Part 16

Viewed simply in its picturesque aspect, this olive leaf of the Old Red seems not at all devoid of poetry. We sail upwards into the high geologic zones, passing from ancient to still more ancient scenes of being; and, as we voyage along, find ever in the surrounding prospect, as in the existing scene from which we set out, a graceful intermixture of land and water, continent, river, and sea. We first coast along the land of the Tertiary, inhabited by the strange quadrupeds of Cuvier, and waving with the reeds and palms of the Paris Basin; the land of the Wealden, with its gigantic iguanodon rustling amid its tree ferns and its cycadeæ, comes next; then comes the green land of the Oolite, with its little pouched insectivorous quadruped, its flying reptiles, its vast jungles of the Brora equisetum, and its forests of the Helmsdale pine; and then, dimly as through a haze, we mark, as we speed on, the thinly scattered islands of the New Red Sandstone, and pick up in our course a large floating leaf, veined like that of a cabbage, which not a little puzzles the botanists of the expedition. And now we near the vast Carboniferous continent, and see along the undulating outline, between us and the sky, the strange forms of a vegetation, compared with which that of every previously seen land seems stunted and poor. We speed day after day along endless forests, in which gigantic club-mosses wave in air a hundred feet over head, and skirt interminable marshes, in which thickets of reeds overtop the mast-head. And, where mighty rivers come rolling to the sea, we mark, through the long-retiring vistas which they open into the interior, the higher grounds of the country covered with coniferous trees, and see doddered trunks of vast size, like those of Granton and Craigleith, reclining under the banks in deep muddy reaches, with their decaying tops turned adown the current. At length the furthermost promontory of this long range of coast comes full in view: we near it,—we have come up abreast of it: we see the shells of the Mountain Limestone glittering white along its further shore, and the green depths under our keel lightened by the flush of innumerable corals; and then, bidding farewell to the land forever,—for so the geologists of but five years ago would have advised,—we launch into the unmeasured ocean of the Old Red, with its three consecutive zones of animal life. Not a single patch of land more do those geologic charts exhibit which we still regard as new. The zones of the Silurian and Cambrian succeed the zones of the Old Red; and, darkly fringed by an obscure bank of cloud ranged along the last zone in the series, a night that never dissipates settles down upon the deep. Our voyage, like that of the old fabulous navigators of five centuries ago, terminates on the sea in a thick darkness, beyond which there lies no shore and there dawns no light. And it is in the middle of this vast ocean, just where the last zone of the Old Red leans against the first zone of the Silurian, that we have succeeded in discovering a solitary island unseen before,—a shrub-bearing land, much enveloped in fog, but with hills that at least look green in the distance. There are patches of floating sea-weed much comminuted by the surf all around it; and on one projecting headland we see clear through our glasses a cone-bearing tree.

This certainly is not the sort of arrangement demanded by the exigencies of the development hypothesis. A true wood at the base of the Old Red Sandstone, or a true Placoid in the Limestones of Bala, very considerably beneath the base of the Lower Silurian system, are untoward misplacements for the purposes of the Lamarckian; and who that has watched the progress of discovery for the last twenty years, and seen the place of the earliest ichthyolite transferred from the Carboniferous to the Cambrian system, and that of the earliest exogenous lignite from the Lias to the Lower Devonian, will now venture to say that fossil wood may not yet be detected as low in the scale as any vegetable organism whatever, or fossil fish as low as the remains of any animal? But though the response of the earlier geologic systems be thus unfavorable to the development hypothesis, may not men such as the author of the “Vestiges” urge, that the geologic evidence, taken as a whole, and in its bearing on groupes and periods, establishes the general fact that the lower plants and animals preceded the higher,—that the conifera, for instance, preceded our true forest trees, such as the oak and elm,—that, in like manner, the fish preceded the reptile, that the reptile preceded the bird, that the bird preceded the mammiferous quadruped and the quadrumana, and that the mammiferous quadruped and the quadrumana preceded man? Assuredly yes! They may and do urge that Geology furnishes evidence of such a succession of existences; and the arrangement seems at once a very wonderful and very beautiful one. Of that great and imposing procession of being of which this world has been the scene, the programme has been admirably marshalled. But the order of the arrangement in no degree justifies the inference based upon it by the Lamarckian. The fact that fishes and reptiles were created on an earlier day than the beasts of the field and the human family, gives no ground whatever for the belief that “the peopling of the earth was one of a natural kind, requiring time,” or that the reptiles and fishes have been not only the predecessors, but also the progenitors of the beasts and of man. The geological phenomena, even had the author of the “Vestiges” been consulted in their arrangement, and permitted to determine their sequence, would yet have failed to furnish, not merely an adequate foundation for the development hypothesis, but even the slightest presumption in its favor. In making good the assertion, may I ask the reader to follow me through the details of a simple though somewhat lengthened illustration?

SUPERPOSITION NOT PARENTAL RELATION. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE.

Several thousand years ago, ere the upheaval of the last of our raised beaches, there existed somewhere on the British coast a submarine bed, rich in sea-weed and the less destructible zoophytes, and inhabited by the commoner crustaceæ and molluscs. Shoals of herrings frequented it every autumn, haunted by their usual enemies the dog-fish, the cod, and the porpoise; and, during the other seasons of the year, it was swum over by the ling, the hake, and the turbot. A considerable stream, that traversed a wide extent of marshy country, waving with flags and reeds, and in which the frog and the newt bred by millions, entered the sea a few hundred yards away, and bore down, when in flood, its modicum of reptilian remains, some of which, sinking over the submarine bed, found a lodgment at the bottom. Portions of reeds and flags were also occasionally entombed, with now and then boughs of the pine and juniper, swept from the higher grounds. Through frequent depositions of earthy matter brought down by the streamlet, and of sand thrown up by the sea, a gradual elevation of the bottom went on, till at length the deep-sea bed came to exist as a shallow bank, over which birds of the wader family stalked mid-leg deep when plying for food; and on one occasion a small porpoise, losing his way, and getting entangled amid its shoals, perished on it, and left his carcass to be covered up by its mud and silt. That elevation of the land, or recession of the sea, to which the country owes its last acquired marginal strip of soil, took place, and the shallow bank became a flat meadow, raised some six or eight feet above the sea-level. Herbs, shrubs, and trees, in course of time covered it over; and then, as century succeeded century, it gathered atop a thick stratum of peaty mould, embedding portions of birch and hazel bushes, and a few doddered oaks. When in this state, at a comparatively recent period, an Italian boy, accompanied by his monkey, was passing over it, when the poor monkey, hard-wrought and ill-fed, and withal but indifferently suited originally for braving the rigors of a keen northern climate, lay down and died, and his sorrowing master covered up the remains. Not many years after, the mutilated corpse of a poor shipwrecked sailor was thrown up, during a night-storm, on the neighboring beach: it was a mere fragment of the human frame,—a mouldering unsightly mass, decomposing in the sun; and a humane herd-boy, scooping out a shallow grave for it, immediately over that of the monkey, buried it up. Last of all, a farmer, bent on agricultural improvement, furrowed the flat meadow to the depth of some six or eight feet, by a broad ditch, that laid open its organic contents from top to bottom. And then a philosopher of the school of Maillet and Lamarck, chancing to come that way, stepped aside to examine the phenomena, and square them with his theory.

