The course of creation

by John Anderson

The same causes will account for their destruction in this country—causes, whose effects are still traceable over the whole of continental Europe. Doubtless, these causes extended across the channel, and may have been cotemporaneous with the movements which resulted in separating us from France, occasioning débacles by the alternate upheaval and depression of the sea-bottom, which even the largest animals would be unable to contend against. In the midst of these movements, multitudes would resort to the higher protected grounds, in quest of food, or retire for shelter to caves and other concealments that were elevated above the waters. Remains, accordingly, of nearly all the quadrupeds of the period, the rhinoceros, hippopotamus, lion, tiger, hyena, bear, elk, are to be found in such places, associated with bones of the elephant family, and mixed, for the most part, with the alluvia and detrital gravel of the district. These animals appear not to have perished simultaneously or suddenly; but from the condition of the celebrated Kirkdale caves, when first discovered, it would rather seem that they had long haunted these places, the caverns being generally at a considerable elevation, with an entrance on the side of the valley. The floors were entirely covered with mud, teeth, bones, and stalagmitic incrustations, several feet deep—a den of monsters that were devouring each other, while the common enemy of destruction was approaching to seal the fate of all! The “Reliquiæ Diluvianæ” of Buckland, which first introduced the notice of these caves to the public, assumed the Mosaic deluge as the cause of the catastrophe: other hypotheses have been resorted to, as that certainly would not apply to all the circumstances of the case. Bones of a species of hare or rabbit, the water-rat, mouse, weasel, with fragments of the skeletons of ravens, pigeons, larks, and ducks, are also included among the relics of the fiercer tribes; and many have supposed that these were drifted in by subaqueous currents, or dropped through the fissures, which are both numerous and large in the limestone in which the caverns, for the most part, are situated.

The Mastodon, that is, the mammillary-toothed elephant, was another of the extinct pachyderm class then inhabiting the island. Remains of this animal have been found in the Norwich Crag; there are several species, all of gigantic proportions, some of which have been detected in North America only, and others in Europe. The tigers of the period were larger than the largest of the Bengal race, as is proved by the fossil teeth and bones of the extremities that have been discovered, both at Kirkdale and other places. And so, generally, of all the extinct carnivora, in the qualities of strength and size, superior to all existing types, and cast in the mold of, as they had to contend with, the mammoths and monster theria among which their destiny was cast.

And again, and again, will the questions recur to every curious reader of these details—when, and how, were these huge quadrupeds exterminated, or driven from this island, some of them now utterly extinct, and some of them only generically allied to existing tropical races? The epoch of their rule, according to the geological testimony, verges on the human age, if it does not actually run into it. Terror-stricken, shall we suppose, by the terrene and subaqueous movements which severed Great Britain from the continent—the rush of waters—the rending of the rocks—and the drying up of lakes, consequent on the change—they sought a refuge above the general wreck, where the weak were preyed upon by the strong, and a fierce carnival, for a season, was maintained? On the continent, while similar alterations were taking place over large superficial areas, and the tertiary deposits were being drifted up, many of the animals, and whole families, would escape into southern and warmer countries, and some of the species, in consequence, might long survive the destruction of others. But here, insulated and deprived of the means of performing their annual migrations, the races of every kind would all more speedily perish, preying more easily upon each other, and weakened by alteration of habits, and the great physical changes to which they were subjected. On the Ararat of Yorkshire, and other favored heights, they found a temporary resting-place! But, it was only temporary; for, as the island approximated to its present condition, it proved no longer a suitable dwelling to creatures of their mold—their course was run—and a new creation was to occupy their place.

In closing these sketches of the geology of Great Britain, one may well marvel at the vast changes over the face of this island and of all its productions, as read in the varied and multiform disclosures which the interior structure, formation upon formation, makes known to us.

