Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot

by Philip Henry Gosse

Once more. The cow that peacefully ruminates under the grateful shadow of yonder spreading beech, was, a year or two ago, a gamesome heifer with budding horns. The year before, she was a bleating calf, which again had been a breathless fœtus wrapped up in the womb of its mother. Earlier still it had been an unformed embryo; and yet earlier, an embryonic vesicle, a microscopically minute cell, formed out of one of the component cells of a still earlier structure,—the germinal vesicle of a fecundated ovum. But this ovum, which is the remotest point to which we can trace the history of our cow as an individual, was, before it assumed a distinct individuality, an undistinguishable constituent of a viscus,—the ovary,—of another cow, an essential part of her structure, a portion of the tissues of her body, to be traced back, therefore, through all the stages which I have enumerated above, to the tissues of another parent cow, thence to those of a former, and so on, through a vista of receding cows, as long as you choose to follow it.

embryo—fœtus—calf—heifer—cow—ovum—germ. vesicle—embr. vesicle

This, then, is the order of all organic nature. When once we are in any portion of the course, we find ourselves running in a circular groove, as endless as the course of a blind horse in a mill. It is evident that there is no one point in the history of any single creature, which is a legitimate beginning of existence. And this is not the law of some particular species, but of all: it pervades all classes of animals, all classes of plants, from the queenly palm down to the protococcus, from the monad up to man: the life of every organic being is whirling in a ceaseless circle, to which one knows not how to assign any commencement,—I will not say any certain or even probable, but any possible, commencement. The cow is as inevitable a sequence of the embryo, as the embryo is of the cow. Looking only at nature, or looking at it only with the lights of experience and reason, I see not how it is possible to avoid one of these two theories, the development of all organic existence out of gaseous elements, or the eternity of matter in its present forms.

Creation, however, solves the dilemma. I have, in my postulates, begged the fact of creation, and I shall not, therefore, attempt to prove it. Creation, the sovereign fiat of Almighty Power, gives us the commencing point, which we in vain seek in nature. But what is creation? It is the sudden bursting into a circle. Since there is no one stage in the course of existence, which, more than any other affords a natural commencing point, whatever stage is selected by the arbitrary will of God, must be an unnatural, or rather a preter-natural, commencing point.

The life-history of every organism commenced at some point or other of its circular course. It was created, called into being, in some definite stage. Possibly, various creatures differed in this respect; perhaps some began existence in one stage of development, some in another; but every separate organism had a distinct point at which it began to live. Before that point there was nothing; this particular organism had till then no existence; its history presents an absolute blank; it was not.

But the whole organisation of the creature thus newly called into existence, looks back to the course of an endless circle in the past. Its whole structure displays a series of developments, which as distinctly witness to former conditions as do those which are presented in the cow, the butterfly, and the fern, of the present day. But what former conditions? The conditions thus witnessed unto, as being necessarily implied in the present organisation, were non-existent; the history was a perfect blank till the moment of creation. The past conditions or stages of existence in question, can indeed be as triumphantly inferred by legitimate deduction from the present, as can those of our cow or butterfly; they rest on the very same evidences; they are identically the same in every respect, except in this one, that they were unreal. They exist only in their results; they are effects which never had causes.

Perhaps it may help to clear my argument if I divide the past developments of organic life, which are necessarily, or at least legitimately, inferrible from present phenomena, into two categories, separated by the violent act of creation. Those unreal developments whose apparent results are seen in the organism at the moment of its creation, I will call prochronic, because time was not an element in them; while those which have subsisted since creation, and which have had actual existence, I will distinguish as diachronic, as occurring during time.

Now, again I repeat, there is no imaginable difference to sense between the prochronic and the diachronic development. Every argument by which the physiologist can prove to demonstration that yonder cow was once a fœtus in the uterus of its dam, will apply with exactly the same power to show that the newly created cow was an embryo, some years before its creation.