First, along the bottom of the deep ditch he detects marine organisms of a low order, and generally of a small size There are dark indistinct markings traversing the gray silt which he correctly enough regards as the remains of fucoids and blent with these, he finds the stony cells of flustra, the calcareous spindles of the sea-pen, the spines of echinus, and the thin granular plates of the crustacea. Layers of mussel and pecten shells come next, mixed up with the shells of buccinum, natica, and trochus. Over the shells there occur defensive spines of the dog-fish, blent with the button-like, thornset boucles of the ray. And the minute skeletons of herrings, with the vertebral and cerebral bones of cod, rest over these in turn. He finds, also, well-preserved bits of reed, and a fragment of pine. Higher up, the well-marked bones of the frog occur, and the minute skeleton of a newt; higher still, the bones of birds of the diver family; higher still, the skeleton of a porpoise; and still higher, he discovers that of a monkey, resting amid the decayed boles and branches of dicotyledonous plants and trees. He pursues his search, vastly delighted to find his doctrine of progressive development so beautifully illustrated; and last of all he detects, only a few inches from the surface, the broken remains of the poor sailor. And having thus collected his facts, he sets himself to collate them with his hypothesis. To hold that the zoophytes had been created zoophytes, the molluscs molluscs, the fishes fishes, the reptiles reptiles, or the man a man, would be, according to our philosopher, alike derogatory to the Divine wisdom and to the acumen and vigor of the human intellect: it would be “distressing to him to be compelled to picture the power of God, as put forth in any other manner than in those slow, mysterious, universal laws, which have so plainly an eternity to work in;” nor, with so large an amount of evidence before him as that which the ditch furnishes,—evidence conclusive to the effect that creation is but development,—does he find it necessary either to cramp his faculties or outrage his taste, by a weak yielding to the requirements of any such belief.

Meanwhile the farmer,—a plain, observant, elderly man, comes up, and he and the philosopher enter into conversation. “I have been reading the history of creation in the side of your deep ditch,” says the philosopher, “and find the record really very complete. Look there,” he adds, pointing to the unfossiliferous strip that runs along the bottom of the bank; “there, life, both vegetable and animal, first began. It began, struck by electricity out of albumen, as a congeries of minute globe-shaped atoms,—each a hollow sphere within a sphere, as in the well-known Chinese puzzle; and from these living atoms were all the higher forms progressively developed. The ditch, of course, exhibits none of the atoms with which being first commenced; for the atoms don’t keep;—we merely see their place indicated by that unfossiliferous band at the bottom; but we may detect immediately over it almost the first organisms into which—parting thus early into the two great branches of organic being—they were developed. There are the fucoids, first-born among vegetables,—and there the zoophytes, well nigh the lowest of the animal forms. The fucoids are marine plants; for, according to Oken, ‘all life is from the sea,—none from the continent;’ but there, a few feet higher, we may see the remains of reeds and flags,—semi-aqueous, semi-aerial plants of the comparatively low monocotyledonous order into which the fucoids were developed; higher still we detect fragments of pines, and, I think, juniper,—trees and shrubs of the land of an intermediate order, into which the reeds and flags were developed in turn; and in that peaty layer immediately beneath the vegetable mould, there occur boughs and trunks of blackened oak,—a noble tree of the dicotyledonous division,—the highest to which vegetation in its upward course has yet attained. Nor is the progress of the other great branch of organized being—that of the animal kingdom—less distinctly traceable. The zoophytes became crustacea and molluscs,—the crustacea and molluscs, dog-fishes and herrings,—the dog-fish, a low placoid, shot up chiefly into turbot, cod, and ling; but the smaller osseous fish was gradually converted into a batrachian reptile; in short, the herring became a frog,—an animal that still testifies to its ichthyological origin, by commencing life as a fish. Gradually, in the course of years, the reptile, expanding in size and improving in faculty, passed into a warm-blooded porpoise; the porpoise at length, tiring of the water as he began to know better, quitted it altogether, and became a monkey, and the monkey by slow degrees improved into man,—yes, into man, my friend, who has still a tendency, especially when just shooting up to his full stature, and studying the ‘Vestiges,’ to resume the monkey. Such, Sir, is the true history of creation, as clearly recorded in the section of earth, moss, and silt, which you have so opportunely laid bare. Where that ditch now opens, the generations of the man atop lived, died, and were developed. There flourished and decayed his great-great-great-great-grandfather the sea-pen,—his great-great-great-grandfather the mussel,—his great-great-grandfather the herring,—his great-grandfather the frog,—his grandfather the porpoise,—and his father the monkey. And there also lived, died, and were developed, the generations of the oak, from the kelp-weed and tangle to the reed and the flag, and from the reed and the flag, to the pine, the juniper, the hazel, and the birch.”

