Part 25

Now, a partially consolidated planet, tempested by frequent earthquakes of such terrible potency, that those of the historic ages would be but mere ripples of the earth’s surface in comparison, could be no proper home for a creature so constituted. The fish or reptile,—animals of a limited range of instinct, exceedingly tenacious of life in most of their varieties, oviparous, prolific, and whose young immediately on their escape from the egg can provide for themselves, might enjoy existence in such circumstances, to the full extent of their narrow capacities; and when sudden death fell upon them,—though their remains, scattered over wide areas, continue to exhibit that distortion of posture incident to violent dissolution, which seems to speak of terror and suffering,—we may safely conclude there was but little real suffering on the case: they were happy up to a certain point, and unconscious forever after. Fishes and reptiles were the proper inhabitants of our planet during the ages of the earth-tempests; and when, under the operation of the chemical laws, these had become less frequent and terrible, the higher mammals were introduced. That prolonged ages of these tempests did exist, and that they gradually settled down, until the state of things became at length comparatively fixed and stable, few geologists will be disposed to deny. The evidence which supports _this_ special theory of the development of our planet in its capabilities as a scene of organized and sentient being, seems palpable at every step. Look first at these Grauwacke rocks; and, after marking how in one place the strata have been upturned on their edges for miles together, and how in another the Plutonic rock has risen molten from below, pass on to the Old Red Sandstone, and examine its significant platforms of violent death,—its faults, displacements, and dislocations; see, next, in the Coal Measures, those evidences of sinking and ever-sinking strata, for thousands of feet together; mark in the Oolite those vast overlying masses of trap, stretching athwart the landscape, far as the eye can reach; observe carefully how the signs of convulsion and catastrophe gradually lessen as we descend to the times of the Tertiary, though even in these ages of the mammiferous quadruped the earth must have had its oft-recurring ague fits of frightful intensity; and then, on closing the survey, consider how exceedingly partial and unfrequent these earth-tempests have become in the recent periods. Yes; we find every where marks of at once progression and identity,—of progress made, and yet identity maintained; but it is in the habitation that we find them,—not in the inhabitants. There is a tract of country in Hindustan that contains nearly as many square miles as all Great Britain, covered to the depth of hundreds of feet by one vast overflow of trap; a track similarly overflown, which exceeds in area all England, occurs in Southern Africa. The earth’s surface is roughened with such,—mottled as thickly by the Plutonic masses as the skin of the leopard by its spots. The trap district which surrounds our Scottish metropolis, and imparts so imposing a character to its scenery, is too inconsiderable to be marked on geological maps of the world, that we yet see streaked and speckled with similar memorials, though on an immensely vaster scale, of the eruption and overflow which took place in the earthquake ages. What could man have done on the globe at a time when such outbursts were comparatively common occurrences? What could he have done where Edinburgh now stands during that overflow of trap porphyry of which the Pentland range forms but a fragment, or that outburst of greenstone of which but a portion remains in the dark ponderous coping of Salisbury Craigs, or when the thick floor of rock on which the city stands was broken up, like the ice of an arctic sea during a tempest in spring, and laid on edge from where it leans against the Castle Hill to beyond the quarries at Joppa? The reasoning brain would have been wholly at fault in a scene of things in which it could neither foresee the exterminating calamity while yet distant, nor control it when it had come; and so the reasoning brain was not produced until the scene had undergone a slow but thorough process of change, during which, at each progressive stage, it had furnished a platform for higher and still higher life. When the coniferæ could flourish on the land, and fishes subsist in the seas, fishes and cone-bearing plants were created; when the earth became a fit habitat for reptiles and birds, reptiles and birds were produced; with the dawn of a more stable and mature state of things the sagacious quadruped was ushered in; and, last of all, when man’s house was fully prepared for him,—when the data on which it is his nature to reason and calculate had become fixed and certain,—the reasoning, calculating brain was moulded by the creative finger, and man became a living soul. Such seems to be the true reading of the wondrous inscription chiselled deep in the rocks. It furnishes us with no clue by which to unravel the unapproachable mysteries of creation;—these mysteries belong to the wondrous Creator, and to Him only. We attempt to theorize upon them, and to reduce them to law, and all nature rises up against us in our presumptuous rebellion. A stray splinter of cone-bearing wood,—a fish’s skull or tooth,—the vertebra of a reptile,—the humerus of a bird,—the jaw of a quadruped,—all, any of these things, weak and insignificant as they may seem, become in such a quarrel too strong for us and our theory: the puny fragment, in the grasp of truth, forms as irresistible a weapon as the dry bone did in that of Samson of old; and our slaughtered sophisms lie piled up, “heaps upon heaps,” before it.

