At least, so it seemed to me, the first day that I went, awe struck, into the High Woods; and so it seemed to me, the last day that I came, even more awe-struck, out of them.
CHAPTER VIII: LA BREA
We were, of course, desirous to visit that famous Lake of Pitch, which our old nursery literature described as one of the ‘Wonders of the World.’ It is not that; it is merely a very odd, quaint, unexpected, and only half-explained phenomenon: but no wonder. That epithet should be kept for such matters as the growth of a crystal, the formation of a cell, the germination of a seed, the coming true of a plant, whether from a fruit or from a cutting: in a word, for any and all those hourly and momentary miracles which were attributed of old to some Vis Formatrix of nature; and are now attributed to some other abstract formula, as they will be to some fresh one, and to a dozen more, before the century is out; because the more accurately and deeply they are investigated, the more inexplicable they will be found.
So it is; but the ‘public’ are not inclined to believe that so it is, and will not see, till their minds get somewhat of a truly scientific training.
If any average educated person were asked—Which seemed to him more wonderful, that a hen’s egg should always produce a chicken, or that it should now and then produce a sparrow or a duckling?—can it be doubted what answer he would give? or that it would be the wrong answer? What answer, again, would he make to the question—Which is more wonderful, that dwarfs and giants (i.e. people under four feet six or over six feet six) should be exceedingly rare, or that the human race is not of all possible heights from three inches to thirty feet? Can it be doubted that in this case, as in the last, the wrong answer would be given? He would defend himself, probably, if he had a smattering of science, by saying that experience teaches us that Nature works by ‘invariable laws’; by which he would mean, usually unbroken customs; and that he has, therefore, a right to be astonished if they are broken. But he would be wrong. The just cause of astonishment is, that the laws are, on the whole, invariable; that the customs are so seldom broken; that sun and moon, plants and animals, grains of dust and vesicles of vapour, are not perpetually committing some vagary or other, and making as great fools of themselves as human beings are wont to do. Happily for the existence of the universe, they do not. But how, and still more why, things in general behave so respectably and loyally, is a wonder which is either utterly inexplicable, or explicable, I hold, only on the old theory that they obey Some One—whom we obey to a very limited extent indeed. Not that this latter theory gets rid of the perpetual and omnipresent element of wondrousness. If matter alone exists, it is a wonder and a mystery how it obeys itself. If A Spirit exists, it is a wonder and a mystery how He makes matter obey Him. All that the scientific man can do is, to confess the presence of mystery all day long; and to live in that wholesome and calm attitude of wonder which we call awe and reverence; that so he may be delivered from the unwholesome and passionate fits of wonder which we call astonishment, the child of ignorance and fear, and the parent of rashness and superstition. So will he keep his mind in the attitude most fit for seizing new facts, whenever they are presented to him. So he will be able, when he doubts of a new fact, to examine himself whether he doubts it on just grounds; whether his doubt may not proceed from mere self-conceit, because the fact does not suit his preconceived theories; whether it may not proceed from an even lower passion, which he shares (being human) with the most uneducated; namely, from dread of the two great bogies, Novelty and Size—novelty, which makes it hard to convince the country fellow that in the Tropics great flowers grow on tall trees, as they do here on herbs; size, which makes it hard to convince him that in far lands trees are often two and three hundred feet high, simply because he has never seen one here a hundred feet high. It is not surprising, but saddening, to watch what power these two phantoms have over the minds of those who would be angry if they were supposed to be uneducated. How often has one heard the existence of the sea-serpent declared impossible and absurd, on these very grounds, by people who thought they were arguing scientifically: the sea-serpent could not exist, firstly because—because it was so odd, strange, new, in a word, and unlike anything that they had ever seen or fancied; and, secondly, because it was so big. The first argument would apply to a thousand new facts, which physical science is daily proving to be true; and the second, when the reputed size of the sea-serpent is compared with the known size of the ocean, rather more silly than the assertion that a ten-pound pike could not live in a half-acre pond, because it was too small to hold him. The true arguments against the existence of a sea-serpent, namely, that no Ophidian could live long under water, and that therefore the sea-serpent, if he existed, would be seen continually at the surface; and again, that the appearance taken for a sea-serpent has been proved, again and again, to be merely a long line of rolling porpoises—these really sound arguments would be nothing to such people, or only be accepted as supplementing and corroborating their dislike to believe in anything new, or anything a little bigger than usual.
But so works the average, i.e. the uneducated and barbaric intellect, afraid of the New and the Big, whether in space or in time. How the fear of those two phantoms has hindered our knowledge of this planet, the geologist knows only too well.
It was excusable, therefore, that this Pitch Lake should be counted among the wonders of the world; for it is, certainly, tolerably big. It covers ninety-nine acres, and contains millions of tons of so-called pitch.
Its first discoverers, of course, were not bound to see that a pitch lake of ninety-nine acres was no more wonderful than any of the little pitch wells—‘spues’ or ‘galls,’ as we should call them in Hampshire—a yard across; or any one of the tiny veins and lumps of pitch which abound in the surrounding forests; and no less wonderful than if it had covered ninety-nine thousand acres instead of ninety-nine. Moreover, it was a novelty. People were not aware of the vast quantity of similar deposits which exist up and down the hotter regions of the globe. And being new and big too, its genesis demanded, for the comfort of the barbaric intellect, a cataclysm, and a convulsion, and some sort of prodigious birth, which was till lately referred, like many another strange object, to volcanic action. The explanation savoured somewhat of a ‘bull’; for what a volcano could do to pitch, save to burn it up into coke and gases, it is difficult to see.
It now turns out that the Pitch Lake, like most other things, owes its appearance on the surface to no convulsion or vagary at all, but to a most slow, orderly, and respectable process of nature, by which buried vegetable matter, which would have become peat, and finally brown coal, in a temperate climate, becomes, under the hot tropic soil, asphalt and oil, continually oozing up beneath the pressure of the strata above it. Such, at least, is the opinion of Messrs. Wall and Sawkins, the geological surveyors of Trinidad, and of several chemists whom they quote; and I am bound to say, that all I saw at the lake and elsewhere, during two separate visits, can be easily explained on their hypothesis, and that no other possible cause suggests itself as yet. The same cause, it may be, has produced the submarine spring of petroleum, off the shore near Point Rouge, where men can at times skim the floating oil off the surface of the sea; the petroleum and asphalt of the Windward Islands and of Cuba, especially the well-known Barbadoes tar; and the petroleum springs of the mainland, described by Humboldt, at Truxillo, in the Gulf of Cumana; and ‘the inexhaustible deposits of mineral pitch in the provinces of Merida and Coro, and, above all, in that of Maracaybo. In the latter it is employed for caulking the ships which navigate the lake.’ [{145}] But the reader shall hear what the famous lake is like, and judge for himself. Why not? He may not be ‘scientific,’ but, as Professor Huxley well says, what is scientific thought but common sense well regulated?
Running down, then, by steamer, some thirty-six miles south from Port of Spain, along a flat mangrove shore, broken only at one spot by the conical hill of San Fernando, we arrived off a peninsula, whose flat top is somewhat higher than the lowland right and left. The uplands are rich with primeval forest, and perhaps always have been. The lower land, right and left, was, I believe, cultivated for sugar, till the disastrous epoch of 1846: but it is now furred over with rastrajo woods.