The Foot-prints of the Creator

by Hugh Miller

Low on the ear the distant billows sound,

And just in view appears their stony bound.”

“The ditches of a fen so near the ocean,” says the poet, in the note which accompanies this passage, “are lined with irregular patches of a coarse-stained laver; a muddy sediment rests on the horse-tail and other perennial herbs which in part conceal the shallowness of the stream; a fat-leaved, pale-flowering scurvy-grass appears early in the year, and the razor-edged bullrush in the summer and autumn. The fen itself has a dark and saline herbage: there are rushes and arrow-head; and in a few patches the flakes of the cotton-grass are seen, but more commonly the sea-aster, the dullest of that numerous and hardy genus; a thrift, blue in flower, but withering, and remaining withered till the winter scatters it; the salt-wort, both simple and shrubby; a few kinds of grass changed by the soil and atmosphere; and low plants of two or three denominations, undistinguished in the general view of scenery;—such is the vegetation of the fen where it is at a small distance from the ocean.”

And such are the descriptions of Crabbe, at once a poet and a botanist. In referring to the blue tint exhibited in salt-fens by the pink-colored flower of the thrift, (Statice Armeria,) he might have added, that the general green of the terrestrial vegetation likewise assumes, when subjected to those modified marine influences under which plants of the land can continue to live, a decided tinge of blue. It is further noticeable, that the general brown of at least the larger algæ presents, as they creep upwards upon the beach to meet with these, a marked tinge of yellow. The prevailing brown of the one flora approximates towards yellow,—the prevailing green of the other towards blue; and thus, instead of mutually merging into some neutral tint, they assume at their line of meeting directly antagonistic hues.

But what does experience say regarding the transmutative conversion of a marine into a terrestrial vegetation,—that experience on which the sceptic founds so much? As I walked along the green edge of the Lake of Stennis, selvaged by the line of detached weeds with which a recent gale had strewed its shores, and marked that for the first few miles the accumulation consisted of marine algæ, here and there mixed with tufts of stunted reeds or rushes, and that as I receded from the sea it was the algæ that became stunted and dwarfish, and that the reeds, aquatic grasses, and rushes, grown greatly more bulky in the mass, were also more fully developed individually, till at length the marine vegetation altogether disappeared, and the vegetable debris of the shore became purely lacustrine,—I asked myself whether here, if anywhere, a transition flora between lake and sea ought not to be found? For many thousand years ere the tall gray obelisks of Stennis, whose forms I saw this morning reflected in the water, had been torn from the quarry, or laid down in mystic circle on their flat promontories, had this lake admitted the waters of the sea, and been salt in its lower reaches and fresh in its higher. And during this protracted period had its quiet, well-shattered bottom been exposed to no disturbing influences through which the delicate process of transmutation could have been marred or arrested. Here, then, if in any circumstances, ought we to have had in the broad, permanently brackish reaches, at least indications of a vegetation intermediate in its nature between the monocotyledons of the lake and the algæ of the sea; and yet not a vestige of such an intermediate vegetation could I find among the up-piled debris of the mixed floras, marine and lacustrine. The lake possesses no such intermediate vegetation. As the water freshens in its middle reaches, the algæ become dwarfish and ill-developed; one species after another ceases to appear, as the habitat becomes wholly unfavorable to it, until at length we find, instead of the brown, rootless, flowerless fucoids and confervæ of the ocean, the green, rooted, flower-bearing flags, rushes, and aquatic grasses of the fresh water. Many thousands of years have failed to originate a single intermediate plant. And such, tested by a singularly extensive experience, is the general evidence.