There is no geological fact nor revealed doctrine with which this special scheme of development does not agree. To every truth, too, really such, from which the antagonist scheme derives its shadowy analogies, it leaves its full value. It has no quarrel with the facts of even the “Vestiges,” in their character as realities. There is certainly something very extraordinary in that fœtal progress of the human brain on which the assertors of the development hypothesis have founded so much. Nature, in constructing this curious organ, first lays down a grooved cord, as the carpenter lays down the keel of his vessel; and on this narrow base the perfect brain, as month after month passes by, is gradually built up, like the vessel from the keel. First it grows up into a brain closely resembling that of a fish; a few additions more convert it into a brain undistinguishable from that of a reptile; a few additions more impart to it the perfect appearance of the brain of a bird; it then developes into a brain exceedingly like that of a mammiferous quadruped; and, finally, expanding atop, and spreading out its deeply corrugated lobes, till they project widely over the base, it assumes its unique character as a human brain. Radically such from the first, it passes towards its full development, through all the inferior forms, from that of the fish upwards,—thus comprising, during its fœtal progress, an epitome of geologic history, as if each man were in himself, not the _microcosm_ of the old fanciful philosopher, but something greatly more wonderful,—a compendium of all animated nature, and of kin to every creature that lives. Hence the remark, that man is the sum total of all animals,—“the animal equivalent,” says Oken, “to the whole animal kingdom.” We are perhaps too much in the habit of setting aside real facts, when they have been first seized upon by the infidel, and appropriated to the purposes of unbelief, as if they had suffered contamination in his hands. We forget, like the brother “weak in the faith,” instanced by the Apostle, that they are in themselves “creatures of God;” and too readily reject the lesson which they teach, simply because they have been offered in sacrifice to an idol. And this strange fact of the progress of the human brain is assuredly a fact none the less worth looking at from the circumstance that infidelity has looked at it first. On no principle recognizable in right reason can it be urged in support of the development hypothesis;—it is a fact of _fœtal_ development, and of that only. But it would be well should it lead our metaphysicians to inquire whether they have not been rendering their science too insulated and exclusive; and whether the mind that works by a brain thus “fearfully and wonderfully made,” ought not to be viewed rather in connection with all animated nature, especially as we find nature exemplified in the various vertebral forms, than as a thing fundamentally abstract and distinct. The brain built up of all the types of _brain_, may be the organ of a mind compounded, if I may so express myself, of all the varieties of _mind_. It would be perhaps over fanciful to urge that it is the creature who has made himself free of all the elements, whose brain has been thus in succession that of all their proper denizens; and that there is no animal instinct, the function of which cannot be illustrated by some art mastered by man: but there can be nothing over fanciful in the suggestion, founded on this fact of fœtal development, that possibly some of the more obscure signs impressed upon the human character may be best read through the spectacles of physical science. The successive phases of the fœtal brain give at least fair warning that, in tracing to its first principles the moral and intellectual nature of man, what is properly his “natural history” should not be overlooked. Oken, after describing the human creature in one passage as “equivalent to the whole animal kingdom,” designates him in another as “God wholly manifested,” and as “God become man;”—a style of expression at which the English reader may start, as that of the “big mouth speaking blasphemy,” but which has become exceedingly common among the nationalists of the Continent. The irreverent naturalist ought surely to have remembered, that the sum total of all the animals cannot be different in its nature from the various sums of which it is an aggregate,—seeing that _no_ summation ever differs in _quality_ from the items summed up, which compose it,—and that, though it may amount in this case to man _the animal_,—to man, as he may be weighed, and measured, and subjected to the dissecting knife,—it cannot possibly amount to God. Is God merely a sum total of birds and beasts, reptiles and fishes;—a mere Egyptian deity, composed of fantastic hieroglyphics derived from the forms of the brute creation? The impieties of the transcendentalist may, however, serve to illustrate that mode of seizing on terms which, as the most sacred in the message of revelation, have been long coupled in the popular mind with saving truths, and forcibly compelling them to bear some visionary and illusive meaning, wholly foreign to that with which they were originally invested, which has become so remarkable a part of the policy of modern infidelity. Rationalism has learned to sacrifice to Deity with a certain measure of conformity to the required pattern; but it is a conformity in appearance only, not in reality: the sacrifice always resembles that of Prometheus of old, who presented to Jupiter what, though it seemed to be an ox without blemish, was merely an ox-skin stuffed full of bones and garbage.

