DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.
[Continued.]
"I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained,—namely, that each species has been independently created,—is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main, but not exclusive means of modification."
This is the kernel of the new theory, the Darwinian creed, as recited at the close of the introduction to the remarkable book under consideration. The questions, "What will he do with it?" and "How far will he carry it?" the author answers at the close of the volume: "I cannot doubt that the theory of descent with modification embraces all the members of the same class." Furthermore, "I believe that all animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number." Seeing that analogy as strongly suggests a further step in the same direction, while he protests that "analogy may be a deceitful guide," yet he follows its inexorable leading to the inference that "probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed."[a]
In the first extract we have the thin end of the wedge driven a little way; in the last, the wedge is driven home.
We have already (in the preceding number) sketched some of the reasons suggestive of such a theory of derivation of species,—reasons which give it plausibility, and even no small probability, as applied to our actual world and to changes occurring since the latest tertiary period. We are well pleased at this moment to find that the conclusions we were arriving at in this respect are sustained by the very high authority and impartial judgment of Pictet, the Swiss palaeontologist. In his review of Darwin's book,—much the fairest and most admirable opposing one that has yet appeared,—he freely accepts that ensemble of natural operations which Darwin impersonates under the now familiar name of Natural Selection, allows that the exposition throughout the first chapters seems "à la fois prudent et fort" and is disposed to accept the whole argument in its foundations, that is, so far as it relates to what is now going on, or has taken place in the present geological period,—which period he carries back through the diluvial epoch to the borders of the tertiary.[c] Pictet accordingly admits that the theory will very well account for the origination by divergence of nearly related species, whether within the present period or in remoter geological times: a very natural view for him to take; since he appears to have reached and published, several years ago, the pregnant conclusion, that there most probably was some material connection between the closely related species of two successive faunas, and that the numerous close species, whose limits are so difficult to determine, were not all created distinct and independent. But while accepting, or ready to accept, the basis of Darwin's theory, and all its legitimate direct inferences, he rejects the ultimate conclusions, brings some weighty arguments to bear against them, and is evidently convinced that he can draw a clear line between the sound inferences, which he favors, and the unsound or unwarranted theoretical deductions, which he rejects. We hope he can.
[Footnote a: P. 484, Engl. ed. In the new American edition, (Vide Supplement, pp. 431, 432,) the principal analogies which suggest the extreme view are referred to, and the remark is appended,—"But this inference is chiefly grounded on analogy, and it is immaterial whether or not it be accepted. The case is different with the members of each great class, as the Vertebrata or Articulata; for here we have in the laws of homology, embryology, etc., some distinct evidence that all have descended from a single primordial parent.">[
[Footnote b: In Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, Mars, 1860.]
[Footnote c: This we learn from his very interesting article, De la Question de l'Homme Fossile, in the same (March) number of the Bibliothèque Universelle.]
This raises the question, Why does Darwin press his theory to these extreme conclusions? Why do all hypotheses of derivation converge so inevitably to one ultimate point? Having already considered some of the reasons which suggest or support the theory at its outset,—which may carry it as far as such sound and experienced naturalists as Pictet allow that it may be true,—perhaps as far as Darwin himself unfolds it in the introductory proposition cited at the beginning of this article,—we may now inquire after the motives which impel the theorist so much farther. Here proofs, in the proper sense of the word, are not to be had. We are beyond the region of demonstration, and have duly probabilities to consider. What are these probabilities? What work will this hypothesis do to establish a claim to be adopted in its completeness? Why should a theory which may plausibly enough account for the diversification of the species of each special type or genus, be expanded into a general system for the origination or successive diversification of all species, and all special types or forms, from four or five remote primordial forms, or perhaps from one? We accept the theory of gravitation because it explains all the facts we know, and bears all the tests that we can put it to. We incline to accept the nebular hypothesis, for similar reasons; not because it is proved,—thus far it is wholly incapable of proof,—but because it is a natural theoretical deduction from accepted physical laws, is thoroughly congruous with the facts, and because its assumption serves to connect and harmonize these into one probable and consistent whole. Can the derivative hypothesis be maintained and carried out into a system on similar grounds? If so, however unproved, it would appear to be a tenable hypothesis, which is all that its author ought now to claim. Such hypotheses as from the conditions of the case can neither be proved nor disproved by direct evidence or experiment are to be tested only indirectly, and therefore imperfectly, by trying their power to harmonize the known facts, and to account for what is otherwise unaccountable. So the question comes to this:
What will an hypothesis of the derivation of species explain which the opposing view leaves unexplained?
Questions these which ought to be entertained before we take up the arguments which have been advanced against this theory. We can only glance at some of the considerations which Darwin adduces, or will be sure to adduce in the future and fuller exposition which is promised. To display them in such wise as to indoctrinate the unscientific reader would require a volume. Merely to refer to them in the most general terms would suffice for those familiar with scientific matters, but would scarcely enlighten those who are not. Wherefore let these trust the impartial Pictet, who freely admits, that, "in the absence of sufficient direct proofs to justify the possibility of his hypothesis, Mr. Darwin relies upon indirect proofs, the bearing of which is real and incontestable"; who concedes that "his theory accords very well with the great facts of comparative anatomy and zoölogy,—comes in admirably to explain unity of composition of organisms, also to explain rudimentary and representative organs, and the natural series of genera and species,—equally corresponds with many palaeontological data,—agrees well with the specific resemblances which exist between two successive faunas, with the parallelism which is sometimes observed between the series of palaeontological succession and of embryonal development," etc.; and finally, although he does not accept the theory in these results, he allows that "it appears to offer the best means of explaining the manner in which organized beings were produced in epochs anterior to our own."
What more than this could be said for such an hypothesis? Here, probably, is its charm, and its strong hold upon the speculative mind. Unproven though it be, and cumbered primâ facie with cumulative improbabilities as it proceeds, yet it singularly accords with great classes of facts otherwise insulated and enigmatic, and explains many things which are thus far utterly inexplicable upon any other scientific assumption.
We have said (p. 116) that Darwin's hypothesis is the natural complement to Lyell's uniformitarian theory in physical geology. It is for the organic world what that popular view is for the inorganic; and the accepters of the latter stand in a position from which to regard the former in the most favorable light. Wherefore the rumor that the cautious Lyell himself has adopted the Darwinian hypothesis need not surprise us. The two views are made for each other, and, like the two counterpart pictures for the stereoscope, when brought together, combine into one apparently solid whole.
If we allow, with Pictet, that Darwin's theory will very well serve for all that concerns the present epoch of the world's history,—an epoch which this renowned palaeontologist regards as including the diluvial or quaternary period,—then Darwin's first and foremost need in his onward course is a practicable road from this into and through the tertiary period, the intervening region between the comparatively near and the far remote past. Here Lyell's doctrine paves the way, by showing that in the physical geology there is no general or absolute break between the two, probably no greater between the latest tertiary and the quaternary period than between the latter and the present time. So far, the Lyellian view is, we suppose, generally concurred in. Now as to the organic world, it is largely admitted that numerous tertiary species have continued down into the quaternary, and many of them to the present time. A goodly percentage of the earlier and nearly half of the later tertiary mollusca, according to Des Hayes, Lyell, and, if we mistake not, Bronn, still live. This identification, however, is now questioned by a naturalist of the very highest authority. But, in its bearings on the new theory, the point here turns not upon absolute identity so much as upon close resemblance. For those who, with Agassiz, doubt the specific identity in any of these cases, and those who say, with Pictet, that "the later tertiary deposits contain in general the débris of species very nearly related to those which still exist, belonging to the same genera, but specifically different," may also agree with Pictet that the nearly related species of successive faunas must or may have had "a material connection." Now the only material connection that we have an idea of in such a case is a genealogical one. And the supposition of a genealogical connection is surely not unnatural in such cases,—is demonstrably the natural one as respects all those tertiary species which experienced naturalists have pronounced to be identical with existing ones, but which others now deem distinct. For to identify the two is the same thing as to conclude the one to be the ancestors of the other. No doubt there are differences between the tertiary and the present individuals, differences equally noted by both classes of naturalists, but differently estimated. By the one these are deemed quite compatible, by the other incompatible, with community of origin. But who can tell us what amount of difference is compatible with community of origin? This is the very question at issue, and one to be settled by observation alone. Who would have thought that the peach and the nectarine came from one stock? But, this being proved, is it now very improbable that both were derived from the almond, or from some common amygdaline progenitor? Who would have thought that the cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, and kohlrabi are derivatives of one species, and rape or colza, turnip, and probably rutabaga, of another species? And who that is convinced of this can long undoubtingly hold the original distinctness of turnips from cabbages as an article of faith? On scientific grounds may not a primordial cabbage or rape be assumed as the ancestor of all the cabbage races, on much the same ground that we assume a common ancestry for the diversified human races? If all our breeds of cattle came from one stock, why not this stock from the auroch, which has had all the time between the diluvial and the historic periods in which to set off a variation perhaps no greater than the difference between some sorts of cattle?
That considerable differences are often discernible between tertiary individuals and their supposed descendants of the present day affords no argument against Darwin's theory, as has been rashly thought, but is decidedly in its favor. If the identification were so perfect that no more differences were observable between the tertiary and the recent shells than between various individuals of either, then Darwin's opponents, who argue the immutability of species from the ibises and cats preserved by the ancient Egyptians being just like those of the present day, could triumphantly add a few hundred thousand years more to the length of the experiment and to the force of their argument. As the facts stand, it appears, that, while some tertiary forms are essentially undistinguishable from existing ones, others are the same with a difference, which is judged not to be specific or aboriginal, and yet others show somewhat greater differences, such as are scientifically expressed by calling them marked varieties, or else doubtful species; while others, differing a little more, are confidently termed distinct, but nearly related species. Now is not all this a question of degree, of mere gradation of difference? Is it at all likely that these several gradations came to be established in two totally different ways,—some of them (though naturalists can't agree which) through natural variation, or other secondary cause, and some by original creation, without secondary cause? We have seen that the judicious Pictet answers such questions as Darwin would have him do, in affirming, that, in all probability, the nearly related species of two successive faunas were materially connected, and that contemporaneous species, similarly resembling each other, were not all created so, but have become so. This is equivalent to saying that species (using the term as all naturalists do and must continue to employ the word) have only a relative, not an absolute fixity; that differences fully equivalent to what are held to be specific may arise in the course of time, so that one species may at length be naturally replaced by another species a good deal like it, or may be diversified through variation or otherwise into two, three, or more species, or forms as different as species. This concedes all that Darwin has a right to ask, all that he can directly infer from evidence. We must add that it affords a locus standi, more or less tenable, for inferring more.
