The Foot-prints of the Creator

by Hugh Miller

In his ninth chapter on the History and Progress of Degradation, our author enters upon a new and interesting subject. The object of it is to determine the proper ground on which the standing of the earlier vertebrata should be decided, namely, the test of what he terms homological symmetry of organization. In nature there are monster families, just as there are in families monster individuals—men without feet, hands, or eyes, or with them in a wrong place—sheep with legs growing from their necks, ducklings with wings on their haunches, and dogs and cats with more legs than they require. We have thus, according to our author—1, monstrosity through defect of parts; 2, monstrosity through redundancy of parts; and 3, monstrosity through displacement of parts. This last species, united in some cases with the other two, our author finds curiously exemplified in the geological history of the fish, which he considers better known than that of any other division of the vertebrata; and he is convinced that it is from a survey of the progress of degradation in the great Ichthyic division that the standing of the kingly fishes of the earlier periods is to be determined.

In the earliest vertebrate period, namely, the Silurian, our author shews that the fishes were homologically symmetrical in their organization, as exhibited in the Placoids. In the second great Ichthyic period, that of the Old Red Sandstone, he finds the first example in the class of fishes of monstrosity, by displacement of parts. In all the Ganoids of the period, there is the same departure from symmetry as would take place in man if his neck was annihilated, and the arms stuck to the back of the head. In the Coccosteus and Pterichthys of the same period, he finds the first example of degradation through defect, the former resembling a human monster without hands, and the latter one without feet. After ages and centuries have passed away, and then after the termination of the Palæozoic period, a change takes place in the formation of the fish tail. “Other ages and centuries pass away, during which the reptile class attains to its fullest development in point of size, organization, and number; and then, after the times of the cretaceous deposits have begun, we find yet another remarkable monstrosity of displacement introduced among all the fishes of one very numerous order, and among no inconsiderable proportion of the fishes of another. In the newly-introduced Ctenoids (Acanthopterygii,) and in those families of the Cycloids which Cuvier erected into the order Malacopterygii sub-brachiati, the hinder limbs are brought forward and stuck on to the base of the previously misplaced fore limbs. All the four limbs, by a strange monstrosity of displacement, are crowded into the place of the extinguished neck. And such, in the present day, is the prevalent type among fishes. Monstrosity through defect is also found to increase; so that the snake-like apoda, or feet-wanting fishes, form a numerous order, some of whose genera are devoid, as in the common eels and the congers, of only the hinder limbs, while in others, as in the genera Muræna and Synbranchus, both hinder and fore-limbs are wanting.” From these and other facts, our author concludes that as in existing fishes we find many more proofs of the monstrosity, both from displacement and defect of parts, than in all the other three classes of the vertebrata, and as these monstrosities did not appear early, but late, “the progress of the race as a whole, though it still retains not a few of the higher forms, has been a progress not of development from the low to the high, but of degradation from the high to the low.” An extreme example of the degradation of distortion, superadded to that of displacement, may be seen in the flounder, plaice, halibut, or turbot,—fishes of a family of which there is no trace in the earlier periods. The creature is twisted half round and laid on its side. The tail, too, is horizontal. Half the features of its head are twisted to one side, and the other half to the other, while its wry mouth is in keeping with its squint eyes. One jaw is straight, and the other like a bow; and while one contains from four to six teeth, the other contains from thirty to thirty-five.

Aided by facts like these, an ingenious theorist might, as our author remarks, “get up as unexceptionable a theory of degradation as of development.” But however this may be, the principle of degradation actually exists, and “the history of its progress in creation bears directly against the assumption that the earlier vertebrata were of a lower type than the vertebrata of the same Ichthyic class which exist now.”

In his next and tenth chapter, our author controverts with his usual power the argument in favor of the development hypothesis, drawn from the predominance of the Brachiopods among the Silurian Molluscs. The existence of the highly organized Cephalopods, in the same formation, not only neutralizes this argument, but authorizes the conclusion that an animal of a very high order of organization existed in the earliest formation. It is of no consequence whether the Cephalopods, or the Brachiopods were most numerous. Had there been only one cuttle fish in the Silurian seas, and a million of Brachiopods, the fact would equally have overturned the development system.

