorii—the worms of Linnæus—to do in a question respecting the place and standing of the real Placoids? True it is that, according to one principle of classification, now grown somewhat obsolete, men and earthworms are equally red-blooded animals; true it is that, according to another principle of classification, the Placoids of Agassiz and the cartilaginous worms of Linnæus are equally Chondropterygii. The bimana and the earthworm have their red blood in common; the glutinous hag and the true Placoids have as certainly their internal cartilage in common; and if the fact of the red blood of the worm lowers in no degree the rank of the bimana, then, on the same principle, the fact of the internal cartilage of the glutinous hag cannot possibly detract from the standing of the true Placoid. In both cases they are creatures that entirely differ,—the earthworms from the bimana, and the cartilaginous worms from the Placoids; and the classification which tags them together, whether it be that of Aristotle or that of Cuvier, cannot be converted into a sort of minus quantity, of force enough to detract from the value and standing of the bimana in the one case, or of the true Placoids in the other. It is in no degree derogatory to the human family that earthworms possess red blood; it is in no degree derogatory to the true Placoids that the Suctorii possess cartilaginous skeletons.

Let the reader now mark the use which has been made, by the author of the “Vestiges,” of the name and authority of Linnæus. “Linnæus,” he states, “was so impressed by the low character of many of this order, (the Chondropterygii,) that he actually ranked them with worms.” Now, what is the fact here? Simply that Linnæus had no such general order as the Chondropterygii in his eye at all. Though chiefly remarkable as a naturalist for the artificialness of his classifications, his estimate of the cartilaginous fishes was remarkable—though carried too far in its extremes, and in some degree founded in error—for an opposite quality. It was an estimate formed, in the main, on a natural basis. Instead of taking their cartilaginous skeleton into account, he looked chiefly at their standing as animals; and, struck with that extent of front which they present, and with both their superiority on the extreme right, and their inferiority on the extreme left, to the ordinary fishes, he erected them into two separate orders, the one lower and the other higher than the members of the osseous line. And so far was he from regarding the true Placoids—those Chondropterygii which to an internal skeleton of cartilage add external plates, points, or spines of bone—as low in the scale, that he actually raised them above fishes altogether, by erecting them into an order of reptiles,—the older Amphibia Nantes. Surely, if the name of Linnæus was to be introduced into this controversy at all, it ought to have been in connection with this special fact; seeing that the point to be determined in the question under discussion is simply the place and standing of that very order which the naturalist rated so high,—not the place and standing of the order which he degraded. It so happens that there is one of the Chondropterygii which, so far from being a true Placoid, does not possess a single osseous plate, point, or spine: it is a worm like creature, without eyes, without movable jaws, without vertebral joints, without scales, always enveloped in slime, and greatly abhorred by our Scotch boatmen of the Moray Frith, who hold that it burrows, like the grave-worm, in the decaying bodies of the dead. And this creature, “the glutinous hag,” or, according to north-country fishermen, the “ramper-eel,” or “poison-ramper,” was regarded by Linnæus as belonging, not to the class of fishes, but to the Vermes. Now, this is the special fact with which, in the development controversy, the author of the “Vestiges” connects the name of the Swedish naturalist! All the fish of the Silurian System belonged to that true Placoid order which Linnæus, impressed by its high standing, erected into an order, not of worms, but of reptiles. He elevated A, the true Placoid, while he degraded B, the glutinous hag. But it was necessary to the argument of the author of the “Vestiges” that the earliest existing fish should be represented as fish low in the scale; and so he has cited the name and authority of Linnæus in its bearing against the glutinous hag B, as if it had borne against the standing of the true Placoid A. The Patagonians are the tallest and bulkiest men in the world, whereas their neighbors, the Fuegians are a slim and diminutive race. And if, in some controversy raised regarding the real size of the more gigantic tribe, they were to be described as the “very tallest types of their class,” any statement in reply, to the effect that some trustworthy voyager had examined certain races of the extreme south of America, and had found that they were both short and thin, would be neither relevant in its facts nor legitimate in its bearing. But if the controversialist who thus strove to strengthen his case by the voyager’s authority, was at the same time fully aware that the voyager had seen not only the diminutive Fuegians, but also the gigantic Patagonians, and that he had described these last as very gigantic indeed, the introduction of the statement regarding the smaller race, when he wholly sank the statement regarding the larger, would be not merely very irrelevant in the circumstances, but also very unfair. Such, however, is the style of statement to which the author of the “Vestiges” has (I trust inadvertently) resorted in this controversy.

It is not uninstructive to mark how slowly and gradually the naturalists have been groping their way to a right classification in the ichthyic department of their science, and how it has been that identical perception of resemblance, having cartilage for its general idea, to which the author of the “Vestiges” attaches so much importance, that has served mainly to retard their progress. Not a few of the more distinguished among their number deemed it too important a distinction to be regarded as merely secondary; and so long as it was retained as a primary characteristic, the fishes failed to range themselves in the natural order;—dissimilar tribes were brought into close neighborhood, while tribes nearly allied were widely separated. It failed, as has been shown, to influence Linnæus; and though he no doubt pressed his peculiar views too far when he degraded the glutinous hag into a worm, and elevated the Sharks and Rays into reptiles, it is certainly worthy of remark, that, in the scheme of classification which is now regarded as the most natural,—that of Professor Muller, modified by Professor Owen,—the ichthyic worms of the Swede are placed in the first and lowest order of fishes,—the Dermopteri,—and the greater part of his ichthyic reptiles, in the eleventh and highest,—the Plagiostomi. Cuvier yielded, as has been shown, to the idea of resemblance founded on the material of the ichthyic framework, and so ranged his fishes into two parallel lines. Professor Oken, after first enunciating as law that “the characteristic organ of fishes is the osseous system,” confessed the “great difficulty” which attaches to the question of skeletal “texture or substance,” and finally gave up the distinction founded on it as obstinately irreducible to the purposes of a natural classification. “The cartilaginous fishes,” he says, “appear to belong to each other, and are also usually arranged together; yet amongst them we find those species, such as the Lampreys, which obviously occupy the lowest grade of all fishes, while the Sharks and Rays remind us of the Reptilia.” And so, sinking the consideration of texture altogether, he placed the family of the Lamprey, including the glutinous hag, at the bottom of the scale, and the Sharks and Rays at the top. Agassiz’s system, peculiarly his own, has had the rare merit, as I have shown, of furnishing a key to the history of the fish in its several dynasties, which we may in vain seek in any other. His divisions,—if, retaining his strongly-marked Placoids and Ganoids, as orders stamped in the mint of nature, we throw his perhaps less obviously divisible Ctenoids and Cycloids into one order,—the corneous or horn-covered,—are scarcely less representative of periods than those great classes of the vertebrata, mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes, which we find not less regularly ranged in their order of succession in the geologic record than in the “Animal Kingdom” of Cuvier,—a shrewd corroboration, in both cases, I am disposed to think, of the rectitude of the arrangement. What seems to be the special defect of his system is, that having erected his four orders, and then finding a certain number of residuary families that, on his principle of cuticular character, stubbornly refused to fall into any determinate place, he distributed them among the others, with reference chiefly to the totally distinct principle of Cuvier. Thus the Suctorii, soft, smooth, slimy-skinned fishes, that do not possess a single placoid character, and are not true Placoids, he has yet placed in his Placoid order, influenced, apparently, by the “perception of resemblance that has cartilage for its central idea;” and the effect has been a massing into one anomalous and entangled group the fishes of the first period of geologic history, with fishes of which we do not find a trace save in the existing scene of things, and of the highest families of their class with families that occupy the lowest place. But we live in an age in which even the benefactors of the world of mind cannot make false steps with impunity; and so, while Agassiz’s three ichthyic orders will continue to be recognized by the palæontologist as the orders of three great geologic periods, the Suctorii have already been struck from off his higher fishes by the classification of Muller and Owen, and carried to that lowest point in the scale (indicated by Linnæus and Oken) which their inferior standing renders so obviously the natural one. Some of my readers may perhaps remember how finely Bacon, in his “Wisdom of the Ancients,” interprets the old mythologic story of Prometheus. Prometheus, says the philosopher, had conferred inestimable favors on men, by moulding their forms into shape, and bringing them fire from heaven; and yet they complained of him and his teachings to Jupiter. And the god, instead of censuring their ingratitude, was pleased with the complaint, and rewarded them with gifts. In putting nature to the question, it is eminently wholesome to be doubting, cross-examining, complaining; ever demanding of our masters and benefactors the philosophers, that they should reign over us, not arbitrarily and despotically,

“Like the old kings, with high exacting looks,

Sceptred and globed,”

but like our modern constitutional monarchs, who govern by law; and, further, that an appeal from their decisions on all subjects within the jurisdiction of Nature should for ever be open to Nature herself. The seeming ingratitude of such a course, if the “complaints” be made in a right spirit and on proper grounds, Jupiter always rewards with gifts.

Let us now see for ourselves, in this spirit, whether there may not be something absolutely derogatory, in the existence of a cartilaginous skeleton, to the creatures possessing it; or whether a deficit of internal bone may not be greatly more than neutralized, as it assuredly must have been in the view of Linnæus, Muller, and Owen, by a larger than ordinary share of a vastly more important substance.

THE PLACOID BRAIN.
EMBRYONIC CHARACTERISTICS NOT NECESSARILY OF A LOW ORDER.

That special substance, according to whose mass and degree of development all the creatures of this world take rank in the scale of creation, is not bone, but brain. Were animals to be ranged according to the solidity of their bones, the class of birds would be assigned the first place; the family of the Felidæ, including the tiger and lion, the second; and the other terrestrial carnivora the third. Man and the herbivorous animals, though tolerably low in the scale, would be in advance of at least the reptiles. Most of these, however, would take precedence of the sagacious Delphinidæ; the osseous fishes would come next in order; the true Placoids would follow, succeeded by the Sturiones; and the Suctorii, i. e. Cyclostomi or Lampreys, would bring up the rear. There would be evidently no order here: the utter confusion of such an arrangement, like that of the bits of a dissected map flung carelessly out of its box by a child, would of itself demonstrate the inadequacy and erroneousness of the regulating principle. But how very different the appearance presented, when for solidity of bone we substitute development of brain! Man takes his proper place at the head of creation; the lower mammalia follow,—each species in due order, according to its modicum of intelligence; the birds succeed the mammalia; the reptiles succeed the birds; the fishes succeed the reptiles; next in the long procession come the invertebrate animals; and these, too, take rank, if not according to their development of brain proper, at least according to their development of the substance of brain. The occipital nervous ganglion of the scorpion greatly exceeds in size that of the earthworm; and the occipital nervous ring of the lobster, that of the intestinal Ascaris. At length, when we reach the lowest or acrite division of the animal kingdom, the substance of brain altogether disappears. It has been calculated by naturalists, that in the vertebrata, the brain in the class of fishes bears an average proportion to the spinal cord of about two to one; in the class of reptiles, of about two and a half to one; in the class of birds, of about three to one; in the class of mammals, of about four to one; and in the high-placed, sceptre-bearing human family, a proportion of not less than twenty-three to one. It is palpably according to development of brain, not development of bone, that we are to determine points of precedence among the animals,—a fact of which no one can be more thoroughly aware than the author of the “Vestiges” himself. Of this let me adduce a striking instance, of which I shall make further use anon.

“All life,” says Oken, “is from the sea; none from the continent. Man also is a child of the warm and shallow parts of the sea in the neighborhood of the land.” Such also was the hypothesis of Lamarck and Maillet. In following up the view of his masters, the author of the “Vestiges” fixes on the Delphinidæ as the sea-inhabiting progenitors of the simial family, and, through the simial family, of man For that highest order of the mammalia to which the Simiadæ (monkeys) belong, “there remains,” he says, “a basis in the Delphinidæ, the last and smallest of the cetacean tribes. This affiliation has a special support in the brain of the dolphin family, which is distinctly allowed to be, in proportion to general bulk, the greatest among mammalia next to the orang-outang and man. We learn from Tiedemann, that each of the cerebral hemispheres is composed, as in man and the monkey tribe, of three lobes,—an anterior, a middle, and a posterior; and these hemispheres present much more numerous circumvolutions and grooves than those of any other animal. Here it might be rash to found any thing upon the ancient accounts of the dolphin,—its familiarity with man, and its helping him in shipwreck and various marine disasters; although it is difficult to believe these stories to be altogether without some basis in fact. There is no doubt, however, that the dolphin evinces a predilection for human society, and charms the mariner by the gambols which it performs beside his vessel.”

Here, then, the author of the “Vestiges” palpably founds on a large development of brain in the dolphin, and on the manifestation of a correspondingly high order of instincts,—and this altogether irrespective of the structure or composition of the creature’s internal skeleton. The substance to which he looks as all-important in the case is brain, not bone. For were he to estimate the standing of the dolphin, not by its brain, but by its skeleton, he would have to assign to it a place, not only not in advance of its brethren the mammalia of the sea, but even in the rear of the reptiles of the sea, the marine tortoises, or turtles,—and scarce more than abreast of the osseous fishes. “Fishes,” says Professor Owen, in his “Lectures on the Vertebrate Animals,” “have the least proportion of earthy matter in their bones; birds the largest. The mammalia, especially the active, predatory species, have more earth, or harder bones, than reptiles. In each class, however, there are differences in the density of bone among its several members. For example, in the fresh-water fishes, the bones are lighter, and retain more animal matter, than in those which swim in the denser sea. And in the dolphin, a warm-blooded marine animal, they differ little in this respect from those of the sea-fish.” Such being the fact, it is surely but fair to inquire of the author of the “Vestiges,” why he should determine the rank and standing of the Delphinidæ according to one set of principles, and the rank and standing of the Placoids according to another and entirely different set? If the Delphinidæ are to be placed high in the scale, notwithstanding the softness of their skeletons, simply because their brains are large, why are the Placoids to be placed low in the scale, notwithstanding the largeness of their brains, simply because their skeletons are soft? It is not too much to demand, that on the principle which he himself recognizes as just, he should either degrade the dolphin or elevate the Placoid. For it is altogether inadmissible that he should reason on one set of laws when the exigencies of his hypothesis require that creatures with soft skeletons should be raised in the scale, and on another and entirely different set when its necessities demand that they should be depressed.

But do the Placoids possess in reality a large development of brain? I have examined the brains of almost all the common fish of our coast, both osseous and cartilaginous, not, I fear, with the skill of a Tiedemann, but all the more intelligently in consequence of what Tiedemann had previously done and written: and so I can speak with some little confidence on the subject, so far at least as my modicum of experience, thus acquired, extends. Of all the common fish of the Scottish seas, the spotted or lesser dog-fish bears, in proportion to its size, the largest brain; the gray or picked dog-fish ranks next in its degree of development; the Rays, in their various species, follow after; and the osseous fishes compose at least the great body of the rear; while still further behind, there lags a hapless class—the Suctorii, one of which, the glutinous hag, has scarce any brain, and one, the Amphioxus or lancelet, wants brain altogether. I have compared the brain of the spotted dog-fish with that of a young alligator, and have found that in scarce any perceptible degree was it inferior, in point of bulk, and very slightly indeed in point of organization, to the brain of the reptile. And the instincts of this Placoid family,—one of the truest existing representatives of the Placoids of the Silurian System[25] to which we can appeal,—correspond, we invariably find, with their superior cerebral development. I have seen the common dog-fish, Spinax Acanthias, hovering in packs in the Moray Frith, some one or two fathoms away from the side of the herring boat from which, when the fishermen were engaged in hauling their nets, I have watched them, and have admired the caution which, with all their ferocity of disposition, they rarely failed to manifest;—how they kept aloof from the net, even more warily than the cetacea themselves,—though both dog-fish and cetacea are occasionally entangled;—and how, when a few herrings were shaken loose from the meshes they at once darted upon them, exhibiting for a moment, through the green depths, the pale gleam of their abdomens, as they turned upon their sides to seize the desired morsels,—a motion rendered necessary by the position of the mouth in this family; and how next, their object accomplished, they fell back into their old position, and waited on as before. And I have been assured by intelligent fishermen, that at the deep-sea white-fishing, in which baited hooks, not nets, are employed, the degree of shrewd caution exercised by these creatures seems more extraordinary still. The hatred which the fisher bears to them arises not more from the actual amount of mischief which they do him, than from the circumstance that in most cases they persist in doing it with complete impunity to themselves. I have seen, said an observant Cromarty fisherman to the writer of these chapters, a pack of dog-fish watching beside our boat, as we were hauling our lines, and severing the hooked fish, as they passed them, at a bite, just a little above the vent, so that they themselves escaped the swallowed hook; and I have frequently lost, in this way, no inconsiderable portion of a fishing. I have observed, however, he continued, that when a fresh pack of hungry dog-fish came up, and joined the pack that had been robbing us so coolly, and at their leisure, a sudden rashness would seize the whole,—the united packs would become a mere heedless mob, and, rushing forward, they would swallow our fish entire, and be caught themselves by the score and the hundred. We may see something very similar to this taking place among even the shrewder mammalia. When pig refuses to take his food, his mistress straightway calls upon the cat, and, quickened by the dread of the coming rival, he gobbles up his rations at once. With the comparatively large development of brain, and the corresponding manifestations of instinct, which the true Placoids exhibit, we find other unequivocal marks of a general superiority to their class. In their reproductive organs they rank not with the common fishes, nor even with the lower reptiles, but with the Chelonians and the Sauria. Among the Rays, as among the higher animals, there are individual attachments formed between male and female: their eggs unlike the mere spawn of the osseous fishes, or of even the Batrachians, are, like those of the tortoise and the crocodile, comparatively few in number, and of considerable size: their young, too, like the young of birds and of the higher reptiles, pass through no such metamorphosis as those of the toad and frog, or of the amphibia generally. And some of their number—the common dog-fish for instance—are ovoviviparous, bringing forth their young, like the common viper and the viviparous lizard, alive and fully formed.

“But such features,” says the author of the “Vestiges,” referring chiefly to certain provisions connected with the reproductory system in the Placoids, “are partly partaken of by families in inferior sub-kingdoms, showing that they cannot truly be regarded as marks of grade in their own class.” Nay, single features do here and there occur in the inferior sub-kingdoms, which very nearly resemble single features in the placoid character and organization, which even very nearly resemble single features in the human character and organization; but is there any of the inferior sub-kingdoms in which there occurs such a collocation of features? or does such a collocation occur in any class of animals—setting the Placoids wholly out of view—which is not a high class? Nay, further, does there occur in any of the inferior sub-kingdoms—existing even as a single feature—that most prominent, leading characteristic of this series of fishes,—a large brain?

But is not the “cartilaginous structure” of the Placoids analogous to the embryonic state of vertebrated animals in general? Do not the other placoid peculiarities to which the author of the “Vestiges” refers,—such as the heterocercal or one-sided tail, the position of the mouth on the under side of the head, and the rudimental state of the maxillaries and intermaxillaries,—bear further analogies with the embryonic state of the higher animals? And is not “embryonic progress the grand key to the theory of development?” Let us examine this matter. “These are the characters,” says this ingenious writer, “which, above all, I am chiefly concerned in looking to; for they are features of embryonic progress, and embryonic progress is the grand key to the theory of development.” Bold assertion, certainly; but, then, assertion is not argument! The statement is not a reason for the faith that is in the author of the “Vestiges,” but simply an avowal of it; it is simply a confession, not a defence, of the Lamarckian creed; and, instead of being admitted as embodying a first principle, it must be put stringently to the question, in order to determine whether it contain a principle at all.

In the first place, let us remark, that the cartilaginous structure of the Placoids bears no very striking analogy to the cartilaginous structure of the higher vertebrata in the embryonic state. In the case of the Delphinidæ, with their soft skeletons, the analogy is greatly more close. Bone consists of animal matter, chiefly gelatinous, hardened by a diffusion of inorganic earth. In the bones of young and fœtal mammalia, inhabitants of the land, the gelatinous prevails; in the old and middle-aged there is a preponderance of the earth. Now, in the bones of the dolphin there is comparatively little earth. The analogies of its internal skeleton bear, not on the skeletons of its brethren the mature full-grown mammals of the land, but on the skeletons of their immature or fœtal offspring. But in the case of the true Placoids that analogy is faint indeed. Their skeletons contain true bone;—the vertebral joints of the Sharks and Rays possess each, as has been shown, an osseous nucleus, which retains, when subjected to the heat of a common fire, the complete form of the joint; and their cranial framework has its surface always covered over with hard osseous points. But though their skeletons possess thus their modicum of bone, unlike those of embryonic birds or mammals, they contain, in what is properly their cartilage, no gelatine. The analogy signally fails in the very point in which it has been deemed specially to exist. The cartilage of the Chondropterygii is a substance so essentially different from that of young or embryonic birds and mammals, and so unique in the animal kingdom, that the heated water in which the one readily dissolves has no effect whatever upon the other. It is, however, a curious circumstance, exemplified in some of the Shark family,[26] though it merely serves, in its exceptive character, to establish the general fact, that while the rays of the double fins, which answer to the phalanges, are all formed of this indissoluble cartilage, those rays which constitute their outer framework, with the rays which constitute the framework of all the single fins, are composed of a mucoidal cartilage, which boils into glue. At certain definite lines a change occurs in the texture of the skeleton; and it is certainly suggestive of thought, that the difference of substance which the change involves distinguishes that part of the skeleton which is homologically representative of the skeletons of the higher vertebrata, from that part of it which is peculiar to the creature as a fish, viz. the dorsal and caudal rays, and the extremities of the double fins. These emphatically ichthyic portions of the animal may be dissipated by boiling, whereas what Linnæus would perhaps term its reptilian portion abides the heat without reduction.

But is not the one-sided tail, so characteristic of the sharks, and of almost all the ancient Ganoids, also a characteristic of the young salmon just burst from the egg? Yes, assuredly; and, so far as research on the subject has yet extended, of not only the salmon, but of all the other osseous fishes in their fœtal state. The salmon, on its escape from the egg, is a little monster of about three quarters of an inch in length, with a huge heart-shaped bag, as bulky as all the rest of its body, depending from its abdomen. In this bag provident nature has packed up for it, in lieu of a nurse, food for five weeks; and, moving about every where in its shallow pool, with its provision knapsack slung fast to it, it reminds one disposed to be fanciful, save that its burden is on the wrong side, of Scottish soldiers of the olden time summoned to attend their king in war,—

“Each on his back, a slender store,

His forty days’ provision bore,

As ancient statutes tell.”

Around that terminal part of the creature’s body traversed by the caudal portion of the vertebral column, which commences in the salmon immediately behind the ventrals, there runs at this period, and for the ensuing five weeks in which it does not feed, a membranous fringe or fin, which exactly resembles that of the tadpole, and which, existing simply as an expansion of the skin, exhibits no mark or rays. In the place of the true caudal fin, however, we may detect with the assistance of a lens, an internal framework with two well-marked lobes, and ascertain, further, that this tail is set on awry,—the effect of a slight upward bend in the creature’s body. And when viewed in a strong light as a transparency, we perceive that the spinal cord takes the same upward bend, and, as in the sturgeon, passes in an exceedingly attenuated form into the upper lobe. What may be regarded as the design of the arrangement is probably to be found in the peculiar form given to the little creature by the protuberan bag in front. A wise instinct teaches it, from the moment of its exclusion from the egg, to avoid its enemies. In the instant the human shadow falls upon its pool, we see it darting into some recess at the side or bottom, with singular alacrity; and in order to enable it to do so, and to steer itself aright,—as, like an ill-trimmed vessel, deep in the water ahead, the balance of its body is imperfect,—there is, if I may so express myself, a heterocercal peculiarity of helm required. It has got an irregularly-developed tail to balance an irregularly-developed body, as skiffs lean on the one beam and full on the other require, in rowing, a cast of the rudder to keep them straight in their course.

Sinking altogether, however, the final cause of the peculiarity, and regarding it simply as a fœtal one, that indicates a certain stage of imperfection in the creature in which it occurs, on what principle, I ask, are we to infer that what is a sign of immaturity in the young of one set of animals, is a mark of inferior organization in the adult forms of another set? The want of eyes in any of the animal families, or the want of organs of progression, or a fixed and sedentary condition, like that of the oyster, are all marks of great inferiority. And yet, if we admit the principle, that what are evidences of immaturity in the young members of one family are signs of inferior organization in the fully-grown members of another, it could easily be shown that eyes and legs are defects, and that the unmoving oyster stands higher in the scale than the ever-restless fish or bird. The immature Tubularia possess locomotive powers, whereas in their fully developed state they remain fixed to one spot in their convoluted tubes. The immature Lepas is furnished with members well adapted for swimming, and with which it swims freely; as it rises towards maturity, these become blighted and weak; and, when fully grown,—fixed by its fleshy pedicle to the rock or floating log to which it attached itself in its transition state,—it is no longer able to swim. The immature Balanus is furnished with two eyes: in its state of maturity these are extinguished, and it passes its period of full development in darkness. Further, it is not generally held that in the human family a white skin is a decided mark of degradation, but rather the reverse; and yet nothing can be more certain than that the Negro fœtus has a white skin. Since eyes, and organs of progression, and a power of moving freely, and a white skin, are mere embryonic peculiarities in the Balanus, the Lepas, the Tubularia, and the Negro, and yet are in themselves, when found in the mature animal, evidences of a high, not of a low standing, on what principle, I ask are we to infer that the peculiarity of a heterocercal tail, embryonic in the salmon, is, when found in the mature Placoid, an evidence, not of a high standing, but of a low? Every true analogy in the case favors an exactly opposite view. In the heterocercal or one-sided tail, the vertebral joints gradually diminish, as in the tails of the Sauria and Ophidia, till they terminate in a point; whereas the homocercal tail common to the osseous fishes exhibits no true analogy with the tails of the higher orders. Its abruptly terminating vertebral column, immensely developed posterior processes, and broadly expanded osseous rays, seem to be simply a few of the many marks of decline and degradation which fishes, the oldest of the vertebrata, exhibit in this late age of the world, and which, in at least the earlier geologic periods, when they were greatly younger as a class, they did not betray.

Fig. 48.

a. Tail of Spinax Acanthias.

b. Tail of Ichthyosaurus Tenuirostris, (Buckland.)

In illustration of this view, I would fain recommend to the reader a simple experiment. Let him procure the tail of a common dog-fish, (fig. 48, a,) and cutting it across about half an inch above where the caudal fin begins, let him boil it smartly for about half an hour. He will first see it swell and then burst, all around those thinner parts of the fin that are traversed by the caudal rays,—wholly mucoidal, as shown by this test, in their texture, and which yield to the boiling water, as if formed of isinglass. They finally dissolve, and drop away, with the surrounding cuticular integument; and then there only remains, as the insoluble framework of the whole, the bodies of the vertebræ, with their neural and hœmal processes. The tail has now lost much of its ichthyic character, and has acquired, instead, a considerable degree of resemblance to the reptilian tail, as exemplified in the saurians. I have introduced into the wood-cut, for the purpose of comparison, the tail of the ichthyosaurus, (b.) It consists, like the other, of a series of gradually diminishing vertebræ, and must have also supported, says Professor Owen, a propelling fin, placed vertically, as in the shark, which, however, from its perishable nature, has in every instance disappeared in the earth, as that of the dog-fish disappears in the boiling water. It will be seen that its processes are comparatively smaller than those of the fish, and that the bodies of its vertebræ are shorter and bulkier; but there is at least a general correspondence of the parts; and were the tail of the crocodile, of which the vertebral bodies are slender and the processes large, to be substituted for that of the enaliosaur here, the correspondence would be more marked still. After thus developing the tail of the reptile out of that of the fish,—as the cauldron-bearing Irish magician of the tale developed young ladies out of old women,—simply by boiling, let the reader proceed to a second stage of the experiment, and see whether he may not be able still further to develope the reptilian tail so obtained, into that of the mammal, by burning. Let him spread it out on a piece of iron hoop, and thrust it into the fire; and then, after exposure for some time to a red heat has consumed and dissipated its merely cartilaginous portions, such as the neural and hœmal processes, with the little pieces which form the sides of the neural arch, and left only the whitened bodies of the vertebræ, let him say whether the bony portion which remains does not present a more exact resemblance to the mammiferous tail—that of the dog, for example—than any thing else he ever saw. The Lamarckians may well deem it an unlucky circumstance, that one special portion of their theory should demand the depreciation of the heterocercal tail, seeing that it might be represented with excellent effect in another, as not merely a connecting link in the upward march of progression between the tail of the true fish and that of the true reptile, but as actually containing in itself—as the caterpillar contains the future pupa and butterfly—the elements of the reptilian and mammiferous tail. If there be any virtue in analogy, the heterocercal tail is, I repeat, of a decidedly higher type than the homocercal one. It furnishes the first example in the vertebrata of the coccygeal vertebræ diminishing to a point, which characterizes not only all the higher reptiles, but also all the higher mammals, and which we find represented by the Os coccygis in man himself. But to this special point I shall again refer.