Here another geological consideration comes in to help on this inference. The species of the later tertiary period for the most part not only resembled those of our days, many of them so closely as to suggest an absolute continuity, but, also occupied in general the same regions that their relatives occupy now. The same may be said, though less specially, of the earlier tertiary and of the later secondary; but there is less and less localization of forms as we recede, yet some localization even in palæozoic times. While in the secondary period one is struck with the similarity of forms and the identity of many of the species which flourished apparently at the same time in all or in the most widely separated parts of the world, in the tertiary epoch, on the contrary, along with the increasing specialization of climates and their approximation to the present state, we find abundant evidence of increasing localization of orders, genera, and species; and this localization strikingly accords with the present geographical distribution of the same groups of species. Where the imputed forefathers lived, their relatives and supposed descendants now flourish. All the actual classes of the animal and vegetable kingdoms were represented in the tertiary faunas and floras, and in nearly the same proportions and the same diversities as at present. The faunas of what is now Europe, Asia, America, and Australia differed from each other much as they now differ: in fact,—according to Adolphe Brongniart, whose statements we here condense,[a]—the inhabitants of these different regions appear for the most part to have acquired, before the close of the tertiary period, the characters which essentially distinguish their existing faunas. The eastern continent had then, as now, its great pachyderms, elephants, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus; South America its armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters; Australia a crowd of marsupials; and the very strange birds of New Zealand had predecessors of similar strangeness. Everywhere the same geographical distribution as now, with a difference in the particular area, as respects the northern portion of the continents, answering to a warmer climate then than ours, such as allowed species of hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and elephant to range even to the regions now inhabited by the reindeer and the musk-ox, and with the serious disturbing intervention of the glacial period within a comparatively recent time. Let it be noted, also, that those tertiary species which have continued with little change down to our days are the marine animals of the lower grades, especially mollusca. Their low organization, moderate sensibility, and the simple conditions of an existence in a medium like the ocean, not subject to great variation and incapable of sudden change, may well account for their continuance; while, on the other hand, the more intense, however gradual, climatic vicissitudes on land, which have driven all tropical and sub-tropical forms out of the higher latitudes and assigned to them their actual limits, would be almost sure to extinguish such huge and unwieldy animals as mastodons, mammoths, and the like, whose power of enduring altered circumstances must have been small.
[Footnote a: In Comptes Rendus, Acad. des Sciences, Févr. 2, 1857.]
This general replacement of the tertiary species of a country by others so much like them is a noteworthy fact. The hypothesis of the independent creation of all species, irrespective of their antecedents, leaves this fact just as mysterious as is creation itself; that of derivation undertakes to account for it. Whether it satisfactorily does so or not, it must be allowed that the facts well accord with that assumption.
The same may be said of another conclusion, namely, that the geological succession of animals and plants appears to correspond in a general way with their relative standing or rank in a natural system of classification. It seems clear, that, though no one of the grand types of the animal kingdom can be traced back farther than the rest, yet the lower classes long preceded the higher; that there has been on the whole a steady progression within each class and order; and that the highest plants and animals have appeared only in relatively modern times. It is only, however, in a broad sense that this generalization is now thought to hold good. It encounters many apparent exceptions and sundry real ones. So far as the rule holds, all is as it should be upon an hypothesis of derivation.
The rule has its exceptions. But, curiously enough, the most striking class of exceptions, if such they be, seems to us even more favorable to the doctrine of derivation than is the general rule of a pure and simple ascending gradation. We refer to what Agassiz calls prophetic and synthetic types; for which the former name may suffice, as the difference between the two is evanescent.
"It has been noticed," writes our great zoölogist, "that certain types, which are frequently prominent among the representatives of past ages, combine in their structure peculiarities which at later periods are only observed separately in different, distinct types. Sauroid fishes before reptiles, Pterodactyles before birds, Ichthyosauri before dolphins, etc. There are entire families, of nearly every class of animals, which in the state of their perfect development exemplify such prophetic relations…. The sauroid fishes of the past geological ages are an example of this kind. These fishes, which preceded the appearance of reptiles, present a combination of ichthyic and reptilian characters not to be found in the true members of this class, which form its bulk at present. The Pterodactyles, which preceded the class of birds, and the Ichthyosauri, which preceded the Cetaeca, are other examples of such prophetic types."[a]
[Footnote a: Agassiz, Contributions: Essay on Classification, p. 117, where, we may be permitted to note, the word "Crustacea" is by a typographical error printed in place of Cetacea.]
Now these reptile-like fishes, of which gar-pikes are the living representatives, though of earlier appearance, are admittedly of higher rank than common fishes. They dominated until reptiles appeared, when they mostly gave place to—or, as the derivationists will insist, were resolved by divergent variation and natural selection into—common fishes, destitute of reptilian characters, and saurian reptiles, the intermediate grades, which, according to a familiar piscine saying, are "neither fish, flesh, nor good red-herring," being eliminated and extinguished by natural consequence of the struggle for existence which Darwin so aptly portrays. And so, perhaps, of the other prophetic types. Here type and antitype correspond. If these are true prophecies, we need not wonder that some who read them in Agassiz's book will read their fulfilment in Darwin's.
Note also, in tins connection, that, along with a wonderful persistence of type, with change of species, genera, orders, etc., from formation to formation, no species and no higher group which has once unequivocally died out ever afterwards reappears. Why is this, but that the link of generation has been sundered? Why, on the hypothesis of independent originations, were not failing species re-created, either identically or with a difference, in regions eminently adapted to their well-being? To take a striking case. That no part of the world now offers more suitable conditions for wild horses and cattle than the Pampas and other plains of South America is shown by the facility with which they have there run wild and enormously multiplied, since introduced from the Old World not long ago. There was no wild American stock. Yet in the times of the Mastodon and Megatherium, at the dawn of the present period, wild horses and cattle—the former certainly very much like the existing horse—roamed over those plains in abundance. On the principle of original and direct created adaptation of species to climate and other conditions, why were these types not reproduced, when, after the colder intervening era, those regions became again eminently adapted to such animals? Why, but because, by their complete extinction in South America, the line of descent was here utterly broken? Upon the ordinary hypothesis, there is no scientific explanation possible of this series of facts, and of many others like them. Upon the new hypothesis, "the succession of the same types of structure within the same areas during the later geological periods ceases to be mysterious, and is simply explained by inheritance." Their cessation is failure of issue.
Along with these considerations the fact (alluded to on p. 114) should be remembered, that, as a general thing, related species of the present age are geographically associated. The larger part of the plants, and still more of the animals, of each separate country are peculiar to it; and, as most species now flourish over the graves of their by-gone relatives of former ages, so they now dwell among or accessibly near their kindred species.
Here also comes in that general "parallelism between the order of succession of animals and plants in geological times, and the gradation among their living representatives" from low to highly organized, from simple and general to complex and specialized forms; also "the parallelism between the order of succession of animals in geological times—and the changes their living representatives undergo during their embryological growth,"—as if the world were one prolonged gestation. Modern science has much insisted on this parallelism, and to a certain extent is allowed to have made it out. All these things, which conspire to prove that the ancient and the recent forms of life "are somehow intimately connected together in one grand system," equally conspire to suggest that the connection is one similar or analogous to generation. Surely no naturalist can be blamed for entering somewhat confidently upon a field of speculative inquiry which here opens so invitingly; nor need former premature endeavors and failures utterly dishearten him.
All these things, it may naturally be said, go to explain the order, not the mode, of the incoming of species. But they all do tend to bring out the generalization expressed by Mr. Wallace in the formula, that "every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with preëxisting closely allied species." Not, however, that this is proved even of existing species as a matter of general fact. It is obviously impossible to prove anything of the kind. But we must concede that the known facts strongly suggest such an inference. And since species are only congeries of individuals, and every individual came into existence in consequence of preëxisting individuals of the same sort, so leading up to the individuals with which the species began, and since the only material sequence we know of among plants and animals is that from parent to progeny, the presumption becomes exceedingly strong that the connection of the incoming with the preëxisting species is a genealogical one.
Here, however, all depends upon the probability that Mr. Wallace's inference is really true. Certainly it is not yet generally accepted; but a strong current is setting towards its acceptance.
So long as universal cataclysms were in vogue, and all life upon the earth was thought to have been suddenly destroyed and renewed many times in succession, such a view could not be thought of. So the equivalent view maintained by Agassiz, and formerly, we believe, by D'Orbigny, that, irrespectively of general and sudden catastrophes, or any known adequate physical cause, there has been a total depopulation at the close of each geological period or formation, say forty or fifty times, or more, followed by as many independent great acts of creation, at which alone have species been originated, and at each of which a vegetable and an animal kingdom were produced entire and complete, full-fledged, as flourishing, as wide-spread and populous, as varied and mutually adapted from the beginning as ever afterwards,—such a view, of course, supersedes all material connection between successive species, and removes even the association and geographical range of species entirely out of the domain of physical causes and of natural science. This is the extreme opposite of Wallace's and Darwin's view, and is quite as hypothetical. The nearly universal opinion, if we rightly gather it, manifestly is, that the replacement of the species of successive formations was not complete and simultaneous, but partial and successive; and that along the course of each epoch some species probably were introduced, and some, doubtless, became extinct. If all since the tertiary belongs to our present epoch, this is certainly true of it: if to two or more epochs, then the hypothesis of a total change is not true of them.
Geology makes huge demands upon time; and we regret to find that it has exhausted ours,—that what we meant for the briefest and most general sketch of some geological considerations in favor of Darwin's hypothesis has so extended as to leave no room for considering "the great facts of comparative anatomy and zoölogy" with which Darwin's theory "very well accords," nor for indicating how "it admirably serves for explaining the unity of composition of all organisms, the existence of representative and rudimentary organs, and the natural series which genera and species compose." Suffice it to say that these are the real strongholds of the new system on its theoretical side; that it goes far towards explaining both the physiological and the structural gradations and relations between the two kingdoms, and the arrangement of all their forms in groups subordinate to groups, all within a few great types; that it reads the riddle of abortive organs and of morphological conformity, of which no other theory has ever offered a scientific explanation, and supplies a ground for harmonizing the two fundamental ideas which naturalists and philosophers conceive to have ruled the organic world, though they could not reconcile them, namely: Adaptation to Purpose and the Conditions of Existence, and Unity of Type. To reconcile these two undeniable principles is a capital problem in the philosophy of natural history; and the hypothesis which consistently does so thereby secures a great advantage.
We all know that the arm and hand of a monkey, the foreleg and foot of a dog and of a horse, the wing of a bat, and the fin of a porpoise are fundamentally identical; that the long neck of the giraffe has the same and no more bones than the short one of the elephant; that the eggs of Surinam frogs hatch into tadpoles with as good tails for swimming as any of their kindred, although as tadpoles they never enter the water; that the Guinea-pig is furnished with incisor teeth which it never uses, as it sheds them before birth; that embryos of mammals and birds have branchial slits and arteries running in loops, in imitation or reminiscence of the arrangement which is permanent in fishes; and that thousands of animals and plants have rudimentary organs which, at least in numerous cases, are wholly useless to their possessors, etc., etc. Upon a derivative theory this morphological conformity is explained by community of descent; and it has not been explained in any other way.