There is scarce a chain-length of the shores of Britain and Ireland that has not been a hundred and a hundred times explored by the botanist,—keen to collect and prompt to register every rarity of the vegetable kingdom; but has he ever yet succeeded in transferring to his herbarium a single plant caught in the transition state? Nay, are there any of the laws under which the vegetable kingdom exists better known than those laws which fix certain species of the algæ to certain zones of coast, in which each, according to the overlying depth of water and the nature of the bottom, finds the only habitat in which it can exist? The rough-stemmed tangle (Laminaria digitata) can exist no higher on the shore than the low line of ebb during stream-tides; the smooth-stemmed tangle (Laminaria saccharina) flourishes along an inner belt, partially uncovered during the ebbs of the larger neaps; the forked and cracker kelp-weeds (Fucus serratus and Fucus nodosus) thrive in a zone still less deeply covered by water, and which even the lower neaps expose. And at least one other species of kelp-weed, the Fucus vesiculosus, occurs in a zone higher still, though, as it creeps upwards on the rocky beach, it loses its characteristic bladders, and becomes short and narrow of frond. The thick brown tufts of Fucus canaliculatus, which in the lower and middle reaches of the Lake of Stennis I found heaped up in great abundance along the shores, also rises high on rocky beaches,—so high in some instances, that during neap-tides it remains uncovered by the water for days together. If, as is not uncommon, there be an escape of land springs along the beach, there may be found, where the fresh water oozes out through the sand and gravel, an upper terminal zone of the confervæ, chiefly of a green color, mixed with the ribbon-like green layer, (Ulva latissima,) the purplish-brown layer, (Porphyra laciniata,) and still more largely with the green silky Enteromorpha, (E. compressa.)[37] And then, decidedly within the line of the storm-beaches of winter,—not unfrequently in low sheltered bays, such as the Bay of Udale or of Nigg, where the ripple of every higher flood washes,—we may find the vegetation of the land—represented by the sentinels and picquets of its outposts—coming down, as if to meet with the higher-growing plants of the sea. In salt marshes the two vegetations may be seen, if I may so express myself, dovetailed together at their edges,—at least one species of club-rush (Scirpus maritimus) and the common saltwort and glasswort (Salsola kali and Salicornia procumbens) encroaching so far upon the sea as to mingle with a thinly-scattered and sorely-diminished fucus,—that bladderless variety of the Fucus vesiculosus to which I have already referred, and which may be detected in such localities, shooting forth its minute brown fronds from the pebbles. On rocky coasts, where springs of fresh water come trickling down along the fissures of the precipices, the observer may see a variety of Rhodomenia palmata—the fresh-water dulse of the Moray Frith—creeping upwards from the lower limits of production, till just where the common gray balanus ceases to grow. And there, short and thick, and of a bleached yellow hue, it ceases also; but one of the commoner marine confervæ,—the Conferva arcta, blent with a dwarfed Enteromorpha,—commencing a very little below where the dulse ends, and taking its place, clothes over the runnels with its covering of green for several feet higher: in some cases, where it is frequently washed by the upward dash of the waves, it rises above even the flood-line; and in some crevice of the rock beside it, often as low as its upper edge, we may detect stunted tufts of the sea-pink or of the scurvy-grass. But while there is thus a vegetation intermediate in place between the land and the sea, we find, as if it had been selected purposely to confound the transmutation theory, that it is in no degree intermediate in character. For, while it is chiefly marine weeds of the lower division of the confervæ that creep upwards from the sea to meet the vegetation of the land, it is chiefly terrestrial plants of the higher division of the dicotyledons that creep downwards from the land to meet the vegetation of the sea. The salt-worts, the glass-worts, the arenaria, the thrift, and the scurvy-grass, are all dicotyledonous plants. Nature draws a deeply-marked line of division where the requirements of the transmutative hypothesis would demand the nicely graduated softness of a shaded one; and, addressing the strongly marked floras on either hand, even more sternly than the waves themselves, demands that to a certain definite bourne should they come, and no farther.

But in what form, it may be asked, or with what limitations, ought the Christian controversialist to avail himself, in this question, of the experience argument? Much ought to depend, I reply, on the position taken up by the opposite side. We find no direct reference made by the author of the “Vestiges” to the anti-miracle argument, first broached by Hume, in a purely metaphysical shape, in his well-known “Inquiry,” and afterwards thrown into the algebraic form by La Place, in his Essai philosophique sur les Probabilités. But we do not detect its influences operative throughout the entire work. It is because of some felt impracticability on the part of its author, of attaining to the prevailing belief in the miracle of creation, that he has recourse, instead, to the so-called law of development. The law and the miracle are the alternatives placed before him; and, rejecting the miracle, he closes with the law. Now, in such circumstances, he can have no more cause of complaint, if, presenting him with the experience argument of Hume and La Place, we demand that he square the evidence regarding the existence of his law strictly according to its requirements, than the soldier of an army that charged its field-pieces with rusty nails would have cause of complaint if he found himself wounded by a missile of a similar kind, sent against him by the artillery of the enemy. You cannot, it might be fairly said, in addressing him, acquiesce in the miracle here, because, as a violation of the laws of nature, there are certain objections, founded on invariable experience, which bear direct against your belief in it. Well, here are the objections, in the strongest form in which they have yet been stated; and here is your hypothesis respecting the development of marine algæ into terrestrial plants. We hold that against that hypothesis the objections bear at least as directly as against any miracle whatever,—nay, that not only is it contrary to an invariable experience, but opposed also to all testimony. We regard it as a mere idle dream. Maillet dreamed it,—and Lamarck dreamed it,—and Oken dreamed it; but none of them did more than merely dream it: its existence rests on exactly the same basis of evidence as that of Whang the miller’s “monstrous pot of gold and diamonds,” of which he dreamed three nights in succession, but which he never succeeded in finding. If we are in error in our estimate, here is the argument, and here the hypothesis; give us, in support of the hypothesis, the amount of evidence, founded on a solid experience, which the argument demands.