With regard to that rudimentary state of the occipital framework of the Placoids to which the author of the “Vestiges” refers, it may be but necessary to say that, notwithstanding the simplicity of their box-like skulls, they bear in their character, as cases for the protection of the brain, at least as close an analogy to the skulls of the higher animals, as those of the osseous fishes, which consist usually of the extraordinary number of from sixty to eighty bones,—a mark—the author of the “Vestiges” himself being judge in the case—rather of inferiority than the reverse. “Elevation is marked in the scale,” we find him saying, “by an animal exchanging a multiplicity of parts serving one end, for a smaller number.” The skull of a cod consists of about thrice as many separate bones as that of a man. But I do not well see that in this case the fact either of simplicity in excess or of multiplicity in excess can be insisted upon in either direction, as a proper basis for argument. Nearly the same remark applies to the maxillaries as to the skull. The under jaw in man consists of a single bone; that of the thornback—if we do not include the two suspending ribs, which belong equally to the upper jaw—of two bones, (the number in all the mammiferous quadrupeds:) that of the cod of four bones, and, if we include the suspending ribs, of twelve. On what principle are we to hold, with one as the representative number of the highest type of jaw, that two indicates a lower standing than four, or four than twelve? In reference to the further statement, that in many of the ancient fishes “traces can be observed of the muscles having been attached to the external plates, strikingly indicating their low grade as vertebrate animals,” it may be answer enough to state, that the peculiarity in question was not a characteristic of the most ancient fishes,—the Placoids of the Silurian system,—but of some Ganoids of the succeeding systems. The reader may remember, as a case in point, the example furnished by the nail-like bone of Asterolepis, figured in [page 111], in which there exists depressions resembling that of the round ligament in the head of the quadrupedal thigh-bone. And as for the remark that the opening of the mouth of the Placoid, “on the under side of the head,” is indicative of a low embryonic condition, it might be almost sufficient to remark, in turn, that the lowest family of fishes—that to which the supposed worms of Linnæus belong—have the mouth not under, but at the anterior termination of the head,—in itself an evidence that the position of the mouth at the extremity of the muzzle, common to the greater number of the osseous fishes, can be no very high character, seeing that the humblest of the Suctorii possess it; and that many osseous fishes, whose mouths open, not on the under, but the upper side of the snout, as in the distorted and asymmetrical genus Platessa, are not only in no degree superior to their bony neighbors, and far inferior to the placoid ones, but bear, in direct consequence of the arrangement, an expression of unmistakable stupidity. The objection, however, admits of a greatly more conclusive reply.

Fig. 49.

PORT JACKSON SHARK, (Cestracion Phillippi.)

“This fish, to speak in the technical language of Agassiz,” says the Edinburgh Reviewer, in reference to the ancient ichthyolite of the Wenlock Shale, “undoubtedly belongs to the Cestraciont family of the Placoid order,—proving to demonstration that the oldest known fossil fish [1845] belongs to the highest type of that division of the vertebrata.” I may add, that the character and family of this ancient specimen was determined by our highest British authority in fossil ichthyology, Sir Philip Egerton. And it is in depreciation of Professor Sedgwick’s statement regarding its high standing that the author of the “Vestiges” refers to the supposed inferiority indicated by a mouth opening, not at the extremity of the muzzle, but under the head. Let us, then, fully grant, for the argument’s sake, that the occurrence of the mouth in the muzzle is a sign of superiority, and its occurrence under the head a mark of great inferiority, and then ascertain how the fact stands with regard to the Cestracion. “The Cestracion sub-genus,” says Mr. James Wilson, in his admirable treatise on fishes, which forms the article Ichthyology in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” “has the temporal aperture, the anal fin, and rounded teeth, of Squalus Mustelus; but the mouth is terminal, or at the extremity of the pointed muzzle.” The accompanying figure, (fig. 49,) taken from a specimen of Cestracion in the collection of Professor John Fleming, may be recorded as of some little interest, both from its direct bearing on the point in question, and from the circumstance that it represents, not inadequately for its size, the sole surviving species (Cestracion Phillippi) of the oldest vertebrate family of creation. With this family, so far as is yet known, ichthyic existence first began. It does not appear that on the globe which we inhabit there was ever an ocean tenanted by living creatures at all that had not its Cestracion,—a statement which could not be made regarding any other vertebrate family. In Agassiz’s “Tabular View of the Genealogy of Fishes,” the Cestracionts, and they only, sweep across the entire geologic scale. And, as shown in the figure, the mouth in this ancient family, instead of opening, as in the ordinary sharks, under the middle of the head, to expose them to the suspicion of being creatures of low and embryonic character, opened in a broad, honest-looking muzzle, very much resembling that of the hog. The mouths of the most ancient Placoids of which we know any thing, did not, I reiterate, open under their heads.

But why introduce the element of embryonic progress into this question at all? It is not a question of embryonic progress. The very legerdemain of the sophist—the juggling by which he substitutes his white balls for black, or converts his pigeons into crows—consists in the art of attaching the conclusions founded on the facts or conditions of one subject, to some other subject essentially distinct in its nature. Gestation is not creation. The history of the young of animals in their embryonic state is simply the history of the fœtal young; just as the history of insect transformation, in which it has been held by good men, but weak reasoners, that there exists direct evidence of the doctrine of the resurrection, is the history of insect transformation, and of nothing else. True, the human mind is so constituted that it converts all nature into a storehouse of comparisons and analogies; and this fact of the metamorphosis of the creeping caterpillar, after first passing through an intermediate period of apparent death as an inert aurelia, into a winged image, seemed to have seized on the human fancy at a very early age, as wonderfully illustrative of life, death, and the future state. The Egyptians wrapped up the bodies of their dead in the chrysalis form, so that a mummy, in their apprehension, was simply a human pupa, waiting the period of its enlargement; and the Greeks had but one word in their language for butterfly and the soul. But not the less true is it, notwithstanding, that the facts of insect transformation furnish no legitimate key to the totally distinct facts of a resurrection of the body, and of a life after death. And on what principle, then, are we to trace the origin of past dynasties in the changes of the fœtus if not the rise of the future dynasty in the transformations of the caterpillar? “These [embryonic] characters [that of the heterocercal tail, and of the mouth of the ordinary shark type] are essential and important,” remarks the author of the “Vestiges,” “whatever the Edinburgh Reviewer may say to the contrary;—they are the characters which, above all, I am chiefly concerned in looking to, for they are the features of embryonic progress, and embryonic progress is the grand key to the theory of development.” Yes; the grand key to the theory of fœtal development; for embryonic progress is fœtal development. But on what is the assertion based that they form a key to the history of creation? Aurelia are not human bodies laid out for the sepulchre, nor are butterflies human souls; as certainly gestation is not creation, nor a life of months in the uterus a succession of races for millions of ages outside of it. On what grounds, then, is the assertion made? Does it embody the result of a discovery or announce the message of a revelation? Did the author of the “Vestiges” find it out for himself, or did an angel from heaven tell it him? If it be a discovery, show us, we ask, the steps through which you have been conducted to it; if a revolution produce, for our satisfaction, the evidence on which it rests. For we are not to accept as data, in a question of science, idle comparisons or vague analogies, whether produced through the intentional juggling of the sophist, or involuntarily conjured up in the dreamy delirium of an excited fancy.

It is one of the difficulties incident to the task of replying to any dogmatic statement of error, that every mere annunciation of a false fact or false principle must be met by elaborate counter-statement or carefully constructed argument and that prolixity is thus unavoidably entailed on the controversialist who labors to set right what his antagonist has set wrong. The promulgator of error may be lively and entertaining, whereas his pains-taking confutator runs no small risk of being tedious and dull. May I, however, solicit the forbearance of the reader, if, after already spending much time in skirmishing on ground taken up by the enemy,—one of the disadvantages incident to the mere defendant in a controversy of this nature,—I spend a little more in indicating what I deem the proper ground on which the standing of the earlier vertebrata should be decided. To the test of brain I have already referred, as all-important in the question: I would now refer to the test of what may be termed homological symmetry of organization.

THE PROGRESS OF DEGRADATION.
ITS HISTORY.

Though all animals be fitted by nature for the life which their instincts teach them to pursue, naturalists have learned to recognize among them certain aberrant and mutilated forms, in which the type of the special class to which they belong seems distorted and degraded. They exist as the monster families of creation, just as among families there appear from time to time monster individuals,—men, for instance, without feet, or hands, or eyes, or with their feet, hands, or eyes grievously misplaced,—sheep with their fore legs growing out of their necks, or ducklings with their wings attached to their haunches. Among these degraded races, that of the footless serpent, which “goeth upon its belly,” has been long noted by the theologian as a race typical, in its condition and nature, of an order of hopelessly degraded beings, borne down to the dust by a clinging curse; and, curiously enough, when the first comparative anatomists in the world give their readiest and most prominent instance of degradation among the denizens of the natural world, it is this very order of footless reptiles that they select. So far as the geologist yet knows, the Ophidians did not appear during the Secondary ages, when the monarchs of creation belonged to the reptilian division, but were ushered upon the scene in the times of the Tertiary deposits, when the mammalian dynasty had supplanted that of the Iguanodon and Megalosaurus. Their ill omened birth took place when the influence of their house was on the wane, as if to set such a stamp of utter hopelessness on its fallen condition, as that set by the birth of a worthless or idiot heir on the fortunes of a sinking family. The degradation of the Ophidians consists in the absence of limbs,—an absence total in by much the greater number of their families, and represented in others, as in the boas and pythons, by mere abortive hinder limbs concealed in the skin; but they are thus not only monsters through defect of parts, if I may so express myself, but also monsters through redundancy, as a vegetative repetition of vertebra and ribs, to the number of three or four hundred, forms the special contrivance by which the want of these is compensated. I am also disposed to regard the poison-bag of the venomous snakes as a mark of degradation;—it seems, judging from analogy, to be a protective provision of a low character, exemplified chiefly in the invertebrate families,—ants, centipedes, and mosquitos,—spiders, wasps, and scorpions. The higher carnivora are, we find, furnished with unpoisoned weapons, which, like those of civilized man, are sufficiently effective, simply from the excellence of their construction, and the power with which they are wielded, for every purpose of assault or defence. It is only the squalid savages and degraded boschmen of creation that have their feeble teeth and tiny stings steeped in venom, and so made formidable. Monstrosity through displacement of parts constitutes yet another form of degradation; and this form, united, in some instances, to the other two, we find curiously exemplified in the geological history of the fish,—a history which, with all its blanks and missing portions, is yet better known than that of any other division of the vertebrata. And it is, I am convinced, from a survey of the progress of degradation in the great ichthyic division,—a progress recorded as “with a pen of iron in the rock for ever,”—and not from superficial views founded on the cartilaginous or non-cartilaginous texture of the ichthyic skeleton, that the standing of the kingly fishes of the earlier periods is to be adequately determined. Any other mode of survey, save the parallel mode which takes development of brain into account, evolves, we find, nothing like principle, and lands the inquirer in inextricable difficulties and inconsistencies.

In all the higher non-degraded vertebrata we find a certain uniform type of skeleton, consisting of the head, the vertebral column, and four limbs; and these last, in the various symmetrical forms, whether exemplified in the higher fish, the higher reptiles, the higher birds, the higher mammals, or in man himself, occur always in a certain determinate order. In all the mammals, the scapular bases of the fore limbs begin opposite the eighth vertebra from the skull backwards, the seven which go before being cervical or neck vertebræ; in the birds,—a division of the vertebrata that, from their peculiar organization, require longer and more flexible necks than the mammals,—the scapulars begin at distances from the occiput, varying, according to the species, from opposite the thirteenth to opposite the twenty-fourth vertebra; and in the reptiles—a division which, according to Cuvier, “presents a greater diversity of forms, characters, and modes of gait, than any of the other two,”—they occur at almost all points, from opposite the second vertebra, as in the frog, to opposite the thirty-third or thirty-fourth vertebra, as in some species of plesiosaurus. But in all,—whether mammals, birds, or undegraded reptiles,—they are so placed, that the creatures possess necks, of greater or less length, as an essential portion of their general type. The hinder limbs have also in all these three divisions of the animal kingdom their typical place. They occur opposite, or very nearly opposite, the posterior termination of the abdominal cavity, and mark the line of separation between the vertebræ of the trunk (dorsal, lumbar, and sacral) and the third and last, or caudal division of the column,—a division represented in man by but four vertebræ, and in the crocodile by about thirty-five, but which is found to exist, as I have already said, in all the more perfect forms. The limbs, then, in all the symmetrical animals of the first three classes of the vertebrata, mark the three great divisions of the vertebral column,—the division of the neck, the division of the trunk, and the division of the tail. Let us now inquire how the case stands with the fourth and lowest class,—that of the fishes.

In those existing Placoids that represent the fishes of the earliest vertebrate period, the places of the double fins,—pectorals and ventrals,—which form in the ichthyic class the true homologues of the limbs, correspond to the places which these occupy in the symmetrical mammals, birds, and reptiles. The scapular bases of the fore or pectoral fins ordinarily begin opposite the twelfth or fourteenth vertebra;[27] but they range, as in man and the mammals, in a forward direction, so that the fins themselves are opposite the eighth or tenth. The pelvic bases of the ventral fins are placed nearly opposite the base of the abdomen, so that, as in all the symmetrical animals, the vent opens between, or nearly between, those hinder limbs which the bases support. In the Rays, which, so far as is yet known, did not appear in creation until the Secondary ages had begun, the bases of the fore limbs, i. e. pectoral fins, are attached to the lower part of a huge cervical vertebra, nearly equal in length to all the trunk vertebræ united; and in the Chimeridæ, which also first appear in the Secondary division, they are attached, as in the osseous fishes, to the hinder part of the head. But in the representatives of all those Silurian Placoids yet known, of which the family can be determined, or any thing with safety predicated, the cervical division is found to occur as a series of vertebræ: they present in this, as in the hinder portion of their bodies, the homological symmetry of organization typical of that vertebral sub-kingdom to which they belong.

In the second great period of ichthyic existence,—that of the Old Red Sandstone,—we find the first example, in the class of fishes, of “monstrosity through displacement of parts,” and apparently also—in at least two genera, though the evidence on this head be not yet quite complete—of “monstrosity through defect of parts.” In all the Ganoids of the period, with (so far as we can determine the point) only two exceptions, the scapular bases of the fore limbs are brought forward from their typical place opposite the base of the cervical vertebræ, and stuck on to the occipital plate. There occurs, in consequence, in one great order of the ichthyic class, such a departure from the symmetrical type as would take place in a monster example of the human family in whom the neck had been annihilated, and the arms stuck on to the back of the head. And in the genera Coccosteus and Pterichthys we find the first example of degradation through defect. In the Pterichthys the hinder limbs seem wanting, and in the Coccosteus we find no trace of the fore limbs. The one resembles a monster of the human family born without hands, and the other a monster born without feet. Ages and centuries pass, and long unreckoned periods come to a close; and then, after the termination of the Palæozoic period, we see that change taking place in the form of the ichthyic tail, to which I have already referred, (and to which I must refer at least once more,) as singularly illustrative of the progress of degradation. Yet other ages and centuries pass away, during which the reptile class attains to its fullest development, in point of size, organization, and number; and then, after the times of the Cretaceous deposits have begun, we find yet another remarkable monstrosity of displacement introduced among all the fishes of one very numerous order, and among no inconsiderable proportion of the fishes of another. In the newly-introduced Ctenoids, (Acanthopterygii,) and in those families of the Cycloids which Cuvier erected into the order Malacopterygii sub-brachiati, the hinder limbs are brought forward, and stuck on to the base of the previously misplaced fore limbs. All the four limbs, by a strange monstrosity of displacement, are crowded into the place of the extinguished neck. And such, at the present day, is the prevalent type among fishes. Monstrosity through defect is also found to increase; so that the snake-like apoda, or feet-wanting fishes, form a numerous order, some of whose genera are devoid, as in the common eels and the congers, of only the hinder limbs, while in others, as in the genera Muræna and Synbranchus, both hinder and fore limbs are wanting. In the class of fishes, as fishes now exist, we find many more evidences of the monstrosity which results from both the misplacement and defect of parts, than in the other three classes of the vertebrata united, and knowing their geological history better than that of any of the others, we know, in consequence, that the monstrosities did not appear early, but late, and that the progress of the race as a whole, though it still retains not a few of the higher forms, has been a progress, not of development from the low to the high, but of degradation from the high to the low.

The reader may mark for himself, in the flounder, plaice, halibut, or turbot,—fishes of a family of which there appears no trace in the earlier periods,—an extreme example of the degradation of distortion superadded to that of displacement. At a first glance the limbs seem but to exhibit merely the amount of natural misarrangement and misorder common to the Acanthopterygii and Sub-brachiati;—the base of the pectorals are stuck on to the head, and the base of the ventrals attached to that of the pectorals. From the circumstance, however, that the creature is twisted half round and laid on its side, we find that at least one of the pairs of double fins—the pectorals—perform the part of single fins,—one projecting from the animal’s superior, the other from its inferior side, in the way the anal and dorsal fins project from the upper and under surfaces of other fishes; while its real dorsal and anal fins, both developed very largely, and—in order to preserve its balance—in about an equal degree, and wonderfully correspondent in form, perform, from their lateral position, the functions of single fins. Indeed, at a first glance they seem the analogues of the largely-developed pectorals of a very different family of flat fishes,—the Rays. It would appear as if single and double fins, by some such mutual agreement as that which, according to the old ballad, took place between the churl of Auchtermuchty and his wife, had agreed to exchange callings, and perform each the work of the other. The tail, too, possesses, in consequence of the twist, not the vertical position of other fish-tails, but is spread out horizontally, like the tails of the cetacea. It is however, in the head of the flounder and its cogeners that we find the more extraordinary distortions exemplified. In order to accommodate it to the general twist, which rendered lateral what in other fishes is dorsal and abdominal, and dorsal and abdominal what in other fishes is lateral, one half its features had to be twisted to the one side, and the other half to the other. The face and cranium have undergone such a change as that which the human face and cranium would undergo, were the eyes to be drawn towards the left ear, and the mouth towards the right. The skull, in consequence, exhibits, in its fixed bones, a strange Cyclopean character, unique among the families of creation: it has its one well-marked eye orbit opening, like that of Polyphemus, direct in the middle of the fore part of its head; while the other, external to the cranium altogether, we find placed among the free bones, directly over the maxillaries. And the wry mouth—twisted in the opposite direction, as if to keep up such a balance of deformity as that which the breast-hump of a hunchback forms to the hump behind—is in keeping with the squint eyes. The jaws are strangely asymmetrical. In symmetrical fishes the two bones that compose the anterior half of the lower jaw are as perfectly correspondent in form and size as the left hand or left foot is correspondent, in the human subject, to the right hand or right foot; but not such their character in the flounder. The one is a broad, short, nearly straight bone; the other is larger, narrower, and bent like a bow; and while the one contains only from four to six teeth, the other contains from thirty to thirty-five. Scarcely in the entire ichthyic kingdom are there any two jaws that less resemble one another than the two halves of the jaw of the flounder, turbot, halibut, or plaice. The intermaxillary bones are equally ill matched: the one is fully twice the size of the other, and contains about thrice as many teeth. That bilateral symmetry of the skeleton which is so invariable a characteristic of the vertebrata, that ordinary observers, who have eyes for only the rare and the uncommon, fail to remark it, but which a Newton could regard as so wonderful, and so thoroughly in harmony with the uniformity of the planetary system, has scarce any place in the asymmetrical head of the flounder. There exists in some of our north country fishing villages an ancient apologue, which, though not remarkable for point or meaning, at least serves to show that this peculiar example of distortion the rude fishermen of a former age were observant enough to detect. Once on a time the fishes met, it is said, to elect a king; and their choice fell on the herring. “The herring king!” contemptuously exclaimed the flounder, a fish of consummate vanity, and greatly piqued on this occasion that its own presumed claims should have been overlooked; “where, then, am I?” And straightway, in punishment of its conceit and rebellion, “its eyes turned to the back of its head.” Here is there a story palpably founded on the degradation of misplacement and distortion, which originated ages ere the naturalist had recognized either the term or the principle.

It would be an easy matter for an ingenious theorist, not much disposed to distinguish between the minor and the master laws of organized being, to get up quite as unexceptionable a theory of degradation as of development. The one-eyed, one-legged Chelsea pensioner, who had a child, unborn at the time, laid to his charge, agreed to recognize his relationship to the little creature, if, on its coming into the world, it was found to have a green patch over its eye, and a wooden leg. And, in order to construct a hypothesis of progressive degradation, the theorist has but to take for granted the transmission to other generations of defects and compensating redundancies at once as extreme and accidental as the loss of eyes or limbs, and the acquisition of timber legs or green patches. The snake, for instance, he might regard as a saurian, that, having accidentally lost its limbs, exerted itself to such account throughout a series of generations, in making up for their absence, as to spin out for itself, by dint of writhing and wriggling, rather more than a hundred additional vertebræ, and to alter, for purposes of greater flexibility, the structure of all the rest. And as fishes, when nearly stunned by a blow, swim for a few seconds on their side, he might regard the flounders as a race of half-stunned fishes, previously degraded by the misplacement of their limbs, that, instead of recovering themselves from the blow given to some remote parent of the family, had expended all their energies in twisting their mouths round to what chanced to be the under side on which they were laid, and their eyes to what chanced to be the upper, and that made their pectorals serve for anal and dorsal fins, and their anal and dorsal fins serve for pectorals. But while we must recognize in nature certain laws of disturbance, if I may so speak, through which, within certain limits, traits which are the result of habit or circumstance in the parents are communicated to their offspring, we would err as egregiously, did we take only these into account, without noting that infinitely stronger antagonist law of reproduction and restoration which, by ever gravitating towards the original type, preserves the integrity of races, as the astronomer would, who, in constructing his orrery, recognized only that law of propulsion through which the planets speed through the heavens, without taking into account that antagonist law of gravitation which, by maintaining them in their orbits, insures the regularity of their movements. The law of restoration would recover and right the stunned fish laid on its side; the law of reproduction would give limbs to the offspring of the mutilated saurian. We have evidence, in the extremeness of the degradation in these cases, that it cannot be a degradation hereditarily derived from accident. Nature is, we find, active, not in perpetuating the accidental wooden legs and green patches of ancestors in their descendants, but in restoring to the offspring the true limbs and eyes which the parents have lost. It is, however, not with a theory of hereditary degradation, but a hypothesis of gradual development, that I have at present to deal; and what I have to establish as proper to the present stage of my argument is, that this principle of degradation really exists, and that the history of its progress in creation bears directly against the assumption that the earlier vertebrata were of a lower type than the vertebrata of the same ichthyic class which exist now.[28]

The progress of the ichthyic tail, as recorded in geologic history, corresponds with that of the ichthyic limbs. And as in the existing state of things we find fishes that nearly represent, in this respect, all the great geologic periods,—I say nearly, not fully, for I am acquainted with no fish adequately representative of the period of the Old Red Sandstone,—it may be well to cast a glance over the contemporary series, as illustrative of the consecutive one. In those Placoids of the shark family that to a large brain unite homological symmetry of organization, and represent the fishes of the first period, we find, as I have already shown, that the vertebræ gradually diminish in the caudal division of the column, until they terminate in a point,—a circumstance in which they resemble not merely the betailed reptiles, but also all the higher mammiferous quadrupeds, and even man himself. And it is this peculiarity, stamped upon the less destructible portions of the framework of the tail,—vertebræ and processes,—rather than the one-sided or heterocercal form of the surrounding fin, composed of but a mucoidal substance, that constitutes its grand characteristic; seeing that in some Placoid genera, such as Scyllium Stellare, the terminal portion of the fin is scarce less largely developed above than below, and that in others, as in most of the Ray family, the under lobe of the fin is wholly wanting. In the sturgeon,—one of the few Ganoids of the present time,—we become sensible of a peculiar modification in this heterocercal type of tail: the lower lobe is, we find, composed, as in Spinax and Scyllium, of rays exclusively; while through the centre of the upper lobe there runs an acutely angular patch of lozenge-shaped plates, like that which runs through the centre of the double fins of Dipterus and the Cœlacanths. But while in the sharks the gradually diminishing vertebræ stand out in bold relief, and form the thickest portion of the tail, that which represents them in the sturgeon (the angular patch) is slim and thin,—slimmer in the middle than even at the sides;—in part a consequence, no doubt, of the want, in this fish, of solid vertebræ, but a consequence also of the extreme attenuation of the nervous cord, in its prolongation into the lobe of the fin. Further, the rays of the tail—its peculiarly ichthyic portion, which are purely mucoidal in Spinax, Scyllium, and Cestracion—have become osseous in the sturgeon. The fish has set and become fixed, as cement sets in a building, or colors are fixed by a mordant. And it is worthy of special remark that, correspondent with the peculiarly ichthyic development of tail in this fish, we find the prevailing ichthyic displacement of the fore limbs. Again, in the Lepidosteus, another of the true Ganoids which still exist, the internal angle of the upper lobe of the tail wholly disappears, and with the internal angle the prolongation of the nervous cord. Still, however, it is what the tail of the sturgeon would become were the angular patch to be obliterated, and rays substituted instead,—it is a tail set on awry. And in this fish also we find the ichthyic displacement of fore limb. One step more, and we arrive at the homocercal or equal-lobed tail, which seems to attain to its most extreme type in those fishes in which, as in the perch and flounder, the last vertebral joint, either very little or very abruptly diminished in size, expands into broad processes without homologue in the higher animals, on which the caudal rays rest as their bases. And in by much the larger proportion of these fishes all the four limbs are slung round the neck;—they at once exhibit the homocercal tail in its broadest type, and displacement of limb in its most extreme form.

Fig. 50.

TAIL OF OSTEOLEPIS.

Fig. 51.

TAIL OF LEPIDOSTEUS OSSEUS.

Now, in tracing the geologic history of the ichthyic tail, we find these several steps or gradations from the heterocercal to the homocercal, represented by periods and formations. The Siluran periods may be regarded as representative of that true heterocercal tail of the Placoids, exemplified in Spinax, ([page 172], fig. 48,) and Cestracion, ([page 177], fig. 49.) The whole caudal portion of this latter animal, commencing immediately behind the ventrals, is, as becomes a true tail, slim, when compared with its trunk; the vertebræ are of very considerable solidity; the rays mucoidal; and where the spinal column runs into the terminal fin, it takes such an upward turn as that which the horse-jockey imparts, by the process of nicking, to the tails of the hunter and the racehorse. And with the heterocercal tail, so true in its homologies to the tails of the higher vertebrata, we find associated, as has been shown, the true homological position of the fore limbs. With the commencement of the Old Red Sandstone the ganoidal tail first presents itself; and we become sensible of a change in the structure of the attached fin, similar to that exemplified in the caudal rays of the sturgeon. As shown by the irregularly-angular patch of scales which in all the true Cœlacanths, and almost all the Dipterians,[29] runs through the upper lobe of the fin, and terminates in a point, (see fig. 50,) it must have possessed the gradually diminishing vertebræ, or a diminishing spinal cord, their analogue; but the rays, fairly set, as their state of keeping in the rocks certify, exist as narrow oblong plates of solid bone; and their anterior edges are strengthened by a line of osseous defences, that pass from scales into rays. And in harmonious accompaniment with this fairly stereotyped edition of the ichthyic tail, we find, in the fishes in which it appears, the first instance of displacement of limb,—the bases of the pectorals being removed from their original position, and stuck on to the nape of the neck. It may be remarked, in passing, that in the tails of two ganoidal genera of this period,—the Coccosteus and Pterichthys,—the analogies traceable lie rather in the direction of the tails of the Rays than in those of the Sharks; and that one of these, the Coccosteus, seems, as has been already intimated, to have had no pectorals, while it is doubtful whether in the Pterichthys the pectorals were not attached to the shoulder, instead on the head. In the Carboniferous and Permian systems there occur, especially among the numerous species of the genus Palæoniscus, tails of the type exemplified by the internal angle of the tail of the sturgeon: the lozenge-shaped scales run in acutely angular patches through their upper lobes; but such is their extreme flatness, as shown by the disposition of the enamelled covering, that it appears exceedingly doubtful whether any vertebral column ran beneath;—they seem but to have covered greatly diminished prolongations of the spinal cord. In the base of the Secondary division,—another long stage towards the existing state of things,—we find, with the homocercal tail, which now appears for the first time, numerous tails like that of the Lepidosteus, (fig. 51,) of an intermediate type;—they are rather tails set on awry than truly heterocercal. The diminished cord has disappeared from among the fin rays. In the numerous Lepidoid genus, and the genera Semionotus and Tetra gonolepis,—all ganoidal fishes of the Secondary period—this intermediate style is very marked; while in their contemporaries of the genera Uræus, Microdon, and Pycnodus, we find the earliest examples of true homocercal tails. And in the Ctenoids and Cycloids of the Chalk the homocercal tail receives its fullest development. It finds bases for its rays in broad non-homological processes, that spread out behind abruptly-terminating vertebræ, (fig. 52,) in the same period in which, by a strange process of degradation, the four ichthyic limbs are first gathered into a cluster, and hung about the neck.[30]

Fig. 52.

