The extent to which even a considerably advanced state of civilisation may become fixed and stereotyped for ages, is the wonder of Europeans who travel in the East. One of my friends declared to me, that whenever the natives expressed to him a wish "that he might live a thousand years," the idea struck him as by no means extravagant, seeing that if he were doomed to sojourn for ever among them, he could only hope to exchange in ten centuries as many ideas, and to witness as much progress as he could do at home in half a century.
It has sometimes happened that one nation has been conquered by another less civilised though more warlike, or that during social and political revolutions, people have retrograded in knowledge. In such cases, the traditions of earlier ages, or of some higher and more educated caste which has been destroyed, may give rise to the notion of degeneracy from a primaeval state of superior intelligence, or of science supernaturally communicated. But had the original stock of mankind been really endowed with such superior intellectual powers and with inspired knowledge and had possessed the same improvable nature as their posterity, the point of advancement which they would have reached ere this would have been immeasurably higher. We cannot ascertain at present the limits, whether of the beginning or the end, of the first stone period when Man co-existed with the extinct mammalia, but that it was of great duration we cannot doubt. During those ages there would have been time for progress of which we can scarcely form a conception, and very different would have been the character of the works of art which we should now be endeavouring to interpret—those relics which we are now disinterring from the old gravel-pits of St. Acheul, or from the Liege caves. In them, or in the upraised bed of the Mediterranean, on the south coast of Sardinia, instead of the rudest pottery or flint tools so irregular in form as to cause the unpractised eye to doubt whether they afford unmistakable evidence of design, we should now be finding sculptured forms surpassing in beauty the masterpieces of Phidias or Praxiteles; lines of buried railways or electric telegraphs from which the best engineers of our day might gain invaluable hints; astronomical instruments and microscopes of more advanced construction than any known in Europe, and other indications of perfection in the arts and sciences such as the nineteenth century has not yet witnessed. Still farther would the triumphs of inventive genius be found to have been carried, when the later deposits, now assigned to the ages of bronze and iron, were formed. Vainly should we be straining our imaginations to guess the possible uses and meaning of such relics—machines, perhaps, for navigating the air or exploring the depths of the ocean, or for calculating arithmetical problems beyond the wants or even the conception of living mathematicians.
The opinion entertained generally by the classical writers of Greece and Rome, that Man in the first stage of his existence was but just removed from the brutes, is faithfully expressed by Horace in his celebrated lines, which begin:—
Quum prorepserunt primis animalia terris.—Sat. lib. 1, 3, 99.
The picture of transmutation given in these verses, however severe and contemptuous the strictures lavishly bestowed on it by Christian commentators, accords singularly with the train of thought which the modern doctrine of progressive development has encouraged.
"When animals," he says, "first crept forth from the newly formed earth, a dumb and filthy herd, they fought for acorns and lurking-places with their nails and fists, then with clubs, and at last with arms, which, taught by experience, they had forged. They then invented names for things and words to express their thoughts, after which they began to desist from war, to fortify cities and enact laws." They who in later times have embraced a similar theory, have been led to it by no deference to the opinions of their pagan predecessors, but rather in spite of very strong prepossessions in favour of an opposite hypothesis, namely, that of the superiority of their original progenitors, of whom they believe themselves to be the corrupt and degenerate descendants.
So far as they are guided by palaeontology, they arrive at this result by an independent course of reasoning; but they have been conducted partly to the same goal as the ancients by ethnological considerations common to both, or by reflecting in what darkness the infancy of every nation is enveloped and that true history and chronology are the creation, as it were, of yesterday.
CHAPTER 20. — THEORIES OF PROGRESSION AND TRANSMUTATION.
Antiquity and Persistence in Character of the existing Races
of Mankind.
Theory of their Unity of Origin considered.
Bearing of the Diversity of Races on the Doctrine of Transmutation.
Difficulty of defining the Terms "Species" and "Race."
Lamarck's Introduction of the Element of Time into the
Definition of a Species.
His Theory of Variation and Progression.
Objections to his Theory, how far answered.
Arguments of modern Writers in favour of Progression in the
Animal and Vegetable World.
The old Landmarks supposed to indicate the first Appearance of Man,
and of different Classes of Animals, found to be erroneous.
Yet the Theory of an advancing Series of Organic Beings not
inconsistent with Facts.
Earliest known Fossil Mammalia of low Grade.
No Vertebrata as yet discovered in the oldest Fossiliferous Rocks.
Objections to the Theory of Progression considered.
Causes of the Popularity of the Doctrine of Progression as compared
to that of Transmutation.