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Title: The Testimony of the Rocks
or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed
Author: Hugh Miller
Release Date: March 4, 2009 [eBook #28248]
Language: English
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THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS;
Or,
Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed.
by
HUGH MILLER
* * * * *
WORKS BY HUGH MILLER,
PUBLISHED BY
GOULD AND LINCOLN,
59 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON.
I.
THE OLD RED SANDSTONE;
OR, NEW WALKS IN AN OLD FIELD.
Illustrated with Plates and Geological Sections. 12mo, cloth. Price
$1.00.
"It is withal one of the most beautiful specimens of English
composition to be found, conveying information on a most difficult
and profound science, in a style at once novel, pleasing and
elegant."--DR. SPRAGUE, ALBANY SPECTATOR.
II.
MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE.
With a fine Engraving of the Author. 12mo, cloth. Price $1.00.
A thrillingly interesting and instructive book of travels;
presenting the most perfectly life-like views of England and its
People to be found in the language.
III.
THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR;
OR, THE ASTEROLEPIS OF STROMNESS.
With numerous Illustrations. With a Memoir of the Author, by Louis
Agassiz. 12mo, cloth. Price $1.00.
Dr. Buckland said HE WOULD GIVE HIS LEFT HAND TO POSSESS SUCH
POWERS OF DESCRIPTION AS THIS MAN.
IV.
MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS;
OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION.
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
With a full length Portrait of the Author. 12mo, cloth. Price $1.25.
This is a personal narrative of a deeply interesting and
instructive character, concerning one of the most remarkable men of
the age. It should be read and studied by every young man in the
land.
V.
TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS;
OR, GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES,
NATURAL AND REVEALED.
"Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field."--JOB.
With numerous elegant Illustrations. One volume, royal 12mo. Price $1.25.
This is the largest and most comprehensive geological work of this
distinguished author. It exhibits the profound learning, the
felicitous style, and the scientific perception, which characterize
his former works, while it embraces the latest results of
geological discovery. But the great charm of the book lies in those
passages of glowing eloquence, in which, having spread out his
facts, the author proceeds to make deductions from them of the most
striking and exciting character.
* * * * *
--> The above works may be had in sets of uniform size and style of
binding.
VALUABLE WORKS.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER: A VIEW OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES OF MODERN SOCIETY,
and the Result of Labor, Capital, and Skill. By CHARLES KNIGHT. American
edition, with Additions, by DAVID A. WELLS, Editor of "Annual of
Scientific Discovery," &c. With numerous Illustrations. 12mo, cloth.
$1.25.
This work is eminently entitled to be ranked in that class, styled,
"BOOKS FOR THE PEOPLE." The author is one of the most popular
writers of the day. "Knowledge is Power" treats of those things
Which "come home to the business and bosoms" of every man. It is
remarkable for its fullness and variety of information, and for the
felicity and force with which the author applies his facts to his
reasoning. The facts and illustrations are drawn from almost every
branch of skilful industry. It is a work which the mechanic and
artizan of every description will be sure to read with a RELISH.
This is a work of rare merit, and touches many strings of
importance with which society is linked together. No work we have
ever seen is better calculated to inspire and awaken inventive
genius in man than this. Almost every department of human labor is
represented, and it contains a large fund of useful information,
condensed in a volume, every chapter of which is worth the cost of
the book. It would be an act of manifest injustice to the community
for any editor to feel an indifference about commending this volume
to a reading public.--N.Y. CH. HERALD.
The style is admirable, and the book itself is as full of
information as an egg is of meat.--JOURNAL.
As teachers we know no better remuneration, than for them FIRST to
buy this book and diligently read it themselves; SECOND, to teach
to their pupils the principles of industrial organization which it
contains, and of the facts by which it is illustrated. It is one of
the merits of this book that its facts will interest youthful minds
and be retained to blossom hereafter into theories of which they
are now incapable. THIRD, endeavor to have a copy procured for the
district library, that the parents may read it, and the teachers
reap fruit in the present generation.--N.Y. TEACHER.
Contains a great amount of information, accompanied with numerous
illustrations, rendering it a compendious history of the subjects
upon which it treats.--N.Y. COURIER AND INQUIRER.
We commend the work as one of real value and profitable
reading.--ROCHESTER AMERICAN.
This work is a rich repository of valuable information on various
subjects, having a bearing on the industrial end social interests
of a community.--PURITAN RECORDER.
MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. BY HUGH
MILLER, author of "Old Red Sandstone," "Footprints of the Creator," "My
First Impressions of England," etc. 12mo, cloth. $1.25.
"This autobiography is quite worthy of the renowned author. His
first attempts at literature, and his career until he stood forth
an acknowledged power among the philosophers and ecclesiastical
leaders of his native land, are given without egotism, with a power
and vivacity which are equally truthful and
delightsome."--PRESBYTERIAN.
"Hugh Miller is one of the most remarkable men of the age. Having
risen from the humble walks of life, and from the employment of a
stone-cutter, to the highest rank among scientific men, everything
relating to his history possesses an interest which belongs to that
of few living men. There is much even in his school-boy days which
points to the man as he now is. The book has all the ease and
graphic power which in characteristic of his writings."--NEW YORK
OBSERVER.
"This volume is a book for the ten thousand. It is embellished with
an admirable likeness of Hugh Miller, the stone mason--his coat off
and his sleeves rolled up--with the implements of labor in
hand--his form erect, and his eye bright and piercing. The
biography of such a man will interest every reader. It is a living
thing--teaching a lesson of self-culture of immense
value."--PHILADELPHIA CHRISTIAN OBSERVER.
"It is a portion of autobiography exquisitely told. He is a living
proof that a single man may contain within himself something more
than all the books in the world, some unuttered word, if he will
look within and read. This is one of the best books we have had of
late, and must have a hearty welcome and a large circulation in
America."--LONDON CORRESP. N.Y. TRIBUNE.
"It is a work of rare interest; at times having the fascination of
a romance, and again suggesting the profoundest views of education
and of science. The ex-mason holds a graphic pen; a quiet humor
runs through his pages; he tells a story well, and some of his
pictures of home life might almost be classed with Wilson's."--NEW
YORK INDEPENDENT.
"This autobiography is THE book for poor boys, and others who are
struggling with poverty and limited advantages; and perhaps it is
not too much to predict that in a few years it will become one of
the poor man's classics, filling a space on his scanty shelf next
to the Autobiography of Franklin."--NEW ENGLAND FARMER.
"Lovers of the romantic should not neglect the book, as it contains
a narrative of tender passion and happily reciprocated affection,
which will be read with subdued emotion and unfailing
interest."--BOSTON TRAVELLER.
* * * * *
[Illustration: SPHENOPTERIS AFFINIS.
A Fern of the Lower Coal Measures.
(_Restored._)]
THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS;
Or,
Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed.
by
HUGH MILLER,
Author of "The Old Red Sandstone," "Footprints of the
Creator," Etc., Etc.
With Memorials of the Death and Character of the Author.
"Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field."--JOB.
Boston:
Gould and Lincoln,
59 Washington Street.
New York: Sheldon, Blakeman & Co.
Cincinnati: George S. Blanchard.
1857.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by GOULD AND
LINCOLN, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
Electro-Stereotyped
by Geo. J. Stiles,
23 Congress St., Boston.
TO
JAMES MILLER, ESQ., F.R.S.E.
PROFESSOR OF SURGERY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH.
MY DEAR SIR,
This volume is chiefly taken up in answering, to the best of its
author's knowledge and ability, the various questions which the old
theology of Scotland has been asking for the last few years of the
newest of the sciences. Will you pardon me the liberty I take in
dedicating it to you? In compliance with the peculiar demand of the
time, that what a man knows of science or of art he should freely
communicate to his neighbors, we took the field nearly together as
popular lecturers, and have at least so far resembled each other in our
measure of success, that the same class of censors have been severe upon
both. For while you have been condemned as a physiologist for asserting
that the human framework, when fairly wrought during the week, is
greatly the better for the rest of the Sabbath, I have been described by
the same pen as one of the wretched class of persons who teach that
geology, rightly understood, does not conflict with revelation. Besides,
I owe it to your kindness that, when set aside by the indisposition
which renders it doubtful whether I shall ever again address a popular
audience, you enabled me creditably to fulfil one of my engagements by
reading for me in public two of the following discourses, and by doing
them an amount of justice on that occasion which could never have been
done them by their author. Further, your kind attentions and advice
during the crisis of my illness were certainly every way suited to
remind me of those so gratefully acknowledged by the wit of the last
century, when he bethought him of
"kind Arbuthnot's aid,
Who knew his art, but not his trade."
And so, though the old style of dedication has been long out of fashion,
I avail myself of the opportunity it affords me of expressing my entire
concurrence in your physiological views, my heartfelt gratitude for your
good services and friendship, and my sincere respect for the
disinterested part you have taken in the important work of elevating and
informing your humbler countryfolk,--while at the same time maintaining
professionally, with Simpson and with Goodsir, the reputation of that
school of anatomy and medicine for which the Scottish capital has been
long so famous.
I am,
MY DEAR SIR,
With sincere respect and regard,
Yours affectionately,
HUGH MILLER.
TO THE READER.
Of the twelve following Lectures, four (the First, Second, Fifth, and
Sixth) were delivered before the members of the Edinburgh Philosophical
Institution (1852 and 1855). One (the Third) was read at Exeter Hall
before the Young Men's Christian Association (1854), and the substance
of two of the others (the Eleventh and Twelfth) at Glasgow, before the
Geological Section of the British Association (1855). Of the five
others,--written mainly to complete and impart a character of unity to
the volume of which they form a part,--only three (the Fourth, Seventh,
and Eighth) were addressed viva voce to popular audiences. The Third
Lecture was published both in this country and America, and translated
into some of the Continental languages. The rest now appear in print for
the first time. Though their writer has had certainly no reason to
complain of the measure of favor with which the read or spoken ones have
been received, they are perhaps all better adapted for perusal in the
closet than for delivery in the public hall or lecture-room; while the
two concluding Lectures are mayhap suited to interest only geologists
who, having already acquainted themselves with the generally ascertained
facts of their science, are curious to cultivate a further knowledge
with such new facts as in the course of discovery are from time to time
added to the common fund. In such of the following Lectures as deal with
but the established geologic phenomena, and owe whatever little merit
they may possess to the inferences drawn from these, or on the
conclusions based upon them, most of the figured illustrations, though
not all, will be recognized as familiar: in the two concluding Lectures,
on the contrary, they will be found to be almost entirely new. They are
contributions, representative of the patient gleanings of years, to the
geologic records of Scotland; and exhibit, in a more or less perfect
state, no inconsiderable portion of all the forms yet detected in the
rocks of her earlier Palæozoic and Secondary floras.
It will be seen that I adopt, in my Third and Fourth Lectures, that
scheme of reconciliation between the Geologic and Mosaic Records which
accepts the six days of creation as vastly extended periods; and I have
been reminded by a somewhat captious critic that I once held a very
different view, and twitted with what he terms inconsistency. I
certainly did once believe with Chalmers and with Buckland that the six
days were simply natural days of twenty-four hours each,--that they had
compressed the entire work of the existing creation,--and that the
latest of the geologic ages was separated by a great chaotic gap from
our own. My labors at the time as a practical geologist had been very
much restricted to the Palæozoic and Secondary rocks, more especially
to the Old Red and Carboniferous Systems of the one division, and the
Oolitic System of the other; and the long extinct organisms which I
found in them certainly did not conflict with the view of Chalmers. All
I found necessary at the time to the work of reconciliation was some
scheme that would permit me to assign to the earth a high antiquity, and
to regard it as the scene of many succeeding creations. During the last
nine years, however, I have spent a few weeks every autumn in exploring
the later formations, and acquainting myself with their peculiar
organisms. I have traced them upwards from the raised beaches and old
coast lines of the human period, to the brick clays, Clyde beds, and
drift and boulder deposits of the Pleistocene era, and again from these,
with the help of museums and collections, up through the mammaliferous
crag of England, to its Red and its Coral crags. And the conclusion at
which I have been compelled to arrive is, that for many long ages ere
man was ushered into being, not a few of his humbler contemporaries of
the fields and woods enjoyed life in their present haunts, and that for
thousands of years anterior to even their appearance, many of the
existing molluscs lived in our seas. That day during which the present
creation came into being, and in which God, when he had made "the beast
of the earth after his kind, and the cattle after their kind," at length
terminated the work by moulding a creature in his own image, to whom he
gave dominion over them all, was not a brief period of a few hours'
duration, but extended over mayhap millenniums of centuries. No blank
chaotic gap of death and darkness separated the creation to which man
belongs from that of the old extinct elephant, hippopotamus, and hyæna;
for familiar animals such as the red deer, the roe, the fox, the wild
cat, and the badger, lived throughout the period which connected their
times with our own; and so I have been compelled to hold, that the days
of creation were not natural, but prophetic days, and stretched far back
into the bygone eternity. After in some degree committing myself to the
other side, I have yielded to evidence which I found it impossible to
resist; and such in this matter has been my inconsistency,--an
inconsistency of which the world has furnished examples in all the
sciences, and will, I trust, in its onward progress, continue to furnish
many more.
EDINBURGH, DECEMBER, 1856.
[The last proofs of this preface were despatched by the Author to his
printer only the day before that melancholy termination of his life, the
details of which will be found in the "MEMORIALS" following.--AM.
PUBLISHERS.]
CONTENTS.
PAGE
MEMORIALS OF THE DEATH AND CHARACTER OF HUGH MILLER, 7
LECTURE FIRST.
THE PALÆONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS, 33
LECTURE SECOND.
THE PALÆONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF ANIMALS, 86
LECTURE THIRD.
THE TWO RECORDS, MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL, 141
LECTURE FOURTH.
THE MOSAIC VISION OF CREATION, 179
LECTURE FIFTH.
GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. PART I. 211
LECTURE SIXTH.
GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES. PART II. 237
LECTURE SEVENTH.
THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. PART I. 283
LECTURE EIGHTH.
THE NOACHIAN DELUGE. PART II. 320
LECTURE NINTH.
THE DISCOVERABLE AND THE REVEALED, 362
LECTURE TENTH.
THE GEOLOGY OF THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS, 392
LECTURE ELEVENTH.
ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. PART I. 429
LECTURE TWELFTH.
ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND. PART II. 463
List of Illustrations
PAGE
A Restoration of Sphenopteris affinis (_Frontispiece_)
1. The Genealogy of Plants, 40
2. Cyclopteris Hibernicus, 42
3. Conifer of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 43
4. The Genealogy of Animals, 45
5. Oldhamia antiqua (_oldest known Zoophyte_), 48
6. Palæochorda minor, 49
7. Lycopodium clavatum, 51
8. Equisetum fluviatile, 51
9. Osmunda regalis (_Royal Fern_), 52
10. Pinus sylvestris (_Scotch Fir_), 53
11. Calamite? of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 55
12. Lycopodite? of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 55
13. Fern? of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 56
14-19. Ferns of the Coal Measures, 58
20. Altingia excelsa (_Norfolk Island Pine_), 59
21. East Indian Fern (_Asophila perrotetiana_), 60
22. Section of Stem, of Tree-Fern (_Cyathea_), 60
23-25. Lepidodendron Sternbergii, 62
26. Calamites Mougeotii, 63
27. Sphenophyllum dentatum, 63
28. Sigillaria reniformis, 64
29. Sigillaria reniformis (_nat. size_), 65
30. Sigillaria pachyderma, 66
31. Stigmaria ficoides, 67
32. Favularia tessellata, 68
33. Lepidodendron obovatum, 68
34. Cycas revoluta, 69
35. Zamia pungens, 69
36. Zamia Feneonis, 69
37. Mantellia nidiformis, 70
38. Equisetum columnare, 71
39. Carpolithes conica, 72
40. Carpolithes Bucklandii, 72
41. Acer trilobatum, 73
42. Ulmus Bronnii (_leaf of a tree allied to the Elm_), 74
43. Palmacites Lamanonis (_a Palm of the Miocene of Aix_), 75
44. Cyclophthalmus Bucklandii (_a Fossil Scorpion of the Coal
Measures of Bohemia_), 81
45. Fossil Dragon-Fly, 83
46. Cyathaxonia Dalmani, 88
47. Glyptocrinus decadactylus, 88
48. Calymene Blumenbachii, 89
49. Orthisina Verneuili, 89
50. Lituites cornu-arietis, 89
51. Lingula Lowisii, 89
52. Fort Jackson Shark (_Cestracion Philippi_), 91
53. The Genealogy of Fishes, 93
54. Amblypterus macropterus (_a Ganoid of the Carboniferous
System_), 94
55. Lebias cephalotes (_Cycloids of Aix_), 94
56. Platax altissimus (_a Ctenoid of Monte Bolca_), 95
57. Pterichthys oblongus, 98
58. Pleuracanthus lævissimus, 100
59. Carcharias productus (_Cutting Tooth_), 101
60. Placodus gigas (_Crushing Teeth_), 101
61. Vespertilio Parisiensis (_a Bat of the Eocene_), 106
62. Ichthyosaurus communis, 106
63. Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, 108
64. Pterodactylus crassirostris, 108
65. Chelonia Benstedi, 109
66. Palæophis Toliapicus (_Ophidian of the Eocene_), 110
67. Bird-tracks of the Connecticut, 113
68. Fossil Footprint, 114
69. Thylacotherium Prevosti, 117
70. Anoplotherium commune, 120
71. Animals of the Paris Basin, 121
72. Dinotherium giganteum, 122
73. Elephas primigenius (_Great British Elephant_), 127
74. Trogontherium Cuvieri (_Gigantic Beaver_), 128
75. Ursus spelæus (_Cave Bear_), 128
76. Hyæena Spelæa (_Cave Hyæna_), 129
77. Asaphus caudatus, 134
78. Orthoceras laterale, 134
79. Spirigerina reticularis, 134
80. Ammonites margaritatus, 134
81. Ammonites bisulcatus, 134
82. Belemnitella mucronata, 134
83. Belemnites sulcatus, 134
84. Murex alveolatus, 135
85. Astarte Omalli, 135
86. Balanus crassus, 136
87. Astarte arctica, 152
88. Tellina proxima, 152
89. Norwegian Spruce (_Abies excelsa_), 153
90. Lepidodendron Sternbergii, 164
91. Calamites cannæformis, 165
92. Megatherium Cuvieri, 167
93. Skull of Dinotherium giganteum 168
94. Ammonites Humphriesianus, 242
95. Encrinites moniliformis, 243
96. Cupressocrinus crassius, 243
97. Pentacrinus fasciculosus, 245
98. Chamfered and Imbricated Scales, 246
99. Scale of Holoptychius giganteus, 247
100. Section of Scale of Holoptychius, 248
101. Sigillaria Groeseri, 255
102-104. Whorled Shells of the Old Red Sandstone, 256
105. Murchisonia bigranulosa, 258
106. Conularia ornata, 258
107. Calico pattern (_Manchester_), 259
108. Smithia Pengellyi, 259
109. Apamæean Medal, 298
110. Old Mexican Picture, 299
111. Megaceros Hibernicus (_Irish Elk_), 331
112. Mylodon robustus, 346
113. Glyptodon clavipes, 346
114. The Geography of Cosmas, 376
115. The Heavens and Earth of Cosmas, 377
116. Nummulites lævigata (_Pharaoh's Beans_), 421
117. Silurian Organism, Graptolite, etc., 431
118. Fucoid, 433
119. Fucoids, 434
120. Plant resembling Lycopodium clavatum, 437
121. Parka decipiens, 449
122. Fossil Fern (_probably_), 450
123. Unnamed Fossil Plant, 450
124. Cyclopterus Hibernicus, 458
125. New and peculiar Fern from Airdrie coal field, 464
126. Stigmaria, 465
127. The same, magnified, 465
128. Stigmaria, 466
129. Sphenopteris bifida, 470
130. Conifers? 475
131. Conifer Twigs, 476
132. Unnamed Fossil Plant, 478
133. Zamia, 479
134. Zamia, 480
135. Zamia of the Lias, 481
136. Zamia of the Oolite, 481
137. Zamia resembling Z. lanceolata, 482
138. Fossil Cone, 483
139. Fossil Cone, 484
140. Helmsdale Fossil Plants, 485
141. Fossil Ferns in Helmsdale Deposits, 486
142. Unnamed Fossil Plant, 488
143. Pecopteris obtusifolia, 489
144. Apparent Fern (_new_), 490
145. Pachypteris, 490
146. Phlebopteris, 491
147. Unnamed Fossil Plant, 492
148. Pentagon, illustrative of Fern allies, 493
149. Imbricated Stem, 494
150. Fossil Plant (_Helmsdale_), 495
151. Dicotyledonous Leaf of the Oolite, 496
152. Fern, 497
MEMORIALS
OF
HUGH MILLER.
Unknown he came. He went a Mystery--
A mighty vessel foundered in the calm,
Her freight half-given to the world. To die
He longed, nor feared to meet the great "I AM."
Fret not. God's mystery is solved to him.
He quarried Truth all rough-hewn from the earth,
And chiselled it into a perfect gem--
A rounded Absolute. Twain at a birth--
Science with a celestial halo crowned,
And Heavenly Truth--God's Works by His Word illumed--
These twain he viewed in holiest concord bound.
Reason outsoared itself. His mind consumed
By its volcanic fire, and frantic driven,
He dreamed himself in hell and woke in heaven.
EDINBURGH, December, 1856.
MEMORIALS
OF THE
DEATH AND CHARACTER OF HUGH MILLER,
WITH AN
ACCOUNT OF HIS FUNERAL OBSEQUIES.
Near the end of last autumn the American publishers of Hugh Miller's
works received from him, through his Edinburgh publishers, the offer of
a new work from his pen. The offer was accepted and a contract was at
once closed. Soon the advance sheets began to come; and as successive
portions were received and perused, it became more and more evident that
the work was destined not only to extend his fame, but to establish for
him new and special claims to the admiration and gratitude of mankind.
In the midst of these anticipations, and ere more than half the sheets
had been received, the publishers and the public here were startled by
the news that Mr. Miller had come to a violent death. The paragraph
conveying the intelligence was such as to leave the mind in a state of
painful suspense. But the next steamer from Europe brought full details
of the lamentable event. It appeared that in a momentary fit of mental
aberration he had died by his own hand, on the night of December 23d,
1856. The cause was over much brain-work. He had been long and
incessantly engaged in preparing the present work for the press, when,
just as he had given the last touches to the eloquent, the immortal
record, reason abandoned her throne, and in the brief interregnum, that
great light of science was quenched forever.
The event caused universal lamentation throughout the British Isles. It
was treated as a public calamity. The British press, from the _London
Times_ to the remotest provincial newspaper, gave expression to the
general sorrow in strains of unwonted eloquence; and in so doing
recounted his great services to the cause of science, and paid homage to
his genius.
Some of the articles which the event thus called forth have seemed to
the American publishers worthy of preservation, from the authentic facts
which they embody, the judgments which they express, and the literary
excellence by which they are marked. They have therefore determined to
print them in connection with this work as permanent Memorials of its
distinguished and lamented author.
The first piece appeared in the _Edinburgh Witness_ of December 27th,
1856,--the paper of which Mr. Miller had been the editor from its
establishment in 1840. It presents an authentic account of the
circumstances attending his death, and is understood to be from the pen
of the REV. WILLIAM HANNA, L.L.D., the son-in-law and biographer of Dr.
Chalmers, and sometime editor of the _North British Review_.
In the belief that nothing touching the character and memory of
such a man can be regarded with other than the deepest interest,
the friends of Mr. Hugh Miller have thought it due at once to his
great name and to the cause of truth, to lay fully before the
public a statement of the most mournful circumstances under which
he has departed from this life. For some months past his
over-tasked intellect had given evidence of disorder. He became the
prey of false or exaggerated alarms. He fancied--if, indeed, it was
a fancy--that occasionally, and for brief intervals, his faculties
quite failed him,--that his mind broke down. He was engaged at this
time with a treatise on the "Testimony of the Rocks," upon which he
was putting out all his strength,--working at his top-most pitch of
intensity. That volume will in a few weeks be in the hands of many
of our readers; and while they peruse it with the saddened
impression that his intellect and genius poured out their latest
treasures in its composition, they will search through it in vain
for the slightest evidence of feebleness or decaying power. Rather
let us anticipate the general verdict that will be pronounced upon
it, and speak of it as one of the ablest of all his writings. But
he wrought at it too eagerly. Hours after midnight the light was
seen to glimmer through the window of that room which within the
same eventful week was to witness the close of the volume, and the
close of the writer's life. This over-working of the brain began to
tell upon his mental health. He had always been somewhat moodily
apprehensive of being attacked by footpads, and had carried loaded
firearms about his person. Latterly, having occasion sometimes to
return to Portobello from Edinburgh at unseasonable hours, he had
furnished himself with a revolver. But now, to all his old fears as
to attacks upon his person, there was added an exciting and
over-mastering impression that his house, and especially that
Museum, the fruit of so much care, which was contained in a
separate outer building, were exposed to the assault of burglars.
He read all the recent stories of house robberies. He believed that
one night, lately, an actual attempt to break in upon his Museum
had been made. Visions of ticket-of-leave men, prowling about his
premises, haunted him by day and by night. The revolver, which lay
nightly near him, was not enough; a broad-bladed dagger was kept
beside it; whilst behind him, at his bed head, a claymore stood
ready at hand. A week or so ago, a new and more aggravated feature
of cerebral disorder showed itself in sudden and singular
sensations in his head. They came only after lengthened intervals.
They did not last long, but were intensely violent. The terrible
idea that his brain was deeply and hopelessly diseased,--that his
mind was on the verge of ruin,--took hold of him, and stood out
before his eye in all that appalling magnitude in which such an
imagination as his alone could picture it. It was mostly at night
that these wild paroxysms of the brain visited him; but up till
last Monday he had spoken of them to no one. A friend who had a
long conversation with him on the Thursday of last week, never
enjoyed an interview more, or remembers him in a more genial mood.
On the Saturday forenoon another friend from Edinburgh found him in
the same happy frame. As was his wont when with an old friend with
whom he felt particularly at ease, he read or recited some favorite
passages, repeating, on this occasion, with great emphasis, that
noble prayer of John Knox,[1] which, he told his friend, it had
been his frequent custom to repeat privately during the days of the
Disruption. On the forenoon of Sunday last he worshipped in the
Free Church at Portobello; and in the evening read a little work
which had been put into his hands, penning that brief notice of it
which will be read with melancholy interest as his last
contribution to this journal. About ten o'clock on Monday morning
he took what with him was an altogether unusual step. He called on
Dr. Balfour, in Portobello, to consult him as to his state of
health. "On my asking," says Dr. Balfour, in a communication with
which we have been favored, "what was the matter with him, he
replied, 'My brain is giving way. I cannot put two thoughts
together to-day. I have had a dreadful night of it; I cannot face
another such. I was impressed with the idea that my Museum was
attacked by robbers, and that I had got up, put on my clothes, and
gone out with a loaded pistol to shoot them. Immediately after that
I became unconscious. How long that continued, I cannot say; but
when I awoke in the morning I was trembling all over, and quite
confused in my brain. On rising I felt as if a stiletto was
suddenly, and as quickly as an electric shock, passed through my
brain from front to back, and left a burning sensation on the top
of the brain just below the bone. So thoroughly convinced was I
that I must have been out through the night, that I examined my
trousers to see if they were wet or covered with mud, but could
find none.' He further said,--'I may state that I was somewhat
similarly affected through the night twice last week, and I
examined my trousers in the morning to see if I had been out. Still
the terrible sensations were not nearly so bad as they were last
night; and I may further inform you, that towards the end of last
week, while passing through the Exchange in Edinburgh, I was seized
with such a giddiness that I staggered, and would, I think, have
fallen, had I not gone into an entry, where I leaned against the
wall, and became quite unconscious for some seconds.'" Dr. Balfour
stated his opinion of the case; told him that he was over-working
his brain, and agreed to call on him on the following day to make a
fuller examination. Meanwhile the quick eye of affection had
noticed that there was something wrong, and on Monday forenoon Mrs.
Miller came up to Edinburgh to express her anxiety to Professor
Miller, and request that he would see her husband. "I arranged,"
says Professor Miller, "to meet Dr. Balfour at Shrub Mount (Mr.
