Chapter 7

Darwin constructs his theory of gradual differentiation on the evidence thus obtained. He takes a given specific animal form, and supposes that, owing to some external change in a given locality, it takes on some correspondent variation. But all of the individuals of the species may not be likewise affected. The circumstances may alter in one place and not in another. The result will be two varieties of animal. The variety goes on increasing in diversity, while the original still continues to produce its like. By and by the variety, having a greater tendency to vary, from its having already done so, undergoes a new differentiation, the difference being, in all cases, slight, and the time between the periods of maximum change being hundreds, thousands of years. One of the new varieties may by peculiar circumstances take on a special amplitude of growth, while the other, peculiarly circumstanced, may be contracted and dwarfed. One of the original varieties may by this time have disappeared. The original itself may have disappeared. Thus the connecting link between the two forms is lost. The more individualized form may go on accenting its own peculiar characters, and again be broken into new varieties, some of which may retain the old characters in circumscribed areas, while others may increase in greater abundance and occupy a much wider area. The wider the field of life, the more numerous the differing influences and the more diverse the conditions the animal must undergo. Thence arise more differentiations. After the lapse of some millions of ages, these constantly forking growths will have taken on a diversity to which that of the pouters and fan-tails is trifling.

Some forms may be less plastic than others, and give way less readily to the incident forces. These may remain unchanged for a far longer period than subsequent varieties, and be coexistent with them. Some varieties may take on a cerebral growth as widely different and as strongly individualized as frame structure. Man himself is a striking instance. The Negro, the Malay, the Mongolian, are almost precisely what they were five thousand years ago. The Bushman, the Hottentot, the Patagonian, and the Digger Indian are to-day not much above the animals about them; while the Caucasian has gone on in a wonderful advancement, leaving the other races in the same state of development in which they were when the Caucasian was no farther advanced than they. And here is perhaps the place to allude to the derisive objection to Darwinism, that it makes man an improved monkey. Darwin's theory certainly gives to both some vastly remote common ancestor; but it does not maintain the metamorphosis of one into the other. It does not suppose that man was once a gorilla. It supposes that from out of some of the differentiations of some animal form arose the first man-like creature, and that, gradually changing, like other animal forms, some of the varieties eventually evolved into apes and orangoutangs, to stop there and die out like hosts of other forms now extinct. But from some strongly individualized variety sprang, with more rapid and advancing growth, the primitive man, who has, under complex influences, differentiated into the so-called races of mankind. We talk of man as being something infinitely above all animals. There is a vast difference between the highest and lowest species of the genus _homo_. Were the race confined to those lowest species, we imagine that European and American pride of nature would go before a grievous fall. These constantly succeeding changes are supposed to have taken place during the whole time that this earth has been fitted for animal life,--a period of time so long that the human mind is unable to grasp it.

One objection to this theory, strongly insisted on, is the absence of any evidence of connecting links between man and the lower animals, or between the strongly defined demarcations of the animal orders. The answer to this is, that little is known of the whole earth: much of it is submerged now that was once above the waters and served for a dwelling-place for organized beings. A great deal is known of the sequence of forms which have been unearthed from their stony sepulchres. The negative evidence is as weighty as the positive. Besides this, millions of air-breathing animals die, without leaving anything behind them to mark their existence. Preyed upon by other animals, devoured at their death by myriads of insects, exposed to the action of destructive chemical agents, they soon decay, and leave no trace behind. Who ever finds the dead bodies of the thousands of animals and birds which perish yearly? Who finds the remains of the familiar creatures which frequent our woods and meadows? For one which is accidentally buried so as to resist the destructive forces of air and water, millions are resolved into their primitive elements, and are annihilated as structural forms. And yet, because in portions of the vast deposits of rock the remains of certain ancient forms are discovered, it is asked that the Darwinians should furnish a perfect progressive sequence of fossils to elucidate the theory, and prove it beyond dispute. Recent discoveries have brought to light human remains in caves, where they are associated with bones of extinct animals. That they are of very ancient origin is beyond doubt,--older than any civilization, as we understand the term. But even they are doubtless modern, when we take into consideration the time that the earth has been as it now is. How many thousands of ages has it taken the Niagara Falls to cut their way through the solid rock back from Ontario to Erie? It is highly probable that the earth has been approximately the same as it now is for many millions of years. Reaching still farther back into the past, before this state of comparative quiescence, can we not find adequate time for the gradual succession of organized beings on this earth, and for the structural differentiations which have finally resulted in the present position of things? Because we see one day succeed another with no change in the organic life around, because the written history of man records no vital change in his structure, men deny the possibility of antecedent variation. Man's written history is a thing of to-day. The builders of the Pyramids were our brothers. The five thousand years which have elapsed since the cultivated civilization of Egypt are but a day to the previous ages upon ages of man's existence before that civilization was dreamed of. The bones of untold myriads of human kind crumbled into dust before Egypt saw the rudest mud-hut that foreshadowed the temples of her prime.