TAIL OF PERCH.

I am aware that by some very distinguished comparative anatomists, among the rest Professor Owen, the attachment, so common among fishes, of the scapular arch and the fore limbs to the occipital bone, is regarded, not as a displacement, but as a normal and primary condition of the parts. Recognizing in the scapular bones the ribs of the occipital centrum, the anatomists of this school of course consider them, when found articulated to the occiput, as in their proper and original place, and as in a state of natural dislocation when removed, as in all the reptiles, birds, and mammals, farther down. We find Professor Oken borrowing support to his hypothesis from this view. The limbs, he tells us, are simply ribs, that in the course of ages have been set free, and have become by development what they now are. And it is unquestionably a curious and interesting fact, that there are certain animals, such as the crocodile, in which every centrum of the vertebral column, and of every vertebra of the head, has its ribs or rib-like appendages, with the exception of the occipital centrum. And it is another equally curious fact, that there is another certain class of animals, such as the osseous horn-covered fishes, with the Sturionidæ, Salamandroidei, and at least one genus among the Placoids, (the Chimæroidei,) in which this occipital centrum bears as its ribs the scapular bones, with their appendages the fore limbs. It is the centrum without ribs that is selected in these animals as the centrum to which the scapular ribs should be attached. Be it remembered, however, that while it is unquestionably the part of the comparative anatomist to determine the relations and homologies of those parts of which all animals are composed, and to interpret the significancy in the scale of being of the various modes and forms in which they exist, it is as unquestionably the part of the geologist to declare their history, and the order of their succession in time. The questions which fall to be determined by the geologist and anatomist are entirely different. It is the function of the anatomist to decide regarding the high and the low, the typical and the aberrant; and so, beginning at what is lowest or highest in the scale, or least or most symmetrical in type, he passes through the intermediate forms to the opposite extreme: and such is the order natural and proper to his science. It is the vocation of the geologist, on the other hand, to decide regarding the early and the late. It is with time, not with rank, that he has to deal. Nor is it in the least surprising that he should seem at issue with the comparative anatomist, when, in classifying his groupes of organized being according to the periods of their appearance, there is an order of arrangement forced upon him, different from that which, on an entirely different principle, the anatomist pursues. Nor can there be a better illustration of a collision of this kind, than the one furnished by the case in point. That peculiarity of structure which, as the lowest in the vertebral skeleton, is to the comparative anatomist the primary and original one, and which, as such, furnishes him with his starting point, is to the geologist not primary, but secondary, simply because it was not primary, but secondary, in the order of its occurrence. It belongs, so far as we yet know, not to the first period of vertebrate existence, but to the second; and appears in geologic history as does that savage state which certain philosophers have deemed the original condition of the human species, in the history of civilization, when read by the light of the Revealed Record, under the shadow of those gigantic ruins of the East that date only a few centuries after the Flood. It is found to be a degradation first introduced during the lapse of an intermediate age,—not the normal condition which obtained during the long cycles of the primal one. It indicates, not the starting point from which the race of creation began, but the stage of retrogradation beyond it at which the pilgrims who set out in a direction opposite to that of the goal first arrived.[31]

This fact of degradation, strangely indicated in geologic history, with reference to all the greater divisions of the animal kingdom, has often appeared to me a surpassingly wonderful one. We can see but imperfectly, in those twilight depths to which all such subjects necessarily belong; and yet at times enough does appear to show us what a very superficial thing infidelity may be. The general advance in creation has been incalculably great. The lower divisions of the vertebrata preceded the higher;—the fish preceded the reptile, the reptile preceded the bird, the bird preceded the mammiferous quadruped, and the mammiferous quadruped preceded man. And yet, is there one of these great divisions in which, in at least some prominent feature, the present, through this mysterious element of degradation, is not inferior to the past? There was a time in which the ichthyic form constituted the highest example of life; but the seas during that period did not swarm with fish of the degraded type. There was, in like manner, a time when all the carnivora and all the herbivorous quadrupeds were represented by reptiles; but there are no such magnificent reptiles on the earth now as reigned over it then. There was an after time, when birds seem to have been the sole representatives of the warm-blooded animals; but we find, from the prints of their feet left in sandstone, that the tallest men might have

“Walked under their huge legs, and peeped about.”

Further, there was an age when the quadrupedal mammals were the magnates of creation; but it was an age in which the sagacious elephant, now extinct, save in the comparatively small Asiatic and African circles, and restricted to two species, was the inhabitant of every country of the Old World, from its southern extremity to the frozen shores of the northern ocean; and when vast herds of a closely allied and equally colossal genus occupied its place in the New. And now, in the times of the high-placed human dynasty,—of those formally delegated monarchs of creation, whose nature it is to look behind them upon the past, and before them, with mingled fear and hope, upon the future,—do we not as certainly see the elements of a state of ever-sinking degradation, which is to exist for ever, as of a state of ever-increasing perfectibility, to which there is to be no end? Nay, of a higher race, of which we know but little, this much we at least know, that they long since separated into two great classes,—that of the “elect angels,” and of “angels, that kept not their first estate.”

EVIDENCE OF THE SILURIAN MOLLUSCS—OF THE FOSSIL FLORA.
ANCIENT TREE.

After dwelling at such length on the earlier fishes, it may seem scarce necessary to advert to their lower contemporaries the mollusca,—that great division of the animal kingdom which Cuvier places second in the descending order, in his survey of the entire series, and first among the invertebrates; and which Oken regards as the division out of which the immediately preceding class of the vertebral animals have been developed. “The fish,” he says, “is to be viewed as a mussel, from between whose shells a monstrous abdomen has grown out.” There is, however, a peculiarity in the molluscan group of the Silurian system, to which I must be permitted briefly to refer, as, to employ the figure of Sterne, it presents “two handles” of an essentially different kind, and as in all such two-handled cases, the mere special pleader is sure to avail himself of only the handle which best suits his purpose for the time.

Cuvier’s first and highest class of the molluscs is formed of what are termed the Cephalopods,—a class of creatures possessed of great freedom of motion: they can walk, swim, and seize their prey; they have what even the lowest fishes such as the lancelet, want,—a brain enclosed in a cartilaginous cavity in the head, and perfectly formed organs of sight; they possess, too, what is found in no other mollusc,—organs of hearing; and in sagacity and activity they prove more than matches for the smaller fishes, many of which they overmaster and devour. With this highest class there contrasts an exceedingly low molluscous class at the bottom of the scale, or, at least, at what is now the bottom of the scale; for they constitute Cuvier’s fifth class; while his sixth and last, the Cirrhopodes, has been since withdrawn from the molluscs altogether, and placed in a different division of the animal kingdom. And this low class, the Brachiopods, are creatures that, living in bivalve shells, unfurnished with spring hinges to throw them open, and always fast anchored to the same spot, can but thrust forth, through the interstitial chinks of their prison-houses, spiral arms, covered with cilia, and winnow the water for a living. Now, it so happens that the molluscan group of the Silurian system is composed chiefly of these two extreme classes. It contains some of the other forms; but they are few in number, and give no character to the rocks in which they occur. There was nothing by which I was more impressed, in a visit to a Silurian region, than that in its ancient graveyards, as in those of the present day, though in a different sense, the high and the low should so invariably meet together. It is, however, not impossible that, in even the present state of things, a similar union of the extreme forms of the marine mollusca may be taking place in deep-sea deposits. Most of the intermediate forms provided with shells capable of preservation, such as the shelled Gasteropoda and the Conchifers, are either littoral, or restricted to comparatively small depths; whereas the Brachiopoda are deep-sea shells; and the Cephalopoda may be found voyaging far from land, in the upper strata of the sea above them. Even in the seas that surround our own island, the Brachiopodous molluscs—terebratula and crania—have been found, ever since deep-sea dredging became common, to be not very rare shells; and in the Mediterranean, where they are less rare still, fleets of Argonauts, the representatives of a highly organized family of the Cephalopods, to which it is now believed the Bellerophon of the Palæozoic rocks belonged, may be seen skimming along the surface, with sail and oar, high over the profound depths in which they lie. And, of course, when death comes, that comes to high and low, the remains of both Argonauts and Brachiopods must lie together at the bottom, in beds almost totally devoid of the intermediate forms.

Now, the author of the “Vestiges,” in maintaining his hypothesis, suspends it on the handle furnished him by the immense abundance of the Silurian Brachiopods. The Silurian period, he says, exhibits “a scanty and most defective development of life; so much so, that Mr. Lyell calls it, par excellence, the age of Brachiopods, with reference to the by no means exalted bivalve shell-fish which forms its predominant class. Such being the actual state of the case, I must persist in describing even the fauna of this age, which we now know was not the first, as, generally speaking, such a humble exhibition of the animal kingdom as we might expect, upon the development theory, to find at an early stage of the history of organization.” The reader will at once discern the fallacy here. The Silurian period was peculiarly an age of Brachiopods, for in no other period were Brachiopods so numerous, specifically or individually, or of such size or importance; whereas it was not so peculiarly an age of Cephalopods, for these we find introduced in still greater numbers during the Liasic and Oolitic periods. In 1848, when Professor Edward Forbes edited the Palæontological map of Britain and Ireland, which forms one of the very admirable series of “Johnstone’s Physical Atlas,” the Cephalopods of the Silurian rocks of England and Wales were estimated at forty-eight species, and the Brachiopods at one hundred and fifty; whereas at the same date there were two hundred and five Cephalopods of the Oolitic formations enumerated, and but fifty-four Brachiopods. It is the molluscs of the inferior, not those of the superior class, that constitute (with their contemporaries the Trilobites) the characteristic fossils of the Silurian rocks; and hence the propriety of the distinctive name suggested by Sir Charles Lyell. But in the development question, what we have specially to consider is, not the numbers of the low, but the standing of the high. A country may be distinctively a country of flocks and herds, or a country of the carnivorous mammalia, or, like New South Wales or the Galapagos, a country of marsupial animals or of reptiles. Its human inhabitants may be merely a few hunters or shepherds, too inconsiderable in numbers, and too much like their brethren elsewhere, to give it any peculiar standing as a home of men. But in estimating the highest point in the scale to which the animal kingdom has attained within its limits, it is of its few men, not of its many beasts, that we must take note. And the point to be specially decided regarding the organisms of the Silurian system, in this question, is, not the proportion in number which the lower forms bore to the higher, but the exact rank which the higher bore in the scale of existence. Did the system furnish but a single Cephalopod or a single fish, we would yet have as certainly to determine that the chain of being reached as high as the Cephalopod or the fish, as if the remains of these creatures constituted its most abundant fossils. The chain of animal life reached quite as high on the evening of the sixth day of creation, when the human family was restricted to a single pair, as it does now, when our statists reckon up by millions the inhabitants of the greater capitals of the world; and the special pleader who, in asserting the contrary, would insist on determining the point, not by the rank of the men of Eden, but by the number of minnows or sticklebacks that swarmed in its rivers, might be perhaps deemed ingenious in his expedients, but certainly not very judicious in the use of them. It is worthy of remark, however, that the Brachiopods of those Palæozoic periods in which the group occupied such large space in creation, consisted of greatly larger and more important animals than any which it contains in the present day. It has yielded to what geological history shows to be the common fate, and sunk into a state of degradation and decline.

The geological history of the vegetable, like that of the animal kingdom, has been pressed into the service of the development hypothesis; and certainly their respective courses, both in actual arrangement and in their relation to human knowledge, seem wonderfully alike. It is not much more than twenty years since it was held that no exogenous plant existed during the Carboniferous period. The frequent occurrence of Coniferæ in the Secondary deposits had been conclusively determined from numerous specimens; but, founding on what seemed a large amount of negative evidence, it was concluded that, previous to the Liasic age, nature had failed to achieve a tree, and that the rich vegetation of the Coal Measures had been exclusively composed of magnificent immaturities of the vegetable kingdom,—of gigantic ferns and club-mosses, that attained to the size of forest trees, and of thickets of the swamp-loving horsetail family of plants, that well nigh rivalled in height those forests of masts which darken the rivers of our great commercial cities. Such was the view promulgated by M. Adolphe Brongniart; and it may be well to remark that, so far as the evidence on which it was based was positive, the view was sound. It is a fact, that inferior orders of plants were developed in those ages in a style which, in their present state of degradation, they never exemplify: they took their place, not, as now, among the pigmies and abortions of creation, but among its tallest and goodliest productions. It is, however, not a fact that they were the highest vegetable forms of their time. True exogenous trees also existed in great numbers and of vast size. In various localities in the coal fields of both England and Scotland,—such as Lennel Braes and Allan Bank in Berwickshire, High-Heworth, Fellon, Gateshead, and Wideopen near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and in quarries to the west of the city of Durham,—the most abundant fossils of the system are its true woods. In the quarry of Craigleith, near Edinburgh, three huge trunks have been laid open during the last twenty years, within the space of about a hundred and fifty yards, and two equally massy trunks, within half that space, in the neighboring quarry of Granton, all low in the Coal Measures. They lie diagonally athwart the strata,—at an angle of about thirty,—with the nether and weightier portion of their boles below, like snags in the Mississippi; and we infer, from their general direction, that the stream to which they reclined must have flowed from nearly north-east to south-west. The current was probably that of a noble river, which reflected on its broad bosom the shadow of many a stately tree. With the exception of one of the Granton specimens, which still retains its strong-kneed roots, they are all mere portions of trees, rounded at both ends as if by attrition or decay; and yet one of these portions measures about six feet in diameter by sixty-one feet in length; another four feet in diameter by seventy feet in length; and the others, of various thickness, but all bulky enough to equal the masts of large vessels, range in length from thirty-six to forty-seven feet. It seems strange to one who derives his supply of domestic fuel from the Dalkeith and Falkirk coal-fields, that the Carboniferous flora could ever have been described as devoid of trees. I can scarce take up a piece of coal from beside my study fire, without detecting in it fragments of carbonized wood, which almost always exhibit the characteristic longitudinal fibres, and not unfrequently the medullary rays. Even the trap-rocks of the district enclose, in some instances, their masses of lignite, which present in their transverse sections, when cut by the lapidary, the net-like reticulations of the coniferæ. The fossil botanist, who devoted himself chiefly to the study of microscopic structure, would have to decide, from the facts of the case, not that trees were absent during the Carboniferous period, but that, in consequence of their having been present in amazing numbers, their remains had entered more palpably and extensively into the composition of coal than those of any other vegetable.[32] So far as is yet known, they all belonged to the two great divisions of the coniferous family, araucarians and pines. The huge trees of Craigleith and Granton were of the former tribe, and approximate more nearly to Altingia excelsa, the Norfolk-Island pine,—a noble araucarian, that rears its proud head from a hundred and sixty to two hundred feet over the soil, and exhibits a green and luxuriant breadth of foliage rare among the Coniferæ,—than any other living tree.

Fig. 53.

ALTINGIA EXCELSA, (NORFOLK-ISLAND PINE.)

From a young specimen in the Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

Beyond the Coal Measures terrestrial plants become extremely rare. The fossil botanist, on taking leave of the lower Carboniferous beds, quits the land, and sets out to sea; and it seems in no way surprising, that the specimens which he there adds to his herbarium should consist mainly of Fucaceæ and Conferveæ. The development hypothesis can borrow no support from the simple fact, that while a high terrestrial vegetation grows upon dry land, only algæ grow in the sea; and even did the Old Red Sandstone and Silurian systems furnish, as their vegetable organisms, fucoids exclusively, the evidence would amount to no more than simply this, that the land of the Palæozoic periods produced plants of the land, and the sea of the Palæozoic periods produced plants of the sea.

In the Upper Old Red Sandstone,—the formation of the Holoptychius and the Stagonolepis,—the only vegetable remains which I have yet seen are of a character so exceedingly obscure and doubtful, that all I could venture to premise regarding them is, that they seem to be the fragments of sorely comminuted fucoids. In the formation of the Middle Old Red,—that of the Cephalaspis and the gigantic lobster of Carmylie,—the vegetable remains are at once more numerous and better defined. I have detected among the gray micaceous sandstones of Forfarshire a fucoid furnished with a thick, squat stem, that branches into numerous divergent leaflets or fronds, of a slim parallelogrammical, grass-like form, and which, as a whole, somewhat resembles the scourge of cords attached to a handle with which a boy whips his top. And Professor Fleming describes a still more remarkable vegetable organism of the same formation, “which, occurring in the form of circular, flat patches, composed each of numerous smaller contiguous circular pieces, is altogether not unlike what might be expected to result from a compressed berry, such as the bramble or rasp.” In the Lower Old Red,—the formation of the Coccosteus and Cheiracanthus,—the remains of fucoids are more numerous still. There are gray slaty beds among the rocks of Navity, that owe their fissile character mainly to their layers of carbonized weed; and “among the rocks of Sandy-Bay, near Thurso,” says Mr. Dick, “the dark impressions of large fucoids are so numerous, that they remind one of the interlaced boughs and less bulky pine-trunks that lie deep in our mosses.” A portion of a stem from the last locality, which I owe to Mr. Dick, measures three inches in diameter; but the ill-compacted cellular tissue of the algæ is but indifferently suited for preservation; and so it exists as a mere coaly film, scarcely half a line in thickness.

The most considerable collection of the Lower Old Red fucoids which I have yet seen is that of the Rev. Charles Clouston of Sandwick, in Orkney,—a skilful cultivator of geological science, who has specially directed his palæontological inquiries on the vegetable remains of the flagstones of his district, as the department in which most remained to be done; but his numerous specimens only serve to show what a poverty-stricken flora that of the ocean of the Lower Old Red Sandstone must have been. I could detect among them but two species of plants;—the one an imperfectly preserved vegetable, more nearly resembling a club-moss than aught else which I have seen, but which bore on its surface, instead of the well-marked scales of the Lycopodiaceæ, irregular rows of tubercles, that, when elongated in the profile, as sometimes happens, might be mistaken for minute, ill-defined leaves; the other, a smooth-stemmed fucoid, existing on the stone in most cases as a mere film, in which, however, thickly-set longitudinal fibres are occasionally traceable, and which may be always distinguished from the other by its sharp-edged outline, and from the circumstance that its stems continue to retain the same diameter for considerable distances, after throwing off at acute angles numerous branches nearly as bulky as themselves. In a Thurso specimen, about two feet in length, which I owe to the kindness of Mr. Dick, there are stems continuous throughout, that, though they ramify in that space into from six to eight branches, are nearly as thick atop as at bottom. They are the remains, in all probability, of a long, flexible weed, that may have somewhat resembled those fucoids of the intertropical seas, which, streaming slantwise in the tide, rise not unfrequently to the surface in from fifteen to twenty fathoms of water; and as, notwithstanding their obscurity, they are among the most perfect specimens of their class yet found, and contrast with the stately araucarians of the Coal Measures, in a style which cannot fail to delight the heart of every assertor of the development hypothesis, I present them to the reader from Mr. Dick’s specimen, in a figure (fig. 54) which, however slight its interest, has at least the merit of being true. The stone exhibits specimens of the two species of Mr. Clouston’s collection,—the sharp-edged, finely-striated weed, a, and that roughened by tubercles, b; which, besides the distinctive character manifested on its surface, differs from the other in rapidly losing breath with every branch which it throws off, and, in consequence, runs soon to a point. The cut on the opposite page (fig. 55) represents not inadequately the cortical peculiarities of the two species when best preserved. The surface of the tubercled one will perhaps remind the Algologist of the knobbed surface of the thong or receptacle of Himanthalia lorea, a recent fucoid, common on the western coast of Scotland, but rare on the east. An Orkney specimen lately sent me by Mr. William Watt, from a quarry at Skaill, has much the appearance of one of the smaller ferns, such as the moor-worts, sea spleen-worts, or maiden-hairs. It exists as an impression in diluted black, on a ground of dark gray, and has so little sharpness of outline, that, like minute figures in oil-paintings, it seems more distinct when viewed at arm’s length than when microscopically examined; but enough remains to show that it must have been a terrestrial, not a marine plant. The accompanying print (fig. 56) may be regarded as no unfaithful representation of this unique fossil its state of imperfect keeping. The vegetation of the Silurian system, from its upper beds down till where we reach the zero of life, is, like that of the Old Red Sandstone, almost exclusively fucoidal. In the older fossiliferous deposits of the system in Sweden, Russia, the Lake Districts of England, Canada, and the United States, fucoids occur, to the exclusion, so far as is yet known, of every other vegetable form; and such is their abundance in some localities, that they render the argillaceous rocks in which they lie diffused, capable of being fired as an alum slate, and exist in others as seams of a compact anthracite, occasionally used as fuel. They also occur in those districts of Wales in which the place and sequence of the various Silurian formations were first determined, though apparently in a state of keeping from which little can be premised regarding their original forms. Sir Roderick Murchison sums up his notice of the vegetable remains of the system in the province whence it derives its name, by stating that he had submitted his specimens to “Mr. Robert Brown and Dr. Greville, and that neither of these eminent botanists were able to say much more regarding them than that they were fucoid-like bodies.”

Fig. 54.

FUCOIDS OF THE LOWER OLD RED SANDSTONE.

a. Smooth-stemmed species.

b. Tubercled species.

(One sixth nat. size, linear.)

Fig. 55.

a. Smooth-stemmed species.

b. Tubercled species.

(Natural size.)

Such are the vegetable organisms of the Old Red Sandstone and Silurian systems: they are the remains of the ancient marine plants of ancient marine deposits and, as such, lend quite as little support to the development hypothesis as the recent algæ of our existing seas. The case, stated in its most favorable form, amounts simply to this,—that at certain early periods,—represented by the Upper and Lower Silurian and the Old Red deposits,—the seas produced sea-plants; and that, at a certain later period,—that of the Carboniferous system,—the land produced land-plants. But even this, did it stand alone, would be a too favorable statement. I have seen, on one occasion, the fisherman bring up with his nets, far in the open sea, a wild rose-bush, that, though it still bore its characteristic thorns, was encrusted with serpula, and laden with pendulous lobularia. It had been swept from its original habitat by some river in flood, that had undermined and torn down the bank on which it grew; and after floating about, mayhap for months, had become so saturated with water, that it could float no longer. And in that single rose-bush, dragged up to the light and air from its place among Sertularia, Flustra, Serpula, and the deep-sea fucoids, I had as certain an evidence of the existence of the dicotyledonous plant, as if I had all the families of the Rosaecæ before me. Now, we are furnished by the more ancient formations with evidence regarding the existence of a terrestrial vegetation, such as that which the rose-bush in this case supplied. We cannot expect that the proofs should be numerous. In the chart of the Pacific attached to the better editions of “Cook’s Voyages,” there are several notes along the tract of the great navigator, that indicate where, in mid ocean, trees or fragments of trees had been picked up. These entries, however, are but few, though they belong to all the three voyages together: if I remember aright, there are only five entries in all,—two in the Northern, and three in the Southern Pacific. The floating shrub or tree, at a great distance from land, is of rare occurrence in even the present scene of things, though the breadth of land be great, and trees numerous; and in the times of the Silurian and Old Red Sandstone systems, when the breadth of land was apparently not great, and trees and shrubs, in consequence, not numerous, it must have been of rarer occurrence still. We learn, however, from Sir Charles Lyell, that in the “Hamilton group of the United States,—a series of beds that corresponds in many of its fossils with the Ludlow rocks of England,—plants allied to the Lepidodendra of the Carboniferous type are abundant; and that in the lower Devonian strata of New York the same plants occur associated with ferns.” And I am able to demonstrate, from an interesting fossil at present before me, that there existed in the period of the Lower Old Red Sandstone vegetable forms of a class greatly higher than either Lepidodendra or ferns.

Fig. 56.

FERN? OF THE LOWER OLD RED SANDSTONE.

(Natural size.)

Fig. 57.

LIGNITE OF THE LOWER OLD RED SANDSTONE.

(One third nat. size, linear.)

In my little work on the Old Red Sandstone, I have referred to an apparent lignite of the Lower Old Red of Cromarty, which presented, when viewed by the microscope, marks of the internal fibre. The surface, when under the glass, resembled, I said, a bundle of horse-hairs lying stretched in parallel lines: and in this specimen alone, it was added, had I found aught in the Lower Old Red Sandstone approaching to proof of the existence of dry land. About four years ago I had this lignite put stringently to the question by Mr. Sanderson, and deeply interesting was the result. I must first mention, however, that there cannot rest the shadow of a doubt regarding the place of the organism in the geologic scale. It is unequivocally a fossil of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. I found it partially embedded, with many other nodules half-disinterred by the sea, in an ichthyolitic deposit, a few hundred yards to the east of the town of Cromarty, which occurs more than four hundred feet over the Great Conglomerate base of the system. A nodule that lay immediately beside it contained a well-preserved specimen of the Coccosteus Decipiens; and in the nodule in which the lignite itself is contained, (fig. 57,) the practised eye may detect a scattered group of scales of Diplacanthus, a scarce less characteristic organism of the lower formation. And what, asks the reader, is the character of this very ancient vegetable,—the most ancient, by three whole formations, that has presented its internal structure to the microscope? Is it as low in the scale of development as in the geological scale? Does this venerable Adam of the forest appear, like the Adam of the infidel, as a squalid, ill-formed savage, with a rugged shaggy nature, which it would require the suggestive necessities of many ages painfully to lick into civilization? Or does it appear rather like the Adam of the poet and the theologian, independent, in its instantaneously-derived perfection, of all after development?

“Adam, the goodliest man of men since born

His sons.”

Is its tissue vascular or cellular, or, like that of some of the cryptogamia, intermediate? Or what, in fine, is the nature and bearing of its mute but emphatic testimony, on that doctrine of progressive development of late so strangely resuscitated?

In the first place, then, this ancient fossil is a true wood,—a Dicotyledonous or Polycotyledonous Gymnosperm, that, like the pines and larches of our existing forests, bore naked seeds, which, in their state of germination, developed either double lobes to shelter the embryo within, or shot out a fringe of verticillate spikes, which performed the same protective functions, and that, as it increased in bulk year after year, received its accessions of growth in outside layers. In the transverse section the cells bear the reticulated appearance which distinguish the coniferæ, (fig. 58, a;) the lignite had been exposed in its bed to a considerable degree of pressure; and so the openings somewhat resemble the meshes of a net that has been drawn a little awry; but no general obliteration of their original character has taken place, save in minute patches, where they have been injured by compression or the bituminizing process. All the tubes indicated by the openings are, as in recent coniferæ, of nearly the same size; and though, as in many of the more ancient lignites, there are no indications of annual rings, the direction of the medullary rays is distinctly traceable. The longitudinal sections are rather less distinct than the transverse one; in the section parallel to the radius of the stem or bole the circular disks of the coniferæ were at first not at all detected; and, as since shown by a very fine microscope, they appear simply as double and triple lines of undefined dots, (b,) that somewhat resemble the stippled markings of the miniature painter; nor are the openings of the medullary rays frequent in the tangental section (i. e. that parallel to the bark,) (c;) but nothing can be better defined than the peculiar arrangement of the woody fibre, and the longitudinal form of the cells. Such is the character of this, the most ancient of lignites yet found, that yields to the microscope the peculiarities of its original structure. We find in it an unfallen Adam,—not a half-developed savage.[33]

Fig. 58.

INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF LIGNITE OF LOWER OLD RED SANDSTONE.

a. Transverse section.

b. Longitudinal section, (parallel to radius, or medullary rays.)

c. Longitudinal section, (tangental, or parallel to the bark.)

(Mag. forty diameters.)

The olive leaf which the dove brought to Noah established at least three important facts, and indicated a few more. It showed most conclusively that there was dry land, that there were olive trees, and that the climate of the surrounding region, whatever change it might have undergone, was still favorable to the development of vegetable life. And, further, it might be very safely inferred from it, that if olive trees had survived, other trees and plants must have survived also; and that the dark muddy prominences round which the ebbing currents were fast sweeping to lower levels, would soon present, as in antediluvian times, their coverings of cheerful green. The olive leaf spoke not of merely a partial, but of a general vegetation. Now, the coniferous lignite of the Lower Old Red Sandstone we find charged, like the olive leaf, with a various and singularly interesting evidence. It is something to know, that in the times of the Coccosteus and Asterolepis there existed dry land, and that that land wore, as at after periods, its soft, gay mantle of green. It is something also to know, that the verdant tint was not owing to a profuse development of the mere immaturities of the vegetable kingdom,—crisp, slow-growing lichens, or watery spore-propagated fungi that shoot up to their full size in a night,—nor even to an abundance of the more highly organized families of the liverworts and the mosses. These may have abounded then, as now; though we have not a shadow of evidence that they did. But while we have no proof whatever of their existence, we have conclusive proof that there existed orders and families of a rank far above them. On the dry land of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, on which, according to the theory of Adolphe Brogniart, nothing higher than a lichen or a moss could have been expected, the ship-carpenter might have hopefully taken axe in hand, to explore the woods for some such stately pine as the one described by Milton,—

“Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast

Of some great admiral.”

Viewed simply in its picturesque aspect, this olive leaf of the Old Red seems not at all devoid of poetry. We sail upwards into the high geologic zones, passing from ancient to still more ancient scenes of being; and, as we voyage along, find ever in the surrounding prospect, as in the existing scene from which we set out, a graceful intermixture of land and water, continent, river, and sea. We first coast along the land of the Tertiary, inhabited by the strange quadrupeds of Cuvier, and waving with the reeds and palms of the Paris Basin; the land of the Wealden, with its gigantic iguanodon rustling amid its tree ferns and its cycadeæ, comes next; then comes the green land of the Oolite, with its little pouched insectivorous quadruped, its flying reptiles, its vast jungles of the Brora equisetum, and its forests of the Helmsdale pine; and then, dimly as through a haze, we mark, as we speed on, the thinly scattered islands of the New Red Sandstone, and pick up in our course a large floating leaf, veined like that of a cabbage, which not a little puzzles the botanists of the expedition. And now we near the vast Carboniferous continent, and see along the undulating outline, between us and the sky, the strange forms of a vegetation, compared with which that of every previously seen land seems stunted and poor. We speed day after day along endless forests, in which gigantic club-mosses wave in air a hundred feet over head, and skirt interminable marshes, in which thickets of reeds overtop the mast-head. And, where mighty rivers come rolling to the sea, we mark, through the long-retiring vistas which they open into the interior, the higher grounds of the country covered with coniferous trees, and see doddered trunks of vast size, like those of Granton and Craigleith, reclining under the banks in deep muddy reaches, with their decaying tops turned adown the current. At length the furthermost promontory of this long range of coast comes full in view: we near it,—we have come up abreast of it: we see the shells of the Mountain Limestone glittering white along its further shore, and the green depths under our keel lightened by the flush of innumerable corals; and then, bidding farewell to the land forever,—for so the geologists of but five years ago would have advised,—we launch into the unmeasured ocean of the Old Red, with its three consecutive zones of animal life. Not a single patch of land more do those geologic charts exhibit which we still regard as new. The zones of the Silurian and Cambrian succeed the zones of the Old Red; and, darkly fringed by an obscure bank of cloud ranged along the last zone in the series, a night that never dissipates settles down upon the deep. Our voyage, like that of the old fabulous navigators of five centuries ago, terminates on the sea in a thick darkness, beyond which there lies no shore and there dawns no light. And it is in the middle of this vast ocean, just where the last zone of the Old Red leans against the first zone of the Silurian, that we have succeeded in discovering a solitary island unseen before,—a shrub-bearing land, much enveloped in fog, but with hills that at least look green in the distance. There are patches of floating sea-weed much comminuted by the surf all around it; and on one projecting headland we see clear through our glasses a cone-bearing tree.

This certainly is not the sort of arrangement demanded by the exigencies of the development hypothesis. A true wood at the base of the Old Red Sandstone, or a true Placoid in the Limestones of Bala, very considerably beneath the base of the Lower Silurian system, are untoward misplacements for the purposes of the Lamarckian; and who that has watched the progress of discovery for the last twenty years, and seen the place of the earliest ichthyolite transferred from the Carboniferous to the Cambrian system, and that of the earliest exogenous lignite from the Lias to the Lower Devonian, will now venture to say that fossil wood may not yet be detected as low in the scale as any vegetable organism whatever, or fossil fish as low as the remains of any animal? But though the response of the earlier geologic systems be thus unfavorable to the development hypothesis, may not men such as the author of the “Vestiges” urge, that the geologic evidence, taken as a whole, and in its bearing on groupes and periods, establishes the general fact that the lower plants and animals preceded the higher,—that the conifera, for instance, preceded our true forest trees, such as the oak and elm,—that, in like manner, the fish preceded the reptile, that the reptile preceded the bird, that the bird preceded the mammiferous quadruped and the quadrumana, and that the mammiferous quadruped and the quadrumana preceded man? Assuredly yes! They may and do urge that Geology furnishes evidence of such a succession of existences; and the arrangement seems at once a very wonderful and very beautiful one. Of that great and imposing procession of being of which this world has been the scene, the programme has been admirably marshalled. But the order of the arrangement in no degree justifies the inference based upon it by the Lamarckian. The fact that fishes and reptiles were created on an earlier day than the beasts of the field and the human family, gives no ground whatever for the belief that “the peopling of the earth was one of a natural kind, requiring time,” or that the reptiles and fishes have been not only the predecessors, but also the progenitors of the beasts and of man. The geological phenomena, even had the author of the “Vestiges” been consulted in their arrangement, and permitted to determine their sequence, would yet have failed to furnish, not merely an adequate foundation for the development hypothesis, but even the slightest presumption in its favor. In making good the assertion, may I ask the reader to follow me through the details of a simple though somewhat lengthened illustration?

SUPERPOSITION NOT PARENTAL RELATION.
THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE.

Several thousand years ago, ere the upheaval of the last of our raised beaches, there existed somewhere on the British coast a submarine bed, rich in sea-weed and the less destructible zoophytes, and inhabited by the commoner crustaceæ and molluscs. Shoals of herrings frequented it every autumn, haunted by their usual enemies the dog-fish, the cod, and the porpoise; and, during the other seasons of the year, it was swum over by the ling, the hake, and the turbot. A considerable stream, that traversed a wide extent of marshy country, waving with flags and reeds, and in which the frog and the newt bred by millions, entered the sea a few hundred yards away, and bore down, when in flood, its modicum of reptilian remains, some of which, sinking over the submarine bed, found a lodgment at the bottom. Portions of reeds and flags were also occasionally entombed, with now and then boughs of the pine and juniper, swept from the higher grounds. Through frequent depositions of earthy matter brought down by the streamlet, and of sand thrown up by the sea, a gradual elevation of the bottom went on, till at length the deep-sea bed came to exist as a shallow bank, over which birds of the wader family stalked mid-leg deep when plying for food; and on one occasion a small porpoise, losing his way, and getting entangled amid its shoals, perished on it, and left his carcass to be covered up by its mud and silt. That elevation of the land, or recession of the sea, to which the country owes its last acquired marginal strip of soil, took place, and the shallow bank became a flat meadow, raised some six or eight feet above the sea-level. Herbs, shrubs, and trees, in course of time covered it over; and then, as century succeeded century, it gathered atop a thick stratum of peaty mould, embedding portions of birch and hazel bushes, and a few doddered oaks. When in this state, at a comparatively recent period, an Italian boy, accompanied by his monkey, was passing over it, when the poor monkey, hard-wrought and ill-fed, and withal but indifferently suited originally for braving the rigors of a keen northern climate, lay down and died, and his sorrowing master covered up the remains. Not many years after, the mutilated corpse of a poor shipwrecked sailor was thrown up, during a night-storm, on the neighboring beach: it was a mere fragment of the human frame,—a mouldering unsightly mass, decomposing in the sun; and a humane herd-boy, scooping out a shallow grave for it, immediately over that of the monkey, buried it up. Last of all, a farmer, bent on agricultural improvement, furrowed the flat meadow to the depth of some six or eight feet, by a broad ditch, that laid open its organic contents from top to bottom. And then a philosopher of the school of Maillet and Lamarck, chancing to come that way, stepped aside to examine the phenomena, and square them with his theory.

First, along the bottom of the deep ditch he detects marine organisms of a low order, and generally of a small size There are dark indistinct markings traversing the gray silt which he correctly enough regards as the remains of fucoids and blent with these, he finds the stony cells of flustra, the calcareous spindles of the sea-pen, the spines of echinus, and the thin granular plates of the crustacea. Layers of mussel and pecten shells come next, mixed up with the shells of buccinum, natica, and trochus. Over the shells there occur defensive spines of the dog-fish, blent with the button-like, thornset boucles of the ray. And the minute skeletons of herrings, with the vertebral and cerebral bones of cod, rest over these in turn. He finds, also, well-preserved bits of reed, and a fragment of pine. Higher up, the well-marked bones of the frog occur, and the minute skeleton of a newt; higher still, the bones of birds of the diver family; higher still, the skeleton of a porpoise; and still higher, he discovers that of a monkey, resting amid the decayed boles and branches of dicotyledonous plants and trees. He pursues his search, vastly delighted to find his doctrine of progressive development so beautifully illustrated; and last of all he detects, only a few inches from the surface, the broken remains of the poor sailor. And having thus collected his facts, he sets himself to collate them with his hypothesis. To hold that the zoophytes had been created zoophytes, the molluscs molluscs, the fishes fishes, the reptiles reptiles, or the man a man, would be, according to our philosopher, alike derogatory to the Divine wisdom and to the acumen and vigor of the human intellect: it would be “distressing to him to be compelled to picture the power of God, as put forth in any other manner than in those slow, mysterious, universal laws, which have so plainly an eternity to work in;” nor, with so large an amount of evidence before him as that which the ditch furnishes,—evidence conclusive to the effect that creation is but development,—does he find it necessary either to cramp his faculties or outrage his taste, by a weak yielding to the requirements of any such belief.

Meanwhile the farmer,—a plain, observant, elderly man, comes up, and he and the philosopher enter into conversation. “I have been reading the history of creation in the side of your deep ditch,” says the philosopher, “and find the record really very complete. Look there,” he adds, pointing to the unfossiliferous strip that runs along the bottom of the bank; “there, life, both vegetable and animal, first began. It began, struck by electricity out of albumen, as a congeries of minute globe-shaped atoms,—each a hollow sphere within a sphere, as in the well-known Chinese puzzle; and from these living atoms were all the higher forms progressively developed. The ditch, of course, exhibits none of the atoms with which being first commenced; for the atoms don’t keep;—we merely see their place indicated by that unfossiliferous band at the bottom; but we may detect immediately over it almost the first organisms into which—parting thus early into the two great branches of organic being—they were developed. There are the fucoids, first-born among vegetables,—and there the zoophytes, well nigh the lowest of the animal forms. The fucoids are marine plants; for, according to Oken, ‘all life is from the sea,—none from the continent;’ but there, a few feet higher, we may see the remains of reeds and flags,—semi-aqueous, semi-aerial plants of the comparatively low monocotyledonous order into which the fucoids were developed; higher still we detect fragments of pines, and, I think, juniper,—trees and shrubs of the land of an intermediate order, into which the reeds and flags were developed in turn; and in that peaty layer immediately beneath the vegetable mould, there occur boughs and trunks of blackened oak,—a noble tree of the dicotyledonous division,—the highest to which vegetation in its upward course has yet attained. Nor is the progress of the other great branch of organized being—that of the animal kingdom—less distinctly traceable. The zoophytes became crustacea and molluscs,—the crustacea and molluscs, dog-fishes and herrings,—the dog-fish, a low placoid, shot up chiefly into turbot, cod, and ling; but the smaller osseous fish was gradually converted into a batrachian reptile; in short, the herring became a frog,—an animal that still testifies to its ichthyological origin, by commencing life as a fish. Gradually, in the course of years, the reptile, expanding in size and improving in faculty, passed into a warm-blooded porpoise; the porpoise at length, tiring of the water as he began to know better, quitted it altogether, and became a monkey, and the monkey by slow degrees improved into man,—yes, into man, my friend, who has still a tendency, especially when just shooting up to his full stature, and studying the ‘Vestiges,’ to resume the monkey. Such, Sir, is the true history of creation, as clearly recorded in the section of earth, moss, and silt, which you have so opportunely laid bare. Where that ditch now opens, the generations of the man atop lived, died, and were developed. There flourished and decayed his great-great-great-great-grandfather the sea-pen,—his great-great-great-grandfather the mussel,—his great-great-grandfather the herring,—his great-grandfather the frog,—his grandfather the porpoise,—and his father the monkey. And there also lived, died, and were developed, the generations of the oak, from the kelp-weed and tangle to the reed and the flag, and from the reed and the flag, to the pine, the juniper, the hazel, and the birch.”

“Master,” replies the farmer, “I see you are a scholar and, I suspect, a wag. It would take a great deal of believing to believe all that. In the days of my poor old neighbor the infidel weaver, who died of delirium tremens thirty years ago, I used to read Tom Paine; and, as I was a little wild at the time, I was, I am afraid, a bit of a sceptic. It wasn’t easy work always to be as unbelieving as Tom, especially when the conscience within got queasy; but it would be a vast deal easier, Master, to doubt with Tom than to believe with you. I am a plain man, but not quite a fool; and as I have now been looking about me in this neighborhood for the last forty years, I have come to know that it gives no assurance that any one thing grew out of any other thing because it chances to be found atop of it, Master. See, yonder is Dobbin lying lazily atop of his bundle of hay; and yonder little Jack, with bridle in hand, and he in a few minutes will be atop of Dobbin. And all I see in that ditch, Master, from top to bottom, is neither more nor less than a certain top-upon-bottom order of things. I see sets of bones and dead plants lying on the top of other sets of bones and dead plants,—things lying atop of things, as I say, like Dobbin on the hay and Jack upon Dobbin. I doubt not the sea was once here, Master, just as it was once where you see the low-lying field yonder, which I won from it ten years ago. I have carted tangle and kelp-weed where I now cut clover and rye-grass, and have gathered periwinkles where I now see snails. But it is clean against experience, as my poor old neighbor the weaver used to say,—against my experience, Master,—that it was the kelp-weed that became the rye-grass, or that the periwinkles freshened into snails. The kelp-weed and periwinkles belong to those plants and animals of the sea that we find growing in only the sea; the rye-grass and snails, to those plants and animals of the land that we find growing on only the land. It is contrary to all experience, and all testimony too, that the one passed into the other, and so I cannot believe it; but I do and must believe, instead,—for it is not contrary to experience, and much according to testimony,—that the Author of all created both land productions and sea productions at the ‘times before appointed,’ and ‘determined the bounds of their habitation.’ ‘By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God;’ and I find I can be a believer on God’s terms at a much less expense of credulity than an infidel on yours.”

But in this form at least it can be scarce necessary that the argument should be prolonged.

The geological phenomena, I repeat, even had the author of the “Vestiges” been consulted in their arrangement, and permitted to determine their sequence, would fail to furnish a single presumption in favor of the development hypothesis. Does the ditch-side of my illustration furnish it with a single favoring presumption? The arrangement and sequence of the various organisms are complete in both the zoological and phytological branch. The flag and reed succeed the fucoid; the fir and juniper succeed the flag and reed; and the hazel, birch, and oak succeed the fir and juniper. In like manner, and with equal regularity, zoophytes, the radiata, the articulata, mollusca, fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals, are ranged, the superior in succession over the inferior classes, in the true ascending order; and yet we at once see that the evidence of the ditch-side, amounting in the aggregate to no more than this, that the remains of the higher lie over those of the lower organisms, gives not a shadow of support to the hypothesis that the lower produced the higher. For, according to the honest farmer, the fact that any one thing is found lying on the top of any other thing, furnishes no presumption whatever that the thing below stands in the relation of parent to the thing above. And the evidence which the well-ranged organisms of the ditch-side do not furnish, the organisms of the entire geologic scale, even were they equally well ranged, would fail to supply. The fossiliferous portion of the ditch-side of my illustration may be, let us suppose, some five or six feet in thickness; the fossiliferous portion of the earth’s crust must be some five or six miles in thickness. But the mere circumstance of space introduces no new element into the question. Equally in both cases the fact of superposition is not identical with the fact of parental relation, nor even in any degree an analogous fact.

As, however, the succession of remains in the fossiliferous series of rocks is infinitely less favorable to the development hypothesis than that of the organisms of the ditch-side, it is not very surprising that the disciples of the development school should be now evincing a disposition to escape from the ascertained facts of Geology, and the legitimate conclusions based upon these, unto unknown and unexplored provinces of the science; or that they should be found virtually urging, that though some of the ascertained facts may seem to bear against them, the facts not yet ascertained may be found telling in their favor. Such, in effect, is the course taken by the author of the “Vestiges,” in his “Explanations,” when, availing himself of a difference of opinion which exists among some of our most accomplished geologists regarding the first epochs of organized existence, he takes part with the section who hold that we have not yet penetrated to the deposits representative of the dawn of being, and that fossil-charged formations may yet be detected beneath the oldest rocks of what is now regarded as the lowest fossiliferous system. Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Leonard Hornet represent the abler and better-known assertors of this last view; while Sir Roderick Murchison and Professor Sedgwick rank among the more distinguished assertors of the antagonist one. It would be of course utterly presumptuous in the writer of these pages to attempt deciding a question regarding which such men differ; but in forming a judgment for myself, various considerations incline me to hold, that the point is now very nearly determined at which, to employ the language of Sir Roderick, “life was first breathed into the waters.” The pyramid of organized existence, as it ascends in the by-past eternity, inclines sensibly towards its apex,—that apex of “beginning” in which, on far other than geological grounds, it is our privilege to believe. The broad base of the superstructure, planted on the existing now, stretches across the entire scale of life, animal and vegetable; but it contracts as it rises into the past;—man—the quadrumana—the quadrupedal mammal—the bird—and the reptile—are each in succession struck from off its breadth, till we at length see it with the vertebrata, represented by only the fish, narrowing, as it were, to a point; and though the clouds of the upper region may hide its extreme apex, we infer from the declination of its sides, that it cannot penetrate much farther into the profound. When Steele and Addison were engaged in breaking up, piecemeal, their Spectator Club,—killing off good Sir Roger de Coverly with a defluction, marrying Will Honeycomb to his tenant’s daughter, and sending away Captain Sentry and Sir Andrew Freeport to their estates to the country,—it was shrewdly inferred that the “Spectator” himself was very soon to quit the field; and the sudden discontinuance of his lucubrations justified the inference. And a corresponding style of reasoning, based on the corresponding fact of the breaking up and piecemeal disappearance of the group of organized being, seems equally admissible. It is somewhat difficult to conceive how at least many more volumes of the geologic record than the known ones could be got up without the club. Further,—so far as yet appears, the fish must have lived in advance of the reptile during the three protracted periods of the Old Red Sandstone, the two still more protracted periods of the Upper and Lower Silurians, and the perhaps more protracted period still of the Cambrian deposits;—in all, apparently, a greatly more extended space than that in which the reptile lived in advance of the quadrupedal mammal, or the quadrupedal mammal lived in advance of man. On principles somewhat similar to those on which, with reference to the average term of life, the genealogist fixes the probable period of some birth in his chain of succession of which he cannot determine the exact date, it seems natural to infer that the birth of the fish should have taken place at least not earlier than the times of the Cambrian system.

There is another consideration, of at least equal, if not greater weight. A general correspondence is found to obtain in widely-separated localities, in the organic contents of that lowest band of the Lower Silurian or Cambrian system in which fossils have been detected. In Russia, in Sweden, in Norway, in the Lake district of England, and in the United States, there are certain rocks which occupy relatively the same place, and enclose what may be described generally as the same remains. They occur in Scandinavia as that “fucoidal band” of Sir Roderick Murchison which forms the base of the vast Palæozoic basin of the Baltic; they exist in Cumberland and Westmoreland as the Skiddaw slates of Professor Sedgwick, and bear also their fucoidal impressions, blent with graptolites; they are present in North America as those Potsdam sandstones of the States’ geologists in which fucoids so abound, mixed with a minute lingula, that they impart to some portions of the strata a carboniferous character. But with these deep-lying beds in all the several localities, thousands of miles apart, in which their passage into the inferior deposits has been traced, fossils cease. And why cease with them? In one locality the ancient ocean may have been of such a depth in the period immediately previous, and represented, in consequence, by the strata immediately beneath, that no animal could have lived at its bottom,—though I do not well see why the remains of those animals who, like the shark and pilot-fish, are frequently seen swimming over the profoundest depths, might not, did such exist at the time, be notwithstanding found at its bottom; or in another locality every trace of organization in the nether rocks may have been obliterated, at some posterior period, by fire. But it is difficult to imagine that that uniform cessation of organized life at one point, which seems to have conducted Sir Roderick Murchison and Professor Sedgwick to their conclusion, should have been thus a mere effect of accident. Accident has its laws, but uniformity is not one of them; and should the experience be invariable, as it already seems extensive, that immediately beneath the fucoidal beds organic remains cease, I do not see how the conclusion is to be avoided, that they represent the period in which at least existences capable of preservation were first introduced. Every case of coincident cessation which has occurred since the determination of the second case, must be reckoned, not simply as an additional unit in evidence, but, on the principles which determine mathematical probability, as a unit multiplied first by the chances against its occurrence, regarded as a mere contingency in that exact formation, and second, by the sum of all the previous occurrences at the same point.

In this curious question, however, which it must be the part of future explorers in the geological field definitely to settle, the Lamarckian can have no legitimate stake. It is but natural that, in his anxiety to secure an ultimate retreat for his hypothesis, he should desire to see that darkness in which ghosts love to walk settling down on the extreme verge of the geological horizon, and enveloping in its folds the first beginnings of life. But even did the cloud exist, it is, if I may so express myself, on its nearer side, where there is light,—not within nor beyond it, where there is none,—that the battle must be fought. It is to Geology as it is known to be, that the Lamarckian has appealed,—not to Geology as it is not known to be. He has summoned into court existing witnesses; and, finding their testimony unfavorable, he seeks to neutralize their evidence by calling from the “vasty deep,” of the unexamined and the obscure, witnesses that “won’t come,”—that by the legitimate authorities are not known even to exist,—and with which he himself is, on his own confession, wholly unacquainted, save in the old scholastic character of mere possibilities. The possible fossil can have no more standing in this controversy than the “possible angel.” He tells us that we have not yet got down to that base-line of all the fossiliferous systems at which life first began; and very possibly we have not. But what of that? He has carried his appeal to Geology as it is;—he has referred his case to the testimony of the known witnesses, for in no case can the unknown ones be summoned or produced. It is on the evidence of the known, and the known only, that the exact value of his claims must be determined; and his appeal to the unknown serves but to show how thoroughly he himself feels that the actually ascertained evidence bears against him. The severe censure of Johnson on reasoners of this class is in no degree over-severe. “He who will determine,” said the moralist, “against that which he knows, because there may be something which he knows not,—he that can set hypothetical possibility against acknowledged certainty,—is not to be admitted among reasonable beings.”

But the honest farmer’s reminiscences of his deceased neighbor the weaver, and his use at second-hand of Hume’s experience-argument, naturally lead me to another branch of the subject.

LAMARCKIAN HYPOTHESIS OF THE ORIGIN OF PLANTS.
ITS CONSEQUENCES.

I have said that the curiously-mixed, semi-marine, semi-lacustrine flora of the Lake of Stennis became associated in my mind, like the ancient Asterolepis of Stromness, with the development hypothesis. The fossil, as has been shown, represents not inadequately the geologic evidence in the question,—the mixed vegetation of the lake may be regarded as forming a portion of the phytological evidence.

“All life,” says Oken, “is from the sea. Where the sea organism, by self-elevation, succeeds in attaining into form, there issues forth from it a higher organism. Love arose out of the sea-foam. The primary mucus (that in which electricity originates life) was, and is still, generated in those very parts of the sea where the water is in contact with earth and air, and thus upon the shores. The first creation of the organic took place where the first mountain summits projected out of the water,—indeed, without doubt, in India, if the Himalaya be the highest mountain. The first organic forms, whether plants or animals, emerged from the shallow parts of the sea.” Maillet wrote to exactly the same effect a full century ago. “In a word,” we find him saying, in his “Telliamed,” “do not herbs, plants, roots, grains, and all of this kind that the earth produces and nourishes, come from the sea? Is it not at least natural to think so, since we are certain that all our habitable lands came originally from the sea? Besides, in small islands far from the continent, which have appeared but a few ages ago at most, and where it is manifest that never any man had been, we find shrubs, herbs, roots, and sometimes animals. Now, you must be forced to own either that these productions owed their origin to the sea, or to a new creation, which is absurd.”

It is a curious fact, to which, in the passing, I must be permitted to call the attention of the reader, that all the leading assertors of the development hypothesis have been bad geologists. Maillet had for his errors and deficiencies the excellent apology that he wrote more than a hundred years ago, when the theory of a universal ocean, promulgated by Leibnitz nearly a century earlier, was quite as good as any of the other theories of the time, and when Geology, as a science, had no existence. And so we do not wonder at an ignorance which was simply that of his age, when we find him telling his readers that plants must have originated in the sea, seeing that “all our habitable lands came originally from the sea;” meaning, of course, by the statement, not at all what the modern geologist would mean were he to employ even the same words, but simply that there was a time when the universal ocean covered the whole globe, and that, as the waters gradually diminished, the loftier mountain summits and higher table-lands, in appearing in their new character as islands and continents, derived their flora from what, in a universal ocean could be the only possible existing flora,—that of the sea. But what shall we say of the equally profound ignorance manifested by Professor Oken, a living authority, whom we find prefacing for the Ray Society, in 1847, the English translation of his “Elements of Physio-philosophy?” “The first creation of the organic took place,” we find him saying, “where the first mountain summits projected out of the sea,—indeed, without doubt, in India, if the Himalaya be the highest mountain.” Here, evidently, in this late age of the world, in which Geology does exist as a science, do we find the ghost of the universal ocean of Leibnitz walking once more, as if it had never been laid. Is there now in all Britain even a tyro geologist so unacquainted with geological fact as not to know that the richest flora which the globe ever saw had existed for myriads of ages, and then, becoming extinct, had slept in the fossil state for myriads of ages more, ere the highest summits of the Himalayan range rose over the surface of the deep? The Himalayas disturbed, and bore up along with them in their upheaval, vast beds of the Oolitic system. Belemnites and ammonites have been dug out of their sides along the line of perpetual snow, seventeen thousand feet over the level of the sea. What in the recent period form the loftiest mountains of the globe, existed as portions of a deep-sea bottom, swum over by the fishes and reptiles of the great Secondary period, when what is now Scotland had its dark forests of stately pine,—represented in the present age of the world by the lignites of Helmsdale, Eathie, and Eigg,—and when the plants of a former creation lay dead and buried deep beneath, in shales and fire-clay,—existing as vast beds of coal, or entombed in solid rock, as the brown massy trunks of Granton and Craigleith. And even ere these last existed as living trees, the coniferous lignite of the Lower Old Red Sandstone found at Cromarty had passed into the fossil state, and lay as a semi-calcareous, semi-bituminous mass, amid perished Dipterians and extinct Coccostei. So much for the Geology of the German Professor. And be it remarked, that the actualities in this question can be determined by only the geologist. The mere naturalist may indicate from the analogies of his science, what possibly might have taken place, but what really did take place, and the true order in which the events occurred, it is the part of the geologist to determine. It cannot be out of place to remark, further, that geological discovery is in no degree responsible for the infidelity of the development hypothesis; seeing that, in the first place, the hypothesis is greatly more ancient than the discoveries, and, in the second, that its more prominent assertors are exactly the men who know least of geological fact. But to this special point I shall again refer.