Naturalists are constantly speaking of "related species," of the "affinity" of a genus or other group, and of "family resemblance,"—vaguely conscious that these terms of kinship are something more than mere metaphors, but unaware of the grounds of their aptness. Mr. Darwin assures them that they have been talking derivative doctrine all their lives without knowing it.
If it is difficult and in some cases practically impossible to fix the limits of species, it is still more so to fix those of genera; and those of tribes and families are still less susceptible of exact natural circumscription. Intermediate forms occur, connecting one group with another in a manner sadly perplexing to systematists, except to those who have ceased to expect absolute limitations in Nature. All this blending could hardly fail to suggest a former material connection among allied forms, such as that which an hypothesis of derivation demands.
Here it would not be amiss to consider the general principle of gradation throughout organic Nature,—a principle which answers in a general way to the law of continuity in the inorganic world, or rather is so analogous to it that both may fairly be expressed by the Leibnitzian axiom, Natura non agit saltatim. As an axiom or philosophical principle, used to test modal laws or hypotheses, this in strictness belongs only to physics. In the investigation of Nature at large, at least in the organic world, nobody would undertake to apply this principle as a test of the validity of any theory or supposed law. But naturalists of enlarged views will not fail to infer the principle from the phenomena they investigate,—to perceive that the rule holds, under due qualifications and altered forms, throughout the realm of Nature; although we do not suppose that Nature in the organic world makes no distinct steps, but only short and serial steps,—not infinitely fine gradations, but no long leaps, or few of them.
To glance at a few illustrations out of many that present themselves. It would be thought that the distinction between the two organic kingdoms was broad and absolute. Plants and animals belong to two very different categories, fulfil opposite offices, and, as to the mass of them, are so unlike that the difficulty of the ordinary observer would be to find points of comparison. Without entering into details, which would fill an article, we may safely say that the difficulty with the naturalist is all the other way,—that all these broad differences vanish one by one as we approach the lower confines of the two kingdoms, and that no absolute distinction whatever is now known between them. It is quite possible that the same organism may be both vegetable and animal, or may be first the one and then the other. If some organisms may be said to be at first vegetables and then animals, others, like the spores and other reproductive bodies of many of the lower Algae, may equally claim to have first a characteristically animal, and then an unequivocally vegetable existence. Nor is the gradation purely restricted to these simple organisms. It appears in general functions, as in that of reproduction, which is reducible to the same formula in both kingdoms, while it exhibits close approximations in the lower forms; also in a common or similar ground of sensibility in the lowest forms of both, a common faculty of effecting movements tending to a determinate end, traces of which pervade the vegetable kingdom,—while on the other hand, this indefinable principle, this vegetable animula vagula, blandula, graduates into the higher sensitiveness of the lower class of animals. Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fine gradations from simple sensitiveness and volition to the higher instinctive and other psychical manifestations of the higher brute animals. The gradation is undoubted, however we may explain it. Again, propagation is of one mode in the higher animals, of two in all plants; but vegetative propagation, by budding or offshoots, extends through the lower grades of animals. In both kingdoms there may be separation of the offshoots, or indifference in this respect, or continued and organic union with the parent stock; and this either with essential independence of the offshoots, or with a subordination of these to a common whole, or finally with such subordination and amalgamation, along with specialization of function, that the same parts, which in other cases can be regarded only as progeny, in these become only members of an individual.
This leads to the question of individuality, a subject quite too large and too recondite for present discussion. The conclusion of the whole matter, however, is, that individuality—that very ground of being as distinguished from thing—is not attained in Nature at one leap. If anywhere truly exemplified in plants, it is only in the lowest and simplest, where the being is a structural unit, a single cell, memberless and organless, though organic,—the same thing as those cells of which all the more complex plants are built up, and with which every plant and (structurally) every animal began its development. In the ascending gradation of the vegetable kingdom individuality is, so to say, striven after, but never attained; in the lower animals it is striven after with greater, though incomplete success; it is realized only in animals of so high a rank that vegetative multiplication or offshoots are out of the question, where all parts are strictly members and nothing else, and all subordinated to a common nervous centre,—fully realized, perhaps, only in a conscious person.
So, also, the broad distinction between reproduction by seeds or ova and propagation by buds, though perfect in some of the lowest forms of life, becomes evanescent in others; and even the most absolute law we know in the physiology of genuine reproduction, that of sexual co-operation, has its exceptions in both kingdoms in parthenogenesis, to which in the vegetable kingdom a most curious series of gradations leads. In plants, likewise, a long and most finely graduated series of transitions leads from bisexual to unisexual blossoms; and so in various other respects. Everywhere we may perceive that Nature secures her ends, and makes her distinctions on the whole manifest and real, but everywhere without abrupt breaks. We need not wonder, therefore, that gradations between species and varieties should occur; the more so, since genera, tribes, and other groups into which the naturalist collocates species are far from being always absolutely limited in Nature, though they are necessarily represented to be so in systems. From the necessity of the case, the classifications of the naturalist abruptly define where Nature more or less blends. Our systems are nothing, if not definite. They are intended to express differences, and perhaps some of the coarser gradations. But this evinces, not their perfection, but their imperfection. Even the best of them are to the system of Nature what consecutive patches of the seven colors are to the rainbow.
Now the principle of gradation throughout organic Nature may, of course, be interpreted upon other assumptions than those of Darwin's hypothesis,—certainly upon quite other than those of materialistic philosophy, with which we ourselves have no sympathy. Still we conceive it not only possible, but probable, that this gradation, as it has its natural ground, may yet have its scientific explanation. In any case, there is no need to deny that the general facts correspond well with an hypothesis like Darwin's, which is built upon fine gradations.
We have contemplated quite long enough the general presumptions in favor of an hypothesis of the derivation of species. We cannot forget, however, while for the moment we overlook, the formidable difficulties which all hypotheses of this class have to encounter, and the serious implications which they seem to involve. We feel, moreover, that Darwin's particular hypothesis is exposed to some special objections. It requires no small strength of nerve steadily to conceive not only of the variation, but of the formation of the organs of an animal through cumulative variation and natural selection. Think of such an organ as the eye, that most perfect of optical instruments, as so produced in the lower animals and perfected in the higher! A friend of ours, who accepts the new doctrine, confesses that for a long while a cold chill came over him whenever he thought of the eye. He has at length got over that stage of the complaint, and is now in the fever of belief, perchance to be succeeded by the sweating stage, during which sundry peccant humors may be eliminated from the system.
For ourselves, we dread the chill, and have some misgiving about the consequences of the reaction. We find ourselves in the "singular position" acknowledged by Pictet,—that is, confronted with a theory which, although it can really explain much, seems inadequate to the heavy task it so boldly assumes, but which, nevertheless, appears better fitted than any other that has been broached to explain, if it be possible to explain, somewhat of the manner in which organized beings may have arisen and succeeded each other. In this dilemma we might take advantage of Mr. Darwin's candid admission, that he by no means expects to convince old and experienced people, whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed during a long course of years from the old point of view. This is nearly our case. So, owning no call to a larger faith than is expected of us, but not prepared to pronounce the whole hypothesis untenable, under such construction as we should put upon it, we naturally sought to attain a settled conviction through a perusal of several proffered refutations of the theory. At least, this course seemed to offer the readiest way of bringing to a head the various objections to which the theory is exposed. On several accounts some of these opposed reviews specially invite examination. We propose, accordingly, to conclude our task with an article upon "Darwin and his Reviewers."
* * * * *
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Modern Painters. By J. RUSKIN. Vol. V. Smith, Elder, & Co. London.
The completion of a work of the importance of the "Modern Painters," which has occupied in its production the thought and a large portion of the labor of fourteen years, is an event of more interest than it often falls to the lot of a book to excite; but when, as in this case, the result shows the development of an individual taste and critical ability entirely without peer in the history of art-letters, the value of the whole work is immensely enhanced by the time which its publication covers.
The first volume of "Modern Painters" was, as everybody will remember, one of the sensation-books of the time, and fell upon the public opinion of the day like a thunderbolt from the clear sky. Denying, and in many instances overthrowing, the received canons of criticism, and defying all the accepted authorities in it, the author excited the liveliest astonishment and the bitterest hostility of the professional critics in general, and at once divided the world of art, so far as his influence reached, into two parts: the one embracing most of the reverent and conservative minds, and by far the larger; the other, most of the enthusiastic, the radical, and earnest; but this, small in numbers at first, was increased, and still increases, by the force of those qualities of enthusiasm and earnestness, until now, in England, it embraces nearly all of the true and living art of our time. But that volume, professedly treating art with reference to its superficial attributes and for a special purpose, the redemption of a great and revered artist from unjust disparagement and undeserved neglect, touched in scarcely the least degree the vital questions of taste or art-production. It had no considerations of sentiment or discussion of principles to offer: it dealt with facts, and touched the simple truths of Nature with an enthusiastic fire and lucidness which were proof positive of the knowledge and feeling of the author; and the public, either conversant with those facts or capable of being satisfied of them without much thought, abandoned itself to the fascination of his eloquence and acquiesced in his teachings, or arrayed itself in utter hostility to him and his new ideas.
The second volume was more abstruse and deeper in feeling, and comparatively few of Mr. Ruskin's followers through the first cared to get entangled in the metaphysical mazes of the second, and it is generally neglected, although containing some of the deepest and most satisfactory studies on the fundamental principles of art and taste which have ever been printed.
The third and fourth volumes, coming up again nearer the surface, made an application of the principles investigated to the material for art which Nature furnishes; and here again the author found in part his audience diminished among those who had at first been carried away by his enthusiasm or silenced and convinced by his unhesitating dogmatism. A partial reaction took place, owing not only to the change in the tone of the "Modern Painters," but to the springing up of a new school of painting, the consequence, mainly and legitimately, of the teachings of the work,—the pre-Raphaelite,—which, at once attacked virulently and immeasurably by the old school of critics, and defended as earnestly by Mr. Ruskin, became the subject of the war which was still waged between him and them. Turner in the meanwhile had passed away and was admitted to apotheosis, the malignant critics of yesterday becoming the ignorant adulators of to-day: his position was conceded, but the hostility to Ruskin was sustained with unabated bitterness on the new field. He was demolished anew, and proved, many useless times over and over, an ignorant pretender; the public in the meanwhile, even his opponents, taking up in turn his protégés, as he pointed them out to their notice. The effect of his criticisms in enhancing the value of the works they approved would be incredible, if one did not know how glad an English public is to be led. As a single instance,—a drawing which was sold from one of the water-color exhibitions at fifty guineas, sold again, after Ruskin's notice, at two hundred and fifty; and in the lists of pictures sold or to be sold at auction, one sees constantly, "Noticed by Mr. Ruskin," "Approved by Mr. Ruskin," appended to the title.
