Chapter L: Agassiz (9)

There is a school of infidelity, tolerably well known in the capital of Scotland as by far the most superficial which our country has yet seen, that measures mind with a tape-line and the callipers, and, albeit not Christian, laudably exemplifies, in a loudly expressed regard for science, the Christian grace of loving its enemy. And the belief in a special Providence, who watches over and orders all things, and without whose permission there falleth not even a “sparrow to the ground,” the apostles of this school set wholly aside, substituting, instead, a belief in the indiscriminating operation of natural laws; as if, with the broad fact before them that even man can work out his will merely by knowing and directing these laws, the God by whom they were instituted should lack either the power or the wisdom to make them the pliant ministers of _his_. It is, I fear, to the distinctive tenet in the creed of this hapless school that the author of the “Vestiges” refers. Nor is it in the least surprising, that a writer who labors through two carefully written volumes,[39] to destroy the existing belief in “God’s works of Creation,” should affect to hold that the belief in his “works of Providence” had been destroyed already. But faith in a special superintendence of Deity is not yet dead: nay, more, He who created the human mind took especial care, in its construction, that, save in a few defective specimens of the race, the belief should never die.

The author of the “Vestiges” complains of the illiberality with which he has been treated. “It has appeared to various critics,” we find him saying, “that very sacred principles are threatened by a doctrine of universal law. A natural origin of life, and a natural basis in organization for the operations of the human mind, speak to them of fatalism and materialism. And, strange to say, those who every day give views of _physical cosmogony_ altogether discrepant in appearance with that of Moses, apply hard names to my book for suggesting an _organic cosmogony_ in the same way, liable to inconsiderate odium. I must firmly protest against this mode of meeting speculations regarding nature. The object of my book, whatever may be said of the manner in which it is treated, is purely scientific. The views which I give of the history of organization stand exactly on the same ground upon which the geological doctrines stood fifty years ago. I am merely endeavoring to read aright another chapter of the mystic book which God has placed under the attention of his creatures.... The absence of all liberality in my reviewers is striking, and especially so in those whose geological doctrines have exposed them to similar misconstruction. If the men newly emerged from the odium which was thrown upon Newton’s theory of the planetary motions had rushed forward to turn that odium upon the patrons of the dawning science of Geology, they would have been prefiguring the conduct of several of my critics, themselves hardly escaped from the rude hands of the narrow-minded, yet eager to join that rabble against a new and equally unfriended stranger, as if such were the best means of purchasing impunity for themselves. _I trust that a little time will enable the public to penetrate this policy._”

Now, there is one very important point to which the author of this complaint does not seem to have adverted. The astronomer founded his belief in the mobility of the earth and the immobility of the sun, not on a mere dream-like hypothesis, founded on nothing, but on a wide and solid base of pure induction. Galileo was no mere dreamer;—he was a discoverer of great truths, and a profound reasoner regarding them: and on his discoveries and his reasonings, compelled by the inexorable laws of his mental constitution, did he build up certain deductive beliefs, which had no previous existence in his mind. His convictions were consequents, not antecedents. Such, also, is the character of geological discovery and inference, and of the existing belief,—their joint production,—regarding the great antiquity of the globe. No geologist worthy of the name _began_ with the belief, and then set himself to square geological phenomena with its requirements. It is a deduction,—a result;—not the starting assumption, or given sum, in a process of calculation, but its ultimate finding or answer. Clergymen of the orthodox Churches, such as the Sumners, Sedgwicks, Bucklands, Conybeares, and Pye Smiths of England, or the Chalmerses, Duncans, and Flemings of our own country, must have come to the study of this question of the world’s age with at least no bias in favor of the geological estimate. The old, and, as it has proven, erroneous reading of the Mosaic account, was by much too general a one early in the present century, not to have exerted upon them, in their character as ministers of religion, a sensible influence of a directly opposite nature. And the fact of the complete reversal of their original bias, and of the broad unhesitating finding on the subject which they ultimately substituted instead, serves to intimate to the uninitiated the strength of the evidence to which they submitted. There can be nothing more certain than that it is minds of the same calibre and class, engaged in the same inductive track, that yielded in the first instance to the astronomical evidence regarding the earth’s motion, and, in the second, to the geological evidence regarding the earth’s age.[40]

But how very different the nature and history of the development hypothesis, and the character of the intellects with whom it originated, or by whom it has been since adopted! In the first place, it existed as a wild dream ere Geology had any being as a science. It was an antecedent, not a consequent,—a starting assumption, not a result. No one will contend that Maillet was a geologist. Geology has no place among the sciences in the age in which he lived and even no name. And yet there is a translation of his _Telliamed_ now lying before me, bearing date 1750, in which I find very nearly the same account given of the origin of animals and plants as that in the “Vestiges,” and in which the sea is described as that great and fruitful womb of nature in which organization and life first began. Lamarck, at the time when Maillet wrote, was a boy in his sixth year. He became, comparatively early in life, a skilful botanist and conchologist; but not until turned of fifty did he set himself to study general zoology; and his greater work on the invertebrate animals, on which his fame as a naturalist chiefly rests, did not _begin_ to appear—for it was published serially—until the year 1815. But his development hypothesis, identical with that of the “Vestiges,” was given to the world long before,—in 1802; at a time when it had not been ascertained that there existed placoids during the Silurian period, or ganoids during the Old Red Sandstone period, or enaliosaurs during the Oolitic period; and when, though Smith had constructed his “Tabular View of the British Strata,” his map had not yet appeared, and there was little more known regarding the laws of superposition among the stratified rocks than was to be found in the writings of Werner. And if the presumption be strong, in the circumstances, that Lamarck originated his development hypothesis ere he became in any very great degree skilful as a zoologist, it is no mere presumption, but a demonstrable truth, that he originated it ere he became a geologist; for a geologist he never became. In common with Maillet and Buffon, he held by Leibnitz’s theory of a universal ocean; and such, as we have already seen, was his ignorance of fossils, that he erected dermal fragments of the Russian _Asterolepis_ into a new genus of Polyparia,—an error into which the merest tyro in palæontology could not now fall. Such, in relation to these sciences, was the man who perfected the dream of development. Nor has the most distinguished of its continental assertors now living,—Professor Oken,—any higher claim to be regarded as a disciple of the inductive school of Geology than Lamarck. In the preface to the recently published translation of his “Physio-Philosophy,” we find the following curious confession:—“I wrote the first edition of 1810 _in a kind of inspiration_, and on that account it was not so well arranged as a systematic work ought to be. Now, though this may appear to have been amended in the second and third edition, yet still it was not possible for me to completely attain the object held in view. The book has therefore remained essentially the same as regards its fundamental principles. It is only the empirical arrangement into series of plants and animals that has been modified from time to time, _in accordance with the scientific elevation of their several departments, or just as discoveries and anatomical investigations have increased, and rendered some other position of the objects a matter of necessity_.” An interesting piece of evidence this; but certainly rather simple as a confession. It will be found that while whatever gives value to the “Physio-Philosophy” of the German Professor (a work which, if divested of all the inspired bits, would be really a good one) was acquired either before or since its first appearance in the ordinary way, its development hypothesis came direct from the god. Further, as I have already had occasion to state, Oken holds, like Lamarck and Maillet, by the universal ocean of Leibnitz; he holds, also, that the globe is a vast crystal, just a little flawed in the facets: and that the three granitic components—quartz, feldspar, and mica—are simply the hail-drops of heavy stone showers that shot athwart the original ocean, and accumulated into rock at the bottom, as snow or hail shoots athwart the upper atmosphere, and accumulates, in the form of ice, on the summits of high hills, or in the arctic or antarctic regions. Such, in the present day, are the geological notions of Oken! They were doubtless all promulgated in what is modestly enough termed “a _kind_ of inspiration;” and there are few now so ignorant of Geology as not to know that the _possessing_ agent in the case—for _inspiration_ is not quite the proper word—must have been at least of kin to that ingenious personage who volunteered of old to be a lying spirit in the mouths of the four hundred prophets. And the well-known fact, that the most popular contemporary expounder of Oken’s hypothesis—the author of the “Vestiges”—has in every edition of his work been correcting, modifying, or altogether withdrawing his statements regarding both geological and zoological phenomena, and that his gradual development as a geologist and zoologist, from the sufficiently low type of acquirement to which his first edition bore witness, may be traced, in consequence, with a distinctness and certainty which we in vain seek in the cases of presumed development which he would so fain establish,—has in its bearing exactly the same effect. His development hypothesis was complete at a time when his geology and zoology were rudimental and imperfect. Give me your facts, said the Frenchman, that I may accommodate them to my theory. And no one can look at the progress of the Lamarckian hypothesis, with reference to the dates when, and the men by whom, it was promulgated, without recognizing in it one of perhaps the most striking embodiments of the Frenchman’s principle which the world ever saw. It is not the illiberal religionist that rejects and casts it off,—it is the inductive philosopher. Science addresses its assertors in the language of the possessed to the sons of Sceva the Jew;—“The astronomer I know, and the geologist I know; but who are ye?”

