Mr. Belloc objects to "The outline of history"

by H. G. Wells

A Magnificent Generalisation

The third argument is essentially a display of Mr. Belloc’s inability to understand the nature of the record of the rocks. I will assume that he knows what “strata” are, but it is clear that he does not understand that any uniform stratum indicates the maintenance of uniform conditions while it was deposited and an absence of selective stresses, and that when it gives place to another different stratum, that signifies a change in conditions, not only in the conditions of the place where the stratum is found, but in the supply of material. An estuary sinks and gives place to marine sands, or fresh water brings down river gravels which cover over an accumulation of shingle. Now if he will think what would happen to-day under such circumstances, he will realise that the fauna and flora of the stratum first considered will drift away and that another fauna and flora will come in with the new conditions. Fresh things will come to feed and wade and drown in the waters, and old types will no longer frequent them. The fossil remains of one stratum are very rarely directly successive to those below it or directly ancestral to those above it. A succession of forms is much more difficult and elusive to follow up, therefore, than Mr. Belloc imagines. And then if he will consider what happens to the rabbits and rats and mice on his Sussex estate, and how they die and what happens to their bodies, he may begin to realise just what proportion of the remains of these creatures is ever likely to find its way to fossilisation. Perhaps years pass without the bones of a single rabbit from the whole of England finding their way to a resting-place where they may become fossil. Nevertheless the rabbit is a very common animal. And then if Mr. Belloc will think of palæontologists, millions of years after this time, working at the strata that we are forming to-day, working at a gravel or sand-pit here or a chance exposure there, and prevented from any general excavation, and if he will ask himself what proportion of the rare few rabbits actually fossilised are likely to come to light, I think he will begin to realise for the first time in his life the tremendous “gappiness” of the geological record and how very childish and absurd is his demand for an unbroken series of forms. The geological record is not like an array of hundreds of volumes containing a complete history of the past. It is much more like a few score crumpled pages from such an array, the rest of the volumes having either never been printed, or having been destroyed or being inaccessible.

In his Third Argument from Evidence Mr. Belloc obliges us with a summary of this record of the rocks, about which he knows so little. I need scarcely note here that the only evidence adduced is his own inspired conviction. No “European” palæontologist or biologist is brought out of the Humbert safe and quoted. Here was a chance to puzzle me dreadfully with something “in French,” and it is scandalously thrown away. Mr. Belloc tells us, just out of his head, that instead of there being that succession of forms in the geological record the Theory of Natural Selection requires, there are “enormously long periods of stable type” and “(presumably) rapid periods of transition.” That “presumably” is splendid; scientific caution and all the rest of it—rapid periods when I suppose the Creative Spirit got busy and types woke up and said, “Turn over; let’s change a bit.”

There is really nothing to be said about this magnificent generalisation except that it is pure Bellocking. Wherever there is a group of strata, sufficiently thick and sufficiently alike to witness to a long-sustained period of slight alterations in conditions, there we find the successive species approximating. This is not a statement à la Belloc. In spite of the chances against such a thing occurring, and in defiance of Mr. Belloc’s assertion that it does not occur, there are several series of forms in time, giving a practically direct succession of species. Mr. Belloc may read about it and at the same time exercise this abnormal linguistic gift which sits upon him so gracefully, his knowledge of the French language, in Deperet’s Transformations du Monde Animal, where all these questions are conveniently summarised. There he will get the results of Waagen with a succession of Ammonites and also of Neumayr with Paludina, and there also he will get information about the sequence of the species of Mastodon throughout the Tertiary age and read about the orderly progress of a pig group, the Brachyodus of the Eocene and Oligocene. There is a touch of irony in the fact that his own special protégé, the Pig, should thus turn upon him and rend his Third Argument from Evidence.