The third volume, being devoted to the correction of the ideas of Style and the Ideal, to Finish, and a review of the Past Landscape-Painting, recurs to Turner in its closing chapter, "On his Teachers"; the fourth was given to Mountain Beauty, following the parallel of the first, which treated of the Truth of Mountains, and bearing as its burden of moral the expression of that Ideal by Turner; and the fifth now comes to conclude the investigations on the Ideal by chapters: first, on "Leaf Beauty," an exceedingly interesting investigation of the development of the forms of trees and plants as concerned with the laws of beauty; second, "Cloud Beauty"; and then of the "Ideas of Relation," in which the author comes finally to the demonstration of the right of Turner to his position amongst the thinking and poetic painters.
From the first division, "Leaf Beauty," we must make one extract. The author has been speaking of the, influence of the Pine on Swiss character.
"But the point which I desire the reader to note is, that the character of the scene which, if any, appears to have been impressive to the inhabitant is not that which we ourselves feel when we enter the district. It was not from their lakes, nor their cliffs, nor their glaciers, though these were all peculiarly their possession, that the three venerable cantons or states received their name. They were not called the States of the Rock, nor the States of the Lake, but the States of the Forest. And the one of the three which contains the most touching record of the spiritual power of Swiss religion, in the name of the convent of the 'Hill of Angels,' has for its own none but the sweet, childish name of 'Under the Woods.'
"And, indeed, you may pass under them, if, leaving the most sacred spot in Swiss history, the Meadow of the Three Fountains, you bid the boatman row southward a little way by the Bay of Uri. Steepest there, on its western side, the walls of its rocks ascend to heaven. Far in the blue of evening, like a great cathedral-pavement, lies the lake in its darkness; and you may hear the whisper of innumerable falling waters return from the hollows of the cliff like the voices of a multitude praying under their breath. From time to time, the beat of a wave, slow lifted, where the rocks lean over the black depth, dies heavily as the last note of a requiem. Opposite, green with steep grass and set with châlet villages, the Tron Alp rises in one solemn glow of pastoral light and peace; and above, against the clouds of twilight, ghostly on the gray precipice, stand, myriad by myriad, the shadowy armies of the Unterwalden pine.
"I have seen that it is possible for the stranger to pass through this great chapel, with its font of waters, and mountain pillars, and vaults of cloud, without being touched by one noble thought or stirred by any sacred passion; but for those who received from its waves the baptism of their youth, and learned beneath its rocks the fidelity of their manhood, and watched amidst its clouds the likeness of the dream of life, with the eyes of age,—for these I will not believe that the mountain-shrine was built or the calm of its forest-shadows guarded by their God in vain."
But perhaps that conclusion of Ruskin's, in the new volume, which will most interest his earnest readers, is that the Venetian school is the only religious school that has ever existed. So much has Ruskin's development seemed to contradict itself, that one is scarcely surprised at one conclusion being apparently opposed to the former one; but a change so great as this, from Giotto, Perugino, and Cima, to Tintoret, Titian, and Veronese, as the religious ideals, will, indeed, amaze all who read it. Yet this is but the logical consequence of his progression hitherto. If he commenced with a belief that asceticism was religion, he would recognize Perugino and Giotto as the true religious artists; but if, as seems to be the case, he has learned at last that religion is a thing of daily life, mingling in all that we do, caring for body as well as soul, sense as well as spirit, and that a complete man must be a man who lives in every sense of the word, then the Venetians, as the painters of the truth of life in all its joy and sorrow, are the true painters, and the only ones whose art was inhabited by a religion worth following.
It is interesting to follow what are called Ruskin's contradictions and see how perfectly they represent the whole system of artistic truth, as seen from the different points of a young artist's or student's growth up to mature and ripened judgment; so that there is no stage of artistic development which has not some form of truth particularly adapted to it, in the "Modern Painters." If it be urged that the book should have been written only from the point of final development, it can only be said that no true book will ever he so written, for no man can ever be certain of his having attained final truth. "Modern Painters" has value in this very showing of the critical development, which to an intelligent student is greater than that a complete and infallible guide could have.
The chapter on Invention is full of the most delightful artistic truth, and shows completely, by copious illustrations, how well Turner deserved the rank Ruskin gives him amongst great composers. The analyses of the compositions of Turner are most curious and interesting, but, of course, depend on the accompanying plates. Some most valuable mental philosophy bearing on the production of art-works concludes Part VIII., which is devoted to "Invention Formal," of which we quote the concluding paragraphs:—
"Until the feelings can give strength enough to the will to enable it to conquer them, they are not strong enough. If you cannot leave your picture at any moment, cannot turn from it and go on with another while the color is drying, cannot work at any part of it you choose with equal contentment, you have not firm enough grasp of it.
"It follows, also, that no vain or selfish person can possibly paint, in the noble sense of the word. Vanity and selfishness are troublous, eager, anxious, petulant: painting can only be done in calm of mind. Resolution is not enough to secure this; it must be secured by disposition as well. You may resolve to think of your picture only; but, if you have been fretted before beginning, no manly or clear grasp of it will be possible for you. No forced calm is calm enough: only honest calm, natural calm. You might as well try by external pressure to smooth a lake till it could reflect the sky, as by violence of effort to secure the peace through which only you can reach imagination. That peace must come in its own time, as the waters settle themselves into clearness as well as quietness: you can no more filter your mind into purity than you can compress it into calmness; you must keep it pure, if you would have it pure; and throw no stones into it, if you would have it quiet. Great courage and self-command may to a certain extent give power of painting without the true calmness underneath, but never of doing first-rate work. There is sufficient evidence of this in even what we know of great men, though of the greatest we nearly always know the least (and that necessarily; they being very silent, and not much given to setting themselves forth to questioners,—apt to be contemptuously reserved no less than unselfishly). But in such writings and sayings as we possess of theirs we may trace a quite curious gentleness and serene courtesy. Rubens's letters are almost ludicrous in their unhurried politeness. Reynolds, swiftest of painters, was gentlest of companions; so also Velasquez, Titian, and Veronese.
"It is gratuitous to add that no shallow or petty person can paint. Mere cleverness or special gift never made an artist. It is only perfectness of mind, unity, depth, decision, the highest qualities, in fine, of the intellect, which will form the imagination.
"And, lastly, no false person can paint. A person false at heart may, when it suits his purposes, seize a stray truth here or there; but the relations of truth, its perfectness, that which makes it wholesome truth, he can never perceive. As wholeness and wholesomeness go together, so also sight with sincerity; it is only the constant desire of and submissiveness to truth, which can measure its strange angles and mark its infinite aspects, and fit them and knit them into sacred invention.
"Sacred I call it deliberately; for it is thus in the most accurate senses, humble as well as helpful,—meek in its receiving as magnificent in its disposing; the name it bears being rightly given even to invention formal, not because it forms, but because it finds. For you cannot find a lie; you must make it for yourself. False things may be imagined, and false things composed; but only truth can be invented."
One of those cardinal doctrines by which we may learn the bearings of a writer's system of truth is that of Ruskin's of the intimate connection between landscape art and humanity.
"Fragrant tissue of flowers, golden circlet of clouds, are only fair when they meet the fondness of human thoughts and glorify human visions of heaven.
"It is the leaning on this truth which more than any other has been the distinctive character of all my own past work. And in closing a series of art-studies, prolonged during so many years, it may be perhaps permitted me to point out this specialty,—the rather that it has been, of all their characters, the one most denied. I constantly see that the same thing takes place in the estimation formed by the modern public of the work of almost any true person, living or dead. It is not needful to state here the causes of such error; but the fact is indeed so, that precisely the distinctive root and leading force of any true man's work and way are the things denied him.
"And in these books of mine, their distinctive character, as essays on art, is their bringing everything to a root in human passion or human hope. Arising first not in any desire to explain the principles of art, but in the endeavor to defend an individual painter from injustice, they have been colored throughout, nay, continually altered in shape, and even warped and broken, by digressions respecting social questions, which had for me an interest tenfold greater than the work I had been forced into undertaking. Every principle of painting which I have stated is traced to some vital or spiritual fact; and in my works on architecture the preference accorded finally to one school over another is founded on a comparison of their influences on the life of the workman,—a question by all other writers on the subject of architecture wholly forgotten or despised.
"The essential connection of the power of landscape with human emotion is not less certain because in many impressive pictures the link is slight or local. That the connection should exist at a single point is all that we need…. That difference, and more, exists between the power of Nature through which humanity is seen, and her power in the desert. Desert,—whether of leaf or sand,—true desertness, is not in the want of leaves, but of life. Where humanity is not and was not, the best natural beauty is more than vain. It is even terrible; not as the dress cast aside from the body, but as an embroidered shroud hiding a skeleton."
The volume, as a whole, will be found less dogmatic, calmer, more convincing, and more directly applicable to artistic judgment, than any of the others. There is the same love of mysticism and undermeanings, but freighted with deeper and more central truths: a charming conclusion to a fourteen-years' diary of such study of Art and Nature, so severe, so unremitting, as never critic gave before.
Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb. By W.W. GOODWIN, Ph.D. Cambridge: Sever and Francis.
Grammarians had once a simple way of disposing of the subject on which Professor Goodwin has given us this elaborate treatise of three hundred pages.
In the Greek Grammar of the Messieurs de Port Royal, which Gibbon praises so highly in his charming autobiography, and which has passed through several editions in England within the present century, we are taught, that, "though the moods [in Greek] are not to be rejected entirely, yet their signification is sometimes so very arbitrary, that they are put for one another through all tenses." Lancelot himself seems to have had a glimmering of the essential incredibility of this statement; for, though he attempts to substantiate it by citing from Greek authors a number of passages in which the Greek idiom happens to differ from the Latin,—passages, however, which Mr. Goodwin would have been glad to use, had they fallen in his way, to illustrate the regular constructions of the language,—he feels it necessary to appeal to the authority of the learned Budæus, the greatest of the early Greek scholars. Strange as it seems that really accomplished Greek scholars should have charged Plato and Demosthenes, speaking the most perfect of tongues, with arbitrary interchanges of moods and tenses, yet the same views continued to be presented in grammatical works down to the close of the last century. The transition to the new school of grammarians was made in 1792, by the publication of a Greek Grammar by Philip Buttmann, which, in the greatly improved form which it afterwards received from his hands, is familiar to all Greek scholars. In our frequent boasts of the great strides that knowledge has taken in the present century, we commonly have in mind the physical sciences; but we doubt whether in any department of physical science the manuals in use seventy-five years ago are so utterly inferior to those of the present day as are, for instance, the remarks of Viger, and his commentators before Hermann, on the syntax of the Greek verb, to the philosophical treatment of the same points by Professor Goodwin.