In the same chapter, Mr. Miller treats of the geological history of the Fossil flora, which has been pressed into the service of the development hypothesis. On the authority of Adolphe Brongniart, it was maintained that, previous to the age of the Lias, “Nature had failed to achieve a tree—and that the rich vegetation of the Coal Measures had been exclusively composed of magnificent immaturities of the vegetable kingdom, of gigantic ferns and club mosses, that attained to the size of forest trees, and of thickets of the swamp-loving horse-tail family of plants.” True exogenous trees, however, do exist of vast size, and in great numbers, in all the coal-fields of our own country, as has been proved by Mr. Miller. Nay, he himself discovered in the Old Red Sandstone, Lignite, which is proved to have formed part of a true gymnospermous tree, represented by the pines of Europe and America, or more probably, as Mr. Miller believes, by the Araucarians of Chili and New Zealand. This important discovery is pregnant with instruction. The ancient Conifer must have waved its green foliage over dry land, and it is not probable that it was the only tree in the primeval forest. “The ship carpenter,” as our author observes, “might have hopefully taken axe in hand to explore the woods for some such stately pine as the one described by Milton,—

‘Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast

Of some great admiral.’”

Viewing this olive leaf of the Old Red Sandstone as not at all devoid of poetry, our author invites us to a voyage from the latest formation up to the first zone of the Silurian formation,—thus passing from ancient to still more ancient scenes of being, and finding, as at the commencement of our voyage, a graceful intermixture of land and water, continent, river, and sea.

But though the existence of a true Placoid, a real vertebrated fish, in the Cambrian limestone of Bala, and of true wood at the base of the Old Red Sandstone, are utterly incompatible with the development hypothesis, its supporters, thus driven to the wall, may take shelter under the vague and unquestioned truth that the lower plants and animals preceded the higher, and that the order of creation was fish, reptiles, birds, mammalia, quadrumana, and man. From this resource, too, our author has cut off his opponents, and proceeds to show that such an order of creation, “at once wonderful and beautiful,” does not afford even the slightest presumption in favor of the hypothesis which it is adduced to support.

This argument is carried on in a popular and amusing dialogue in the eleventh chapter. Mr. Miller shows, in the clearest manner, that “superposition is not parental relation,” or that an organism lying above another gives us no ground for believing that the lower organism was the parent of the higher. The theorist, however, looks only at those phases of truth which are in unison with his own views; and, when truth presents no such favorable aspect, he finally wraps himself up in the folds of ignorance and ambiguity—the winding-sheet of error refuted and exposed. We have not yet penetrated, says he, in feeble accents, to the formations which represent the dawn of being, and the simplest organism may yet be detected beneath the lowest fossiliferous rocks. This undoubtedly may be, and Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Leonard Horner are of opinion that such rocks may yet be discovered; while Sir Roderick Murchison and Professor Sedgwick and Mr. Miller are of an opposite opinion. But even were such rocks discovered to-morrow, it would not follow that their organisms gave the least support to the development hypothesis. In the year 1837, when fishes were not discovered in the Upper Silurian rocks, the theorist would have rightly predicted the existence of lower fossiliferous beds; but when they are discovered, and their fossils examined, they furnish the strongest argument that could be desired against the theory they were expected to sustain. This fact, no doubt, is so far in favor of the supposition that there may be still lower fossil-bearing strata; but, as Mr. Miller observes, “The pyramid of organized existence, as it ascends into the by-past eternity, inclines sensibly towards its apex,—that apex of ‘beginning’ on which, on far other than geological grounds, it is our privilege to believe. The broad base of the superstructure planted on the existing scene stretches across the entire scale on life, animal and vegetable; but it contracts as it rises into the past;—man,—the quadrumana,—the quadrupedal man,—the bird and the reptile are each in succession struck from off its breadth, till we at length see it with the vertebrata, represented by only the fish, narrowing as it were to a point; and though the clouds of the upper region may hide its apex, we infer, from the declination of its sides, that it cannot penetrate much farther into the profound.”