The imperfectness of the geological record is certainly a great hindrance to the exact proof of the Darwinian theory, and is a strong weapon in the hands of its opponents. But while so much of the dim, remote past is attainable only by inference and deduction, the argument is decisive for neither side. One weighty argument for the Darwinians is the general plan upon which animals are constructed. All vertebrates have the same typical form. Take off the skins from some dozen air-breathing vertebrates, place the bodies in an upright attitude, and they are in general structure identical. The position of the head, eyes, and ears, the neck, the central vertebral column, the fore legs, which are arms in that position, the pelvis, the hind legs, all bear a close resemblance. Of course there are material differences; but they are evidently moulded upon one general plan. If there were a special creation for each species, why should they all necessarily have a kindred structure? To be sure the question may be answered, that they might as well be similar as dissimilar. But how much more in consonance with the known action of natural laws is it, to suppose that from some original type these various forms have gradually differentiated into their present diversity of structure; the original typical plan, the least variable characteristic, having maintained its individuality, while the more plastic appendages have been swayed by incident forces. This will logically and naturally account for the unlikeness, and yet the resemblance.

The Darwinian theory then is, that Natural Law or Persistent Force, acting through all time upon the universe, has evolved from certain primitive organic forms of a very low order of existence the present diversified races on the earth. It does not stop here. With the eye of prescience it sees the process going on far into the ages yet to come. What may be the result in that distant day, finite speculation may not determine. But the laws which have swayed the world sway it still, and will sway it forevermore. As in the past they have evolved order out of disorder, heterogeneous beauty out of homogeneous crudity, progressive individuality of being and thought out of chaotic vapor, so will they continue their evolving force through all time, till the boasted perfectness of this day of ours, perfect because it is our day, will be as primitive to the later denizens of this globe as the barbarity of the cave savages is to modern civilization.

A host of noble minds, each in its own peculiar province, is exploring the vast field of knowledge. Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndal, Lyell, Hooker, and many others, are giving their profound thought to the elucidation of the laws which govern the vast universe of which they are a part. Their intellects touch the scarce-seen planets; they turn over the stony pages of earth's autobiography; they anatomize to their ultimate atoms the structure of its organisms; they use the intelligence evolved from their own growth to search for the law which has determined that evolution. And they speak out their convictions manfully and earnestly. They proclaim what is to them a revelation of truth in the records which the past and the present offer to their understanding. Herbert Spencer thus maintains the necessity of the expression of man's deepest convictions, in a passage instinct with nobleness of thought and dignity of utterance:--

"Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view. Let him duly realize the fact, that opinion is the agency through which character adapts external arrangements to itself,--that his opinion rightly forms part of this agency,--is a unit of force, constituting, with other such units, the general power which works out social changes,--and he will perceive that he may properly give full utterance to his innermost conviction, leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. He, with all his capacities and aspirations and beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He must remember that, while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future; and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly consider himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the Unknown Cause; and when the Unknown Cause produces in him a certain belief, he is thereby authorized to profess and act out that belief. For, to render in their highest sense the words of the poet,

'Nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes.'

"Not as adventitious, therefore, will the wise man regard the faith which is in him. The highest truth he sees he will fearlessly utter; knowing that, let what may come of it, he is thus playing his right part in the world,--knowing that, if he can effect the change he aims at, well: if not, well also, though not _so_ well."

VARIOUS ASPECTS OF THE WOMAN QUESTION.

_Diogenes._ Eve did not enter into the original plan; she was an unlucky afterthought. Listen to Milton:--

"O, why did God, Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven With spirits masculine...?"

You observe that there are no feminine angels in heaven?

_Aristippus._ So much the better for us, if we have them all here.

_Diogenes._ For the same reason, probably, we are told that there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage hereafter.

_Aristippus._ Not at all. There will be so many more women in heaven than men, that any marriage, except of the Mormon kind, would be impossible.

_Diogenes._

"O, why did God ... create at last This novelty on earth, this fair defect Of nature?"

I have always wondered why.

_Aristippus._ You forget that it was Eve who first picked fruit from the tree of knowledge.

