The Foot-prints of the Creator

by Hugh Miller

Of some great admiral.”

Viewed simply in its picturesque aspect, this olive leaf of the Old Red seems not at all devoid of poetry. We sail upwards into the high geologic zones, passing from ancient to still more ancient scenes of being; and, as we voyage along, find ever in the surrounding prospect, as in the existing scene from which we set out, a graceful intermixture of land and water, continent, river, and sea. We first coast along the land of the Tertiary, inhabited by the strange quadrupeds of Cuvier, and waving with the reeds and palms of the Paris Basin; the land of the Wealden, with its gigantic iguanodon rustling amid its tree ferns and its cycadeæ, comes next; then comes the green land of the Oolite, with its little pouched insectivorous quadruped, its flying reptiles, its vast jungles of the Brora equisetum, and its forests of the Helmsdale pine; and then, dimly as through a haze, we mark, as we speed on, the thinly scattered islands of the New Red Sandstone, and pick up in our course a large floating leaf, veined like that of a cabbage, which not a little puzzles the botanists of the expedition. And now we near the vast Carboniferous continent, and see along the undulating outline, between us and the sky, the strange forms of a vegetation, compared with which that of every previously seen land seems stunted and poor. We speed day after day along endless forests, in which gigantic club-mosses wave in air a hundred feet over head, and skirt interminable marshes, in which thickets of reeds overtop the mast-head. And, where mighty rivers come rolling to the sea, we mark, through the long-retiring vistas which they open into the interior, the higher grounds of the country covered with coniferous trees, and see doddered trunks of vast size, like those of Granton and Craigleith, reclining under the banks in deep muddy reaches, with their decaying tops turned adown the current. At length the furthermost promontory of this long range of coast comes full in view: we near it,—we have come up abreast of it: we see the shells of the Mountain Limestone glittering white along its further shore, and the green depths under our keel lightened by the flush of innumerable corals; and then, bidding farewell to the land forever,—for so the geologists of but five years ago would have advised,—we launch into the unmeasured ocean of the Old Red, with its three consecutive zones of animal life. Not a single patch of land more do those geologic charts exhibit which we still regard as new. The zones of the Silurian and Cambrian succeed the zones of the Old Red; and, darkly fringed by an obscure bank of cloud ranged along the last zone in the series, a night that never dissipates settles down upon the deep. Our voyage, like that of the old fabulous navigators of five centuries ago, terminates on the sea in a thick darkness, beyond which there lies no shore and there dawns no light. And it is in the middle of this vast ocean, just where the last zone of the Old Red leans against the first zone of the Silurian, that we have succeeded in discovering a solitary island unseen before,—a shrub-bearing land, much enveloped in fog, but with hills that at least look green in the distance. There are patches of floating sea-weed much comminuted by the surf all around it; and on one projecting headland we see clear through our glasses a cone-bearing tree.

This certainly is not the sort of arrangement demanded by the exigencies of the development hypothesis. A true wood at the base of the Old Red Sandstone, or a true Placoid in the Limestones of Bala, very considerably beneath the base of the Lower Silurian system, are untoward misplacements for the purposes of the Lamarckian; and who that has watched the progress of discovery for the last twenty years, and seen the place of the earliest ichthyolite transferred from the Carboniferous to the Cambrian system, and that of the earliest exogenous lignite from the Lias to the Lower Devonian, will now venture to say that fossil wood may not yet be detected as low in the scale as any vegetable organism whatever, or fossil fish as low as the remains of any animal? But though the response of the earlier geologic systems be thus unfavorable to the development hypothesis, may not men such as the author of the “Vestiges” urge, that the geologic evidence, taken as a whole, and in its bearing on groupes and periods, establishes the general fact that the lower plants and animals preceded the higher,—that the conifera, for instance, preceded our true forest trees, such as the oak and elm,—that, in like manner, the fish preceded the reptile, that the reptile preceded the bird, that the bird preceded the mammiferous quadruped and the quadrumana, and that the mammiferous quadruped and the quadrumana preceded man? Assuredly yes! They may and do urge that Geology furnishes evidence of such a succession of existences; and the arrangement seems at once a very wonderful and very beautiful one. Of that great and imposing procession of being of which this world has been the scene, the programme has been admirably marshalled. But the order of the arrangement in no degree justifies the inference based upon it by the Lamarckian. The fact that fishes and reptiles were created on an earlier day than the beasts of the field and the human family, gives no ground whatever for the belief that “the peopling of the earth was one of a natural kind, requiring time,” or that the reptiles and fishes have been not only the predecessors, but also the progenitors of the beasts and of man. The geological phenomena, even had the author of the “Vestiges” been consulted in their arrangement, and permitted to determine their sequence, would yet have failed to furnish, not merely an adequate foundation for the development hypothesis, but even the slightest presumption in its favor. In making good the assertion, may I ask the reader to follow me through the details of a simple though somewhat lengthened illustration?