“Master,” replies the farmer, “I see you are a scholar and, I suspect, a wag. It would take a great deal of believing to believe all that. In the days of my poor old neighbor the infidel weaver, who died of delirium tremens thirty years ago, I used to read Tom Paine; and, as I was a little wild at the time, I was, I am afraid, a bit of a sceptic. It wasn’t easy work always to be as unbelieving as Tom, especially when the conscience within got queasy; but it would be a vast deal easier, Master, to doubt with Tom than to believe with you. I am a plain man, but not quite a fool; and as I have now been looking about me in this neighborhood for the last forty years, I have come to know that it gives no assurance that any one thing grew out of any other thing because it chances to be found atop of it, Master. See, yonder is Dobbin lying lazily atop of his bundle of hay; and yonder little Jack, with bridle in hand, and he in a few minutes will be atop of Dobbin. And all I see in that ditch, Master, from top to bottom, is neither more nor less than a certain top-upon-bottom order of things. I see sets of bones and dead plants lying on the top of other sets of bones and dead plants,—things lying atop of things, as I say, like Dobbin on the hay and Jack upon Dobbin. I doubt not the sea was once here, Master, just as it was once where you see the low-lying field yonder, which I won from it ten years ago. I have carted tangle and kelp-weed where I now cut clover and rye-grass, and have gathered periwinkles where I now see snails. But it is clean against experience, as my poor old neighbor the weaver used to say,—against my experience, Master,—that it was the kelp-weed that became the rye-grass, or that the periwinkles freshened into snails. The kelp-weed and periwinkles belong to those plants and animals of the sea that we find growing in only the sea; the rye-grass and snails, to those plants and animals of the land that we find growing on only the land. It is contrary to all experience, and all testimony too, that the one passed into the other, and so I cannot believe it; but I do and must believe, instead,—for it is not contrary to experience, and much according to testimony,—that the Author of all created both land productions and sea productions at the ‘times before appointed,’ and ‘determined the bounds of their habitation.’ ‘By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God;’ and I find I can be a believer on God’s terms at a much less expense of credulity than an infidel on yours.”

But in this form at least it can be scarce necessary that the argument should be prolonged.

The geological phenomena, I repeat, even had the author of the “Vestiges” been consulted in their arrangement, and permitted to determine their sequence, would fail to furnish a single presumption in favor of the development hypothesis. Does the ditch-side of my illustration furnish it with a single favoring presumption? The arrangement and sequence of the various organisms are complete in both the zoological and phytological branch. The flag and reed succeed the fucoid; the fir and juniper succeed the flag and reed; and the hazel, birch, and oak succeed the fir and juniper. In like manner, and with equal regularity, zoophytes, the radiata, the articulata, mollusca, fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals, are ranged, the superior in succession over the inferior classes, in the true ascending order; and yet we at once see that the evidence of the ditch-side, amounting in the aggregate to no more than this, that the remains of the higher lie over those of the lower organisms, gives not a shadow of support to the hypothesis that the lower produced the higher. For, according to the honest farmer, the fact that any one thing is found lying on the top of any other thing, furnishes no presumption whatever that the thing below stands in the relation of parent to the thing above. And the evidence which the well-ranged organisms of the ditch-side do not furnish, the organisms of the entire geologic scale, even were they equally well ranged, would fail to supply. The fossiliferous portion of the ditch-side of my illustration may be, let us suppose, some five or six feet in thickness; the fossiliferous portion of the earth’s crust must be some five or six miles in thickness. But the mere circumstance of space introduces no new element into the question. Equally in both cases the fact of superposition is not identical with the fact of parental relation, nor even in any degree an analogous fact.

As, however, the succession of remains in the fossiliferous series of rocks is infinitely less favorable to the development hypothesis than that of the organisms of the ditch-side, it is not very surprising that the disciples of the development school should be now evincing a disposition to escape from the ascertained facts of Geology, and the legitimate conclusions based upon these, unto unknown and unexplored provinces of the science; or that they should be found virtually urging, that though some of the ascertained facts may seem to bear against them, the facts not yet ascertained may be found telling in their favor. Such, in effect, is the course taken by the author of the “Vestiges,” in his “Explanations,” when, availing himself of a difference of opinion which exists among some of our most accomplished geologists regarding the first epochs of organized existence, he takes part with the section who hold that we have not yet penetrated to the deposits representative of the dawn of being, and that fossil-charged formations may yet be detected beneath the oldest rocks of what is now regarded as the lowest fossiliferous system. Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Leonard Hornet represent the abler and better-known assertors of this last view; while Sir Roderick Murchison and Professor Sedgwick rank among the more distinguished assertors of the antagonist one. It would be of course utterly presumptuous in the writer of these pages to attempt deciding a question regarding which such men differ; but in forming a judgment for myself, various considerations incline me to hold, that the point is now very nearly determined at which, to employ the language of Sir Roderick, “life was first breathed into the waters.” The pyramid of organized existence, as it ascends in the by-past eternity, inclines sensibly towards its apex,—that apex of “beginning” in which, on far other than geological grounds, it is our privilege to believe. The broad base of the superstructure, planted on the existing now, stretches across the entire scale of life, animal and vegetable; but it contracts as it rises into the past;—man—the quadrumana—the quadrupedal mammal—the bird—and the reptile—are each in succession struck from off its breadth, till we at length see it with the vertebrata, represented by only the fish, narrowing, as it were, to a point; and though the clouds of the upper region may hide its extreme apex, we infer from the declination of its sides, that it cannot penetrate much farther into the profound. When Steele and Addison were engaged in breaking up, piecemeal, their Spectator Club,—killing off good Sir Roger de Coverly with a defluction, marrying Will Honeycomb to his tenant’s daughter, and sending away Captain Sentry and Sir Andrew Freeport to their estates to the country,—it was shrewdly inferred that the “Spectator” himself was very soon to quit the field; and the sudden discontinuance of his lucubrations justified the inference. And a corresponding style of reasoning, based on the corresponding fact of the breaking up and piecemeal disappearance of the group of organized being, seems equally admissible. It is somewhat difficult to conceive how at least many more volumes of the geologic record than the known ones could be got up without the club. Further,—so far as yet appears, the fish must have lived in advance of the reptile during the three protracted periods of the Old Red Sandstone, the two still more protracted periods of the Upper and Lower Silurians, and the perhaps more protracted period still of the Cambrian deposits;—in all, apparently, a greatly more extended space than that in which the reptile lived in advance of the quadrupedal mammal, or the quadrupedal mammal lived in advance of man. On principles somewhat similar to those on which, with reference to the average term of life, the genealogist fixes the probable period of some birth in his chain of succession of which he cannot determine the exact date, it seems natural to infer that the birth of the fish should have taken place at least not earlier than the times of the Cambrian system.

