I love that solemn crypt of the great scientific Church. There I best can feel the sacred soul, the still present spirit of our great masters, their great, their sublime effort, and the immortal audacity of our voyagers and travellers, the intrepid collectors of such a wealth of whatever is beautiful or instructive. Wherever their bones may lie they themselves are still present in the Museum by the treasures which they have bequeathed, treasures which some of them have paid for with their lives.
On the 15th of last October, having remained in that crypt somewhat late, I had some difficulty in reading the label on some Madrepores—that label bore the name of "Lamarck."
A sudden warmth, a religious glow, thrilled through my heart and brain.
"Lamarck!" Great name, and already antique! It is as though among the tombs of Saint Denis we should suddenly read the name of Clovis. The glory, the strifes, the royal triumphs, of his successor, have obscured somewhat the name of that blind Homer of the Museum, who, with the instinct of genius created, organized, and named the previously almost unknown class of Invertebrates; a class, nay, a whole world, a vast abyss of soft half organized life still destitute of vertebræ; that bony centralization and essential support of personality. These are all the more interesting because they are obviously the earliest of all—those humble and so long neglected tribes. Réaumur placed the Crocodiles among the insects. The proud Buffon deigned not to know even the names of humble Invertebrates, he excluded them altogether from the Olympus at Versailles which he erected to Nature. These great populations, so obscure, so confused, which, nevertheless, prepared everything and abound every where, remained exiled from the world of science until the coming of Lamarck. It was precisely the elders that were thus excluded, elders so numerous that to exclude them was, in some sort, to close the eyes and bar the gate against nature herself.
The genius of the Metamorphoses was emancipated by botany and chemistry. It was a bold but most precious thing to take Lamarck, from the Botany in which he had passed his life, and remove him to the vast world of animality. That ardent genius, trained in miracles by the transformations of plants, and full of faith in the unity of life, next drew the animals, and that vast animal, the Globe, from the state of petrifaction in which they so long had lain. Half blind, he intrepidly treated a thousand things which the clear sighted scarcely dared to approach. At least, he infused his fire into them, and Geoffroy, Cuvier and Blainville found them warm and living.
"All is living, or has been," said Lamarck; "everything is life, either present or past." Great revolutionary effort, that, against inert matter; effort proceeding even to suppress and banish the inorganic! No longer any actual death. That which has lived may sleep; and yet preserve latent life, the capacity to revive. Who is really dead? No one. What? Nothing.
This dictum, so novel, and so bold, swelled the sails of our scientific age with a strong and a favoring gale; it has urged on enquiries, such as but for it we should never have dreamed of making. History, or Natural History, we demand of every thing, who are you—and every where the answer is, "I am Life," and, thus, Death retreats before the bold advance and eagle glance of science, and Mind moves onward still, conquering and to conquer.
Among these resuscitations, I first note my Madrepores, taking the interest of life, though previously scorned, or unnoticed, as dead stone. When Lamarck collected and explained them at the Museum, they were detected in the mystery of their activity, in their immense creations, and they exemplified how a world is made. That once known, it was at once suspected that if the earth makes the animal, the animal also makes the earth; and that each aids the other in the office of creation.
Animality is every where, filling every thing and peopling every thing. We find the remains or the imprint of it even in the minerals, as the statuary marble and alabaster, which have passed through the crucible of the most destructive fires. At every advance, in our knowledge of the existing, we discover an enormous past of animal life. As soon as our improvements in Optics enabled us to discover and to watch the Infusoriæ, we behold them making mountains and paving the ocean. The hard silex is a mass of animalcules, the sponge is an animated silex. Our limestones are all animals; Paris is built with infusoriæ, a part of Germany rests upon a newly buried bed of coral. Infusoriæ, coral, shells, chalk and lime. They are constantly taking from the Ocean, but the fish, which devour the coral, restore it as chalk, and restore it to the waters whence it came. Thus the Coral Sea in its labor of production, of upheaving, in its constructions incessantly augmented or diminished, built, ruined, and rebuilt, is an immense fabric of limestone which is continually oscillating between its two lives;—the acting life of the day—the other life that will act to-morrow.