The Foot-prints of the Creator

by Hugh Miller

The author of the “Vestiges” is at one, regarding the supposed marine origin of terrestrial plants, with Maillet and Oken; and he regards the theory, we find him stating in his “Explanations,” as the true key to the well-established fact, that the vegetation of groupes of islands generally corresponds with that of the larger masses of land in their neighborhood. Marine plants of the same kinds crept out of the sea, it would seem, upon the islands on the one hand, and upon the larger masses of land on the other, and thus produced the same flora in each; just as tadpoles, after passing their transition state, creep out of their canal or river on the opposite banks, and thus give to the fields or meadows on the right-hand side a supply of frogs, of the same appearance and size as those poured out upon the fields and meadows of the left. “Thus, for example,” we find him saying, “the Galapagos exhibit general characters in common with South America; and the Cape de Verd islands, with Africa. They are, in Mr. Darwin’s happy phrase, satellites to those continents, in respect of natural history. Again,” he continues, “when masses of land are only divided from each other by narrow seas, there is usually a community of forms. The European and African shores of the Mediterranean present an example. Our own islands afford another of far higher value. It appears that the flora of Ireland and Great Britain is various, or rather that we have five floras or distinct sets of plants, and that each of these is partaken of by a portion of the opposite continent. There are, first, a flora confined to the west of Ireland, and imparted likewise to the north-west of Spain; second, a flora in the south-west promontory of England and of Ireland, extending across the Channel to the north-west coast of France; third, one common to the south-east of England and north of France; fourth, an Alpine flora developed in the Scottish and Welsh Highlands, and intimately related to that of the Norwegian Alps; fifth, a flora which prevails over a large part of England and Ireland, ‘mingled with other floras, and diminishing slightly as we proceed westward:’ this bears intimate relation with the flora of Germany. Facts so remarkable would force the meanest fact-collector or species-demonstrator into generalization. The really ingenious man who lately brought them under notice (Professor Edward Forbes) could only surmise, as their explanation, that the spaces now occupied by the intermediate seas must have been dry land at the time when these floras were created. In that case, either the original arrangement of the floras, or the selection of land for submergence, must have been apposite to the case in a degree far from usual. The necessity for a simpler cause is obvious, and it is found in the hypothesis of a spread of terrestrial vegetation from the sea into the lands adjacent. The community of forms in the various regions opposed to each other merely indicates a distinct marine creation in each of the oceanic areas respectively interposed, and which would naturally advance into the lands nearest to it, as far as circumstances of soil and climate were found agreeable.”

Such, regarding the origin of terrestrial vegetation, are the views of Maillet, Oken, and the author of the “Vestiges.” They all agree in holding that the plants of the land existed in their first condition as weeds of the sea.

Let me request the reader at this stage, ere we pass on to the consideration of the experience-argument, to remark a few incidental, but by no means unimportant, consequences of the belief. And, first, let him weigh for a moment the comparative demands on his credulity of the theory by which Professor Forbes accounts for the various floras of the British Islands, and that hypothesis of transmutation which the author of the “Vestiges” would so fain put in its place, as greatly more simple, and, of course, more in accordance with the principles of human belief. In order to the reception of the Professor’s theory, it is necessary to hold, in the first place, that the creation of each species of plant took place, not by repetition of production in various widely-separated centres, but in some single centre, from which the species propagated itself by seed, bud, or scion, across the special area which it is now found to occupy. And this, in the first instance, is of course as much an assumption as any of those assumed numbers or assumed lines with which, in algebra and the mathematics, it is necessary in so many calculations to set out, in quest of some required number or line, which, without the assistance of the assumed ones, we might despair of ever finding. But the assumption is in itself neither unnatural nor violent; there are various very remarkable analogies which lend it support; the facts which seem least to harmonize with it are not wholly irreconcilable, and are, besides, of a merely exceptional character; and, further, it has been adopted by botanists of the highest standing.[34] It is necessary to hold, in the second place, in order to the reception of the theory, that the area of the earth’s surface occupied by the British Islands and the neighboring coasts of the Continent once stood fifty fathoms higher, in relation to the existing sea-level, than it does now,—a belief which, whatever its specific grounds or standing in this particular case, is at least in strict accordance with the general geological phenomena of subsidence and elevation, and which, so far from outraging any experience founded on observation or testimony, runs in the same track with what is known of wide areas now in the course of sinking, like that on the Italian coast, in which the Bay of Baiæ and the ruins of the temple of Serapis occur, or that in Asia, which includes the Run of Cutch; or of what is known of areas in the course of rising, like part of the coast of Sweden, or part of the coast of South America, or in Asia along the western shores of Aracan. Whereas, in order to close with the simpler antagonistic belief of the author of the “Vestiges,” it is necessary to hold, contrary to all experience, that dulce and henware[35] became, through a very wonderful metamorphosis, cabbage and spinnage; that kelp-weed and tangle bourgeoned into oaks and willows; and that slack, rope-weed, and green-raw,[36] shot up into mangel-wurzel, rye-grass, and clover. Simple, certainly! An infidel on terms such as these could with no propriety be regarded as an unbeliever. It is well that the New Testament makes no such extraordinary demands on human credulity.