Hugh Miller's house), on the afternoon of next day. We met
accordingly at half-past three on Tuesday. He was a little annoyed
at Mrs. Miller's having given me the trouble, as he called it, but
received me quite in his ordinary kind, friendly manner. We
examined his chest and found that unusually well; but soon we
discovered that it was head symptoms that made him uneasy. He
acknowledged having been, night after night, up till very late in
the morning, working hard and continuously at his new book,
'which,' with much satisfaction, he said, 'I have finished this
day.' He was sensible that his head had suffered in consequence, as
evidenced in two ways: first, occasionally he felt as if a very
fine poignard had been suddenly passed through and through his
brain. The pain was intense, and momentarily followed by confusion
and giddiness, and the sense of being 'very drunk,'--unable to
stand or walk. He thought that a period of unconsciousness must
have followed this,--a kind of swoon,--but he had never fallen.
Second, what annoyed him most, however, was a kind of nightmare,
which for some nights past had rendered sleep most miserable. It
was no dream, he said; he saw no distinct vision, and could
remember nothing of what had passed accurately. It was a sense of
vague and yet intense horror, with a conviction of being abroad in
the night wind, and dragged through places as if by some invisible
power. 'Last night,' he said, 'I felt as if I had been ridden by a
witch for fifty miles, and rose far more wearied in mind and body
than when I lay down.' So strong was his conviction of having been
out, that he had difficulty in persuading himself to the contrary,
by carefully examining his clothes in the morning, to see if they
were not wet or dirty; and he looked inquiringly and anxiously to
his wife, asking if she was sure he had not been out last night,
and walking in this disturbed trance or dream. His pulse was quiet,
but tongue foul. The head was not hot, but he could not say it was
free from pain. But I need not enter into professional details.
Suffice it to say that we came to the conclusion that he was
suffering from an over-worked mind, disordering his digestive
organs, enervating his whole frame, and threatening serious head
affection. We told him this, and enjoined absolute discontinuance
of work, bed at eleven, light supper (he had all his life made that
a principal meal), thinning the hair of the head, a warm
sponging-bath at bed time, &c. To all our commands he readily
promised obedience, not forgetting the discontinuance of neck
rubbing, to which he had unfortunately been prevailed to submit
some days before. For fully an hour we talked together on these and
other subjects, and I left him with no apprehension of impending
evil, and little doubting but that a short time of rest and regimen
would restore him to his wonted vigor." It was a cheerful hour that
thus was passed, and his wife and family partook of the hopeful
feeling with which his kind friend, Professor Miller, had parted
with him. It was now near the dinner hour, and the servant entered
the room to spread the table. She found Mr. Miller in the room
alone. Another of the paroxysms was on him. His face was such a
picture of horror that she shrunk in terror from the sight. He
flung himself on the sofa, and buried his head, as if in agony,
upon the cushion. Again, however, the vision flitted by, and left
him in perfect health. The evening was spent quietly with his
family. During tea he employed himself in reading aloud Cowper's
"Castaway," the Sonnet on Mary Unwin, and one of his more playful
pieces, for the special pleasure of his children. Having corrected
some proofs of the forthcoming volume, he went up stairs to his
study. At the appointed hour he had taken the bath, but
unfortunately his natural and peculiar repugnance to physic had
induced him to leave untaken the medicine that had been prescribed.
He had retired into his sleeping-room,--a small apartment opening
out of his study, and which, for some time past, in consideration
of the delicate state of his wife's health, and the irregularity of
his own hours of study, he occupied at night alone,--and lain
sometime upon the bed. The horrible trance, more horrible than
ever, must have returned. All that can now be known of what
followed is to be gathered from the facts, that next morning his
body, half dressed, was found lying lifeless on the floor, the feet
upon the study rug, the chest pierced with the ball of the revolver
pistol, which was found lying in the bath that stood close by.[2]
The deadly bullet had perforated the left lung, grazed the heart,
cut through the pulmonary artery at its root, and lodged in the
rib in the right side. Death must have been instantaneous. The
servant by whom the body was first discovered, acting with singular
discretion, gave no alarm, but went instantly in search of the
doctor and minister; and on the latter the melancholy duty was
devolved of breaking the fearful intelligence to that now
broken-hearted widow, over whose bitter Borrow it becomes us to
draw the veil. The body was lifted and laid upon the bed. We saw it
there a few hours afterwards. The head lay back sideways on the
pillow. There was the massive brow, the firm-set, manly features,
we had so often looked upon admiringly, just as we had lately seen
them,--no touch nor trace upon them of disease,--nothing but that
overspread pallor of death to distinguish them from what they had
been. But the expression of that countenance in death will live in
our memory forever. Death by gunshot wounds is said to leave no
trace of suffering behind; and never was there a face of the dead
freer from all shadow of pain, or grief, or conflict, than that of
our dear departed friend. And as we bent over it, and remembered
the troubled look it sometimes had in life, and thought what must
have been the sublimely terrific expression that it wore at the
moment when the fatal deed was done, we could not help thinking
that it lay there to tell us, in that expression of unruffled,
majestic repose that sat upon every feature, what we so assuredly
believe, that the spirit had passed through a terrible tornado, in
which reason had been broken down; but that it had made the great
passage in safety, and stood looking back to us, in humble,
grateful triumph, from the other side.
On looking round the room in which the body had been discovered, a
folio sheet of paper was seen lying on the table. On the centre of
the page the following lines were written,--the last which that pen
was ever to trace:--
"DEAREST LYDIA,--My brain burns. I _must_ have _walked_; and a
fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought.
God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon me. Dearest
Lydia, dear children, farewell. My brain burns as the recollection
grows. My dear, dear wife, farewell."
HUGH MILLER.
What a legacy of love to a broken-hearted family! and to us, and
all who loved him, how pleasing to observe, that in that
bewildering hour, when the horror of that great darkness came down
upon that noble spirit, and some hideous, shapeless phantom
overpowered it, and took from it even the capacity to discern the
right from the wrong, humility, and faith, and affection, still
kept their hold;--amid the ruins of the intellect, that tender
heart remaining still unbroken! These last lines remain as the
surest evidence of the mysterious power that laid his spirit
prostrate, and of the noble elements of which that spirit was
composed,--humble, and reverent, and loving to the last.
Yesterday, at the request of friends, and under the authority of
the Procurator-Fiscal, a _post mortem_ examination of the body took
place. We subjoin the result:--
"EDINBURGH, December 26, 1856.
"We hereby certify, on soul and conscience, that we have this day
examined the body of Mr. Hugh Miller, at Shrub Mount, Portobello.
"The cause of death we found to be a pistol-shot through the left
side of the chest; and this, we are satisfied, was inflicted by his
own hand.
"From the diseased appearances found in the brain, taken in
connection with the history of the case, we have no doubt that the
act was suicidal under the impulse of insanity."
JAMES MILLER, W.T. GAIRDNER,
A.H. BALFOUR, A.M. EDWARDS.
We must ask to be excused from attempting any analysis of Mr.
Miller's character and genius, or any estimate of the distinguished
services he has rendered to literature, science, and the Christian
faith. His loss is too heavy a one,--his removal has come upon us
too suddenly and too awfully for mind or hand to be steady enough
for such a task. The voice of the public press has already told
what a place he had won for himself in the admiration and affection
of his countrymen; and for the delicate and tender way in which the
manner of his departure has universally been alluded to, were we
permitted to speak in the name of Mr. Miller's friends, we should
express our deepest gratitude. It is a beautiful and worthy tribute
that his brother journalists have rendered to the memory of one who
was a laborer along with them in elevating the talent and tone of
our newspaper literature.
As Free Churchmen, however, it would be unpardonable were we to
omit all reference, at such a time as this, to what he did on
behalf of the church of his adoption. Dr. Chalmers did not err
when, self-oblivious, he spake of Mr. Miller, as he so often did,
as the greatest Scotchman alive after Sir Walter Scott's death, and
as the man who had done more than all others to defend and make
popular throughout the country the non-intrusion cause. We know
well what the mutual love and veneration was of those two great men
for one another whilst living; and now that both are gone,--and
hereafter we believe still more so than even now,--their two names
will be intertwined in the grateful and admiring remembrance of the
ministers and members of the Free Church. It was die high honor of
the writer of these hurried lines to record the part taken by his
venerated relative in that great ecclesiastical struggle which
terminated in the Disruption. At that lime it was matter to him of
great regret that, as his office was that of the biographer, and
not of the historian, there did not occur those natural
opportunities of speaking of the part taken by Mr. Miller in that
struggle, of which he gladly would have availed himself. And he
almost wishes now that he had violated what appeared to him to be
his duty, in order to create such an opportunity. He feels as if in
this he had done some injustice to the dead,--an injustice which it
would gratify him beyond measure if he could now in any way repair,
by expressing it as his own judgment, and the judgment of the vast
body of his Church, that, next to the writings and actings of Dr.
Chalmers, the leading articles of Mr. Miller in this journal did
more than anything else to give the Free Church the place it holds
in the affections of so many of our fellow-countrymen.
But Mr. Miller was far more than a Free Churchman, and did for the
Christianity of his country and the world a far higher service than
any which in that simple character and office was rendered by him.
There was nothing in him of the spirit and temper of the sectarian.
He breathed too broad an atmosphere to live and move within such
narrow bounds. In the heat of the conflict there may have been too
much occasionally of the partisan; and in the pleasure that the
sweep and stroke of his intellectual tomahawk gave to him who
wielded it, he may have forgotten at times the pain inflicted where
it fell; but let his writings before and after the Disruption be
now consulted, and it will be found that it was mainly because of
his firm belief, whether right or wrong, that the interests of
vital godliness were wrapped up in it, that he took his stand, and
played his conspicuous part, in the ecclesiastical conflict. It is
well known that for some time past,--for reasons to which it would
be altogether unseasonable to allude,--he has ceased to take any
active part in ecclesiastical affairs. He had retired even, in a
great measure, from the field of general literature, to devote
himself to the study of Geology. His past labors in this
department,--enough to give him a high and honored place among its
most distinguished cultivators,--he looked upon but as his training
for the great life-work he had marked out for himself,--the full
investigation and illustration of the Geology of Scotland. He had
large materials already collected for this work; and it was his
intention, after completing that volume which has happily been left
in so finished a state, to set himself to their arrangement. The
friends of science in many lands will mourn over the incompleted
project which, however ably it may hereafter be accomplished by
another, it were vain to hope shall ever be so accomplished as it
should have been by one who united in himself the power of accurate
observation, of logical deduction, of broad generalization, and of
pictorial and poetic representation. But the friends of
Christianity cannot regret, that since it was the mysterious decree
of Heaven that he should prematurely fall,--his work as a pure
Geologist not half done,--he should have been led aside by the
publication of the Vestiges of Creation to that track of
semi-theological, semi-scientific research to which his later
studies and later writings have been devoted. That, as it now seems
to us, was the great work which it was given him on earth to
do,--to illustrate the perfect harmony of all that science tells us
of the physical structure and history of our globe, with all that
the Bible tells of the creation and government of this earth by and
through Christ Jesus our Lord. The establishment and exhibition of
that harmony was a task to which is it too much to say that there
was no man living so competent as he? We leave it to the future to
declare how much he has done by his writings to fulfil that task;
but mourning, as we now can only do, over his sad and melancholy
death,--to that very death, with all the tragic circumstances that
surround it, we would point as the closing sacrifice offered on the
altar of our faith. His very intellect, his reason,--God's most
precious gift,--a gift dearer than life,--perished in the great
endeavor to harmonize the works and word of the Eternal. A most
inscrutable event, that such an intellect should have been suffered
to go to wreck through too eager a prosecution of such a work. But
amid the mystery, which we cannot penetrate, our love, and our
veneration, and our gratitude, toward that so highly gifted and
truly Christian man shall only grow the deeper because of the cloud
and the whirlwind in which he has been borne off from our side.
On the 31st of December, two days after the obsequies had been
performed, Dr. Hanna resumed the subject in the following elevated
strain:
We have still but little heart to dilate on any political or
literary topic. Our thoughts can dwell on but one thrice melancholy
event. Need we name that event? Alas, no! It had occurred but a few
hours when the tidings of it struck our city with stunning,
stupefying, and deeply saddening blow. It has already thrilled our
whole land; and is on its way, through a hundred channels, to the
west, to the east, and to the south, carrying with it mourning and
lamentation throughout the vast area which is covered by the
language in which Hugh Miller wrote. Writing, as it were, amid the
deep shadows of the funeral chamber, and brought in a manner into
the very presence of the dead, we are made strongly to feel, and we
daresay our readers to a large extent will feel, too, the
nothingness of those discussions which usually occupy and engross
men. The weightiest matter that ever occupied the wisdom of cabinet
or the pen of journalist appears verily but fleeting and
transitory, when brought thus into prominent contrast with the
awful realities of human existence and destiny; and it is only when
reflection shows us that these matters are yet parts of a grand
Providential scheme, embracing man's happiness now, and entering
deeply into the question of his future and eternal well-being, that
we can see in them that amount of significance and importance which
they really possess.
From the firmament of British literature and science a great light
has departed. But yesterday we rejoiced in its beams, and now it
has set all suddenly and forever; and to us there remains but the
melancholy task of bewailing its departure, and tracing very
hastily and imperfectly its track. The intellectual powers of Hugh
Miller had certainly not declined. He was marked to the very last
by that wonderful robustness of mind which had characterized him
all through life. His sense was as manly, his judgment as sound and
comprehensive, his penetration as discriminating and deep, his
imagination as vigorous and bold, and his taste as pure and trusty,
as they had ever been. The whole of his great powers were found
working together up to the last week of his earthly career, with
their usually calm, noiseless strength, and finely balanced and
exquisitely toned harmony. We have evidence of this fact under his
own hand in recent numbers of the _Witness_. His last two articles
were, the one on Russia, and the other on our modern poets. The
former,--that on the resources of the Russian empire,--is
characterized by the same wide range of thinking, the same skill in
analysis, and the same power of grouping and arranging details, and
making them to throw light on some great principle, which usually
marked and notified his hand when employed on such subjects. The
latter,--that on the poets,--is rich and genial as usual,
betokening a full and unclouded recollection of all his early
reading in that department of our literature, abounding in the
finest touches of pathos and beauty, and redolent with a most
generous sympathy with kindred genius. It is not inconsistent with
what we have now stated, and it is the fact, that latterly the
inroads of disease, which had entrenched itself deeply in a
constitution originally strong, and which kept steadily advancing
upon the vital powers, had come so near the seat of the mind, that
for short intervals the noble spirit was sadly beclouded, and its
moral and intellectual action momentarily suspended. But, apart
from this, there seemed ground to believe that there was yet before
Mr. Miller much honorable and noble labor. The strong man, after
all his tasks, appeared to be still strong. His powers were
mellowing into richness and calm, matured strength; his conceptions
of great principles were growing yet wider; his store of facts,
literary as well as scientific, was accumulating with every busy
and laborious year that passed over him; and there did seem ground
to expect from his pen, unrivalled among his contemporaries in its
exquisite purity and calm power, many a deep thoughted article, and
many a profoundly reasoned and richly illustrated volume. We looked
to him for the solution of many a dark question in science; and we
certainly hoped, from that fine union of science and theology which
dwelt in him above all men, for a yet fuller and more complete
adjustment of the two great records of Creation,--that of the
Rocks, and that of Moses. But alas! all these hopes have suddenly
failed us. It seemed right otherwise to the Great Disposer of all.
He has said to his faithful servant, "Enough."
Let us look back upon that work. We by no means aim at giving a
calm, well weighed, and deeply pondered estimate of it, but only
such a glance as the circumstances permit and require. His great
and special work was his advocacy of the principles of the Free
Church. Mr. Miller was _par excellence_ the popular expounder and
defender of these principles, whether in their embryotic state in
the Non-Intrusion party, or as embodied in the fully developed and
completely emancipated Free Protesting Church of Scotland. For this
service, in connection with which he would have best liked to be
remembered, as he best deserved it, he had unconsciously been
undergoing a course of preparation even when a boy. He himself has
told us with what eagerness he devoured, at that period of life,
the legendary histories of Wallace and Bruce; and the occupation
had its use. It gave him a capacity for admiring what was great
though perilous in exploit, and for truly and largely sympathizing
with what was patriotic and self-sacrificing in character; and so
it created a groundwork for his own future thinking and acting. The
admiration he then bore to these earliest of our "Scottish
Worthies," who vindicated on Bannockburn, and kindred fields,
Scotland's right to be an independent and free country, he
afterwards transferred to our later "Worthies," whom he revered as
greater still. Not that he ever lost his admiration of the former,
or ceased to value the incalculable services they rendered to the
Scottish nation; but that he regarded Knox and Melville as men
occupying a yet higher platform,--as gifted with a yet deeper
insight into their country's wants,--as, in short, carrying forward
and consummating the glorious task which Wallace and Bruce had but
begun. He saw that unless our reformers had come after our heroes,
planting schools, founding colleges, and, above all, imparting to
their countrymen a scriptural and rational faith, in vain had Bruce
unsheathed his sword,--in vain had Wallace laid down his life.
Wallace and Bruce had created an independent country; Knox and
Melville had created an independent people. They were the creators
of the Scottish nation,--the real enfranchisers of our people; and
it was this that taught Mr. Miller to venerate these men so
profoundly, and that made him in his inmost soul a devoted
follower, and to the utmost extent of his great faculties a
defender, of their cause. He was a soldier from love,--pure,
heroic, chivalrous devotion soaring infinitely above the partisan.
He saw that the Church of Scotland was the creator of the rights
and privileges of the people of Scotland,--that she was the grand
palladium of the country's liberties,--that while she stood an
independent and free institution, the people stood an independent
and free nation,--and that bonds to her meant slavery to them.
Therefore did he gird on the sword when he saw peril gathering
around her. The privileges,--the entire standing of the common
people, as given them by the Reformation,--he saw to be in danger:
he was "one of themselves;" and he felt and fought as if almost the
quarrel had been a personal one, and the question at issue his own
liberty or slavery. How richly equipped and nobly armed he came
into the field, we need not here state. What fulness yet precision
of ecclesiastical lore,--what strength and conclusiveness of
argument,--what flashes of humor, wit, and sarcasm,--and in what a
luminous yet profoundly philosophical light did he set the great
principles involved in the controversy, making them patent in the
very cottages of our land, and so fixing them in the understandings
of the very humblest of our people, that they never afterwards
could be either misunderstood or forgotten! It was thus that the
way was prepared for the great result of the 18th of May, 1843.
Of Mr. Miller, as a man of science and a public journalist, we
cannot speak at present at any length. In him the love of science
was deeply seated and early developed. The first arena on which he
appeared--obscure and humble as it was--afforded him special
opportunities of initiating himself into what to him was then, and
continued ever afterwards to be, a most fascinating study. The
study of geology was eagerly prosecuted amid the multifarious
duties, and during the brief pauses, of a busy life. Several
original discoveries rewarded his patient and laborious
investigations. He succeeded at length in placing his name in the
first rank of British scientific thinkers and writers. His works
are characterized by a fine union of strict science, classic
diction, and enchanting description, which rises not unfrequently
into the loftiest vein of poetry. The fruits of his researches were
ever made to bear upon the defence and elucidation of the Oracles
of Truth. Our common Christianity owes much to his pen. Viewing him
as a journalist, Mr. Miller not only excelled in article
writing,--the most difficult of all kinds of composition,--but, as
will be generally admitted, he has introduced a new era into
newspaper writing. If the moral tone of our newspaper press is
higher now than it was twenty-five years ago, we have Mr. Miller in
large degree to thank for it; and to him, too, is to be traced that
purer style and more philosophic spirit which begins to be
discernible in the columns of our public journals.
But the character in which his personal friends will deplore him
most, and will most frequently recall his memory, will be that of
the man. How meek and gentle he was!--how unpretending and modest,
even as a very child!--how true and steady in friendship!--how wise
and playful his mirth!--how ripened and chastened his wisdom!--how
ready to counsel!--how willing to oblige!--how generous and large
his sympathies! No little jealousies, no fretful envyings, had he!
Even in opposition, how noble and manly was he: if a powerful, he
was a fair and open antagonist; and whatever hard blows were
dealt, they were dealt in his own journal. We have seen him in
various moods and in all circumstances; but never did we hear him
utter an unkind or disparaging word of man. He was, too, a sincere
and humble Christian; and the lively faith which he cherished in
the adorable Redeemer and his all-efficacious sacrifice, bore
abundantly its good fruits in a life including no ordinary variety
of condition and trial, and running on to such term as to make
abundantly manifest what manner of man he was.
The article which follows is from the _Edinburgh News_. It is evidently
from the pen of one who was intimately acquainted with Hugh Miller, and
is worthy of attention, not only for its eloquent and discriminating
notices of his works, but also for its statements respecting his great
designs, never, alas, to be accomplished.
It is not many months since we chronicled the death of the greatest
of living Scotsmen, and the prince of modern philosophers--Sir
William Hamilton. These last few days have bereft us of another of
our countrymen not less illustrious, and known all over the world
as one of the princes of geology. We cannot well estimate the loss
which society sustains in the death of Mr. Miller. He occupied a
foremost place among us, and there is none on whom his mantle can
fall. In the world of letters his name takes high rank, for
undoubtedly he was one of the ablest writers in our literature. Who
can have read without delight his manly, vigorous language, soaring
sometimes into the highest eloquence, anon plunging into the depths
of metaphysical argument, or grappling with the dry technicalities
of science, yet ever rolling along with the same easy, onward flow?
His style has all the charm of Goldsmith's sweetness, with the
infusion of a rich vigor that gives it an air of great originality.
He is one of the few writers who have successfully conjoined the
graces of literature with the formal details of science, and whose
works are perused for their literary excellences, independently
altogether of their scientific merit. His writings will ever be
regarded among the classics of the English language. For obvious
reasons we pass over his editorial labors. It is on the republic of
science that his death will fall most heavily. There can be little
doubt that he has done more to popularize his favorite department
than any other writer. Of all geological works, his enjoy, perhaps,
the widest circulation--not in this country, merely, but all over
the world, and especially in the United States. His reputation,
however, does not rest solely on his standing as an exponent of
science to the people; he was himself an original and accurate
observer. When the infant science of geology was battling for
existence against the opposing phalanx of united Christendom, Hugh
Miller, then a mere lad, was quietly working as a stone-mason in
the north of Scotland, and employing his leisure time among the
fossil fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, and the ammonites and the
belemnites of the Lias, that abound in the neighborhood of
Cromarty. As years rolled slowly away, he continued his
observations, and when at length, in 1841, the results were given
to the world in his well known "Old Red Sandstone," every one was
charmed with the novelty and beauty of the style, and his
reputation as a writer was at once established. Men of science,
however, though acknowledging the graphic and elegant diction of
his descriptions, had some doubts as to their truthfulness. Indeed,
by some geologists they were cast aside as fanciful, and other
restorations of the Old Red fishes were proposed and adopted. Those
who are acquainted with Old Red ichthyolites, or who have had the
pleasure of examining the exquisite series in Mr. Miller's
collection, may well smile at the absurdity of the restorations
that were adopted. Yet some of these found their way into a work of
no little popularity,--Mantell's "Medals of Creation." It is
sufficient to state that the drawings there given bear no
resemblance to anything in the heavens above or on the earth
beneath, or in the waters under the earth, nor to any fossil
organism that has ever been discovered. At length the progress of
investigation led to the discarding of these monstrosities, and
Miller's restorations were returned to, as, after all, the true
ones. "The Old Red Sandstone" formed an era in the history of
fossil geology. That formation had hitherto been regarded as well
nigh barren of organic remains; but Mr. Miller demonstrated that it
contains at least three successive stages, each characterized by a
suite of uncouth and hitherto unknown fishes. A few years later he
published his "Footprints of the Creator." This is undoubtedly his
_chef-d'oeuvre_, exhibiting, as it does, the full powers of his
massive intellect and his poetic imagination. As a piece of
scientific investigation and research, it is of a very high order;
as a reply to the crudities of the development theory, it is
unanswerable; and as a contribution to our physico-theological
literature, it ranks, with Chalmers' "Astronomical Lectures," among
the finest in this or any other language. Some of the ideas are as
profound as they are original, opening up a new field of thought,
which it was doubtless the intention of the deceased himself to
cultivate. His published works, however, contain but a fraction, of
the labors of his lifetime. For many years past he has been, one of
the most energetic members of the Royal Physical Society, at whose
meetings he from time to time made known the progress of his
researches. Were these papers collected, they would form several
goodly volumes. But their author studiously refrained from
publishing them, save occasionally in the columns of the _Witness_
newspaper. It was his intention that they should each form a part
of the great work of his life, to which for many years his leisure
moments had been devoted. His design was to combine the results of
all his labors among the different rock formations of Scotland into
one grand picture of the geological history of our country. For
this end he had explored a large part of the Scottish counties,
anxious that his statements should rest as far as possible upon the
authority of his own personal investigations. His knowledge of the
geology of the country was thus far more extensive than was
generally supposed. We may refer particularly to that branch of it
on which he bestowed the unremitted attention of his closing
years,--the palæontological history of the glacial beds,--that
strange and as yet almost unknown period that ushered in the
existing creation. He studied it minutely along the shores of the
Moray Firth, on the east coast of Scotland, along the shores of
Fife and the Lothians, and on the coast of Ayrshire and the Firth
of Clyde. This last summer he made a tour through the centre of the
island, and obtained boreal shells at Buchlyvie in
Stirlingshire,--the _omphalos_ of Scotland. The importance of this
discovery, in connection with those he had previously made in
following out the same chain of evidence, can only be appreciated
by those who have paid some attention to geology. We may state
briefly that it proves the central area of Scotland to have been
submerged beneath an icy sea, and icebergs to have grated along
over what is now the busy valley of the Forth and Clyde, while the
waters were tenanted by shells at present found only in the
Northern Ocean. A large part of his work is written, though it is
to be feared that much knowledge, amassed in the course of its
preparation, has perished with him. In particular, there were whole
sections of his Museum understood only by himself. Every little
fragment had its story, and contributed its quota of evidence to
the truth of his descriptions. There is, perhaps, but another mind
in Britain,--that of Sir Philip Egerton,--that can catch up the
thread, and read off, though with difficulty, the meaning of those
carefully arranged fragments. Yet, even with such aid, much must
long, if not forever, remain dark and obscure. The work on which he
was more immediately engaged at the time of his death was partly
theological, partly scientific. It was to embrace the substance of
some lectures lately delivered, and a paper read last year before
the British Association at Glasgow on the fossil plants collected
by himself from the Oolite and Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. It
was likewise to contain the figures of some thirty or forty
hitherto undescribed species of vegetables. We hope that, as it was
all but ready for publication, it may yet be given to the world.
The name of Hugh Miller will ever stand forth as synonymous with
all that is honest and manly; as the impersonation of moral courage
and indomitable energy; as the true ideal of a self-educated man.
From the humblest sphere of life, and from the toils of a
stone-mason's apprentice, without means, without friends, without
other than the most rudimentary education, he rose, by his own
unaided and unwearied exertions, to fill one of the brightest pages
in the annals of our country. And when, in future years, an example
is sought of unconquerable perseverance, of fearless integrity, and
of earnest, ceaseless activity, the voice of universal approbation
shall proclaim--"_the stone-mason of Cromurty_." We have spoken of
this mournful event only as a public calamity; yet, to those who
were personally acquainted with the departed, it is invested with
no ordinary sadness. Long, long shall they remember the playful
fancy, the rich humor, the warm, genial heart of their friend. His
simple, open frankness endeared him to every one, though his
retiring disposition prevented him from making many intimate
friendships. To those who enjoyed this higher privilege, his death
must have caused the most poignant regret. Yet what can even their
sorrow be to that of the relatives of the departed? We lament the
death of one who was alike an honor to his profession, to
literature, to science, and to his country,--one of the most loved
and cherished of friends. Let us not forget to mingle our sympathy
and our sorrow with that deeper grief that mourns the loss of a
husband and a father.
As coming from a different quarter, and presenting a somewhat different
view, the following, from the _London Literary Gazette_, should have a
place here.