This work is entitled, we think, to rank with the best grammars of the Greek language that have appeared in German or English, in all the points that constitute grammatical excellence; while its monographic character justified and required an exhaustive treatment of its particular topic, not to be found even in the huge grammars of Matthiæ and Kühner. Indeed, not the least of its merits is this, that, in addition to the excellent matter which is original with Professor Goodwin, it furnishes to the student, American or English,—for we hope to see its merits recognized on the other side of the Atlantic,—a digest, as it were, of all that is most valuable on the subject of the syntax of the Greek verb in the best German grammars, from Buttmann to Madvig, enhanced, too, in value by being recast and worked into a homogeneous system by an acute scholar and experienced teacher. One excellence of the book we would by no means pass over, an excellence which we are sure will be particularly appreciated by all who have used translations of German grammars,—the precision both of thought and expression by which it is characterized, which releases the student from the labor of constructing the meaning of a rule from the data of the appended examples. Not that Mr. Goodwin is chary of examples; on the contrary, one of the most attractive and not least profitable features of the book is the copiousness and freshness of the illustrative quotations from Greek authors. These are as welcome as the brightness of newly minted coin to the eye which, in consulting grammar after grammar, has been condemned to meet under corresponding rules always the same examples, till they begin to produce that effect upon the nerves which all have experienced at the mention of the deadly upas-tree, or the imminence of the dissolution of the Union.
We must not omit to speak of the typographical merit of the work,—and especially of what constitutes the first and the last merit of books of this class, the excellent table of contents, and the indexes, Greek and English, which leave nothing to be desired in the way of facility of reference, except, perhaps, an index to the quotations.
The Law of the Territories. Philadelphia: C. Sherman & Son.
The author of the two able essays contained in this volume will be remembered by many of our readers under his assumed name of "Cecil." The second, as he himself tells us, on "Popular Sovereignty in the Territories," was published, as one of a series of essays on Southern politics, in the Philadelphia North American and United States Gazette. The first, we believe, has never been published before.
Our author, whom we may designate, without violating any confidence, as Mr. George Sidney Fisher, devotes an elaborate preface, which is itself a third essay, to discussing the invasion of Virginia by John Brown and the Southern threats of secession, drawing from the foray of Harper's Ferry a conclusion very different from that of the disunionists. In his own words,—
"Disunion is a word of fear. Is it not strange that it should have been as yet pronounced only by the South? The danger of insurrection and servile war belongs to the nature of slavery. It is, perhaps, not too much to assert that the safety and tranquillity of Southern society depend on the fact that the Northern people are close at hand to aid in case of need,—that the power of the General Government is ever ready for the same purpose. Four millions of barbarians, growing with tropical vigor, and soon to be eight millions, with tropical passions boiling in their blood, endowed with native courage, with sinews strong by toil, and stimulated by the hope of liberty and unbounded license, are not to be trifled with. Take away from them the idea of an irresistible power in the North, ready at any moment to be invoked by their masters, or let them expect in the North, not enemies, but friends and supporters, which even now they are told every day by these masters they may expect,—and how soon might a flame be lighted which no power in the South could extinguish!"
Mr. Fisher treats of the "Law of the Territories" in two essays,—the first considering more particularly "The Territories and the Constitution," the second, "Popular Sovereignty in the Territories." The first commences with a quotation so happy that it has all the effect of original wit:—
"The wily and witty Talleyrand was once asked the meaning of the word 'non-intervention,' so often used in European diplomacy. 'It is a word,' he replied, 'metaphysical and political, not accurately defined, but which means—much the same thing as intervention!' The same word has been frequently employed, of late years, in our politics, with the same difference between its professed and its practical signification. It was introduced for the first time in reference to the government of the Territories, when it became an object for the South to gain Kansas as a Slave State. Two obstacles were to be overcome. One was the Missouri Compromise, which was a solemn compact between North and South to settle a disturbing and dangerous question; the other was a possible majority in Congress, that, it was feared, might prohibit slavery in the new Territory. Southern politicians had at the time control of the government; and they got rid of both difficulties by repealing the Missouri Compromise in the Kansas and Nebraska Bill. By necessary implication, arising from the relation of the Territories to the rest of the nation, by the language of the Constitution, and by the uniform construction of it and practice under it from the earliest period of our history, the Territories had been subjected to the absolute control of the General Government. By the Kansas and Nebraska Bill they were withdrawn from that control. The principle of Popular Sovereignty, it was said, applied to them as well as to the States; and this bill declared that the people of the Territories should be perfectly free to choose their own domestic institutions and regulate their own affairs in their own way."
The means employed to carry out this plan and the ultimate failure of the plan itself are sketched with a boldness and vigor that our limits, much to our regret, forbid our reproducing. Mr. Fisher, however, fails to notice the wretched plea put forth by the Democratic managers, in favor of the recognition by Congress of the Lecompton Constitution,—that it had been officially authenticated. All might be wrong, but the official record pronounced it right; and behind that record Congress had no authority to go. And this plea was advanced in the face of overwhelming evidence tending to show that the officials, for whose record so inviolable a sanctity was claimed, were appointed for the express purpose of falsifying that record! If confirmation be wanted, we need go no farther than the fate of Robert J. Walker, who was eager to make Kansas a Slave State, but was so false to every principle of Democratic integrity as to confine himself to legitimate means to bring about that result,—a remissness for which he was promptly removed by President Buchanan! Mr. Fisher pertinently says,—
"Two great facts were plainly visible through the flimsy web of attorney logic and quibbling technicality, not very ingeniously woven to conceal them. One of these facts was, that the people of Kansas were heartily and almost unanimously averse to slavery; the other was, that the Government was trying by every means in its power to impose slavery upon them."
After describing the contemptuous rejection by the people of Kansas of the pro-slavery constitution, Mr. Fisher proceeds with an analysis of the Kansas-Nebraska fraud, so clear and so masterly that we must again quote his own language, with an occasional condensation or omission.
"It was clear, therefore, that the principle of Popular Sovereignty, introduced by the Kansas and Nebraska Bill, a principle before unknown to the law and practice of our government, would not suit the South. It appeared too probable that not only the people to inhabit all the territory north of 36° 30', but also much territory south of it, would, like the people of Kansas, reject slavery, if left to regulate their domestic institutions in their own way. What, then, were Southern politicians to do? Invoke the ancient and long exercised, but now denied and derided power of Congress over the Territories? This might prove a dangerous weapon in the hands of possible future Northern majorities. It was obviously necessary to withdraw slavery alike from the control of Congress and of the people of a Territory. Some ingenuity was required for this. The doctrine that the Constitution extends to the Territories (a doctrine broached before by Mr. Calhoun, but always defeated on the ground that the Constitution, by its language and the practice under it, was made for States only, and that the Territories were subject to the supreme control of Congress,—a control frequently exercised, not only independently of the Constitution, but in a manner incompatible with it) was introduced, with other innovations, into the Kansas and Nebraska Bill. The Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court followed, by which the Constitution recognizes slavery as a national institution. It recognizes slaves as mere property, differing in no respect from other merchandise. The Territories belong to the nation. Every citizen has equal rights to them and in them. Why, therefore, may not a Southern man, as well as a Northern man, go into them with his property? What right has Congress to place the South under an ignominious bar of restriction? The Constitution declares that slaves are property; that all the States and the people have equal rights. The Territories belong to all. Therefore, under the Constitution, they should be enjoyed by all.
"By this ingenious logic the Kansas and Nebraska Bill is made to contradict itself. It first declares that the Constitution extends to the Territories; in other words, slavery exists there by force of the Constitution, without reference to the will of the people. It then says that the people of the Territories shall be 'perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way.'
"The contradictions, duplicity, and absurdity of the law are obvious at once. The first sentence announces a change in the settled principles and policy of the Government; else why declare that the Constitution 'shall' extend to Nebraska, if it already extended there? Then comes the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The reason given for this is, that it is inconsistent with the non-intervention by Congress with slavery, recognized in the Compromise of 1850. But that law declares positively that Congress does not intervene, because it is 'inexpedient' to do so; and gives the reason why it is inexpedient. The power of Congress was asserted by Mr. Clay, who made the law, and the terms of it were chosen for the very purpose of preventing any inference being drawn from it against that power.
"It is remarkable, too, that the Bill, whilst declaring the perfect freedom of the Territories, should still have left them subject to the power of the President, who, as before, is permitted to appoint their Governor, Judges, and Marshals, officers who are his agents, and without whose sanction the acts of the Territorial Legislature can neither become laws, nor be construed and applied, nor executed. So that the will of the people may be defeated, should it happen to be opposed to the will of the President: as was seen in the case of Kansas.
"Why," Mr. Fisher asks, "is the anomalous monster of Popular Sovereignty to be introduced with reference to slavery? Is it because slaves are 'mere property'? Why, then, not subject all property, land included, to popular control? Is it because the subject of slavery is an exciting topic, a theme for dangerous agitation, to be checked only by placing the subject beyond the power of Congress? The answer is, that Congress cannot abdicate its power on the ground of expediency. If it may give up one power, it may give up all. Nor can Congress delegate its power for the same reason. Trust power, from its very nature, cannot be delegated. To break down great principles, to set aside ancient usage, to abandon legal authority, in order to appease the contests of parties, is too great a sacrifice. No true peace can come of it; only suppressed and adjourned war."
The natural inference from the extracts we have given would be that Mr. Fisher was a member of the Republican party. But such is not the fact: Mr. Fisher rests his hope upon a party "yet to be organized." "The extreme Northern, or Free-soil, or Abolition party is only less guilty than the extreme Southern and Democratic party." Which? Does Mr. Fisher mean that "Northern," "Free-soil," and "Abolition" are synonymous terms? And does any or do all of them mean the Republican party? Or, finally, does Mr. Fisher shrink from the conclusions presented by his logic, and is his vaguely convenient linking together of different words intended to leave his position gracefully doubtful? And in that case, do the Baltimore nominations, with their innocent unconsciousness, supply his political needs? It is not easy to answer these questions. We begin now upon the views of a Pennsylvania Oppositionist; and quicksilver defied not more utterly the skill of Raymond Lullius than the doctrines of the Philadelphia school perplex the inquiries of sharply defined New England minds. The rudimentary state of Republican principles may nowhere else be so clearly seen as in Pennsylvania. Four years of the Democratic administration of her "favorite son" have done much to make her less favored sons into good Republicans; but the State needs another Democratic President. Mr. Fisher appears to much more advantage in pulling down than in building up. We have hitherto seen only the keen, fearless dissector of fraud and hypocrisy; we are now to contemplate a circumspect alarmist, who dreads to call things by their right names for fear of unpleasant consequences. He is such a master of English, so judicious in the use of middle terms,—so shrewd a fencer altogether,—that even his timidity cannot make him other than a formidable opponent.
Mr. Fisher, believing that slavery receives ample protection from a fair interpretation of the Constitution, holds that
"Congress has plenary power over the Territories, often exercised on this subject of slavery. It may be said that Congress has on various occasions prohibited slavery in the Territories. True; but with the consent and coöperation of the Southern States. The people of all the States have equal right in the Territories. To exclude the people of the Slave States, therefore, without their consent, would be unequal and opposed to the spirit of the Constitution."