Let us remark further, at this stage, that, judging from the generally received geological evidence in the case, very little time seems to be allowed by the author of the “Vestiges” for that miraculous process of transmutation through which the low algæ of our sea-shores are held to have passed into high orders of plants which constitute the prevailing British flora. The boulder clay, which rises so high along our hills, and which, as shown by its inferior position on the lower grounds, is decidedly the most ancient of the country’s superficial deposits, is yet so modern, geologically, that it contains only recent shells. It belongs to that cold, glacial, post-Tertiary period, in which what is now Britain existed as a few groupes of insulated hill-tops, bearing the semi-arctic vegetation of our fourth flora,—that true Celtic flora of the country which we now find, like the country’s Celtic races of our own species, cooped up among the mountains. The fifth or Germanic flora must have been introduced, it is held, at a later period, when the climate had greatly meliorated. And if we are to hold that the plants of this last flora were developed from sea-weed, not propagated across a continuity of land from the original centre in Germany, or borne by currents from the mouths of the Germanic rivers,—the theory of Mon. C. Martins,—then must we also hold that that development took place since the times of the boulder clay, and that fucoids and confervæ became dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous plants during a brief period, in which the Purpura lapillus and Turritella terebra did not alter a single whorl, and the Cyprina islandica and Astarte borealis retained unchanged each minute projection of their hinges, and each nicer peculiarity of their muscular impressions. Creation would be greatly less wonderful than a sudden transmutative process such as this, restricted in its operation to groupes of English, Irish, and Manx plants, identical with groupes in Germany, when all the various organisms around them, such as our sea-shells, continued to be exactly what they had been for ages before. A process of development from the lowest to the highest forms, rigidly restricted to the flora of a country, would be simply the miracle of Jonah’s gourd several thousand times repeated.