But to leave the experience argument in exactly the state in which it was left by Hume and La Place, would be doing no real justice to our subject. It is in that state quite sufficient to establish the fact, that there can be no real escape from belief in acts of creation never witnessed by man, to processes of development never witnessed by man; seeing that a presumed law beyond the cognizance of experience must be as certainly rejected, on the principle of the argument, as a presumed miracle beyond that cognizance. It places the presumed law and the presumed miracle on exactly the same level. But there is a palpable flaw in the anti-miracle argument. It does not prove that miracles may not have taken place, but that miracles, whether they have taken place or no, are not to be credited, and this simply because they are miracles, i. e. violations of the established laws of nature. And if it be possible for events to take place which man, on certain principles, is imperatively required not to credit, these principles must of course serve merely to establish a discrepancy between the actual state of things, and what is to be believed regarding it. And thus, instead of serving purposes of truth, they are made to subserve purposes of error; for the existence of truth in the mind is neither more nor less than the existence of certain conceptions and beliefs, adequately representative of what actually is, or what really has taken place.

I cannot better illustrate this direct tendency of the anti-miracle argument to destroy truth in the mind, by bringing the mental beliefs into a state of nonconformity with the possible and actual, than by a quotation from La Place himself: “We would not,” he says, “give credit to a man who would affirm that he saw a hundred dice thrown into the air, and that they all fell on the same faces. If we had ourselves been spectators of such an event, we would not believe our own eyes till we had scrupulously examined all the circumstances, and assured ourselves that there was no trick or deception. After such an examination, we would not hesitate to admit it, notwithstanding its great improbability; and no one would have recourse to an inversion of the laws of vision in order to account for it.” Now, here is the principle broadly laid down, that it is impossible to communicate by the evidence of testimony, belief in an event which might happen, and which, if it happened, ought on certain conditions to be credited. No one knew better than La Place himself, that the possibility of the event which he instanced could be represented with the utmost exactitude by figures. The probability, in throwing a single die, that the ace will be presented on its upper face, is as one in six,—six being the entire number of sides which the cube can possibly present, and the side with the ace being one of these;—the probability that in throwing a pair of dice the aces of both will be at once presented on their upper faces, is as one in thirty-six, as against the one sixth chance of the ace being presented by the one, there are also six chances that the ace of the other should not concur with it;—and in throwing three dice, the probability that their three aces should be at once presented is, of course, on the same principle, as one in six times thirty-six, or, in other words, as one in two hundred and sixteen. And thus, in ascertaining the exact degree of probability of the hundred aces at once turning up, we have to go on multiplying by six, for each die we add to the number, the product of the immediately previous calculation. Unquestionably, the number of chances against, thus balanced with the single chance for, would be very great; but its existence as a definite number would establish, with all the force of arithmetical demonstration, the possibility of the event; and if an eternity were to be devoted to the throwing into the air of the hundred dice, it would occur an infinite number of times. And yet the principle of Hume and La Place forms, when adopted, an impassable gulf between this possibility and human belief. The possibility might be embodied, as we see, in an actual occurrence,—an occurrence witnessed by hundreds; and yet the anti-miracle argument, as illustrated by La Place, would cut off all communication regarding it between these hundreds of witnesses, however unexceptionable their character as such, and the rest of mankind. The principle, instead of giving us a right rule through which the beliefs in the mind are to be rendered correspondent with the reality of things, goes merely to establish a certain imperfection of transmission from one mind to another, in consequence of which, realities in fact, if very extraordinary ones, could not possibly be received as objects of belief, nor the mental appreciation of things be rendered adequately concurrent with the state in which the things really existed.