Certainly it would. Who proposes to do it? No living man, woman, or child. It is worth noticing, by the way, that the Republican party is not committed to the doctrine of carrying out the principle of the Wilmot Proviso. But supposing it were, Mr. Fisher's argument has no force or direction, unless he can establish his suppressed premise,—that the exclusion of slavery from the Territories is the exclusion of "the people of the Slave States" from the Territories. And to make that good, all Mr. Fisher's skill and ingenuity will be required. Why so many Northern politicians should have weakly surrendered this point is a mystery. Because the slaveholders (who are not, Mr. Fisher, "the people of the Slave States," by any means, but a small portion of them) are at home a privileged aristocracy, have they any claim to the same position abroad? If so, on what does it rest? The laws of the Southern States? They are now beyond their jurisdiction. The common law? To that wise and beneficent law slavery is a thing unknown. The Constitution? It is silent. There is no exclusion of the Southerners even proposed. Let them come: but when they claim to carry with them the right to hold a certain class of men as property because they are recognized as property by certain local regulations elsewhere prevailing, they must not complain, if such a claim be disallowed. The Southerner's complaint, that he is accustomed to the institution of slavery, is fairly met by the Northerner's retort, that he is accustomed to the institution of freedom.
Now, which voice shall prevail? Neither party has any more right than the other; and neither party has any right at all. The Territories are in a state of wardship; and Congress is to decide as it thinks best for their welfare, present and future; and if Congress thinks that a nation prospers with free institutions and droops under slavery, then let Congress admit the Territory as a Free State. True, there is some inconvenience to the slave-holder; but from so abnormal a relation as slavery some inconvenience must result. When admitted to be a necessary evil, it is barely tolerable; when boastingly proclaimed to be a sovereign good, it is fairly intolerable. And it is both criminal and foolish to try to make good all the evils inseparable from slavery by systematic injustice to other interests.
"Slavery has changed. When Southern men consented to its prohibition, they hoped and believed that the time would come when it could be abolished altogether. They have as much right to these as to their former opinions, and to have them represented in the Government."
Here Mr. Fisher hints at, rather than fully states, the grand retort of the Southerners,—"Our fathers, you say, were opposed to slavery: very good; but we are not: why should we be bound by their opinions?" A mere misapprehension of the force of the argument. The Southerner of 1860 is not bound by the opinions of Madison and Jefferson; but the North may fairly adduce the opinions of those men, who were framers of the Constitution, not as binding upon their descendants, but as serving to explain the meaning of disputed provisions in that Constitution. The Constitution binds us all, North and South: then recurs the question, What is the meaning of its provisions? and then the contemporaneous opinions of its framers come legitimately into play as an argument.
Of the Missouri Compromise Mr. Fisher says,—
"It may be said that this law was a violation of the equal rights of the Southern people, by excluding them from a large portion of the national domain. The answer is, not merely that this was done with their consent, their representatives having approved the law, but that the law did recognize their rights, by dividing between them and the Northern people all the territory then possessed by the Government."
We are surprised that upon his own presentation of the case this simple question does not occur to Mr. Fisher: Supposing the South and the North to have had equal and conflicting rights in the national domain, and supposing that there was need of some arbiter, and remembering that Congress undertook the duties of arbiter and decided that the division under the Missouri Compromise gave each section its rightful share,—then, with what propriety can the South, after occupying its own share, call for a portion in the share allotted to the North?
The second essay, on "Popular Sovereignty in the Territories," presents comparatively few salient points. A very spirited and just history of the working of the Administration schemes in Kansas, a restating of some of the arguments against the Kansas-Nebraska Act set forth in the preceding essay, and a remonstrance against the headstrong course of Southern politicians are its most noticeable features.
"The Union, the Constitution, and the friendship of the North: these are the pillars on which rest the peace, the safety, the independence of the South. The extraordinary thing is, that for some years past the South has been, and now is, sedulously employed in undermining this triple foundation of its power and safety. Its extravagant pretensions, its excesses, its crimes, are rapidly cooling the friendship of the North,—converting it, indeed, into positive enmity. Its leading politicians are ever plotting and threatening disunion. disunion will he proffered to them from the North, not as a vague and passionate threat, but as a positive and well-considered plan, backed by a force of public opinion which nothing can resist. Ere long, the South is likely to be left with no other defence than the Union it has weakened and the Constitution it has mutilated and defaced.
"The makers of the Kansas and Nebraska law were clumsy workmen. They forgot to provide for the case of an anti-slavery President. They will, perhaps, learn wisdom by experience.
"'To wilful men
The injuries that they themselves procure
Must be their schoolmasters.'
"Those who framed the Constitution and laid the foundation of this Union understood their business better. That Constitution was intended to protect the South, and has protected it. Southern politicians cannot improve it. For their own sakes they had better let it alone."
We have given enough to show that in discussing Mr. Fisher we are dealing with two different men. The field is now clear for the great political contest of 1860. Mr. Fisher may have allied himself before this with the Republicans, or may look to have his anticipations fulfilled by that third party who are as unconscious of wrong as powerless to rectify it, "the world-forgetting, by the world forgot." We wish him well through his troubles.
A Dictionary of English Etymology. By HENSLEIGH WEDGWOOD, M. A. Late Fellow of Chr. Coll. Cam. Vol. I. (A-D.) London: Trübner and Co., 60 Paternoster Row. 1859. pp. xxiv., 507.
There is nothing more dangerously fascinating than etymologies. To the uninitiated the victim seems to have eaten of "insane roots that take the reason prisoner"; while the illuminate too often looks upon the stems and flowers of language, the highest achievements of thought and poesy, as mere handles by which to pull up the grimy tubers that lie at the base of articulate expression, shapeless knobs of speech, sacred to him as the potato to the Irishman.
The sarcasms of Swift were not without justification; for crazier analogies than that between Andromache and Andrew Mackay have been gravely insisted on by persons who, like the author of "Amilec," believed that the true secret of philosophizing est celui de rêver heureusement. It is only within a few years that etymological investigations have been limited by anything; like scientific precision, or that profound study, patient thought, and severity of method have asserted in this, as in other departments of knowledge, their superiority to point-blank guessing and the bewitching generalization conjured out of a couple or so of assumed facts, which, even if they turn out to be singly true, are no more nearly related than Hecate and green cheese.
We do not object to that milder form of philology of which the works of Dean Trench offer the readiest and most pleasing example, and which confines itself to the mere study of words, to the changes of form and meaning they have undergone and the forgotten moral that lurks in them. But the interest of Dr. Trench and others like him sticks fast in words, it is almost wholly an aesthetic interest, and does not pretend to concern itself with the deeper problems of language, its origin, its comparative anatomy, its bearing upon the prehistoric condition of mankind and the relations of races, and its claim to a place among the natural sciences as an essential element in any attempt to reconstruct the broken and scattered annals of our planet. It would not be just to find fault with Dr. Trench's books for lacking a scientific treatment to which they make no pretension, but they may fairly be charged with smelling a little too much of the shop. There is a faint odor of the sermon-case about every page, and we learn to dread, sometimes to skip, the inevitable homily, as we do the moral at the end of an Æsopic fable. We enter our protest, not against Dr. Trench in particular, for his books have other and higher claims to our regard, but because we find that his example is catching, the more so as verbal morality is much cheaper than linguistic science. If there be anything which the study of words should teach, it is their value.
There are two theories as to the origin of language, which, for shortness, may be defined as the poetic and the matter-of-fact. The former (of which M. Ernest Renan is one of the most eloquent advocates) supposes a primitive race or races endowed with faculties of cognition and expression so perfect and so intimately responsive one to the other, that the name of a thing came into being coincidently with the perception of it. Verbal inflections and other grammatical forms came into use gradually to meet the necessities of social commerce between man and man, and were at some later epoch reduced to logical system by constructive minds. If we understand him rightly, while not excluding the influence of onomatopeia, (or physical imitation,) he would attach a far greater importance to metaphysical causes. He says admirably well, "La liaison du sens et du mot n'est jamais nécessaire, jamais arbitraire; toujours elle est motivée." His theory amounts to this: that the fresh perfection of the senses and the mental faculties made the primitive man a poet.
The other theory seeks the origin of language in certain imitative radicals out of which it has analogically and metaphorically developed itself. This system has at least the merits of clearness and simplicity, and of being to a certain extent capable of demonstration. Its limitation in this last respect will depend upon that mental constitution which divides men naturally into Platonists and Aristotelians. It has never before received so thorough an exposition or been tested by so wide a range of application as in Mr. Wedgwood's volume, nor could it well be more fortunate in its advocate. Mr. Wedgwood is thorough, scrupulous, and fair-minded.
It will be observed that neither theory brings any aid to the attempt of Professor Max Müller and others to demonstrate etymologically the original unity of the human race. Mr. Wedgwood leaves this question aside, as irrelevant to his purpose. M. Renan combats it at considerable length. The logical consequence of admitting either theory would be that the problem was simply indemonstrable.
At first sight, so imaginative a scheme as that of M. Renan is singularly alluring; for, even when qualified by the sentence we have quoted, we may attach such a meaning to the word motivée as to find in words the natural bodies of which the Platonic ideas are the soul and spirit. We find in it a correlative illustration of that notion not uncommon among primitive poets, and revived by the Cabalists, that whoever knew the Word of a thing was master of the thing itself, and an easy way of accounting for the innate fitness and necessity, the fore ordination, which stamps the phrases of real poets. If, on the other hand, we accept Mr. Wedgwood's system, we must consider speech, as the theologians of the Middle Ages assumed of matter, to be only potentiated with life and soul, and shall find the phenomenon of poetry as wonderful, if less mysterious, when we regard the fineness of organization requisite to a perception of the remote analogies of sense and thought, and the power, as of Solomon's seal, which can compel the unwilling genius back into the leaden void which language becomes when used as most men use it.