I must here indulge in a few remarks more, which, though they may seem of an incidental character, have a direct bearing on the general subject. The geologist infers, in all his reasonings founded on fossils, that a race or species has existed from some one certain point in the scale to some other certain point, if he find it occurring at both points together. He infers on this principle, for instance, that the boulder clay, which contains only recent shells, belongs to the recent or post-Tertiary period; and that the Oolite and Lias, which contain no recent shells, represent a period whose existences have all become extinct. And all experience serves to show that his principle is a sound one. In creation there are many species linked together, from their degree of similarity, by the generic tie; but no perfect verisimilitude obtains among them, unless hereditarily derived from the one, two, or more individuals, of contemporary origin, with which the race began. True, there are some races that have spread over very wide circles,—the circle of the human family has become identical with that of the globe; and there are certain plants and animals that, from peculiar powers of adaptation to the varieties of soil and climate,—mayhap also from the tenacious vitality of their seeds, and their facilities of transport by natural means,—are likewise diffused very widely. There are plants, too, such as the common nettle and some of the ordinary grasses, which accompany civilized man all over the globe, he scarce knows how, and spring up unbidden where-ever he fixes his habitation. He, besides, carries with him the common agricultural weeds: there are localities in the United States, says Sir Charles Lyell, where these exotics outnumber the native plants; but these are exceptions to the prevailing economy of distribution; and the circles of species generally are comparatively limited and well defined. The mountains of the southern hemisphere have, like those of Switzerland and the Scotch Highlands, their forests of coniferous trees; but they furnish no Swiss pines or Scotch firs; nor do the coasts of New Zealand or Van Dieman’s Land supply the European shells or fish. True, there may be much to puzzle in the identity of what may be termed the exceptional plants, equally indigenous, apparently, in circles widely separated by space. It has been estimated that there exist about a hundred thousand vegetable species, and of these, thirty Antarctic forms have been recognized by Dr. Hooker as identical with European ones. Had Robinson Crusoe failed to remember that he had shaken the old corn-bag where he found the wheat and barley ears springing up on his island, he might have held that he had discovered a new centre of the European cerealia. And the process analogous to the shaking of the bag is frequently a process not to be remembered. There are several minute lochans in the Hebrides and the west of Ireland in which there occurs a small plant of the cord-rush family, (Eriocaulon septangulare,) which, though common in America, is nowhere to be found on the European Continent. It is the only British plant which belongs to no other part of Europe. How was it transported across the Atlantic? Entangled, mayhap, in the form of a single seed,—for its seeds are exceedingly light and small,—in the plumage of some water-fowl, free of both sea and lake, it had been carried in the germ from the weed-skirted edge of some American swamp or mere, to some mossy lochan of Connaught or of Skye; and one such seed transported by one such accident, unique in its occurrence in thousands of years, would be quite sufficient to puzzle all the botanists forever after. I have seen the seed of one of our Scotch grasses, that had been originally caught in the matted fleece of a sheep reared among the hills of Sutherland, and then wrought into a coarse, ill-dressed woollen cloth, carried about for months in a piece of underclothing. It might have gone over half the globe in that time, and, when cast away with the worn vestment, might have originated a new circle for its species in South America or New Holland. There are seeds specially contrived by the Great Designer to be carried far from their original habitats in the coats of animals,—a mode which admits of transport to much greater distances than the mode, also extensively operative, of consigning them for conveyance to their stomachs; and when we see the work in its effects, we are puzzled by the want of a record of an emigratory process, of which, in the circumstances, no record could possibly exist. Unable to make out a case for the “shaking of the bag,” we bethink us, in the emergency, of repetition of creation. But in circles separated by time, not space,—by time, across whose dim gulfs no voyager sails, and no bird flies, and over which there are no means of transport from the point where a race once fails, to any other point in the future,—we find no repetition of species. If the production of perfect duplicates or triplicates in independent centres were a law of nature, our works of physical science could scarce fail to tell us of identical species found occurring in widely-separated systems,—Scotch firs and larches, for instance, among the lignites of the Lias, or Cyprina islandica and Ostrea edulis among the shells of the Mountain Limestone. But never yet has the geologist found in his systems or formations any such evidence as facts such as these might be legitimately held to furnish, of the independent de novo production of individual members of any single species. On the contrary, the evidence lies so entirely the other way, that he reasons on the existence of a family relation obtaining between all the members of each species, as one of his best established principles. If members of the same species may exist through de novo production, without hereditary relationship, so thoroughly, in consequence, does the fabric of geological reasoning fall to the ground, that we find ourselves incapacitated from regarding even the bed of common cockle or mussel shells, which we find lying a few feet from the surface on our raised beaches, as of the existing creation at all. Nay, even the human remains of our moors may have belonged, if our principle of relationship in each species be not a true one, to some former creation, cut off from that to which we ourselves belong, by a wide period of death. All palæontological reasoning is at an end forever, if identical species can originate in independent centres, widely separated from each other by periods of time; and if they fail to originate in periods separated by time, how or why in centres separated by space?