There is another consideration, of at least equal, if not greater weight. A general correspondence is found to obtain in widely-separated localities, in the organic contents of that lowest band of the Lower Silurian or Cambrian system in which fossils have been detected. In Russia, in Sweden, in Norway, in the Lake district of England, and in the United States, there are certain rocks which occupy relatively the same place, and enclose what may be described generally as the same remains. They occur in Scandinavia as that “fucoidal band” of Sir Roderick Murchison which forms the base of the vast Palæozoic basin of the Baltic; they exist in Cumberland and Westmoreland as the Skiddaw slates of Professor Sedgwick, and bear also their fucoidal impressions, blent with graptolites; they are present in North America as those Potsdam sandstones of the States’ geologists in which fucoids so abound, mixed with a minute lingula, that they impart to some portions of the strata a carboniferous character. But with these deep-lying beds in all the several localities, thousands of miles apart, in which their passage into the inferior deposits has been traced, fossils cease. And why cease with them? In one locality the ancient ocean may have been of such a depth in the period immediately previous, and represented, in consequence, by the strata immediately beneath, that no animal could have lived at its bottom,—though I do not well see why the remains of those animals who, like the shark and pilot-fish, are frequently seen swimming over the profoundest depths, might not, did such exist at the time, be notwithstanding found at its bottom; or in another locality every trace of organization in the nether rocks may have been obliterated, at some posterior period, by fire. But it is difficult to imagine that that uniform cessation of organized life at one point, which seems to have conducted Sir Roderick Murchison and Professor Sedgwick to their conclusion, should have been thus a mere effect of accident. Accident has its laws, but uniformity is not one of them; and should the experience be invariable, as it already seems extensive, that immediately beneath the fucoidal beds organic remains cease, I do not see how the conclusion is to be avoided, that they represent the period in which at least existences capable of preservation were first introduced. Every case of coincident cessation which has occurred since the determination of the second case, must be reckoned, not simply as an additional unit in evidence, but, on the principles which determine mathematical probability, as a unit multiplied first by the chances against its occurrence, regarded as a mere contingency in that exact formation, and second, by the sum of all the previous occurrences at the same point.

In this curious question, however, which it must be the part of future explorers in the geological field definitely to settle, the Lamarckian can have no legitimate stake. It is but natural that, in his anxiety to secure an ultimate retreat for his hypothesis, he should desire to see that darkness in which ghosts love to walk settling down on the extreme verge of the geological horizon, and enveloping in its folds the first beginnings of life. But even did the cloud exist, it is, if I may so express myself, on its nearer side, where there is light,—not within nor beyond it, where there is none,—that the battle must be fought. It is to Geology as it is known to be, that the Lamarckian has appealed,—not to Geology as it is not known to be. He has summoned into court existing witnesses; and, finding their testimony unfavorable, he seeks to neutralize their evidence by calling from the “vasty deep,” of the unexamined and the obscure, witnesses that “won’t come,”—that by the legitimate authorities are not known even to exist,—and with which he himself is, on his own confession, wholly unacquainted, save in the old scholastic character of mere possibilities. The possible fossil can have no more standing in this controversy than the “possible angel.” He tells us that we have not yet got down to that base-line of all the fossiliferous systems at which life first began; and very possibly we have not. But what of that? He has carried his appeal to Geology as it is;—he has referred his case to the testimony of the known witnesses, for in no case can the unknown ones be summoned or produced. It is on the evidence of the known, and the known only, that the exact value of his claims must be determined; and his appeal to the unknown serves but to show how thoroughly he himself feels that the actually ascertained evidence bears against him. The severe censure of Johnson on reasoners of this class is in no degree over-severe. “He who will determine,” said the moralist, “against that which he knows, because there may be something which he knows not,—he that can set hypothetical possibility against acknowledged certainty,—is not to be admitted among reasonable beings.”

But the honest farmer’s reminiscences of his deceased neighbor the weaver, and his use at second-hand of Hume’s experience-argument, naturally lead me to another branch of the subject.

LAMARCKIAN HYPOTHESIS OF THE ORIGIN OF PLANTS. ITS CONSEQUENCES.

I have said that the curiously-mixed, semi-marine, semi-lacustrine flora of the Lake of Stennis became associated in my mind, like the ancient Asterolepis of Stromness, with the development hypothesis. The fossil, as has been shown, represents not inadequately the geologic evidence in the question,—the mixed vegetation of the lake may be regarded as forming a portion of the phytological evidence.

“All life,” says Oken, “is from the sea. Where the sea organism, by self-elevation, succeeds in attaining into form, there issues forth from it a higher organism. Love arose out of the sea-foam. The primary mucus (that in which electricity originates life) was, and is still, generated in those very parts of the sea where the water is in contact with earth and air, and thus upon the shores. The first creation of the organic took place where the first mountain summits projected out of the water,—indeed, without doubt, in India, if the Himalaya be the highest mountain. The first organic forms, whether plants or animals, emerged from the shallow parts of the sea.” Maillet wrote to exactly the same effect a full century ago. “In a word,” we find him saying, in his “Telliamed,” “do not herbs, plants, roots, grains, and all of this kind that the earth produces and nourishes, come from the sea? Is it not at least natural to think so, since we are certain that all our habitable lands came originally from the sea? Besides, in small islands far from the continent, which have appeared but a few ages ago at most, and where it is manifest that never any man had been, we find shrubs, herbs, roots, and sometimes animals. Now, you must be forced to own either that these productions owed their origin to the sea, or to a new creation, which is absurd.”