There is a large class of words which every body admits to be imitative of sounds,—such, for example, as bang, splash, crack,—and Mr. Wedgwood undertakes to show that their number and that of their derivative applications is much larger than is ordinarily supposed. He confines himself almost wholly to European languages, but not always to the particular class of etymologies which it is his main object to trace out. Some of his explanations of words, not based upon any real or assumed radical, but showing their gradual passage toward their present forms and meanings, are among the most valuable parts of the book. As striking proofs of this, we refer our readers to Mr. Wedgwood's treatment of the words abide, abie, allow, danger, and denizen. When he differs from other authorities, it is never inconsiderately or without examination. Now and then we think his derivations are far-fetched, when simpler ones were lying near his hand. He makes the Italian balcone come from the Persian båia khaneh, an upper chamber. An upper chamber over a gate in the Persian caravanserais is still called by that name, according to Rich. (p. 97.) Yet under the word balk we find, "A hayloft is provincially termed the balks, (Halliwell,) because situated among the rafters. Hence also, probably, the Ital. balco, or pulcoy a scaffold; a loftlike erection supported upon beams." As a balcone is not an upper chamber, nor a chamber over a gate, but is precisely "a loftlike erection supported upon beams," it seems more reasonable to suppose it an augmentative formed in the usual way from balco. Mr. Wedgwood's derivation of barbican from bala khaneh seems to us more happy. (Ducange refers the word to an Eastern source.) He would also derive the Fr. ébaucher from balk, though we have a correlative form, sbozzare, in Italian, (old Sp. esbozar, Port, esboyar, Diez,) with precisely the same meaning, and from a root bozzo, which is related to a very different class of words from balk. So bewitched is Mr. Wedgwood with this word balk, that he prefers to derive the Ital. valicam, varcare, from it rather than from the Latin varicare. We should think a deduction from the latter to the English walk altogether as probable. Mr. Wedgwood also inclines to seek the origin of acquaint in the Germ, kund, though we have all the intermediate steps between it and the Mid. Lat. adcognitare. Again, under daunt he says, "Probably not directly from Lat. domare, but from the Teutonic form damp, which is essentially the same word." It may be plain that the Fr. dompter (whence daunt) is not directly from domare, but not so plain, as it seems to us, that it is not directly from the frequentative form domitare.—"Decoy. Properly duck-coy, as pronounced by those who are familiar with the thing itself. 'Decoys, vulgarly duck-coys.'—Sketch of the Fens, in Gardener's Chron. 1849. Du. koye, cavea, septum, locus in quo greges stabulantur.—Kil. Kooi, konw, kevi, a cage; vogel-kooi, a bird-cage, decoy, apparatus for entrapping waterfowl. Prov. E. Coy, a decoy for ducks, a coop for lobsters.—Forby. The name was probably imported with the thing itself from Holland to the fens." (p. 447.) Duck-coy, we cannot help thinking, is an instance of a corruption like bag o' nails from bacchanals, for the sake of giving meaning to a word not understood. Decoys were and are used for other birds as well as ducks, and vogel-kooi in Dutch applies to all birds, (answering to our trap-cage,) the special apparatus for ducks being an eende-kooi. The French coi adverbialized by the prefix de, and meaning quietly, slyly, as a hunter who uses decoys must demean himself, would seem a more likely original.—Andiron Mr. Wedgwood derives from Flem. wend-ijser, turn-irons, because the spit rested upon them. But the original meaning seems to have no reference to the spit. The French landier is plainly a corruption of the Mid. Lat. anderia, by the absorption of the article (l'andier). This gives us an earlier form andier, and the augmentative andieron would be our word.—Baggage. We cannot think Mr. Wedgwood's derivation of this word from bague an improvement on that of Ducange from baga, area.—Coarse Mr. Wedgwood considers identical with course,—that is, of course, ordinary. He finds a confirmation of this in the old spelling. Old spelling is seldom a safe guide, though we wonder that the archaic form boorly did not seem to him a sufficient authority for the common derivation of burly. If coarse be not another form of gross, (Fr. gros, grosse,) then there is no connection between corn and granum, or horse and ross.—"Cullion. It. Coglione, a cullion, a fool, a scoundrel, properly a dupe. See Cully. It. cogionare, to deceive, to make a dupe of…. In the Venet. coglionare becomes cogionare, as vogia for voglia…. Hence E. to cozen, as It. fregio, frieze; cugino, cousin; prigione, prison." (p. 387.) Under cully, to which Mr. Wedgwood refers, he gives another etymology of coglione, and, we think, a wrong one. Coglionare is itself a derivative form from coglione, and the radical meaning is to be sought in cogliere, to gather, to take in, to pluck. Hence a coglione is a sharper, one who takes in, plucks. Cully and gull (one who is taken in) must be referred to the same source. Mr. Wedgwood's derivation of cozen is ingenious, and perhaps accounts for the doubtful Germ, kosen, unless that word itself be the original.—"To chaff, in vulgar language to rally one, to chatter or talk lightly. From a representation of the inarticulate sounds made by different kinds of animals uttering rapidly repeated cries. Du. keffen, to yap, to bark, also to prattle, chatter, tattle. Halma," etc. We think it demonstrable that chaff is only a variety of chafe, from Fr. écauffer, retaining the broader sound of the a from the older form chaufe. So gaby, which Mr. Wedgwood (p. 84) would connect with gäwisch, (Fr. gauche,) is derived immediately from O. Fr. gabé, (a laughing-stock, a butt,) the participial form of gaber, to make fun of, which would lead us to a very different root. (See the Fabliaux, passim.)—Cress. "Perhaps," says Mr. Wedgwood, (p. 398,) "from the crunching sound of eating the crisp, green herb." This is one of the instances in which he is lured from the plain path by the Nixy Onomatopoeia. The analogy between cress and grass flies in one's eyes; and, perhaps, the more probable derivation of the latter is from the root meaning to grow, rather than from that meaning to eat, unless, indeed, the two be originally identical. The A. S. forms coers and goers are almost identical. The Fr. cresson, from It. crescione, which Mr. Wedgwood cites, points in the direction of crescere; and the O. Fr. cressonage, implying a verb cressoner, means the right of grazing.—Under dock Mr. Wedgwood would seem (he does not make himself quite clear) to refer It. doccia to a root analogous with dyke and ditch. He cites Prov. doga, which he translates by bank. Raynouard has only "dogua, douve, creux, cavité," and refers to It. doga. The primary meaning seems rather the hollow than the bank, though this would matter little, as the same transference of meaning may have taken place as in dyke and ditch, But when Mr. Wedgwood gives mill-dam as the first meaning of the word doccia, his wish seems to have stood godfather. Diez establishes the derivation of doccia from ductus; and certainly the sense of a channel to lead (ducere) water in any desired direction is satisfactory. The derivative signification of doccia (a gouge, a tool to make channels with) coincides. Moreover, we have the masculine form doccio, answering exactly to the Sp. ducho in aguaducho, the o for u, as in doge for duce, from the same root ducere. Another instance of Mr. Wedgwood's preferring the bird in the bush is to be found in his refusing to consider dout, to extinguish, (do out,) as analogous to _don, doff, and dup. He would rather connect it with tödten, tuer. He cites as allied words Bohemian dusyti, to choke, to extinguish; Polish dusic, to choke, stifle, quell; and so arrives at the English slang phrase, "dowse the glim." As we find several other German words in thieves' English, we have little doubt that dowse is nothing more than thu' aus, do (thou) out, which would bring us back to our starting-point.
We have picked out a few instances in which we think Mr. Wedgwood demonstrably mistaken, because they show the temptation which is ever lying in wait to lead the theoretical etymologist astray. Mr. Wedgwood sometimes seems to reverse the natural order of things, and to reason backward from the simple to the more complex. He does not always respect the boundaries of legitimate deduction. On the other hand, his case becomes very strong where he finds relations of thought as well as of sound between whole classes of words in different languages. But it is very difficult to say how long ago instinctive imitation ceased and other elements are to be admitted as operative. We see words continually coming into vogue whose apparent etymologies, if all historical data of their origin were lost, would inevitably mislead. If we did not know, for example, the occasion which added the word chouse to the English language, we have little doubt that the twofold analogy of form and meaning would have led etymologists to the German kosen, (with the very common softening of the k to ch,) and that the derivation would have been perfectly satisfactory to most minds.—Tantrums would look like a word of popular coinage, and yet we find a respectable Old High German verb tantarôn, delirare, (Graff, V. 437,) which may perhaps help us to make out the etymology of dander, in our vulgar expression of "getting one's dander up," which is equivalent to flying into a passion.—Jog, in the sense of going, (to jog along,) has a vulgar look. Richardson derives it from the same root with the other jog, which means to shake, ("A. S. sceac-an, to shake, or shock, or shog.") Shog has nothing whatever to do with shaking, unless when Nym says to Pistol, "Will you shog off?" he may be said to have shaken him off. When the Tinker in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Coxcomb" says, "Come, prithee, let's shog off," what possible allusion to shaking is there, except, perhaps, to "shaking stumps"? The first jog and shog are identical in meaning and derivation, and may be traced, by whosoever chooses, to the Gothic tiuhan, (Germ, ziehen,) and are therefore near of kin to our tug. Togs and toggery belong here also. (The connecting link may be seen in the preterite form zog.) The other jog probably comes to us immediately from the French choquer; and its frequentative joggle answers to the German schutkeln, It. cioccolare. Whether they are all remotely from the same radical is another question. We only cited it as a monosyllabic word, having the air of being formed by the imitative process, while its original tiuhan makes quite another impression.—Had the word ramose been a word of English slang-origin, (and it might easily have been imported, like so many more foreign phrases, by sailors,) we have as little doubt that a derivation of it from the Spanish vamos would have failed to convince the majority of etymologists. This word is a good example of the way in which the people (and it is always the people, never the scholars, who succeed in adding to the spoken language) proceed in naturalizing a foreign term. The accent has gone over to the last syllable, in accordance with English usage in verbs of two syllables; and though the sharp sound of the s has been thus far retained, it is doubtful how long it will maintain itself against a fancied analogy with the grave sound of the same letter in such words as inclose and suppose.—We should incline to think the slang verb to mosey a mere variety of form, and that its derivation from a certain absconding Mr. Moses (who broke the law of his great namesake through a blind admiration of his example in spoiling the Egyptians) was only a new instance of that tendency to mythologize which is as strong as ever among the uneducated. Post, ergo propter, is good people's-logic; and if an antecedent be wanting, it will not be long before one is invented.
If we once admit the principle of onomatopoeia, the difficulty remains of drawing the line which shall define the territory within which those capable of judging would limit its operation. Its boundary would be a movable one, like that of our own Confederacy. Some students, from natural fineness of ear, would be quicker to recognize resemblances of sound; others would trace family likeness in spite of every disguise; others, whose exquisiteness of perception was mental, would find the scent in faint analogies of meaning, where the ordinary brain would be wholly at fault. In the original genesis of language, also, we should infer the influence of the same idiosyncrasies. We were struck with this the other day in a story we heard of a little boy, who, during a violent thunder-storm, asked his father what that was out there,—all the while winking rapidly to explain his meaning. Had his vocabulary been more complete, he would have asked what that winking out there was. The impression made upon him by the lightning was not the ordinary one of brightness, (as in blitz, (?) éclair, fulmen, flash,) but of the rapid alternations of light and dark. Had he been obliged to make a language for himself, like the two unfortunate children on whom King Psarnmetichus made his linguistic experiment, he would have christened the phenomenon accordingly.
