Facts and fancies in modern science / Studies of the relations of science to prevalent speculations and religious belief

by Sir John William Dawson

Fig. 12.

Snowflakes copied from nature under the microscope, and serving to illustrate the geometrical arrangement of molecules of water in crystallizing. a, b, simple stars; c, d, hexagonal plates; e, f, rays of large and complex star-shaped flakes. The law of arrangement of the molecules is that of attraction in the lines of three axes at angles of sixty degrees, and the varieties are produced by differences in temperature and rate of supply of material.

A lump of coal at first suggests little to excite interest or imagination; but the student of its composition and microscopic structure finds that it is an accumulation of vegetable matter representing the action of the solar light on the leaves of trees of the Palæozoic Age. It thus calls up images of these perished forests and of the causes concerned in their production and growth, and in the accumulation and preservation of their buried remains. It further suggests the many ways in which this solar energy, so long sealed up, can be recalled to activity in heat, gaslight, steam, and electric light, and how remarkably these things have been related to the wealth and the civilization of modern nations. An able writer of the agnostic school, in a popular lecture on coal, has his imagination so stimulated by these thoughts that he apostrophizes "Nature" as the cunning contriver who stored up this buried sunlight by her strange and mysterious alchemy, kept it quietly to herself through all the long geological periods when reptiles and brute mammals were lords of creation, and through those centuries of barbarism when savage men roamed over the productive coal-districts in ignorance of their treasures, and then revealed her long-hidden stores of wealth and comfort to the admiring study of science and civilization, and for the benefit of the millions belonging to densely-peopled and progressive nations; It is plain that "Nature" in such a connection represents either a poetical fiction, a superstitious fancy, or an intelligent Creative Mind. It is further evident that such Creative Mind must be in harmony with that of man, though vastly greater in its scope and grasp in time and space.

Even the numerical relations observed in nature teach the same lesson. The leaves of plants are not arranged at random, but in a series of curiously-related spirals, differing in different plants, but always the same in the same species and regulated by definite laws. Similar definiteness regulates the ramification of plants, which depends primarily on the arrangement of the leaves. The angle of ramification of the veins of the leaf is settled for each species of plant; so are the numbers of parts in the flower and the angular arrangement of these parts. It is the same in the animal kingdom, such numbers as 5, 6, 8, 10 being selected to determine the parts in particular animals and portions of animals. Once settled, these numbers are wonderfully permanent in geological time. The first known land reptiles appear in the Carboniferous period, and they have normally five toes; these appear in the earliest known species in the lowest beds of the Carboniferous. Their predecessors, the fishes, had numerous fin-rays; but when limbs for locomotion on land were contrived, the number five was adopted as the typical one. It still persists in the five toes and fingers of man himself. From these, as is well known, our decimal notation is derived. It did not originate in any special fitness of the number ten, but in the fact that men began to reckon by counting their ten fingers. Thus the decimal system of arithmetic, with all that follows from it, was settled millions of years ago, in the Carboniferous period, either by certain low-browed and unintelligent batrachians or by their Maker.

2. Nature presents to us very remarkable revelations of dissimilar and widely-separated matters and forces. I have referred to the numerical arrangement of the leaves of plants; but the leaf itself, in its structure and functions, is one of the most remarkable things in nature. Composed of layers of loosely-placed living cells with air-spaces between them; enclosed above and below with a transparent epidermis, the spaces between the cells communicating with the atmosphere without by means of microscopic pores guarded by cunningly-contrived valves opening or closing according to the hygrometric state of the air; connected with the stem of the plant by a system of tubes strengthened with spiral fibres within,—the structure of the leaf is, mechanically considered, of extreme beauty and complexity. But its living functions are still more wonderful. Receiving the water from the soil with such materials as it brings thence in solution, and absorbing carbonic dioxide and ammonia from the air, the living protoplasm of the leaf-cells has the power of chemically changing all these substances, and of producing from them those complicated and otherwise inimitable organic compounds of which the tissues of the plant are built up. The force by which this is done is that of the solar heat and light, both admitted freely into the interior of the leaf through the transparent epidermis, and therein imprisoned, so as to constitute a powerful storehouse of evaporation and chemical energy. In this way all the materials available for the maintenance of life, whether vegetable or animal, are produced, and no other structure than the living vegetable cell, as it exists in the leaf, has the power to effect these miracles of transmutation. Here, let it be observed, we have the vegetable cell placed in relation with the system of the plant, with the soil, with the atmosphere and its waters, with the distant sun itself and the properties of its emitted energies. Let it further be observed that, on the one hand, the chemistry involved in this is of a character altogether different from that which applies to inorganic matter, and, on the other, the products derived from a very few elements embrace all that vast variety of compounds which we observe in plants and animals, and which constitute the material of one of the most complex of sciences—that of organic chemistry. Finally, these complicated structures were produced and all their relations set up at a very early geological period. In so far as we can judge from their remains and the results effected, the leaves of the Palæozoic period were functionally as perfect as their modern successors (see Figs. 13, 14). Of course, the agnostic evolutionist may, if he pleases, attribute all this to fortuitous interactions of the sun, the atmosphere, and the earth, and may provide for what these fail to explain by the assumption of potentialities equivalent to the things produced. But the probability of such an hypothesis becomes infinitely small when we consider the variety and the diversity of things and forces which must have conspired to produce the results observed, and to maintain them so constantly, and yet with so much difference in circumstances and details. It is a relief to turn from such bewildering and gratuitous suppositions to the theory which supposes a designing Creative Mind.

Fig. 13.

Section of the leaf of a Cycad, being one of the most ancient styles of leaf of which the structure is known. a, upper epidermis; b, upper layer of cells, with grains of chlorophyll; c, lower layer of cells, with chlorophyll; d, lower epidermis; e, stomata, or breathing-pores, with contractile cells for opening and closing.

Fig. 14.