“The creatures see of flood and field,
And those that travel on the wind,
With them no strife can last; they live
In peace and peace of mind.”
Generally speaking, the carnivorous mammalia respect one another: lion does not war with tiger, nor the leopard contend with the hyena. But the carnivorous reptiles manifest no such respect for the carnivorous mammals. There are fierce contests in their native jungles, on the banks of the Ganges, between the gavial and the tiger; and in the steaming forests of South America, the boa-constrictor casts his terrible coil scarce less readily round the puma than the antelope. A world which, after it had become a home of the higher herbivorous and more powerful carnivorous mammals, continued to retain the gigantic reptiles of its earlier ages, would be a world of horrid, exterminating war, and altogether rather a place of torment than a scene of intermediate character, in which, though it sometimes reëchoes the groans of suffering nature, life is, in the main, enjoyment. And so,—save in a few exceptional cases, that, while they establish the rule as a fact, serve also as a key to unlock that principle of the Divine government on which it appears to rest,—no sooner was the reptile removed from his place in the fore-front of creation, and creatures of a higher order introduced into it the consolidating and fast-ripening planet of which he had been so long the monarch, than his bulk shrank and his strength lessened, and he assumed a humility of form and aspect at once in keeping with his reduced circumstances, and compatible with the general welfare. But though the reason of the reduction appears obvious, I know not that it can be referred to any other cause than simply the will of the All-Wise Creator.
There hangs a mystery greatly more profound over the fact of the degradation than over that of the reduction and diminution of classes. We can assign what at least seems to be a sufficient reason why, when reptiles formed as a class the highest representatives of the vertebrata, they should be of imposing bulk and strength, and altogether worthy of that post of precedence which they then occupied among the animals. We can also assign a reason for the strange reduction which took place among them in strength and bulk immediately on their removal from the first to the second place. But why not only reduction, but also degradation? Why, as division started up in advance of division,—first the reptiles in front of the fishes, then the quadrupedal mammals in front of the reptiles, and, last of all, man in front of the quadrupedal mammals,—should the supplanted classes,—two of them at least,—fishes and reptiles,—for there seem to have been no additions made to the mammals since man entered upon the scene,—why should they have become the receptacles of orders and families of a degraded character, which had no place among them in their monarchical state? The fishes removed beyond all analogy with the higher vertebrata, by their homocercal tails,—the fishes (Acanthopterygii and Sub-brachiati) with their four limbs slung in a belt round their necks,—the flat fishes, (Pleuronectidæ,) that, in addition to this deformity, are so twisted to a side, that while the one eye occupies a single orbit in the middle of the skull, the other is thrust out to its edge,—the irregular fishes generally (sun-fishes, frog-fishes, hippocampi, &c.) were not introduced into the ichthyic division until after the full development of the reptile dynasty; nor did the hand that makes no slips in its working “form the crooked serpent,” footless, grovelling, venom-bearing, the authorized type of a fallen and degraded creature, until after the introduction of the mammals. What can this fact of degradation mean? Species and genera seem to be greatly more numerous in the present age of the world than in any of the geologic ages. Is it not possible that the extension of the chain of being which has thus taken place—not only, as we find, through the addition of the higher divisions of animals to its upper end, but also through the interpolations of lower links into the previously existing divisions—may have borne reference to some predetermined scheme of well-proportioned gradation, or, according to the poet,
“Of general Order since the whole began?”
May not, in short, what we term degradation be merely one of the modes resorted to for filling up the voids in creation, and thereby perfecting a scale which must have been originally not merely a scale of narrow compass, but also of innumerable breaks and blanks, hiatuses and chasms? Such, certainly, would be the reading of the enigma which a Soame Jenyns or a Bolingbroke would suggest; but the geologist has learned from his science, that the completion of a chain of at least contemporary being, perfect in its gradations, cannot possibly have formed the design of Providence. Almost ever since God united vitality to matter, the links in this chain of animated nature, as if composed of a material too brittle to bear their own weight when stretched across the geologic ages, have been dropping one after out, from his hand, and sinking, fractured and broken, into the rocks below. It is urged by Pope, that were “we to press on superior powers,” and rise from our own assigned place to the place immediately above all, we would, in consequence of the transposition,
“In the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroyed.