CHAPTER V.

THE WORLD MAKERS.

Our Museum of Natural History, within its too narrow limits, contains a faëry palace in every part of which we see the genius of metamorphoses of Lamarck and Geoffroy. In the dark lower hall the Madrepores serve as the base of the more and more living world that rises, stage above stage, above. Higher up the superior creatures of the sea display their energy of organization, and prepare the life of the terrestrials, and above these, Mammiferæ, over which the lovely birds spread their wings and almost seem to be still singing! The multitude of visitors pass quickly and with small show of interest from the Madrepores, those elder born of the globe, and hasten to the light and to the presence of things of brightest beauty, mother of pearl, the richly painted wings of butterflies, and the plumage of birds. I, who stop longer below, often find myself quite alone in that dark little gallery.

I love that solemn crypt of the great scientific Church. There I best can feel the sacred soul, the still present spirit of our great masters, their great, their sublime effort, and the immortal audacity of our voyagers and travellers, the intrepid collectors of such a wealth of whatever is beautiful or instructive. Wherever their bones may lie they themselves are still present in the Museum by the treasures which they have bequeathed, treasures which some of them have paid for with their lives.

On the 15th of last October, having remained in that crypt somewhat late, I had some difficulty in reading the label on some Madrepores--that label bore the name of "Lamarck."

A sudden warmth, a religious glow, thrilled through my heart and brain.

"Lamarck!" Great name, and already antique! It is as though among the tombs of Saint Denis we should suddenly read the name of Clovis. The glory, the strifes, the royal triumphs, of his successor, have obscured somewhat the name of that blind Homer of the Museum, who, with the instinct of genius created, organized, and named the previously almost unknown class of Invertebrates; a class, nay, a whole world, a vast abyss of soft half organized life still destitute of vertebræ; that bony centralization and essential support of personality. These are all the more interesting because they are obviously the earliest of all--those humble and so long neglected tribes. Réaumur placed the Crocodiles among the insects. The proud Buffon deigned not to know even the names of humble Invertebrates, he excluded them altogether from the Olympus at Versailles which he erected to Nature. These great populations, so obscure, so confused, which, nevertheless, prepared everything and abound every where, remained exiled from the world of science until the coming of Lamarck. It was precisely the elders that were thus excluded, elders so numerous that to exclude them was, in some sort, to close the eyes and bar the gate against nature herself.

The genius of the Metamorphoses was emancipated by botany and chemistry. It was a bold but most precious thing to take Lamarck, from the Botany in which he had passed his life, and remove him to the vast world of animality. That ardent genius, trained in miracles by the transformations of plants, and full of faith in the unity of life, next drew the animals, and that vast animal, the Globe, from the state of petrifaction in which they so long had lain. Half blind, he intrepidly treated a thousand things which the clear sighted scarcely dared to approach. At least, he infused his fire into them, and Geoffroy, Cuvier and Blainville found them warm and living.

"All is living, or has been," said Lamarck; "everything is life, either present or past." Great revolutionary effort, that, against inert matter; effort proceeding even to suppress and banish the inorganic! No longer any actual death. That which has lived may sleep; and yet preserve latent life, the capacity to revive. Who is really dead? No one. What? Nothing.

This dictum, so novel, and so bold, swelled the sails of our scientific age with a strong and a favoring gale; it has urged on enquiries, such as but for it we should never have dreamed of making. History, or Natural History, we demand of every thing, who are you--and every where the answer is, "_I am Life_," and, thus, Death retreats before the bold advance and eagle glance of science, and Mind moves onward still, conquering and to conquer.

Among these resuscitations, I first note my Madrepores, taking the interest of life, though previously scorned, or unnoticed, as dead stone. When Lamarck collected and explained them at the Museum, they were detected in the mystery of their activity, in their immense creations, and they exemplified how a world is made. That once known, it was at once suspected that if the earth makes the animal, the animal also makes the earth; and that each aids the other in the office of creation.