The author of the “Vestiges” is at one, regarding the supposed marine origin of terrestrial plants, with Maillet and Oken; and he regards the theory, we find him stating in his “Explanations,” as the true key to the well-established fact, that the vegetation of groupes of islands generally corresponds with that of the larger masses of land in their neighborhood. Marine plants of the same kinds crept out of the sea, it would seem, upon the islands on the one hand, and upon the larger masses of land on the other, and thus produced the same flora in each; just as tadpoles, after passing their transition state, creep out of their canal or river on the opposite banks, and thus give to the fields or meadows on the right-hand side a supply of frogs, of the same appearance and size as those poured out upon the fields and meadows of the left. “Thus, for example,” we find him saying, “the Galapagos exhibit general characters in common with South America; and the Cape de Verd islands, with Africa. They are, in Mr. Darwin’s happy phrase, satellites to those continents, in respect of natural history. Again,” he continues, “when masses of land are only divided from each other by narrow seas, there is usually a community of forms. The European and African shores of the Mediterranean present an example. Our own islands afford another of far higher value. It appears that the flora of Ireland and Great Britain is various, or rather that we have five floras or distinct sets of plants, and that each of these is partaken of by a portion of the opposite continent. There are, first, a flora confined to the west of Ireland, and imparted likewise to the north-west of Spain; second, a flora in the south-west promontory of England and of Ireland, extending across the Channel to the north-west coast of France; third, one common to the south-east of England and north of France; fourth, an Alpine flora developed in the Scottish and Welsh Highlands, and intimately related to that of the Norwegian Alps; fifth, a flora which prevails over a large part of England and Ireland, ‘mingled with other floras, and diminishing slightly as we proceed westward:’ this bears intimate relation with the flora of Germany. Facts so remarkable would force the meanest fact-collector or species-demonstrator into generalization. The really ingenious man who lately brought them under notice (Professor Edward Forbes) could only surmise, as their explanation, that the spaces now occupied by the intermediate seas must have been dry land at the time when these floras were created. In that case, either the original arrangement of the floras, or the selection of land for submergence, must have been apposite to the case in a degree far from usual. The necessity for a simpler cause is obvious, and it is found in the hypothesis of a spread of terrestrial vegetation from the sea into the lands adjacent. The community of forms in the various regions opposed to each other merely indicates a distinct marine creation in each of the oceanic areas respectively interposed, and which would naturally advance into the lands nearest to it, as far as circumstances of soil and climate were found agreeable.”

Such, regarding the origin of terrestrial vegetation, are the views of Maillet, Oken, and the author of the “Vestiges.” They all agree in holding that the plants of the land existed in their first condition as weeds of the sea.

Let me request the reader at this stage, ere we pass on to the consideration of the experience-argument, to remark a few incidental, but by no means unimportant, consequences of the belief. And, first, let him weigh for a moment the comparative demands on his credulity of the theory by which Professor Forbes accounts for the various floras of the British Islands, and that hypothesis of transmutation which the author of the “Vestiges” would so fain put in its place, as greatly more simple, and, of course, more in accordance with the principles of human belief. In order to the reception of the Professor’s theory, it is necessary to hold, in the first place, that the creation of each species of plant took place, not by repetition of production in various widely-separated centres, but in some single centre, from which the species propagated itself by seed, bud, or scion, across the special area which it is now found to occupy. And this, in the first instance, is of course as much an assumption as any of those assumed numbers or assumed lines with which, in algebra and the mathematics, it is necessary in so many calculations to set out, in quest of some required number or line, which, without the assistance of the assumed ones, we might despair of ever finding. But the assumption is in itself neither unnatural nor violent; there are various very remarkable analogies which lend it support; the facts which seem least to harmonize with it are not wholly irreconcilable, and are, besides, of a merely exceptional character; and, further, it has been adopted by botanists of the highest standing.[34] It is necessary to hold, in the second place, in order to the reception of the theory, that the area of the earth’s surface occupied by the British Islands and the neighboring coasts of the Continent once stood fifty fathoms higher, in relation to the existing sea-level, than it does now,—a belief which, whatever its specific grounds or standing in this particular case, is at least in strict accordance with the general geological phenomena of subsidence and elevation, and which, so far from outraging any experience founded on observation or testimony, runs in the same track with what is known of wide areas now in the course of sinking, like that on the Italian coast, in which the Bay of Baiæ and the ruins of the temple of Serapis occur, or that in Asia, which includes the Run of Cutch; or of what is known of areas in the course of rising, like part of the coast of Sweden, or part of the coast of South America, or in Asia along the western shores of Aracan. Whereas, in order to close with the simpler antagonistic belief of the author of the “Vestiges,” it is necessary to hold, contrary to all experience, that dulce and henware[35] became, through a very wonderful metamorphosis, cabbage and spinnage; that kelp-weed and tangle bourgeoned into oaks and willows; and that slack, rope-weed, and green-raw,[36] shot up into mangel-wurzel, rye-grass, and clover. Simple, certainly! An infidel on terms such as these could with no propriety be regarded as an unbeliever. It is well that the New Testament makes no such extraordinary demands on human credulity.

Let us remark further, at this stage, that, judging from the generally received geological evidence in the case, very little time seems to be allowed by the author of the “Vestiges” for that miraculous process of transmutation through which the low algæ of our sea-shores are held to have passed into high orders of plants which constitute the prevailing British flora. The boulder clay, which rises so high along our hills, and which, as shown by its inferior position on the lower grounds, is decidedly the most ancient of the country’s superficial deposits, is yet so modern, geologically, that it contains only recent shells. It belongs to that cold, glacial, post-Tertiary period, in which what is now Britain existed as a few groupes of insulated hill-tops, bearing the semi-arctic vegetation of our fourth flora,—that true Celtic flora of the country which we now find, like the country’s Celtic races of our own species, cooped up among the mountains. The fifth or Germanic flora must have been introduced, it is held, at a later period, when the climate had greatly meliorated. And if we are to hold that the plants of this last flora were developed from sea-weed, not propagated across a continuity of land from the original centre in Germany, or borne by currents from the mouths of the Germanic rivers,—the theory of Mon. C. Martins,—then must we also hold that that development took place since the times of the boulder clay, and that fucoids and confervæ became dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous plants during a brief period, in which the Purpura lapillus and Turritella terebra did not alter a single whorl, and the Cyprina islandica and Astarte borealis retained unchanged each minute projection of their hinges, and each nicer peculiarity of their muscular impressions. Creation would be greatly less wonderful than a sudden transmutative process such as this, restricted in its operation to groupes of English, Irish, and Manx plants, identical with groupes in Germany, when all the various organisms around them, such as our sea-shells, continued to be exactly what they had been for ages before. A process of development from the lowest to the highest forms, rigidly restricted to the flora of a country, would be simply the miracle of Jonah’s gourd several thousand times repeated.

I must here indulge in a few remarks more, which, though they may seem of an incidental character, have a direct bearing on the general subject. The geologist infers, in all his reasonings founded on fossils, that a race or species has existed from some one certain point in the scale to some other certain point, if he find it occurring at both points together. He infers on this principle, for instance, that the boulder clay, which contains only recent shells, belongs to the recent or post-Tertiary period; and that the Oolite and Lias, which contain no recent shells, represent a period whose existences have all become extinct. And all experience serves to show that his principle is a sound one. In creation there are many species linked together, from their degree of similarity, by the generic tie; but no perfect verisimilitude obtains among them, unless hereditarily derived from the one, two, or more individuals, of contemporary origin, with which the race began. True, there are some races that have spread over very wide circles,—the circle of the human family has become identical with that of the globe; and there are certain plants and animals that, from peculiar powers of adaptation to the varieties of soil and climate,—mayhap also from the tenacious vitality of their seeds, and their facilities of transport by natural means,—are likewise diffused very widely. There are plants, too, such as the common nettle and some of the ordinary grasses, which accompany civilized man all over the globe, he scarce knows how, and spring up unbidden where-ever he fixes his habitation. He, besides, carries with him the common agricultural weeds: there are localities in the United States, says Sir Charles Lyell, where these exotics outnumber the native plants; but these are exceptions to the prevailing economy of distribution; and the circles of species generally are comparatively limited and well defined. The mountains of the southern hemisphere have, like those of Switzerland and the Scotch Highlands, their forests of coniferous trees; but they furnish no Swiss pines or Scotch firs; nor do the coasts of New Zealand or Van Dieman’s Land supply the European shells or fish. True, there may be much to puzzle in the identity of what may be termed the exceptional plants, equally indigenous, apparently, in circles widely separated by space. It has been estimated that there exist about a hundred thousand vegetable species, and of these, thirty Antarctic forms have been recognized by Dr. Hooker as identical with European ones. Had Robinson Crusoe failed to remember that he had shaken the old corn-bag where he found the wheat and barley ears springing up on his island, he might have held that he had discovered a new centre of the European cerealia. And the process analogous to the shaking of the bag is frequently a process not to be remembered. There are several minute lochans in the Hebrides and the west of Ireland in which there occurs a small plant of the cord-rush family, (Eriocaulon septangulare,) which, though common in America, is nowhere to be found on the European Continent. It is the only British plant which belongs to no other part of Europe. How was it transported across the Atlantic? Entangled, mayhap, in the form of a single seed,—for its seeds are exceedingly light and small,—in the plumage of some water-fowl, free of both sea and lake, it had been carried in the germ from the weed-skirted edge of some American swamp or mere, to some mossy lochan of Connaught or of Skye; and one such seed transported by one such accident, unique in its occurrence in thousands of years, would be quite sufficient to puzzle all the botanists forever after. I have seen the seed of one of our Scotch grasses, that had been originally caught in the matted fleece of a sheep reared among the hills of Sutherland, and then wrought into a coarse, ill-dressed woollen cloth, carried about for months in a piece of underclothing. It might have gone over half the globe in that time, and, when cast away with the worn vestment, might have originated a new circle for its species in South America or New Holland. There are seeds specially contrived by the Great Designer to be carried far from their original habitats in the coats of animals,—a mode which admits of transport to much greater distances than the mode, also extensively operative, of consigning them for conveyance to their stomachs; and when we see the work in its effects, we are puzzled by the want of a record of an emigratory process, of which, in the circumstances, no record could possibly exist. Unable to make out a case for the “shaking of the bag,” we bethink us, in the emergency, of repetition of creation. But in circles separated by time, not space,—by time, across whose dim gulfs no voyager sails, and no bird flies, and over which there are no means of transport from the point where a race once fails, to any other point in the future,—we find no repetition of species. If the production of perfect duplicates or triplicates in independent centres were a law of nature, our works of physical science could scarce fail to tell us of identical species found occurring in widely-separated systems,—Scotch firs and larches, for instance, among the lignites of the Lias, or Cyprina islandica and Ostrea edulis among the shells of the Mountain Limestone. But never yet has the geologist found in his systems or formations any such evidence as facts such as these might be legitimately held to furnish, of the independent de novo production of individual members of any single species. On the contrary, the evidence lies so entirely the other way, that he reasons on the existence of a family relation obtaining between all the members of each species, as one of his best established principles. If members of the same species may exist through de novo production, without hereditary relationship, so thoroughly, in consequence, does the fabric of geological reasoning fall to the ground, that we find ourselves incapacitated from regarding even the bed of common cockle or mussel shells, which we find lying a few feet from the surface on our raised beaches, as of the existing creation at all. Nay, even the human remains of our moors may have belonged, if our principle of relationship in each species be not a true one, to some former creation, cut off from that to which we ourselves belong, by a wide period of death. All palæontological reasoning is at an end forever, if identical species can originate in independent centres, widely separated from each other by periods of time; and if they fail to originate in periods separated by time, how or why in centres separated by space?

Let the reader remark further, the bearing of those facts from which this principle of geological reasoning has been derived, on the development hypothesis. We find species restricted to circles and periods; and though stragglers are occasionally found outside the circle in the existing state of things, never are they found beyond their period among the remains of the past. It was profoundly argued by Cuvier, that life could not possibly have had a chemical origin. “In fact,” we find him remarking, “life exercising upon the elements which at every instant form part of the living body, and upon those which it attracts to it, an action contrary to that which would be produced without it by the usual chemical affinities, it is inconsistent to suppose that it can itself be produced by these affinities.” And the phenomena of restriction to circle and period testify to the same effect. Nothing, on the one hand, can be more various in character and aspect than the organized existences of the various circles and periods; nothing more invariable, on the other, than the results of chemical or electrical experiment. And yet, to use almost the words of Cuvier, “we know of no other power in nature capable of reuniting previously separated molecules,” than the electric and the chemical. To these agents, accordingly, all the assertors of the development hypothesis have had recourse for at least the origination of life. Air, water, earth existing as a saline mucus, and an active persistent electricity, are the creative ingredients of Oken. The author of the “Vestiges” is rather less explicit on the subject: he simply refers to the fact, that the “basis of all vegetable and animal substances consists of nucleated cells,—that is, of cells having granules within them;” and states that globules of a resembling character “can be produced in albumen by electricity;” and that though albumen itself has not yet been produced by artificial means,—the only step in the process of creation which is wanting,—it is yet known to be a chemical composition, the mode of whose production may “be any day discovered in the laboratory.” Further, he adopts, as part of the foundation of his hypothesis, the pseudo-experiment of Mr. Weekes, who holds that out of certain saline preparations, acted upon by electricity, he can produce certain living animalcula of the mite family;—the vital and the organized out of the inorganic and the dead. In all such cases, electricity, or rather, according to Oken, galvanism, is regarded as the vitalizing principle. “Organism,” says the German, “is galvanism residing in a thoroughly homogeneous mass.... A galvanic pile pounded into atoms must become alive. In this manner nature brings forth organic bodies.” I have even heard it seriously asked whether electricity be not God! Alas! could such a god, limited in its capacity of action, like those “gods of the plains” in which the old Syrian trusted, have wrought, in the character of Creator, with a variety of result so endless, that in no geologic period has repetition taken place? In all that purports to be experiment on the development side of the question, we see nothing else save repetition. The Acarus Crossi of Mr. Weekes is not a new species, but the repetition of an old one, which has been long known as the Acarus horridus, a little bristle-covered creature of the mite family, that harbors in damp corners among the debris of outhouses, and the dust and dirt of neglected workshops and laboratories. Nay, even a change in the chemical portion of the experiment by which he believed the creature to be produced, failed to secure variety. A powerful electric current had been sent, in the first instance, through a solution of silicate of potash, and, after a time, the Acarus horridus crawled out of the fluid. The current was then sent through a solution of nitrate of copper, and after a due space, the Acarus horridus again creeped out. A solution of ferro-cyanate of potash was next subjected to the current, and yet again, and in greater numbers than on the two former occasions, there appeared, as in virtue, it would seem, of its extraordinary appetency, to be the same ever-recurring Acarus horridus. How, or in what form, the little creature should have been introduced into the several experiments, it is not the part of those who question their legitimacy to explain; it is enough for us to know, that individuals of the family to which the Acarus belongs are so remarkable for their powers of life, even in their fully developed state, as to resist, for a time, the application of boiling water, and to live long in alcohol. We know, further, that the germs of the lower animals are greatly more tenacious of vitality than the animals themselves; and that they may exist in their state of embryonism in the most unthought of and elusive forms; nay,—as the recent discoveries regarding alterations of generation have conclusively shown,—that the germ which produced the parent may be wholly unlike the germ that produces its offspring, and yet identical with that which produced the parent’s parent. Save on the theory of a quiescent vitality, maintained by seeds for centuries within a few inches of the earth’s surface, we know not how a layer of shell, sand, or marl, spread over the bleak moors of Harris, should produce crops of white clover, where only heath had grown before; nor how brakes of doddered furze burnt down on the slopes of the Cromarty Sutors should be so frequently succeeded by thickets of raspberry. We are not, however to give up the unknown,—that illimitable province in which science discovers,—to be a wild region of dream, in which fantasy may invent. There are many dark places in the field of human knowledge which even the researches of ages may fail wholly to enlighten; but no one derives a right from that circumstance to people them with chimeras and phantoms. They belong to the philosophers of the future,—not to the visionaries of the present. But while it is not our part to explain how, in the experiments of Mr. Weekes, the chain of life from life has been maintained unbroken, we can most conclusively show, that that world of organized existence of which we ourselves form part, is, and ever has been, a world, not of tame repetition, but of endless variety. It is palpably not a world of Acaridæ of one species, nor yet of creatures developed from these, under those electric or chemical laws of which the grand characteristic is invariability of result. The vast variety of its existences speak not of the operation of unvarying laws, that represent, in their uniformity of result, the unchangeableness of the Divinity, but of creative acts, that exemplify the infinity of His resources.

Let the reader yet further remark, if he has followed me through these preliminary observations, what is really involved in the hypothesis of the author of the “Vestiges,” regarding the various floras common to the British islands and the Continent. If it was upon his scheme that England, Ireland, and the mainland of Europe came to possess an identical flora, production de novo and by repetition of the same species must have taken place in thousands of instances along the shores of each island and of the mainland. His hypothesis demands that the sea-weed on the coast of Ireland should have been developed, first through lower, and then higher forms, into thousands of terrestrial plants,—that exactly the same process of development from sea-weed into terrestrial plants of the same species should have taken place on the coast of England, and again on the coasts of the Continent generally,—and that identically the same vegetation should have been originated in this way in at least three great centres. And if plants of the same species could have had three distinct centres of organization and development, why not three hundred, or three thousand, or three hundred thousand? Nor will it do to attempt escaping from the difficulty, by alleging that there is the groundwork in the case of at least a common marine vegetation to start from; and that thus, if we have not properly the existence of the direct hereditary tie among the various individuals of each species, we may yet recognize at least a sort of collateral relationship among them, derived from the relationship of their marine ancestry. For relationship, in even the primary stage, the author of the “Vestiges” virtually repudiates, by adopting, as one of the foundations of his hypothesis, with, of course, all the legitimate consequences, the experiments of Mr. Weekes. The animalculæ-making process is instanced as representative of the first stage of being,—that in which dead inorganic matter assumes vitality; and it corresponds, in the zoological branch, to the production of a low marine vegetation in the phytological one. A certain semi-chemical, semi-electrical process, originates, time after time, certain numerous low forms of life, identical in species, but connected by no tie of relationship: such is the presumed result of the Weekes experiment. A certain further process of development matures low forms of life, thus originated, into higher species, also identical, and also wholly unconnected by the family tie: such are the consequences legitimately involved in that island-vegetation theory promulgated by the author of the “Vestiges.” And be it remembered that Mr. Weekes’ process, so far as it is simply electrical and chemical, is a process which is as capable of having been gone through in all times and all places, as that other process of strewing marl upon a moor, through which certain rustic experimenters have held that they produced white clover. It could have been gone through during the Carboniferous or the Silurian period; for all truly chemical and electrical experiments would have resulted in manifestations of the same phenomena then as now:—an acid would have effervesced as freely with an alkali; and each fibre of an electrified feather—had feathers then existed—would have stood out as decidedly apart from all its neighbors. We must therefore hold, if we believe with the author of the “Vestiges,” first, from the Weekes experiment, that in all times, and in all places, every centre of a certain chemical and electric action would have become a new centre of creation to certain recent species of low, but not very low, organization; and, second, from his doctrine regarding the identity of the British and Continental floras, that in the course of subsequent development from these low forms, the process in each of many widely-separated centres,—widely separated both by space and time,—would be so nicely correspondent with the process in all the others, that the same higher recent forms would be matured in all. And to doctrines such as these, the experience of all Geologists, all Phytologists, all Zoologists, is diametrically opposed. If these doctrines be true, their sciences are false in their facts, and idle and unfounded in their principles.

THE TWO FLORAS, MARINE AND TERRESTRIAL.
BEARING OF THE EXPERIENCE ARGUMENT.

Is the reader acquainted with the graphic verse, and scarce less graphic prose, in which Crabbe describes the appearances presented by a terrestrial vegetation affected by the waters of the sea? In both passages, as in all his purely descriptive writings, there is a solidity of truthful observation exhibited, which triumphs over their general homeliness of vein.

“On either side

Is level fen, a prospect wild and wide,

With dykes on either hand, by ocean self-supplied.

Far on the right the distant sea is seen,

And salt the springs that feed the marsh between;

Beneath an ancient bridge the straitened flood

Rolls through its sloping banks of slimy mud;

Near it a sunken boat resists the tide,

That frets and hurries to the opposing side;

The rushes sharp, that on the borders grow,

Bend their brown florets to the stream below,

Impure in all its course, in all its progress slow.

Here a grave Flora scarcely deigns to bloom,

Nor wears a rosy blush, nor sheds perfume.

The few dull flowers that o’er the place are spread,

Partake the nature of their fenny bed;

Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom,

Grows the salt lavender, that lacks perfume;

Here the dwarf sallows creep, the septfoil harsh,

And the soft slimy mallow of the marsh.

Low on the ear the distant billows sound,

And just in view appears their stony bound.”

“The ditches of a fen so near the ocean,” says the poet, in the note which accompanies this passage, “are lined with irregular patches of a coarse-stained laver; a muddy sediment rests on the horse-tail and other perennial herbs which in part conceal the shallowness of the stream; a fat-leaved, pale-flowering scurvy-grass appears early in the year, and the razor-edged bullrush in the summer and autumn. The fen itself has a dark and saline herbage: there are rushes and arrow-head; and in a few patches the flakes of the cotton-grass are seen, but more commonly the sea-aster, the dullest of that numerous and hardy genus; a thrift, blue in flower, but withering, and remaining withered till the winter scatters it; the salt-wort, both simple and shrubby; a few kinds of grass changed by the soil and atmosphere; and low plants of two or three denominations, undistinguished in the general view of scenery;—such is the vegetation of the fen where it is at a small distance from the ocean.”

And such are the descriptions of Crabbe, at once a poet and a botanist. In referring to the blue tint exhibited in salt-fens by the pink-colored flower of the thrift, (Statice Armeria,) he might have added, that the general green of the terrestrial vegetation likewise assumes, when subjected to those modified marine influences under which plants of the land can continue to live, a decided tinge of blue. It is further noticeable, that the general brown of at least the larger algæ presents, as they creep upwards upon the beach to meet with these, a marked tinge of yellow. The prevailing brown of the one flora approximates towards yellow,—the prevailing green of the other towards blue; and thus, instead of mutually merging into some neutral tint, they assume at their line of meeting directly antagonistic hues.

But what does experience say regarding the transmutative conversion of a marine into a terrestrial vegetation,—that experience on which the sceptic founds so much? As I walked along the green edge of the Lake of Stennis, selvaged by the line of detached weeds with which a recent gale had strewed its shores, and marked that for the first few miles the accumulation consisted of marine algæ, here and there mixed with tufts of stunted reeds or rushes, and that as I receded from the sea it was the algæ that became stunted and dwarfish, and that the reeds, aquatic grasses, and rushes, grown greatly more bulky in the mass, were also more fully developed individually, till at length the marine vegetation altogether disappeared, and the vegetable debris of the shore became purely lacustrine,—I asked myself whether here, if anywhere, a transition flora between lake and sea ought not to be found? For many thousand years ere the tall gray obelisks of Stennis, whose forms I saw this morning reflected in the water, had been torn from the quarry, or laid down in mystic circle on their flat promontories, had this lake admitted the waters of the sea, and been salt in its lower reaches and fresh in its higher. And during this protracted period had its quiet, well-shattered bottom been exposed to no disturbing influences through which the delicate process of transmutation could have been marred or arrested. Here, then, if in any circumstances, ought we to have had in the broad, permanently brackish reaches, at least indications of a vegetation intermediate in its nature between the monocotyledons of the lake and the algæ of the sea; and yet not a vestige of such an intermediate vegetation could I find among the up-piled debris of the mixed floras, marine and lacustrine. The lake possesses no such intermediate vegetation. As the water freshens in its middle reaches, the algæ become dwarfish and ill-developed; one species after another ceases to appear, as the habitat becomes wholly unfavorable to it, until at length we find, instead of the brown, rootless, flowerless fucoids and confervæ of the ocean, the green, rooted, flower-bearing flags, rushes, and aquatic grasses of the fresh water. Many thousands of years have failed to originate a single intermediate plant. And such, tested by a singularly extensive experience, is the general evidence.

There is scarce a chain-length of the shores of Britain and Ireland that has not been a hundred and a hundred times explored by the botanist,—keen to collect and prompt to register every rarity of the vegetable kingdom; but has he ever yet succeeded in transferring to his herbarium a single plant caught in the transition state? Nay, are there any of the laws under which the vegetable kingdom exists better known than those laws which fix certain species of the algæ to certain zones of coast, in which each, according to the overlying depth of water and the nature of the bottom, finds the only habitat in which it can exist? The rough-stemmed tangle (Laminaria digitata) can exist no higher on the shore than the low line of ebb during stream-tides; the smooth-stemmed tangle (Laminaria saccharina) flourishes along an inner belt, partially uncovered during the ebbs of the larger neaps; the forked and cracker kelp-weeds (Fucus serratus and Fucus nodosus) thrive in a zone still less deeply covered by water, and which even the lower neaps expose. And at least one other species of kelp-weed, the Fucus vesiculosus, occurs in a zone higher still, though, as it creeps upwards on the rocky beach, it loses its characteristic bladders, and becomes short and narrow of frond. The thick brown tufts of Fucus canaliculatus, which in the lower and middle reaches of the Lake of Stennis I found heaped up in great abundance along the shores, also rises high on rocky beaches,—so high in some instances, that during neap-tides it remains uncovered by the water for days together. If, as is not uncommon, there be an escape of land springs along the beach, there may be found, where the fresh water oozes out through the sand and gravel, an upper terminal zone of the confervæ, chiefly of a green color, mixed with the ribbon-like green layer, (Ulva latissima,) the purplish-brown layer, (Porphyra laciniata,) and still more largely with the green silky Enteromorpha, (E. compressa.)[37] And then, decidedly within the line of the storm-beaches of winter,—not unfrequently in low sheltered bays, such as the Bay of Udale or of Nigg, where the ripple of every higher flood washes,—we may find the vegetation of the land—represented by the sentinels and picquets of its outposts—coming down, as if to meet with the higher-growing plants of the sea. In salt marshes the two vegetations may be seen, if I may so express myself, dovetailed together at their edges,—at least one species of club-rush (Scirpus maritimus) and the common saltwort and glasswort (Salsola kali and Salicornia procumbens) encroaching so far upon the sea as to mingle with a thinly-scattered and sorely-diminished fucus,—that bladderless variety of the Fucus vesiculosus to which I have already referred, and which may be detected in such localities, shooting forth its minute brown fronds from the pebbles. On rocky coasts, where springs of fresh water come trickling down along the fissures of the precipices, the observer may see a variety of Rhodomenia palmata—the fresh-water dulse of the Moray Frith—creeping upwards from the lower limits of production, till just where the common gray balanus ceases to grow. And there, short and thick, and of a bleached yellow hue, it ceases also; but one of the commoner marine confervæ,—the Conferva arcta, blent with a dwarfed Enteromorpha,—commencing a very little below where the dulse ends, and taking its place, clothes over the runnels with its covering of green for several feet higher: in some cases, where it is frequently washed by the upward dash of the waves, it rises above even the flood-line; and in some crevice of the rock beside it, often as low as its upper edge, we may detect stunted tufts of the sea-pink or of the scurvy-grass. But while there is thus a vegetation intermediate in place between the land and the sea, we find, as if it had been selected purposely to confound the transmutation theory, that it is in no degree intermediate in character. For, while it is chiefly marine weeds of the lower division of the confervæ that creep upwards from the sea to meet the vegetation of the land, it is chiefly terrestrial plants of the higher division of the dicotyledons that creep downwards from the land to meet the vegetation of the sea. The salt-worts, the glass-worts, the arenaria, the thrift, and the scurvy-grass, are all dicotyledonous plants. Nature draws a deeply-marked line of division where the requirements of the transmutative hypothesis would demand the nicely graduated softness of a shaded one; and, addressing the strongly marked floras on either hand, even more sternly than the waves themselves, demands that to a certain definite bourne should they come, and no farther.

