How are the worms in human bodies to be accounted for? There are some, it is true, which bear a resemblance to earth-worms, and are supposed to be eggs we take in with roots, vegetables, &c. Not to insist upon the impossibility of a creature intended to live in the cold earth existing on the hot stomach, it is well known that there are worms in the intestines which have no resemblance to any other thing in the creation—the jointed worm, for instance, which is found of many yards in length: indeed, if some accounts are to be credited, of some scores of yards. Where does this animal exist except in the stomach where it is found? Sheep, dogs, horses, &c. breed worms peculiar to themselves. I have seen frequently between the sound and back-bone of a whiting, long worms that were evidently bred there. As I have no system to support, I shall have no objection if you can account for these facts according to the present philosophy—but to me it seems absolutely impossible.
I may strengthen every thing I have advanced on self-production with additional arguments, and those from instances on the largest scale. The old and new continents are two immense islands. You will get little by supposing them once joined at Kamchatka. What should ever induce those animals which are never seen out of a hot climate, to travel so far North as the Strait between the continents? They do not approach it now, why should they then? Besides, has not each continent some creatures peculiar to itself? Did those in America come from countries where no such animals exist? If they did not, and are found in America only, what is the fair conclusion?
When an inhabitant of the old continent asks how America was peopled, why does the question stop there? How was it supplied with vegetables and animals? particularly river-fish; and whence came those creatures that exist no where else? Pray, what is to hinder an American from reversing the question? When did our people, he may say, first migrate and give inhabitants to the Eastern world? What answer can be given to these questions confident with the present system of philosophy?
There is something in the sound of self-production which seems like a contradiction. I mean nothing more by it, than that a vegetable or animal does in many instances first exist by a different principle than that upon which the species is afterwards continued. As the term does not exactly express this, it may easily be perverted from the sense in which I wish to be understood. Perhaps we shall find that self-production shocks the imagination more or less according to the size of the thing produced. Who would not sooner believe that cheese breeds mites, than that deserts produce elephants? And yet, according to our present philosophy, one is as possible as the other.
If the consequences I have drawn from these facts appear to you wrong, or the facts themselves ill-supported—convince me of my error, and the whole shall be retracted as freely as it is advanced by
Yours most faithfully, &c.
LETTER XXV.
THO’ I hate to set out upon the principle of word-hunting, yet it always gives me pleasure when by accident I can trace the meaning of a word or phrase to its source, and pursue it through its various changes to its present date. The pleasure is still greater to mark the gradual refinement of language from obscurity and barbarism, until it arrives at precision and elegance. Our tongue, as every one knows, is a compound of many.——The pains which William the Conqueror took to graft his Norman French upon it, succeeded in many instances, and there are others where we may trace the dying away of the French by degrees, and the English resuming its old place. Chaucer in his character of the Monk, says
He was a lord full fat and in good point.