More recondite for Mr. Belloc is the work of Hilgendorf upon Planorbis, because it is in German; but the drift of it is visible in the Palæontology wing of the London Natural History Museum, Room VIII. A species of these gasteropods was, during the slow processes of secular change, caught in a big lake, fed by hot springs. It underwent progressive modification into a series of successive new species as conditions changed through the ages. Dr. Klähms’ specimens show this beautifully. Rowe’s account of the evolutionary series in the genus Micraster (Q.J.M.S., 1899) is also accessible to Mr. Belloc, and he will find other matter to ponder in Goodrich’s Living Organisms, 1924. The finest series of all, longer in range and completer in its links, is that of the Horse. There is an excellent little pamphlet by Matthew and Chubb, well illustrated, The Evolution of the Horse, published by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, so plain, so simple, so entirely and humiliatingly destructive of Mr. Belloc’s nonsensical assertions, that I pray him to get it and read it for the good of his really very unkempt and neglected soul.

Thus we observe that Mr. Belloc does not know the facts in this case of Natural Selection, and that he argues very badly from such facts as he misconceives. It is for the reader to decide which at the end is more suitable as a laughing-stock—the Theory of Natural Selection or Mr. Belloc. And having thus studied this great Catholic apologist as an amateur biologist and arrived at the result, we will next go on to consider what he has to say about the origins of mankind—and Original Sin.

IV
MR. BELLOC’S ADVENTURES AMONG THE SUB-MEN: MANIFEST TERROR OF THE NEANDERTHALER

From Mr. Belloc’s feats with Natural Selection we come to his adventures among his ancestors and the fall of man. These are, if possible, even more valiant than his beautiful exposure of the “half-educated assurance” of current biological knowledge. He rushes about the arena, darting from point to point, talking of my ignorance of the “main recent European work in Anthropology,” and avoiding something with extraordinary skill and dexterity. What it is he is avoiding I will presently explain. No one who has read my previous articles need be told that not a single name, not a single paper, is cited from that galaxy of “main recent European” anthropology. With one small exception. There is a well-known savant, M. Marcellin Boule, who wrote of the Grottes de Grimaldi in 1906. Some facetious person seems to have written to Mr. Belloc and told him that M. Boule in 1906 “definitely proved the exact opposite” of the conclusions given by Mr. Wright in his Quaternary Ice Age (1914), and quoted in my Outline. Mr. Belloc writes this down, elevates M. Boule to the magnificence of “Boule” simply and follows up with the habitual insults. By counting from his one fixed mathematical point, zero in some dimension unknown to me, he concludes that I must be twenty years out of date, though the difference between 1906 and 1914, by ordinary ways of reckoning, is really not minus twenty but plus eight.

The same ungracious humorist seems to have stuffed up Mr. Belloc with a story that for the last twenty years the climate of the earth has ceased to vary with the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, and that any natural consequences of the precession of the equinoxes no longer occur; that climate has, in fact, cut loose from astronomical considerations, and that you can find out all about it in the Encyclopædia Britannica. You cannot. Mr. Belloc should have tried. Some day he must find time to puzzle out M. Boule’s curve of oscillation of the Mediterranean and correlate it with Penck’s, and go into the mystery of certain Moustierian implements that M. Boule says are not Moustierian; and after that he had better read over the little discussion about changes of climate in the Outline of History—it is really quite simply put—and see what it is I really said and what his leg-pulling friend has been up to with him in that matter. It may be kinder to Mr. Belloc to help him with a hint. Croll made an excellent book in which he pointed out a number of astronomical processes which must produce changes of climate. He suggested that these processes were sufficient to account for the fluctuations of the glacial age. They are not. But they remain perfectly valid causes of climatic variation. Croll is no more done for than Darwin is done for. That is where Mr. Belloc’s friend let Mr. Belloc down.

But Mr. Belloc does not always work on the information of facetious friends, and sometimes one is clearly in the presence of the unassisted expert controversialist. When, for example, I say that the Tasmanians are not racially Neanderthalers, but that they are Neanderthaloid, he can bring himself to alter the former word also to Neanderthaloid in order to allege an inconsistency. And confident that most of his Catholic readers will not check him back by my book, he can ascribe to me views about race for which there is no shadow of justification. But it is disagreeable to me to follow up such issues, they concern Mr. Belloc much more than they do the living questions under discussion, and I will not even catalogue what other such instances of unashamed controversy occur.