Hugh Miller was born at Cromarty in 1805. In his early life he
worked as a laborer in the Sandstone quarries in his native
district, and afterwards as a stone-mason in different parts of
Scotland. In a work published in 1854, "My Schools and
Schoolmasters, or the story of my Education," Mr. Miller gives a
most interesting account of his early history, and of the training
and self-culture by which he rose to honorable rank in literature
and science. Notwithstanding the unpretending statements of this
narrative, and the disavowal of any other elements of success than
are within ordinary reach, every reader of that book feels that
homage is due to a genius original and rare, as well as to natural
talents diligently and judiciously cultivated. While professedly
written for the benefit of the working classes of his own country,
there are few who may not derive pleasant and profitable lessons
from this most remarkable piece of autobiography. After being
engaged in manual labor for about fifteen years, Mr. Miller was for
some time manager of a bank that was established in his native
town. While in this position, a pamphlet that he published, on the
ecclesiastical controversies which then distracted Scotland,
attracted the attention of the leaders of the party who now form
the Free Church, and they invited him to be editor of the _Witness_
newspaper, then about to be established for the advocacy of their
principles. Mr. Miller had already published a volume of "Legendary
Tales of Cromarty," of which the late Baron Hume, nephew of the
historian, himself a man of much judgment and taste, said it was
"written in an English style, which he had begun to regard as one
of the lost arts." The ability displayed by Mr. Miller as editor of
the _Witness_, and the influence exerted by him on ecclesiastical
and educational events in Scotland, are well known. Mr. Miller did
not confine his newspaper to topics of local or passing interest.
In its columns he made public his geological observations and
researches; and most of his works originally appeared in the form
of articles in that newspaper. It was in 1840, the year at which
the autobiographical memoir closes, that the name of Hugh Miller
first became widely known beyond his own country.
At the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science at Glasgow that year, Sir Roderick, then Mr. Murchison,
gave an account of the striking discoveries recently made in the
Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. M. Agassiz, who was present, pointed
out the peculiarities and the importance of these discoveries; and
it was on this occasion that he proposed to associate the name of
Mr. Miller with them, by the wonderful fossil, the _Pterichthys
Milleri_, specimens of which were then under the notice of the
section. Dr. Buckland, following M. Agassiz, said that "he had
never been so much astonished in his life by the powers of any man
as he had been by the geological descriptions of Mr. Miller. He
described these objects with a felicity which made him ashamed of
the comparative meagreness and poverty of his own descriptions in
the 'Bridgewater Treatise,' which had cost him hours and days of
labor. He (Dr. Buckland) _would give his left hand to possess such
powers of description as this man_; and if it pleased Providence to
spare his useful life, he, if any one, would certainly render the
science attractive and popular, and do equal service to theology
and geology." At the meetings of the Association, the language of
panegyric and of mutual compliment is not unfrequent, and does not
signify much; but these were spontaneous tributes of praise to one
comparatively unknown. The publication of the volume on the "Old
Red Sandstone," with the details of the author's discoveries and
researches, more than justified all the anticipations that had been
formed. It was received with highest approbation, not by men of
science alone, for the interest of its facts, but by men of
letters, for the beauty of its style. Sir Roderick Murchison, in
his address to the Geological Society that year, "hailed the
accession to their science of such a writer," and said that "his
work is, to a beginner, worth a thousand didactic treatises." The
_Edinburgh Review_ spoke of the book being "as admirable for the
clearness of its descriptions, and the sweetness of its
composition, as for the purity and gracefulness that pervade it."
The impression made by such a testimony was the more marked, that
the reviewer spoke of the writer as a fellow countryman,
"meritorious and self-taught."
In 1847 appeared "First Impressions of England and its People," the
result of a tour made during the previous year. Some parts of this
book, especially the account of the pilgrimages to
Stratford-on-Avon, and the Leasowes, and Olney, and other places
memorable for their literary associations, are as fine pieces of
descriptive writing as the English language possesses. This magic
of style characterized all his works, whether those of a more
popular kind, or his scientific treatises, such as the "Old Red
Sandstone," and "Footprints of the Creator," a volume suggested by
the "Vestiges of Creation," and subversive of the fallacies of that
superficial and plausible book. Not one of the authors of our day
has approached Hugh Miller as a master of English composition, for
the equal of which we must go back to the times of Addison, Hume,
and Goldsmith. Other living writers have now a wider celebrity, but
they owe it much to the peculiarities of their style or the
popularity of their topics. Mr. Miller has taken subjects of
science, too often rendered dry and repulsive, and has thrown over
them an air of attractive romance. His writings on literature,
history, and politics, are known to comparatively few, from having
appeared in the columns of a local newspaper. A judicious selection
from his miscellaneous articles in the _Witness_ would widely
extend his fame, and secure for him a place, in classic English
literature, as high as he held during his life as a periodical
writer and as a scientific geologist.
The personal appearance of Mr. Miller, or "Old Red," as he was
familiarly named by his scientific friends, will not be forgotten
by any who have seen him. A head of great massiveness, magnified by
an abundant profusion of sub-Celtic hair, was set on a body of
muscular compactness, but which in later years felt the undermining
influence of a life of unusual physical and mental toil. Generally
wrapped in a bulky plaid, and with a garb ready for any work, he
had the appearance of a shepherd from the Rosshire hills rather
than an author and a man of science. In conversation or in
lecturing, the man of original genius and cultivated mind at once
shone out, and his abundant information and philosophical acuteness
were only less remarkable than his amiable disposition, his
generous spirit, and his consistent, humble piety. Literature and
science have lost in him one of their brightest ornaments, and
Scotland one of its greatest men.
* * * * *
On the Sabbath following Mr. Miller's death, sermons referring to the
event were preached in many of the churches in Edinburgh. Some of these
were reported in the newspapers, among which may be mentioned those by
the Rev. Drs. Hanna, Guthrie, Hetherington, Begg, and Tweedie.
On Monday, December the 29th, the Funeral Obsequies were performed. The
following account of the imposing ceremonial is from the _Edinburgh
Witness_.
FUNERAL OF MR. HUGH MILLER.
The mortal remains of this truly great man were consigned to the
grave on Monday, amid the most marked demonstrations of sorrow on
the part of the entire community.
The private company, numbering about sixty individuals, met at
Shrub Mount, the residence of the deceased at Portobello, about a
quarter to one in the afternoon. Amongst those present were the
Lord Provost of Edinburgh; A.M. Dunlop, Esq., M.P.; A. Black, Esq.,
M.P.; Professors Simpson, Balfour, and Fraser; Rev. Principal
Cunningham; Professor James Buchanan; Rev. Drs. Guthrie, Candlish,
Hanna, Bruce, Begg, Hetherington, and Wylie; Rev. Messrs. M'Kenzie
of Dunfermline, Cameron and Hunter of Nagpoor; Maurice Lothian,
Esq.; Geo. Dalziell, Esq., W.S.; W. Wood, Esq.; R. Paul, Esq.;
Francis Russell, Esq., advocate; M. Torrance, Esq.; Dr. Russell;
Dr. Geo. Bell; J.F. Macfarlan, Esq.; Archibald Gibson, Esq.; and
Councillor Johnston. The devotional exercises were conducted by Dr.
Guthrie, who was deeply affected during the prayer, and whose
feelings at times threatened to overcome him.
Thirteen two-horse mourning coaches were here in waiting to convey
the company to the place of sepulture in the Grange Cemetery,
preceded by the hearse, which had four horses.
The melancholy event, as might have been expected, cast a gloom
over the whole of Portobello; and the Provost and Magistrates,
anticipating the general feeling of the inhabitants, to whom Mr.
Miller had endeared himself by his genius and the modesty of his
demeanor, and also by the readiness which he ever displayed to
contribute to their intellectual elevation, by taking part in
several courses of popular lectures in the town, recommended the
closing of the different shops,--a request which was at once
readily complied with. Another striking proof of the general desire
to pay the last tribute of respect to the remains of the deceased,
was furnished by the circumstance that upwards of one hundred
gentlemen, many of whom had, so recently as the previous Tuesday,
listened to the reading of one of the ablest of his lectures, by
the Rev. Mr. Wight, the Congregational minister, met at half-past
twelve in the Free Church, in order to accompany the funeral,
either on foot or in carriages, to the burial place,--a distance of
about four miles. After a short, impressive religious service,
conducted by the Rev. Mr. Philip and the Rev. Mr. Wight, they
proceeded to join the private company, who had by this time taken
their places in the mourning carriages, on their way to Edinburgh.
On reaching the General Post-Office, in Waterloo Place, the ranks
of the funeral procession were largely augmented, there being here
as many as from twenty to thirty private carriages in waiting,
filled with the leading citizens, and a large body of the
inhabitants, of all ranks, classes, and denominations, drawn up in
line three or four abreast.
The Kirk-Session of Free St. John's, of which Mr. Miller was an
office-bearer, headed by the Rev. Dr. Guthrie and the Rev. Dr.
Hanna, who left the carriage at the Post-Office, occupied the front
of the procession, immediately followed by the Royal Physical
Society, of which the lamented deceased was a leading member, the
_employes_ in the _Witness_ office, and a large body of the general
public. A still more numerous body of the citizens, as well as of
parties from Glasgow, Liverpool, Stirling, Bridge of Allan, and
other parts of the country, drew up in the rear of the long line of
carriages, while the sides of the streets were also lined with
mourners, who accompanied the procession to the Cemetery. Besides
the large concourse of people who here joined the procession, the
whole front of the Register Office and the corners of the North
Bridge were densely occupied by some thousands of spectators; and
it may be safely said, that no event since the death of Dr.
Chalmers has caused such deep-felt sorrow and regret in Edinburgh.
The numbers present in the funeral _cortege_ must have amounted to
from one to two thousand; indeed, one paper states that "at one
time there could not have been many less than four thousand people
in the procession;" whilst another journal says, that although the
inclemency of the weather, the day being one of the dreariest of
the season, "kept back many who would otherwise have swelled the
line of mourners, even with this drawback, it has been informed
that the attendance was even greater than on the occasion of the
funeral of Dr. Chalmers in 1847."
After a short delay, caused by these accessions to the procession,
the whole moved up the North Bridge. It was gratifying to observe
that nearly all the shops on the North and South Bridges, and in
Nicolson and Clerk streets, along which the _cortege_ passed, were
closed; and along the whole route many a saddened countenance and
tearful eye could be seen, all testifying to the deep respect
entertained for him whose manly form had so often traversed these
same streets.
On reaching the entrance of the Grange Cemetery, the coffin was
removed from the hearse, and borne shoulder high to the tomb,
followed by the pall-bearers and the general company. The ground
selected for the burial-place is the westmost space but one on the
northern side of the Cemetery, and in a line with the graves of Dr.
Chalmers, Sir Andrew Agnew, and Sheriff Speirs, with which it is in
close proximity. As many of our readers are aware, the situation is
one of surpassing scenic beauty, and was described by the
deceased's own matchless pen but a few years ago, on the occasion
of the burial of Chalmers; and certainly in the grave of Hugh
Miller a new feature of attraction has been added to the spot.
The pall-bearers were Mr. Miller's oldest son,--a boy about
fourteen years of age,--who was accompanied by his younger brother,
six or seven years old; Mr. A. Williamson, his half-brother and
nearest kinsman; Mr. Fairly, his partner in business; Rev. Dr.
Guthrie, Rev. Dr. Hanna, Mr. Dunlop, M.P., Mr. R. Paul, and
Principal Cunningham.
The mournful ceremony was now near its close. As the heavy, dull
sound, caused by the fall of the damp earth upon the coffin, fell
upon the ear, a sad and painful sensation crept over the frame,
increased as this was by the wintry aspect of the day and the heavy
leaden sky, which, like a pall, was spread over the face of nature,
in striking harmony with the solemnity of the scene. A few minutes
more, and all was over; and the vast company, uncovered, paid the
closing mark of respect to the ashes of the mighty dead. A touching
scene occurred at the close of all. After the whole of the company
had retired, a laboring man, clad in humble habiliments, seized
hold of a handful of ivy or laurel leaves, and gently strewed them
upon the grave, while the tearful eye eloquently spoke of the
strength of his feelings.
So passed away one of whom Dr. Chalmers made the remark that "since
Scott's death he was the greatest Scotchman that was left." "The space
his name occupied in the literary and scientific world," says another,
"could hardly have been conjectured, but for the blank he leaves behind
him now that he has left it. Other men may have extended the domain of
science wider; but no man has done more to extend the circle of its
votaries by the magic of his style and the life-like power of his
descriptions; nor has any man done more to keep together the claims, too
often made to appear divergent, of Science and Religion, and to blend
them into one intelligent and reasonable service. It was worth while to
have lived to effect this, even at the cost of the clouds which saddened
and darkened the close. But
----'glory without end
Scatters the clouds away; and on that name attend
The thanks and praises of all time.'"
A PRAYER
BY JOHN KNOX,
MADE AT THE FIRST ASSEMBLIE OF THE CONGREGATION, WHEN THE
CONFESSION OF OUR FAITHE AND WHOLE ORDERS OF THE CHURCH WAS THERE
RED AND APPROVED.[3]
O Lord God Almightie, and Father moste mcrcifull, there is none lyke
thee in heaven nor in earthe, which workest all thinges for the glorie
of thy name and the comfort of thyne elect. Thou dydst once make man
ruler over all thy creatures, and placed hym in the garden of all
pleasures; but how soone, alas, dyd he in his felicitie forget thy
goodness? Thy people Israel also, in their wealth dyd evermore runne
astray, abusinge thy manifold mercies; lyke as all fleshe contynually
rageth when it hath gotten libertie and external prosperitie. But such
is thy wisdome adjoyned to thy mercies, deare Father, that thou sekest
all means possible to brynge thy chyldren to the sure sense and lyvely
feelinge of thy fatherly favour. And therefore when prosperitie wyll not
serve, then sendest thow adversitie, graciously correctinge all thy
chyldren whome thou receyvest into thy howshold. Wherfore we, wretched
and miserable synners, render unto thee most humble and hartie thankes,
that yt hath pleased thee to call us home to thy folde by thy Fatherly
correction at this present, wheras in our prosperitie and libertie we
dyd neglect thy graces offered unto us. For the which negligence, and
many other grevous synnes whereof we now accuse our selves before thee,
thow mightest moste justly have gyven us up to reprobate mynds and
induration of our hartes, as thow haste done others. But such is thy
goodnes, O Lord, that thou semest to forget alt our offences, and haste
called us of thy good pleasure from all idolatries into this Citie most
Christianlye refourmed, to professe thy name, and to suffer some crosse
amongest thy people for thy truth and Gospell's sake; and so to be thy
wytnesses with thy Prophets and Apostles, yea, with thy dearely beloved
Sonne Jesus Christ our head, to whome thow dost begynne here to fashion
us lyke, that in his glorie we may also be lyke hym when he shall
appear. O Lord God, what are we upon whome thowe shuldest shewe this
great mercye? O moste lovynge Lord, forgyve us our unthankfulnes, and
all our synnes, for Jesus Christ's sake. O heavenly Father, increase thy
Holy Spirit in us, to teache our heartes to cry Abba, deare Father! to
assure us of our eternal election in Christ; to revele thy wyll more and
more towards us; to confirme us so in thy trewthe, that we may lyve and
dye therein; and that by the power of the same Spirit we may boldlely
gyve an accompts of our faith to all men with humblenes and mekenes,
that whereas they backbyte and slaunder us as evyll doers, they may be
ashamed and once stopp their mowthes, seinge our good conversation in
Christ Iesu, for whose sake we beseche thee, O Lord God, to guide,
governe, and prosper this our enterprise in assemblinge our bretherne,
to prayse thy holie name. And not only to be here present with us thy
children according to thy promesse, but also mercifullie to assist thy
like persecuted people, our Bretherne, gathered in all other places,
that they and we, consentinge together in one spirite and truethe, may
(all worldly respectes set a part) seke thy onely honor and glorie in
all our and their Assemblies.
SO BE IT.
THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS.
LECTURE FIRST.
THE PALÆONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS.
Palæontology, or the science of ancient organisms, deals, as its
subject, with all the plants and animals of all the geologic periods. It
bears nearly the same sort of relation to the _physical_ history of the
past, that biography does to the civil and political history of the
past. For just as a complete biographic system would include every name
known to the historian, a complete palæontologic system would include
every fossil known to the geologist. It enumerates and describes all the
organic existences of all the extinct creations,--all the existences,
too, of the present creation that occur in the fossil or semi-fossil
form; and, thus coextensive in space with the earth's surface,--nay,
greatly more than coextensive with the earth's surface,--for in the vast
hieroglyphic record which our globe composes, page lies beneath page,
and inscription covers over inscription,--coextensive, too, in time,
with every period in the terrestrial history since being first began
upon our planet,--it presents to the student a theme so vast and
multifarious, that it might seem but the result, on his part, of a
proper modesty, conscious of the limited range of his powers, and of
the brief and fleeting term of his life, were he to despair of being
ever able effectually to grapple with it. "But," to borrow from one of
the most ingenious of our Scottish metaphysicians, "in this, as in other
instances in which nature has given us difficulties with which to cope,
she has not left us to be wholly overcome." "If," says Dr. Thomas Brown,
in his remarks on the classifying principle,--"if she has placed us in a
labyrinth, she has at the same time furnished us with a clue which may
guide us, not, indeed, through all its dark and intricate windings, but
through those broad paths which conduct us into day. The single power by
which we discover resemblance or relation in general, is a sufficient
aid to us in the perplexity or confusion of our first attempts at
arrangement. It begins by converting thousands, and more than thousands,
into one; and, reducing in the same manner the numbers thus formed, it
arrives at last at the few distinctive characters of those great
comprehensive tribes on which it ceases to operate, because there is
nothing left to oppress the memory or the understanding."
But, is this all? Can the Palæontologist but say that that classifying
principle, which in every other department of science yields such
assistance to the memory, is also of use in his, or but urge that it
enables him to sort and arrange his facts; and that, by converting one
idea into the type and exemplar of many resembling ones, it imparts to
him an ability of carrying not inadequate conceptions of the mighty
whole in his mind? If this were all, you might well ask, Why obtrude
upon us, in connection with your special science, a common
semi-metaphysical idea, equally applicable to all the sciences,--in
especial, for example, to that botany which is the science of existing
plants, and to that zoology which is the science of existing animals?
Nay, I reply, but it is not all. I refer to this classifying principle
because, while it exists in relation to all other sciences as a
principle--to use the words of the metaphysician just quoted--"given to
us by nature,"--as a principle of _the mind within_,--it exists in
Palæontological science as a principle of nature itself,--as a principle
palpably _external to the mind_. It is a marvellous fact, whose full
meaning we can as yet but imperfectly comprehend, that myriads of ages
ere there existed a human mind, well nigh the same principles of
classification now developed by man's intellect in our better treatises
of zoology and botany, were developed on this earth by the successive
geologic periods; and that the by-past productions of our planet, animal
and vegetable, were chronologically arranged in its history, according
to the same laws of thought which impart regularity and order to the
works of the later naturalist and phytologists.
I need scarce say how slow and interrupted in both provinces the course
of arrangement has been, or how often succeeding writers have had to
undo what their predecessors had done, only to have their own
classifications set aside by _their_ successors in turn. At length,
however, when the work appears to be well nigh completed, a new science
has arisen, which presents us with a very wonderful means of testing it.
Cowley, in his too eulogistic ode to Hobbes,--smit by the singular
ingenuity of the philosophic infidel, and unable to look through his
sophisms to the consequences which they involved,--could say, in
addressing him, that
"only God could know
Whether the fair idea he did show
Agreed entirely with God's own or no."
And he then not very wisely added,--
"This, I dare boldly tell,
'T is so like truth, 't will serve our turn as well."
We now know, however, that no mere resemblance to truth will for any
considerable length of time serve its turn. It is because the
resemblances have, like those of Hobbes, been mere resemblances, that so
much time and labor have had to be wasted by the pioneers of science in
their removal; and, now that a wonderful opportunity has occurred of
comparing, in this matter of classification, the human with the Divine
idea,--the idea embodied by the zoologists and botanists in their
respective systems, with the idea embodied by the Creator of all in
geologic history,--we cannot perhaps do better, in entering upon our
subject, than to glance briefly at the great features in which God's
order of classification, as developed in Palæontology, agrees with the
order in which man has at length learned to range the living
productions, plant and animal, by which he is surrounded, and of which
he himself forms the most remarkable portion. In an age in which a class
of writers not without their influence in the world of letters would
fain repudiate every argument derived from _design_, and denounce all
who hold with Paley and Chalmers as anthropomorphists, that labor to
create for themselves a god of their own type and form, it may be not
altogether unprofitable to contemplate the wonderful parallelism which
exists between the Divine and human systems of classification,
and--remembering that the geologists who have discovered the one had no
hand in assisting the naturalists and phytologists who framed the
other--soberly to inquire whether we have not a new argument in the fact
for an identity in constitution and quality of the Divine and human
minds,--not a mere fanciful identity, the result of a disposition on the
part of man to imagine to himself a God bearing his own likeness, but an
identity real and actual, and the result of that creative act by which
God formed man in his own image.
The study of plants and animals seems to have been a favorite one with
thoughtful men in every age of the world. According to the Psalmist,
these great "works of the Lord are sought out of all them that have
pleasure therein." The Book of Job, probably the oldest writing in
existence, is full of vivid descriptions of the wild denizens of the
flood and desert; and it is expressly recorded of the wise old king,
that he "spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, even
unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall; and also of beasts, and
of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes." Solomon was a zoologist
and botanist; and there is palpable classification in the manner in
which his studies are described. It is a law of the human mind, as has
been already said, that, wherever a large stock of facts are acquired,
the classifying principle steps in to arrange them. "Even the rudest
wanderer in the fields," says Dr. Brown, "finds that the profusion of
blossoms around him--in the greater number of which he is able himself
to discover many striking resemblances--may be reduced to some order of
arrangement." But, for many centuries, this arranging faculty labored
but to little purpose. As specimens of the strange classification that
continued to obtain down till comparatively modern times, let us select
that of two works which, from the literary celebrity of their authors,
still possess a classical standing in letters,--Cowley's "Treatise on
Plants," and Goldsmith's "History of the Earth and Animated Nature." The
plants we find arranged by the poet on the simple but very inadequate
principle of size and show. Herbs are placed first, as lowest and least
conspicuous in the scale; then flowers; and, finally, trees. Among the
herbs, at least two of the ferns--the true maidenhair and the
spleenwort--are assigned places among plants of such high standing as
sage, mint, and rosemary: among the flowers, monocotyledons, such as the
iris, the tulip, and the lily, appear among dicotyledons, such as the
rose, the violet, the sunflower, and the auricula: and among trees we
find the palms placed between the plum and the olive; and the yew, the
fir, and the juniper, flanked on one side by the box and the holly, and
on the other by the oak. Such, in treating of plants, was the
classification adopted by one of the most learned of English poets in
the year 1657.
Nor was Goldsmith,-who wrote more than a century later, much more
fortunate in dealing with the animal kingdom. Buffon had already
published his great work; and even he could bethink him of no better
mode of dividing his animals than into wild and tame. And in Goldsmith,
who adopted, in treating of the mammals, a similar principle, we find
the fishes and molluscs placed, in advance of the sauroid, ophidian, and
batrachian reptiles,--the whale united in close relationship to the
sharks and rays,--animals of the tortoise kind classed among animals of
the lobster kind, and both among shell fish, such as the snail, the
nautilus, and the oyster. And yet Goldsmith was engaged on his work
little more than eighty years ago. In fine, the true principles of
classification in the animal kingdom are of well nigh as recent
development as geologic science itself, and not greatly more ancient in
even the _vegetable_ kingdom. It would, of course, be wholly out of
place to attempt giving a minute history here of the progress of
arrangement in either department; but it can scarce be held that the
natural system of plants was other than very incomplete previous to
1789, when Jussieu first enunciated his scheme of classification; nor
did it receive its later improvements until so late as 1846, when, after
the publication, in succession, of the schemes of De Candolle and
Endlicher, Lindley communicated his finished system to the world. And
there certainly existed no even tolerably perfect system of zoology
until 1816, when the "Animal Kingdom" of Cuvier appeared. Later
naturalists,--such as Agassiz, in his own special department, the
history of fishes, and Professor Owen in the invertebrate
divisions,--have improved on the classification of even the great
Frenchman; but for purposes of comparison between the scheme developed
in geologic history and that at length elaborated by the human mind, the
system of Cuvier will be found, for at least our present purpose,
sufficiently complete. And in tracing through time the course of the
vegetable kingdom, let us adopt, as our standard to measure it by, the
system of Lindley.
Commencing at the bottom of the scale, we find the Thallogens, or
flowerless plants which lack proper stems and leaves,--a class which
includes all the algæ. Next succeed the Acrogens, or flowerless plants
that possess both stems and leaves,--such as the ferns and their allies.
Next, omitting an inconspicuous class, represented by but a few
parasitical plants incapable of preservation as fossils, come the
Endogens,--monocotyledonous flowering plants, that include the
palms, the liliaceæ, and several other families, all characterized
by the parallel venation of their leaves. Next, omitting another
inconspicuous tribe, there follows a very important class,--the
Gymnogens,--polycotyledonous trees, represented by the conifers; and
cycadaceæ. And, last of all, come the Dicotyledonous Exogens,--a class
to which all our fruit, and what are known as our "forest trees,"
belong, with a vastly preponderating majority of the herbs and flowers
that impart fertility and beauty to our gardens and meadows. This last
class, though but one, now occupies much greater space in the vegetable
kingdom than all the others united.
Such is the arrangement of Lindley, or rather an arrangement the slow
growth of ages, to which this distinguished botanist has given the last
finishing touches. And let us now mark how closely it resembles the
geologic arrangement as developed in the successive stages of the
earth's history.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.[4]
-+-------------------------
| Thallogens.
Silurian. |
| Acrogens.
-+-----+-------------------
| | | Gymnogens.
Old Red. | | |
| | |
-+-----+-----+-------------
| | | | Monocotyledons.
Carboniferous. | | | |
| | | |
-+-----+-----+-----+-------
Permian. | | | |
-+-----+-----+-----+-------
Triassic. | | | |
-+-----+-----+-----+-------
| | | | : Dicotyledons.
Oolitic. | | | | :
| | | | |
-+-----+-----+-----+-----+-
| | | | |
Cretaceous. | | | | |
| | | | |
-+-----+-----+-----+-----+- Dicotyledonous Trees.
| | | | |
Tertiary. | | | | |
| | | | |
-+-----+-----+-----+-----+-
Geologic [Thal. Ac. Gy. Mon. Dic.] arrangement.
Lindley's [Thal. Ac. Mon. Gy. Dic.] arrangement.
THE GENEALOGY OF PLANTS.]
The most ancient period of whose organisms any trace remains in the
rocks seems to have been, prevailingly at least, a period of
Thallogens. We must, of course, take into account the fact, that it has
yielded no land plants, and that the sea is everywhere now, as of old,
the great habitat of the algæ,--one of the four great orders into which
the Thallogens are divided. There appear no traces of a terrestrial
vegetation until we reach the uppermost beds of the Upper Silurian
System. But, account for the fact as we may, it is at least worthy of
notice, that, alike in the systems of our botanists and in the
chronological arrangements of our geologists, the first or introductory
class which occurs in the ascending order is this humble Thallogenic
class. There is some trace in the Lower Silurians of Scotland of a
vegetable structure which may have belonged to one of the humbler
Endogens, of which, at least, a single genus, the _Zosteraceæ,_ still
exists in salt water; but the trace is faint and doubtful, and, even
were it established, it would form merely a solitary exception to the
general evidence that the first known period of vegetable existence was
a period of Thallogens. The terrestrial remains of the Upper Silurians
of England, the oldest yet known, consist chiefly of spore-like bodies,
which belonged, says Dr. Hooker, to Lycopodiaceæ,--an order of the
second or acrogenic class. And, in the second great geologic
period,--that of the Old Red Sandstone,--we find this second class not
inadequately represented. In its lowest fossiliferous beds we detect a
Lycopodite which not a little resembles one of the commonest of our club
mosses,--_Lycopodium clavatum_,--with a minute fern and a large striated
plant resembling a calamite, and evidently allied to an existing genus
of Acrogens, the equisetaceæ. In the Middle Old Red Sandstone there also
occurs a small fern, with some trace of a larger; and one of its best
preserved vegetable organisms is a lepidodendron,--an extinct ally of
the Lycopodiums; while in the upper beds of the system, especially as
developed in the south of Ireland, the noble fern known as _Cyclopteris
Hibernicus_ is very abundant. This fern has been detected also in the
Upper Old Red of our own country, mingled with fragments of contemporary
calamites. With, however, these earliest plants of the land yet known,
there occurs a true wood, which belonged, as shown by its structure, to
a gymnospermous or polycotyledonous tree, and which we find associated
with remains of Coccosteus and Diplacanthus.
[Illustration: Fig. 2.
CYCLOPTERIS HIBERNICUS.
(Nat. size.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 3.
CONIFER OF THE LOWER OLD RED SANDSTONE.
Cromarty.
(Mag. forty diameters.)]
