Initiative in Evolution

CHAPTER I.. From Known to Unknown

FROM KNOWN TO UNKNOWN

Upward--still upward--still upward to the highest! Such is the claim of modern man for the story of himself and the lower inhabitants of the globe. The zoologists have gone so far as to confer upon him the surname Sapiens--Homo Sapiens. Learned indeed he is, and heir of all the ages, but whether or not his assumed surname be warranted the doctrine of descent with modification can never again be questioned. The work of Darwin was crowned when he compelled a general acceptance of that doctrine, and now the Descent of Man and the Ascent of Man are equivalent terms for a natural process which has converted man from a thing to a person, and is the foundation of all modern thought. The biologist works secure in the knowledge that he is studying some portion of a chain of life stretching back for incalculable ages, and is not careful to produce those missing links demanded by the once formidable foes of his fundamental principle. Haeckel may announce that Pithecanthropus Erectus of Dubois is truly a Pliocene remainder of that famous group of highest Catarrhines which were the immediate pithecoid ancestors of man. This may or may not be true, but if true it makes the descent of man from a lower stock none the surer, the increasing verification of which is not found to rest on missing links.

Many of the discoveries of modern science are made by proceeding from known phenomena to the unknown, or, more precisely, from the well-known through the little-known to the hitherto unknown.

As to the validity of knowledge it is enough to say this--and pass on--all our knowledge is provisional and imperfect, and much of our ignorance is as transient as ourselves.

There are two chief ways in which historians deal with their subject-matter, though the moderns combine them. When oral tradition gives place to written records the lineal descendant of the bards and annalists collects his scanty authorities and compiles his story from them from beginning to end. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of Bede and Alfred, the Book of Howth, the works of Giraldus Cambrensis, the Chronicles of Froissart and the Memoirs of de Comines were composed in the only way that was then possible. But the muse of history entered on a deeper and more fruitful course when about ninety years ago the study of documents became an essential feature of historical work. It was then that the historian grew up, entered upon his finest inheritance and assumed his Greek title, Enquirer, Student of facts, Man of research. He is now nothing if not a man of science as well as of letters. With a wealth of documents within his reach so great that the 3239 Vatican cases full of them formed by no means the richest collection in the archives of Europe, he proceeds to read backwards correctly what many an earlier annalist read forwards falsely. “We are still at the beginning of the documentary age which is destined to make history independent of historians, to develop learning at the expense of writing, and to accomplish a revolution in other sciences as well.”

Acton. A Lecture on the Study of History, p. 19.

The Historian a Biologist.

It is not too much to say that he who studies history, national, political, constitutional, ecclesiastical, military or economic is as much a biologist in the widest sense as the botanist and zoologist. Indeed these were till recently termed students of natural history, until the advance of knowledge gave us the various special groups of workers, conveniently called biologists. Though the study of human history by documents is an essential part of the historical method and the student may read his subject backwards, this would not of itself warrant the technical biologist in doing so, even though he be a child of Nature and part of her--“Nature’s insurgent son.” But some reflection on the facts of certain provinces of science affords ample justification for the method. It is chiefly in questions of origin that it avails, while it fails in that form of research by experiment which is the glory of modern science. A few examples of the process of passing from the known to the unknown will illustrate the method.

Darwin.

Much of the Origin of Species and all of the Descent of Man was founded on this method; thus in the former the conceptions of struggle took their main rise from the work of Malthus on Human Population, and of variation from domesticated animals and plants, and this is true also of Wallace. A mere glance at the divisions of The Descent of Man shows that it could never have been attempted in any other than the backward way.

Geology.

In their researches on the crust of the earth Playfair, Hutton and Lyell did not pursue them by going down a coal mine till they came to the lowest available beds and work upward from these to the highest. Though for purposes of exposition a great geologist, as Sir Archibald Geikie, may expound the making of the earth from the lowest to the highest levels, and Professor Bonney tell us the Story of our Planet from beginning to end as if he had watched it unfolding, Lyell in his Principles of Geology shows how the studies of his great province began. There we have the backward reading of its story pursued by himself and other great ones, and where it led them. Commencing with the Pleistocene period and passing through Neocene and Eocene periods through the Mesozoic Era and its cretaceous, jurassic and triassic systems to the Newer Palæozoic Era and its Permian, carboniferous, and Devonian systems, the older Palæozoic Era and its Silurian Ordovician and Cambrian systems, he reaches the unknown. But before all this patient research and its record is reached he treats, as he must, of consolidation and alteration of strata, of petrification of organic remains, elevation of strata, horizontal and inclined stratification, of faulting, denudation, upheaval and subsidence as they combine to remodel the earth’s crust. The title of his classical work is significant--An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation (it may be noted that in 1830 they were fond of capital letters and of underlining their words). If these great men had been condemned to the sole use of the method of the annalist in his treatment of human history, that of the coal mine in geology, this great province of knowledge would never have been what it is to-day.

At this point I think it well to state that this illuminating principle of Lyell is pursued in nearly all the matters of fact and their interpretation contained in the following chapters, so that from time to time I shall have to employ the verb, coined for the purpose, when I attempt to “Lyell” them on behalf of Lamarck.

Anthropology.

The anthropologist could hardly make a start with his research, if, knowing nothing of his own anatomy, physiology, customs and beliefs, he tried to interpret the physical features, habits, manners, customs and rites of an African tribe. Without such prior knowledge he would find it a profitless task to journey to the banks of the Zambesi and bring back any intelligible history of the aborigines. If he did not know the games of a European child how could he understand the variants of them such as the writer of Savage Childhood expounds so well?

Savage Childhood, Dudley Kidd.

The Sources of Rivers.

To trace the course and source of a river is a simple task through the work of modern geographers, and such a pursuit illustrates well the two methods here considered, but it is doubtful if any river was ever traced originally from its fountain head to its mouth. The backward way of such exploration, from the nature of the case, has always been taken, and men have traced the more or less finished products of the lower stretches, backward, still backwards, even as in the Indus, to the still-unknown. The earliest thinkers and seekers in the plains of Bengal were familiar with much of their great sacred and composite river as it flowed into its delta. Slowly, laboriously, here a little and there a little, they learned its stupendous story. They found the plateau of Tibet in the Himalayas where the twin-sisters, Brahmaputra and Ganges were born, and saw how from the one high cradle they parted on their eastward course for a thousand miles with the mountain-chain between them, and how, coming together again, the one descending through Assam and the other flowing through the plains, reinforced by the Jumna, they united to form the Ganges-Brahmaputra. A great subject indeed for the early geographer, but one which he could only follow in the backward way. Again how well known and revered in Egypt was the Nile for thousands of years before its source in Victoria Nyanza could be traced, even though Nero might send his explorers as far as the marshes of the White Nile, and Ptolemy’s search for it might lead him to guess the riddle, and assign it to two great lakes!

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