_Diogenes._ The only use she made of it was to get the idea of dress; and the primeval curse still clings to man, in the shape of milliners' bills.

_Aristippus._ Nevertheless we ought to be grateful to her for her enterprising spirit. Whatever her motives may have been, you must admit that her move was in the right direction. Where would we be now, had the future of the race been left to Adam alone? And if woman did turn man out of Paradise, she has done her best ever since to make it up to him. Every pretty girl one sees is a reminiscence of the garden of Eden.

_Diogenes._

"This mischief had not then befallen, And more that shall befell, innumerable Disturbances on earth through female snares."

It was an excellent fancy of the ancients to make woman the incarnation of original sin,--the tempter and the temptation in one,--a combination of the apple and the serpent. King David, Herod, and even the terrible Bluebeard, might have behaved well in a world without women. It is proverbial that there is no quarrel without a woman in it.

_Aristippus._ Because, as Steele said, there is nothing else worth quarrelling about.

_Hipparchia._ Admirable! You remind me of the two shepherds in a pastoral who sing in alternate strains.

"Be mine your tuneful struggle to deride."

You, Diogenes, should recollect that woman is a fact you cannot get rid of, and that the only remedy for your complaints is to improve her condition. And you, Aristippus, like a thousand other sentimental conservatives, cannot hear the suggestion that woman might do something more in this world than she is now doing without giving tongue at once: "Woman's sphere is the home,"--"Woman's mission is to be beautiful, to cheer, and to elevate." Suppose she has no home, and is old and ugly; what then? I know nothing more cheering and elevating than intelligence and efficiency; and I have never heard that either was detrimental to beauty. Is your ideal a woman who is good for nothing?--

"Bred only and completed to the taste Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance, To dress and troll the tongue and roll the eye"?

_Aristippus._ Not at all. I believe in the old Roman notion, that woman's domestic honor and chief praise is, _Domi mansit, lanam fecit_,--with the qualification, that _lanam_ shall not mean worsted-work. I understand the Scriptural word "helpmeet," as applied to wife, in the New England sense of "help." She should, above all, be a creature not too bright and good to know how to prepare and serve up human nature's daily food. I have never seen without emotion the epitaph placed by a high legal dignitary in a neighboring State on the tomb of his first wife:--

"An excellent woman and a good cook."

And when I hear an able-bodied woman in easy circumstances speak of housekeeping as too much for her strength, or "too wearing," I set her down very low on my list of contemptibles, and ask her, mentally, "What the devil then are you good for?" But you and your friends, Hipparchia, would make a world all cubes, parallelopipedons, and pyramids,--an achromatic world, peopled with wise creatures who could demonstrate the usefulness of all they did, and the economy of the processes by which they did it. As there is no place in such a world for women as we know them, you wish to create Eve over again, or rather to call forth a female Adam. I object. Man cannot live by pure mathematics alone. Imagination is a faculty of the mind, as much as reason. Now, women are the imaginative side of the human race; not only imaginative themselves, but the cause of imagination in others. I like mountains and clouds, trees, birds, and flowers,--the raw material of poetry; but to me handsome women are more pleasant than all of them,--they are little poems ready made. I like their rustling dresses, their bright, graceful ways, the "flash of swift white feet" in ball-room; even their roguish airs and childlike affectations. And if some of them do not trim their souls quite as much as their gowns, or perhaps venture into society with minds naked to the verge of indecent ignorance, then I say to these, "Talk to me only with your eyes,"--and they can be more eloquent than any Demosthenes of your New England Athens. Women are younger than men, and nearer to nature; they have more animal life and spirits and glee. Their lively, frolicsome, sunshiny chatter keeps existence from growing mouldy and stale. We have it on the authority of the wittiest of Frenchmen, that for the purposes of pleasant, every-day life, _L'enjouement vaut mieux que l'esprit_. If I wish to discuss a question of political economy, or of metaphysics, I can go to men; but the art of talking the men of to-day have lost. They either lecture, dispute, or twaddle. A Rabbinical story relates that twelve baskets of chit-chat fell from heaven, and that Eve secured nine while Adam was picking up the other three. Since then, Eve seems to have obtained possession of all.

What do you "earnest women" want? You have your own way in everything. I cannot take up a paper without reading something about lovely, delicate, refined females; or an item announcing that some ungallant fellow has been turned out of an omnibus because he would not offer his seat to an Irish lady, who had probably twice his muscular power and endurance.