It is a curious fact, to which, in the passing, I must be permitted to call the attention of the reader, that all the leading assertors of the development hypothesis have been bad geologists. Maillet had for his errors and deficiencies the excellent apology that he wrote more than a hundred years ago, when the theory of a universal ocean, promulgated by Leibnitz nearly a century earlier, was quite as good as any of the other theories of the time, and when Geology, as a science, had no existence. And so we do not wonder at an ignorance which was simply that of his age, when we find him telling his readers that plants must have originated in the sea, seeing that “all our habitable lands came originally from the sea;” meaning, of course, by the statement, not at all what the modern geologist would mean were he to employ even the same words, but simply that there was a time when the universal ocean covered the whole globe, and that, as the waters gradually diminished, the loftier mountain summits and higher table-lands, in appearing in their new character as islands and continents, derived their flora from what, in a universal ocean could be the only possible existing flora,—that of the sea. But what shall we say of the equally profound ignorance manifested by Professor Oken, a living authority, whom we find prefacing for the Ray Society, in 1847, the English translation of his “Elements of Physio-philosophy?” “The first creation of the organic took place,” we find him saying, “where the first mountain summits projected out of the sea,—indeed, without doubt, in India, if the Himalaya be the highest mountain.” Here, evidently, in this late age of the world, in which Geology does exist as a science, do we find the ghost of the universal ocean of Leibnitz walking once more, as if it had never been laid. Is there now in all Britain even a tyro geologist so unacquainted with geological fact as not to know that the richest flora which the globe ever saw had existed for myriads of ages, and then, becoming extinct, had slept in the fossil state for myriads of ages more, ere the highest summits of the Himalayan range rose over the surface of the deep? The Himalayas disturbed, and bore up along with them in their upheaval, vast beds of the Oolitic system. Belemnites and ammonites have been dug out of their sides along the line of perpetual snow, seventeen thousand feet over the level of the sea. What in the recent period form the loftiest mountains of the globe, existed as portions of a deep-sea bottom, swum over by the fishes and reptiles of the great Secondary period, when what is now Scotland had its dark forests of stately pine,—represented in the present age of the world by the lignites of Helmsdale, Eathie, and Eigg,—and when the plants of a former creation lay dead and buried deep beneath, in shales and fire-clay,—existing as vast beds of coal, or entombed in solid rock, as the brown massy trunks of Granton and Craigleith. And even ere these last existed as living trees, the coniferous lignite of the Lower Old Red Sandstone found at Cromarty had passed into the fossil state, and lay as a semi-calcareous, semi-bituminous mass, amid perished Dipterians and extinct Coccostei. So much for the Geology of the German Professor. And be it remarked, that the actualities in this question can be determined by only the geologist. The mere naturalist may indicate from the analogies of his science, what possibly might have taken place, but what really did take place, and the true order in which the events occurred, it is the part of the geologist to determine. It cannot be out of place to remark, further, that geological discovery is in no degree responsible for the infidelity of the development hypothesis; seeing that, in the first place, the hypothesis is greatly more ancient than the discoveries, and, in the second, that its more prominent assertors are exactly the men who know least of geological fact. But to this special point I shall again refer.

The author of the “Vestiges” is at one, regarding the supposed marine origin of terrestrial plants, with Maillet and Oken; and he regards the theory, we find him stating in his “Explanations,” as the true key to the well-established fact, that the vegetation of groupes of islands generally corresponds with that of the larger masses of land in their neighborhood. Marine plants of the same kinds crept out of the sea, it would seem, upon the islands on the one hand, and upon the larger masses of land on the other, and thus produced the same flora in each; just as tadpoles, after passing their transition state, creep out of their canal or river on the opposite banks, and thus give to the fields or meadows on the right-hand side a supply of frogs, of the same appearance and size as those poured out upon the fields and meadows of the left. “Thus, for example,” we find him saying, “the Galapagos exhibit general characters in common with South America; and the Cape de Verd islands, with Africa. They are, in Mr. Darwin’s happy phrase, satellites to those continents, in respect of natural history. Again,” he continues, “when masses of land are only divided from each other by narrow seas, there is usually a community of forms. The European and African shores of the Mediterranean present an example. Our own islands afford another of far higher value. It appears that the flora of Ireland and Great Britain is various, or rather that we have five floras or distinct sets of plants, and that each of these is partaken of by a portion of the opposite continent. There are, first, a flora confined to the west of Ireland, and imparted likewise to the north-west of Spain; second, a flora in the south-west promontory of England and of Ireland, extending across the Channel to the north-west coast of France; third, one common to the south-east of England and north of France; fourth, an Alpine flora developed in the Scottish and Welsh Highlands, and intimately related to that of the Norwegian Alps; fifth, a flora which prevails over a large part of England and Ireland, ‘mingled with other floras, and diminishing slightly as we proceed westward:’ this bears intimate relation with the flora of Germany. Facts so remarkable would force the meanest fact-collector or species-demonstrator into generalization. The really ingenious man who lately brought them under notice (Professor Edward Forbes) could only surmise, as their explanation, that the spaces now occupied by the intermediate seas must have been dry land at the time when these floras were created. In that case, either the original arrangement of the floras, or the selection of land for submergence, must have been apposite to the case in a degree far from usual. The necessity for a simpler cause is obvious, and it is found in the hypothesis of a spread of terrestrial vegetation from the sea into the lands adjacent. The community of forms in the various regions opposed to each other merely indicates a distinct marine creation in each of the oceanic areas respectively interposed, and which would naturally advance into the lands nearest to it, as far as circumstances of soil and climate were found agreeable.”

Such, regarding the origin of terrestrial vegetation, are the views of Maillet, Oken, and the author of the “Vestiges.” They all agree in holding that the plants of the land existed in their first condition as weeds of the sea.