There is another very remarkable class of facts in geological history, which appear to fall as legitimately within the scope of argument founded on final causes, as those which bear on the appearance of man at his proper era. The period of the mammiferous quadrupeds seems, like the succeeding human period, to have been determined, as I have said, by the earth’s fitness at the time as a place of habitation for creatures so formed. And the bulk to which, in the more extreme cases, they attained, appears to have been regulated, as in the higher mammals now, with reference to the force of gravity at the earth’s surface. The Megatherium and the Mastodon, the Dinotherium and the extinct elephant, increased in bulk, in obedience to the laws of the specific constitution imparted to them at their creation; and these laws bore reference, in turn, to another law,—that law of gravity which determines that no creature which moves in air and treads the surface of the earth should exceed a certain weight or size. To very near the limits assigned by this law some of the ancient quadrupeds arose. It is even doubtful whether the Dinotherium, the most gigantic of mammals, may not have been, like the existing sea-lions and morses, mainly an aquatic quadruped;—an inference grounded on the circumstance that, in at least portions of its framework, it seems to have risen beyond these limits. Now, it does not seem wonderful that, with apparent reference to the point at which the gravity of bodies at the earth’s surface _bisects_ the conditions of texture and matter necessary to existence among the sub-aerial vertebrata, the _reptiles_ of the Secondary periods should have grown up in some of their species and genera to the extreme size. A world of frogs, newts, and lizards would have borne stamped upon it the impress of a tame and miserable mediocrity, that would have harmonized ill with the extent of the earth’s capabilities for supporting life on a large scale. There would be no principle of adaptation or rule of proportion maintained between an animal kingdom composed of so contemptible a group of beings, and either the dynamic laws under which matter exists on our planet, or the luxuriant vegetation which it bore during the Secondary ages. And such was not the character of the group which composed the reptile dynasty. The Iguanodon must have been quite as tall as the elephant,—greatly longer, and, it would seem, at least as bulky. The Megalosaurus must have at least equalled the rhinoceros; the Hylæosaurus would have outweighed the hippopotamus. And when reptiles that rivalled in size our hugest mammals inhabited the land, other reptiles,—Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, and Cetiosaurs,—scarce less bulky than the cetacea themselves, possessed the sea. Not only was the platform of being occupied in all its _breadth_, but also in all its _height_; and it is according to our simpler and more obvious ideas of adaptation—simple and obvious because gleaned from the very surface of the universe of life—that such should have been the case. But it does appear strange, because under the regulation, it would seem, of a principle of adaptation more occult, and, if I may so speak, more _Providential_, that no sooner are the huge mammals introduced _as a group_, than, with but a few exceptions, the reptiles appear in greatly diminished proportions. They no longer occupy the platform to its full extent of _height_. Even in tropical countries, in which certain families of mammals still attain to the maximum size, the reptiles, if we except the crocodilean family, a few harmless turtles, and the degraded boas and pythons, are a small and comparatively unimportant race. Nay, the existing giants of the class—the crocodiles and boas—hardly equal in bulk the third-rate reptiles of the ages of the Oolite and the Wealden. So far as can be seen, there is no reason deduceable from the nature of things, why the country that sustains a mammal bulky as the elephant, should not also support a reptile huge as the Iguanodon; or why the Megalosaurus, Hylæosaurus, and Dicynodon, might not have been contemporary with the lion, tiger, and rhinoceros. The change which took place in the reptile group immediately on their dethronement at the close of the Secondary period, seems scarce less strange than that sung by Milton:—

“Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed In bigness to surpass earth’s giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Thronged numberless; like that pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount; or fairy elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while, overhead, the moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth Wheels her pale course.”

But though we cannot assign a _cause_ for this general reduction of the reptile class, save simply the will of the all-wise Creator, the _reason_ why it should have taken place seems easily assignable. It was a bold saying of the old philosophic heathen, that “God is the soul of brutes;” but writers on instinct in even our own times have said less warrantable things. God _does_ seem to do for many of the inferior animals of the lower divisions, which, though devoid of brain and vertebral column, are yet skilful chemists and accomplished architects and mathematicians, what he enables man, through the exercise of the reasoning faculty, to do for himself; and the ancient philosopher meant no more. And in clearing away the giants of the reptile dynasty, when their kingdom had passed away, and then re-introducing the class as much shrunken in their proportions as restricted in their domains, the Creator seems to have been doing for the mammals what man, in the character of a “mighty hunter before the Lord,” does for himself. There is in nature very little of what can be called war. The cities of this country cannot be said to be in a state of war, though their cattle-markets are thronged every week with animals for slaughter and the butcher and fishmonger find their places of business thronged with customers. And such, in the main, is the condition of the animal world;—it consists of its two classes,—animals of prey, and the animals upon which they prey: its wars are simply those of the butcher and fisher, lightened by a dash of the enjoyments of the sportsman.