One of the strangest passages in the “Sequel to the Vestiges,” is that in which its author carries his appeal from the tribunal of science to “another tribunal,” indicated but not named, before which “this new philosophy” [remarkable chiefly for being neither philosophy nor new] “is to be truly and righteously judged.” The principle is obvious, on which, were his opponents mere theologians, wholly unable, though they saw the mischievous character and tendency of his conclusions, to disprove them scientifically, he might appeal from theology to science: “it is with scientific truth,” he might urge, “not with moral consequences, that I have aught to do.” But on what allowable principle, professing, as he does, to found his theory on scientific fact, can he appeal from science to the want of it? “After discussing,” he says, “the whole arguments on both sides in so ample a manner, it may be hardly necessary to advert to the objection arising from the mere fact, that nearly all the scientific men are opposed to the theory of the ‘Vestiges.’ As this objection, however, is likely to be of some avail with many minds, it ought not to be entirely passed over. If I did not think there were reasons, independent of judgment, for the scientific class coming so generally to this conclusion, I might feel the more embarrassed in presenting myself in direct opposition to so many men possessing talents and information. As the case really stands, the ability of this class to give at the present a true response upon such a subject appears extremely challengeable. It is no discredit to them that they are, almost without exception, engaged each in his own little department of science, and able to give little or no attention to other parts of that vast field. From year to year, and from age to age, we see them at work, adding, no doubt, much to the known, and advancing many important interests, but at the same time doing little for the establishment of comprehensive views of nature Experiments in however narrow a walk, facts of whatever minuteness, make reputations in scientific societies; all beyond is regarded with suspicion and distrust. The consequence is, that philosophy, as it exists amongst us, does nothing to raise its votaries above the common ideas of their time. There can therefore be nothing more conclusive against our hypothesis in the disfavor of the scientific class, than in that of any other section of educated men.”