But in what form, it may be asked, or with what limitations, ought the Christian controversialist to avail himself, in this question, of the experience argument? Much ought to depend, I reply, on the position taken up by the opposite side. We find no direct reference made by the author of the “Vestiges” to the anti-miracle argument, first broached by Hume, in a purely metaphysical shape, in his well-known “Inquiry,” and afterwards thrown into the algebraic form by La Place, in his Essai philosophique sur les Probabilités. But we do not detect its influences operative throughout the entire work. It is because of some felt impracticability on the part of its author, of attaining to the prevailing belief in the miracle of creation, that he has recourse, instead, to the so-called law of development. The law and the miracle are the alternatives placed before him; and, rejecting the miracle, he closes with the law. Now, in such circumstances, he can have no more cause of complaint, if, presenting him with the experience argument of Hume and La Place, we demand that he square the evidence regarding the existence of his law strictly according to its requirements, than the soldier of an army that charged its field-pieces with rusty nails would have cause of complaint if he found himself wounded by a missile of a similar kind, sent against him by the artillery of the enemy. You cannot, it might be fairly said, in addressing him, acquiesce in the miracle here, because, as a violation of the laws of nature, there are certain objections, founded on invariable experience, which bear direct against your belief in it. Well, here are the objections, in the strongest form in which they have yet been stated; and here is your hypothesis respecting the development of marine algæ into terrestrial plants. We hold that against that hypothesis the objections bear at least as directly as against any miracle whatever,—nay, that not only is it contrary to an invariable experience, but opposed also to all testimony. We regard it as a mere idle dream. Maillet dreamed it,—and Lamarck dreamed it,—and Oken dreamed it; but none of them did more than merely dream it: its existence rests on exactly the same basis of evidence as that of Whang the miller’s “monstrous pot of gold and diamonds,” of which he dreamed three nights in succession, but which he never succeeded in finding. If we are in error in our estimate, here is the argument, and here the hypothesis; give us, in support of the hypothesis, the amount of evidence, founded on a solid experience, which the argument demands.

But to leave the experience argument in exactly the state in which it was left by Hume and La Place, would be doing no real justice to our subject. It is in that state quite sufficient to establish the fact, that there can be no real escape from belief in acts of creation never witnessed by man, to processes of development never witnessed by man; seeing that a presumed law beyond the cognizance of experience must be as certainly rejected, on the principle of the argument, as a presumed miracle beyond that cognizance. It places the presumed law and the presumed miracle on exactly the same level. But there is a palpable flaw in the anti-miracle argument. It does not prove that miracles may not have taken place, but that miracles, whether they have taken place or no, are not to be credited, and this simply because they are miracles, i. e. violations of the established laws of nature. And if it be possible for events to take place which man, on certain principles, is imperatively required not to credit, these principles must of course serve merely to establish a discrepancy between the actual state of things, and what is to be believed regarding it. And thus, instead of serving purposes of truth, they are made to subserve purposes of error; for the existence of truth in the mind is neither more nor less than the existence of certain conceptions and beliefs, adequately representative of what actually is, or what really has taken place.

I cannot better illustrate this direct tendency of the anti-miracle argument to destroy truth in the mind, by bringing the mental beliefs into a state of nonconformity with the possible and actual, than by a quotation from La Place himself: “We would not,” he says, “give credit to a man who would affirm that he saw a hundred dice thrown into the air, and that they all fell on the same faces. If we had ourselves been spectators of such an event, we would not believe our own eyes till we had scrupulously examined all the circumstances, and assured ourselves that there was no trick or deception. After such an examination, we would not hesitate to admit it, notwithstanding its great improbability; and no one would have recourse to an inversion of the laws of vision in order to account for it.” Now, here is the principle broadly laid down, that it is impossible to communicate by the evidence of testimony, belief in an event which might happen, and which, if it happened, ought on certain conditions to be credited. No one knew better than La Place himself, that the possibility of the event which he instanced could be represented with the utmost exactitude by figures. The probability, in throwing a single die, that the ace will be presented on its upper face, is as one in six,—six being the entire number of sides which the cube can possibly present, and the side with the ace being one of these;—the probability that in throwing a pair of dice the aces of both will be at once presented on their upper faces, is as one in thirty-six, as against the one sixth chance of the ace being presented by the one, there are also six chances that the ace of the other should not concur with it;—and in throwing three dice, the probability that their three aces should be at once presented is, of course, on the same principle, as one in six times thirty-six, or, in other words, as one in two hundred and sixteen. And thus, in ascertaining the exact degree of probability of the hundred aces at once turning up, we have to go on multiplying by six, for each die we add to the number, the product of the immediately previous calculation. Unquestionably, the number of chances against, thus balanced with the single chance for, would be very great; but its existence as a definite number would establish, with all the force of arithmetical demonstration, the possibility of the event; and if an eternity were to be devoted to the throwing into the air of the hundred dice, it would occur an infinite number of times. And yet the principle of Hume and La Place forms, when adopted, an impassable gulf between this possibility and human belief. The possibility might be embodied, as we see, in an actual occurrence,—an occurrence witnessed by hundreds; and yet the anti-miracle argument, as illustrated by La Place, would cut off all communication regarding it between these hundreds of witnesses, however unexceptionable their character as such, and the rest of mankind. The principle, instead of giving us a right rule through which the beliefs in the mind are to be rendered correspondent with the reality of things, goes merely to establish a certain imperfection of transmission from one mind to another, in consequence of which, realities in fact, if very extraordinary ones, could not possibly be received as objects of belief, nor the mental appreciation of things be rendered adequately concurrent with the state in which the things really existed.

Nor is the case different when, for a possibility which the arithmetician can represent by figures, we substitute the miracle proper. Neither Hume nor La Place ever attempted to show that miracles could not take place; they merely directed their argument against a belief in them. The wildest sceptic must admit, if in any degree a reasonable man, that there may exist a God, and that that God may have given laws to nature. No demonstration of the non-existence of a Great First Cause has been ever yet attempted, nor, until the knowledge of some sceptic extends over all space, ever can be rationally attempted. Merely to doubt the fact of God’s existence, and to give reasons for the doubt, must till then form the highest achievements of scepticism. And the God who may thus exist, and who may have given laws to nature, may also have revealed himself to man, and, in order to secure man’s reasonable belief in the reality of the revelation, may have temporarily suspended in its operation some great natural law, and have thus shown himself to be its Author and Master. Such seems to be the philosophy of miracles; which are thus evidently not only not impossibilities, but even not improbabilities. Even were we to permit the sceptic himself to fix the numbers representative of those several mays in the case, which I have just repeated, the chances against them, so to speak, would be less by many thousand times than the chances against the hundred dice of La Place’s illustration all turning up aces. The existence of a Great First Cause is at least as probable—the sceptic himself being judge in the matter—as the non-existence of a Great First Cause; and so the probability in this first stage of the argument, instead of being, as in the case of the single die, only one to six, is as one to one. Again,—in accordance with an expectation so general among the human family as to form one of the great instincts of our nature,—an instinct to which every form of religion, true or false, bears evidence,—it is in no degree less probable that this God should have revealed himself to man, than that he should not have revealed himself to man; and here the chances are again as one to one,—not, as in the second stage of the calculation on the dice, as one to thirty-six. Nor, in the third and last stage, is it less probable that God, in revealing himself to man should have given miraculous evidence of the truth of the revelation, so that man “might believe in Him for His work’s sake,” than that He should not have done so; and here yet again the chances are as one to one,—not as one to two hundred and sixteen. No rational sceptic could fix the chances lower; nay, no rational sceptic, so far as the existence of a Great First Cause is concerned, would be inclined to fix them so low: and yet it is in order to annihilate all belief in a possibility against which the chances are so few as to be represented—scepticism itself being the actuary in the case—by three units, that Hume and La Place have framed their argument. Miracles may have taken place,—the probabilities against them, stated in their most extreme and exaggerated form, are by no means many or strong; but we are nevertheless not to believe that they did take place, simply because miracles they were. Now, the effect of the establishment of a principle such as this would be simply, I repeat, the destruction of the ability of transmitting certain beliefs, however well founded originally, from one set or generation of men to another. These beliefs the first set or generation might, on La Place’s own principles, be compelled to entertain. The evidence of the senses, however wonderful the event which they certified, is not, he himself tells us, to be resisted. But the conviction which, on one set of principles, these men were on no account to resist, the men that came immediately after them were, on quite another set of principles, on no account to entertain. And thus the anti-miracle argument, instead of leading, as all true philosophy ought, to an exact correspondence between the realities of things and the convictions received by the mind regarding them, palpably forms a bar to the reception of beliefs, adequate to the possibilities of actual occurrence or event, and so constitutes an imperfection or flaw in the mental economy, instead of working an improvement. And, in accordance with this view, we find that in the economy of minds of the very highest order this imperfection or flaw has had no place. Locke studied and wrote upon the subject of miracles proper, and exhibited in his “Discourse” all the profundity of his extraordinary mind; and yet Locke was a believer. Newton studied and wrote on the subject of miracles of another kind,—those of prophecy; and he also, as shown by his “Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse,” was a believer. Butler studied and wrote on the subject of miracles, chiefly in connection with “Miraculous Revelation;” and he also was a believer. Chalmers studied and wrote on the subject of miracles in his “Evidences,” after Hume, La Place, and Playfair had all promulgated their peculiar views regarding it; and he also was a believer. And in none of the truly distinguished men of the present day, though all intimately acquainted with the anti-miracle argument, is this flaw or imperfection found to exist: on the contrary, they all hold, as becomes the philosophic intellect and character, that whatever is possible may occur, and that whatever occurs ought, on the proper evidence, to be believed.

But though the experience argument is of no real force, and, as shown by the beliefs of the higher order of minds, of no real effect, when brought to bear against miracles supported by the proper testimony, it is of great force and effect when brought to bear, not against miracles, but against some presumed law. It is experience, and experience only, that determines what is or is not law, and it is law, and law only, that constitutes the subject-matter of ordinary experience. Experience, in determining what is really miracle, does so simply through its positive knowledge of law: by knowing law, it knows also what would be a violation of it. And so miracle cannot possibly form the subject-matter of experience in the sense of Hume. For did miracle constitute the subject-matter of experience, the law of which the miracle was a violation could not: most emphatically, in this case, were there “no law” there could be “no transgression;” and so experience would be unable to recognize, not only the existence of the law transgressed, but also of the miracle, in its character as such, which was a transgression of the law. We determine from experience that there exists a certain fixed law, known among men as the law of gravitation; and that, in consequence of this law, if a human creature attempt standing upon the sea, he will sink into it; or if he attempt rising from the earth into the heavens, he will remain fixed to the spot on which the attempt is made. Such, in these cases, would be the direct effects of this gravitation law; and any presumed law antagonistic in its character could not be other than a law contrary to that invariable experience by which the existence of the real law in the case is determined. But certain it is—for the evidence regarding the facts cannot be resisted, and by the greatest minds has not been resisted—that a man did once walk upon the sea without sinking into it, and did once ascend from the earth into the sky; and these miracles ought not to be tested—and by earnest inquirers after truth really never have been tested—by any experience of the uniformity of the law of which they were professed transgressions, seeing it was essentially and obviously necessary that, in order to serve the great moral purpose which God intended by them, the law which they violated should have been a uniform law, and that they should have been palpable violations of it. But while the experience argument is thus of no value when directed against well-attested miracle, it is, as I have said, all-potent when directed against presumed law. Of law we know nothing, I repeat, except what experience tells us. A miracle contrary to experience in the sense of Hume is simply a miracle; a presumed law contrary to experience is no law at all. For it is from experience, and experience only, that we know any thing of natural law. The argument of Hume and La Place is perfect, as such, when directed against the development visions of the Lamarckian.

THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS IN ITS EMBRYONIC STATE.
OLDER THAN ITS ALLEGED FOUNDATIONS.

When Maillet first promulgated his hypothesis, many of the departments of natural history existed as mere regions of fable and romance; and, in addressing himself to the Muscadins of Paris, in a popular work as wild and amusing as a fairy tale, he could safely take the liberty, and he did take it very freely, of exaggerating the marvellous, and adding fresh fictions to the untrue. And in preparing them for his theory of the metamorphoses of a marine into a terrestrial vegetation, he set himself, in accordance with his general character, to show that really the transmutation did not amount to much. “I know you have resided a long time,” his Indian Philosopher is made to say, “at Marseilles. Now, you can bear me witness, that the fishermen there daily find in their nets, and among their fish, plants of a hundred kinds, with their fruits still upon them; and though these fruits are not so large and so well nourished as those of our earth, yet the species of these plants is in no other respect dubious. They there find clusters of white and black grapes, peach-trees, pear-trees, prune-trees, apple-trees, and all sorts of flowers. When in that city, I saw, in the cabinet of a curious gentleman, a prodigious number of those sea-productions of different qualities, especially of rose-trees, which had their roses very red when they came out of the sea. I was there presented with a cluster of black sea-grapes. It was at the time of the vintage, and there were two grapes perfectly ripe.”

Now, all this, and much more of the same nature, addressed to the Parisians of the reign of Louis the Fifteenth, passed, I doubt not, wonderfully well; but it will not do now, when almost every young girl, whether in town or country, is a botanist, and works on the algæ have become popular. Since Maillet wrote, Hume promulgated his argument on Miracles, and La Place his doctrine of Probabilities. There can be no doubt that these have exerted a wholesome influence on the laws of evidence; and by these laws, as restricted and amended,—laws to which, both in science and religion, we ourselves conform,—we insist on trying the Lamarckian hypothesis, and in condemning it,—should it be found to have neither standing in experience nor support from testimony,—as a mere feverish dream, incoherent in its parts and baseless in its fabric. Give, we ask, but one well-attested instance of transmutation from the algæ to even the lower forms of terrestrial vegetation common on our sea-coasts, and we will keep the question open, in expectation of more. It will not do to tell us—as Cuvier was told, when he appealed to the fact, determined by the mummy birds and reptiles of Egypt, of the fixity of species in all, even the slightest particulars, for at least three thousand years—that immensely extended periods of time are necessary to effect specific changes, and that human observation has not been spread over a period sufficiently ample to furnish the required data regarding them. The apology is simply a confession that, in these ages of the severe inductive philosophy, you have been dreaming your dream, cut off, as if by the state of sleep, from all the tangibilities of the real waking-day world, and that you have not a vestige of testimony with which to support your ingenious vagaries.

But on another account do we refuse to sustain the excuse. It is not true that human observation has not been spread over a period sufficiently extended to furnish the necessary data for testing the development hypothesis. In one special walk,—that which bears on the supposed transmutation of algæ into terrestrial plants,—human observation has been spread over what is strictly analogous to millions of years. For extent of space in this matter is exactly correspondent with duration of time. No man, in this late period of the world’s history, attains to the age of five hundred years; and as some of our larger English oaks have been known to increase in bulk of trunk and extent of bough for five centuries together, no man can possibly have seen the same huge oak pass, according to Cowper, through its various stages of “treeship,”—

“First a seedling hid in grass;

Then twig; then sapling; and, as century rolls

Slow after century, a giant bulk,

Of girth enormous, with moss-cushioned root

Upheaved above the soil, and sides embossed

With prominent wens globose.”

But though no man lives throughout five hundred years of time, he can trace, by passing in some of the English forests through five hundred yards of space, the history of the oak in all its stages of growth, as correctly as if he did live throughout the five hundred years. Oaks, in the space of a few hundred yards, may be seen in every stage of growth, from the newly burst acorn, that presents to the light its two fleshy lobes, with the first tender rudiments of a leaflet between, up to the giant of the forest, in the hollow of whose trunk the red deer may shelter, and find ample room for the broad spread of his antlers. The fact of the development of the oak, from the minute two-lobed seedling of a week’s growth up to the gigantic tree of five centuries, is as capable of being demonstrated by observation spread over five hundred yards of space, as by observation spread over five hundred years of time. And be it remembered, that the sea-coasts of the world are several hundred thousand miles in extent. Europe is by far the smallest of the earth’s four large divisions, and it is bounded, in proportion to its size, by a greater extent of land than any of the others. And yet the sea-coasts of Europe alone, including those of its islands, exceed twenty-five thousand miles. We have results before us, in this extent of space, identical with those of many hundred thousand years of time; and if terrestrial plants were as certainly developments of the low plants of the sea as the huge oak is a development of the immature seedling, just sprung from the acorn, so vast a stretch of sea-coast could not fail to present us with the intermediate vegetation in all its stages. But the sea-coasts fail to exhibit even a vestige of the intermediate vegetation. Experience spread over an extent of space analogous to millions of years of time, does not furnish, in this department, a single fact corroborative of the development theory, but, on the contrary, many hundreds of facts that bear directly against it.

The author of the “Vestiges” is evidently a practised and tasteful writer, and his work abounds in ingenious combinations of thought; but those powers of abstract reflection on whose vigorous exercise the origination of argument depends, nature seems to have denied him. There are two things in especial which his work wants,—original observation and abstract thought,—the power of seeing for himself and of reasoning for himself; and what we find instead is simply a vivid appreciation of the images of things, as these images exist in other minds, and a vigorous perception of the various shades of resemblance which obtain among them. There is a large amount of analogical power exhibited; but that basis of truth which correct observation can alone furnish, and that ability of nicely distinguishing differences by which the faculty of discerning similarity must be forever regulated and governed, are wanting, in what, in a mind of fine general texture and quality, must be regarded as an extraordinary degree. And hence an ingenious but very unsolid work,—full of images transferred, not from the scientific field, but from the field of scientific mind, and charged with glittering but vague resemblances, stamped in the mint of fancy; which, were they to be used as mere counters in some light literary game of story-telling or character-sketching, would be in no respect out of place, but which, when passed current as the proper coin of philosophic argument, are really frauds on the popular understanding. There are, however, not a few instances in the “Vestiges” and its “Sequel,” in which that defect of reflective power to which I refer rather enhances than diminishes the difficulty of reply, by presenting to the controversialist mere intangible clouds with which to grapple; that yet, through the existence of a certain superstition in the popular mind, as predisposed to accept as true whatever takes the form of science, as its predecessor the old superstition was inclined a century ago to reject science itself, are at least suited to blind and bewilder. Of this kind of difficulty, the following passage, in which the author of the work cashiers the Creator as such, and substitutes, instead, a mere animal-manufacturing piece of clock-work, which bears the name of natural law,[38] furnishes us with a remarkable instance.

“Admitting,” he remarks, “that we see not now any such fact as the production of new species, we at least know, that while such facts were occurring upon earth, there were associated phenomena in progress of a character perfectly ordinary. For example, when the earth received its first fishes, sandstone and limestone were forming in the manner exemplified a few years ago in the ingenious experiments of Sir James Hall; basaltic columns rose for the future wonder of man, according to the principle which Dr. Gregory Watt showed in operation before the eyes of our fathers; and hollows in the igneous rocks were filled with crystals, precisely as they could now be by virtue of electric action, as shown within the last few years by Crosse and Becquerel. The seas obeyed the impulse of gentle breezes, and rippled their sandy bottoms, as seas of the present day are doing; the trees grew as now, by favor of sun and wind, thriving in good seasons and pining in bad: this while the animals above fishes were yet to be created. The movements of the sea, the meteorological agencies, the disposition which we see in the generality of plants to thrive when heat and moisture were most abundant, were kept up in silent serenity, as matters of simply natural order, throughout the whole of the ages which saw reptiles enter in their various forms upon the sea and land. It was about the time of the first mammals that the forest of the Dirt-Bed was sinking in natural ruin amidst the sea sludge, as forests of the Plantagenets have been doing for several centuries upon the coast of England. In short all the common operations of the physical world were going on in their usual simplicity, obeying that order which we still see governing them; while the supposed extraordinary causes were in requisition for the development of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. There surely hence arises a strong presumption against any such causes. It becomes much more likely that the latter phenomena were evolved in the manner of law also, and that we only dream of extraordinary causes here, as men once dreamt of a special action of Deity in every change of wind and the results of each season, merely because they did not know the laws by which the events in question were evolved.”

How, let us suppose, would David Hume—the greatest thinker of which infidelity can boast—have greeted the auxiliary who could have brought him such an argument as a contribution to the cause? “Your objection, so far as you have stated it,” the philosopher might have said, “amounts simply to this:—Creation by direct act is a miracle; whereas all that exists is propagated and maintained by natural law. Natural laws—to vary the illustration—were in full operation at the period when the Author of the Christian religion was, it is said, engaged in working his miracles. When, according to our opponents, he walked upon the surface of the sea, Peter, through the operation of the natural law of gravitation, was sinking into it; when he withered, by a word, the barren fig-tree, there were other trees on the Mount thriving in conformity with the vegetative laws, under the influence of sun and shower; when he raised the dead Lazarus, there were corpses in the neighboring tombs passing, through the natural putrefactive fermentation, into a state of utter decomposition. In fine, at the time when he was engaged, as Reid and Campbell believe, in working miracles in violation of law, the laws of which these were a violation actually existed, and were every where actively operative; or, to employ your own words, when the New Testament miracles were, it is alleged, in the act of being wrought, ‘all the common operations of the physical world were going on in their usual simplicity, obeying that order which we still see governing them.’ Such is the portion of your statement already made; what next?” “It is surely very unlikely,” replies the auxiliary, “that in such a complex mass of phenomena there should have been two totally distinct modes of the exercise of the Divine power,—the mode by miracle and the mode by law.” “Unlikely!” rejoins the philosopher; “on what grounds?” “O, just unlikely,” says the auxiliary;—“unlikely that God should be at once operating on matter through the agency of natural laws, of which man knows much, and through the agency of miraculous acts, of the nature of which man knows nothing. But I have not thought out the subject any further: you have, in the statement already made, my entire argument.” “Ay, I see,” the author of the “Essay on Miracles” would probably have remarked; “you deem it unlikely that Deity should not only work in part, as he has always done, by means of which men,—clever fellows like you and me—think they know a great deal but that he should also work in part, as he has always done, by means of which they know nothing at all. Admirably reasoned out! You are, I make no doubt, a sound, zealous unbeliever in your private capacity, and your argument may have great weight with your own mind, and be, in consequence, worthy of encouragement in a small way; but allow me to suggest that, for the sake of the general cause, it should be kept out of reach of the enemy. There are in the Churches Militant on both sides of the Tweed shrewd combatants, who have nearly as much wit as ourselves.” I think I understand the reference of the author of the “Vestiges” to the dream “of a special action of Deity in every change of wind and the results of each season.” Taken with what immediately goes before, it means something considerably different from those fancies of the “untutored Indian,” who, according to the poet,

“Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.”

There is a school of infidelity, tolerably well known in the capital of Scotland as by far the most superficial which our country has yet seen, that measures mind with a tape-line and the callipers, and, albeit not Christian, laudably exemplifies, in a loudly expressed regard for science, the Christian grace of loving its enemy. And the belief in a special Providence, who watches over and orders all things, and without whose permission there falleth not even a “sparrow to the ground,” the apostles of this school set wholly aside, substituting, instead, a belief in the indiscriminating operation of natural laws; as if, with the broad fact before them that even man can work out his will merely by knowing and directing these laws, the God by whom they were instituted should lack either the power or the wisdom to make them the pliant ministers of his. It is, I fear, to the distinctive tenet in the creed of this hapless school that the author of the “Vestiges” refers. Nor is it in the least surprising, that a writer who labors through two carefully written volumes,[39] to destroy the existing belief in “God’s works of Creation,” should affect to hold that the belief in his “works of Providence” had been destroyed already. But faith in a special superintendence of Deity is not yet dead: nay, more, He who created the human mind took especial care, in its construction, that, save in a few defective specimens of the race, the belief should never die.

The author of the “Vestiges” complains of the illiberality with which he has been treated. “It has appeared to various critics,” we find him saying, “that very sacred principles are threatened by a doctrine of universal law. A natural origin of life, and a natural basis in organization for the operations of the human mind, speak to them of fatalism and materialism. And, strange to say, those who every day give views of physical cosmogony altogether discrepant in appearance with that of Moses, apply hard names to my book for suggesting an organic cosmogony in the same way, liable to inconsiderate odium. I must firmly protest against this mode of meeting speculations regarding nature. The object of my book, whatever may be said of the manner in which it is treated, is purely scientific. The views which I give of the history of organization stand exactly on the same ground upon which the geological doctrines stood fifty years ago. I am merely endeavoring to read aright another chapter of the mystic book which God has placed under the attention of his creatures.... The absence of all liberality in my reviewers is striking, and especially so in those whose geological doctrines have exposed them to similar misconstruction. If the men newly emerged from the odium which was thrown upon Newton’s theory of the planetary motions had rushed forward to turn that odium upon the patrons of the dawning science of Geology, they would have been prefiguring the conduct of several of my critics, themselves hardly escaped from the rude hands of the narrow-minded, yet eager to join that rabble against a new and equally unfriended stranger, as if such were the best means of purchasing impunity for themselves. I trust that a little time will enable the public to penetrate this policy.”