SUPERPOSITION NOT PARENTAL RELATION.
THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE.

Several thousand years ago, ere the upheaval of the last of our raised beaches, there existed somewhere on the British coast a submarine bed, rich in sea-weed and the less destructible zoophytes, and inhabited by the commoner crustaceæ and molluscs. Shoals of herrings frequented it every autumn, haunted by their usual enemies the dog-fish, the cod, and the porpoise; and, during the other seasons of the year, it was swum over by the ling, the hake, and the turbot. A considerable stream, that traversed a wide extent of marshy country, waving with flags and reeds, and in which the frog and the newt bred by millions, entered the sea a few hundred yards away, and bore down, when in flood, its modicum of reptilian remains, some of which, sinking over the submarine bed, found a lodgment at the bottom. Portions of reeds and flags were also occasionally entombed, with now and then boughs of the pine and juniper, swept from the higher grounds. Through frequent depositions of earthy matter brought down by the streamlet, and of sand thrown up by the sea, a gradual elevation of the bottom went on, till at length the deep-sea bed came to exist as a shallow bank, over which birds of the wader family stalked mid-leg deep when plying for food; and on one occasion a small porpoise, losing his way, and getting entangled amid its shoals, perished on it, and left his carcass to be covered up by its mud and silt. That elevation of the land, or recession of the sea, to which the country owes its last acquired marginal strip of soil, took place, and the shallow bank became a flat meadow, raised some six or eight feet above the sea-level. Herbs, shrubs, and trees, in course of time covered it over; and then, as century succeeded century, it gathered atop a thick stratum of peaty mould, embedding portions of birch and hazel bushes, and a few doddered oaks. When in this state, at a comparatively recent period, an Italian boy, accompanied by his monkey, was passing over it, when the poor monkey, hard-wrought and ill-fed, and withal but indifferently suited originally for braving the rigors of a keen northern climate, lay down and died, and his sorrowing master covered up the remains. Not many years after, the mutilated corpse of a poor shipwrecked sailor was thrown up, during a night-storm, on the neighboring beach: it was a mere fragment of the human frame,—a mouldering unsightly mass, decomposing in the sun; and a humane herd-boy, scooping out a shallow grave for it, immediately over that of the monkey, buried it up. Last of all, a farmer, bent on agricultural improvement, furrowed the flat meadow to the depth of some six or eight feet, by a broad ditch, that laid open its organic contents from top to bottom. And then a philosopher of the school of Maillet and Lamarck, chancing to come that way, stepped aside to examine the phenomena, and square them with his theory.

First, along the bottom of the deep ditch he detects marine organisms of a low order, and generally of a small size There are dark indistinct markings traversing the gray silt which he correctly enough regards as the remains of fucoids and blent with these, he finds the stony cells of flustra, the calcareous spindles of the sea-pen, the spines of echinus, and the thin granular plates of the crustacea. Layers of mussel and pecten shells come next, mixed up with the shells of buccinum, natica, and trochus. Over the shells there occur defensive spines of the dog-fish, blent with the button-like, thornset boucles of the ray. And the minute skeletons of herrings, with the vertebral and cerebral bones of cod, rest over these in turn. He finds, also, well-preserved bits of reed, and a fragment of pine. Higher up, the well-marked bones of the frog occur, and the minute skeleton of a newt; higher still, the bones of birds of the diver family; higher still, the skeleton of a porpoise; and still higher, he discovers that of a monkey, resting amid the decayed boles and branches of dicotyledonous plants and trees. He pursues his search, vastly delighted to find his doctrine of progressive development so beautifully illustrated; and last of all he detects, only a few inches from the surface, the broken remains of the poor sailor. And having thus collected his facts, he sets himself to collate them with his hypothesis. To hold that the zoophytes had been created zoophytes, the molluscs molluscs, the fishes fishes, the reptiles reptiles, or the man a man, would be, according to our philosopher, alike derogatory to the Divine wisdom and to the acumen and vigor of the human intellect: it would be “distressing to him to be compelled to picture the power of God, as put forth in any other manner than in those slow, mysterious, universal laws, which have so plainly an eternity to work in;” nor, with so large an amount of evidence before him as that which the ditch furnishes,—evidence conclusive to the effect that creation is but development,—does he find it necessary either to cramp his faculties or outrage his taste, by a weak yielding to the requirements of any such belief.

