Look at these, and a hundred kindred forms, and then see how nature is not only “maxima in minimis”—greatest in her least, but often “pulcherrima in abditis”—fairest in her most hidden works; and how the Creative Spirit has lavished, as it were, unspeakable artistic skill on lowly-organized creature, never till now beheld by man, and buried, not only in foul mud, but in their own unsightly heap of living jelly.
But so it was from the beginning;—and this planet was not made for man alone. Countless ages before we appeared on earth the depths of the old chalk-ocean teemed with forms as beautiful and perfect as those, their lineal descendants, which the dredge now brings up from the Atlantic sea-floor; and if there were—as my reason tells me that there must have been—final moral causes for their existence, the only ones which we have a right to imagine are these—that all, down to the lowest Rhizopod, might delight themselves, however dimly, in existing; and that the Lord might delight Himself in them.
Thus, much—alas! how little—about the wonders of the deep. We, who are no deep-sea dredgers, must return humbly to the wonders of the shore. And first, as after descending the gap in the sea-wall we walk along the ribbed floor of hard yellow sand, let me ask you to give a sharp look-out for a round grey disc, about as big as a penny-piece, peeping out on the surface. No; that is not it, that little lump: open it, and you will find within one of the common little Venus gallina.—The closet collectors have given it some new name now, and no thanks to them: they are always changing the names, instead of studying the live animals where Nature has put them, in which case they would have no time for word-inventing. Nay, I verify suspect that the names grow, like other things; at least, they get longer and longer and more jaw-breaking every year. The little bivalve, however, finding itself left by the tide, has wisely shut up its siphons, and, by means of its foot and its edges, buried itself in a comfortable bath of cool wet sand, till the sea shall come back, and make it safe to crawl and lounge about on the surface, smoking the sea-water instead of tobacco. Neither is that depression what we seek. Touch it, and out poke a pair of astonished and inquiring horns: it is a long-armed crab, who saw us coming, and wisely shovelled himself into the sand by means of his nether-end. Corystes Cassivelaunus is his name, which he is said to have acquired from the marks on his back, which are somewhat like a human face. “Those long antennæ,” says my friend, Mr. Lloyd [90]—I have not verified the fact, but believe it, as he knows a great deal about crabs, and I know next to nothing—“form a tube through which a current of water passes into the crab’s gills, free from the surrounding sand.” Moreover, it is only the male who has those strangely long fore-arms and claws; the female contenting herself with limbs of a more moderate length. Neither is that, though it might be, the hole down which what we seek has vanished: but that burrow contains one of the long white razors which you saw cast on shore at Paignton. The boys close by are boring for them with iron rods armed with a screw, and taking them in to sell in Torquay market, as excellent food. But there is one, at last—a grey disc pouting up through the sand. Touch it, and it is gone down, quick as light. We must dig it out, and carefully, for it is a delicate monster. At last, after ten minutes’ careful work, we have brought up, from a foot depth or more—what? A thick, dirty, slimy worm, without head or tail, form or colour. A slug has more artistic beauty about him. Be it so. At home in the aquarium (where, alas! he will live but for a day or two, under the new irritation of light) he will make a very different figure. That is one of the rarest of British sea-animals, Peachia hastata (Pl. XII. Fig. 1), which differs from most other British Actiniæ in this, that instead of having like them a walking disc, it has a free open lower end, with which (I know not how) it buries itself upright in the sand, with its mouth just above the surface. The figure on the left of the plate represents a curious cluster of papillæ which project from one side of the mouth, and are the opening of the oviduct. But his value consists, not merely in his beauty (though that, really, is not small), but in his belonging to what the long word-makers call an “interosculant” group,—a party of genera and species which connect families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh link in the great chain, or rather the great network, of zoological classification. For here we have a simple, and, as it were, crude form; of which, if we dared to indulge in reveries, we might say that the Creative Mind realized it before either Actiniæ or Holothurians, and then went on to perfect the idea contained in it in two different directions; dividing it into two different families, and making on its model, by adding new organs, and taking away old ones, in one direction the whole family of Actiniæ (sea-anemones), and in a quite opposite one the Holothuriæ, those strange sea-cucumbers, with their mouth-fringe of feathery gills, of which you shall see some anon. Thus there has been, in the Creative Mind, as it gave life to new species, a development of the idea on which older species were created, in order—we may fancy—that every mesh of the great net might gradually be supplied, and there should be no gaps in the perfect variety of Nature’s forms. This development is one which we must believe to be at least possible, if we allow that a Mind presides over the universe, and not a mere brute necessity, a Law (absurd misnomer) without a Lawgiver; and to it (strangely enough coinciding here and there with the Platonic doctrine of Eternal Ideas existing in the Divine Mind) all fresh inductive discovery seems to point more and more.