Now, there is one very important point to which the author of this complaint does not seem to have adverted. The astronomer founded his belief in the mobility of the earth and the immobility of the sun, not on a mere dream-like hypothesis, founded on nothing, but on a wide and solid base of pure induction. Galileo was no mere dreamer;—he was a discoverer of great truths, and a profound reasoner regarding them: and on his discoveries and his reasonings, compelled by the inexorable laws of his mental constitution, did he build up certain deductive beliefs, which had no previous existence in his mind. His convictions were consequents, not antecedents. Such, also, is the character of geological discovery and inference, and of the existing belief,—their joint production,—regarding the great antiquity of the globe. No geologist worthy of the name began with the belief, and then set himself to square geological phenomena with its requirements. It is a deduction,—a result;—not the starting assumption, or given sum, in a process of calculation, but its ultimate finding or answer. Clergymen of the orthodox Churches, such as the Sumners, Sedgwicks, Bucklands, Conybeares, and Pye Smiths of England, or the Chalmerses, Duncans, and Flemings of our own country, must have come to the study of this question of the world’s age with at least no bias in favor of the geological estimate. The old, and, as it has proven, erroneous reading of the Mosaic account, was by much too general a one early in the present century, not to have exerted upon them, in their character as ministers of religion, a sensible influence of a directly opposite nature. And the fact of the complete reversal of their original bias, and of the broad unhesitating finding on the subject which they ultimately substituted instead, serves to intimate to the uninitiated the strength of the evidence to which they submitted. There can be nothing more certain than that it is minds of the same calibre and class, engaged in the same inductive track, that yielded in the first instance to the astronomical evidence regarding the earth’s motion, and, in the second, to the geological evidence regarding the earth’s age.[40]

But how very different the nature and history of the development hypothesis, and the character of the intellects with whom it originated, or by whom it has been since adopted! In the first place, it existed as a wild dream ere Geology had any being as a science. It was an antecedent, not a consequent,—a starting assumption, not a result. No one will contend that Maillet was a geologist. Geology has no place among the sciences in the age in which he lived and even no name. And yet there is a translation of his Telliamed now lying before me, bearing date 1750, in which I find very nearly the same account given of the origin of animals and plants as that in the “Vestiges,” and in which the sea is described as that great and fruitful womb of nature in which organization and life first began. Lamarck, at the time when Maillet wrote, was a boy in his sixth year. He became, comparatively early in life, a skilful botanist and conchologist; but not until turned of fifty did he set himself to study general zoology; and his greater work on the invertebrate animals, on which his fame as a naturalist chiefly rests, did not begin to appear—for it was published serially—until the year 1815. But his development hypothesis, identical with that of the “Vestiges,” was given to the world long before,—in 1802; at a time when it had not been ascertained that there existed placoids during the Silurian period, or ganoids during the Old Red Sandstone period, or enaliosaurs during the Oolitic period; and when, though Smith had constructed his “Tabular View of the British Strata,” his map had not yet appeared, and there was little more known regarding the laws of superposition among the stratified rocks than was to be found in the writings of Werner. And if the presumption be strong, in the circumstances, that Lamarck originated his development hypothesis ere he became in any very great degree skilful as a zoologist, it is no mere presumption, but a demonstrable truth, that he originated it ere he became a geologist; for a geologist he never became. In common with Maillet and Buffon, he held by Leibnitz’s theory of a universal ocean; and such, as we have already seen, was his ignorance of fossils, that he erected dermal fragments of the Russian Asterolepis into a new genus of Polyparia,—an error into which the merest tyro in palæontology could not now fall. Such, in relation to these sciences, was the man who perfected the dream of development. Nor has the most distinguished of its continental assertors now living,—Professor Oken,—any higher claim to be regarded as a disciple of the inductive school of Geology than Lamarck. In the preface to the recently published translation of his “Physio-Philosophy,” we find the following curious confession:—“I wrote the first edition of 1810 in a kind of inspiration, and on that account it was not so well arranged as a systematic work ought to be. Now, though this may appear to have been amended in the second and third edition, yet still it was not possible for me to completely attain the object held in view. The book has therefore remained essentially the same as regards its fundamental principles. It is only the empirical arrangement into series of plants and animals that has been modified from time to time, in accordance with the scientific elevation of their several departments, or just as discoveries and anatomical investigations have increased, and rendered some other position of the objects a matter of necessity.” An interesting piece of evidence this; but certainly rather simple as a confession. It will be found that while whatever gives value to the “Physio-Philosophy” of the German Professor (a work which, if divested of all the inspired bits, would be really a good one) was acquired either before or since its first appearance in the ordinary way, its development hypothesis came direct from the god. Further, as I have already had occasion to state, Oken holds, like Lamarck and Maillet, by the universal ocean of Leibnitz; he holds, also, that the globe is a vast crystal, just a little flawed in the facets: and that the three granitic components—quartz, feldspar, and mica—are simply the hail-drops of heavy stone showers that shot athwart the original ocean, and accumulated into rock at the bottom, as snow or hail shoots athwart the upper atmosphere, and accumulates, in the form of ice, on the summits of high hills, or in the arctic or antarctic regions. Such, in the present day, are the geological notions of Oken! They were doubtless all promulgated in what is modestly enough termed “a kind of inspiration;” and there are few now so ignorant of Geology as not to know that the possessing agent in the case—for inspiration is not quite the proper word—must have been at least of kin to that ingenious personage who volunteered of old to be a lying spirit in the mouths of the four hundred prophets. And the well-known fact, that the most popular contemporary expounder of Oken’s hypothesis—the author of the “Vestiges”—has in every edition of his work been correcting, modifying, or altogether withdrawing his statements regarding both geological and zoological phenomena, and that his gradual development as a geologist and zoologist, from the sufficiently low type of acquirement to which his first edition bore witness, may be traced, in consequence, with a distinctness and certainty which we in vain seek in the cases of presumed development which he would so fain establish,—has in its bearing exactly the same effect. His development hypothesis was complete at a time when his geology and zoology were rudimental and imperfect. Give me your facts, said the Frenchman, that I may accommodate them to my theory. And no one can look at the progress of the Lamarckian hypothesis, with reference to the dates when, and the men by whom, it was promulgated, without recognizing in it one of perhaps the most striking embodiments of the Frenchman’s principle which the world ever saw. It is not the illiberal religionist that rejects and casts it off,—it is the inductive philosopher. Science addresses its assertors in the language of the possessed to the sons of Sceva the Jew;—“The astronomer I know, and the geologist I know; but who are ye?”

One of the strangest passages in the “Sequel to the Vestiges,” is that in which its author carries his appeal from the tribunal of science to “another tribunal,” indicated but not named, before which “this new philosophy” [remarkable chiefly for being neither philosophy nor new] “is to be truly and righteously judged.” The principle is obvious, on which, were his opponents mere theologians, wholly unable, though they saw the mischievous character and tendency of his conclusions, to disprove them scientifically, he might appeal from theology to science: “it is with scientific truth,” he might urge, “not with moral consequences, that I have aught to do.” But on what allowable principle, professing, as he does, to found his theory on scientific fact, can he appeal from science to the want of it? “After discussing,” he says, “the whole arguments on both sides in so ample a manner, it may be hardly necessary to advert to the objection arising from the mere fact, that nearly all the scientific men are opposed to the theory of the ‘Vestiges.’ As this objection, however, is likely to be of some avail with many minds, it ought not to be entirely passed over. If I did not think there were reasons, independent of judgment, for the scientific class coming so generally to this conclusion, I might feel the more embarrassed in presenting myself in direct opposition to so many men possessing talents and information. As the case really stands, the ability of this class to give at the present a true response upon such a subject appears extremely challengeable. It is no discredit to them that they are, almost without exception, engaged each in his own little department of science, and able to give little or no attention to other parts of that vast field. From year to year, and from age to age, we see them at work, adding, no doubt, much to the known, and advancing many important interests, but at the same time doing little for the establishment of comprehensive views of nature Experiments in however narrow a walk, facts of whatever minuteness, make reputations in scientific societies; all beyond is regarded with suspicion and distrust. The consequence is, that philosophy, as it exists amongst us, does nothing to raise its votaries above the common ideas of their time. There can therefore be nothing more conclusive against our hypothesis in the disfavor of the scientific class, than in that of any other section of educated men.”

This is surely a very strange statement. Waiving altogether the general fact, that great original discoverers in any department of knowledge are never men of one science or one faculty, but possess, on the contrary, breadth of mind and multiplicity of acquirement;—waiving, too, the particular fact, that the more distinguished original discoverers of the present day rank among at once its most philosophic, most elegant, and most extensively informed writers;—granting, for the argument’s sake, that our scientific men are men of narrow acquirement, and “exclusively engaged, each in his own little department of science;”—it is surely rational to hold, notwithstanding, that in at least these little departments they have a better right to be heard than any other class of persons whatever. We must surely not refuse to the man of science what we at once grant to the common mechanic. A cotton-weaver or calico-printer may be a very narrow man, “exclusively engaged in his own little department;” and yet certain it is that, in a question of cotton-weaving or calico-printing, his evidence is justly deemed more conclusive in courts of law than that of any other man, however much his superior in general breadth and intelligence. And had the author of the “Vestiges” founded his hypothesis on certain facts pertaining to the arts of cotton-weaving and calico-printing, the cotton-weaver and calico-printer would have an indisputable right to be heard on the question of their general correctness. Are we to regard the case as different because it is on facts pertaining to science, not to cotton-weaving or calico-printing, that he professes to found? His hypothesis, unless supported by scientific evidence, is a mere dream,—a fiction as baseless and wild as any in the “Fairy Tales” or the “Arabian Nights.” And, fully sensible of the fact, he calls in as witnesses the physical sciences, and professes to take down their evidence. He calls into court Astronomy, Geology, Phytology, and Zoology. “Hold!” exclaims the astronomer, as the examination goes on; “you are taking the evidence of my special science most unfairly; I challenge a right of cross-examining the witness.” “Hold!” cries the geologist; “you are putting my science to the question, and extorting from it, in its agony, a whole series of fictions: I claim the right of examining it fairly and softly, and getting from it just the sober truth, and nothing more.” And the phytologist and zoologist urge exactly similar claims. “No, gentlemen,” replies the author of the “Vestiges,” “you are narrow men, confined each of you to his own little department, and so I will not permit you to cross-examine the witnesses.” “What!” rejoin the men of science, “not permit us to examine our own witnesses!—refuse to us what you would at once concede to the cotton-weaver or the calico-printer, were the question one of cotton-weaving or of calico-printing! We are surely not much narrower men than the man of cotton or the man of calico. It is but in our own little departments that we ask to be heard.” “But you shall not be heard, gentlemen,” says the author of the “Vestiges;” “at all events, I shall not care one farthing for anything you say. For observe, gentlemen, my hypothesis is nothing without the evidence of your sciences; and you all unite, I see, in taking that evidence from me; and so I confidently raise my appeal in this matter to people who know nothing about either you or your sciences. It must be before another tribunal that the new philosophy is to be truly and righteously judged.” Alas! what can this mean? or where are we to seek for that tribunal of last resort to which this ingenious man refers with such confidence the consideration of his case? Can it mean, that he appeals from the only class of persons qualified to judge of his facts, to a class ignorant of these, but disposed by habits of previous scepticism to acquiesce in his conclusions, and take his premises for granted;—that he appeals from astronomers and geologists to low-minded materialists and shallow phrenologers,—from phytologists and zoologists to mesmerists and phreno-mesmerists?

I remember being much struck, several years ago, by a remark dropped in conversation by the late Rev. Mr. Stewart of Cromarty, one of the most original-minded men I ever knew. “In reading in my Greek New Testament this morning,” he said, “I was curiously impressed by a thought which, simple as it may seem, never occurred to me before. The portion which I perused was in the First Epistle of Peter; and as I passed from the thinking of the passage to the language in which it is expressed,—‘This Greek of the untaught Galilean fisherman,’—I said, ‘so admired by scholars and critics for its unaffected dignity and force, was not acquired, as that of Paul may have been, in the ordinary way, but formed a portion of the Pentecostal gift! Here, then, immediately under my eye, on these pages, are there embodied, not, as in many other parts of the Scriptures, the mere details of a miracle, but the direct results of a miracle. How strange! Had the old tables of stone been placed before me, with what an awe-struck feeling would I have looked on the characters traced upon them by God’s own finger! How is it that I have failed to remember that, in the language of these Epistles, miraculously impressed by the Divine power upon the mind, I possessed as significant and suggestive a relic as that which the inscription miraculously impressed by the Divine power upon the stone could possibly have furnished?” It was a striking thought; and in the course of our walk, which led us over richly fossiliferous beds of the Old Red Sandstone, to a deposit of the Eathie Lias, largely charged with the characteristic remains of that formation, I ventured to connect it with another. “In either case,” I remarked, as we seated ourselves beside a sea-cliff, sculptured over with the impressions of extinct plants and shells, “your relics, whether of the Pentecostal Greek or of the characters inscribed on the old tables of stone, could address themselves to but previously existing belief. The sceptic would see in the Sinaitic characters, were they placed before him, merely the work of an ordinary tool; and in the Greek of Peter and John, a well-known language, acquired, he would hold, in the common way. But what say you to the relics that stand out in such bold relief from the rocks beside us, in their character as the results of miracle? The perished tribes and races which they represent all began to exist. There is no truth which science can more conclusively demonstrate than that they had all a beginning. The infidel who, in this late age of the world, would attempt falling back on the fiction of an ‘infinite series,’ would be laughed to scorn. They all began to be. But how? No true geologist holds by the development hypothesis;—it has been resigned to sciolists and smatterers;—and there is but one other alternative. They began to be, through the miracle of creation. From the evidence furnished by these rocks we are shut down either to the belief in miracle, or to the belief in something else infinitely harder of reception, and as thoroughly unsupported by testimony as it is contrary to experience. Hume is at length answered by the severe truths of the stony science. He was not, according to Job, ‘in league with the stones of the field,’ and they have risen in irresistible warfare against him in the Creator’s behalf.”

FINAL CAUSES.—THEIR BEARING ON GEOLOGIC HISTORY.
CONCLUSION.

“Natural History has a principle on which to reason,” says Cuvier, “which is peculiar to it, and which it employs advantageously on many occasions: it is that of the conditions of existence, commonly termed final causes.”

In Geology, which is Natural History extended over all ages, this principle has a still wider scope,—embracing not merely the characteristics and conditions of the beings which now exist, but of all, so far as we can learn regarding them, which have ever existed, and involving the consideration of not merely their peculiarities as races placed before us without relation to time, but also of the history of their rise, increase, decline, and extinction. In studying the biography, if I may so express myself, of an individual animal, we have to acquaint ourselves with the circumstances in which nature has placed it,—its adaptation to these, both in structure and instinct,—the points of resemblance which it presents to the individuals of other races and families, and the laws which determine its terms of development, vigorous existence, and decay. And all Natural History, when restricted to the passing now of the world’s annals, is simply a congeries of biographies. It is when we extend our view into the geological field that it passes from biography into history proper, and that we have to rise from the consideration of the birth and death of individuals, which, in all mere biographies, form the great terminal events that constitute beginning and end, to a survey of the birth and death of races, and the elevation or degradation of dynasties and sub-kingdoms.

We learn from human history that nations are as certainly mortal as men. They enjoy a greatly longer term of existence, but they die at last: Rollin’s History of Ancient Nations is a history of the dead. And we are taught by geological history, in like manner, that species are as mortal as individuals and nations, and that even genera and families become extinct. There is no man upon earth at the present moment whose age greatly exceeds an hundred years;—there is no nation now upon earth (if we perhaps except the long-lived Chinese) that also flourished three thousand years ago;—there is no species now living upon earth that dates beyond the times of the Tertiary deposits. All bear the stamp of death,—individuals,—nations,—species; and we may scarce less safely predicate, looking upon the past, that it is appointed for nations and species to die, than that it “is appointed for man once to die.” Even our own species, as now constituted,—with instincts that conform to the original injunction, “increase and multiply,” and that, in consequence, “marry and are given in marriage,”—shall one day cease to exist: a fact not less in accordance with beliefs inseparable from the faith of the Christian, than with the widely-founded experience of the geologist. Now, it is scarce possible for the human mind to become acquainted with the fact, that at certain periods species began to exist and then, after the lapse of untold ages, ceased to be, without inquiring whether, from the “conditions of existence, commonly termed final causes,” we cannot deduce a reason for their rise or decline, or why their term of being should have been included rather in one certain period of time than another. The same faculty which finds employment in tracing to their causes the rise and fall of nations, and which it is the merit of the philosophic historian judiciously to exercise, will to a certainty seek employment in this department of history also; and that there will be an appetency for such speculations in the public mind, we may infer from the success, as a literary undertaking, of the “Vestiges of Creation,”—a work that bears the same sort of relation, in this special field to sober inquiry, founded on the true conditions of things, that the legends of the old chroniclers bore to authentic history. The progressive state of geologic science has hitherto militated against the formation of theory of the soberer character. Its facts—still merely in the forming—are necessarily imperfect in their classification, and limited in their amount; and thus the essential data continues incomplete. Besides, the men best acquainted with the basis of fact which already exists, have quite enough to engage them in adding to it. But there are limits to the field of palæontological discovery, in its relation to what may be termed the chronology of organized existence, which, judging from the progress of the science in the past, may be well nigh reached in favored localities, such as the British islands, in about a quarter of a century from the present time; and then, I doubt not, geological history, in legitimate conformity with the laws of mind, and from the existence of the pregnant principle peculiar, according to Cuvier, to that science of which Geology is simply an extension, will assume a very extraordinary form. We cannot yet aspire “to the height of this great argument:” our foundations are in parts still unconsolidated and incomplete, and unfitted to sustain the perfect superstructure which shall one day assuredly rise upon them; but from the little which we can now see, “as if in a glass darkly,” enough appears from which to

“Assert eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.”

The history of the four great monarchies of the world was typified, in the prophetic dream of the ancient Babylonish king, by a colossal image, “terrible in its form and brightness,” of which the “head was pure gold,” the “breast and arms of silver,” the “belly and thighs of brass,” and the legs and feet “of iron, and of iron mingled with clay.” The vision in which it formed the central object was appropriately that of a puissant monarch; and the image itself typified the merely human monarchies of the earth. It would require a widely different figure to symbolize the great monarchies of creation. And yet Revelation does furnish such a figure. It is that which was witnessed by the captive prophet beside “the river Chebar,” when “the heavens were opened, and he saw visions of God.” In that chariot of Deity, glowing in fire and amber, with its complex wheels “so high that they were dreadful,” set round about with eyes, there were living creatures, of whose four faces three were brute and one human; and high over all sat the Son of Man. It would almost seem as if, in this sublime vision,—in which, with features distinct enough to impress the imagination, there mingle the elements of an awful incomprehensibility, and which even the genius of Raffaelle has failed adequately to portray,—the history of all the past and of all the future had been symbolized. In the order of Providence intimated in the geologic record, the brute faces, as in the vision, outnumber the human;—the human dynasty is one, and the dynasties of the inferior animals are three; and yet who can doubt that they all equally compose parts of a well-ordered and perfect whole, as the four faces formed but one cherubim; that they have been moving onward to a definite goal, in the unity of one grand harmonious design,—now “lifted up high” over the comprehension of earth,—now let down to its humble level; and that the Creator of all has been ever seated over them on the throne of his providence,—a “likeness in the appearance of a man,”—embodying the perfection of his nature in his workings, and determining the end from the beginning?

There is geologic evidence, as has been shown, that in the course of creation the higher orders succeeded the lower. We have no good reason to believe that the mollusc and crustacean preceded the fish, seeing that discovery, in its slow course, has already traced the vertebrata in the ichthyic form, down to deposits which only a few years ago were regarded as representatives of the first beginnings of organized existence on our planet, and that it has at the same time failed to add a lower system to that in which their remains occur. But the fish seems most certainly to have preceded the reptile and the bird; the reptile and the bird to have preceded the mammiferous quadruped; and the mammiferous quadruped to have preceded man,—rational, accountable man, whom God created in his own image,—the much-loved Benjamin of the family,—last-born of all creatures. It is of itself an extraordinary fact, without reference to other considerations, that the order adopted by Cuvier, in his animal kingdom, as that in which the four great classes of vertebrate animals, when marshalled according to their rank and standing, naturally range should be also that in which they occur in order of time. The brain which bears an average proportion to the spinal cord of not more than two to one, came first,—it is the brain of the fish; that which bears to the spinal cord an average proportion of two and a half to one succeeded it,—it is the brain of the reptile; then came the brain averaging as three to one,—it is that of the bird; next in succession came the brain that averages as four to one,—it is that of the mammal; and last of all there appeared a brain that averages as twenty-three to one,—reasoning, calculating man had come upon the scene. All the facts of geological science are hostile to the Lamarckian conclusion, that the lower brains were developed into the higher. As if with the express intention of preventing so gross a mis-reading of the record, we find, in at least two classes of animals,—fishes and reptiles,—the higher races placed at the beginning: the slope of the inclined plane is laid, if one may so speak, in the reverse way, and, instead of rising towards the level of the succeeding class, inclines downwards, with at least the effect, if not the design, of making the break where they meet exceedingly well marked and conspicuous. And yet the record does seem to speak of development and progression;—not, however, in the province of organized existence, but in that of insensate matter, subject to the purely chemical laws. It is in the style and character of the dwelling-place that gradual improvement seems to have taken place;—not in the functions or the rank of any class of its inhabitants; and it is with special reference to this gradual improvement in our common mansion-house the earth, in its bearing on the “conditions of existence,” that not a few of our reasonings regarding the introduction and extinction of species and genera must proceed.

That definite period at which man was introduced upon the scene seems to have been specially determined by the conditions of correspondence which the phenomena of his habitation had at length come to assume with the predestined constitution of his mind. The large reasoning brain would have been wholly out of place in the earlier ages. It is indubitably the nature of man to base the conclusions which regulate all his actions on fixed phenomena,—he reasons from cause to effect, or from effect to cause; and when placed in circumstances in which, from some lack of the necessary basis, he cannot so reason, he becomes a wretched, timid, superstitious creature, greatly more helpless and abject than even the inferior animals. This unhappy state is strikingly exemplified by that deep and peculiar impression made on the mind by a severe earthquake, which Humboldt, from his own experience, so powerfully describes. “This impression,” he says, “is not, in my opinion, the result of a recollection of those fearful pictures of devastation presented to our imagination by the historical narratives of the past, but is rather due to the sudden revelation of the delusive nature of the inherent faith by which we had clung to a belief in the immobility of the solid parts of the earth. We are accustomed from early childhood to draw a contrast between the mobility of water and the immobility of the soil on which we tread; and this feeling is confirmed by the evidence of our senses. When, therefore, we suddenly feel the ground move beneath us, a mysterious force, with which we were previously unacquainted, is revealed to us as an active disturber of stability. A moment destroys the illusion of a whole life; our deceptive faith in the repose of nature vanishes; and we feel transported into a realm of unknown destructive forces. Every sound—the faintest motion of the air—arrests our attention, and we no longer trust the ground on which we stand. There is an idea conveyed to the mind, of some universal and unlimited danger. We may flee from the crater of a volcano in active eruption, or from the dwelling whose destruction is threatened by the approach of the lava stream; but in an earthquake, direct our flight whithersoever we will, we still feel as if we trod upon the very focus of destruction.” Not less striking is the testimony of Dr. Tschudi, in his “Travels in Peru,” regarding this singular effect of earthquakes on the human mind. “No familiarity with the phenomenon can,” he remarks, “blunt the feeling. The inhabitant of Lima, who from childhood has frequently witnessed these convulsions of nature, is roused from his sleep by the shock, and rushes from his apartment with the cry of ‘Misericordia!’ The foreigner from the north of Europe, who knows nothing of earthquakes but by description, waits with impatience to feel the movements of the earth, and longs to hear with his own ear the subterranean sounds, which he has hitherto considered fabulous. With levity he treats the apprehension of a coming convulsion, and laughs at the fears of the natives; but as soon as his wish is gratified, he is terror-stricken, and is involuntarily prompted to seek safety in flight.”

Now, a partially consolidated planet, tempested by frequent earthquakes of such terrible potency, that those of the historic ages would be but mere ripples of the earth’s surface in comparison, could be no proper home for a creature so constituted. The fish or reptile,—animals of a limited range of instinct, exceedingly tenacious of life in most of their varieties, oviparous, prolific, and whose young immediately on their escape from the egg can provide for themselves, might enjoy existence in such circumstances, to the full extent of their narrow capacities; and when sudden death fell upon them,—though their remains, scattered over wide areas, continue to exhibit that distortion of posture incident to violent dissolution, which seems to speak of terror and suffering,—we may safely conclude there was but little real suffering on the case: they were happy up to a certain point, and unconscious forever after. Fishes and reptiles were the proper inhabitants of our planet during the ages of the earth-tempests; and when, under the operation of the chemical laws, these had become less frequent and terrible, the higher mammals were introduced. That prolonged ages of these tempests did exist, and that they gradually settled down, until the state of things became at length comparatively fixed and stable, few geologists will be disposed to deny. The evidence which supports this special theory of the development of our planet in its capabilities as a scene of organized and sentient being, seems palpable at every step. Look first at these Grauwacke rocks; and, after marking how in one place the strata have been upturned on their edges for miles together, and how in another the Plutonic rock has risen molten from below, pass on to the Old Red Sandstone, and examine its significant platforms of violent death,—its faults, displacements, and dislocations; see, next, in the Coal Measures, those evidences of sinking and ever-sinking strata, for thousands of feet together; mark in the Oolite those vast overlying masses of trap, stretching athwart the landscape, far as the eye can reach; observe carefully how the signs of convulsion and catastrophe gradually lessen as we descend to the times of the Tertiary, though even in these ages of the mammiferous quadruped the earth must have had its oft-recurring ague fits of frightful intensity; and then, on closing the survey, consider how exceedingly partial and unfrequent these earth-tempests have become in the recent periods. Yes; we find every where marks of at once progression and identity,—of progress made, and yet identity maintained; but it is in the habitation that we find them,—not in the inhabitants. There is a tract of country in Hindustan that contains nearly as many square miles as all Great Britain, covered to the depth of hundreds of feet by one vast overflow of trap; a track similarly overflown, which exceeds in area all England, occurs in Southern Africa. The earth’s surface is roughened with such,—mottled as thickly by the Plutonic masses as the skin of the leopard by its spots. The trap district which surrounds our Scottish metropolis, and imparts so imposing a character to its scenery, is too inconsiderable to be marked on geological maps of the world, that we yet see streaked and speckled with similar memorials, though on an immensely vaster scale, of the eruption and overflow which took place in the earthquake ages. What could man have done on the globe at a time when such outbursts were comparatively common occurrences? What could he have done where Edinburgh now stands during that overflow of trap porphyry of which the Pentland range forms but a fragment, or that outburst of greenstone of which but a portion remains in the dark ponderous coping of Salisbury Craigs, or when the thick floor of rock on which the city stands was broken up, like the ice of an arctic sea during a tempest in spring, and laid on edge from where it leans against the Castle Hill to beyond the quarries at Joppa? The reasoning brain would have been wholly at fault in a scene of things in which it could neither foresee the exterminating calamity while yet distant, nor control it when it had come; and so the reasoning brain was not produced until the scene had undergone a slow but thorough process of change, during which, at each progressive stage, it had furnished a platform for higher and still higher life. When the coniferæ could flourish on the land, and fishes subsist in the seas, fishes and cone-bearing plants were created; when the earth became a fit habitat for reptiles and birds, reptiles and birds were produced; with the dawn of a more stable and mature state of things the sagacious quadruped was ushered in; and, last of all, when man’s house was fully prepared for him,—when the data on which it is his nature to reason and calculate had become fixed and certain,—the reasoning, calculating brain was moulded by the creative finger, and man became a living soul. Such seems to be the true reading of the wondrous inscription chiselled deep in the rocks. It furnishes us with no clue by which to unravel the unapproachable mysteries of creation;—these mysteries belong to the wondrous Creator, and to Him only. We attempt to theorize upon them, and to reduce them to law, and all nature rises up against us in our presumptuous rebellion. A stray splinter of cone-bearing wood,—a fish’s skull or tooth,—the vertebra of a reptile,—the humerus of a bird,—the jaw of a quadruped,—all, any of these things, weak and insignificant as they may seem, become in such a quarrel too strong for us and our theory: the puny fragment, in the grasp of truth, forms as irresistible a weapon as the dry bone did in that of Samson of old; and our slaughtered sophisms lie piled up, “heaps upon heaps,” before it.

There is no geological fact nor revealed doctrine with which this special scheme of development does not agree. To every truth, too, really such, from which the antagonist scheme derives its shadowy analogies, it leaves its full value. It has no quarrel with the facts of even the “Vestiges,” in their character as realities. There is certainly something very extraordinary in that fœtal progress of the human brain on which the assertors of the development hypothesis have founded so much. Nature, in constructing this curious organ, first lays down a grooved cord, as the carpenter lays down the keel of his vessel; and on this narrow base the perfect brain, as month after month passes by, is gradually built up, like the vessel from the keel. First it grows up into a brain closely resembling that of a fish; a few additions more convert it into a brain undistinguishable from that of a reptile; a few additions more impart to it the perfect appearance of the brain of a bird; it then developes into a brain exceedingly like that of a mammiferous quadruped; and, finally, expanding atop, and spreading out its deeply corrugated lobes, till they project widely over the base, it assumes its unique character as a human brain. Radically such from the first, it passes towards its full development, through all the inferior forms, from that of the fish upwards,—thus comprising, during its fœtal progress, an epitome of geologic history, as if each man were in himself, not the microcosm of the old fanciful philosopher, but something greatly more wonderful,—a compendium of all animated nature, and of kin to every creature that lives. Hence the remark, that man is the sum total of all animals,—“the animal equivalent,” says Oken, “to the whole animal kingdom.” We are perhaps too much in the habit of setting aside real facts, when they have been first seized upon by the infidel, and appropriated to the purposes of unbelief, as if they had suffered contamination in his hands. We forget, like the brother “weak in the faith,” instanced by the Apostle, that they are in themselves “creatures of God;” and too readily reject the lesson which they teach, simply because they have been offered in sacrifice to an idol. And this strange fact of the progress of the human brain is assuredly a fact none the less worth looking at from the circumstance that infidelity has looked at it first. On no principle recognizable in right reason can it be urged in support of the development hypothesis;—it is a fact of fœtal development, and of that only. But it would be well should it lead our metaphysicians to inquire whether they have not been rendering their science too insulated and exclusive; and whether the mind that works by a brain thus “fearfully and wonderfully made,” ought not to be viewed rather in connection with all animated nature, especially as we find nature exemplified in the various vertebral forms, than as a thing fundamentally abstract and distinct. The brain built up of all the types of brain, may be the organ of a mind compounded, if I may so express myself, of all the varieties of mind. It would be perhaps over fanciful to urge that it is the creature who has made himself free of all the elements, whose brain has been thus in succession that of all their proper denizens; and that there is no animal instinct, the function of which cannot be illustrated by some art mastered by man: but there can be nothing over fanciful in the suggestion, founded on this fact of fœtal development, that possibly some of the more obscure signs impressed upon the human character may be best read through the spectacles of physical science. The successive phases of the fœtal brain give at least fair warning that, in tracing to its first principles the moral and intellectual nature of man, what is properly his “natural history” should not be overlooked. Oken, after describing the human creature in one passage as “equivalent to the whole animal kingdom,” designates him in another as “God wholly manifested,” and as “God become man;”—a style of expression at which the English reader may start, as that of the “big mouth speaking blasphemy,” but which has become exceedingly common among the nationalists of the Continent. The irreverent naturalist ought surely to have remembered, that the sum total of all the animals cannot be different in its nature from the various sums of which it is an aggregate,—seeing that no summation ever differs in quality from the items summed up, which compose it,—and that, though it may amount in this case to man the animal,—to man, as he may be weighed, and measured, and subjected to the dissecting knife,—it cannot possibly amount to God. Is God merely a sum total of birds and beasts, reptiles and fishes;—a mere Egyptian deity, composed of fantastic hieroglyphics derived from the forms of the brute creation? The impieties of the transcendentalist may, however, serve to illustrate that mode of seizing on terms which, as the most sacred in the message of revelation, have been long coupled in the popular mind with saving truths, and forcibly compelling them to bear some visionary and illusive meaning, wholly foreign to that with which they were originally invested, which has become so remarkable a part of the policy of modern infidelity. Rationalism has learned to sacrifice to Deity with a certain measure of conformity to the required pattern; but it is a conformity in appearance only, not in reality: the sacrifice always resembles that of Prometheus of old, who presented to Jupiter what, though it seemed to be an ox without blemish, was merely an ox-skin stuffed full of bones and garbage.