And here let me remark, that the facts of Palæontological science compel
us to blend, in some degree, with the classification of our modern
botanists, that of the botanists of an earlier time. In a passage
already quoted, Solomon is said to have discoursed of plants, "from the
cedar tree that is in Lebanon, to the hyssop that springeth out of the
wall,"--from the great tree to the minute herb; and Cowley rose, in his
metrical treatise, as has been shown, from descriptions of herbs and
flowers to descriptions of fruit and forest trees. And as in every age
in which there existed a terrestrial vegetation there seem to have been
"trees" as certainly as "herbs," the palæontological botantist finds that
he has, in consequence, to range his classes, not in one series, but in
two,--the Gymnogens, or cone-bearing trees, in a line nearly parallel
with the Acrogens, or flowerless, spore-bearing herbs. But the
arrangement is in no degree the less striking from the circumstance that
it is ranged, not in one, but in two lines. It is, however, an untoward
arrangement for the purposes of the Lamarckian, whose peculiar
hypothesis would imperatively demand, not a double, but a single column,
in which the ferns and club mosses would stand far in advance, in point
of time, of the Coniferæ. In the Coal Measures, so remarkable for the
great luxuriance of their flora, both the Gymnogens and Acrogens are
largely developed, with a very puzzling intermediate class, that, while
they attained to the size of trees, like the former, retained in a
remarkable degree, as in the Lepidodendra and the Calamites, the
peculiar features of the latter. And with these there appear, though
more sparingly, the Endogens,--monocotyledonous plants, represented by a
few palm-like trees (Palmacites), a few date-like fruits
(Trigonocarpum), and a few grass-like herbs (Poacites). In the great
Secondary division, the true dicotyledonous plants first appear; but, so
far as is yet known, no dicotyledonous wood. In the earlier formations
of the division a degree of doubt attaches to even the few leaves of
this class hitherto detected; but in the Lower Cretaceous strata they
become at once unequivocal in their character, and comparatively
abundant, both as individuals and species; and in the Tertiary deposits
they greatly outnumber all the humbler classes, and appear not only as
herbs, but also as great trees. Not, however, until shortly before the
introduction of man do some of their highest orders, such as the
Rosaceæ, come upon the scene, as plants of that great garden--including
the fields of the agriculturist--which it has been part of man's set
task upon earth to keep and to dress. And such seems to be the order of
classification in the vegetable kingdom, as developed in creation, and
determined by the geologic periods.
[Illustration:
Fig. 4.[5]
-+-----+-----+-------------------------------
| | | Rad. Art. Mol.
Silurian. | | |
| | | | Fishes.
-+-----+-----+-----+-------------------------
| | | |
Old Red. | | | |
| | | | | Reptiles.
-+-----+-----+-----+-----+-------------------
| | | | |
Carboniferous. | | | | |
| | | | |
-+-----+-----+-----+-----+-------------------
Permian. | | | | |
-+-----+-----+-----+-----+-------------------
Triassic. | | | | |
-+-----+-----+-----+-----+-------------------
| | | | | | Birds.
Oolitic. | | | | | | : Mammals.
| | | | | | :
-+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-------
| | | | | | :
Cretaceous. | | | | | | :
| | | | | | :
-+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-------
| | | | | | | Pla. Mam.
Tertiary. | | | | | | |
| | | | | | |
| | | | | | |
-+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-
Recent. | | | | | | | | Man.
-+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-
Geologic [Rad. Art. Mol. Fish. Rep. Bird. Mam. Man.] Arrangement.
Cuvier's [Rad. Art. Mol. Fish. Rep. Bird. Mam. Man.] Arrangement.
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS.]
The parallelism which exists between the course of creation, as
exhibited in the animal kingdom, and the classification of the greatest
zoologist of modern times, is perhaps still more remarkable. Cuvier
divides all animals into vertebrate and invertebrate; the invertebrates
consisting, according to his arrangement, of three great
divisions,--mollusca, articulata, and radiata; and the vertebrates, of
four great classes,--the mammals, the birds, the reptiles, and the
fishes. From the lowest zone at which organic remains occur, up till
the higher beds of the Lower Silurian System, all the animal remains yet
found belong to the invertebrate divisions. The numerous tables of stone
which compose the leaves of this first and earliest of the geologic
volumes correspond in their contents with that concluding volume of
Cuvier's great work in which he deals with the mollusca, articulata, and
radiata; with, however, this difference, that the three great divisions,
instead of occurring in a continnous series, are ranged, like the
terrestrial herbs and trees, in parallel columns. The chain of animal
being on its first appearance is, if I may so express myself, a
threefold chain;--a fact nicely correspondent with the further fact,
that we cannot in the present creation range _serially_, as either
higher or lower in the scale, at least two of these divisions,--the
mollusca and articulata. In one of the higher beds of the Upper Silurian
System,--a bed which borders on the base of the Old Red Sandstone,--the
vertebrates make their earliest appearance in their fourth or ichthyic
class; and we find ourselves in that volume of the geologic record which
corresponds to Cuvier's volume on the fishes. In the many-folded pages
of the Old Red Sandstone, till we reach the highest and last, there
occur the remains of no other vertebrates than those of this fourth
class; but in its uppermost deposits there appear traces of the third or
reptilian class; and in passing upwards still, through the
Carboniferous, Permian, and Triassic Systems, we find reptiles
continuing the master existences of the time. The geologic volume in
which these great formations are included corresponds to the Cuvierian
one devoted to the Reptilia. Early in the Oolitic System, birds,
Cuvier's second class of the vertebrata, make their first appearance,
though their remains, like those of birds in the present time, are rare
and infrequent; and, for at least the earlier periods of their
existence, we know that they were,--that they haunted for food the
waters of the period, and waded in their shallows,--only from marks
similar to those by which Crusoe became first aware of the visits paid
to his island by his savage neighbors,--their footprints, left impressed
on the sands over which they stalked of old. This early Oolitic volume
corresponds in its contents to the section devoted by Cuvier, in his
great work, to his second class, the birds. And in the Stonisfield
slate,--a deposit interposed between the "Inferior" and "Great
Oolites," we detect the earliest indications of his first or
mammaliferous class, apparently represented, however, by but one
order,--the Marsupiata, or pouched animals, to whose special place in
the scale I shall afterwards have occasion to refer. Not until we reach
the times of the Tertiary division do the mammals in their higher orders
appear. The great Tertiary volume corresponds to those volumes of Cuvier
which treat of the placental animals that suckle their young. And
finally,--last born of creation,--man appears upon the scene, in his
several races and varieties; the sublime arch of animal being at length
receives its keystone; and the finished work stands up complete, from
foundation to pinnacle, at once an admirably adjusted occupant of space,
and a wonderful monument of Divine arrangement and classification, as it
exists in time. Save at two special points, to which I shall afterwards
advert, the particular arrangement unfolded by geologic history is
exactly that which the greatest and most philosophic of the naturalists
had, just previous to its discovery, originated and adopted as most
conformable to nature: the arrangements of geologic history as exhibited
in time, if, commencing at the earliest ages, we pursue it downwards, is
exactly that of the "Animal Kingdom" of Cuvier read backwards.
Let us then, in grappling with the vast multiplicity of our subject,
attempt reducing and simplifying it by means of the classifying
principle; not simply, however,--again to recur to the remark of the
metaphysician,--as an internal principle given us by nature, but as an
external principle _exemplified_ by nature. Let us take the organisms of
the old geologic periods in the order in which they occur in time;
secure, as has been shown, that if our chronology be correct, our
classification will, as a consequence, be good. It will be for the
natural theologians of the coming age to show the bearing of this
wonderful fact on the progress of man towards the just and the solid,
and on the being and character of man's Creator,--to establish, on the
one hand, against the undue depreciators of intellect and its results,
that in certain departments of mind, such as that which deals with the
arrangement and development of the scheme of organic being, human
thought is not profitlessly revolving in an idle circle, but progressing
Godwards, and gradually unlocking the order of creation. And, on the
other hand, it will be equally his proper business to demand of the
Pantheist how,--seeing that only _persons_ (such as the Cuviers and
Lindleys) could have wrought out for themselves the real arrangement of
this scheme,--how, I say, or on what principle, it is to be held that it
was a scheme originated and established at the beginning, not by a
_personal_, but by an impersonal God. But our present business is with
the _fact_ of the parallel arrangements, Divine and human,--not with the
inferences legitimately deducible from it.
[Illustration: Fig. 5.
OLDHAMIA ANTIQUA;--the oldest known Zoophyte.
Wrae Head, Ireland.]
[Illustration: Fig. 6.
PALÆOCHORDA MINOR.
(One half nat. size.)]
Beginning with the plants, let us, however, remark, that they do not
precede in the order of their appearance the humbler animals. No more
ancient organism than the _Oldhamia_ of the Lowest Irish Silurians, a
plant-like zoophyte somewhat resembling our modern sertularia, has yet
been detected by the geologist; though only a few months ago the
researches of Mr. Salter in the ancient rocks of the Longmynd,
Shropshire, previously deemed unfossiliferous, have given, to it what
seem to be contemporary vegetable organisms, in a few ill-preserved
fucoids. So far as is yet known, plants and animals appear together. The
long upward march of the animal kingdom takes its departure at its
starting point from a thick forest of algæ. In Bohemia, in Norway, in
Sweden, in the British Islands, in North America, wherever, in fine,
what appears to be the lowest, or at least one of the lowest, zones of
life has yet been detected, the rocks are found to be darkened by the
remains of algæ, so abundantly developed in some cases, that they
compose, as in the ancient Lower Silurians of Dumfriesshire, impure beds
of anthracite several feet in thickness. Apparently, from the original
looseness of their texture, the individual plants are but indifferently
preserved; nor can we expect that organisms so ancient should exhibit
any _very_ close resemblance to the plants which darken the half-tide
rocks and skerries of our coasts at the present time. We do detect,
however, in some of these primordial fossils, at least a noticeable
likeness to families familiar to the modern algæologist. The cord-like
plant, _Chorda filum_, known to our children as "dead men's ropes,"
from its proving fatal at times to the too adventurous swimmer who gets
entangled in its thick wreaths, had a Lower Silurian representative,
known to the Palæontologist as the _Palæochorda_, or ancient chorda,
which existed apparently in two species,--a larger and smaller. The
still better known _Chondrus crispus_, the Irish moss or carrageen of
our cookery-books, has likewise its apparent though more distant
representative in _Chondritis_, a Lower Silurian algæ, of which there
seems to exist at least three species. The fucoids, or kelp weeds,
appear to have had also their representatives in such plants as
_Fucoides gracilis_ of the Lower Silurians of the Malverns; in short,
the Thallogens of the first ages of vegetable life seem to have
resembled, in the group, and in at least their more prominent features,
the algæ of the existing time. And with the first indications of land we
pass direct from the Thallogens to the Acrogens,--from the sea weeds to
the fern allies. The Lycopodiaceæ;, or club mosses, bear in the axils of
their leaves minute circular cases, which form the receptacles of their
spore-like seeds. And when, high in the Upper Silurian System, and just
when preparing to quit it for the Lower Old Red Sandstone, we detect our
earliest terrestrial organisms, we find that they are composed
exclusively of those little spore receptacles. The number of land plants
gradually increases as we ascend into the overlying system. Still,
however, the Flora of even the Old Red is but meagre and poor; and you
will perhaps permit me to lighten this part of my subject, which
threatens too palpably to partake of the poverty of that with which it
deals, by a simple illustration.
[Illustration: Fig. 7.
LYCOPODIUM CLAVATUM.]
[Illustration: Fig. 8.
EQUISETUM FLUVIATILE.]
We stand, at low ebb, on the outer edge of one of those iron-bound
shores of the Western Highlands, rich in forests of algæ, from which,
not yet a generation bygone, our Celtic proprietors used to derive a
larger portion of their revenues than from their fields and moors. Rock
and skerry are brown with sea weed. The long cylindrical lines of
_Chorda filum_, many feet in length, lie aslant in the tideway; long
shaggy bunches of _Fucus serratus_ and _Fucus nodosus_ droop heavily
from the rock sides; while the flatter ledges, that form the uneven
floor upon which we tread, bristle thick with the stiff, cartilaginous,
many-cleft fronds of at least two species of chondrus,--the common
carrageen, and the smaller species, _C. Norvegicus_. Now, in
the thickly-spread fucoids of this Highland shore we have not a
_very_ inadequate representation of the first, or thallogenic
vegetation,--that of the great Silurian period, as exhibited in the
rocks, from the base to nearly the top of the system. And should we add
to the rocky tract, rich in fucoids, a submarine meadow of pale shell
sand, covered by a deep green swathe of zostera, with its jointed
saccharine roots and slim flowers, unfurnished with petals, we would
render it perhaps more adequately representative still.
[Illustration: Fig. 9.
OSMUNDA REGALIS. (Royal Fern.)]
We cross the beach, and enter on a bare brown moor, comparatively
fertile, however, in the club mosses. One of the largest and finest of
the species, _Lycopodium clavatum_, with its long scaly stems and
upright spikes of lighter green,--altogether a graceful though
flowerless plant, which the herd-boy learns to select from among its
fellows, and to bind round his cap,--goes trailing on the drier spots
for many feet over the soil; while at the edge of trickling runnel or
marshy hollow, a smaller and less hardy species, _Lycopodium inundatum_,
takes its place. The marshes themselves bristle thick with the deep
green horse tail, _Equisetum fluviatile_, with its fluted stem and
verticillate series of linear brandies. Two other species of the same
genus, _Equisetum sylvaticum_ and _Equisetum arvense_, flourish on the
drier parts of the moor, blent with two species of minute ferns, the
moonwort and the adder's tongue,--ferns that, like the magnificent royal
fern (_Osmunda regalis_), though on a much humbler scale, bear their
seed cases on independent stems, and were much sought after of old for
imaginary virtues, which the modern schools of medicine refuse to
recognize. Higher up the moor, ferns of ampler size occur, and what
seems to be rushes, which bear atop conglobate panicles on their smooth
leafless stems; but at its lower edge little else appears than the
higher Acrogens,--ferns and their allies. There occurs, however, just
beyond the first group of club mosses,--a remarkable exception in a
solitary pine,--the advance guard of one of the ancient forests of the
country, which may be seen far in the background, clothing with its
shaggy covering of deep green the lower hill-slopes. And as we found in
the Thallogens of that littoral zone over which we have just passed,
representatives of the marine flora of the Silurian System, from the
first appearance of organisms in its nether beds, to its bone-bed of the
Upper Ludlow rocks, in which the Lycopodites first appear, so in the
Acrogens of that moor, with its solitary coniferous tree, we may
recognize an equally striking representative of the terrestrial flora
which existed during the deposition of these Ludlow rocks, and of the
various formations of the Old Red Sandstone, Lower, Middle, and Upper.
[Illustration: Fig. 10.
PINUS SYLVESTRIS. (Scotch Fir.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 11.
CALAMITE? Of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. Shetland. (One eighth nat.
size.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 12.
LYCOPODITE? Of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. Thurso. (Mag. two
diameters.)]
In the upper beds of the Upper Silurian, as has been already remarked,
Lycopodites are the only terrestrial plants yet found. In the Lower Old
Red Sandstone we find added to these, with Thallogens that bear at least
the same _general_ character as in the system beneath, minute ferns, and
a greatly larger plant, allied to the horse tails. The Old Red flora
seems to have been prevailingly an acrogenic flora; and yet with almost
its first beginnings,--contemporary with at least the earlier fossils of
the system in Scotland, we find a true polycotyledonous tree, not lower
in the scale than the araucarites of the Coal Measures,--which in
structure it greatly resembles,--or than the pines or cedars of our own
times (see Fig. 3). In the Middle Old Red Sandstone there occurs, with
plants representative apparently of the ferns and their allies, a
somewhat equivocal and doubtful organism, which may have been the
panicle or compound fruit of some aquatic rush; while in the Upper Old
Red, just ere the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures began to be, there
existed in considerable abundance a stately fern, the _Cyclopteris
Hibernicus_ (see Fig. 2), of mayhap not smaller proportions than our
monarch of the British ferns, _Osmunda regalis_, associated with a
peculiar lepidodendron, and what seems to be a lepidostrobus,--possibly
the fructiferous spike or cone of the latter, mingled with carbonaceous
stems, which, in the simplicity of their texture, and their abundance,
give evidence of a low but not scanty vegetation. Ere passing to the
luxuriant carboniferous flora, I shall make but one other remark. The
existing plants whence we derive our analogies in dealing with the
vegetation of this early period, contribute but little, if at all, to
the support of animal life. The ferns and their allies remain untouched
by the grazing animals. Our native club mosses, though once used in
medicine, are positively deleterious; the horse tails, though harmless,
so abound in silex, which wraps them round with a cuticle of stone, that
they are rarely cropped by cattle; while the thickets of fern which
cover our hill-sides, and seem so temptingly rich and green in their
season, scarce support the existence of a single creature, and remain
untouched in stem and leaf, from their first appearance in spring, until
they droop and wither under the frosts of early winter. Even the insects
that infest the herbaria of the botanist almost never injure his ferns.
Nor are our resin-producing conifers, though they nourish a few beetles,
favorites with the herbivorous tribes in a much greater degree. Judging
from all we yet know, the earliest terrestrial flora may have covered
the dry land with its mantle of cheerful green, and served its general
purposes, chemical and others, in the well-balanced economy of nature;
but the herb-eating animals would have fared but ill even where it
throve most luxuriantly; and it seems to harmonize with the fact of its
non-edible character, that up to the present time we know not that a
single herbivorous animal lived among its shades. From all that
appears, it may be inferred that it had not to serve the purposes of the
floras of the passing time, in which, according to the poet,
"The world's bread depends on the shooting of a seed."
[Illustration: Fig. 13.
FERN? of Lower Old Red Sandstone. Orkney.
(Nat. Size.)]
The flora of the Coal Measures was the richest and most luxuriant, in at
least individual productions, with which the fossil botanist has formed
any acquaintance. Never before or since did our planet bear so rank a
vegetation as that of which the numerous coal seams and inflammable
shales of the carboniferous period form but a portion of the
remains,--the portion spared, in the first instance, by dissipation and
decay, and in the second by the denuding agencies. Almost all our
coal,--the stored up fuel of a world,--forms but a comparatively small
part of the produce of this wonderful flora. Amid much that was so
strange and antique of type in its productions as to set the analogies
of the botanist at fault, there occurred one solitary order, not a few
of whose species closely resembled their cogeners of the present time. I
refer, of course, to its ferns. And these seem to have formed no small
proportion of the entire flora of the period. Francis estimates the
recent dorsiferous ferns of Great Britain at thirty-five species, and
the species of all the other genera at six more,--forty-one species in
all; and as the flowering plants of the country do not fall short of
fourteen hundred species, the ferns bear to them the rather small
proportion of about one to thirty-five; whereas of the British Coal
Measure flora, in which we do not yet reckon quite three hundred species
of plants, about a hundred and twenty were ferns. Three sevenths of the
entire carboniferous flora of Britain belonged to this familiar class;
and for about fifty species more we can discover no nearer analogies
than those which connect them with the fern allies. And if with the
British Coal Measure we include those also of the Continent of America,
we shall find the proportions in favor of the ferns still greater. The
number of carboniferous plants hitherto described amounts, says M. Ad.
Brogniart, to about five hundred, and of these two hundred and
fifty,--one half of the whole,--were ferns.
[Illustration: Fig. 14.]
[Illustration: Fig. 15.]
[Illustration: Fig. 16.]
[Illustration: Fig. 17.]
[Illustration: Fig. 18.]
[Illustration: Fig. 19.]
[Illustration: FERNS OF THE COAL MEASURES.[6]]
[Illustration: Fig. 20.
ALTINGIA EXCELSA.
Norfolk Island Pine. (Young Specimen.)]
Rising in the scale from the lower to the higher vegetable forms of the
system,--from its ferns to its trees,--we find great conifers,--so great
that they must have raised their heads more than a hundred feet over the
soil; and such was their abundance in this neighborhood, that one can
scarce examine a fragment of coal beside one's household fire that is
not charged with their carbonized remains. Though marked by certain
peculiarities of structure, they bore, as is shown by the fossil trunks
of Granton and Craigleith, the familiar outlines of true coniferous
trees; and would mayhap have differed no more in appearance from their
successors of the same order that now live in our forests, than these
differ from the conifers of New Zealand or of New South Wales. We have
thus, in the numerous ferns and numerous coniferous trees of the Coal
Measures, known objects by which to conceive of some of the more
prominent features of the flora of which they composed so large a part.
We have not inadequate conceptions of at once the giants of its forests
and the green swathe of its plains and hill-sides,--of its mighty trees
and its dwarf _underwood_,--of its cedars of Lebanon, so to speak, and
its hyssop of the wall. But of an intermediate class we have no
existing representatives; and in this class the fossil botanist finds
puzzles and enigmas with which hitherto at least he has been able to
deal with only indifferent success. There is a view, however,
sufficiently simple, which may be found somewhat to lessen, if not
altogether remove, the difficulty. Nature does not dwell willingly in
mediocrity; and so in all ages she as certainly produced trees, or
plants of tree-like proportions and bulk, as she did minute shrubs and
herbs. In not a few of the existing orders and families, such as the
Rosaceæ, the Leguminosæ, the Myrtaceæ, and many others, we have plants
of all sizes, from the creeping herb, half hidden in the sward, to the
stately tree. The wild dwarf strawberry and minute stone-bramble are of
the same order as our finer orchard trees,--apple, pear, and plum,--or
as those noble hawthorn, mountain ash, and wild cherry trees, that
impart such beauty to our lawns and woods; and the minute spring vetch
and everlasting pea are denizens of the same great family as the tall
locust and rosewood trees, and the gorgeous laburnum. Did there exist no
other plants than the Rosaceæ or the Leguminosæ, we would possess,
notwithstanding, herbs, shrubs, and trees, just as we do now. And in
plants of a greatly humbler order we have instances of similar variety
in point of size. The humblest grass in our meadows belongs to the same
natural order as the tall bamboo, that, shooting up its panicles amid
the jungles of India to the height of sixty feet, looks down upon all
the second class trees of the country. Again, the minute forked
spleenwort of Arthur Seat, which rarely exceeds three inches in length,
is of the same family as those tree-ferns of New Zealand and Tasmania
that rise to an elevation of from twenty to thirty feet. And we know how
in the ferns provision is made for the attainment and maintenance of the
tree-like size and character. The rachis, which in the smaller species
is either subterranean or runs along the ground, takes in the tree-fern
a different direction, and, rising erect, climbs slowly upwards in the
character of a trunk or stem, and sends out atop, year after year, a
higher and yet higher coronal of fronds. And in order to impart the
necessary strength to this trunk, and to enable it to war for ages with
the elements, its mass of soft cellular tissue is strengthened all round
by internal buttresses of dense vascular fibre, tough and elastic as the
strongest woods. Now, not a few of the more anomalous forms of the Coal
Measures seem to be simply fern allies of the types Lycopodiaceæ,
Marsileaceæ, and Equisetum, that, escaping from the mediocrity of mere
herbs, shot up into trees,--some of them very great trees,--and that had
of necessity to be furnished with a tissue widely different from that of
their minuter contemporaries and successors. It was of course an
absolute mechanical necessity, that if they were to present, by being
tall and large, a wide front to the tempest, they should also be
comparatively solid and strong to resist it; but with this simple
mechanical requirement there seems to have mingled a principle of a more
occult character. The Gymnogens or conifers were the highest vegetable
existences of the period,--its true trees; and all the tree-like fern
allies were strengthened to meet the necessities of their increased
size, on, if I may so speak, a _coniferous_ principle. Tissue resembling
that of their contemporary conifers imparted the necessary rigidity to
their framework; nay, so strangely were they pervaded throughout by the
coniferous characteristics, that it seems difficult to determine whether
they really most resembled the acrogenous or gymnogenous families. The
Lepidodendra,--great plants of the club moss type, that rose from fifty
to seventy feet in height,--had well nigh as many points of resemblance
to the coniferæ as to the Lycopodites. The Calamites,--reed-like,
jointed plants, that more nearly resemble the Equisetaceæ than aught
else which now exists, but which attained, in the larger specimens, to
the height of ordinary trees, also manifest very decidedly, in their
internal structure, some of the characteristics of the conifers. It has
been remarked by Lindley and Hutton of even Sphenophyllum,--a genus of
plants with verticillate leaves, of which at least six species occur in
our Coal Measures, and which Brogniart refers to one of the humblest
families of the fern allies,--that it seems at least as nearly related
to the Coniferæ as to its lowlier representatives, the Marsileaceæ. And
it is this union of traits, pertaining to what are now widely separated
orders, that imparts to not a few of the vegetables of the Coal Measures
their singularly anomalous character.
[Illustration: Fig. 21.
EAST INDIA TREE-FERN.[7]
(_Asophila perrotetiana._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 22.
SECTION OF STEM OF TREE-FERN.[8]
(_Cyathea._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 23.]
[Illustration: Fig. 24.]
[Illustration: Fig. 25.]
[Illustration: LEPIDODENDRON STERNBERGII.[9]]
[Illustration: Fig. 26.
CALAMITES MOUGEOTII.]
[Illustration: Fig. 27.
SPHENOPHYLLUM DENTATUM.]
[Illustration: Fig. 28.
SIGILLARIA RENIFORMIS.]
Let me attempt introducing you more intimately to one of those plants
which present scarce any analogy with existing forms, and which must
have imparted so strange a character and appearance to the flora of the
Coal Measures. The Sigillaria formed a numerous genus of the
Carboniferous period: no fewer than twenty-two different species have
been enumerated in the British coal fields alone; and such was their
individual abundance, that there are great seams of coal which seem to
be almost entirely composed of their remains. At least the ancient soil
on which these seams rest, and on which their materials appear to have
been elaborated from the elements, is in many instances as thickly
traversed by their underground stems as the soil occupied by our densest
forests is traversed by the tangled roots of the trees by which it is
covered; and we often find associated with them in these cases the
remains of no other plant. The Sigillaria were remarkable for their
beautifully sculptured stems, various in their pattern, according to
their species. All were fluted vertically, somewhat like columns of the
Grecian Doric; and each flute or channel had its line of sculpture
running adown its centre. In one species (_S. flexuosa_) the sculpture
consists of round knobs, surrounded by single rings, like the heads of
the bolts of the ship carpenter; in another (_S. reniformis_) the knobs
are double, and of an oval form, somewhat resembling pairs of
kidneys,--a resemblance to which the species owes its name. In another
species (_S. catenulata_) what seems a minute chain of distinctly
formed elliptical links drops down the middle of each flute; in yet
another (_S. oculata_) the carvings are of an oval form, and, bearing
each a round impression in its centre, they somewhat resemble rows of
staring goggle-eyes; while the carvings in yet another species (_S.
pachyderma_) consist chiefly of crescent-shaped depressions. The roots,
or rather underground stems, of this curious genus attracted notice,
from their singularity, long ere their connection with the carved and
fluted stems had been determined, and have been often described as the
"stigmaria" of the fossil botanist. They, too, have their curious
carvings, consisting of deeply marked stigmata, quincuncially arranged,
with each a little ring at its bottom, and, in at least one rare
species, surrounded by a sculptured star. Unlike true roots, they
terminate abruptly; each rootlet which they send forth was jointed to
the little ring or dimpled knob at the bottom of the stigmata; and the
appearance of the whole, as it radiated from the central mass, whence
the carved trunk proceeded, somewhat resembled that of an enormous
coach-wheel divested of the rim. Unfortunately we cannot yet complete
our description of this strange plant. A specimen, traced for about
forty feet across a shale bed, was found to bifurcate atop into two
great branches,--a characteristic in which, with several others, it
differed from most of the tree-ferns,--a class of plants to which
Adolphe Brogniart is inclined to deem it related; but no specimen has
yet shown the nature of its foliage. I am, however, not a little
disposed to believe with Brogniart that it may have borne as leaves some
of the supposed ferns of the Coal Measures; nowhere, at least, have I
found these lie so thickly, layer above layer, as around the stems of
Sigillaria; and the fact that, even in our own times, plants widely
differing from the tree-ferns,--such, for instance, as one of the
Cycadeæ,--should bear leaves scarce distinguishable from fern fronds,
may well reconcile us to an apparent anomaly in the case of an ancient
plant such as Sigillaria, whose entire constitution, so far as it has
been ascertained, appears to have been anomalous. The sculpturesque
character of this richly fretted genus was shared by not a few of its
contemporaries. The Ulodendra, with their rectilinear rows of circular
scars, and their stems covered with leaf-like carvings, rivalled in
effect the ornately relieved torus of a Corinthian column: Favularia,
Knorria, Halonia, many of the Calamites, and all the Lepidodendra,
exhibited the most delicate sculpturing. In walking among the ruins of
this ancient flora, the Palæontologist almost feels as if he had got
among the broken fragments of Italian palaces, erected long ages ago,
when the architecture of Rome was most ornate, and every moulding was
roughened with ornament; and in attempting to call up in fancy the old
Carboniferous forests, he has to dwell on this peculiar feature as one
of the most prominent, and to see, in the multitude of trunks darkened
above by clouds of foliage, that rise upon him in the prospect, the slim
columns of an elder Alhambra, roughened with arabesque tracery and
exquisite filagree work.