Meanwhile the farmer,—a plain, observant, elderly man, comes up, and he and the philosopher enter into conversation. “I have been reading the history of creation in the side of your deep ditch,” says the philosopher, “and find the record really very complete. Look there,” he adds, pointing to the unfossiliferous strip that runs along the bottom of the bank; “there, life, both vegetable and animal, first began. It began, struck by electricity out of albumen, as a congeries of minute globe-shaped atoms,—each a hollow sphere within a sphere, as in the well-known Chinese puzzle; and from these living atoms were all the higher forms progressively developed. The ditch, of course, exhibits none of the atoms with which being first commenced; for the atoms don’t keep;—we merely see their place indicated by that unfossiliferous band at the bottom; but we may detect immediately over it almost the first organisms into which—parting thus early into the two great branches of organic being—they were developed. There are the fucoids, first-born among vegetables,—and there the zoophytes, well nigh the lowest of the animal forms. The fucoids are marine plants; for, according to Oken, ‘all life is from the sea,—none from the continent;’ but there, a few feet higher, we may see the remains of reeds and flags,—semi-aqueous, semi-aerial plants of the comparatively low monocotyledonous order into which the fucoids were developed; higher still we detect fragments of pines, and, I think, juniper,—trees and shrubs of the land of an intermediate order, into which the reeds and flags were developed in turn; and in that peaty layer immediately beneath the vegetable mould, there occur boughs and trunks of blackened oak,—a noble tree of the dicotyledonous division,—the highest to which vegetation in its upward course has yet attained. Nor is the progress of the other great branch of organized being—that of the animal kingdom—less distinctly traceable. The zoophytes became crustacea and molluscs,—the crustacea and molluscs, dog-fishes and herrings,—the dog-fish, a low placoid, shot up chiefly into turbot, cod, and ling; but the smaller osseous fish was gradually converted into a batrachian reptile; in short, the herring became a frog,—an animal that still testifies to its ichthyological origin, by commencing life as a fish. Gradually, in the course of years, the reptile, expanding in size and improving in faculty, passed into a warm-blooded porpoise; the porpoise at length, tiring of the water as he began to know better, quitted it altogether, and became a monkey, and the monkey by slow degrees improved into man,—yes, into man, my friend, who has still a tendency, especially when just shooting up to his full stature, and studying the ‘Vestiges,’ to resume the monkey. Such, Sir, is the true history of creation, as clearly recorded in the section of earth, moss, and silt, which you have so opportunely laid bare. Where that ditch now opens, the generations of the man atop lived, died, and were developed. There flourished and decayed his great-great-great-great-grandfather the sea-pen,—his great-great-great-grandfather the mussel,—his great-great-grandfather the herring,—his great-grandfather the frog,—his grandfather the porpoise,—and his father the monkey. And there also lived, died, and were developed, the generations of the oak, from the kelp-weed and tangle to the reed and the flag, and from the reed and the flag, to the pine, the juniper, the hazel, and the birch.”

“Master,” replies the farmer, “I see you are a scholar and, I suspect, a wag. It would take a great deal of believing to believe all that. In the days of my poor old neighbor the infidel weaver, who died of delirium tremens thirty years ago, I used to read Tom Paine; and, as I was a little wild at the time, I was, I am afraid, a bit of a sceptic. It wasn’t easy work always to be as unbelieving as Tom, especially when the conscience within got queasy; but it would be a vast deal easier, Master, to doubt with Tom than to believe with you. I am a plain man, but not quite a fool; and as I have now been looking about me in this neighborhood for the last forty years, I have come to know that it gives no assurance that any one thing grew out of any other thing because it chances to be found atop of it, Master. See, yonder is Dobbin lying lazily atop of his bundle of hay; and yonder little Jack, with bridle in hand, and he in a few minutes will be atop of Dobbin. And all I see in that ditch, Master, from top to bottom, is neither more nor less than a certain top-upon-bottom order of things. I see sets of bones and dead plants lying on the top of other sets of bones and dead plants,—things lying atop of things, as I say, like Dobbin on the hay and Jack upon Dobbin. I doubt not the sea was once here, Master, just as it was once where you see the low-lying field yonder, which I won from it ten years ago. I have carted tangle and kelp-weed where I now cut clover and rye-grass, and have gathered periwinkles where I now see snails. But it is clean against experience, as my poor old neighbor the weaver used to say,—against my experience, Master,—that it was the kelp-weed that became the rye-grass, or that the periwinkles freshened into snails. The kelp-weed and periwinkles belong to those plants and animals of the sea that we find growing in only the sea; the rye-grass and snails, to those plants and animals of the land that we find growing on only the land. It is contrary to all experience, and all testimony too, that the one passed into the other, and so I cannot believe it; but I do and must believe, instead,—for it is not contrary to experience, and much according to testimony,—that the Author of all created both land productions and sea productions at the ‘times before appointed,’ and ‘determined the bounds of their habitation.’ ‘By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God;’ and I find I can be a believer on God’s terms at a much less expense of credulity than an infidel on yours.”

But in this form at least it can be scarce necessary that the argument should be prolonged.