This is surely a very strange statement. Waiving altogether the _general_ fact, that great original discoverers in any department of knowledge are never men of one science or one faculty, but possess, on the contrary, breadth of mind and multiplicity of acquirement;—waiving, too, the _particular_ fact, that the more distinguished original discoverers of the present day rank among at once its most philosophic, most elegant, and most extensively informed writers;—granting, for the argument’s sake, that our scientific men _are_ men of narrow acquirement, and “exclusively engaged, each in his own little department of science;”—it is surely rational to hold, notwithstanding, that in at least these little departments they have a better right to be heard than any other class of persons whatever. We must surely not refuse to the man of science what we at once grant to the common mechanic. A cotton-weaver or calico-printer may be a very narrow man, “exclusively engaged in his own little department;” and yet certain it is that, in a question of cotton-weaving or calico-printing, his evidence is justly deemed more conclusive in courts of law than that of any other man, however much his superior in general breadth and intelligence. And had the author of the “Vestiges” founded his hypothesis on certain facts pertaining to the arts of cotton-weaving and calico-printing, the cotton-weaver and calico-printer would have an indisputable right to be heard on the question of their general correctness. Are we to regard the case as different because it is on facts pertaining to science, not to cotton-weaving or calico-printing, that he professes to found? His hypothesis, unless supported by scientific evidence, is a mere dream,—a fiction as baseless and wild as any in the “Fairy Tales” or the “Arabian Nights.” And, fully sensible of the fact, he calls in as witnesses the physical sciences, and professes to take down their evidence. He calls into court Astronomy, Geology, Phytology, and Zoology. “Hold!” exclaims the astronomer, as the examination goes on; “you are taking the evidence of my special science most unfairly; I challenge a right of cross-examining the witness.” “Hold!” cries the geologist; “you are putting my science to the question, and extorting from it, in its agony, a whole series of fictions: I claim the right of examining it fairly and softly, and getting from it just the sober truth, and nothing more.” And the phytologist and zoologist urge exactly similar claims. “No, gentlemen,” replies the author of the “Vestiges,” “you are narrow men, confined each of you to his own little department, and so I will not permit you to cross-examine the witnesses.” “What!” rejoin the men of science, “not permit us to examine our own witnesses!—refuse to us what you would at once concede to the cotton-weaver or the calico-printer, were the question one of cotton-weaving or of calico-printing! We are surely not much narrower men than the man of cotton or the man of calico. It is but in our own little departments that we ask to be heard.” “But you shall not be heard, gentlemen,” says the author of the “Vestiges;” “at all events, I shall not care one farthing for anything you say. For observe, gentlemen, my hypothesis is nothing without the evidence of your sciences; and you all unite, I see, in taking that evidence from me; and so I confidently raise my appeal in this matter to people who know nothing about either you or your sciences. It must be before another tribunal that the new philosophy is to be truly and righteously judged.” Alas! what can this mean? or where are we to seek for that tribunal of last resort to which this ingenious man refers with such confidence the consideration of his case? Can it mean, that he appeals from the only class of persons qualified to judge of his facts, to a class ignorant of these, but disposed by habits of previous scepticism to acquiesce in his conclusions, and take his premises for granted;—that he appeals from astronomers and geologists to low-minded materialists and shallow phrenologers,—from phytologists and zoologists to mesmerists and phreno-mesmerists?

I remember being much struck, several years ago, by a remark dropped in conversation by the late Rev. Mr. Stewart of Cromarty, one of the most original-minded men I ever knew. “In reading in my Greek New Testament this morning,” he said, “I was curiously impressed by a thought which, simple as it may seem, never occurred to me before. The portion which I perused was in the First Epistle of Peter; and as I passed from the thinking of the passage to the language in which it is expressed,—‘This Greek of the untaught Galilean fisherman,’—I said, ‘so admired by scholars and critics for its unaffected dignity and force, was not acquired, as that of Paul may have been, in the ordinary way, but formed a portion of the Pentecostal gift! Here, then, immediately under my eye, on these pages, are there embodied, not, as in many other parts of the Scriptures, the mere _details_ of a miracle, but the direct _results_ of a miracle. How strange! Had the old tables of stone been placed before me, with what an awe-struck feeling would I have looked on the characters traced upon them by God’s own finger! How is it that I have failed to remember that, in the language of these Epistles, miraculously impressed by the Divine power upon the mind, I possessed as significant and suggestive a relic as that which the inscription miraculously impressed by the Divine power upon the stone could possibly have furnished?” It was a striking thought; and in the course of our walk, which led us over richly fossiliferous beds of the Old Red Sandstone, to a deposit of the Eathie Lias, largely charged with the characteristic remains of that formation, I ventured to connect it with another. “In either case,” I remarked, as we seated ourselves beside a sea-cliff, sculptured over with the impressions of extinct plants and shells, “your relics, whether of the Pentecostal Greek or of the characters inscribed on the old tables of stone, could address themselves to but previously existing belief. The sceptic would see in the Sinaitic characters, were they placed before him, merely the work of an ordinary tool; and in the Greek of Peter and John, a well-known language, acquired, he would hold, in the common way. But what say you to the relics that stand out in such bold relief from the rocks beside us, in _their_ character as the results of miracle? The perished tribes and races which they represent all _began_ to exist. There is no truth which science can more conclusively demonstrate than that they had all a beginning. The infidel who, in this late age of the world, would attempt falling back on the fiction of an ‘infinite series,’ would be laughed to scorn. They all began to be. But how? No true geologist holds by the development hypothesis;—it has been resigned to sciolists and smatterers;—and there is but one other alternative. They began to be, _through the miracle of creation_. From the evidence furnished by these rocks we are shut down either to the belief in _miracle_, or to the belief in something else infinitely harder of reception, and as thoroughly unsupported by testimony as it is contrary to experience. Hume is at length answered by the severe truths of the stony science. He was not, according to Job, ‘in league with the stones of the field,’ and they have risen in irresistible warfare against him in the Creator’s behalf.”