[Illustration: Fig. 29.
SIGILLARIA RENIFORMIS.
(Nat. size.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 30.
SIGILLARIA PACHYDERMA.
(One fourth nat. size.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 31.
STIGMARIA FICOIDES.
(One fourth nat. size.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 32.
FAVULARIA TESSELLATA.
(One fifth nat. size.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 33.
LEPIDODENDRON OBOVATUM.
(Nat. size.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 34.
CYCAS REVOLUTA.
(_Recent._)]
[Illustration: Fig.35.
ZAMIA PUNGENS.
(_Recent._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 36.
ZAMIA FENEONIS (PORTLAND OOLITE.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 37.
MANTELLIA NIDIFORMIS.
(Portland Dirt-bed.)]
In the Oolitic flora we find a few peculiar features introduced. The
Cyeadeæ,--a family of plants allied to the ferns on the one hand, and to
the conifers on the other, and which in their general aspect not a
little resemble stunted palms,--appear in this flora for the first time.
Its coniferous genera, too, receive great accessions to their numbers,
and begin to resemble, more closely than at an earlier period, the
genera which still continue to exist. The cypresses, the yews, the
thujas, the dammaras, all make their earliest appearance in the flora of
the Oolite. Among our existing woods there seem to be but two conifers
(that attain to the dignity of trees) indigenous to Britain,--the common
yew, _Taxus baccata_, and the common Scotch fir, _Pinus sylvestris_; and
yet we know that the latter alone formed, during the last few centuries,
great woods, that darkened for many miles together the now barren moors
and bare hill-sides of the Highlands of Scotland,--moors and hill-sides
that, though long since divested of their last tree, are still known by
their old name of _forests_. In the times of the Oolite, on the other
hand, Britain had from fourteen to twenty different species of conifers;
and its great forests, of whose existence we have direct evidence in the
very abundant lignites of the system, must have possessed a richness and
variety which our ancient fir woods of the historic or human period
could not have possessed. With the Conifers and the Cycadeæ there were
many ferns associated,--so many, that they still composed nearly two
fifths of the entire flora; and associated with these, though in reduced
proportions, we find the fern allies. The reduction, however, of these
last is rather in species than in individuals. The Brora Coal, one of
the most considerable Oolitic seams in Europe, seems to have been formed
almost exclusively of an equisetum,--_E. columnare_. In this flora the
more equivocal productions of the Coal Measures are represented by what
seems to be the last of the Calamites; but it contains no
Lepidodendra,--no Ulodendra,--no Sigillaria,--no Favularia,--no Knorria
or Halonia. Those monsters of the vegetable world that united to the
forms of its humbler productions the bulk of trees, had, with the
solitary exception of the Calamites, passed into extinction; and ere the
close of the system they too had disappeared. The forms borne by most of
the Oolitic plants were comparatively familiar forms. With the Acrogens
and Gymnogens we find the first indication of the Liliaceæ, or lily-like
plants,--of plants, too, allied to the Pandanaceæ or screw pines, the
fruits of which are sometimes preserved in a wonderfully perfect state
of keeping in the Inferior Oolite, together with Carpolithes,--palm-like
fruits, very ornately sculptured,--and the remains of at least one other
monocotyledon, that bears the somewhat general name of an Endogenite.
With these there occur a few disputed leaves, which I must persist in
regarding as dicotyledonous. But they formed, whatever their true
character, a very inconspicuous feature in the Oolitic flora; and not
until the overlying Cretaceous System is ushered in do we find leaves in
any considerable quantity decidedly of this high family; nor until we
enter into the earlier Tertiaries do we succeed in detecting a true
dicotyledonous tree. On such an amount of observation is this order of
succession determined,--though the evidence is, of course, mainly
negative,--that when, some eight or ten years ago, Dr. John Wilson, the
learned Free Church missionary to the Parsees of India, submitted to me
specimens of fossil woods which he had picked up in the Egyptian Desert,
in order that I might if possible determine their age, I told him, ere
yet the optical lapidary had prepared them for examination, that if they
exhibited the coniferous structure, they might belong to any geologic
period from the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone downwards; but that
if they manifested in their tissue the dicotyledonous character, they
could not be older than the times of the Tertiary. On submitting them in
thin slices to the microscope, they were found to exhibit the peculiar
dicotyledonous structure as strongly as the oak or chestnut. And
Lieutenant Newbold's researches in the deposit in which they occur has
since demonstrated, on stratigraphical evidence, that not only does it
belong to the great Tertiary division, but also to one of the
comparatively modern formations of the Tertiary.
[Illustration: Fig. 38
EQUISETUM COLUMNARE.
(Nat. size.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 39.
CARPOLITHES CONICA.
(Reduced one third.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 40.
CARPOLITHES BUCKLANDII.[10]
(Reduced one third.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 41.
ACER TRILOBATUM.[11]
(Miocene of OEningen.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 42.
ULMUS BRONNII.[12]
(Miocene of Bohemia.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 43.
PALMACITES LAMANONIS.
(A Palm of the Miocene of Aix.)]
The earlier flora of this Tertiary division presents an aspect widely
different from that of any of the previous ones. The ferns and their
allies sink into their existing proportions; nor do the coniferæ,
previously so abundant, occupy any longer a prominent place. On the
other hand, the dicotyledonous herbs and trees, previously so
inconspicuous in creation, are largely developed. Trees of those
Amentiferous orders to which the oak, the hazel, the beech, and the
plane belong, were perhaps not less abundant in the Eocene woods than in
those of the present time: they were mingled with trees of the Laurel,
the Leguminous, and the Anonaceous or custard apple families, with many
others; and deep forests, in the latitude of London (in which the
intertropical forms must now be protected, as in the Crystal Palace,
with coverings of glass, and warmed by artificial heat), abounded in
graceful palms. Mr. Bowerbank found in the London clay of the island of
Sheppey alone the fruits of no fewer than thirteen different species of
this picturesque family, which lends so peculiar a feature to the
landscapes in which it occurs; and ascertained that the undergrowth
beneath was composed, in large proportion, of creeping plants of the
gourd and melon order. From the middle or Miocene flora of the Tertiary
division,--of which we seem to possess in Britain only the small but
interesting fragment detected by his Grace the Duke of Argyll among the
trap-beds of Mull,--most of the more exotic forms seem to have been
excluded. The palms, however, still survive in no fewer than thirty-one
different species, and we find in great abundance, in the place of the
other exotics, remains of the plane and buckthorn families,--part of a
group of plants that in their general aspect, as shown in the Tertiary
deposits of the Continent, not a little resembled the vegetation of the
United States at the present day. The nearer we approach to existing
times, the more familiar in form and outline do the herbs and trees
become. We detect, as has been shown, at least one existing _order_ in
the ferns of the Coal Measures; we detect at least existing _genera_
among the Coniferæ, Equisetaceæ, and Cycadaceæ of the Oolite; the
acacias, gourds, and laurels of the Eocene flora, and the planes,
willows, and buckthorns of the Miocene, though we fail to identify their
species with aught that now lives, still more strongly remind us of the
recent productions of our forests or conservatories; and, on entering,
in our downward course, the Pleistocene period, we at length find
ourselves among familiar _species_. On old terrestrial surfaces, that
date before the times of the glacial period, and underlie the boulder
clay, the remains of forests of oak, birch, hazel, and fir have been
detected,--all of the familiar species indigenous to the country, and
which still flourish in our native woods. And it was held by the late
Professor Edward Forbes, that the most ancient of his five existing
British floras,--that which occurs in the south-west of Ireland, and
corresponds with the flora of the northwest of Spain and the
Pyrenees,--had been introduced into the country as early, perhaps, as
the times of the Miocene. Be this, however, as it may, there can rest no
doubt on the great antiquity of the prevailing trees of our indigenous
forests.
The oak, the birch, the hazel, the Scotch fir, all lived, I repeat, in
what is now Britain, ere the last great depression of the land. The
gigantic northern elephant and rhinoceros, extinct for untold ages,
forced their way through their tangled branches; and the British tiger
and hyæna harbored in their thickets. Cuvier framed an argument for the
fixity of species on the fact that the birds and beasts embalmed in the
catacombs were identical in every respect with the animals of the same
kinds that live now. But what, it has been asked, was a brief period of
three thousand years, compared with the geologic ages? or how could any
such argument be founded on a basis so little extended? It is, however,
to no such narrow basis we can refer in the case of these woods. All
human history is comprised in the nearer corner of the immense period
which they measure out; and yet, from their first appearance in creation
till now they have not altered a single fibre. And such, on this point,
is the invariable testimony of Palæontologic science,--testimony so
invariable, that no great Palæontologist was ever yet an asserter of the
development hypothesis. With the existing trees of our indigenous woods
it is probable that in even these early times a considerable portion of
the herbs of our recent flora would have been associated, though their
remains, less fitted for preservation, have failed to leave distinct
trace behind them. We at least know generally, that with each succeeding
period there appeared a more extensively useful and various vegetation
than that which had gone before. I have already referred to the sombre,
unproductive character of the earliest terrestrial flora with which we
are acquainted. It was a flora unfitted, apparently, for the support of
either graminivorous bird or herbivorous quadruped. The singularly
profuse vegetation of the Coal Measures was, with all its wild
luxuriance, of a resembling cast. So far as appears, neither flock nor
herd could have lived on its greenest and richest plains; nor does even
the flora of the Oolite seem to have been in the least suited for the
purposes of the shepherd or herdsman. Not until we enter on the Tertiary
periods do we find floras amid which man might have profitably labored
as a dresser of gardens, a tiller of fields, or a keeper of flocks and
herds. Nay, there are whole orders and families of plants of the very
first importance to man which do not appear until late in even the
Tertiary ages. Some degree of doubt must always attach to merely
negative evidence; but Agassiz, a geologist whose statements must be
received with respect by every student of the science, finds reason to
conclude that the order of the Rosaceæ,--an order more important to the
gardener than almost any other, and to which the apple, the pear, the
quince, the cherry, the plum, the peach, the apricot, the victorine, the
almond, the raspberry, the strawberry, and the various brambleberries
belong, together with all the roses and the potentillas,--was introduced
only a short time previous to the appearance of man. And the true
grasses,--a still more important order, which, as the corn-bearing
plants of the agriculturist, feed at the present time at least two
thirds of the human species, and in their humbler varieties form the
staple food of the _grazing_ animals,--scarce appear in the fossil state
at all. They are peculiarly plants of the human period.
Let me instance one other family of which the fossil botanist has not
yet succeeded in finding any trace in even the Tertiary deposits, and
which appears to have been specially created for the gratification of
human sense. Unlike the Rosaceæ, it exhibits no rich blow of color, or
tempting show of luscious fruit;--- it does not appeal very directly to
either the sense of taste or of sight: but it is richly odoriferous;
and, though deemed somewhat out of place in the garden for the last
century and more, it enters largely into the composition of some of our
most fashionable perfumes. I refer to the _Labiate_ family,--a family to
which the lavenders, the mints, the thymes, and the hyssops belong, with
basil, rosemary, and marjoram,--all plants of "gray renown," as
Shenstone happily remarks in his description of the herbal of his
"Schoolmistress."
"Herbs too she knew, and well of each could speak,
That in her garden sipped the silvery dew,
Where no vain flower disclosed a gaudy streak,
But herbs for use and physic not a few,
Of gray renown within those borders grew.
The tufted basil, pun-provoking thyme,
And fragrant balm, and sage of sober hue.
"And marjoram sweet in shepherd's posie found,
And lavender, whose spikes of azure bloom
Shall be erewhile in arid bundles bound,
To lurk amid her labors of the loom,
And crown her kerchiefs clean with meikle rare perfume.
"And here trim rosemary, that whilom crowned
The daintiest garden of the proudest peer,
Ere, driven from its envied site, it found
A sacred shelter for its branches here,
Where, edged with gold, its glittering skirts appear,
With horehound gray, and mint of softer green."
All the plants here enumerated belong to the labiate family; which,
though unfashionable even in Shenstone's days, have still their products
favorably received in the very best society. The rosemary, whose
banishment from the gardens of the great he specially records, enters
largely in the composition of eau de Cologne. Of the lavenders, one
species (_Lavendula vera_) yields the well known lavender oil, and
another (_L. latifolio_) the spike oil. The peppermint (_Meantha
viridus_) furnishes the essence so popular under that name among our
confectioners; and one of the most valued perfumes of the East (next to
the famous _Attar_, a product of the Rosaceæ) is the oil of the
_Patchouly_ plant, another of the labiates. Let me indulge, ere quitting
this part of the subject, in a single remark. There have been classes of
religionists, not wholly absent from our own country, and well known on
the Continent, who have deemed it a merit to deny themselves every
pleasure of sense, however innocent and delicate. The excellent but
mistaken Pascal refused to look upon a lovely landscape; and the Port
Royalist nuns remarked, somewhat simply for their side of the argument,
that they seemed as if warring with Providence, seeing that the favors
which he was abundantly showering upon them, they, in obedience to the
stern law of their lives, were continually rejecting. But it is better,
surely, to be on the side of Providence against Pascal and the nuns,
than on the side of Pascal and the nuns against Providence. The great
Creator, who has provided so wisely and abundantly for all his
creatures, knows what is best for us, infinitely better than we do
ourselves; and there is neither sense nor merit, surely, in churlishly
refusing to partake of that ample entertainment, sprinkled with delicate
perfumes, garnished with roses, and crowned with the most delicious
fruit, which we now know was not only specially prepared for us, but
also got ready, as nearly as we can judge, for the appointed hour of our
appearance at the feast. This we also know, that when the Divine Man
came into the world,--unlike the Port Royalists, he did not refuse the
temperate use of any of these luxuries, not even of that "ointment of
spikenard, very precious" (a product of the labiate family), with which
Mary anointed his feet.
[Illustration: Fig. 44.
CYCLOPHTHALMUS BUCKLANDI.
(A Fossil Scorpion of the Coal Measures of Bohemia.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 45.
FOSSIL DRAGON-FLY.
Solenhofen.]
Though it may at first seem a little out of place, let us anticipate
here, for the sake of the illustration which it affords, one of the
sections of the other great division of our subject,--that which treats
of the fossil animals. Let us run briefly over the geologic history of
insects, in order that we may mark the peculiar light which it casts on
the character of the ancient floras. No insects have yet been detected
in the Silurian or Old Red Sandstone Systems. They first appear amid the
hard, dry, flowerless vegetation of the Coal Measures, and in genera
suited to its character. Among these the scorpions take a prominent
place,--carnivorous arachnidæ of ill repute, that live under stones and
fallen trunks, and seize fast with their nippers upon the creatures on
which they prey, crustaceans usually, such as the wood-louse, or
insects, such as the earth-beetles and their grubs. With the scorpions
there occur cockroaches of types not at all unlike the existing ones,
and that, judging from their appearance, must have been foul feeders, to
which scarce anything could have come amiss as food. Books, manuscripts,
leather, ink, oil, meat, even the bodies of the dead, are devoured
indiscriminately by the recent _Blatta gigantea_ of the warmer parts of
the globe,--one of the most disagreeable pests of the European settler,
or of war vessels on foreign stations. I have among my books an
age-embrowned copy of Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany," that had been
carried into foreign parts by a musical relation, after it had seen hard
service at home, and had become smoke dried and black; and yet even it,
though but little tempting, as might be thought, was not safe from the
cockroaches; for, finding it left open one day, they ate out in half an
hour half its table of contents, consisting of several leaves.
Assuredly, if the ancient _Blattæ_ were as little nice in their eating
as the devourers of the "Tea Table Miscellany," they would not have
lacked food amid even the unproductive flora and meagre fauna of the
Coal Measures. With these ancient cockroaches a few locusts and beetles
have been found associated, together with a small _Tinea_,--a creature
allied to the common clothes-moth, and a _Phasmia_,--a creature related
to the spectre insects. But the group is an inconsiderable one; for
insects seem to have occupied no very conspicuous place in the
carboniferous fauna. The beetles appear to have been of the wood and
seed devouring kinds, and would probably have found their food among the
conifers; the _Phasmidæ_ and grasshoppers would have lived on the tender
shoots of the less rigid plants their contemporaries; the _Tinea_,
probably on ligneous or cottony fibre. Not a single insect has the
system yet produced of the now numerous kinds that seek their food among
flowers. In the Oolitic ages, however, insects become greatly more
numerous,--so numerous that they seemed to have formed almost
exclusively the food of the earliest mammals, and apparently also of
some of the flying reptiles of the time. The magnificent dragon-flies,
the carnivorous tyrants of their race, were abundant; and we now know,
that while they were, as their name indicates, dragons to the weaker
insects, they themselves were devoured by dragons as truly such as were
ever yet feigned by romancer of the middle ages. Ants were also common,
with crickets, grasshoppers, bugs both of the land and water, beetles,
two-winged flies, and, in species distinct from the preceding
carboniferous ones, the disgusting cockroaches. And for the first time
amid the remains of a flora that seems to have had its few
flowers,--though flowers could have formed no conspicuous feature in
even an Oolitic landscape,--we detect in a few broken fragments of the
wings of butterflies, decided trace of the flower-sucking insects. Not,
however, until we enter into the great Tertiary division do these become
numerous. The first bee makes its appearance in the amber of the Eocene,
locked up hermetically in its gem-like tomb,--an embalmed corpse in a
crystal coffin,--along with fragments of flower-bearing herbs and trees.
The first of the Bombycidæ too,--insects that maybe seen suspended over
flowers by the scarce visible vibrations of their wings, sucking the
honied juices by means of their long, slender trunks,--also appear in
the amber, associated with moths, butterflies, and a few caterpillars.
Bees and butterflies are present in increased proportions in the latter
Tertiary deposits: but not until that terminal creation to which we
ourselves belong was ushered on the scene did they receive their fullest
development. There is exquisite poetry in Wordsworth's reference to "the
soft murmur of the vagrant bee,"--
"A slender sound, yet hoary Time
Doth to the soul exalt it with the chime
Of all his years; a company
Of ages coming, ages gone,
Nations from before them sweeping."
And yet, mayhap, the naked scientific facts of the history of this busy
insect are scarcely less poetic than the pleasing imagination of the
poet regarding it. They tell that man's world, with all its griefs and
troubles, is more emphatically a world of flowers than any of the
creations that preceded it, and that as one great family--the
grasses--were called into existence, in order, apparently, that he
might enter in favoring circumstances upon his two earliest avocations,
and be in good hope a keeper of herds and a tiller of the ground; and as
another family of plants--the Rosaceæ--was created in order that the
gardens which it would be also one of his vocations to keep and to dress
should have their trees "good for food and pleasant to the taste;" so
flowers in general were profusely produced just ere he appeared, to
minister to that sense of beauty which distinguishes him from all the
lower creatures, and to which he owes not a few of his most exquisite
enjoyments. The poet accepted the bee as a sign of high significance:
the geologist also accepts her as a sign. Her entombed remains testify
to the gradual fitting up of our earth as a place of habitation for a
creature destined to seek delight for the mind and the eye as certainly
as for the grosser senses, and in especial marks the introduction of the
stately forest trees, and the arrival of the delicious flowers. And,
"Thus in their stations lifting toward the sky
The foliaged head in cloud-like majesty,
The shadow-casting race of trees survive:
Thus in the train of spring arrive
Sweet flowers: what living eye hath viewed
Their myriads? endlessly renewed
Wherever strikes the sun's glad ray,
Where'er the subtile waters stray,
Wherever sportive zephyrs bend
Their course, or genial showers descend."
LECTURE SECOND.
THE PALÆONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF ANIMALS.
Amid the unceasing change and endless variety of nature there occur
certain great radical ideas, that, while they form, if I may so express
myself, the groundwork of the change,--the basis of the variety,--admit
in themselves of no change or variety whatever. They constitute the
aye-enduring tissue on which the ever-changing patterns of creation are
inscribed: the patterns are ever varying; the tissue which exhibits them
for ever remains the same. In the animal kingdom, for instance, the
prominent ideas have always been uniform. However much the faunas of the
various geologic periods may have differed from each other, or from the
fauna which now exists, in their general aspect and character, they were
all, if I may so speak, equally underlaid by the great leading ideas
which still constitute the master types of animal life. And these
leading ideas are four in number. _First_, there is the _star-like_ type
of life,--life embodied in a form that, as in the corals, the
sea-anemones, the sea-urchins, and the star-fishes, radiates outwards
from a centre; _second_, there is the _articulated_ type of life,--life
embodied in a form composed, as in the worms, crustaceans, and insects,
of a series of rings united by their edges, but more or less moveable on
each other; _third_, there is the bilateral or _molluscan_ type of
life,--life embodied in a form in which there is a duality of
corresponding parts, ranged, as in the cuttle-fishes, the clams, and
the snails, on the sides of a central axis or plane; and _fourth_, there
is the _vertebrate_ type of life,--life embodied in a form in which an
internal skeleton is built up into two cavities placed the one over the
other; the upper for the reception of the nervous centres, cerebral and
spinal,--the lower for the lodgment of the respiratory, circulatory, and
digestive organs. Such have been the four central ideas of the faunas of
every succeeding creation, except perhaps the earliest of all, that of
the Lower Silurian System, in which, so far as is yet known, only three
of the number existed,--the radiated, articulated, and molluscan ideas
or types. That Omnipotent Creator, infinite in his resources,--who, in
at least the details of his workings, seems never yet to have repeated
himself, but, as Lyell well expresses it, breaks, when the parents of a
species have been moulded, the dye in which they were cast,--manifests
himself, in these four great ideas, as the unchanging and unchangeable
One. They serve to bind together the present with all the past; and
determine the unity of the authorship of a wonderfully complicated
design, executed on a groundwork broad as time, and whose scope and
bearing are deep as eternity.
The fauna of the Silurian System bears in all its three great types the
stamp of a fashion peculiarly antique, and which, save in a few of the
mollusca, has long since become obsolete. Its radiate animals are
chiefly corals, simple or compound, whose inhabitants may have somewhat
resembled the sea-anemones; with zoophites, akin mayhap to the sea-pens,
though the relationship must have been a remote one; and numerous
crinoids, or stone lilies, some of which consisted of but a sculptured
calyx without petals, while others threw off a series of long, flexible
arms, that divided and subdivided like the branches of a tree, and were
thickly fringed by hair-like fibres. There is great variety and beauty
among these Silurian crinoids; and, from the ornate sculpture of their
groined and ribbed _capitals_ and slender _columns_, the Gothic
architect might borrow not a few striking ideas.
[Illustration: Fig. 46.
CYATHAXONIA DALMANI.]
The difference between the older and newer fashions, as exemplified in
the cup-shaped corals, may be indicated in a single sentence. The
ancient corals were stars of four rays, or of multiples of four; the
modern corals are stars of six rays, or of multiples of six. But though,
at a certain definite period,--that during which the great Palæozoic
division ended and the Secondary division began--nature, in forming
this class of creatures, discarded the number four, and adopted instead
the number six, the great leading idea of the star itself was equally
retained in corals of the modern as in those of the more ancient type.
[Illustration: Fig. 47.
GLYPTOCRINUS DECADACTYLUS.
(Hudson River Group, Lower Silurian.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 48.
CALYMENE BLUMENBACHII.]
[Illustration: Fig. 49.
ORTHISINA VERNEUILI.]
[Illustration: Fig. 50.
LITUITES CORNU-ARIETIS.]
[Illustration: Fig. 51.
LINGULA LOWISII.]
The articulata of the Silurian period bore a still more peculiar
character. They consisted mainly of the Trilobites,--a family in whose
nicely-jointed shells the armorer of the middle ages might have found
almost all the contrivances of his craft, anticipated, with not a few
besides which he had failed to discover; and which, after receiving so
immense a development during the middle and later times of the Silurian
period, that whole rocks were formed almost exclusively of their
remains, gradually died out in the times of the Old Red Sandstone, and
disappeared for ever from creation after the Carboniferous Limestone had
been deposited. The Palæontologist knows no more unique family than that
of the Trilobites, or a family more unlike any which now exists, or a
family which marks with more certainty the early rocks in which they
occur. And yet, though formed in a fashion that perished myriads of
ages ago, how admirably does it not exhibit the articulated type of
being, and illustrate that unity of design which, amid endless
diversity, pervades all nature. The mollusca of the Silurians ranged
from the high cephalopoda, represented in our existing seas by the
nautili and the cuttle-fishes, to the low brachipods, some of whose
congeners may still be detected in the terebratula of our Highland lochs
and bays, and some in the lingulæ of the southern hemisphere. The
cephalopods of the system are all of an obsolete type, that disappeared
myriads of ages ago,--a remark which, with the exceptions just
intimated, and perhaps one or two others, applies equally to its
brachipods; but of at least two of its intermediate families,--the
gasteropoda and lamellibranchiata,--several of the forms resemble those
of recent shells of the temperate latitudes. In its general aspect,
however, the Silurian fauna, antiquely fashioned, as I have said, as
became its place in the primeval ages of existence, was unlike any other
which the world ever saw; and the absence of the vertebrata, or at least
the inconspicuous place which they occupied if they were at all present,
must have imparted to the whole, as a group, a humble and mediocre
character. It seems to have been for many ages together a creation of
molluscs, corals, and Crustacea. At length, in an upper bed of the
system, immediately under the base of the Old Red Sandstone, the remains
of the earliest known fishes appear, blent with what also appears for
the first time,--the fragmentary remains of a terrestrial vegetation.
The rocks beneath this ancient bone-bed have yielded, as I have already
said, no trace of any plant higher than the Thallogens, or at least not
higher than the Zosteracea,--plants whose proper habitat is the sea;
but, through an apparently simultaneous advance of the two kingdoms,
animal and vegetable,--though of course the simultaneousness may be but
merely apparent,--the first land plants and the first vertebrates
appear together in the same deposit.
What, let us inquire, is the character of these ancient fishes, that
first complete the scale of animated nature in its four master ideas, by
adding the vertebrate to the invertebrate divisions? So far as is yet
known, they all consist of one well marked order,--that placoidal order
of Agassiz that to an internal framework of cartilage adds an external
armature, consisting of plates, spines, and shagreen points of solid
bone. Either of the two kinds of dog-fishes on our coasts,--the spiked
or spotted,--maybe accepted as not inadequate representatives of this
order as it now exists. The Port Jackson shark, however,--a creature
that to the dorsal spines and shagreen-covered skin of the common
dog-fish adds a mouth terminal at the snout, not placed beneath, as in
most other sharks, and a palate covered with a dense pavement of
crushing teeth,--better illustrates the order as it first appeared in
creation than any of our British placoids.
[Illustration: Fig. 52.
PORT JACKSON SHARK.
(Cestracion Phillippi.)]
[Illustration:
Fig. 53.[13]
-----------------------
Silurian.
-----+-----------------Placoid.
| | Ganoid.
Old Red. | |
-----+----+------------
| |
Carboniferous. | |
-----+----+------------
Permian. | |
-----+----+------------
Triassic. | |
-----+----+------------
| |
Oolitic. | |
-----+----+----+----+--
Cretaceous. | | | | Ctenoid and Cycloid.
| | | |
-----+----+----+----+--
Tertiary. | | | |
| | | |
-----+----+----+----+--
Geologic [Pla. Gan. Cte. Cyc.] arrangement.
Agassiz's [Pla. Gan. Cte. Cyc.] arrangement.
THE GENEALOGY OF FISHES.]
[Illustration: Fig. 54.
AMBLYPTERUS MACROPTERTUS.
From the Coal at Saarbruck.
(A Ganoid of the Carboniferous System.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 55.
LEBIAS CEPHALOTES.
Cycloids of Aix. (_Miocene._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 56.
PLATAX ALTISSIMUS.