Let the reader remark further, the bearing of those facts from which this principle of geological reasoning has been derived, on the development hypothesis. We find species restricted to circles and periods; and though stragglers are occasionally found outside the circle in the existing state of things, never are they found beyond their period among the remains of the past. It was profoundly argued by Cuvier, that life could not possibly have had a chemical origin. “In fact,” we find him remarking, “life exercising upon the elements which at every instant form part of the living body, and upon those which it attracts to it, an action contrary to that which would be produced without it by the usual chemical affinities, it is inconsistent to suppose that it can itself be produced by these affinities.” And the phenomena of restriction to circle and period testify to the same effect. Nothing, on the one hand, can be more various in character and aspect than the organized existences of the various circles and periods; nothing more invariable, on the other, than the results of chemical or electrical experiment. And yet, to use almost the words of Cuvier, “we know of no other power in nature capable of reuniting previously separated molecules,” than the electric and the chemical. To these agents, accordingly, all the assertors of the development hypothesis have had recourse for at least the origination of life. Air, water, earth existing as a saline mucus, and an active persistent electricity, are the creative ingredients of Oken. The author of the “Vestiges” is rather less explicit on the subject: he simply refers to the fact, that the “basis of all vegetable and animal substances consists of nucleated cells,—that is, of cells having granules within them;” and states that globules of a resembling character “can be produced in albumen by electricity;” and that though albumen itself has not yet been produced by artificial means,—the only step in the process of creation which is wanting,—it is yet known to be a chemical composition, the mode of whose production may “be any day discovered in the laboratory.” Further, he adopts, as part of the foundation of his hypothesis, the pseudo-experiment of Mr. Weekes, who holds that out of certain saline preparations, acted upon by electricity, he can produce certain living animalcula of the mite family;—the vital and the organized out of the inorganic and the dead. In all such cases, electricity, or rather, according to Oken, galvanism, is regarded as the vitalizing principle. “Organism,” says the German, “is galvanism residing in a thoroughly homogeneous mass.... A galvanic pile pounded into atoms must become alive. In this manner nature brings forth organic bodies.” I have even heard it seriously asked whether electricity be not God! Alas! could such a god, limited in its capacity of action, like those “gods of the plains” in which the old Syrian trusted, have wrought, in the character of Creator, with a variety of result so endless, that in no geologic period has repetition taken place? In all that purports to be experiment on the development side of the question, we see nothing else save repetition. The Acarus Crossi of Mr. Weekes is not a new species, but the repetition of an old one, which has been long known as the Acarus horridus, a little bristle-covered creature of the mite family, that harbors in damp corners among the debris of outhouses, and the dust and dirt of neglected workshops and laboratories. Nay, even a change in the chemical portion of the experiment by which he believed the creature to be produced, failed to secure variety. A powerful electric current had been sent, in the first instance, through a solution of silicate of potash, and, after a time, the Acarus horridus crawled out of the fluid. The current was then sent through a solution of nitrate of copper, and after a due space, the Acarus horridus again creeped out. A solution of ferro-cyanate of potash was next subjected to the current, and yet again, and in greater numbers than on the two former occasions, there appeared, as in virtue, it would seem, of its extraordinary appetency, to be the same ever-recurring Acarus horridus. How, or in what form, the little creature should have been introduced into the several experiments, it is not the part of those who question their legitimacy to explain; it is enough for us to know, that individuals of the family to which the Acarus belongs are so remarkable for their powers of life, even in their fully developed state, as to resist, for a time, the application of boiling water, and to live long in alcohol. We know, further, that the germs of the lower animals are greatly more tenacious of vitality than the animals themselves; and that they may exist in their state of embryonism in the most unthought of and elusive forms; nay,—as the recent discoveries regarding alterations of generation have conclusively shown,—that the germ which produced the parent may be wholly unlike the germ that produces its offspring, and yet identical with that which produced the parent’s parent. Save on the theory of a quiescent vitality, maintained by seeds for centuries within a few inches of the earth’s surface, we know not how a layer of shell, sand, or marl, spread over the bleak moors of Harris, should produce crops of white clover, where only heath had grown before; nor how brakes of doddered furze burnt down on the slopes of the Cromarty Sutors should be so frequently succeeded by thickets of raspberry. We are not, however to give up the unknown,—that illimitable province in which science discovers,—to be a wild region of dream, in which fantasy may invent. There are many dark places in the field of human knowledge which even the researches of ages may fail wholly to enlighten; but no one derives a right from that circumstance to people them with chimeras and phantoms. They belong to the philosophers of the future,—not to the visionaries of the present. But while it is not our part to explain how, in the experiments of Mr. Weekes, the chain of life from life has been maintained unbroken, we can most conclusively show, that that world of organized existence of which we ourselves form part, is, and ever has been, a world, not of tame repetition, but of endless variety. It is palpably not a world of Acaridæ of one species, nor yet of creatures developed from these, under those electric or chemical laws of which the grand characteristic is invariability of result. The vast variety of its existences speak not of the operation of unvarying laws, that represent, in their uniformity of result, the unchangeableness of the Divinity, but of creative acts, that exemplify the infinity of His resources.