FINAL CAUSES.—THEIR BEARING ON GEOLOGIC HISTORY. CONCLUSION.

“Natural History has a principle on which to reason,” says Cuvier, “which is peculiar to it, and which it employs advantageously on many occasions: it is that of the _conditions of existence_, commonly termed _final causes_.”

In Geology, which is Natural History extended over all ages, this principle has a still wider scope,—embracing not merely the characteristics and conditions of the beings which now exist, but of all, so far as we can learn regarding them, which have ever existed, and involving the consideration of not merely their peculiarities as races placed before us without relation to time, but also of the history of their rise, increase, decline, and extinction. In studying the _biography_, if I may so express myself, of an individual animal, we have to acquaint ourselves with the circumstances in which nature has placed it,—its adaptation to these, both in structure and instinct,—the points of resemblance which it presents to the individuals of other races and families, and the laws which determine its terms of development, vigorous existence, and decay. And all Natural History, when restricted to the passing _now_ of the world’s annals, is simply a congeries of biographies. It is when we extend our view into the geological field that it passes from _biography_ into _history proper_, and that we have to rise from the consideration of the birth and death of individuals, which, in all mere biographies, form the great terminal events that constitute beginning and end, to a survey of the birth and death of races, and the elevation or degradation of dynasties and sub-kingdoms.

We learn from human history that nations are as certainly mortal as men. They enjoy a greatly longer term of existence, but they die at last: Rollin’s History of Ancient Nations is a history of the dead. And we are taught by geological history, in like manner, that _species_ are as mortal as individuals and nations, and that even genera and families become extinct. There is no _man_ upon earth at the present moment whose age greatly exceeds an hundred years;—there is no _nation_ now upon earth (if we perhaps except the long-lived Chinese) that also flourished three thousand years ago;—there is no _species_ now living upon earth that dates beyond the times of the Tertiary deposits. All bear the stamp of death,—individuals,—nations,—species; and we may scarce less safely predicate, looking upon the past, that it is appointed for nations and species to die, than that it “is appointed for _man_ once to die.” Even our own species, _as now constituted_,—with instincts that conform to the original injunction, “increase and multiply,” and that, in consequence, “marry and are given in marriage,”—shall one day cease to exist: a fact not less in accordance with beliefs inseparable from the faith of the Christian, than with the widely-founded experience of the geologist. Now, it is scarce possible for the human mind to become acquainted with the fact, that at certain periods species began to exist and then, after the lapse of untold ages, ceased to be, without inquiring whether, from the “conditions of existence, commonly termed final causes,” we cannot deduce a reason for their rise or decline, or why their term of being should have been included rather in one certain period of time than another. The same faculty which finds employment in tracing to their causes the rise and fall of nations, and which it is the merit of the philosophic historian judiciously to exercise, will to a certainty seek employment in this department of history also; and that there will be an appetency for such speculations in the public mind, we may infer from the success, as a literary undertaking, of the “Vestiges of Creation,”—a work that bears the same sort of relation, in this special field to sober inquiry, founded on the true conditions of things, that the legends of the old chroniclers bore to authentic history. The progressive state of geologic science has hitherto militated against the formation of theory of the soberer character. Its facts—still merely in the forming—are necessarily imperfect in their classification, and limited in their amount; and thus the essential data continues incomplete. Besides, the men best acquainted with the basis of fact which already exists, have quite enough to engage them in adding to it. But there are limits to the field of palæontological discovery, in its relation to what may be termed the chronology of organized existence, which, judging from the progress of the science in the past, may be well nigh reached in favored localities, such as the British islands, in about a quarter of a century from the present time; and then, I doubt not, geological history, in legitimate conformity with the laws of mind, and from the existence of the pregnant principle peculiar, according to Cuvier, to that science of which Geology is simply an extension, will assume a very extraordinary form. We cannot yet aspire “to the height of this great argument:” our foundations are in parts still unconsolidated and incomplete, and unfitted to sustain the perfect superstructure which shall one day assuredly rise upon them; but from the little which we can now see, “as if in a glass darkly,” enough appears from which to

“Assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.”

The history of the four great monarchies of the world was typified, in the prophetic dream of the ancient Babylonish king, by a colossal image, “terrible in its form and brightness,” of which the “head was pure gold,” the “breast and arms of silver,” the “belly and thighs of brass,” and the legs and feet “of iron, and of iron mingled with clay.” The vision in which it formed the central object was appropriately that of a puissant monarch; and the image itself typified the merely human monarchies of the earth. It would require a widely different figure to symbolize the great monarchies of creation. And yet Revelation does furnish such a figure. It is that which was witnessed by the captive prophet beside “the river Chebar,” when “the heavens were opened, and he saw visions of God.” In that chariot of Deity, glowing in fire and amber, with its complex wheels “so high that they were dreadful,” set round about with eyes, there were living creatures, of whose four faces three were brute and one human; and high over all sat the Son of Man. It would almost seem as if, in this sublime vision,—in which, with features distinct enough to impress the imagination, there mingle the elements of an awful incomprehensibility, and which even the genius of Raffaelle has failed adequately to portray,—the history of all the past and of all the future had been symbolized. In the order of Providence intimated in the geologic record, the brute faces, as in the vision, outnumber the human;—the human dynasty is one, and the dynasties of the inferior animals are three; and yet who can doubt that they all equally compose parts of a well-ordered and perfect whole, as the four faces formed but one cherubim; that they have been moving onward to a definite goal, in the unity of one grand harmonious design,—now “lifted up high” over the comprehension of earth,—now let down to its humble level; and that the Creator of all has been ever seated over them on the throne of his providence,—a “likeness in the appearance of a man,”—embodying the perfection of his nature in his workings, and determining the end from the beginning?