1. Mark the distinct character of the geological evidence of all the changes, organic and inorganic, to which the island and its inhabitants have been subjected. The evidence rests upon direct observation. The registers are graven as with a pen of iron, and in characters which to be understood have only to be read. The historical period, beyond two decades of centuries, is an utter blank. When Cæsar came into the island, painted savages peopled the land, Druids immolated in thousands their human victims, and, the brief occupation of the invaders past, we are again involved in the darkness of barbarous annals and exterminating wars of unknown tribes. Whence the migrations of its first inhabitants? who were the Cymri that spoke the language of Cwm Llewelyn, and of Cefn y Bêdd? who were the Silures, the Trinobantes, the Cantii, and the Atribates? and whither and what the ever-conflicting lines betwixt the territories of Picts, Celts, and Scots?—questions these that will ever puzzle and disturb the slumbers of the unhappy wight who deals in chronicle lore and archæological history. What now of the oldest civilized states of the old world who gave law, literature, science, art, language, and blood, to all the families of the earth, as the tide of population rolled westward, and the Quadrumana and the Bimana contended for mastery amid the dense aboriginal forests on the banks of the Danube, the Rhine, the Rhone, the Seine, the Thames, the mountains of Cambria and Caledonia? Rome sits in ruined majesty by the waters of the Tiber. Greece knows not, and mourns not, the buried ashes of her mighty dead. Carthage has been blotted out. Tyre has fulfilled her destiny—“a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea.” The shepherd kings of the pyramids have not a name even among men; and Thebes, Luxor, and Carnac, lie as fossils in the desert. What of Babylon and her Tower on the plains of Shinar, that was to reach unto the heavens? and of Nineveh, “a city of three days’ journey” to be compassed? Mounds of earth and rubbish, over which the Arab has pitched his rude tent, and into which the prying antiquary, at the risk of his life, digs for fragments, while the Tigris and Euphrates pursue their heedless course through the waste slimy borders of Uz and Mesopotamia. Thus mark how many illustrious heroes, scholars, lawgivers, who once filled the world with their fame, have, with all their splendid or useful benefactions to their race, passed under the thick cloud of oblivion! The very names of the most noted of them is matter of dispute. And of the multitudes who panted after glory in these ancient days, not an incident in the life of millions has reached the present times.

But geology, as history, is truthful in the oldest as in the most recent of its narrations. How generally accurate in its family genealogies: their relations, kindreds, alliances, and individual peculiarities; the length and strength of body, contour of face, size, structure, and capacity of head, eye, and stomach—all as precisely determined and described in regard to the “habitans” of the most ancient fossiliferous rocks, as the living possessors of earth, sea, or air. Look into our museums, cabinets, monographs, and palæontological lists, and types of organic life are there, from which not only to number the tribes, but to tell of their own varying states and conditions. Wonders there are in geology. But its most seeming fables are realities. The placoids and ganoids of the silurian and devonian age, the exuberant flora of the carboniferous, the giant birds of the triassic, the matchless reptilian forms of the oolite, the microscopic organisms of the chalk, the colossal mammoths and mammalia of the tertiaries, were all as veritable productions of the island as the most familiar grains, grasses, and domesticated breeds which minister to our daily wants. How obscure, uncertain, and limited the range of human history! How extensive, and boundless, and minute the pursuits of geology, which touches on the history of all creatures that ever lived through all their species, genera, orders, and classes, and even remounts to the primeval condition of the planet itself during all the periods, phases, and revolutions of its existence! But of man there is no trace. No voice from the past, issuing out of the solid framework of the globe, intimates the existence of the human family anterior to the last of those great physical changes which we have been contemplating, and over the wreck of whose organic tribes the epoch of the tertiary sections of its crust closes.

2. The teachings of this science in physical geography are no less definite than the astounding disclosures which it makes in history—shadowing out, where mountain chains now rise, the seats of ancient sea bottoms—creeks and bays by lines of mudstones and conglomerates—continents that have been formed from islands, and islands disrupted from continents—lakes, estuaries, and rivers displaced and silted up, and now become the richest depositories of our mineral treasures. The connection of Great Britain with France is a matter almost of demonstration. A zone of primary crystalline rocks encompasses the western coast of both countries, whence geology follows them from Wales and Cornwall into Brittany and Normandy. The silurian, devonian, and carboniferous systems are arranged in the same order on both sides of the channel. Their chalk coasts are identical. A succession of elevating movements, depressions, and dislocations, is traceable everywhere along the southern counties of England, where the line of disturbance, from east to west, has separated the chalk on the north and south, and elevated the Wealden into an anticlinal axis on the Sussex coast. The Isle of Wight has been so shaken by the convulsion, as to have been literally tumbled over, the whole cretaceous formation, and every inferior deposit subjacent to the tertiaries, being in an inverted position. The existence, too, of a vast connecting stretch of land in the Atlantic is far from being improbable, whence the rivers of the Wealden may have issued, as well as much of the detrital matter been transported which now constitutes, with their remarkable and varied organic exuviæ, the basins of London, Hampshire, and Paris.