Let the reader yet further remark, if he has followed me through these preliminary observations, what is really involved in the hypothesis of the author of the “Vestiges,” regarding the various floras common to the British islands and the Continent. If it was upon his scheme that England, Ireland, and the mainland of Europe came to possess an identical flora, production de novo and by repetition of the same species must have taken place in thousands of instances along the shores of each island and of the mainland. His hypothesis demands that the sea-weed on the coast of Ireland should have been developed, first through lower, and then higher forms, into thousands of terrestrial plants,—that exactly the same process of development from sea-weed into terrestrial plants of the same species should have taken place on the coast of England, and again on the coasts of the Continent generally,—and that identically the same vegetation should have been originated in this way in at least three great centres. And if plants of the same species could have had three distinct centres of organization and development, why not three hundred, or three thousand, or three hundred thousand? Nor will it do to attempt escaping from the difficulty, by alleging that there is the groundwork in the case of at least a common marine vegetation to start from; and that thus, if we have not properly the existence of the direct hereditary tie among the various individuals of each species, we may yet recognize at least a sort of collateral relationship among them, derived from the relationship of their marine ancestry. For relationship, in even the primary stage, the author of the “Vestiges” virtually repudiates, by adopting, as one of the foundations of his hypothesis, with, of course, all the legitimate consequences, the experiments of Mr. Weekes. The animalculæ-making process is instanced as representative of the first stage of being,—that in which dead inorganic matter assumes vitality; and it corresponds, in the zoological branch, to the production of a low marine vegetation in the phytological one. A certain semi-chemical, semi-electrical process, originates, time after time, certain numerous low forms of life, identical in species, but connected by no tie of relationship: such is the presumed result of the Weekes experiment. A certain further process of development matures low forms of life, thus originated, into higher species, also identical, and also wholly unconnected by the family tie: such are the consequences legitimately involved in that island-vegetation theory promulgated by the author of the “Vestiges.” And be it remembered that Mr. Weekes’ process, so far as it is simply electrical and chemical, is a process which is as capable of having been gone through in all times and all places, as that other process of strewing marl upon a moor, through which certain rustic experimenters have held that they produced white clover. It could have been gone through during the Carboniferous or the Silurian period; for all truly chemical and electrical experiments would have resulted in manifestations of the same phenomena then as now:—an acid would have effervesced as freely with an alkali; and each fibre of an electrified feather—had feathers then existed—would have stood out as decidedly apart from all its neighbors. We must therefore hold, if we believe with the author of the “Vestiges,” first, from the Weekes experiment, that in all times, and in all places, every centre of a certain chemical and electric action would have become a new centre of creation to certain recent species of low, but not very low, organization; and, second, from his doctrine regarding the identity of the British and Continental floras, that in the course of subsequent development from these low forms, the process in each of many widely-separated centres,—widely separated both by space and time,—would be so nicely correspondent with the process in all the others, that the same higher recent forms would be matured in all. And to doctrines such as these, the experience of all Geologists, all Phytologists, all Zoologists, is diametrically opposed. If these doctrines be true, their sciences are false in their facts, and idle and unfounded in their principles.

THE TWO FLORAS, MARINE AND TERRESTRIAL.
BEARING OF THE EXPERIENCE ARGUMENT.

Is the reader acquainted with the graphic verse, and scarce less graphic prose, in which Crabbe describes the appearances presented by a terrestrial vegetation affected by the waters of the sea? In both passages, as in all his purely descriptive writings, there is a solidity of truthful observation exhibited, which triumphs over their general homeliness of vein.