A Ctenoid of Monte Bolca. (_Eocene._)]
And here let me adduce another and very remarkable instance of the
correspondence which obtains between the sequence in which certain
classes of organisms were first ushered into being, and the order of
classification adopted, after many revisions, by the higher
naturalists. Cuvier, with not a few of the ichthyologists who preceded
him, arranged the fishes into two distinct series,--the Cartilaginous
and Osseous; and these last he mainly divided into the hard or
spiny-finned fishes, and the soft or joint-finned fishes. He placed the
sturgeon in his Cartilaginous series; while in his soft-finned order he
found a place for the Polypterus of the Nile and the Lepidosteus of the
Ohio and St. Lawrence. But the arrangement, though it seemed at the time
one of the best and most natural possible, failed to meet any
corresponding arrangement in the course of geologic history. The place
assigned to the class of fishes as a whole corresponded to their place
in the Palæontological scale;--- first of the vertebrate division in the
order of their appearance, they border, as in the "_Animal Kingdom_" of
the naturalist, on the invertebrate divisions. But it was not until the
new classification of Agassiz had ranged them after a different fashion
that the correspondence became complete in all its parts. First, he
erected the fishes that to an internal cartilaginous skeleton unite an
external armature of plates and points of bone, into his Placoid order;
next, gathering together a mere handful of individuals from among the
various orders and families over which they had been scattered,--the
sturgeons from among the cartilaginous fishes, and the lepidosteus and
polypterus from among the Clupia or herrings,--he erected into a small
ganoid order all the fishes that are covered, whatever the consistency
of their skeleton, by a continuous or nearly continuous armor of
enamelled bone, or by great bony plates that lock into each other at
their edges. Out of the remaining fishes,--those covered with scales of
a horny substance, and which now comprise nearly nine tenths of the
whole class,--he erected two orders more,--a Ctenoid order, consisting
of fishes whose scales, like those of the perch, are pectinated at
their lower edges like the teeth of a comb, and a Cycloid order,
composed of fishes whose scales, like those of the salmon, are defined
all around by a simple continuous margin; and no sooner was the division
effected than it was found to cast a singularly clear light on the early
history of the class. The earliest fishes--firstborn of their
family--seem to have been all placoids. The Silurian System has not yet
afforded trace of any other vertebral animal. With the Old Red Sandstone
the ganoids were ushered upon the scene in amazing abundance; and for
untold ages, comprising mayhap millions of years, the entire ichthyic
class consisted, so far as is yet known, of but these two orders.
During the times of the Old Red Sandstone, of the Carboniferous, of the
Permian, of the Triassic, and of the Oolitic Systems, all fishes, though
apparently as numerous individually as they are now, were comprised in
the ganoidal and placoidal orders. The period of these orders seems to
have been nearly correspondent with the reign, in the vegetable kingdom,
of the Acrogens and Gymnogens, with the intermediate classes, their
allies. At length, during the ages of the Chalk, the Cycloids and
Ctenoids were ushered in, and were gradually developed in creation until
the human period, in which they seem to have reached their culminating
point, and now many times exceed in number and importance all other
fishes. We do not see a sturgeon (our British representative of the
ganoids) once in a twelvemonth; and though the skate and dog-fish (our
representatives of the placoids) are greatly less rare, their number
bears but a small proportion to that of the fishes belonging to the two
prevailing orders, of which thousands of boat-loads are landed on our
coasts every day.
The all but entire disappearance of the ganoids from creation is surely
a curious and not unsuggestive circumstance. In the human family there
are races that have long since reached their culminating point, and are
now either fast disappearing or have already disappeared. The Aztecs of
Central America, or the Copts of the valley of the Nile, are but the
inconsiderable fragments of once mighty nations, memorials of whose
greatness live in the vast sepulchral mounds of the far West, or in the
temples of Thebes or Luxor, or the pyramids of Gizah. But in the rivers
of these very countries,--in the Polypterus of the Nile, or the
Lepidosteus of the Mississippi,--we are presented with the few surviving
fragments of a dynasty compared with which that of Egypt or of Central
America occupied but an exceedingly small portion of either space or
time. The dynasty of the ganoids was at one time coextensive with every
river, lake, and sea, and endured during the unreckoned _eons_ which
extended from the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone until those of
the Chalk. I may here mention, that as there are orders of plants, such
as the Rosaceæ and the Grasses, that scarce preceded man in their
appearance, so there are families of fishes that seem peculiarly to
belong to the human period. Of these, there is a family very familiar on
our coasts, and which, though it furnishes none of our higher ichthyic
luxuries, is remarkable for the numbers of the human family which it
provides with a wholesome and palatable food. The delicate Salmonidæ and
the Pleuronectidæ,--families to which the salmon and turbot
belong,--were ushered into being as early as the times of the Chalk; but
the Gadidæ or cod family,--that family to which the cod proper, the
haddock, the dorse, the whiting, the coal-fish, the pollock, the hake,
the torsk, and the ling belong, with many other useful and wholesome
species,--did not precede man by at least any period of time appreciable
to the geologist. No trace of the family has yet been detected in even
the Tertiary rocks.
[Illustration: Fig. 57
PTERICHTHYS OBLONGUS.
(One half nat. size.)]
Of the ganoids of the second age of vertebrate existence,--that of the
Old Red Sandstone,--some were remarkable for the strangeness of their
forms, and some for constituting links of connection which no longer
exist in nature, between the ganoid and placoid orders. The Acanth
family, which ceased with the Coal Measures, was characterized,
especially in its Old Red species, by a combination of traits common to
both orders; and among the extremer forms, in which Palæontologists for
a time failed to detect that of the fish at all, we reckon those of the
genera Coccosteus, Pterichthys, and Cephalaspis. The more aberrant
genera, however, even while they consisted each of several species, were
comparatively short lived. The Coccosteus and Cephalaspis were
restricted to but one formation apiece; while the Pterichthys, which
appears for the first time in the lower deposits of the Old Red
Sandstone, becomes extinct at its close. On the other hand, some of the
genera that exemplified the general type of their class were extremely
long lived. The Celacanths were reproduced in many various species, from
the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone to those of the Chalk; and the
Cestracions, which appear in the Upper Ludlow Rocks as the oldest of
fishes, continue in at least one species to exist still. It would
almost seem as if some such law influenced the destiny of genera in this
ichthyic class, as that which we find so often exemplified in our
species. The dwarf, or giant, or deformed person, is seldom a long
liver;--all the more remarkable instances of longevity have been
furnished by individuals cast in the ordinary mould and proportions of
the species. Not a few of these primordial ganoids wore, however, of the
highest rank and standing ever exemplified by their class; and we find
Agassiz boldly assigning a reason for their superiority to their
successors, important for the fact which it embodies, and worthy, as
coming from him, of our most respectful attention. "It is plain," we
find him saying, "that before the class of reptiles was introduced upon
our globe, the fishes, being then the only representatives of the type
of vertebrata, were invested with the characters of a higher order,
embodying, as it were, a prospective view of a higher development in
another class, which was introduced as a distinct type only at a later
period; and from that time the reptilian character, which had been so
prominent in the oldest fishes, was gradually reduced, till in more
recent periods, and in the present creation, the fishes lost all this
herpetological relationship, and were at last endowed with characters
which contrast as much, when compared with those of reptiles, as they
agreed closely in the beginning. Lepidosteus alone reminds us in our
time of these old-fashioned characters of the class of fishes as it was
in former days."
[Illustration: Fig. 58
PLEURACANTHUS LÆVISSIMUS.
(_Coal Measures._)
(Half nat. size.)]
The ancient fishes seem to have received their fullest development
during the Carboniferous period. Their number was very great: some of
them attained to an enormous size, and, though the true reptile had
already appeared, they continued to retain, till the close of the
system, the high reptilian character and organization. Nothing, however,
so impresses the observer as the formidable character of the offensive
weapons with which they were furnished, and the amazing strength of
their defensive armature. I need scarce say, that the Palæontologist
finds no trace in nature of that golden age of the world, of which the
poets delighted to sing, when all creatures lived together in unbroken
peace, and war and bloodshed were unknown. Ever since animal life began
upon our planet, there existed, in all the departments of being,
carnivorous classes, who could not live but by the death of their
neighbors, and who were armed, in consequence, for their destruction,
like the butcher with his axe and knife, and the angler with his hook
and spear. But there were certain periods in the history of the past,
during which these weapons assumed a more formidable aspect than at
others; and never were they more formidable than in the times of the
Coal Measures. The teeth of the Rhizodus--a ganoidal fish of our coal
fields--were more sharp and trenchant than those of the crocodile of the
Nile, and in the larger specimens fully four times the bulk and size of
the teeth of the hugest reptile of this species that now lives. The
dorsal spine of its contemporary, the Gyracanthus, a great placoid, much
exceeded in size that of any existing fish: it was a mighty spear head,
ornately carved like that of a New Zealand chief, but in a style that,
when he first saw a specimen in my collection, greatly excited the
admiration of Mr. Ruskin. But one of the most remarkable weapons of the
period was the sting of the Pleuracanthus, another great placoid of the
age of gigantic fishes. It was sharp and polished as a stiletto, but,
from its rounded form and dense structure, of great strength; and along
two of its sides, from the taper point to within a few inches of the
base, there ran a thickly-set row of barbs, hooked downwards, like the
thorns that bristle on the young shoots of the wild rose, and which must
have rendered it a weapon not merely of destruction, but also of
torture. The defensive armor of the period, especially that of its
ganoids, seems to have been us remarkable for its powers of resistance
as the offensive must have been for their potency in the assault; and
it seems probable that in the great strength of the bony and enamelled
armature of this order of fishes we have the secret of the extremely
formidable character of the teeth, spines, and stings that coexisted
along with it.
[Illustration: Fig. 59.
CARCHARIAS PRODUCTUS.
Cutting Tooth. (_Miocene._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 60.
PLACODUS GIGAS.
Crushing Teeth. (_Trias._)]
Such of the fishes of the present time as live on crustacea and the
shelled molluscs,--such as the Wrasse or rock-fish family, and at least
one of the Goby family, the sea-wolf,--have an apparatus of crushing
teeth greatly more solid and strong than the teeth of such of their
contemporaries as are either herbivorous or feed on the weaker families
of their own class. A similar remark applies to the ancient sharks, as
contrasted with those of later times. So long as the strongly-armed
ganoidal order prevailed in nature, the sharks were furnished with
massive crushing teeth; but when the ganoids waned in creation, and the
soft-scaled cycloid and ctenoid orders took and amply filled the place
which they had left vacant, the well known modern form of sharks' teeth
was introduced,--a form much rather suited for cutting soft bodies than
for crushing hard ones. In fine, the offensive weapons of the times of
the Coal Measures seem very formidable, just as those personal weapons
of the middle ages seem so that were borne at a time when every soldier
took the field cased in armor of proof. The slim scimitar or slender
rapier would have availed but little against massive iron helmets or
mail coats of tempered steel. And so the warriors of the period armed
themselves with ponderous maces, battle-axes as massive as hammers, and
double-handed swords of great weight and strength.
Before passing onwards to other and higher classes and orders, as they
occurred in creation, permit me to make the formidable armor of the
earlier fishes, offensive and defensive, the subject of a single remark.
We are told by Goethe, in his autobiography, that he had attained his
sixth year when the terrible earthquake at Lisbon took place,--"an
event," he says, "which greatly disturbed" his "peace of mind for the
first time." He could not reconcile a catastrophe so suddenly
destructive to thousands, with the ideas which he had already formed for
himself of a Providence all-powerful and all-benevolent. But he
afterwards learned, he tells us, to recognize in such events the "_God
of the Old Testament._" I know not in what spirit the remark was made;
but this I know, that it is the God of the Old Testament whom we see
exhibited in all nature and all providence; and that it is at once
wisdom and duty in his rational creatures, however darkly they may
perceive or imperfectly they may comprehend, to hold in implicit faith
that the Adorable Monarch of all the past and of all the future is a
King who "can do no wrong." This early exhibition of tooth, and spine,
and sting,--of weapons constructed alike to cut and to pierce,--to unite
two of the most indispensable requirements of the modern armorer,--a
keen edge to a strong back,--nay, stranger still, the examples furnished
in this primeval time, of weapons formed not only to kill, but also to
torture,--must be altogether at variance with the preconceived opinions
of those who hold that until man appeared in creation, and darkened its
sympathetic face with the stain of moral guilt, the reign of violence
and outrage did not begin, and that there was no death among the
inferior creatures, and no suffering. But preconceived opinion, whether
it hold fast, with Lactantius and the old Schoolmen, to the belief that
there can be no antipodes, or assert, with Caccini and Bellarmine, that
our globe hangs lazily in the midst of the heavens, while the sun moves
round it, must yield ultimately to scientific truth. And it is a truth
as certain as the existence of a southern hemisphere, or the motion of
the earth round both its own axis and the great solar centre, that,
untold ages ere man had sinned or suffered, the animal creation
exhibited exactly its present state of war,--that the strong, armed with
formidable weapons, exquisitely constructed to kill, preyed upon the
weak; and that the weak, sheathed, many of them, in defensive armor
equally admirable in its mechanism, and ever increasing and multiplying
upon the earth far beyond the requirements of the mere maintenance of
their races, were enabled to escape, as species, the assaults of the
tyrant tribes, and to exist unthinned for unreckoned ages. It has been
weakly and impiously urged,--as if it were merely with the geologist
that men had to settle this matter,--that such an economy of warfare and
suffering,--of warring and of being warred upon,--would be, in the words
of the infant Goethe, unworthy of an all-powerful and all-benevolent
Providence, and in effect a libel on his government and character. But
that grave charge we leave the objectors to settle with the great
Creator himself. Be it theirs, not ours, according to the poet, to
"Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod,
Rejudge his justice, be the god of God."
Be it enough for the geologist rightly to interpret the record of
creation,--to declare the truth as he finds it,--to demonstrate, from
evidence no clear intellect ever yet resisted, that he, the Creator,
from whom even the young lions seek their food, and who giveth to all
the beasts, great and small, their meat in due season, ever wrought as
he now works in his animal kingdom,--that he gave to the primeval fishes
their spines and their stings,--to the primeval reptiles their trenchant
teeth and their strong armor of bone,--to the primeval mammals their
great tusks and their sharp claws,--that he of old divided all his
creatures, as now, into animals of prey and the animals preyed
upon,--that from the beginning of things he inseparably established
among his non-responsible existences the twin laws of generation and of
death,--nay, further, passing from the established truths of _Geologic_
to one of the best established truths of _Theologic_ science,--God's
eternal justice and truth,--let us assert, that in the Divine government
the matter of fact always determines the question of right, and that
whatever has been done by him who rendereth no account to man of his
matters, he had in all ages, and in all places, an unchallengeable right
to do.
The oldest known reptiles appear just a little before the close of the
Old Red Sandstone, just as the oldest known fishes appeared just a
little before the close of the Silurian System. What seems to be the
Upper Old Red of our own country, though there still hangs a shade of
doubt on the subject, has furnished the remains of a small reptile,
equally akin, it would appear, to the lizards and the batrachians; and
what seems to be the Upper Old Red of the United States has exhibited
the foot-tracks of a larger animal of the same class, which not a little
resemble those which would be impressed on recent sand or clay by the
alligator of the Mississippi, did not the alligator of the Mississippi
efface its own footprints (a consequence of the shortness of its legs)
by the trail of its abdomen. In the Coal Measures, the reptiles hitherto
found,--and it is still little more than ten years since the first was
detected,--are all allied, though not without a cross of the higher
crocodilian or lacertian nature, to the batrachian order,--that lowest
order of the reptiles to which the frogs, newts, and salamanders belong.
These reptiles of the carboniferous era, though only a few twelvemonths
ago we little suspected the fact, seem to have been not very rare in our
own neighborhood. My attention was called some time since by Mr. Henry
Cadell,--an intelligent practical geologist,--to certain appearances in
one of the Duke of Buccleuch's coal pits near Dalkeith, which lie
regarded as the tracks of air-breathing quadrupeds; and, after examining
a specimen, containing four footprints, which he had brought above
ground, and which not a little excited my curiosity, we visited the pit
together. And there, in a side working about half a mile from the pit
mouth, and about four hundred feet under the surface, I found the roof
of the coal, which rose at a high angle, traversed by so many
foot-tracks, upwards, downwards, and athwart, that it cost me some
little care to trace the individual lines. At least one of the number,
however,--consisting of eleven footprints of the right and as many of
the left foot--I was able to trace from side to side of the working, a
distance of four yards; and several of the others for shorter spaces.
The prints, which were reverses or casts in a very coarse sandstone,
were about thirtecn inches apart across the creature's chest, and rather
more than a foot apart from its fore to its hinder limbs. They were
alternately larger and smaller,--the smaller (those of the fore feet)
measuring about four inches in length, and the larger (those of the
hinder feet) about six inches. The number of toes seemed to be
alternately four and five; but from the circumstance that the original
matrix on which the tracks had been impressed,--a micaceous clay
resolved into a loose fissile sandstone,--had fallen away in the working
of the pit, leaving but the boldly-relieved though ill-defined casts on
the coarse sandstone, I could not definitely determine the point.
Enough, however, remained to show that at that spot,--little more than a
mile from where the Duke of Buccleuch's palace now stands,--large
reptiles had congregated in considerable numbers shortly after the great
eight feet coal seam of the Dalkeith basin had been formed. In another
part of the pit I found foot-tracks of apparently the same animal in
equal abundance, but still less distinct in their state of keeping. But
they bore testimony with the others to the comparative abundance of
reptilian life at an early period, when the coal-bearing strata of the
empire were little more than half deposited. It was not, however, until
the Permian and Triassic Systems had come to a close, and even the
earlier ages of the Oolitic System had passed away, that the class
received its fullest development in creation. And certainly very
wonderful was the development which it then did receive. Reptiles became
everywhere the lords and masters of this lower world. When any class of
the air-breathing vertebrates is very largely developed, we find it
taking possession of all the three old terrestrial elements,--earth,
air, and water. The human period, for instance, like that which
immediately preceded it, is peculiarly a period of mammals; and we find
the class, _free_, if I may so express myself, of the three elements,
disputing possession of the sea with the fishes, in its Cetaceans, its
seals, and its sea-lions, and of the air with the birds, in its numerous
genera of the bat family. Further, not until the great mammaliferous
period is fairly ushered in do either the bats or the whales make their
appearance in creation. Remains of Oolitic reptiles have been mistaken
in more than one instance for those of Cetacea; but it is now generally
held that the earliest known specimens of the family belong to the
Tertiary ages, while those of the oldest bats occur in the Eocene of the
Paris Basin, associated with the bones of dolphins, lamantines, and
morses. Now, in the times of the Oolite it was the reptilian class that
possessed itself of all the elements. Its gigantic enaliosaurs, huge
reptilian _whales_ mounted on paddles, were the tyrants of the ocean,
and must have reigned supreme over the already reduced class of fishes;
its pterodactyles,--dragons as strange as were ever feigned by romancer
of the middle ages, and that to the jaws and teeth of the crocodile
added the wings of a bat and the body and tail of an ordinary mammal,
had "the power of the air," and, pursuing the fleetest insects in their
flight, captured and bore them down;[14] its lakes and rivers abounded
in crocodiles and fresh water tortoises of ancient type and fashion; and
its woods and plains were the haunts of a strange reptilian fauna, of
what has been well termed "fearfully great lizards,"--some of which,
such as the iguanodon, rivalled the largest elephant in height, and
greatly more than rivalled him in length and bulk. Judging from what
remains, it seems not improbable that the reptiles of this Oolitic
period were quite as numerous individually, and consisted of well nigh
as many genera and species, as all the mammals of the present time. In
the cretaceous ages, the class, though still the dominant one, is
visibly reduced in its standing; it had reached its culminating point in
the Oolite, and then began to decline; and with the first dawn of the
Tertiary division we find it occupying, as now, a very subordinate place
in creation. Curiously enough, it is not until its times of humiliation
and decay that one of the most remarkable of its orders appears,--an
order itself illustrative of extreme degradation, and which figures
largely, in every scheme of mythology that borrowed through traditional
channels from Divine revelation, as a meet representative of man's great
enemy the Evil One. I of course refer to the ophidian or serpent family.
The earliest ophidian remains known to the Palæontologist occur in that
ancient deposit of the Tertiary division known as the London Clay, and
must have belonged to serpents, some of them allied to the Pythons, some
to the sea-snakes, which, judging from the corresponding parts of recent
species, must have been from fourteen to twenty feet in length.
[Illustration: Fig. 61.
VESPERTILIO PARISIENSIS.
A Bat of the Eocene.]
[Illustration: Fig. 62
ICHTHYOSAURUS COMMUNIS.
(_Lias._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 63.
PLESIOSAURUS DOLICHODEIRUS.
(_Lias._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 64.
PTERODACTYLUS CRASSIROSTRIS.
(_Oolite._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 65.
CHELONIA BENSTEDI.
(_Chalk._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 66.
PALÆOPHIS TOLIAPICUS.
(_Ophidian of the Eocene._)]
And here let us again pause for a moment, to remark how strangely these
irascible, repulsive reptiles,--creatures lengthened out far beyond the
proportions of the other members of their class by mere vegetative
repetitions of the vertebræ,--condemned to derive, worm-like, their
ability of progressive motion from the ring-like scutes of the
abdomen--venomous in many of their species,--formidable in others to
even the noblest animals, from their fascinating powers and their great
craft,--without, fore or hinder limbs, without thoracic or pelvic
arches,--the very types and exemplars (our highest naturalists being the
judges) of the extreme of animal degradation,--let us, I say, remark how
strangely their history has been mixed up with that of man and of
religion in all the older mythologies, and in that Divine Revelation
whence the older mythologies were derived. It was one of the most
ancient of the Phoenician fables, that the great antagonist of the
gods was a gigantic serpent, that had at one time been their subject,
but revolted against them and became their enemy. It was a monstrous
serpent that assailed and strove to destroy the _mother_ of Apollo ere
yet the birth of the god, but which, long after, _Apollo_ in turn
assaulted and slew. It was a great serpent that watched over the apples
of the Hesperides, and that Hercules, ere he could possess himself of
the fruit, had to combat and kill. It was a frightful serpent that
guarded the golden fleece from Jason, and which the hero had to destroy
in the first instance, and next to exterminate the strange brood of
armed men that sprang up from its sown teeth. In short, the old
mythologies are well nigh as full of the serpent as those ancient Runic
obelisks of our country, whose endless knots and complicated fretwork
are formed throughout of the interlacings of snakes. Let us, however,
accept as representative of this innumerable class of legends, the
classical story, rendered yet more classical by the profound and
reverend comment given by Bacon in his "Wisdom of the Ancients."
"Jupiter and the other gods," says the philosopher, in his simple
version of the tradition, "conferred upon men a most acceptable and
desirable boon,--the gift of perpetual youth. But men, foolishly
overjoyed hereat, laid this present of the gods upon an ass, who, in
returning back with it, being extremely thirsty, and coming to a
fountain, the serpent who was guardian thereof would not suffer him to
drink but upon condition of receiving the burden he carried, whatever it
should be. The silly ass complied; and thus the perpetual renewal of
youth was for a sup of water transferred from men to the race of
serpents." "That this gift of perpetual youth should pass from men to
serpents," continues Bacon, "seems added, by way of ornament and
illustration, to the fable." And it certainly _has_ much the appearance
of an after-thought. But how very striking the resemblance, borne by the
story, as a whole, to that narrative in the opening page of human
history which exhibits the first parents of the race as yielding up to
the temptation of the serpent the gift of immortality; and further, how
remarkable the fact, that the reptile selected as typical here of the
great fallen spirit that kept not his first estate, should be at once
the reptile of latest appearance in creation, and the one selected by
philosophical naturalists as representative of a reversed process in the
course of being,--of a downward, sinking career, from the vertebrate
antetype towards greatly lower types in the invertebrate divisions! The
fallen spirit is represented in revelation by what we are now taught to
recognize in science as a _degraded_ reptile.
[Illustration: Fig. 67.
BIRD TRACKS OF THE CONNECTICUT.
(_Lias or Oolite._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 68.
FOSSIL FOOTPRINT.
Connecticut.]
Birds make their first appearance in a Red Sandstone deposit of the
United States in the valley of the Connecticut, which was at one time
supposed to belong to the Triassic System, but which is now held to be
at least not older than the times of the Lias. No fragments of the
skeletons of birds have yet been discovered in formations older than the
Chalk: the Connecticut remains are those of footprints exclusively; and
yet they tell their extraordinary story, so far as it extends, with
remarkable precision and distinctness. They were apparently all of the
Grallæ or stilt order of birds,--an order to which the cranes, herons,
and bustards belong, with the ostriches and cassowaries, and which is
characterized by possessing but three toes on each foot (one species of
ostrich has but two), or, if a fourth toe be present, so imperfectly is
it developed in most of the cases, that it fails to reach the ground.
And in almost all the footprints of the primeval birds of the
Connecticut there are only three toes exhibited. Peculiar, ill
understood laws regulate the phalangal divisions of the various animals.
It is a law of the human kind, for instance, that the thumb should
consist of but three phalanges; while the fingers, even the smallest,
consist of four. And, in the same way, it is a law generally exemplified
among birds, that of the three toes which correspond to the fingers, the
inner toe should be composed of three phalanges, the middle or largest
toe of four phalanges, and the outer toe, though but second in point of
size, of five phalanges. Such is the law now, and such was equally the
law, as shown by the American footprints, in the times of the Lias. Some
of the impressions are of singular distinctness. Every claw and phalange
has left its mark in the stone; while the trifid termination of the
tarso-metatarsal bone leaves three marks more,--fifteen in all,--the
true ornithic number. In some of the specimens even the pressure of a
metatarsal brush, still possessed by some birds, is distinctly
traceable; nay, there are instances in which the impress of the dermoid
papillæ has remained as sharply as if made in wax. But the immense size
of some of these footprints served to militate for a time against belief
in their ornithic origin. The impressions that are but secondary in
point of size greatly exceed those of the hugest birds which now exist;
while those of the largest class equal the prints of the bulkier
quadrupeds. There are tridactyle footprints in the red sandstones of
Connecticut that measure eighteen inches in length from the heel to the
middle claw, nearly thirteen inches in breadth from the outer to the
inner toe, and which indicate, from their distance apart in the straight
line, a stride of about six feet in the creature that impressed them in
these ancient sands,--measurements that might well startle zoologists
who had derived their experience of the ornithic class from existing
birds exclusively. Comparatively recent discoveries have, however, if
not lessened, at least familiarized us to the wonder. In a deposit of
New Zealand that dates little if at all in advance of the human period,
there have been detected the remains of birds scarce inferior in size to
those of America in the Liassic ages. The bones of the _Dinornus
giganteus_, exhibited by the late Dr. Mantell in Edinburgh in the autumn
of 1850, greatly exceeded in bulk those of the largest horse. A thigh
bone sixteen inches in length measured nearly nine inches in
circumference in the middle of the shaft: the head of a tibia measured
twenty-one inches in circumference. It was estimated that a foot entire
in all its parts, which formed an interesting portion of the exhibition,
would, when it was furnished with nails, and covered by the integuments,
have measured about fifteen inches in length; and it was calculated by a
very competent authority, Professor Owen, that of the other bones of the
leg to which it belonged, the tibia must have been about two feet nine
inches, and the femur about fourteen and a half inches long. The larger
thigh bone referred to must have belonged, it was held, to a bird that
stood from eleven to twelve feet high,--the extreme height of the great
African elephant. Such were the monster birds of a comparatively recent
period; and their remains serve to render credible the evidence
furnished by the great footprints of their remote predecessors of the
Lias. The huge feet of the greatest Dinornus whose bones have yet been
found would have left impressions scarcely an inch shorter than those of
the still huger birds of the Connecticut. Is it not truly wonderful,
that in this late age of the world, in which the invention of the poets
seems to content itself with humbler and lowlier flights than of old, we
should thus find the facts of geology fully rivalling, in the strange
and the _outré_, the wildest fancies of the romancers who flourished in
the middle ages? I have already referred to flying dragons,--real
existences of the Oolitic period,--that were quite as extraordinary of
type, if not altogether so huge of bulk, as those with which the Seven
Champions of Christendom used to do battle; and here are we introduced
to birds of the Liassic ages that were scarce less gigantic than the roc
of Sinbad the Sailor. They are fraught with strange meanings these
footprints of the Connecticut. They tell of a time far removed into the
by-past eternity, when great birds frequented by myriads the shores of a
nameless lake, to wade into its shallows in quest of mail-covered fishes
of the ancient type, or long-extinct molluscs; while reptiles equally
gigantic, and of still stranger proportions, haunted the neighboring
swamps and savannahs; and when the same sun that shone on the tall
moving forms beside the waters, and threw their long shadows across the
red sands, lighted up the glades of deep forests, all of whose fantastic
productions,--tree, bush, and herb,--have even in their very species
long since passed away. And of this scene of things only the footprints
remain,--"footprints on the sands of time," that tell us, among other
matters, whence the graceful American poet derived his quiet but
singularly effective and unmistakeably indigenous figure:--
"Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
_And, departing, leave behind us_
_Footprints on the sand of time._
Footprints that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again."