Nor is the case different when, for a possibility which the arithmetician can represent by figures, we substitute the miracle proper. Neither Hume nor La Place ever attempted to show that miracles could not take place; they merely directed their argument against a belief in them. The wildest sceptic must admit, if in any degree a reasonable man, that there may exist a God, and that that God may have given laws to nature. No demonstration of the non-existence of a Great First Cause has been ever yet attempted, nor, until the knowledge of some sceptic extends over all space, ever can be rationally attempted. Merely to doubt the fact of God’s existence, and to give reasons for the doubt, must till then form the highest achievements of scepticism. And the God who may thus exist, and who may have given laws to nature, may also have revealed himself to man, and, in order to secure man’s reasonable belief in the reality of the revelation, may have temporarily suspended in its operation some great natural law, and have thus shown himself to be its Author and Master. Such seems to be the philosophy of miracles; which are thus evidently not only not impossibilities, but even not improbabilities. Even were we to permit the sceptic himself to fix the numbers representative of those several mays in the case, which I have just repeated, the chances against them, so to speak, would be less by many thousand times than the chances against the hundred dice of La Place’s illustration all turning up aces. The existence of a Great First Cause is at least as probable—the sceptic himself being judge in the matter—as the non-existence of a Great First Cause; and so the probability in this first stage of the argument, instead of being, as in the case of the single die, only one to six, is as one to one. Again,—in accordance with an expectation so general among the human family as to form one of the great instincts of our nature,—an instinct to which every form of religion, true or false, bears evidence,—it is in no degree less probable that this God should have revealed himself to man, than that he should not have revealed himself to man; and here the chances are again as one to one,—not, as in the second stage of the calculation on the dice, as one to thirty-six. Nor, in the third and last stage, is it less probable that God, in revealing himself to man should have given miraculous evidence of the truth of the revelation, so that man “might believe in Him for His work’s sake,” than that He should not have done so; and here yet again the chances are as one to one,—not as one to two hundred and sixteen. No rational sceptic could fix the chances lower; nay, no rational sceptic, so far as the existence of a Great First Cause is concerned, would be inclined to fix them so low: and yet it is in order to annihilate all belief in a possibility against which the chances are so few as to be represented—scepticism itself being the actuary in the case—by three units, that Hume and La Place have framed their argument. Miracles may have taken place,—the probabilities against them, stated in their most extreme and exaggerated form, are by no means many or strong; but we are nevertheless not to believe that they did take place, simply because miracles they were. Now, the effect of the establishment of a principle such as this would be simply, I repeat, the destruction of the ability of transmitting certain beliefs, however well founded originally, from one set or generation of men to another. These beliefs the first set or generation might, on La Place’s own principles, be compelled to entertain. The evidence of the senses, however wonderful the event which they certified, is not, he himself tells us, to be resisted. But the conviction which, on one set of principles, these men were on no account to resist, the men that came immediately after them were, on quite another set of principles, on no account to entertain. And thus the anti-miracle argument, instead of leading, as all true philosophy ought, to an exact correspondence between the realities of things and the convictions received by the mind regarding them, palpably forms a bar to the reception of beliefs, adequate to the possibilities of actual occurrence or event, and so constitutes an imperfection or flaw in the mental economy, instead of working an improvement. And, in accordance with this view, we find that in the economy of minds of the very highest order this imperfection or flaw has had no place. Locke studied and wrote upon the subject of miracles proper, and exhibited in his “Discourse” all the profundity of his extraordinary mind; and yet Locke was a believer. Newton studied and wrote on the subject of miracles of another kind,—those of prophecy; and he also, as shown by his “Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse,” was a believer. Butler studied and wrote on the subject of miracles, chiefly in connection with “Miraculous Revelation;” and he also was a believer. Chalmers studied and wrote on the subject of miracles in his “Evidences,” after Hume, La Place, and Playfair had all promulgated their peculiar views regarding it; and he also was a believer. And in none of the truly distinguished men of the present day, though all intimately acquainted with the anti-miracle argument, is this flaw or imperfection found to exist: on the contrary, they all hold, as becomes the philosophic intellect and character, that whatever is possible may occur, and that whatever occurs ought, on the proper evidence, to be believed.