Darwin found an idea in South America. You have to examine it very closely to appreciate it clearly. Let us recapitulate very briefly the hundred years of zoology and botany that had gone before.
In the eighteenth century Linné drew up, for the first time, a great catalogue of plant and animal species. Each species had a solid Latin name, and was provided with its particular label, by which every representative of the species could be recognised at once. Then the species were bracketed together in larger groups, and a general system was formed. It was an immense scientific advance, and is still generally appreciated as such. But we have to make one reserve. It is not man that separates things; nature, or rather God who created nature, has already distinguished them. In this respect zoology and botany are of God. The various species of plants and animals are something firmly established by God. Take the polar bear, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, or a particular species of palm, or vine, or rose. There they are, and all that man has to do is to learn their specific characters in order to determine and name them.
Behind all this we really have the ancient idea of the Mosaic story of creation. God made the animals and plants, species by species, put them in their places, and said to man, “Name them as you think fit, classify them, putting the like together and separating the unlike.” So God spake to Adam when he stood before him, naked as a Fuegian. Linné comes on the scene some six thousand years afterwards to set about this naming and arranging in earnest. But that does not make much difference. There are the species created by God. They have ceaselessly reproduced themselves since the days of Paradise according to the command to increase and multiply, each one in its own kind, so that the polar bear has only begotten polar bears, the giraffe giraffes, the hippopotamus hippopotami. Thus, in spite of death, the primitive Paradise is still there, and Linné, the official professor at Upsala, with his venerable wig and embroidered coat, can take up the work of the naked Adam with a good conscience, and finish what the patriarch had not been able to do.
Linné died in 1778 (about the time when Goethe was beginning the Iphigenia and Wilhelm Meister) in the full fame of all these achievements and all his hypotheses from the giraffe to God. Fifty years elapsed between this and Darwin’s voyage; but in those fifty years the following process is accomplished:—
An increasing number of bones and other relics of animal species, that exist no longer, were dug out of the earth. In South America the skeleton was found of a giant-sloth, the megatherium, the remains of a kind of animal, larger than the elephant, that no traveller could find living in the country. The famous mammoth-corpse came to light in the ice of Siberia; an entirely strange elephant with curved tusks and a red woolly coat. Ichthyosauri were found in the rocks in England, and so on. All these “extinct” species had to be named and arranged in the system. A special scientific indication was put on them, which means “extinct.” But this was not enough for thought—which cannot be “entirely dispensed with,” as some one well said, even in exact science.
Where did these extinct species come from? What is their relation to the Creator? Were they created long ago in Paradise with the others, and afterwards conveyed in the ark, only to disappear in the course of time? And what was the cause of their disappearance? Must we conclude that part of what Adam saw was not available for Linné and his pupils? These four remains, a few bones here and there, do not tell us much about them.
Therefore, species may perish: many of them have perished.
There was something new in this, something that obscured the clear lines of earlier science. However, a way of escape was found. It was claimed that these grotesque monsters—ichthyosauri, megatheria, mammoths, &c.—represent an earlier creation, with which Adam had nothing to do. Cuvier developed the theory in his grandiose way in 1812. Before the creation of the animal and plant species that Adam found in Paradise there was a long series of periods in the history of the earth, each of which had its own animal and plant population. It was in one of these periods that the forests grew which we find fossilised in our coal. In another the ichthyosauri, gigantic lizards, filled the ocean. In a third the hideous megatherium dragged along its huge frame, and so on. It is true that there is nothing in the Bible about these ancient and extinct periods; but the Mosaic verses move quickly—they press on to come to man. The repeated creations of the animal and plant worlds are summed up in a single one. We must read something between the lines.
Apart from that, everything is clear. Hence the ancient species were made fixed, solid, and unchangeable by God just like the later species that Adam found in Paradise, and that still exist. Without the will of God they could no more have died out than the actual ones; and there were no human beings there to destroy them. But the divine action intervened. At the end of each of these old-world periods a terrible spectacle was witnessed. The heavens poured out their punishing floods; the seas were heated to steam by fiery masses of rock that were summoned by the divine power from the bowels of the earth. In the course of a single day the carboniferous forests were swallowed up; the megatheria disappeared, legs uppermost, like flies in butter, in the sand dunes of the terrible floods.
The might of the creative act was equalled by the might of the destruction. The science of these vast new creations and divine revolutions before Adam’s birth was called geology. It lived in peace with Linné’s theory of fixed species. Its parent, Cuvier, was so great a genius that it seemed quite impossible that he had made a mistake. Before twenty years were out he was, in the opinion of a contemporary and equally able geologist, declared to be certainly wrong on one point.