The Religion of Geology and Its Connected Sciences

by Edward Hitchcock

Such a general view of the subject of organic remains seems to give plausibility to the hypothesis of organic development. But the tables are turned when we descend to particulars. The idea of a distinct stirps or germ for each great class of animals and plants seems to me to destroy an essential feature of the hypothesis. It supposes that law produces at once a vertebral animal and a flowering plant; for the first, certainly, we find in the very lowest of the fossiliferous rocks. “The lower silurian,” says Sir Roderick Murchison, in 1847, “is no longer to be viewed as an invertebrate period, for the onchus (a genus of fish) has been found in the Llandeilo Flags, and in the lower silurian rocks of Bala.”

It is also a most important fact, that this fish of the oldest rock was not, as the development scheme would require, of a low organization, but quite high on the scale of fishes. The same is true of all the earliest species of this class. “All our most ancient fossil fishes,” says Professor Sedgwick, “belong to a high organic type; and the very oldest species that are well determined fall naturally into an order of fishes which Owen and Müller place, not at the bottom, but at the top of the whole class.”—Discourse on the Studies of the University, &c. 5th edit. p. lxiv. pref.

This point has been fully and ably discussed by Hugh Miller, Esq., in his late work, “The Footprints of the Creator, or the Asterolepis of Stromness.” The asterolepis was one of these fishes found in the old red sandstone, sometimes over twenty feet long; yet, says Mr. Miller, “instead of being, as the development hypothesis would require, a fish low in its organization, it seems to have ranged on the level of the highest ichthyic-reptilian families ever called into existence.”

Another point which Mr. Miller has labored hard to establish, and of which there seems to be no reasonable doubt, is, that in many families of animals, not only were the first species that appeared of high organization, but there was a gradual degradation among those that were created afterwards. Of the fishes generally, he says, that “the progress of the race, as a whole, though it still retains not a few of the higher forms, has been a progress, not of development from the low to the high, but of degradation from the high to the low.” Again he says, “We know, as geologists, that the dynasty of the fish was succeeded by that of the reptile; that the dynasty of the reptile was succeeded by that of the mammiferous quadruped; and that the dynasty of the mammiferous quadruped was succeeded by that of man, as man now exists—a creature of a mixed character, and subject, in all conditions, to wide alternations of enjoyment and suffering. We know further,—so far, at least, as we have succeeded in deciphering the record,—that the several dynasties were introduced, not in their lower, but in their higher forms; that, in short, in the imposing programme of creation, it was arranged as a general rule, that in each of the great divisions of the procession the magnates should walk first. We recognize yet further the fact of degradation specially exemplified in the fish and the reptile.” “Among these degraded races, that of the footless serpent, which goeth upon its belly, has long been noted by the theologian as a race typical, in its condition and nature, of an order of hopelessly degraded beings, borne down to the dust by a clinging curse; and curiously enough, when the first comparative anatomists in the world give their readiest and most prominent instance of degradation among the divisions of the natural world, it is this very order of footless reptiles that they select.”

Among the invertebrate animals are numerous examples of the deterioration of a race. M. Alcide D’Orbigny, one of the most accomplished of living paleontologists, in his Cours Elementaire de Paleontologie et de Geologie, speaks as follows of the cephalopods found in the oldest rocks: “See, then, the result; the cephalopods, the most perfect of the mollusks, which lived in the early period of the world, show a progress of degradation in their generic forms. We insist on this fact relative to the cephalopods, which we shall hereafter compare with the less perfect classes of mollusks, since it must lead to the conclusion that the mollusks, as to their classes, have certainly retrograded from the compound to the simple, or from the more to the less perfect.”

Such facts as these are absolutely fatal to the hypothesis of development; and geology abounds with them. Indeed, through all her archives, we search in vain for facts that show any thing like a passage of one species, genus, or family, into another. Certain distinct types characterize the different formations up to a certain period, when there is a sudden change; and in the subsequent strata we find animals and plants entirely different from those that have disappeared. The new races are, indeed, often of a higher grade than those that preceded them, but could not have sprung from them.

The true theory of animal and vegetable existence on our globe appears to be this: Such natures were placed upon the earth as were adapted to its varying condition. When the earliest group was created, such were the climate, the atmosphere, the waters, and the means of subsistence, that the lower tribes were best adapted to the condition of things. That group occupied the earth till such changes had occurred as to make it unsuited to their natures, and consequently they died out, and new races were brought in; not by mere law, but by divine benevolence, power, and wisdom. These tribes also passed away, when the condition of things was so changed as to be uncongenial to their natures, to give place to a third group, and these again to a fourth, and so on to the present races, which, in their turn, perhaps, are destined to become extinct. From the first, however, the changes which the earth has undergone, as to temperature, soil, and climate, have been an improvement of its condition; so that each successive group of animals and plants could be more and more complicated and perfect; and therefore we find an increase and development of flowering plants and vertebral animals. And yet, from the beginning, all the great classes seem to have existed, so that the changes have been only in the proportion of the more and less perfect at different periods. In short, we have only to suppose that the Creator exactly adapted organic natures to the several geological periods, and we perfectly explain the phenomena of organic remains. But the doctrine of development by law corresponds only in a loose and general way to the facts, and cannot be reconciled to the details. If that hypothesis cannot get a better foothold somewhere else, it will soon find its way into the limbo of things abortive and forgotten.

I have now noticed, I believe, the principal sources of evidence in which the law hypothesis rests; and at the best, we find only a possibility, but rarely, if ever, a probability, that such a power exists in nature. I turn now, for a few moments, to the arguments on the other side; that is, against the hypothesis.

And first, it cannot explain the wonderful adaptation of animals and plants to their condition and to one another.

There is not a more striking thing in nature than that adaptation; and geology shows us that it has always been so. Now, if any thing requires the exercise of infinite wisdom and power, it is this feature of creation. But according to this hypothesis, the laws of nature may be so arranged as to create every animal and plant just at the right time, and place them in the right spot, and adjust every thing around them to their nature and wants. In other words, it supposes law capable of doing what only infinite wisdom and power can do. What is this but ascribing infinite perfection to law, and imputing to it effects which only an infinite intelligence could bring about? In other words, it is making a Deity of the laws which he ordains. Theoretically it may be of little importance by what name men call the Deity; but practically to impute natural effects to law, as an independent power, is to put a blind, unintelligent agency in the place of Jehovah.