“The creatures see of flood and field, And those that travel on the wind, With them no strife can last; they live In peace and peace of mind.”

Generally speaking, the carnivorous mammalia respect one another: lion does not war with tiger, nor the leopard contend with the hyena. But the carnivorous reptiles manifest no such respect for the carnivorous mammals. There are fierce contests in their native jungles, on the banks of the Ganges, between the gavial and the tiger; and in the steaming forests of South America, the boa-constrictor casts his terrible coil scarce less readily round the puma than the antelope. A world which, after it had become a home of the higher herbivorous and more powerful carnivorous mammals, continued to retain the gigantic reptiles of its earlier ages, would be a world of horrid, exterminating war, and altogether rather a place of torment than a scene of intermediate character, in which, though it sometimes reëchoes the groans of suffering nature, life is, in the main, enjoyment. And so,—save in a few exceptional cases, that, while they establish the rule as a fact, serve also as a key to unlock that principle of the Divine government on which it appears to rest,—no sooner was the reptile removed from his place in the fore-front of creation, and creatures of a higher order introduced into it the consolidating and fast-ripening planet of which he had been so long the monarch, than his bulk shrank and his strength lessened, and he assumed a humility of form and aspect at once in keeping with his reduced circumstances, and compatible with the general welfare. But though the _reason_ of the reduction appears obvious, I know not that it can be referred to any other _cause_ than simply the will of the All-Wise Creator.

There hangs a mystery greatly more profound over the fact of the _degradation_ than over that of the _reduction_ and _diminution_ of classes. We can assign what at least _seems_ to be a sufficient _reason_ why, when reptiles formed as a class the highest representatives of the vertebrata, they should be of imposing bulk and strength, and altogether worthy of that post of precedence which they then occupied among the animals. We can also assign a _reason_ for the strange reduction which took place among them in strength and bulk immediately on their removal from the first to the second place. But why not only _reduction_, but also _degradation_? Why, as division started up in advance of division,—first the reptiles in front of the fishes, then the quadrupedal mammals in front of the reptiles, and, last of all, man in front of the quadrupedal mammals,—should the supplanted classes,—two of them at least,—fishes and reptiles,—for there seem to have been no additions made to the mammals since man entered upon the scene,—why should they have become the receptacles of orders and families of a degraded character, which had no place among them in their monarchical state? The fishes removed beyond all analogy with the higher vertebrata, by their homocercal tails,—the fishes (_Acanthopterygii_ and _Sub-brachiati_) with their four limbs slung in a belt round their necks,—the flat fishes, (_Pleuronectidæ_,) that, in addition to this deformity, are so twisted to a side, that while the one eye occupies a single orbit in the middle of the skull, the other is thrust out to its edge,—the irregular fishes generally (sun-fishes, frog-fishes, hippocampi, &c.) were not introduced into the ichthyic division until after the full development of the reptile dynasty; nor did the hand that makes no slips in its working “form the crooked serpent,” footless, grovelling, venom-bearing, the authorized type of a fallen and degraded creature, until after the introduction of the mammals. What can this fact of degradation mean? Species and genera seem to be greatly more numerous in the present age of the world than in any of the geologic ages. Is it not possible that the extension of the chain of being which has thus taken place—not only, as we find, through the addition of the higher divisions of animals to its upper end, but also through the interpolations of _lower links_ into the previously existing divisions—may have borne reference to some predetermined scheme of well-proportioned gradation, or, according to the poet,

“Of general ORDER since the whole began?”

May not, in short, what we term degradation be merely one of the modes resorted to for filling up the voids in creation, and thereby perfecting a scale which must have been originally not merely a scale of narrow compass, but also of innumerable breaks and blanks, hiatuses and chasms? Such, certainly, would be the reading of the enigma which a Soame Jenyns or a Bolingbroke would suggest; but the geologist has learned from his science, that the completion of a chain of at least contemporary being, perfect in its gradations, cannot possibly have formed the design of Providence. Almost ever since God united vitality to matter, the links in this chain of animated nature, as if composed of a material too brittle to bear their own weight when stretched across the geologic ages, have been dropping one after out, from his hand, and sinking, fractured and broken, into the rocks below. It is urged by Pope, that were “we to press on superior powers,” and rise from our own assigned place to the place immediately above all, we would, in consequence of the transposition,

“In the full creation leave a void, Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroyed. From nature’s chain whatever link we strike, Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.”