Mr. Wedgwood has by no means carried out his theory fully even in reference to the words contained in his first volume, nor does the volume itself nearly exhaust the vocabulary of the letters it includes (A to D). Sometimes, where we should have expected him to apply his system, he refrains, whether from caution or oversight it is not easy to discover. The word cow, which is commonly referred to an imitative radical, he is provokingly reserved about; and under chew he hints at no relation between the name of the action and that of the capital ruminant animal.[a] Even where he has derived a word from an imitative radical, he sometimes fails to carry the process on to some other where it would seem equally applicable, sometimes pushes it too far. For instance, "Crag. 1. The neck, the throat.—Jam. Du. kraeghe, the throat; Pol. kark, the nape, crag, neck; Bohem. krk, the neck; Icel. krage, Dan. krave, the collar of a coat. The origin is an imitation of the noise made by clearing the throat. Bohem. krkati, to belch, krcati, to vomit; Pol. krzakaé, to hem, to hawk. The same root gives rise to the Fr. cracher, to spit, and It. recere, to vomit; E. reach, to strain in vomiting; Icel. hraki, spittle; A. S. hrara, cough, phlegm, the throat, jaws; G. rachen, the jaws." (As crag is not an English word, all this should have come under the head of craw.) "Crag. 2. A rock. Gael. creag, a rock; W. careg, a stone; caregos, pebbles." We do not see why the rattling sound of stones should not give them a claim to the same pedigree,—the name being afterwards transferred to the larger mass, the reverse of which we see in the popular rock for stone. Nay, as Mr. Wedgwood (sub voce draff, p. 482) assumes rac (more properly rk) as the root, it would answer equally well for rock also. Indeed, as the chief occupation of crags, and their only amusement, in mountainous regions, is to pelt unwary passengers and hunters of scenery with their débris, we might have creag, quasi caregos faciens sive dejiciens, sicut rupes a rumpere. Indeed, there is an analogous Sanscrit root, meaning break, crack. But though Mr. Wedgwood lets off this coughing, hawking, spitting, and otherwise unpleasant old patriarch Rac so easily in the case of the foundling Crag, he has by no means done with him. Stretched on the unfilial instrument of torture that bears his name, he is made to confess the paternity of draff, and dregs, and dross, and so many other uncleanly brats, that we feel as if he ought to be nailed by the ear to the other side of the same post on which Mr. Carlyle has pilloried August der starke forever. But we honestly believe the old fellow to be belied, and that he is as guiltless of them as of that weak-witted Hebrew Raca who looks so much like him in the face.
[Footnote a: An etymology of this kind would have been particularly interesting in the hands of so learned and acute a man as Mr. Wedgwood. It would have afforded him a capital example of the fact that considerable differences in the form and sound of words meaning the same thing prove nothing against the onomatopoeic theory, but merely that the same sound represents a different thing to different ears. L. Boare, mugire, E. moo; F. beugler, E. bellow; G. leuen, L. lugere, E. low, are all attempts at the same sound, or, which would not affect the question, variations of an original radical gô or gu. For a full discussion of the matter, admirable for its thorough learning, see Pictet, Les Origines Indo-Européennes, Vol. I. Section 86.]
In the case of crag, Mr. Wedgwood argues from a sound whose frequency and marked character (and colds must have been frequent when the fig-tree was the only draper) gave a name to the organ producing it. We can easily imagine it. One of these early pagans comes home of an evening, heated from the chase, and squats himself on the damp clay floor of a country-seat imperfectly guarded against draughts. The next morning he says to his helpmeet, "Mrs. Barbar, I have a dreadful cold in my—hrac! hrac!" Here he is interrupted by a violent fit of coughing, and resorts to semeiology by pointing to his throat. Similar incidents carrying apprehension (as Lord Macaulay would say) to the breezy interiors of a thousand shanties on the same fatal morning, the domestic circle would know no name so expressive as hrac for that fatal tube through which man, ingenious in illegitimate perversion, daily compels the innocent breath to discharge a plumbeous hail of rhetoric.
But seriously, we think Mr. Wedgwood's derivation of crag (or rather, that which he adopts, for it has had other advocates) a very probable one, at least for more northern tribes. There is no reason why men should have escaped the same law of nomenclature which gave names to the cuckoo and the pavo.[a] But when he approaches draff, he gets upon thinner ice. Where a metaphorical appropriateness is plainly wanting to one etymology and another as plainly supplies it, other considerations being equal, probability may fairly turn the scale in favor of the latter. Mr. Wedgwood is here dealing with a sound translated to another meaning by an intellectual process of analogy; and no one knows better than he—for his book shows everywhere the fair-mindedness of a thorough scholar—the extreme difficulty of convincing other minds in such matters. He seems to have been unconsciously influenced in this case by a desire to give more support to a very ingenious etymology of the word dream. His process of reasoning may be briefly stated thus: draff and dregs are refuse, they are things thrown away, sometimes (as in German dreck, sordes) they are even disgustful; and as there is no expression of contempt and disgust so strong as spitting, the sound rac transferred itself by a natural association of ideas from the act to the object of it. He cites Du. drabbe, Dan. drav, Ger. träbern, Icel. dregg, Prov. draco, Ger., Du. dreck, O. F. drache, drêche, (and he might have added E. trash,) E. dross, all with nearly the same meaning. We have selected such as would show the different forms of the word. To the same radical Mr. Wedgwood refers G. trüjen, betrügen, and this would carry with it our English trick (Prov. tric, in Diez, Fr. triche). In our opinion he is wrong, doubly wrong, inasmuch as we think he has confounded two widely different roots. He has taken his O. Fr. forms from Roquefort (Gloss. Rom. I. 411,) but has omitted one of his definitions, coque qui enveloope le grain, that is, the husk, or hull. Mr. Wedgwood might perhaps found an argument on this in support of our old friend Rac and his relation to huskiness; but it seems to us one of those trifles, the turned leaf, or broken twig, that put one on the right trail. We accept Mr. Wedgwood's derivative signification of refuse, worthless, contemptible, and ask if all these terms do not apply equally well to the chaff of the threshing-floor? It is more satisfactory to us, then, to attribute a part of the words given above to the Gothic dragan, (L. trahere, G. tragen,) to drag, to draw, and a part to Goth. thriskan, to thresh. The conjecture of Diez, (cited by Diefenbach,) that the Italian trescare (to stamp with the feet, to dance) should be referred to the same root, is confirmed by the ancient practice of threshing grain by treading it out with cattle. We might, indeed, refer all to one root, by deriving dross (a provincial form of which is drass) through the O. Fr. drache, (as in O. Fr. treche, Fr. tresse, E. tress,) but we have A. S. dresten, which is better accounted for by therscan. The other forms, such as drabbe, dregg, and dragan, the b and v being analogous to E. draggle, drabble, draught, draft, all equally from dragan. We have a suspicion that dragon is to be referred to the same root. Mr. Wedgwood follows Richardson, who follows Vossius in a fanciful etymology from the Greek [Greek: derkomai = blepein] to see. Sharpness of sight, it is true, was attributed to the mythologized reptile, but the primitive draco was nothing but a large serpent, supposed to be the boa. This sense must accordingly be comparatively modern. The eagle is the universal type of keenness of vision. The reptile's way of moving himself without legs is his most striking peculiarity; and if we derive dragon from the root meaning to drag, to draw, (because he draws himself along,) we find it analogous to serpent, reptile, snake. The relation between [Greek: trechein] and dragan may be seen in G. ziehen, meaning both to draw and to go. Mr. Wedgwood says that he finds it hard to conceive any relation between the notion of treachery, betrayal, (trügen, betrügen,) and that of drawing. It would seem that to draw into an ambush, the drawing of a fowler's net, and the more sublimated drawing a man on to his destruction, supplied analogies enough. The contempt we feel for treachery (for it is only in this metaphysical way that Mr. Wedgwood can connect the word with his radical rac[c]) is a purely subsidiary, derivative, and comparatively modern notion. Many, perhaps most, kinds of treachery were looked upon as praiseworthy in early times, and are still so regarded among savages. Does Mr. Wedgwood believe that Romulus lost caste by the way in which he made so many respectable Sabines fathers-in-law against their will, or that the wise Odysseus was a perfectly admirable gentleman in our sense of the word? Even in the sixteenth century, in the then most civilized country of the world, the grave irony with which Macchiavelli commends the frightful treacheries of Cæsar Borgia would have had no point, if he had not taken it for granted that almost all who read his treatise would suppose him to be in earnest. In the same way dregs is explained simply as the sediment left after drawing off liquids. Dredge also is certainly, in one of its meanings, a derivative of dragan; so, too, trick in whist, and perhaps trudge. Indeed, all the words above-cited are more like each other than Fr. toit and E. deck, both from one root, or the Neapol. sciù and the Lat. flos, from which it is corrupted.
[Footnote a: The German pfau retains the imitative sound which the English pea-cock has lost, and of which our system of pronunciation robs the Latin.]
[Footnote b: And to worm, (another word for dragon,) if, as has been conjectured, there be any radical affinity between that and schwärmen, whose primitive sense of crawl or creep is seen in the swarming of bees, and swarming up a tree.]
[Footnote c: That is, unless he takes the rag in dragan to be the same thing, which he might support with several plausible analogies, such as E. rake, It. recare, etc.]
But the same subtilty of mind, which sometimes seduces Mr. Wedgwood into making distinctions without a difference and preferring an impalpable relation of idea to a plain derivative affinity, is of great advantage to him when the problem is to construct an etymology by following the gossamer clews that lead from sensual images to the metaphorical and tropical adaptations of them to the demands of fancy and thought. The nice optics that see what is not to be seen have passed into a sarcastic proverb; yet those are precisely the eyes that are in the heads and brains of all who accomplish much, whether in science, poetry, or philosophy. With the kind of etymologies we are speaking of, it is practically useful to have the German gift of summoning a thing up from the depths of one's inward consciousness. It is when Mr. Wedgwood would reverse the order of Nature, and proceed from the tropical to the direct and simple, that we are at issue with him. For it is not philosophers who make language, though they often unmake it.
Mr. Wedgwood's most successful application of his system may be found, as we think, under the words, dim, dumb, deaf, and death. He might have confirmed the relation between dumbness and darkness from the acutest metaphysician among poets, in Dante's ove il sol tace. We have not left ourselves room enough to illustrate Mr. Wedgwood's handling of these etymologies by extracts; we must refer our readers to the book itself. Apart from its value as suggesting thought, or quickening our perception of shades of meaning, and so freshening our feeling of the intimate harmony of sense and spirit in language, and of the thousand ways in which the soul assumes the material world into her own heaven and transfigures it there, the volume will be found practically the most thorough contribution yet made to English etymology. We are glad to hear that we are to have an American edition of it under the able supervision of Mr. Marsh. Etymology becomes of practical importance, when, as the newspapers inform us, two members of a New York club have been fighting a duel because one of them doubted whether Garry Baldy were of Irish descent. Any student of language could have told them that Garibaldi is only the plural form (common in Italian family names) of Garibaldo, the Teutonic Heribald, whose meaning, appropriate enough in this case, would be nearly equivalent to Bold Leader.