There is geologic evidence, as has been shown, that in the course of creation the higher orders succeeded the lower. We have no good reason to believe that the mollusc and crustacean preceded the fish, seeing that discovery, in its slow course, has already traced the vertebrata in the ichthyic form, down to deposits which only a few years ago were regarded as representatives of the first beginnings of organized existence on our planet, and that it has at the same time failed to add a lower system to that in which their remains occur. But the fish seems most certainly to have preceded the reptile and the bird; the reptile and the bird to have preceded the mammiferous quadruped; and the mammiferous quadruped to have preceded man,—rational, accountable man, whom God created in his own image,—the much-loved Benjamin of the family,—last-born of all creatures. It is of itself an extraordinary fact, without reference to other considerations, that the order adopted by Cuvier, in his animal kingdom, as that in which the four great classes of vertebrate animals, when marshalled according to their rank and standing, naturally range should be also that in which they occur in order of time. The brain which bears an average proportion to the spinal cord of not more than two to one, came first,—it is the brain of the fish; that which bears to the spinal cord an average proportion of two and a half to one succeeded it,—it is the brain of the reptile; then came the brain averaging as three to one,—it is that of the bird; next in succession came the brain that averages as four to one,—it is that of the mammal; and last of all there appeared a brain that averages as _twenty-three_ to one,—reasoning, calculating man had come upon the scene. All the facts of geological science are hostile to the Lamarckian conclusion, that the lower brains were developed into the higher. As if with the express intention of preventing so gross a mis-reading of the record, we find, in at least two classes of animals,—fishes and reptiles,—the higher races placed at the beginning: the slope of the inclined plane is laid, if one may so speak, in the reverse way, and, instead of rising towards the level of the succeeding class, inclines downwards, with at least the effect, if not the design, of making the break where they meet exceedingly well marked and conspicuous. And yet the record does seem to speak of _development and progression_;—not, however, in the province of organized existence, but in that of insensate matter, subject to the purely chemical laws. It is in the style and character of _the dwelling-place_ that gradual improvement seems to have taken place;—not in the functions or the rank of any class of its inhabitants; and it is with special reference to this gradual improvement in our common mansion-house the earth, in its bearing on the “conditions of existence,” that not a few of our reasonings regarding the introduction and extinction of species and genera must proceed.

That definite period at which man was introduced upon the scene seems to have been specially determined by the conditions of correspondence which the phenomena of his habitation had at length come to assume with the predestined constitution of his mind. The large reasoning brain would have been wholly out of place in the earlier ages. It is indubitably the nature of man to base the conclusions which regulate all his actions on fixed phenomena,—he reasons from cause to effect, or from effect to cause; and when placed in circumstances in which, from some lack of the necessary basis, he cannot so reason, he becomes a wretched, timid, superstitious creature, greatly more helpless and abject than even the inferior animals. This unhappy state is strikingly exemplified by that deep and peculiar impression made on the mind by a severe earthquake, which Humboldt, from his own experience, so powerfully describes. “This impression,” he says, “is not, in my opinion, the result of a recollection of those fearful pictures of devastation presented to our imagination by the historical narratives of the past, but is rather due to the sudden revelation of the delusive nature of the inherent faith by which we had clung to a belief in the immobility of the solid parts of the earth. We are accustomed from early childhood to draw a contrast between the mobility of water and the immobility of the soil on which we tread; and this feeling is confirmed by the evidence of our senses. When, therefore, we suddenly feel the ground move beneath us, a mysterious force, with which we were previously unacquainted, is revealed to us as an active disturber of stability. A moment destroys the illusion of a whole life; our deceptive faith in the repose of nature vanishes; and we feel transported into a realm of unknown destructive forces. Every sound—the faintest motion of the air—arrests our attention, and we no longer trust the ground on which we stand. There is an idea conveyed to the mind, of some universal and unlimited danger. We may flee from the crater of a volcano in active eruption, or from the dwelling whose destruction is threatened by the approach of the lava stream; but in an earthquake, direct our flight whithersoever we will, we still feel as if we trod upon the very focus of destruction.” Not less striking is the testimony of Dr. Tschudi, in his “Travels in Peru,” regarding this singular effect of earthquakes on the human mind. “No familiarity with the phenomenon can,” he remarks, “blunt the feeling. The inhabitant of Lima, who from childhood has frequently witnessed these convulsions of nature, is roused from his sleep by the shock, and rushes from his apartment with the cry of ‘_Misericordia_!’ The foreigner from the north of Europe, who knows nothing of earthquakes but by description, waits with impatience to feel the movements of the earth, and longs to hear with his own ear the subterranean sounds, which he has hitherto considered fabulous. With levity he treats the apprehension of a coming convulsion, and laughs at the fears of the natives; but as soon as his wish is gratified, he is terror-stricken, and is involuntarily prompted to seek safety in flight.”

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.”