Very recently botany has come to the assistance of geology, in a manner as remarkable as it was unsuspected. It appears that, along the coast line of Great Britain and Ireland, there are several distinct floras or groups of plants, and all geographically related to existing families on the opposite coasts of the Continent. The flora of the west of Ireland corresponds to that on the north-west of Spain—the south-west of England, and also of Ireland, presents groups allied to those on the north-west of France,—and, again, one is common to the north coast line of France, and south-east of England,—while the fourth and fifth have their types in the alpine flora developed in the Scottish and Welsh mountains, and the mixed and diversified tribes more generally distributed over Ireland, England, and Germany. The assumption implied in this botanic speculation is, that these are the remains of a state of things no longer enduring, proofs of the existence of hotter or colder climates than now prevail, and the indications of a configuration of land and sea when a great mountain barrier extended across the Atlantic from Ireland to Spain. The distribution of the second and third sets of vegetation depended on the connection of England with France and Germany, when a sea covered a large portion of the south of Europe, and the upheaval of whose bed, which constitutes the latest of the tertiary deposits, gave rise to a vast continent, comprising Spain, Ireland, the north of Africa, the Azores, and the Canaries. The alpine flora of Scotland and Wales was effected during the glacial period—to be afterward noticed—when the mountain summits of Britain were low islands or members of an archipelago extending over the Frozen Ocean, and clothed with an arctic vegetation which, in the gradual upheaval of those islands and consequent change of climate, became limited to the summits of the still existing mountains. Professor Edward Forbes, adopting in this curious speculation the views of Mr. Hewet Watson, finds a corroboration of them in the peculiar distribution of endemic animals, especially of the marine and terrestrial mollusca. And he justly concludes that all the changes required for the events which he would connect with the distribution of the British flora, are borne out by the geological phenomena that prevailed during the epoch of the several tertiary deposits.

3. Geology, moreover, in deciphering the evidences of those stupendous operations which resulted in the statical, mineral, and organic arrangements merging in the modern epoch, inculcates some important truths connected with the science of natural theology. The mind, indeed, can never escape, in these investigations, from theistic conclusions. Step by step, as we ascended through the component strata of the globe, witnessed the modifications to which they were subjected, and observed the successive introduction and extinction of so many types of animal and vegetable life, we were just furnished with so many incontestable proofs of the direct interposition of Almighty power. If, indeed, I can read anything more clearly than another in these constantly recurring geological phenomena, termed epochs and formations, it is that of interference with the established order of things. I am conscious that matter did not originate itself. I can see no power in what is termed a law of matter to constitute organic bodies. The originator of matter must be the disposer of all its forms. And when I see these forms so repeatedly changed, assuming new shapes, and giving new scope for varied and multiplied degrees of enjoyment, I have only the more evidences and illustrations before me, that creation and change are, in these instances, correlative terms. The quadrupeds of the tertiary age are like nothing that preceded them in any of the orders or sections of animal existence. Their size, structure, and abundance, equally rivet the attention. And, however long or short the period assigned them on earth, they constitute a group of organic statuary, too remarkable to have been slid in and out by the simple operations of material law. The geological fact, of formation after formation, and of life after life, lies at the foundation of the sublime truth, that God is potentially in, arranging and disposing anew, the entire series of his works: and when I see this mundane scene shifted in all its parts, one system subverted, and another so very different introduced; and, again, the organic and inorganic condition of things readjusted, and in keeping as before, I at once rise in the contemplation of the change “from nature up to nature’s God.”