In his admirable Bridgewater Treatise, Dr. Buckland has conclusively shown that the same great system of organization and adaptation has always prevailed on the globe. It was the same in those immensely remote ages, when the fossil animals lived, as it now is. And there is one feature of that system which deserves notice in this argument. At present, we know that there exist large tribes of animals, called carnivorous, provided with organs expressly designed to enable them to destroy other animals, and of course to inflict on them violent and painful death. Exactly similar tribes, and in a like proportion, are found among the fossil animals. They were not always the same tribes; but when one class of carnivora disappeared, another was created to take their place, in order to keep down the excessive multiplication of other races, which appears to be the grand object accomplished by the carnivorous races. And that animals of such an organization not only lived in the ages preceding man’s creation, but actually destroyed contemporary species, we have the evidence in the remains of the one animal enclosed in the body of another, by whom it was devoured for food and both are now converted into rock, and will testify to the most sceptical, that death among animals existed in the world before man’s transgression.
Under the third part of this investigation, I shall attempt to show that physiology teaches us that death is a general law of organic natures.
It is not confined to animals, but embraces also plants. As they correspond in a striking manner to animals in their reproduction and growth, so they do in their decay and dissolution. In short, wherever in nature we find life and organization, death is inevitable. The amount of vital energy varies in different species, and in individuals; but in them all, it at length becomes exhausted, and the functions cease. After a certain period, the vessels which convey the nutritive materials, and elaborate the proximate principles, become choked with excrementitious matter, assimilation is performed imperfectly, and gradually the vital energies are overpowered, and yield up their charge to the disorganizing power of chemical agencies. We can hardly see why the delicate machinery cannot hold out longer than it does, or even indefinitely. But experience shows us that an irresistible law of nature has fixed the period of its operations. In the expressive language of Scripture, which applies to plants as well as animals, there is no discharge in that war.
A little reflection will convince any one, that in such a system as exists in the world, this universal decay and dissolution are indispensable. For dead organic matter is essential to the support and nourishment of living beings. Admit, for the sake of the argument, (although it is obviously absurd in respect to the carnivorous races,) that animals might be supported by vegetable food. Yet, if plants must furnish nourishment for their successors, as well as for animals, the organic matter must at length be exhausted. And, furthermore, how could animals feed on plants without destroying, as they now do, multitudes of minute insects and animalcules? It is obvious, also, that, for a variety of reasons, the multiplication of animals must soon be arrested, or famine would be the result, or the world would be more than full. In short, it would require an entirely different system in nature from the present, in order to exclude death from the world. To the existing system it is as essential as gravitation, and apparently just as much a law of nature.
To strengthen this argument still further, comparative anatomy testifies that large classes of animals have a structure evidently intended to enable them to feed on other tribes. The teeth of the more perfect carnivorous animals are adapted for seizing and tearing their prey, while those which feed on vegetables have cutting and grinding teeth, but not the canine. So the whole digestive apparatus in the carnivora is more simple, and of less extent, than in the herbivorous tribes, while in the former the gastric juice acts more readily upon flesh, and in the latter upon vegetables. The muscular apparatus, also, is developed in greater power in the former than in the latter, especially in the neck and fore paw. Throughout all the classes of animals, those which feed on flesh are armed with poisonous fangs, or talons, or beaks, or other formidable weapons, while the vegetable feeders are usually in a great measure defenceless. In short, in the one class we find a perfect adaptation, in all the organs, for destroying, digesting, and assimilating other animals, and in the other class, an arrangement, equally obvious, for procuring and digesting vegetables. Indeed, you need only show the anatomist the skeleton, or even a very small part of the skeleton, of an unknown animal, to enable him, in most cases, to decide, what is the food of that animal, with almost as much certainty as if he had for years observed its habits. Who can doubt, then, that when a carnivorous animal employs the weapons with which nature has furnished it for the destruction of another animal, in order to satisfy its hunger, that it acts in obedience to a law of its being, originally impressed upon its constitution by the Creator? It is true, that even the flesh-eating animals may be taught for a time to subsist upon vegetable products. But this is unnatural; and such an animal usually pays the price of thus inverting its original instinct, by disease and premature decay. In a state of nature, an animal would starve rather than thus violate its instinctive desires.
I will allude to only one other fact, that shows death to be inseparable from organized beings, without a constant miraculous interference, in such a world as ours. Animal organization, in all conceivable circumstances, must be liable to accident, from mere mechanical force, by which life would be destroyed. It may be possible, perhaps, to conceive of a material tenement for the soul, which should be unaffected by all forms of mechanical violence and chemical action; if, for instance, its constitution were analogous to that supposed medium through which light, heat, and electricity, and perhaps gravitation, act. But, surely, our present bodies are far enough removed from such conditions, being of all terrestrial things the most liable to ruin from the causes above mentioned.
The conclusions from all these facts and reasonings are, that death is an essential feature of the present system of organized nature; that it must have entered into the plan of creation in the divine mind originally, and consequently must have existed in the world before the apostasy of man. Whether the entire system of death had any connection with that event, or whether there is any thing peculiar in the death endured by the human family, will be questions for examination in a subsequent part of my lecture.
In opposition to these conclusions, however, the common theory of death maintains that, when man transgressed, there was an entire change throughout all organic nature; so that animals and plants, which before contained a principle of immortal life, were smitten with the hereditary contagion of disease and death. Those animals which, before that event, were gentle and herbivorous, or frugivorous, suddenly became ferocious or carnivorous. The climate, too, changed, and the sterile soil sent forth the thorn and the thistle, in the place of the rich flowers and fruits of Eden. The great English poet, in his Paradise Lost, has clothed this hypothesis in a most graphic and philosophical dress; and probably his descriptions have done more than the Bible to give it currency. Indeed, could the truth be known, I fancy that, on many points of secondary importance, the current theology of the day has been shaped quite as much by the ingenious machinery of Paradise Lost as by the Scriptures; the theologians having so mixed up the ideas of Milton with those derived from inspiration, that they find it difficult to distinguish between them.
In the case under consideration, Milton does not limit the change induced by man’s apostasy to sublunary things, but, like a sagacious philosopher, perceives, also, that the heavenly bodies must have been diverted from their paths.
“At that tasted fruit,
The sun, as from Thyestian banquet, turned
His course intended; else-how had the world
Inhabited, though sinless, more than now,
Avoided pinching cold and scorching heat?”