There is another very remarkable class of facts in geological history, which appear to fall as legitimately within the scope of argument founded on final causes, as those which bear on the appearance of man at his proper era. The period of the mammiferous quadrupeds seems, like the succeeding human period, to have been determined, as I have said, by the earth’s fitness at the time as a place of habitation for creatures so formed. And the bulk to which, in the more extreme cases, they attained, appears to have been regulated, as in the higher mammals now, with reference to the force of gravity at the earth’s surface. The Megatherium and the Mastodon, the Dinotherium and the extinct elephant, increased in bulk, in obedience to the laws of the specific constitution imparted to them at their creation; and these laws bore reference, in turn, to another law,—that law of gravity which determines that no creature which moves in air and treads the surface of the earth should exceed a certain weight or size. To very near the limits assigned by this law some of the ancient quadrupeds arose. It is even doubtful whether the Dinotherium, the most gigantic of mammals, may not have been, like the existing sea-lions and morses, mainly an aquatic quadruped;—an inference grounded on the circumstance that, in at least portions of its framework, it seems to have risen beyond these limits. Now, it does not seem wonderful that, with apparent reference to the point at which the gravity of bodies at the earth’s surface bisects the conditions of texture and matter necessary to existence among the sub-aerial vertebrata, the reptiles of the Secondary periods should have grown up in some of their species and genera to the extreme size. A world of frogs, newts, and lizards would have borne stamped upon it the impress of a tame and miserable mediocrity, that would have harmonized ill with the extent of the earth’s capabilities for supporting life on a large scale. There would be no principle of adaptation or rule of proportion maintained between an animal kingdom composed of so contemptible a group of beings, and either the dynamic laws under which matter exists on our planet, or the luxuriant vegetation which it bore during the Secondary ages. And such was not the character of the group which composed the reptile dynasty. The Iguanodon must have been quite as tall as the elephant,—greatly longer, and, it would seem, at least as bulky. The Megalosaurus must have at least equalled the rhinoceros; the Hylæosaurus would have outweighed the hippopotamus. And when reptiles that rivalled in size our hugest mammals inhabited the land, other reptiles,—Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, and Cetiosaurs,—scarce less bulky than the cetacea themselves, possessed the sea. Not only was the platform of being occupied in all its breadth, but also in all its height; and it is according to our simpler and more obvious ideas of adaptation—simple and obvious because gleaned from the very surface of the universe of life—that such should have been the case. But it does appear strange, because under the regulation, it would seem, of a principle of adaptation more occult, and, if I may so speak, more Providential, that no sooner are the huge mammals introduced as a group, than, with but a few exceptions, the reptiles appear in greatly diminished proportions. They no longer occupy the platform to its full extent of height. Even in tropical countries, in which certain families of mammals still attain to the maximum size, the reptiles, if we except the crocodilean family, a few harmless turtles, and the degraded boas and pythons, are a small and comparatively unimportant race. Nay, the existing giants of the class—the crocodiles and boas—hardly equal in bulk the third-rate reptiles of the ages of the Oolite and the Wealden. So far as can be seen, there is no reason deduceable from the nature of things, why the country that sustains a mammal bulky as the elephant, should not also support a reptile huge as the Iguanodon; or why the Megalosaurus, Hylæosaurus, and Dicynodon, might not have been contemporary with the lion, tiger, and rhinoceros. The change which took place in the reptile group immediately on their dethronement at the close of the Secondary period, seems scarce less strange than that sung by Milton:—

“Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed

In bigness to surpass earth’s giant sons,

Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room

Thronged numberless; like that pygmean race

Beyond the Indian mount; or fairy elves,

Whose midnight revels, by a forest side

Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,

Or dreams he sees, while, overhead, the moon

Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth

Wheels her pale course.”

But though we cannot assign a cause for this general reduction of the reptile class, save simply the will of the all-wise Creator, the reason why it should have taken place seems easily assignable. It was a bold saying of the old philosophic heathen, that “God is the soul of brutes;” but writers on instinct in even our own times have said less warrantable things. God does seem to do for many of the inferior animals of the lower divisions, which, though devoid of brain and vertebral column, are yet skilful chemists and accomplished architects and mathematicians, what he enables man, through the exercise of the reasoning faculty, to do for himself; and the ancient philosopher meant no more. And in clearing away the giants of the reptile dynasty, when their kingdom had passed away, and then re-introducing the class as much shrunken in their proportions as restricted in their domains, the Creator seems to have been doing for the mammals what man, in the character of a “mighty hunter before the Lord,” does for himself. There is in nature very little of what can be called war. The cities of this country cannot be said to be in a state of war, though their cattle-markets are thronged every week with animals for slaughter and the butcher and fishmonger find their places of business thronged with customers. And such, in the main, is the condition of the animal world;—it consists of its two classes,—animals of prey, and the animals upon which they prey: its wars are simply those of the butcher and fisher, lightened by a dash of the enjoyments of the sportsman.

“The creatures see of flood and field,

And those that travel on the wind,

With them no strife can last; they live

In peace and peace of mind.”

Generally speaking, the carnivorous mammalia respect one another: lion does not war with tiger, nor the leopard contend with the hyena. But the carnivorous reptiles manifest no such respect for the carnivorous mammals. There are fierce contests in their native jungles, on the banks of the Ganges, between the gavial and the tiger; and in the steaming forests of South America, the boa-constrictor casts his terrible coil scarce less readily round the puma than the antelope. A world which, after it had become a home of the higher herbivorous and more powerful carnivorous mammals, continued to retain the gigantic reptiles of its earlier ages, would be a world of horrid, exterminating war, and altogether rather a place of torment than a scene of intermediate character, in which, though it sometimes reëchoes the groans of suffering nature, life is, in the main, enjoyment. And so,—save in a few exceptional cases, that, while they establish the rule as a fact, serve also as a key to unlock that principle of the Divine government on which it appears to rest,—no sooner was the reptile removed from his place in the fore-front of creation, and creatures of a higher order introduced into it the consolidating and fast-ripening planet of which he had been so long the monarch, than his bulk shrank and his strength lessened, and he assumed a humility of form and aspect at once in keeping with his reduced circumstances, and compatible with the general welfare. But though the reason of the reduction appears obvious, I know not that it can be referred to any other cause than simply the will of the All-Wise Creator.

There hangs a mystery greatly more profound over the fact of the degradation than over that of the reduction and diminution of classes. We can assign what at least seems to be a sufficient reason why, when reptiles formed as a class the highest representatives of the vertebrata, they should be of imposing bulk and strength, and altogether worthy of that post of precedence which they then occupied among the animals. We can also assign a reason for the strange reduction which took place among them in strength and bulk immediately on their removal from the first to the second place. But why not only reduction, but also degradation? Why, as division started up in advance of division,—first the reptiles in front of the fishes, then the quadrupedal mammals in front of the reptiles, and, last of all, man in front of the quadrupedal mammals,—should the supplanted classes,—two of them at least,—fishes and reptiles,—for there seem to have been no additions made to the mammals since man entered upon the scene,—why should they have become the receptacles of orders and families of a degraded character, which had no place among them in their monarchical state? The fishes removed beyond all analogy with the higher vertebrata, by their homocercal tails,—the fishes (Acanthopterygii and Sub-brachiati) with their four limbs slung in a belt round their necks,—the flat fishes, (Pleuronectidæ,) that, in addition to this deformity, are so twisted to a side, that while the one eye occupies a single orbit in the middle of the skull, the other is thrust out to its edge,—the irregular fishes generally (sun-fishes, frog-fishes, hippocampi, &c.) were not introduced into the ichthyic division until after the full development of the reptile dynasty; nor did the hand that makes no slips in its working “form the crooked serpent,” footless, grovelling, venom-bearing, the authorized type of a fallen and degraded creature, until after the introduction of the mammals. What can this fact of degradation mean? Species and genera seem to be greatly more numerous in the present age of the world than in any of the geologic ages. Is it not possible that the extension of the chain of being which has thus taken place—not only, as we find, through the addition of the higher divisions of animals to its upper end, but also through the interpolations of lower links into the previously existing divisions—may have borne reference to some predetermined scheme of well-proportioned gradation, or, according to the poet,

“Of general Order since the whole began?”

May not, in short, what we term degradation be merely one of the modes resorted to for filling up the voids in creation, and thereby perfecting a scale which must have been originally not merely a scale of narrow compass, but also of innumerable breaks and blanks, hiatuses and chasms? Such, certainly, would be the reading of the enigma which a Soame Jenyns or a Bolingbroke would suggest; but the geologist has learned from his science, that the completion of a chain of at least contemporary being, perfect in its gradations, cannot possibly have formed the design of Providence. Almost ever since God united vitality to matter, the links in this chain of animated nature, as if composed of a material too brittle to bear their own weight when stretched across the geologic ages, have been dropping one after out, from his hand, and sinking, fractured and broken, into the rocks below. It is urged by Pope, that were “we to press on superior powers,” and rise from our own assigned place to the place immediately above all, we would, in consequence of the transposition,

“In the full creation leave a void,

Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroyed.

From nature’s chain whatever link we strike,

Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.”

The poet could scarce have anticipated that there was a science then sleeping in its cradle, and dreaming the dreams of Whiston, Leibnitz, and Burnet, which was one day to rise and demonstrate that both the tenth and the ten thousandth link in the chain had been already broken and laid by, with all the thousands of links between; and that man might laudably “press on superior powers,” and attain to a “new nature,” without in the least affecting the symmetry of creation by the void which his elevation would necessarily create; that, in fine, voids and blanks in the scale are exceedingly common things; and that, if men could, by rising into angels, make one blank more, they might do so with perfect impunity. Further, even were the graduated chain of Bolingbroke a reality, and not what Johnson well designates it, an “absurd hypothesis,” and were what I have termed the interpolation of links necessary to its completion, the mere filling up of the original blanks and chasms would not necessarily involve the fact of degradation, seeing that each blank could be filled up, if I may go express myself, from its lower end. Each could be as certainly occupied to the full by an elevation of lower forms, as by a humiliation of the higher. We might receive the hypothesis of Bolingbroke, and yet find the mysterious fact of degradation remain an unsolved riddle in our hands.

But though I can assign neither reason nor cause for the fact, I cannot avoid the conclusion, that it is associated with certain other great facts in the moral government of the universe, by those threads of analogical connection which run through the entire tissue of Creation and Providence, and impart to it that character of unity which speaks of the single producing Mind. The first idea of every religion on earth which has arisen out of what may be termed the spiritual instincts of man’s nature, is that of a Future State; the second idea is, that in this state men shall exist in two separate classes,—the one in advance of their present condition, the other far in the rear of it. It is on these two great beliefs that conscience every where finds the fulcrum from which it acts upon the conduct; and it is, we find, wholly inoperative as a force without them. And in that one religion among men that, instead of retiring, like the pale ghosts of the others, before the light of civilization, brightens and expands in its beams, and in favor of whose claim as a revelation from God the highest philosophy has declared, we find these two master ideas occupying a still more prominent place than in any of those merely indigenous religions that spring up in the human mind of themselves. The special lesson which the Adorable Saviour, during his ministry on earth, oftenest enforced, and to which all the others bore reference, was the lesson of a final separation of mankind into two great divisions,—a division of God-like men, of whose high Standing and full-orbed happiness man, in the present scene of things, can form no adequate conception; and a division of men finally lost, and doomed to unutterable misery and hopeless degradation. There is not in all Revelation a single doctrine which we find oftener or more clearly enforced than that there shall continue to exist, throughout the endless cycles of the future, a race of degraded men and of degraded angels.

Now, it is truly wonderful how thoroughly, in its general scope, the revealed pieces on to the geologic record. We know, as geologists, that the dynasty of the fish was succeeded by that of the reptile,—that the dynasty of the reptile was succeeded by that of the mammiferous quadruped,—and that the dynasty of the mammiferous quadruped was succeeded by that of man as man now exists,—a creature of mixed character, and subject, in all conditions, to wide alternations of enjoyment and suffering. We know, further—so far at least as we have yet succeeded in deciphering the record,—that the several dynasties were introduced, not in their lower, but in their higher forms;—that, in short, in the imposing programme of creation it was arranged, as a general rule, that in each of the great divisions of the procession the magnates should walk first. We recognize yet further the fact of degradation specially exemplified in the fish and the reptile. And then, passing on to the revealed record, we learn that the dynasty of man in the mixed state and character is not the final one, but that there is to be yet another creation, or, more properly, re-creation, known theologically as the Resurrection, which shall be connected in its physical components, by bonds of mysterious paternity, with the dynasty which now reigns, and be bound to it mentally by the chain of identity, conscious and actual; but which, in all that constitutes superiority, shall be as vastly its superior as the dynasty of responsible man is superior to even the lowest of the preliminary dynasties. We are further taught, that at the commencement of this last of the dynasties, there will be a re-creation of not only elevated, but also of degraded beings,—a re-creation of the lost. We are taught yet further, that though the present dynasty be that of a lapsed race, which at their first introduction were placed on higher ground than that on which they now stand, and sank by their own act, it was yet part of the original design, from the beginning of all things, that they should occupy the existing platform; and that Redemption is thus no after-thought, rendered necessary by the fall, but, on the contrary, part of a general scheme, for which provision had been made from the beginning; so that the Divine Man, through whom the work of restoration has been effected, was in reality, in reference to the purposes of the Eternal, what he is designated in the remarkable text, “the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world.” Slain from the foundations of the world! Could the assertors of the stony science ask for language more express? By piecing the two records together,—that revealed in Scripture and that revealed in the rocks,—records which, however widely geologists may mistake the one, or commentators misunderstand the other, have emanated from the same great Author—we learn that in slow and solemn majesty has period succeeded period, each in succession ushering in a higher end yet higher scene of existence,—that fish, reptiles, mammiferous quadrupeds, have reigned in turn,—that responsible man, “made in the image of God,” and with dominion over all creatures, ultimately entered into a world ripened for his reception; but, further, that this passing scene, in which he forms the prominent figure, is not the final one in the long series, but merely the last of the preliminary scenes; and that that period to which the bygone ages, incalculable in amount, with all their well-proportioned gradations of being, form the imposing vestibule, shall have perfection for its occupant, and eternity for its duration. I know not how it may appear to others; but for my own part, I cannot avoid thinking that there would be a lack of proportion in the series of being, were the period of perfect and glorified humanity abruptly connected, without the introduction of an intermediate creation of responsible imperfection, with that of the dying irresponsible brute. That scene of things in which God became Man, and suffered, seems, as it no doubt is, a necessary link in the chain.

I am aware that I stand on the confines of a mystery which man, since the first introduction of sin into the world till now, has “vainly aspired to comprehend.” But I have no new reading of the enigma to offer. I know not why it is that moral evil exists in the universe of the All-Wise and the All-Powerful; nor through what occult law of Deity it is that “perfection should come through suffering.” The question, like that satellite, ever attendant upon our planet, which presents both its sides to the sun, but invariably the same side to the earth, hides one of its faces from man, and turns it to but the Eye from which all light emanates. And it is in that God-ward phase of the question that the mystery dwells. We can map and measure every protuberance and hollow which roughens the nether disk of the moon, as, during the shades of night, it looks down upon our path to cheer and enlighten; but what can we know of the other? It would, however, seem, that even in this field of mystery the extent of the inexplicable and the unknown is capable of reduction, and that the human understanding is vested in an ability of progressing towards the central point of that dark field throughout all time, mayhap all eternity, as the asymptote progresses upon its curve. Even though the essence of the question should forever remain a mystery, it may yet in its reduced and defined state, serve as a key for the laying of other mysteries open. The philosophers are still as ignorant as ever respecting the intrinsic nature of gravitation; but regarded simply as a force, how many enigmas has it not served to unlock! And that moral gravitation towards evil, manifested by the only two classes of responsible beings of which there is aught known to man, and of which a degradation linked by mysterious analogy with a class of facts singularly prominent in geologic history is the result, occupies apparently a similar place, as a force, in the moral dynamics of the universe, and seems suited to perform a similar part. Inexplicable itself, it is yet a key to the solution of all the minor inexplicabilities in the scheme of Providence.

In a matter of such extreme niceness and difficulty, shall I dare venture on an illustrative example?

So far as both the geologic and the Scriptural evidence extends, no species or family of existences seems to have been introduced by creation into the present scene of being since the appearance of man. In Scripture the formation of the human race is described as the terminal act of a series, “good” in all its previous stages, but which became “very good” then; and geologists, judging from the modicum of evidence which they have hitherto succeeded in collecting on the subject,—evidence still meagre, but, so far as it goes, independent and distinct,—pronounce “post-Adamic creations” at least “improbable.” The naturalist finds certain animal and vegetable species restricted to certain circles, and that in certain foci in these circles they attain to their fullest development and their maximum number. And these foci he regards as the original centres of creation, whence, in each instance in the process of increase and multiplication, the plant or creature propagated itself outwards in circular wavelets of life, that sank at each stage as they widened till at length, at the circumference of the area, they wholly ceased. Now we find it argued by Professor Edward Forbes that “since man’s appearance, certain geological areas, both of land and water, have been formed, presenting such physical conditions as to entitle us to expect within their bounds one, or in some instances more than one, centre of creation, or point of maximum of a zoological or botanical province. But a critical examination renders evident,” the Professor adds, “that instead of showing distinct foci of creation, they have been in all instances peopled by colonization, i. e. by migration of species from pre-existing, and in every case pre-Adamic, provinces. Among the terrestrial areas the British isles may serve as an example; among marine, the Baltic, Mediterranean, and Black Seas. The British islands have been colonized from various centres of creation in (now) continental Europe; the Baltic Sea from the Celtic region, although it runs itself into the conditions of the Boreal one; and the Mediterranean, as it now appears, from the fauna and flora of the more ancient Lusitanian province.” Professor Forbes, it is stated further, in the report of his paper to which I owe these details,—a paper read at the Royal Institution in March last,—“exhibited, in support of the same view, a map, showing the relation which the centres of creation of the air-breathing molluscs in Europe bear to the geological history of the respective areas, and proving that the whole snail population of its northern and central extent (the portion of the Continent of newest and probably post-Adamic origin) had been derived from foci of creation seated in pre-Adamic lands. And these remarkable facts have induced the Professor,” it was added, “to maintain the improbability of post-Adamic creations.”

With the introduction of man into the scene of existence, creation, I repeat, seems to have ceased. What is it that now takes its place, and performs its work? During the previous dynasties, all elevation in the scale was an effect simply of creation. Nature lay dead in a waste theatre of rock, vapor, and sea, in which the insensate laws, chemical; mechanical, and electric, carried on their blind, unintelligent processes: the creative fiat went forth; and, amid waters that straightway teemed with life in its lower forms, vegetable and animal, the dynasty of the fish was introduced. Many ages passed, during which there took place no further elevation: on the contrary, in not a few of the newly introduced species of the reigning class there occurred for the first time examples of an asymmetrical misplacement of parts, and, in at least one family of fishes, instances of defect of parts: there was the manifestation of a downward tendency towards the degradation of monstrosity, when the elevatory fiat again went forth, and, through an act of creation, the dynasty of the reptile began. Again many ages passed by, marked, apparently, by the introduction of a warm-blooded oviparous animal, the bird, and of a few marsupial quadrupeds, but in which the prevailing class reigned undeposed, though at least unelevated. Yet again, however, the elevatory fiat went forth, and through an act of creation the dynasty of the mammiferous quadruped began. And after the further lapse of ages, the elevatory fiat went forth yet once more in an act of creation; and with the human, heaven-aspiring dynasty, the moral government of God, in its connection with at least the world which we inhabit, “took beginning.” And then creation ceased. Why? Simply because God’s moral government had begun,—because in necessary conformity with the institution of that government, there was to be a thorough identity maintained between the glorified and immortal beings of the terminal dynasty, and the dying magnates of the dynasty which now is; and because, in consequence of the maintenance of this identity as an essential condition of this moral government, mere acts of creation could no longer carry on the elevatory process. The work analogous in its end and object to those acts of creation which gave to our planet its successive dynasties of higher and yet higher existences, is the work of Redemption. It is the elevatory process of the present time,—the only possible provision for that final act of re-creation “to everlasting life,” which shall usher in the terminal dynasty.

I cannot avoid thinking that many of our theologians attach a too narrow meaning to the remarkable reason “annexed to the Fourth Commandment” by the Divine Lawgiver. “God rested on the seventh day,” says the text, “from all his work which He had created and made; and God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.” And such is the reason given in the Decalogue why man should also rest on the seventh day. God rested on the Sabbath, and sanctified it; and therefore man ought also to rest on the Sabbath, and keep it holy. But I know not where we shall find grounds for the belief that that Sabbath-day during which God rested was merely commensurate in its duration with one of the Sabbaths of short-lived man,—a brief period, measured by a single revolution of the earth on its axis. We have not, as has been shown, a shadow of evidence that He resumed his work of creation on the morrow: the geologist finds no trace of post-Adamic creation,—the theologian can tell us of none. God’s Sabbath of rest may still exist;—the work of Redemption may be the work of his Sabbath day. That elevatory process through successive acts of creation which engaged Him during myriads of ages, was of an ordinary week-day character; but in when the term of his moral government began, the elevatory process proper to it assumed the Divine character of the Sabbath. This special view appears to lend peculiar emphasis to the reason embodied in the commandment. The collation of the passage with the geologic record seems, as if by a species of re-translation, to make it enunciate as its injunction, “Keep this day, not merely as a day of memorial related to a past fact, but also as a day of coöperation with God in the work of elevation in relation both to a present fact and a future purpose. God keeps his Sabbath,” it says, “in order that He may save; keep yours also, in order that ye may be saved.” It serves, besides, to throw light on the prominence of the Sabbatical command, in a digest of law of which no part or tittle can pass away until the fulfilment of all things. During the present dynasty of probation and trial, that special work of both God and man on which the character of the future dynasty depends, is the Sabbath-day work of saving and being saved.[41]

It is in this dynasty of the future that man’s moral and intellectual faculties will receive their full development The expectation of any very great advance in the present scene of things—great, at least, when measured by man’s large capacity of conceiving of the good and fair—seems to be, like all human hope when restricted to time, an expectation doomed to disappointment. There are certain limits within which the race improves;—civilization is better than the want of it, and the taught superior to the untaught man. There is a change, too, effected in the moral nature, through that Spirit which, by working belief in the heart, brings its aspirations into harmony with the realities of the unseen world, that, in at least its relation to the future state, cannot be estimated too highly. But conception can travel very far beyond even its best effects in their merely secular bearing; nay, it is peculiarly its nature to show the men most truly the subjects of it, how miserably they fall short of the high standard of conduct and feeling which it erects, and to teach them, more emphatically than by words, that their degree of happiness must of necessity be as low as their moral attainments are humble. Further,—man, though he has been increasing in knowledge ever since his appearance on earth, has not been improving in faculty;—a shrewd fact, which they who expect most from the future of this world would do well to consider. The ancient masters of mind were in no respect inferior in calibre to their predecessors. We have not yet shot ahead of the old Greeks in either the perception of the beautiful, or in the ability of producing it; there has been no improvement in the inventive faculty since the Iliad was written, some three thousand years ago; nor has taste become more exquisite, or the perception of the harmony of numbers more nice, since the age of the Æneid. Science is cumulative in its character; and so its votaries in modern times stand on a higher pedestal than their predecessors. But though nature produced a Newton some two centuries ago, as she produced a Goliath of Gath at an earlier period, the modern philosophers, as a class, do not exceed in actual stature the worse informed ancients,—the Euclids, Archimedeses, and Aristotles. We would be without excuse if, with the Bacon, Milton, and Shakspeare of these latter ages of the world full before us, we recurred to the obsolete belief that the human race is deteriorating; but then, on the other hand, we have certain evidence, that since genius first began unconsciously to register in its works its own bulk and proportions, there has been no increase in the mass or improvement in the quality of individual mind. As for the dream that there is to be some extraordinary elevation of the general platform of the race achieved by means of education, it is simply the hallucination of the age,—the world’s present alchemical expedient for converting farthings into guineas, sheerly by dint of scouring. Not but that education is good; it exercises, and, in the ordinary mind, developes, faculty. But it will not anticipate the terminal dynasty. Yet further,— man’s average capacity of happiness seems to be as limited and as incapable of increase as his average reach of intellect: it is a mediocre capacity at best; nor is it greater by a shade now, in these days of power-looms and portable manures, than in the times of the old patriarchs. So long, too, as the law of increase continues, man must be subject to the law of death, with its stern attendants, suffering and sorrow; for the two laws go necessarily together; and so long as death reigns, human creatures, in even the best of times, will continue to quit this scene of being without professing much satisfaction at what they have found either in it or themselves. It will no doubt be a less miserable world than it is now, when the good come, as there is reason to hope they one day shall, to be a majority; but it will be felt to be an inferior sort of world even then, and be even fuller than now of wishes and longings for a better. Let it improve as it may, it will be a scene of probation and trial till the end. And so Faith, undeceived by the mirage of the midway desert, whatever form or name, political or religious, the phantasmagoria may bear, must continue to look beyond its unsolid and tremulous glitter,—its bare rocks exaggerated by the vapor into air-drawn castles, and its stunted bushes magnified into goodly trees,—and, fixing her gaze upon the re-creation yet future,—the terminal dynasty yet unbegun,—she must be content to enter upon her final rest—for she will not enter upon it earlier—“at return”

“Of Him, the Woman’s Seed,

Last in the clouds, from heaven to be revealed

In glory of the Father, to dissolve

Satan with his perverted world, then raise

From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,

New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date,

Founded in righteousness, and peace, and love,

To bring forth fruits,—joy and eternal bliss.”

But it may be judged that I am trespassing on a field into which I have no right to enter. Save, however, for its close proximity with that in which the geologist expatiates as properly his own, this little volume would never have been written. It is the fact that man must believingly coöperate with God in the work of preparation for the final dynasty, or exist throughout its never-ending cycles as a lost and degraded creature, that alone renders the development hypothesis formidable. But inculcating that the elevatory process is one of the natural law, not of moral endeavor,—by teaching, inferentially at least, that in the better state of things which is coming there is to be an identity of race with that of the existing dynasty, but no identity of individual consciousness,—that, on the contrary, the life after death which we are to inherit is to be merely a horrid life of wriggling impurities, originated in the putrefactive mucus,—and that thus the men who now live possess no real stake in the kingdom of the future,—it is its direct tendency, so far as its influence extends, to render the required coöperation with God an impossibility. For that coöperation cannot exist without belief as its basis. The hypothesis involves a misreading of the geologic record, which not merely affects its meaning in relation to the mind, and thus, in a question of science, substitutes error for truth, but which also threatens to affect the record itself, in relation to the destiny of every individual perverted and led astray. It threatens to write down among the degraded and the lost, men who, under the influence of an unshaken faith, might have risen at the dawn of the terminal period, to enjoy the fulness of eternity among the glorified and the good.