Let me request the reader at this stage, ere we pass on to the consideration of the experience-argument, to remark a few incidental, but by no means unimportant, consequences of the belief. And, first, let him weigh for a moment the comparative demands on his credulity of the theory by which Professor Forbes accounts for the various floras of the British Islands, and that hypothesis of transmutation which the author of the “Vestiges” would so fain put in its place, as greatly more simple, and, of course, more in accordance with the principles of human belief. In order to the reception of the Professor’s theory, it is necessary to hold, in the first place, that the creation of each species of plant took place, not by repetition of production in various widely-separated centres, but in some single centre, from which the species propagated itself by seed, bud, or scion, across the special area which it is now found to occupy. And this, in the first instance, is of course as much an assumption as any of those assumed numbers or assumed lines with which, in algebra and the mathematics, it is necessary in so many calculations to set out, in quest of some required number or line, which, without the assistance of the assumed ones, we might despair of ever finding. But the assumption is in itself neither unnatural nor violent; there are various very remarkable analogies which lend it support; the facts which seem least to harmonize with it are not wholly irreconcilable, and are, besides, of a merely exceptional character; and, further, it has been adopted by botanists of the highest standing. It is necessary to hold, in the second place, in order to the reception of the theory, that the area of the earth’s surface occupied by the British Islands and the neighboring coasts of the Continent once stood fifty fathoms higher, in relation to the existing sea-level, than it does now,—a belief which, whatever its specific grounds or standing in this particular case, is at least in strict accordance with the general geological phenomena of subsidence and elevation, and which, so far from outraging any experience founded on observation or testimony, runs in the same track with what is known of wide areas now in the course of sinking, like that on the Italian coast, in which the Bay of Baiæ and the ruins of the temple of Serapis occur, or that in Asia, which includes the Run of Cutch; or of what is known of areas in the course of rising, like part of the coast of Sweden, or part of the coast of South America, or in Asia along the western shores of Aracan. Whereas, in order to close with the simpler antagonistic belief of the author of the “Vestiges,” it is necessary to hold, contrary to all experience, that dulce and henware became, through a very wonderful metamorphosis, cabbage and spinnage; that kelp-weed and tangle bourgeoned into oaks and willows; and that slack, rope-weed, and green-raw, shot up into mangel-wurzel, rye-grass, and clover. Simple, certainly! An infidel on terms such as these could with no propriety be regarded as an unbeliever. It is well that the New Testament makes no such extraordinary demands on human credulity.

Let us remark further, at this stage, that, judging from the generally received geological evidence in the case, very little time seems to be allowed by the author of the “Vestiges” for that miraculous process of transmutation through which the low algæ of our sea-shores are held to have passed into high orders of plants which constitute the prevailing British flora. The boulder clay, which rises so high along our hills, and which, as shown by its inferior position on the lower grounds, is decidedly the most ancient of the country’s superficial deposits, is yet so modern, geologically, that it contains only recent shells. It belongs to that cold, glacial, post-Tertiary period, in which what is now Britain existed as a few groupes of insulated hill-tops, bearing the semi-arctic vegetation of our fourth flora,—that true Celtic flora of the country which we now find, like the country’s Celtic races of our own species, cooped up among the mountains. The fifth or Germanic flora must have been introduced, it is held, at a later period, when the climate had greatly meliorated. And if we are to hold that the plants of this last flora were developed from sea-weed, not propagated across a continuity of land from the original centre in Germany, or borne by currents from the mouths of the Germanic rivers,—the theory of Mon. C. Martins,—then must we also hold that that development took place since the times of the boulder clay, and that fucoids and confervæ became dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous plants during a brief period, in which the Purpura lapillus and Turritella terebra did not alter a single whorl, and the Cyprina islandica and Astarte borealis retained unchanged each minute projection of their hinges, and each nicer peculiarity of their muscular impressions. Creation would be greatly less wonderful than a sudden transmutative process such as this, restricted in its operation to groupes of English, Irish, and Manx plants, identical with groupes in Germany, when all the various organisms around them, such as our sea-shells, continued to be exactly what they had been for ages before. A process of development from the lowest to the highest forms, rigidly restricted to the flora of a country, would be simply the miracle of Jonah’s gourd several thousand times repeated.

I must here indulge in a few remarks more, which, though they may seem of an incidental character, have a direct bearing on the general subject. The geologist infers, in all his reasonings founded on fossils, that a race or species has existed from some one certain point in the scale to some other certain point, if he find it occurring at both points together. He infers on this principle, for instance, that the boulder clay, which contains only recent shells, belongs to the recent or post-Tertiary period; and that the Oolite and Lias, which contain no recent shells, represent a period whose existences have all become extinct. And all experience serves to show that his principle is a sound one. In creation there are many species linked together, from their degree of similarity, by the generic tie; but no perfect verisimilitude obtains among them, unless hereditarily derived from the one, two, or more individuals, of contemporary origin, with which the race began. True, there are some races that have spread over very wide circles,—the circle of the human family has become identical with that of the globe; and there are certain plants and animals that, from peculiar powers of adaptation to the varieties of soil and climate,—mayhap also from the tenacious vitality of their seeds, and their facilities of transport by natural means,—are likewise diffused very widely. There are plants, too, such as the common nettle and some of the ordinary grasses, which accompany civilized man all over the globe, he scarce knows how, and spring up unbidden where-ever he fixes his habitation. He, besides, carries with him the common agricultural weeds: there are localities in the United States, says Sir Charles Lyell, where these exotics outnumber the native plants; but these are exceptions to the prevailing economy of distribution; and the circles of species generally are comparatively limited and well defined. The mountains of the southern hemisphere have, like those of Switzerland and the Scotch Highlands, their forests of coniferous trees; but they furnish no Swiss pines or Scotch firs; nor do the coasts of New Zealand or Van Dieman’s Land supply the European shells or fish. True, there may be much to puzzle in the identity of what may be termed the exceptional plants, equally indigenous, apparently, in circles widely separated by space. It has been estimated that there exist about a hundred thousand vegetable species, and of these, thirty Antarctic forms have been recognized by Dr. Hooker as identical with European ones. Had Robinson Crusoe failed to remember that he had shaken the old corn-bag where he found the wheat and barley ears springing up on his island, he might have held that he had discovered a new centre of the European cerealia. And the process analogous to the shaking of the bag is frequently a process not to be remembered. There are several minute lochans in the Hebrides and the west of Ireland in which there occurs a small plant of the cord-rush family, (Eriocaulon septangulare,) which, though common in America, is nowhere to be found on the European Continent. It is the only British plant which belongs to no other part of Europe. How was it transported across the Atlantic? Entangled, mayhap, in the form of a single seed,—for its seeds are exceedingly light and small,—in the plumage of some water-fowl, free of both sea and lake, it had been carried in the germ from the weed-skirted edge of some American swamp or mere, to some mossy lochan of Connaught or of Skye; and one such seed transported by one such accident, unique in its occurrence in thousands of years, would be quite sufficient to puzzle all the botanists forever after. I have seen the seed of one of our Scotch grasses, that had been originally caught in the matted fleece of a sheep reared among the hills of Sutherland, and then wrought into a coarse, ill-dressed woollen cloth, carried about for months in a piece of underclothing. It might have gone over half the globe in that time, and, when cast away with the worn vestment, might have originated a new circle for its species in South America or New Holland. There are seeds specially contrived by the Great Designer to be carried far from their original habitats in the coats of animals,—a mode which admits of transport to much greater distances than the mode, also extensively operative, of consigning them for conveyance to their stomachs; and when we see the work in its effects, we are puzzled by the want of a record of an emigratory process, of which, in the circumstances, no record could possibly exist. Unable to make out a case for the “shaking of the bag,” we bethink us, in the emergency, of repetition of creation. But in circles separated by time, not space,—by time, across whose dim gulfs no voyager sails, and no bird flies, and over which there are no means of transport from the point where a race once fails, to any other point in the future,—we find no repetition of species. If the production of perfect duplicates or triplicates in independent centres were a law of nature, our works of physical science could scarce fail to tell us of identical species found occurring in widely-separated systems,—Scotch firs and larches, for instance, among the lignites of the Lias, or Cyprina islandica and Ostrea edulis among the shells of the Mountain Limestone. But never yet has the geologist found in his systems or formations any such evidence as facts such as these might be legitimately held to furnish, of the independent de novo production of individual members of any single species. On the contrary, the evidence lies so entirely the other way, that he reasons on the existence of a family relation obtaining between all the members of each species, as one of his best established principles. If members of the same species may exist through de novo production, without hereditary relationship, so thoroughly, in consequence, does the fabric of geological reasoning fall to the ground, that we find ourselves incapacitated from regarding even the bed of common cockle or mussel shells, which we find lying a few feet from the surface on our raised beaches, as of the existing creation at all. Nay, even the human remains of our moors may have belonged, if our principle of relationship in each species be not a true one, to some former creation, cut off from that to which we ourselves belong, by a wide period of death. All palæontological reasoning is at an end forever, if identical species can originate in independent centres, widely separated from each other by periods of time; and if they fail to originate in periods separated by time, how or why in centres separated by space?