[Illustration: Fig. 69.
THYLACOTHERIUM PREVOSTI.
(_Stonisfield Slate._)]
With the Stonisfield slates,--a deposit which lies above what is known
as the Inferior Oolite,--the remains of mammaliferous animals first
appear. As, however, no other mammalian remains occur until after the
close of the great Secondary Division, and as certain marked
peculiarities attach to these Oolitic ones, it may be well to inquire
whether their place, so far in advance of their fellows, may not be
indicative of a radical difference of character,--a difference
considerable enough to suggest to the zoologist an improvement in his
scheme of classification. It has been shown by Professor Owen,--our
highest authority in comparative anatomy,--that while one Stonisfield
genus unequivocally belonged to the marsupial order, another of its
genera bears also certain of the marsupial traits; and that the group
which they composed,--a very small one, and consisting exclusively of
minute insect-eating animals,--exhibits in its general aspect the
characteristics of this pouched family. Even the genus of the group that
least resembles them was pronounced by Cuvier to have its nearest
affinities with the opossums. And let us mark how very much may be
implied in this circumstance. In the "_Animal Kingdom_" of the great
naturalist just named, the marsupiata, or pouched animals, are made to
occupy the fourth place among the nine orders of the Mammalia; but
should they not rather occupy a place intermediate between the placental
mammals and the birds? and does not nature indicate their true position
by the position which she assigns to them in the geologic scale? The
birds are oviparous; and between the extrusion of the egg and the
development of the perfect young bird they have to hatch it into life
during a long period of incubation. The marsupiata are not oviparous,
for their _eggs_ want the enveloping shell or skin; but they, too, are
extruded in an exceedingly rudimentary and foetal state, and have to
undergo in the pouch a greatly longer period of _incubation_ than that
demanded by nature for any bird whatever. The young kangaroo is
extruded, after it has remained for little more than a month in the
womb, as a foetus scarcely an inch in length by somewhat less than half
an inch in breadth: it is blind, exhibiting merely dark eye spots; its
limbs are so rudimentary, that even the hinder legs, so largely
developed in the genus when mature, exist as mere stumps; it is unable
even to suck, but, holding permanently on by a minute dug, has the
sustaining fluid occasionally pressed into its mouth by the mother. And,
undergoing a peculiar but not the less real process of incubation, the
creature that had to remain for little more than a month in the
womb,--strictly thirty-nine days,--has to remain in the mother's pouch,
ere it is fully developed and able to provide for itself, for a period
of eight months. It is found to increase in weight during this hatching
process, from somewhat less than an ounce to somewhat more than eight
pounds. Now, this surely is a process quite as nearly akin to the
incubation of egg-bearing birds as to the ordinary nursing process of
the placental mammals; and on the occult but apparently real principle,
that the true arrangement of the animal kingdom is that which we find
exemplified by the successive introduction of its various classes and
orders in the course of geologic history, should we not anticipate a
point of time for the introduction of the marsupiata, intermediate
between the widely-distant points at which the egg-bearing birds and the
true placental mammals appeared? Ranged at once chronologically, and by
their mode of reproduction, the various classes of the vertebrata would
run, did we accept the suggested reading, as follows:--First appear
cold-blooded vertebrates (fishes), that propagate by eggs or
spawn,--chiefly by the latter. Next appear cold-blooded vertebrates
(reptiles), that propagate by eggs or spawn,--chiefly by the former.
Then appear warm-blooded vertebrates (birds), that propagate by eggs
exclusively. Then warm-blooded vertebrates come upon the stage, that
produce _eggs_ without shells, which have to be subjected for months to
a species of extra-placental incubation. And last of all the true
placental mammals appear. And thus, tried by the test of perfect
reproduction, the great vertebral division receives its full development
in creation.
[Illustration: Fig. 70.
ANOPLTHERIUM COMMUNE.
(_Eocene._)]
The placental mammals make their appearance, as I have said, in the
earliest ages of the great Tertiary division, and exhibit in the group
an aspect very unlike that which they at present bear. The Eocene ages
were peculiarly the ages of the Palæotheres,--strange animals of that
pachydermatous or thick-skinned order to which the elephants, the
tapirs, the hogs, and the horses belong. It had been remarked by
naturalists, that there are fewer families of this order in living
nature than of almost any other, and that, of the existing genera, not a
few are widely separated in their analogies from the others. But in the
Palæotheres of the Eocene, which ranged in size from a large horse to a
hare, not a few of the missing links have been found,--links connecting
the tapirs to the hogs, and the hogs to the Palæotheres proper; and
there is at least one species suggestive of an union of some of the more
peculiar traits of the tapirs and the horses. It was among these extinct
Pachydermata of the Paris basin that Cuvier effected his wonderful
restorations, and produced those figures in outline which are now as
familiar to the geologist as any of the forms of the existing animals.
The London Clay and the Eocene of the Isle of Wight have also yielded
numerous specimens of those pachyderms, whose identity with the
Continental ones has been established by Owen; but they are more
fragmentary, and their state of keeping less perfect, than those
furnished by the gypsum quarries of Velay and Montmartre. In these the
smaller animals occur often in a state of preservation so peculiar and
partial as to excite the curiosity of even the untaught workmen. Only
half the skeleton is present. The limbs and ribs of the under side are
found lying in nearly their proper places; while of the limbs and ribs
of the upper side usually not a trace can be detected,--even the upper
side of the skull is often awanting. It-would almost seem as if some
pre-Adamite butcher had divided the carcasses longitudinally, and
carried away with him all the upper halves. The reading of the enigma
seems to be, that when the creatures lay down and died, the gypsum in
which their remains occur was soft enough to permit their under sides to
sink into it, and that then gradually hardening, it kept the bones in
their places; while the uncovered upper sides, exposed to the
disintegrating influences, either mouldered away piecemeal, or were
removed by accident. The bones of the larger animals of the basin are
usually found detached; and ere they could be reconstructed into perfect
skeletons, they taxed the extraordinary powers of the greatest of
comparative anatomists. Rather more than twenty different species of
extinct mammals have been detected in the Paris basin,--not a great
number, it may be thought; and yet for so limited a locality we may deem
it not a very small one, when we take into account the fact that all our
native mammals of Britain and Ireland amount (according to Fleming), if
we except the Cetaceæ and the seals, to but forty species.
[Illustration: Fig 71.
ANIMALS OF THE PARIS BASIN.[15]
(_Eocene._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 72.
DINOTHERIUM GIGANTEUM.
(_Miocene._)]
In the Middle or Miocene Tertiary, pachyderms, though of a wholly
different type from their predecessors, are still the prevailing forms.
The Dinotherium, one of the greatest quadrupedal mammals that ever
lived, seems to have formed a connecting link in this middle age between
the Pachydermata and the Cetaceæ. Each ramus of the under jaw, which in
the larger specimens are fully four feet in length, bore at the
symphysis a great bent tusk turned downwards, which appears to have been
employed as a pickaxe in uprooting the aquatic plants and liliaceous
roots on which the creature seems to have lived. The head, which
measured about three feet across,--a breadth, sufficient, surely, to
satisfy the demands of the most exacting phrenologist,--was provided
with muscles of enormous strength, arranged so as to give potent effect
to the operations of this strange tool. The hinder part of the skull
not a little resembled that of the Cetaceæ; while, from the form of the
nasal bones, the creature was evidently furnished with a trunk like the
elephant. It seems not improbable, therefore, that this bulkiest of
mammaliferous quadrupeds constituted, as I have said, a sort of uniting
tie between creatures still associated in the human mind, from the
circumstance of their massive proportions, as the greatest that swim the
sea or walk the land,--the whale and the elephant. The Mastodon, an
elephantoid animal, also furnished, like the elephant, with tusks and
trunk, but marked by certain peculiarities which constitute it a
different genus, seems in Europe to have been contemporary with the
Dinotherium; but in North America (the scene of its greatest numerical
development) it appears to belong to a later age. In height it did not
surpass the African elephant, but it considerably exceeded it in
length,--a specimen which could not have stood above twelve feet high
indicating a length of about twenty-five feet: it had what the elephants
want,--tusks fixed in its lower jaw, which the males retained through
life, but the females lost when young; its limbs were proportionally
shorter, but more massive, and its abdomen more elongated and slim; its
grinder teeth too, some of which have been known to weigh from seventeen
to twenty pounds, and their cusps elevated into great mammæ-like
protuberances, to which the creature owes its name, and wholly differ in
their proportions and outline from the grinders of the elephant. The
much greater remoteness of the mastodonic period in Europe than in
America is a circumstance worthy of notice, as it is one of many facts
that seem to indicate a general transposition of at least the later
geologic ages on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. Groups of
corresponding character on the eastern and western shores of this great
ocean were not contemporaneous in time. It has been repeatedly
remarked, that the existing plants and trees of the United States, with
not a few of its fishes and reptiles, bear in their forms and
construction the marks of a much greater antiquity than those of Europe.
The geologist who sets himself to discover similar types on the eastern
side of the Atlantic would have to seek for them among the deposits of
the later Tertiaries. North America seems to be still passing through
its later Tertiary ages; and it appears to be a consequence of this
curious transposition, that while in Europe the mastodonic period is
removed by two great geologic eras from the present time, it is removed
from it in America by only one. Even in America, however, that period
lies far beyond the reach of human tradition,--a fact borne out by the
pseudo-traditions retailed by the aborigines regarding the mastodon. By
none of at least the higher naturalists has there been a doubt
entertained respecting its herbivorous character; and the discovery of
late years of the stomach of an individual charged with decayed herbage
and fragments of the succulent branches of trees, some of them of
existing species, has demonstrated the solidity of the reasonings
founded on its general structure and aspect. The pseudo-traditions,
however, represent it in every instance as a carnivorous tyrant, that,
had it not been itself destroyed, would have destroyed all the other
animals its contemporaries. It is said by the red men of Virginia, "that
a troop of these tremendous quadrupeds made fearful havoc for some time
among the deer, the buffaloes, and all the other animals created for the
use of the Indians, and spread desolation far and wide. At last '_the
Mighty Man above_' seized his thunder and killed them all, with the
exception of the largest of the males, who presenting his head to the
thunderbolts, shook them off as they fell; but, being wounded in the
side, he betook himself to flight towards the great lakes, where he
still resides at the present day."
Let me here remind you in the passing, that that antiquity of type
which characterizes the recent productions of North America is one of
many wonders,--not absolutely geological in themselves, but which, save
for the revelations of geology, would have forever remained unnoted and
unknown,--which have been pressed, during the last half century, on the
notice of naturalists. "It is a circumstance quite extraordinary and
unexpected," says Agassiz, in his profoundly interesting work on Lake
Superior, "that the fossil plants of the Tertiary beds of Oeningen
resemble more closely the trees and shrubs which grow at present in the
eastern parts of North America, than those of any other parts of the
world; thus allowing us to express correctly the difference between the
opposite coasts of Europe and America, by saying that the present
eastern American flora, and, I may add, the fauna also, have a more
ancient character than those of Europe. The plants, especially the trees
and shrubs, growing in our days in the United States, are, as it were,
old-fashioned; and the characteristic genera Lagomys, Chelydra, and the
large Salamanders with permanent gills, that remind us of the fossils of
Oeningen, are at least equally so;--they bear the marks of former ages."
How strange a fact! Not only are we accustomed to speak of the eastern
continents as the Old World, in contradistinction to the great continent
of the west, but to speak also of the world before the Flood as the Old
World, in contradistinction to the post-diluvian world which succeeded
it. And yet equally, if we receive the term in either of its
acceptations, is America an older world still,--an older world than that
of the eastern continents,--an older world, in the fashion and type of
its productions, than the world before the Flood. And when the immigrant
settler takes axe amid the deep backwoods, to lay open for the first
time what he deems a new country, the great trees that fall before
him,--the brushwood that he lops away with a sweep of his tool,--the
unfamiliar herbs which he tramples under foot,--the lazy fish-like
reptile that scarce stirs out of his path as he descends to the
neighboring creek to drink,--the fierce alligator-like tortoise, with
the large limbs and small carpace, that he sees watching among the reeds
for fish and frogs, just as he reaches the water,--and the little
hare-like rodent, without a tail, that he startles by the way,--all
attest, by the antiqueness of the mould in which they are cast, how old
a country the seemingly new one really is,--a country vastly older, in
type at least, than that of the antediluvians and the patriarchs, and
only to be compared with that which flourished on the eastern side of
the Atlantic long ere the appearance of man, and the remains of whose
perished productions we find locked up in the _loess_ of the Rhine, or
amid the lignites of Nassau. America is emphatically the _Old_ World. If
we accept, however, as sound the ingenious logic by which Colton labors
to show, in not inelegant verse, that the _Moderns_ are the true
_Ancients_, we may continue to term it the New World still.
"We that on these late days are thrown
Must be the oldest Ancients known;
The _earliest_ Modern earth hath seen
Was Adam in his apron green.
He lived when young Creation pealed
Her morning hymn o'er flood and field,
Till all her infant offspring came
To that great christening for a name.
And he that would the Ancients know,
Must forward come, not backward go:
The learned lumber of the shelves
Shows nothing older than ourselves.
But who in older times than we
Shall live?--That infant on the knee,--
See sights to us were never shown,
And secrets known to us unknown."
[Illustration: Fig. 73.
ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS.
(_Mammoth._) Great British Elephant.]
[Illustration: Fig. 74.
TROGONTHERIUM CUVIERI.
Gigantic Beaver. (_Pleistocene._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 75.
URSUS SPELÆUS.
Cave Bear. (_Pleistocene._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 76.
HYENA SPELÆA.
Cave Hyæna. (_Pleistocene._)]
The group of mammals which, in Europe, at least, immediately preceded
the human period seems to have been everywhere a remarkable one; and
nowhere was it more so than in the British islands. Our present
mammaliferous fauna is rather poor; but the contents of the later
deposits show that we must regard it as but a mere fragment of a very
noble one. Associated with species that still exist in the less
cultivated parts of the country, such as the badger, the fox, the wild
cat, the roe and the red deer, we find the remains of great animals,
whose congeners must now be sought for in the intertropical regions.
Britain, during the times of the boulder clay, and for ages previous,
had its native elephant, its two species of rhinoceros, its
hippopotamus, its hyæna, its tiger, its three species of bears, its two
species of beavers, its great elk, and its gigantic deer. Forms now
found widely apart, and in very different climates, meet within the
British area. During at least the earlier times of the group, the
temperature of our island seems to have been very much what it is now.
As I have already had occasion to remark, the British oak flourished on
its plains and lower slopes, and the birch and Scotch fir on its hills.
And yet under these familiar trees the lagomys or tailless hare, a form
now mainly restricted to Siberia and the wilds of Northern America, and
the reindeer, an animal whose proper habitat at the present time is
Lapland, were associated with forms that are now only to be found
between the tropics, such as that of the hippopotamus and rhinoceros.
These last, however, unequivocally of extinct species, seem to have been
adapted to live in a temperate climate; and we know from the famous
Siberian specimen, that the British elephant, with its covering of long
hair and closely-felted wool, was fitted to sustain the rigors of a very
severe one. It is surely a strange fact, but not less true than strange,
that since hill and dale assumed in Britain their present configuration,
and the oak and birch flourished in its woods, there were caves in
England haunted for ages by families of hyænas,--that they dragged into
their dens with the carcasses of long extinct animals those of the still
familiar denizens of our hill-sides, and feasted, now on the lagomys,
and now on the common hare,--that they now fastened on the beaver or the
reindeer, and now upon the roebuck or the goat. In one of these caves,
such of the bones as projected from the stiff soil have been actually
worn smooth in a narrow passage where the hyænas used to come in contact
with them in passing out and in; and for several feet in depth the floor
beneath is composed almost exclusively of gnawed fragments, that still
exhibit the deeply indented marks of formidable teeth. In the famous
Kirkdale cave alone, parts of the skeletons of from two to three hundred
hyænas have been detected, mixed with portions of the osseous framework
of the cave-tiger, the cave-bear, the ox, the deer, the mammoth, and the
rhinoceros. That cave must have been a den of wild creatures for many
ages ere the times of the boulder clay, during which period it was shut
up from all access to the light and air by a drift deposit, and lay
covered over until again laid open by some workmen little more than
thirty years ago. Not only were many of the wild animals of the country
which still exist contemporary for a time with its extinct bears,
tigers, and elephants, but it seems at least highly probable that
several of our domesticated breeds derived their origin from progenitors
whose remains we find entombed in the bone-caves and other deposits of
the same age; though of course the changes effected by domestication in
almost all the tame animals renders the question of their identity with
the indigenous breeds somewhat obscure. Cuvier was, however, unable to
detect any difference between the skeleton of a fossil horse,
contemporary with the elephant, and that of our domestic breed: a fossil
goat of the same age cannot be distinguished from the domesticated
animal; and one of our two fossil oxen (_Bos longifrons_) does not
differ more from some of the existing breeds than these have, in the
course of time, been made, chiefly by artificial means, to differ among
themselves. But of one of our domestic tribes no trace has yet been
found in the rocks: like the cod family among fishes, or the Rosaceæ
among plants, it seems to have preceded man by but a very brief period.
And certainly, if created specially for his use, though the pride of the
herald might prevent him from selecting it as in aught typical of the
human race, it would yet not be easy to instance a family of animals
that has ministered more extensively to his necessities. I refer to the
sheep,--that soft and harmless creature, that clothes civilized man
everywhere in the colder latitudes with its fleece,--that feeds him with
its flesh,--that gives its bowels to be spun into the catgut with which
he refits his musical instruments,--whose horns he has learned to
fashion into a thousand useful trinkets,--and whose skin, converted into
parchment, served to convey to later times the thinking of the first
full blow of the human intellect across the dreary gulf of the middle
ages.
At length the human period begins. A creature appears upon the scene
unlike all that had preceded him, and whose nature it equally is to look
back upon the events of the past,--among other matters, on that
succession of beings upon the planet which he inhabits, with which we
are this evening attempting to deal,--and to anticipate at least one
succession more, in that still future state in which he himself is again
to appear, in happier circumstances than now, and in a worthier
character. We possess another history of the primeval age and subsequent
chronology of the human family than that which we find inscribed in the
rocks. And it is well that we do so. From various causes, the geologic
evidence regarding the period of man's first appearance on earth is
singularly obscure. That custom of "burying his dead out of his sight,"
which obtained, we know, in the patriarchal times, and was probably in
use ever since man came first under the law of death, has had the effect
of mingling his remains with those of creatures that were extinct for
ages ere he began to be. The cavern, once a haunt of carnivorous
animals, that in the first simple ages of his history had furnished him
with a shelter when living, became his burying-place when dead; and thus
his bones, and his first rude attempts in pottery and weapon-making,
have been found associated with the remains of the cave-hyæna and
cave-tiger, with the teeth of the ancient hippopotamus, and the tusks of
the primeval elephant. The evidence on the point, too,--from the great
paucity of human remains of a comparatively remote period, and from the
circumstance that they are rarely seen by geologists in the stratum in
which they occur,--is usually very imperfect in its details. Further, it
is an evidence obnoxious to suspicion, from the fact that a keen
controversy has arisen on the subject of man's antiquity, that such
fragments of man himself or of his works as manifest great age have been
pressed to serve as weapons in the fray,--that, occurring always in
superficial and local deposits, their true era may be greatly antedated,
under the influence of prejudice, by men who have no design wilfully to
deceive,--and that while, respecting the older formations, with their
abundant organisms, the conclusions of any one geologist may be tested
by all the others, the geologist who once in a lifetime picks up in a
stratified sand or clay a stone arrow-head or a human bone, finds that
the data on which he founds his conclusions may be received or rejected
by his contemporaries, but not re-examined. It may be safely stated,
however, that that ancient record in which man is represented as the
lastborn of creation, is opposed by no geologic fact; and that if,
according to Chalmers, "the Mosaic writings do not fix the antiquity of
the globe," they at least _do_ fix--making allowance, of course, for the
varying estimates of the chronologer--"the antiquity of the human
species." The great column of being, with its base set in the sea, and
inscribed, like some old triumphal pillar, with many a strange form,--at
once hieroglyphic and figure,--bears, as the ornately sculptured
capital, which imparts beauty and finish to the whole, reasoning,
responsible man. There is surely a very wonderful harmony manifested in
the proportions of that nice sequence in which the invertebrates--the
fishes, the reptiles, the birds, the marsupials, the placental mammals,
and, last of all, man himself--are so exquisitely arranged. It reminds
us of the fine figure employed by Dryden in his first Ode for St.
Cecilia's Day,--a figure which, viewed in the light cast on it by the
modern science of Palæontology, stands out in bolder relief than that in
which it could have appeared to the poet himself:--
"From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began;
From harmony to harmony,
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The _diapason_ closing full in man."
[Illustration: Fig. 77.
ASAPHUS CAUDATUS.
(_Silurian._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 78.
ORTHOCERAS LATERALE.
(_Mountain Limestone._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 79.
SPIRIGERINA RETICULARIS.
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 80.
A. MARGARITATUS.
(_Lias._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 81.
A. BISULCATUS.
(_Lias._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 82.
BELEMNITELLA MUCRONATA.
(_Chalk._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 83.
BELEMNITES SULCATUS.
(_Oolite._)]
In the limits to which I have restricted myself, I have been able to do
little more than simply to chronicle the successive eras in which the
various classes and divisions of the organic kingdom, vegetable and
animal, make their appearance in creation. I have produced merely a
brief record of the various births, in their order, of that great family
whose father is God. And in pursuing such a plan, much, of necessity,
must have been omitted. I ought perhaps to have told you, that very
rarely, if ever, do the master forms of a period constitute the
prevailing or typical organisms of its deposits. Of the three great
divisions of which the geologic scale consists,--Palæozoic, Secondary,
and Tertiary,--the first, or ichthyic period, is marked chiefly, not by
its great fishes, but by the peculiar character of its brachipodous and
cephalopodous mollusca, and in its earlier stages by its three-lobed
crustaceæ; the second or reptilian period was emphatically the period
of the ammonite and belemnite; while the third and last, or mammalian
period, was that of gastropodous and conchiferous molluscs, impressed,
generically at least, by all the features of the group which still
exists in our seas. Save in a few local deposits, fishes do not form the
prevailing organisms in the formations of the age of fishes; nor
reptiles in the formations of the age of reptiles; nor yet mammals in
the formations of the age of mammals. Nay, it is not improbable that the
recent or human period may be marked most prominently in the future,
when it comes to exist simply as a geologic system, by a still humbler
organism than most of these molluscs. On almost all rocky shores a line
of pale gray may be seen at low water, running for mile after mile along
the belt that has been laid bare at the bases of the cliffs by the fall
of the tide. It owes its pale color to millions of millions of a small
balanus (_B. balanoides_), produced in such amazing abundance in the
littoral zone as to cover with a rough crust every minute portion of
rock and every sedentary shell. Other species of the same genus (_B.
crenatus_ and _B. porcatus_) occupy the depths of the sea beyond; and
their remains, washed ashore by the waves, and mingled with those of the
littoral species, form often great accumulations of shell sand. I have
seen among the Hebrides a shell sand accumulated along the beach to the
depth of many feet, of which fully two thirds was composed of the valves
and compartments of balanidæ; and a similar sand on the east coast of
Scotland, a little to the south of St. Andrews, formed in still larger
proportions of the fragments of a single species,--_Balanus crenatus_.
Now, this genus, so amazingly abundant at the present time in every
existing sea, and whose accumulated remains bid fair to exist as great
limestone rocks in the future, had no existence in the Palæozoic or
Secondary ages. It first appears in the times of the earlier Tertiary,
in, however, only a single species; and, becoming gradually of more and
more importance as a group, it receives its fullest numerical
development in the present time. And thus the remains of a sub-class of
animals, low in their standing among the articulata, may form one of the
most prominent Palæontological features of the human period. But enough
for the present of circumstance and detail.
[Illustration: Fig. 84.
MUREX ALVEOLATUS.
(_Red Crag._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 85.
ASTARTE OMALII.
(_Red Crag._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 86.
BALANUS CRASSUS.
(_Red Crag._)]
Such, so far as the geologist has yet been able to read the records of
his science, has been the course of creation, from the first beginnings
of vitality upon our planet, until the appearance of man. And very
wonderful, surely, has that course been! How strange a procession! Never
yet on Egyptian obelisk or Assyrian frieze,--where long lines of figures
seem stalking across the granite, each charged with symbol and
mystery,--have our Layards or Rawlinsons seen aught so extraordinary as
that long procession of being which, starting out of the blank depths of
the bygone eternity, is still defiling across the stage, and of which we
ourselves form some of the passing figures. Who shall declare the
profound meanings with which these geologic hieroglyphics are charged,
or indicate the ultimate goal at which the long procession is destined
to arrive?
The readings already given, the conclusions already deduced, are as
various as the hopes and fears, the habits of thought, and the cast of
intellect, of the several interpreters who have set themselves,--some,
alas! with but little preparation and very imperfect knowledge,--to
declare in their order the details of this marvellous, dream-like
vision, and, with the dream, "the interpretation thereof." One class of
interpreters may well remind us of the dim-eyed old man,--the genius of
unbelief so poetically described by Coleridge,--who, sitting in his cold
and dreary cave, "talked much and vehemently concerning an infinite
series of causes and effects, which he explained to be a string of blind
men, the last of whom caught hold of the skirt of the one before him, he
of the next, and so on, till they were all out of sight, and that they
all walked infallibly straight, without making one false step, though
all were alike blind." With these must I class those assertors of the
development hypothesis who can see in the upward progress of being only
the operations of an incomprehending and incomprehensible law, through
which, in the course of unreckoned ages, the lower tribes and families
have risen into the higher, and inferior into superior natures, and in
virtue of which, in short, the animal creation has grown, in at least
its nobler specimens, altogether unwittingly, without thought or care on
its own part, and without intelligence on the part of the operating law,
from irrational to rational, and risen in the scale from the mere
promptings of instinct to the highest exercise of reason,--from apes and
baboons to Bacons and Newtons. The blind lead the blind;--the unseeing
law operates on the unperceiving creatures; and they go, not together
into the ditch, but direct onwards, straight as an arrow, and higher
and higher at every step.
Another class look with profound melancholy on that great city of the
dead,--the burial-place of all that ever lived in the past,--which
occupies with its ever-extending pavements of gravestones, and its
ever-lengthening streets of tombs and sepulchres, every region opened up
by the geologist. They see the onward procession of being as if but
tipped with life, and nought but inanimate carcasses all behind,--dead
individuals, dead species, dead genera, dead creations,--a universe of
death; and ask whether the same annihilation which overtook in turn all
the races of all the past, shall not one day overtake our own race also,
and a time come when men and their works shall have no existence save as
stone-pervaded fossils locked up in the rock forever? Nowhere do we find
the doubts and fears of this class more admirably portrayed than in the
works of perhaps the most thoughtful and suggestive of living poets:--
"Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams,
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life?
'So careful of the type!' but no,
From scarped cliff and quarried stone,
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone;
I care for nothing; all shall go:
Thou makest thine appeal to me;
I bring to life, I bring to death;
The spirit does but mean the breath.
I know no more.' And he,--shall he,
Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies
And built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed,
And love creation's final law,
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw,
With ravine shrieked against his creed,--
Who loved, who suffered countless ills,
Who battled for the true, the just,--
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or sealed within the iron hills?
No more!--a monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tore each other in their slime,
Were mellow music matched with him.
O, life, as futile then as frail,--
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer or redress,
Behind the vail, behind the vail!"