Animality is every where, filling every thing and peopling every thing. We find the remains or the imprint of it even in the minerals, as the statuary marble and alabaster, which have passed through the crucible of the most destructive fires. At every advance, in our knowledge of the existing, we discover an enormous past of animal life. As soon as our improvements in Optics enabled us to discover and to watch the Infusoriæ, we behold them making mountains and paving the ocean. The hard silex is a mass of animalcules, the sponge is an animated silex. Our limestones are all animals; Paris is built with infusoriæ, a part of Germany rests upon a newly buried bed of coral. Infusoriæ, coral, shells, chalk and lime. They are constantly taking from the Ocean, but the fish, which devour the coral, restore it as chalk, and restore it to the waters whence it came. Thus the Coral Sea in its labor of production, of upheaving, in its constructions incessantly augmented or diminished, built, ruined, and rebuilt, is an immense fabric of limestone which is continually oscillating between its two lives;--the _acting_ life of the day--the other life that _will act_ to-morrow.

Foster quite justly decides that these circular islands are the craters of volcanoes, raised up by the polypes. He has been contradicted, but wrongly so. Upon no other hypothesis can we account for this identity of figure. There is always the same ring of about a hundred paces in diameter, very low, beaten on the outside by the waves, but enclosing a tranquil basin. A few plants of three or four species, here and there, crown the basin with verdure. The water is of the most beautiful green. The enclosing ring is of white sand, the residue of dissolved coral, contrasting with the blue of the Ocean. Beneath the salt water, our little laborers are at work, the stronger and bolder at the breakers, the weaker and more timid on the smoother sides.

This is not a very varied world. But wait. The winds and the currents are constantly at work to enrich it; come a good tempest, and all the neighboring isles will be laid under contribution to enrich this rising one. And in this is one of the most magnificent functions of the Tempest; the greater, the wilder, and the more sweeping, the more fecund it is. A water-spout passes over an island; the torrent that it produces carries with it slime, rubbish, plants, living or dead, and even whole forests, which the waves carry to the neighboring isles, raising, and at the same time enriching, their soil.

A great messenger of life, and one of the most transportable, is the solid cocoanut. Not only does it travel well, but, when thrown upon shoal or rock, if it find only a little poor white sand, which would support nothing else, the cocoanut contents itself there, finds brackish water not a jot less agreeable than the freshest; germinates, thrives, grows into a robust cocoa tree. A tree being thus planted, fresh water comes, falling leaves create earth, other trees follow, and at length we see the noble palm grove, which arrests the vapors, which at length form a rivulet or river, which, flowing from the center of the isle, make an opening of fresh water in the cincture of white sand, and thus keep the polypes, inhabitants only of salt water, at a respectful distance.

Of the rapidity with which the Polypes do their work, we have some curious proofs. In forty days' harboring at Rio Janeiro, boats were wholly destroyed; in a strait near Australia, there were formerly only twenty-six islets; there are already a hundred and fifty--well recognized: and the English admiralty believes that there are even more; and in twenty years hence the whole strait, forty leagues in length, will be so completely blocked up as to be unnavigable.

The eastern shoal of Australia is three hundred and sixty leagues, (one hundred and twenty-seven without any interruption,) and that of New Caledonia one hundred and forty-five leagues; the single shoal of the Maldives is almost five hundred miles long, and groups of isles in the Pacific are four hundred leagues long, by a hundred and fifty wide. To all this work of the Polypes, we must add, that the banks of the isle of France, and the shallows of the Red Sea, are continually rising. Tunis and its environs present a wholly animal world; and the rocks present forms so strange, and colors so splendid, that the spectator is amazed and dazzled. You see them in a space of several leagues of shallow sea water--probably not averaging more than a foot of depth, working calmly, but perseveringly at their business of creating.

Their first intelligent observer was Forster, companion of Cook, who found them at work, caught them in the very fact of their great conspiracy to make, noiselessly and marvellously, whole chains of islands, to be by degrees converted into a continent.