Let the reader remark further, the bearing of those facts from which this principle of geological reasoning has been derived, on the development hypothesis. We find species restricted to circles and periods; and though stragglers are occasionally found outside the circle in the existing state of things, never are they found beyond their period among the remains of the past. It was profoundly argued by Cuvier, that life could not possibly have had a chemical origin. “In fact,” we find him remarking, “life exercising upon the elements which at every instant form part of the living body, and upon those which it attracts to it, an action contrary to that which would be produced without it by the usual chemical affinities, it is inconsistent to suppose that it can itself be produced by these affinities.” And the phenomena of restriction to circle and period testify to the same effect. Nothing, on the one hand, can be more various in character and aspect than the organized existences of the various circles and periods; nothing more invariable, on the other, than the results of chemical or electrical experiment. And yet, to use almost the words of Cuvier, “we know of no other power in nature capable of reuniting previously separated molecules,” than the electric and the chemical. To these agents, accordingly, all the assertors of the development hypothesis have had recourse for at least the origination of life. Air, water, earth existing as a saline mucus, and an active persistent electricity, are the creative ingredients of Oken. The author of the “Vestiges” is rather less explicit on the subject: he simply refers to the fact, that the “basis of all vegetable and animal substances consists of nucleated cells,—that is, of cells having granules within them;” and states that globules of a resembling character “can be produced in albumen by electricity;” and that though albumen itself has not yet been produced by artificial means,—the only step in the process of creation which is wanting,—it is yet known to be a chemical composition, the mode of whose production may “be any day discovered in the laboratory.” Further, he adopts, as part of the foundation of his hypothesis, the pseudo-experiment of Mr. Weekes, who holds that out of certain saline preparations, acted upon by electricity, he can produce certain living animalcula of the mite family;—the vital and the organized out of the inorganic and the dead. In all such cases, electricity, or rather, according to Oken, galvanism, is regarded as the vitalizing principle. “Organism,” says the German, “is galvanism residing in a thoroughly homogeneous mass.... A galvanic pile pounded into atoms must become alive. In this manner nature brings forth organic bodies.” I have even heard it seriously asked whether electricity be not God! Alas! could such a god, limited in its capacity of action, like those “gods of the plains” in which the old Syrian trusted, have wrought, in the character of Creator, with a variety of result so endless, that in no geologic period has repetition taken place? In all that purports to be experiment on the development side of the question, we see nothing else save repetition. The Acarus Crossi of Mr. Weekes is not a new species, but the repetition of an old one, which has been long known as the Acarus horridus, a little bristle-covered creature of the mite family, that harbors in damp corners among the debris of outhouses, and the dust and dirt of neglected workshops and laboratories. Nay, even a change in the chemical portion of the experiment by which he believed the creature to be produced, failed to secure variety. A powerful electric current had been sent, in the first instance, through a solution of silicate of potash, and, after a time, the Acarus horridus crawled out of the fluid. The current was then sent through a solution of nitrate of copper, and after a due space, the Acarus horridus again creeped out. A solution of ferro-cyanate of potash was next subjected to the current, and yet again, and in greater numbers than on the two former occasions, there appeared, as in virtue, it would seem, of its extraordinary appetency, to be the same ever-recurring Acarus horridus. How, or in what form, the little creature should have been introduced into the several experiments, it is not the part of those who question their legitimacy to explain; it is enough for us to know, that individuals of the family to which the Acarus belongs are so remarkable for their powers of life, even in their fully developed state, as to resist, for a time, the application of boiling water, and to live long in alcohol. We know, further, that the germs of the lower animals are greatly more tenacious of vitality than the animals themselves; and that they may exist in their state of embryonism in the most unthought of and elusive forms; nay,—as the recent discoveries regarding alterations of generation have conclusively shown,—that the germ which produced the parent may be wholly unlike the germ that produces its offspring, and yet identical with that which produced the parent’s parent. Save on the theory of a quiescent vitality, maintained by seeds for centuries within a few inches of the earth’s surface, we know not how a layer of shell, sand, or marl, spread over the bleak moors of Harris, should produce crops of white clover, where only heath had grown before; nor how brakes of doddered furze burnt down on the slopes of the Cromarty Sutors should be so frequently succeeded by thickets of raspberry. We are not, however to give up the unknown,—that illimitable province in which science discovers,—to be a wild region of dream, in which fantasy may invent. There are many dark places in the field of human knowledge which even the researches of ages may fail wholly to enlighten; but no one derives a right from that circumstance to people them with chimeras and phantoms. They belong to the philosophers of the future,—not to the visionaries of the present. But while it is not our part to explain how, in the experiments of Mr. Weekes, the chain of life from life has been maintained unbroken, we can most conclusively show, that that world of organized existence of which we ourselves form part, is, and ever has been, a world, not of tame repetition, but of endless variety. It is palpably not a world of Acaridæ of one species, nor yet of creatures developed from these, under those electric or chemical laws of which the grand characteristic is invariability of result. The vast variety of its existences speak not of the operation of unvarying laws, that represent, in their uniformity of result, the unchangeableness of the Divinity, but of creative acts, that exemplify the infinity of His resources.