_Hipparchia._ Hotel elegance, railway manners, and penny-a-liner sentiment are alike contemptible. Do you suppose that any sensible female cares for those second-hand phrases and vulgar civilities? This deference you boast of is a mere habit, worn threadbare: the feeling has died out. What does it really amount to, when, in this city, a woman, even of my age, cannot go alone to an evening lecture or to the theatre without the risk of an insult? English and French women have more liberty of action than we have, although the men do not offer them their seats on every occasion. I had rather take my chance with the crowd at a hotel ordinary, and have more independence in daily life. The time will come, I trust, when women will no longer be contented with the few empty and exaggerated compliments in which men pay them off,--"Angelic creatures!" "Poet's theme!" and so on,--stuff that springs from what Diogenes calls the spooney view of women, and only applicable to the young and handsome,--a very small minority. It is sad to see the graceless, the "gone-off," and the downright elderly smirk complacently at a few phrases which are only aimed at them in derision. The others, too, one would think, ought to care little for adulation that fades away with their good looks.

The supremacy of woman in this country is like that of the Mikado in Japan,--a sovereign sacred and irresponsible, but on condition of sitting still, and leaving the management of affairs, the real business of life, to others. It is the same theory of government with which the constitutionalists tormented the late Louis Philippe,--_Le roi regne et ne gouverne pas_. He was unwilling to accept such a position, and so am I. I cannot take a pride in insignificance and uselessness, although I confess with shame that most women do,--the result of which is, that we have not the kind of influence we ought to have, and that a real, hearty, genuine respect for women does not exist. In every man's heart there lurks a mild contempt for us, because of our ignorance of business, politics, and practical matters generally outside of the nursery and the milliner's shop. The best of you look upon us and our doings as grown people look at pretty children and their plays,--with a good-natured feeling of superiority, and a smile half pleasure and half pity. The truth is, that men have always despised us, from the earliest times. At first, we were mere slaves and drudges; then, playthings, if handsome and lively,--something to be brought on with the wine at a feast. Chivalry, which in newspaper rhetoric means devotion to women and respect, knew little of either, when it was alive and vigorous. The _droits de bottage et de cuissage_ alone are enough to prove that. In our times, indeed, the savage view of woman as a slave has been softened by civilization into housekeeper and nurse; but it still lingers in every man's feelings. Woman's mission in his eyes is simply babies; to which is superadded the duty of making the father comfortable. But the high prices of living are teaching people who have never heard of Malthus or of Mill the necessity of celibacy; and women must find something else to do than to rock a cradle.

_Diogenes._ Yes, unlimited issues on an insufficient capital lead to ruin. That ivy clinging to the oak view of the woman question still finds a place in print; but in practice I think the oaks are getting rather tired of it They find that the graceful wreaths of the ivy draw heavily upon their substance, and they would prefer a more self-sustaining simile.

_Hipparchia._ So much the better. I desire to see females support themselves.

_Aristippus._ Don't say female again, Hipparchia! I hate the word used in that sense, as much as Swift hated the word _bowels_. It is a term of natural history. A mare is a female; so is a cow, and so is a female dog. It would be curious to analyze the feeling that led euphuistic donkeys to choose it as a compromise word between lady and woman.

_Hipparchia._ They must have been male donkeys. All the terms of reproach you apply to us when you forget your chivalry manners, such as _witch_, _shrew_, _termagant_, _slut_, and so on, were all originally made by men for men,--at least so Archdeacon Trench tells us. You have gradually shuffled them off upon us; and worse yet, when you wish to describe in two words a pompous, prosing, dull-witted man, you call him an old woman. This is not just. Old women always have some imagination; and their gossip does not pretend to be the highest wisdom, which makes a great difference.

_Diogenes._ True! The elderly male fossil of the Silurian age,--the age of mollusks,--whose _habitat_ is some still-water club, or public reading-room, where he babbles of the morning's news, is a thousand times more tiresome than any loquacious elderly lady. We excel in this as in everything. We beat you at your own weapons. Sewing seems to be instinctive with women; yet tailors tell me that they are obliged to give out their best work to men.

_Hipparchia._ Dress and want of method are two radical weaknesses women must extirpate if they ever hope to rise from their present secondary position. Their dress is the outward and visible sign of it,--the livery of their lower condition. Everything about it is absurd, from the spurious waterfall pinned to the back of their heads down to the train that sweeps the muddy pavement. Their hair is infested with beads, bits of lace and of ribbons, or mock jewelry. A bonnet is an epitome of fag-ends. The poor crazy creatures in the asylum, who pick up any rag, or wisp of straw, or scrap of tin, they may find, and wear it proudly upon their frocks, are not a whit more absurd.