Let me speak freely a few words on this important matter. Geology has disproved the old popular belief that the universe was brought into being as it now exists by a single fiat. We know that the work has been gradual; that the earth
“In tracts of fluent heat began,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
The home of seeming random forms,
Till, at the last, arose the man.”
And we know, also, that these forms, “seeming random” as they are, have appeared according to a law which, as far as we can judge, has been on the whole one of progress,—lower animals (though we cannot yet say, the lowest) appearing first, and man, the highest mammal, “the roof and crown of things,” one of the latest in the series. We have no more right, let it be observed, to say that man, the highest, appeared last, than that the lowest appeared first. It was probably so, in both cases; but there is as yet no positive proof of either; and as we know that species of animals lower than those which already existed appeared again and again during the various eras, so it is quite possible that they may be appearing now, and may appear hereafter: and that for every extinct Dodo or Moa, a new species may be created, to keep up the equilibrium of the whole. This is but a surmise: but it may be wise, perhaps, just now, to confess boldly, even to insist on, its possibility, lest any should fancy, from our unwillingness to allow it, that there would be ought in it, if proved, contrary to sound religion.
I am, I must honestly confess, more and more unable to perceive anything which an orthodox Christian may not hold, in those physical theories of “evolution,” which are gaining more and more the assent of our best zoologists and botanists. All that they ask us to believe is, that “species” and “families,” and indeed the whole of organic nature, have gone through, and may still be going through, some such development from a lowest germ, as we know that every living individual, from the lowest zoophyte to man himself, does actually go through. They apply to the whole of the living world, past, present, and future, the law which is undeniably at work on each individual of it. They may be wrong, or they may be right: but what is there in such a conception contrary to any doctrine—at least of the Church of England? To say that this cannot be true; that species cannot vary, because God, at the beginning, created each thing “according to its kind,” is really to beg the question; which is—Does the idea of “kind” include variability or not? and if so, how much variability? Now, “kind,” or “species,” as we call it, is defined nowhere in the Bible. What right have we to read our own definition into the word?—and that against the certain fact, that some “kinds” do vary, and that widely,—mankind, for instance, and the animals and plants which he domesticates. Surely that latter fact should be significant, to those who believe, as I do, that man was created in the likeness of God. For if man has the power, not only of making plants and animals vary, but of developing them into forms of higher beauty and usefulness than their wild ancestors possessed, why should not the God in whose image he is made possess the same power? If the old theological rule be true—“There is nothing in man which was not first in God” (sin, of course, excluded)—then why should not this imperfect creative faculty in man be the very guarantee that God possesses it in perfection?
Such at least is the conclusion of one who, studying certain families of plants, which indulge in the most fantastic varieties of shape and size, and yet through all their vagaries retain—as do the Palms, the Orchids, the Euphorbiaceæ—one organ, or form of organs, peculiar and highly specialized, yet constant throughout the whole of each family, has been driven to the belief that each of these three families, at least, has “sported off” from one common ancestor—one archetypal Palm, one archetypal Orchid, one archetypal Euphorbia, simple, it may be, in itself, but endowed with infinite possibilities of new and complex beauty, to be developed, not in it, but in its descendants. He has asked himself, sitting alone amid the boundless wealth of tropic forests, whether even then and there the great God might not be creating round him, slowly but surely, new forms of beauty? If he chose to do it, could He not do it? That man found himself none the worse Christian for the thought. He has said—and must be allowed to say again, for he sees no reason to alter his words—in speaking of the wonderful variety of forms in the Euphorbiaceæ, from the weedy English Euphorbias, the Dog’s Mercuries, and the Box, to the prickly-stemmed Scarlet Euphorbia of Madagascar, the succulent Cactus-like Euphorbias of the Canaries and elsewhere; the Gale-like Phyllanthus; the many-formed Crotons; the Hemp-like Maniocs, Physic-nuts, Castor-oils, the scarlet Poinsettia, the little pink and yellow Dalechampia, the poisonous Manchineel, and the gigantic Hura, or sandbox tree, of the West Indies,—all so different in shape and size, yet all alike in their most peculiar and complex fructification, and in their acrid milky juice,—“What if all these forms are the descendants of one original form? Would that be one whit the more wonderful than the theory that they were, each and all, with the minute, and often imaginary, shades of difference between certain cognate species among them, created separately and at once? But if it be so—which I cannot allow—what would the theologian have to say, save that God’s works are even more wonderful than he always believed them to be? As for the theory being impossible—that is to be decided by men of science, on strict experimental grounds. As for us theologians, who are we, that we should limit, à priori, the power of God? ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’ asked the prophet of old; and we have a right to ask it as long as the world shall last. If it be said that ‘natural selection,’ or, as Mr. Herbert Spencer better defines it, the ‘survival of the fittest,’ is too simple a cause to produce such fantastic variety—that, again, is a question to be settled exclusively by men of science, on their own grounds. We, meanwhile, always knew that God works by very simple, or seemingly simple, means; that the universe, as far as we could discern it, was one organization of the most simple means. It was wonderful—or should have been—in our eyes, that a shower of rain should make the grass grow, and that the grass should become flesh, and the flesh food for the thinking brain of man. It was—or ought to have been—more wonderful yet to us that a child should resemble its parents, or even a butterfly resemble, if not always, still usually, its parents likewise. Ought God to appear less or more august in our eyes if we discover that the means are even simpler than we supposed? We held Him to be Almighty and All-wise. Are we to reverence Him less or more if we find Him to be so much mightier, so much wiser, than we dreamed, that He can not only make all things, but—the very perfection of creative power—make all things make themselves? We believed that His care was over all His works; that His providence worked perpetually over the universe. We were taught—some of us at least—by Holy Scripture, that without Him not a sparrow fell to the ground, and that the very hairs of our head were all numbered; that the whole history of the universe was made up, in fact, of an infinite network of special providences. If, then, that should be true which a great naturalist writes, ‘It may be metaphorically said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being, in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life,’—if this, I say, were proved to be true, ought God’s care and God’s providence to seem less or more magnificent in our eyes? Of old it was said by Him without whom nothing is made—‘My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.’ Shall we quarrel with physical science, if she gives us evidence that those words are true?”
And—understand it well—the grand passage I have just quoted need not be accused of substituting “natural selection for God.” In any case natural selection would be only the means or law by which God works, as He does by other natural laws. We do not substitute gravitation for God, when we say that the planets are sustained in their orbits by the law of gravitation. The theory about natural selection may be untrue, or imperfect, as may the modern theories of the “evolution and progress” of organic forms: let the man of science decide that. But if true, the theories seem to me perfectly to agree with, and may be perfectly explained by, the simple old belief which the Bible sets before us, of a Living God: not a mere past will, such as the Koran sets forth, creating once and for all, and then leaving the universe, to use Goethe’s simile, “to spin round his finger;” nor again, an “all-pervading spirit,” words which are mere contradictory jargon, concealing, from those who utter them, blank Materialism: but One who works in all things which have obeyed Him to will and to do of His good pleasure, keeping His abysmal and self-perfect purpose, yet altering the methods by which that purpose is attained, from æon to æon, ay, from moment to moment, for ever various, yet for ever the same. This great and yet most blessed paradox of the Changeless God, who yet can say “It repenteth me,” and “Behold, I work a new thing on the earth,” is revealed no less by nature than by Scripture; the changeableness, not of caprice or imperfection, but of an Infinite Maker and “Poietes,” drawing ever fresh forms out of the inexhaustible treasury of His primæval Mind; and yet never throwing away a conception to which He has once given actual birth in time and space, (but to compare reverently small things and great) lovingly repeating it, re-applying it; producing the same effects by endlessly different methods; or so delicately modifying the method that, as by the turn of a hair, it shall produce endlessly diverse effects; looking back, as it were, ever and anon over the great work of all the ages, to retouch it, and fill up each chasm in the scheme, which for some good purpose had been left open in earlier worlds; or leaving some open (the forms, for instance, necessary to connect the bimana and the quadrumana) to be filled up perhaps hereafter when the world needs them; the handiwork, in short, of a living and loving Mind, perfect in His own eternity, but stooping to work in time and space, and there rejoicing Himself in the work of His own hands, and in His eternal Sabbaths ceasing in rest ineffable, that He may look on that which He hath made, and behold it is very good.