Let the reader yet further remark, if he has followed me through these preliminary observations, what is really involved in the hypothesis of the author of the “Vestiges,” regarding the various floras common to the British islands and the Continent. If it was upon his scheme that England, Ireland, and the mainland of Europe came to possess an identical flora, production de novo and by repetition of the same species must have taken place in thousands of instances along the shores of each island and of the mainland. His hypothesis demands that the sea-weed on the coast of Ireland should have been developed, first through lower, and then higher forms, into thousands of terrestrial plants,—that exactly the same process of development from sea-weed into terrestrial plants of the same species should have taken place on the coast of England, and again on the coasts of the Continent generally,—and that identically the same vegetation should have been originated in this way in at least three great centres. And if plants of the same species could have had three distinct centres of organization and development, why not three hundred, or three thousand, or three hundred thousand? Nor will it do to attempt escaping from the difficulty, by alleging that there is the groundwork in the case of at least a common marine vegetation to start from; and that thus, if we have not properly the existence of the direct hereditary tie among the various individuals of each species, we may yet recognize at least a sort of collateral relationship among them, derived from the relationship of their marine ancestry. For relationship, in even the primary stage, the author of the “Vestiges” virtually repudiates, by adopting, as one of the foundations of his hypothesis, with, of course, all the legitimate consequences, the experiments of Mr. Weekes. The animalculæ-making process is instanced as representative of the first stage of being,—that in which dead inorganic matter assumes vitality; and it corresponds, in the zoological branch, to the production of a low marine vegetation in the phytological one. A certain semi-chemical, semi-electrical process, originates, time after time, certain numerous low forms of life, identical in species, but connected by no tie of relationship: such is the presumed result of the Weekes experiment. A certain further process of development matures low forms of life, thus originated, into higher species, also identical, and also wholly unconnected by the family tie: such are the consequences legitimately involved in that island-vegetation theory promulgated by the author of the “Vestiges.” And be it remembered that Mr. Weekes’ process, so far as it is simply electrical and chemical, is a process which is as capable of having been gone through in all times and all places, as that other process of strewing marl upon a moor, through which certain rustic experimenters have held that they produced white clover. It could have been gone through during the Carboniferous or the Silurian period; for all truly chemical and electrical experiments would have resulted in manifestations of the same phenomena then as now:—an acid would have effervesced as freely with an alkali; and each fibre of an electrified feather—had feathers then existed—would have stood out as decidedly apart from all its neighbors. We must therefore hold, if we believe with the author of the “Vestiges,” first, from the Weekes experiment, that in all times, and in all places, every centre of a certain chemical and electric action would have become a new centre of creation to certain recent species of low, but not very low, organization; and, second, from his doctrine regarding the identity of the British and Continental floras, that in the course of subsequent development from these low forms, the process in each of many widely-separated centres,—widely separated both by space and time,—would be so nicely correspondent with the process in all the others, that the same higher recent forms would be matured in all. And to doctrines such as these, the experience of all Geologists, all Phytologists, all Zoologists, is diametrically opposed. If these doctrines be true, their sciences are false in their facts, and idle and unfounded in their principles.

THE TWO FLORAS, MARINE AND TERRESTRIAL. BEARING OF THE EXPERIENCE ARGUMENT.

Is the reader acquainted with the graphic verse, and scarce less graphic prose, in which Crabbe describes the appearances presented by a terrestrial vegetation affected by the waters of the sea? In both passages, as in all his purely descriptive writings, there is a solidity of truthful observation exhibited, which triumphs over their general homeliness of vein.

“On either side Is level fen, a prospect wild and wide, With dykes on either hand, by ocean self-supplied. Far on the right the distant sea is seen, And salt the springs that feed the marsh between; Beneath an ancient bridge the straitened flood Rolls through its sloping banks of slimy mud; Near it a sunken boat resists the tide, That frets and hurries to the opposing side; The rushes sharp, that on the borders grow, Bend their brown florets to the stream below, Impure in all its course, in all its progress slow. Here a grave Flora scarcely deigns to bloom, Nor wears a rosy blush, nor sheds perfume. The few dull flowers that o’er the place are spread, Partake the nature of their fenny bed; Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom, Grows the salt lavender, that lacks perfume; Here the dwarf sallows creep, the septfoil harsh, And the soft slimy mallow of the marsh. Low on the ear the distant billows sound, And just in view appears their stony bound.”

“The ditches of a fen so near the ocean,” says the poet, in the note which accompanies this passage, “are lined with irregular patches of a coarse-stained laver; a muddy sediment rests on the horse-tail and other perennial herbs which in part conceal the shallowness of the stream; a fat-leaved, pale-flowering scurvy-grass appears early in the year, and the razor-edged bullrush in the summer and autumn. The fen itself has a dark and saline herbage: there are rushes and arrow-head; and in a few patches the flakes of the cotton-grass are seen, but more commonly the sea-aster, the dullest of that numerous and hardy genus; a thrift, blue in flower, but withering, and remaining withered till the winter scatters it; the salt-wort, both simple and shrubby; a few kinds of grass changed by the soil and atmosphere; and low plants of two or three denominations, undistinguished in the general view of scenery;—such is the vegetation of the fen where it is at a small distance from the ocean.”