All this passed before his eyes, as it might have done in the first days of the world. From the submarine depths, the central fire throws up a dome or cone, which opens, and its lava forms a circular crater. But the volcanic strength becomes exhausted, and the cooling lava becomes covered with a living jelly, an animal multitude, whose perpetual exudation of mucus continually raises the circle higher and higher, to low water mark; no higher, or they would be dry; no lower, because they would lack the light. If they have no special organ with which to perceive the light, it circumfuses, penetrates, permeates their whole being. The glowing sun of the tropics, which traverses right through their transparent little frames, seems to have for them all the irresistible attraction of magnetism. When the tide ebbs and leaves them uncovered, they, nevertheless, remain open, and drink in the vivid light.

Dumont d'Urville, who so often coasted among their little isles, says:--"It is a real pain to see, so near by the peace of that interior basin, and to see all around shallow waters, beneath which are the shelving rocks, tenanted by the coral insects, in perfect security, while we are enduring all the shocks of a raging tempest." But this amiable community and its edifice are a shoal, a terrible lee shore, scarcely hidden by the shallow waters; touch upon that shoal and you will be crushed. Trust not to anchors among those peaked and jagged rocks; your cables, however good, would soon wear and snap. The seaman's anxiety is extreme, in those long nights when the Southern surges drive him among these shoals, at once so rugged and yet as cutting as razors.

To such accusations as these, our innocent shoal-makers reply--"Time--give us only time, and these rocks will become hospitable, tenanted, fruitful. These banks, joined on to their neighboring banks, will no longer have these terrible threatenings for the seaman. We are preparing a spare world to replace your old one should it perish. Ingrates! Come some great and overwhelming catastrophe to your old world, if, as some one among you has said, the sea turns from one pole to the other in every ten thousand years, and you perchance will bless us, and hail with joy these southern isles which we are making, this huge southern continent that we are preparing. Confess, now, that if, unhappily, ships do occasionally perish on these shoals, our work here, nevertheless, is useful, and good, and great. Our improvised world may not unjustly be proud. To say nothing about the beauty of its triumphant colors, before which those of your earth grow pale; to say nothing about the graceful curves and circles on which we pride ourselves,--how many are the problems, which, insolvable to you, find their solution among us! The division of labor, a charming variety combined with a great regularity, a geometrical order, softened and made graceful and gracious by a rising liberty--where, among you men, will you find these so combined as from the beginning we have combined them among us? Our incessant labor in relieving the sea-water of its salts, creates those currents which give it life and healthful power. We are the very spirits of the Sea, giving, as we do, her motion."

"And the sea is not ungrateful; she nourishes us at fixed periods; and not less punctually comes the glowing sun to caress us and dower us with brilliant colors. We are the beloved, the favored workers of the Deity, entrusted by him with the first rude sketches and outlines of his worlds, and all our juniors upon this globe, need us, and are indebted to us. Our friend the Cocoa tree, that inaugurates terrestrial life upon our isle, could not do so but from our dust. In its far back origin, vegetable life is our liberal gift, and, made rich by us, it nourishes the superior creation."

"But what need of other animals? We are within our own circle complete, harmonious and sufficing; with us the circle of creation might be closed. For as God crowns his isle on his old volcano of fire, he has created a volcano of life, and expansion of that living paradise. He has created all that he needs, and now He may repose."

Not yet, not yet. A creation must rise above yours, a thing which you do not fear. That rival is not the tempest, you would brave it; nor the fresh water, you would build beside it. It is not even the earth, which by degrees is invading your constructions. What, then, is that other power? In yourself, in Polypes, there is an ambition to cease to be one. In your Republic there is a certain creature who in constant anxiety and yearning, repeats that the perfection of this vegetating existence is not real life. It constantly dreams of a freer and more expanded life, navigating hither and thither, penetrating and viewing the unknown world even at the hazard of shipwreck;--that thing is--the Soul.