The sagacity of the poet here,--that strange sagacity which seems so
nearly akin to the prophetic spirit,--suggests in this noble passage the
true reading of the enigma. The appearance of man upon the scene of
being constitutes a new era in creation; the operations of a new
_instinct_ come into play,--that _instinct_ which anticipates a life
after the grave, and reposes in implicit faith upon a God alike just and
good, who is the pledged "rewarder of all who diligently seek Him." And
in looking along the long line of being,--ever rising in the scale from
higher to yet higher manifestations, or abroad on the lower animals,
whom instinct never deceives,--can we hold that man, immeasurably higher
in his place, and infinitely higher in his hopes and aspirations, than
all that ever went before him, should be, notwithstanding, the one grand
error in creation,--the one painful worker, in the midst of present
trouble, for a state into which he is never to enter,--the befooled
expectant of a happy future, which he is never to see? Assuredly no. He
who keeps faith with all his humbler creatures,--who gives to even the
bee and the dormouse the winter for which they prepare,--will to a
certainty not break faith with man,--with man, alike the deputed lord of
the present creation, and the chosen heir of all the future. We have
been looking abroad on the old geologic burying-grounds, and deciphering
the strange inscriptions on their tombs; but there are other
burying-grounds, and other tombs,--solitary churchyards among the hills,
where the dust of the martyrs lies, and tombs that rise over the ashes
of the wise and good; nor are there awanting, on even the monuments of
the perished races, frequent hieroglyphics, and symbols of high meaning,
which darkly intimate to us, that while _their_ burial-yards contain but
the debris of the past, we are to regard the others as charged with the
sown seed of the future.
LECTURE THIRD.
THE TWO RECORDS, MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL.
It is now exactly fifty years since a clergyman of the Scottish Church,
engaged in lecturing at St. Andrews, took occasion in enumerating the
various earths of the chemist, to allude to the science, then in its
infancy, that specially deals with the rocks and soils which these
earths compose. "There is a prejudice," he remarked, "against the
speculations of the geologist, which I am anxious to remove. It has been
said that they nurture infidel propensities. It has been alleged that
geology, by referring the origin of the globe to a higher antiquity than
is assigned to it by the writings of Moses, undermines our faith in the
inspiration of the Bible, and in all the animating prospects of the
immortality which it unfolds. This is a false alarm. _The writings of
Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe._"
The bold lecturer on this occasion,--for it needed no small courage in a
divine of any Established Church to take up, at the beginning of the
present century, a position so determined on the geologic side,--was at
the time an obscure young man, characterized, in the small circle in
which he moved, by the ardor of his temperament and the breadth and
originality of his views; but not yet distinguished in the science or
literature of his country, and of comparatively little weight in the
theological field. He was marked, too, by what his soberer acquaintance
deemed eccentricities of thought and conduct. When the opposite view was
all but universal, he held and taught that free trade would be not only
a general benefit to the people of this country, but would inflict
permanent injury on no one class or portion of them; and further, at a
time when the streets and lanes of all the great cities of the empire
were lighted with oil burnt in lamps, he held that the time was not
distant when a carburetted hydrogen gas would be substituted instead;
and, on getting his snug parsonage-house repaired, he actually
introduced into the walls a system of tubes and pipes for the passage
into its various rooms of the gaseous fluid yet to be employed as the
illuminating agent. Time and experience have since impressed their stamp
on these supposed eccentricities, and shown them to be the sagacious
forecastings of a man who saw further and more clearly than his
contemporaries; and fame has since blown his name very widely, as one of
the most comprehensive and enlightened, and, withal, one of the most
thoroughly earnest and sincere, of modern theologians. The bold lecturer
of St. Andrews was Dr. Thomas Chalmers,--a divine whose writings are now
known wherever the English language is spoken, and whose wonderful
eloquence lives in memory as a vanished power, which even his
extraordinary writings fail adequately to represent. And in the position
which he took up at this early period with respect to geology and the
Divine Record, we have yet another instance of the great sagacity of the
man, and of his ability of correctly estimating the prevailing weight of
the evidence with which, though but partially collected at the time, the
geologist was preparing to establish the leading propositions of his
science. Even in this late age, when the scientific standing of geology
is all but universally recognized, and the vast periods of time which it
demands fully conceded, neither geologist nor theologian, could, in any
new scheme of reconciliation, shape his first proposition more skilfully
than it was shaped by Chalmers a full half century ago. It has formed
since that time the preliminary proposition of those ornaments of at
once science and the English Church, the present venerable Archbishop of
Canterbury, Dr. Bird Sumner, with Doctors Buckland, Conybeare, and
Professor Sedgwick; of eminent evangelistic Dissenters too, such as the
late Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. John Harris, Dr. Robert Vaughan, Dr. James
Hamilton, and the Rev. Mr. Binney,--enlightened and distinguished men,
who all came early to the conclusion, with the lecturer of St. Andrews,
that "the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe."
In 1814, ten years after the date of the St. Andrews' lectures, Dr.
Chalmers produced his more elaborate scheme of reconciliation between
the Divine and the Geologic Records, in a "Review of Cuvier's Theory of
the Earth;" and that scheme, perfectly adequate to bring the Mosaic
narrative into harmony with what was known at the time of geologic
history, has been very extensively received and adopted. It may, indeed,
still be regarded as the most popular of the various existing schemes.
It teaches, and teaches truly, that between the first act of creation,
which evoked out of the previous nothing the _matter_ of the heavens and
earth, and the first act of the first day's work recorded in Genesis,
periods of vast duration may have intervened; but further, it insists
that the days themselves were but natural days of twenty-four hours
each; and that, ere they began, the earth, though mayhap in the previous
period a fair residence of life, had become void and formless, and the
sun, moon, and stars, though mayhap they had before given light, had
been, at least in relation to our planet, temporarily extinguished. In
short, while it teaches that the successive creations of the geologist
may all have found ample room in the period preceding that creation to
which man belongs, it teaches also that the record in Genesis bears
reference to but the existing creation, and that there lay between it
and the preceding ones a chaotic period of death and darkness. The
scheme propounded by the late Dr. Pye Smith, and since adopted by
several writers, differs from that of Chalmers in but one circumstance,
though an important one. Dr. Smith held, with the great northern divine,
that the Mosaic days were natural days; that they were preceded by a
chaotic period; and that the work done in them related to but that last
of the creations to which the human species belongs. Further, however,
he held in addition, that the chaos of darkness and confusion out of
which that creation was called was of but limited extent, and that
outside its area, and during the period of its existence, many of our
present lands and seas may have enjoyed the light of the sun, and been
tenanted by animals and occupied by plants, the descendants of which
still continue to exist. The treatise of Dr. Pye Smith was published
exactly a quarter of a century posterior to the promulgation, through
the press, of the argument of Dr. Chalmers; and this important
addition,--elaborated by its author between the years 1837 and
1839,--seems to have been made to suit the more advanced state of
geological science at the time. The scheme of reconciliation perfectly
adequate in 1814 was found in 1839 to be no longer so; and this mainly
through a peculiarity in the order in which geological fact has been
evolved and accumulated in this country, and the great fossiliferous
systems studied and wrought out; to which I must be permitted briefly to
advert.
William Smith, the "Father of English Geology," as he has been well
termed (a humble engineer and mineral surveyor, possessed of but the
ordinary education of men of his class and profession), was born upon
the English Oolite,--that system which, among the five prevailing
divisions of the great Secondary class of rocks, holds exactly the
middle place. The Triassic system and the Lias lie beneath it; the
Cretaceous system and the Weald rest above. Smith, while yet a child,
had his attention attracted by the Oolitic fossils; and it was observed,
that while his youthful contemporaries had their garnered stores of
marbles purchased at the toy shop, he had collected, instead, a hoard of
spherical fossil terebratulæ, which served the purposes of the game
equally well. The interest which he took in organic remains, and the
deposits in which they occur, influenced him in the choice of a
profession; and, when supporting himself in honest independence as a
skilful mineral surveyor and engineer, he travelled over many thousand
miles of country, taking as his starting point the city of Bath, which
stands near what is termed the Great Oolite: and from that centre he
carefully explored the various Secondary formations above and below. He
ascertained that these always occur in a certain determinate order; that
each contains fossils peculiar to itself; and that they run diagonally
across the kingdom in nearly parallel lines from north-east to
south-west. And, devoting every hour which he could snatch from his
professional labors to the work, in about a quarter of a century, or
rather more, he completed his great stratigraphical map of England. But,
though a truly Herculean achievement, regarded as that of a single man
unindebted to public support, and uncheered by even any very general
sympathy in his labors, it was found to be chiefly valuable in its
tracings of the Secondary deposits, and strictly exact in only that
Oolitic centre from which his labors began. It was remarked at an early
period that he ought to have restricted his publication to the
formations which lie between the Chalk and the Red Marl inclusive; or,
in other words, to the great Secondary division. The Coal Measures had,
however, been previously better known, from their economic importance,
and the number of the workings opened among them, than the deposits of
any other system; and ere the publication of the map of Smith, Cuvier
and Brogniart had rendered famous all over the world the older Tertiary
formations of the age of the London Clay. But both ends of the
geological scale, comprising those ancient systems older than the Coal,
and representative of periods in which, so far as is yet known, life,
animal and vegetable, first began upon our planet, and those systems of
comparatively modern date, representative of the periods which
immediately preceded the human epoch, were equally unknown. The light
fell strongly on only that middle portion of the series on which the
labors of Smith had been mainly concentrated. The vast geologic bridge,
which, like that in the exquisite allegory of Addison, strode across a
"part of the great tide of eternity," "had a black cloud hanging at each
end of it." And such was the state of geologic science when, in 1814,
Dr. Chalmers framed his scheme of reconciliation.
Since that time, however, a light not less strong than the one thrown by
William Smith on the formations of the Lias and the Oolite has been cast
on both the older and the newer fossiliferous systems. Two great gaps
still remain to be filled up,--that which separates the Palæozoic from
the Secondary division, and that which separates the Secondary from the
Tertiary one. But they occur at neither end of the geological scale.
Mainly through the labors of two distinguished geologists, who, finding
the geologic school of their own country distracted by a fierce and
fruitless controversy, attached themselves to the geologic school of
England, and have since received the honor of knighthood in
acknowledgment of their labors, both ends of the geologic scale have
been completed. Sir Roderick Murchison addressed himself to the
formations older than the Coal, more especially to the Upper and Lower
Silurian systems, from the Ludlow rooks to the Llandeilo flags. The Old
Red Sandstone too, a system which lies more immediately beneath the
Coal, has also been explored, and its various deposits, with their
peculiar organic remains, enumerated and described. And Sir Charles
Lyell, setting himself to the other extremity of the scale, has wrought
out the Tertiary formations, and separated them into the four great
divisions which they are now recognized as forming. And of these, the
very names indicate that certain proportions of their organisms still
continue to exist. It is a great fact, now fully established in the
course of geological discovery, that between the plants which in the
present time cover the earth, and the animals which inhabit it, and the
animals and plants of the later extinct creations, there occurred no
break or blank, but that, on the contrary, many of the existing
organisms were contemporary during the morning of their being, with many
of the extinct ones during the evening of theirs. We know further, that
not a few of the shells which now live on our coasts, and several of
even the wild animals which continue to survive amid our tracts of hill
and forest, were in existence many ages ere the human age began. Instead
of dating their beginning only a single natural day, or at most two
natural days, in advance of man, they must have preceded him by many
thousands of years. In fine, in consequence of that comparatively recent
extension of geologic fact in the direction of the later systems and
formations, through which we are led to know that the present creation
was not cut off abruptly from the preceding one, but that, on the
contrary, it dovetailed into it at a thousand different points, we are
led also to know, that any scheme of reconciliation which would
separate between the recent and the extinct existences by a chaotic gulf
of death and darkness, is a scheme which no longer meets the necessities
of the case. Though perfectly adequate forty years ago, it has been
greatly outgrown by the progress of geological discovery, and is, as I
have said, adequate no longer; and it becomes a not unimportant matter
to determine the special scheme that would bring into completest harmony
the course of creation, as now ascertained by the geologist, and that
brief but sublime narrative of its progress which forms a meet
introduction in Holy Writ to the history of the human family. The first
question to which we must address ourselves in any such inquiry is of
course a very obvious one,--_What are the facts scientifically
determined which now demand a new scheme of reconciliation?_
There runs around the shores of Great Britain and Ireland a flat terrace
of unequal breadth, backed by an escarpment of varied height and
character, which is known to geologists as the old coast-line. On this
flat terrace most of the seaport towns of the empire are built. The
subsoil which underlies its covering of vegetable mould consists usually
of stratified sands and gravels, arranged after the same fashion as on
the neighboring beach, and interspersed in the same manner with sea
shells. The escarpment behind, when formed of materials of no great
coherency, such as gravel or clay, exists as a sloping, grass-covered
bank,--at one place running out into promontories that encroach upon the
terrace beneath,--at another receding into picturesque, bay-like
recesses; and where composed, as in many localities, of rock of an
enduring quality, we find it worn, as if by the action of the surf,--in
some parts relieved into insulated stacks, in others hollowed into deep
caverns,--in short, presenting all the appearance of a precipitous
coast-line, subjected to the action of the waves. Now, no geologist can
or does doubt that this escarpment was at one time the coast-line of the
island,--the line against which the waves broke at high water in some
distant age, when either the sea stood from twenty to thirty feet higher
along our shores than it does now, or the land sat from twenty to thirty
feet lower. Nor can the geologist doubt, that along the flat terrace
beneath, with its stratified beds of sand and gravel, and its
accumulations of sea shells, the tides must have risen and fallen twice
every day, as they now rise and fall along the beach that at present
girdles our country. But, in reference to at least human history, the
age of the old coast-line and terrace must be a very remote one. Though
geologically recent, it lies far beyond the reach of any written record.
It has been shown by Mr. Smith of Jordanhill, one of our highest
authorities on the subject, that the wall of Antoninus, erected by the
Romans as a protection against the Northern Caledonians, was made to
terminate at the Firths of Forth and Clyde, with relation, not to the
level of the old coast-line, but to that of the existing one. And so we
must infer that, ere the year A.D. 140 (the year during which, according
to our antiquaries, the greater part of the wall was erected) the old
coast-line had attained to its present elevation over the sea. Further,
however, we know from the history of Diodorus the Sicilian, that at a
period earlier by at least two hundred years, St. Michael's Mount, in
Cornwall, was connected with the mainland at low water, just as it is
now, by a flat isthmus, across which, upon the falling of the tide, the
ancient Cornish miners used to carry over their tin in carts. Had the
relative levels of sea and land been those of the old coast-line at the
time, St. Michael's Mount, instead of being accessible at low ebb would
have been separated from the shore by a strait from three to five
fathoms in depth. It would not have been then as now, as described in
the verse of Carew,--
"Both land and island twice a day."
But even the incidental notice of Diodorus Siculus represents very
inadequately the antiquity of the existing coast-line. Some of its
caves, hollowed in hard rock in the line of faults and shifts by the
attrition of the surf, are more than a hundred feet in depth; and it
must have required many centuries to excavate tough trap or rigid gneiss
to a depth so considerable, by a process so slow. And yet, however long
the sea may have stood against the present coast-line, it must have
stood for a considerably longer period against the ancient one. The
latter presents generally marks of greater attrition than the modern
line, and its wave-hollowed caves are of a depth considerably more
profound. In determining, on an extensive tract of coast, the average
profundity of both classes of caverns from a considerable number of
each, I ascertained that the proportional average depth of the modern to
the ancient is as two to three. For every two centuries, then, during
which the waves have been scooping out the caves of the present
coast-line, they must have been engaged for three centuries in scooping
out those of the old one. But we know _historically_, that for at least
twenty centuries the sea has been toiling in these modern caves; and who
shall dare affirm that it has not been toiling in them for at least ten
centuries more? But if the sea has stood for but even two thousand six
hundred years against the present coast-line (and no geologist would
dare fix his estimate lower), then must it have stood against the old
line, ere it could have excavated caves one third deeper, three thousand
nine hundred years. And both periods united (six thousand five hundred
years) more than exhaust the Hebrew chronology. Yet what a mere
beginning of geologic history does not the epoch of the old coast-line
form! It is but a mere starting point from the recent period. Not a
single shell seems to have become extinct during the last six thousand
five hundred years! The shells which lie embedded in the subsoils
beneath the old coast-line are exactly those which still live in our
seas.
[Illustration: Fig. 87.
ASTARTE ARCTICA.]
[Illustration: Fig. 88.
TELLINA PROXIMA.]
Above this ancient line of coast we find, at various heights, beds of
shells of vastly older date than those of the low-lying terrace, and
many of which are no longer to be found living around our shores. I
spent some time last autumn in exploring one of these beds, once a sea
bottom, but now raised two hundred and thirty feet over the sea, in
which there occurred great numbers of shells now not British, though
found in many parts of Britain at heights varying from two hundred to
nearly fourteen hundred feet over the existing sea level. But though no
longer British shells, they are shells that still continue to live in
high northern latitudes, as on the shores of Iceland and Spitzbergen;
and the abundance in which they were developed on the submerged plains
and hill-sides of what are now England and Scotland, during what is
termed the Pleistocene period, shows of itself what a very protracted
period that was. The prevailing tellina of the bed which I last
explored,--a bed which occurs in some places six miles inland, in others
elevated on the top of dizzy crags,--is a sub-arctic shell (_Tellina
proxima_), of which only dead valves are now to be detected on our
coasts, but which may be found living at the North Cape and in
Greenland. The prevailing astarte, its contemporary, was _Astarte
arctica_, now so rare as a British species, that many of our most
sedulous collectors have never seen a native specimen, but which is
comparatively common on the northern shores of Iceland, and on the
eastern coasts of Norway, within the arctic circle. In this elevated
Scottish bed of the Pleistocene period I laid these boreal shells open
to the light by hundreds, on the spot evidently where the individuals
had lived and died. Under the severe climatal conditions to which
(probably from some change in the direction of the gulf stream) what is
now Northern Europe had been brought, this tellina and astarte had
increased and multiplied until they became prevailing shells of the
British area; and this increase must have been the slow work of ages,
during which the plains, and not a few of the table lands, of the
country, were submerged in a sub-arctic sea, and Great Britain existed
as but a scattered archipelago of wintry islands. But in a still earlier
period, of which there exists unequivocal evidence in the buried forests
of Happisburgh and Cromer, the country had not only its head above
water, as now, but seems to have possessed oven more than its present
breadth of surface. During this ancient time,--more remote by many
centuries than not only the times of the old coast-line, but than even
those of the partial submergence of the island,--that northern mammoth
lived in great abundance, of which the remains have been found by
hundreds in England alone, together with the northern hippopotamus, and
at least two northern species of rhinoceros. And though they have all
ceased to exist, with their wild associates in the forests and jungles
of the Pleistocene, the cave-hyæna, the cave-tiger, and the cave-bear,
we know that the descendants of some of their feebler contemporaries,
such as the badger, the fox, the wild cat, and the red deer, still live
amid our hills and brakes. The trees, too, under which they roamed, and
whose remains we find buried in the same deposits as theirs, were of
species that still hold their place as aboriginal trees of the country,
or of at least the more northerly provinces of the continent. The common
Scotch fir, the common birch, and a continental species of conifer of
the far north, the Norwegian spruce (_Abies excelsa_), have been found
underlying the Pleistocene drift, and rooted in the mammiferous crag;
and for many ages must the old extinct elephant have roamed amid these
familiar trees. From one limited tract of sea bottom on the Norfolk
coast the fishermen engaged in dredging oysters brought ashore, in the
course of thirteen years (from 1820 to 1833), no fewer than two thousand
elephants' grinders, besides great tusks and numerous portions of
skeletons. It was calculated that these remains could not have belonged
to fewer than five hundred individual mammoths of English growth; and,
various in their states of keeping, and belonging to animals of which
only a few at a time could have found sufficient food in a limited tract
of country, the inference seems inevitable that they must have belonged,
not to one or two, but to many succeeding generations. The further fact,
that remains of this ancient elephant (_Elephas primigenius_) occur all
round the globe in a broad belt, extending from the fortieth to near the
seventieth degree of north latitude, leads to the same conclusion. It
must have required many ages ere an animal that breeds so slowly as the
elephant could have extended itself over an area so vast.
[Illustration: Fig. 89.
NORWEGIAN SPRUCE.
(Abies excelsa.)]
Many of the contemporaries of this northern mammoth, especially of its
molluscan contemporaries, continue, as I have said, to live in their
descendants. Of even a still more ancient period, represented by the Red
Crag, seventy out of every hundred species of shells still exist; and of
an older period still, represented by the Coraline Crag, there survive
sixty out of every hundred. In the Red Crag, for instance, we find the
first known ancestors of our common edible periwinkle and common edible
mussel; and in the Coraline Crag, the first known ancestors of the
common horse-mussel, the common whelk, the common oyster, and the great
pecten. There then occurs a break in the geologic deposits of Britain,
which, however, in other parts of Europe we find so filled up as to
render it evident that no corresponding break took place in the chain of
existence; but that, on the contrary, from the present time up to the
times represented by the earliest Eocene formations of the Tertiary
division, day has succeeded day, and season has followed season, and
that no chasm or hiatus--no age of general chaos, darkness, and
death--has occurred, to break the line of succession, or check the
course of life. All the evidence runs counter to the supposition that
immediately before the appearance of man upon earth, there existed a
chaotic period which separated the previous from the present creation.
Up till the commencement of the Eocene ages, if even then, there was no
such chaotic period, in at least what is now Britain and the European
continent: the persistency from a high antiquity of some of the existing
races, of not only plants and shells, but of even some of the
mammiferous animals, such as the badger, the goat, and the wild cat,
prove there was not; and any scheme of reconciliation which takes such a
period for granted must be deemed as unsuited to the present state of
geologic knowledge, as any scheme would have been forty years ago which
took it for granted that the writings of Moses _do_ "fix the antiquity
of the globe."
The scheme of reconciliation adopted by the late Dr. Pye Smith, though,
save in one particular, identical, as I have said, with that of Dr.
Chalmers, is made, in virtue of its single point of difference, to steer
clear of the difficulty. Both schemes exhibit the creation recorded in
Genesis as an event which took place about six thousand years ago; both
describe it as begun and completed in six natural days; and both
represent it as cut off from a previously existing creation by a chaotic
period of death and darkness. But while, according to the scheme of
Chalmers, both the Biblical creation and the previous period of death
are represented as coextensive with the globe, they are represented,
according to that of Dr. Smith, as limited and local. They may have
extended, it is said, over only a few provinces of Central Asia, in
which, when all was life and light in other parts of the globe, there
reigned for a time only death and darkness amid the welterings of a
chaotic sea; which, at the Divine command, was penetrated by light, and
occupied by dry land, and ultimately, ere the end of the creative week,
became a centre in which certain plants and animals, and finally man
himself, were created. And this scheme, by leaving to the geologist in
this country and elsewhere, save mayhap in some unknown Asiatic
district, his unbroken series, certainly does not conflict with the
facts educed by geologic discovery. It virtually removes Scripture
altogether out of the field. I must confess, however, that on this, and
on some other accounts, it has failed to satisfy me. I have stumbled,
too, at the conception of a merely local and limited chaos, in which the
darkness would be so complete, that when first penetrated by the light,
that penetration could be described as actually a _making_ or creating
of light; and that, while life obtained all around its precincts, could
yet be thoroughly void of life, A local darkness so profound as to admit
no ray of light seems to have fallen for a time on Egypt, as one of the
ten plagues; but the event was evidently miraculous; and no student of
natural science is entitled to have recourse, in order to extricate
himself out of a difficulty, to supposititious, unrecorded miracle.
Creation cannot take place without miracle; but it would be a strange
reversal of all our previous conclusions on the subject, should we have
to hold that the dead, dark, blank out of which creation arose was
miraculous also. And if, rejecting miracle, we cast ourselves on the
purely natural, we find that the local darknesses dependent on known
causes, of which we have any record in history, were always either very
imperfect, like the darkness of your London fogs, or very temporary,
like the darkness described by Pliny as occasioned by a cloud of
volcanic ashes; and so, altogether inadequate to meet the demands of a
hypothesis such as that of Dr. Smith. And yet further, I am disposed, I
must add, to look for a broader and more general meaning in that grand
description of the creation of all things with which the Divine record
so appropriately opens, than I could recognize it as forming, were I
assured it referred to but one of many existing creations,--a creation
restricted to mayhap a few hundred square miles of country, and to
mayhap a few scores of animals and plants. What, then, is the scheme of
reconciliation which I would venture to propound?
Let me first remark, in reply, that I come before you this evening, not
as a philologist, but simply as a student of geological fact, who,
believing his Bible, believes also, that though theologians have at
various times striven hard to pledge it to false science, geographical,
astronomical, and geological, it has been pledged by its Divine Author
to no falsehood whatever. I occupy exactly the position now, with
respect to geology, that the mere Christian geographer would have
occupied with respect to geography in the days of those doctors of
Salamanca who deemed it unscriptural to hold with Columbus that the
world is round,--not flat; or exactly the position which the mere
Christian astronomer would have occupied with respect to astronomy in
the days of that Francis Turrettine who deemed it unscriptural to hold
with Newton and Galileo, that it is the earth which moves in the
heavens, and the sun which stands still. The mere geographer or
astronomer might have been wholly unable to discuss with Turrettine or
the doctors the niceties of Chaldaic punctuation, or the various
meanings of the Hebrew verbs. But this much, notwithstanding, he would
be perfectly qualified to say:--However great your skill as linguists,
your reading of what you term the scriptural geography or scriptural
astronomy must of necessity be a false reading, seeing that it commits
Scripture to what, in my character as a geographer or astronomer, I know
to be a monstrously false geography or astronomy. Premising, then, that
I make no pretensions to even the slightest skill in philology, I remark
further, that it has been held by accomplished philologists, that the
days of the Mosaic creation may be regarded, without doing violence to
the genius of the Hebrew language, as successive periods of great
extent. And certainly, in looking at my English Bible, I find that the
portion of time spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis as _six_ days,
is spoken of in the second chapter as _one_ day. True, there are other
philologers, such as the late Professor Moses Stuart, who take a
different view; but then I find this same Professor Stuart striving hard
to make the phraseology of Moses "fix the antiquity of the globe;" and
so, as a mere geologist, I reject his philology, on exactly the same
principle on which the mere geographer would reject, and be justified in
rejecting, the philology of the doctors of Salamanca, or on which the
mere astronomer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the
philology of Turrettine and the old Franciscans. I would, in any such
case, at once, and without hesitation, cut the philological knot, by
determining that that philology cannot be sound which would commit the
Scriptures to a science that cannot be true. Waiving, however, the
question as a philological one, and simply holding with Cuvier,
Parkinson, and Silliman, that each of the _six_ days of the Mosaic
narrative in the first chapter were what is assuredly meant by the _day_
referred to in the second,--not natural days, but lengthened periods,--I
find myself called on, as a geologist, to account for but three of the
six. Of the period during which light was created,--of the period during
which a firmament was made to separate the waters from the waters,--or
of the period during which the two great lights of the earth, with the
other heavenly bodies, became visible from the earth's surface,--we need
expect to find no record in the rocks. Let me, however, pause for a
moment, to remark the peculiar character of the language in which we are
first introduced in the Mosaic narrative to the heavenly bodies,--sun,
moon, and stars. The moon, though absolutely one of the smallest lights
of our system, is described as secondary and subordinate to only its
greatest light, the sun. It is the apparent, then, not the actual, which
we find in the passage,--what _seemed_ to be, not what _was_; and as it
was merely what appeared to be greatest that was described as greatest,
on what grounds are we to hold that it may not also have been what
_appeared_ at the time to be made that has been described as made? The
sun, moon, and stars may have been created long before, though it was
not until this fourth period of creation that they became visible from
the earth's surface.
The geologist, in his attempts to collate the Divine with the geologic
record, has, I repeat, only three of the six periods of creation to
account for,--the period of plants, the period of great sea monsters and
creeping things, and the period of cattle and beasts of the earth. He is
called on to question his systems and formations regarding the remains
of these three great periods, and of these only. And the question once
fairly stated, what, I ask, is the reply? All geologists agree in
holding that the vast geological scale naturally divides into _three_
great parts. There are many lesser divisions,--divisions into systems,
formations, deposits, beds, strata; but the master divisions, in each of
which we find a type of life so unlike that of the others, that even the
unpractised eye can detect the difference, are simply three,--the
Palæozoic, or oldest fossiliferous division; the Secondary, or middle
fossiliferous division; and the Tertiary, or latest fossiliferous
division.
In the first, or Palæozoic division, we find corals, crustaceans,
molluscs, fishes, and, in its later formations, a few reptiles. But none
of these classes of organisms give its leading character to the
Palæozoic; they do not constitute its prominent feature, or render it
more remarkable as a scene of life than any of the divisions which
followed. That which chiefly distinguished the Palæozoic from the
Secondary and Tertiary periods was its gorgeous flora. It was
emphatically the period of plants,--"of herbs yielding seed after their
kind." In no other age did the world ever witness such a flora: the
youth of the earth was peculiarly a green and umbrageous youth,--a youth
of dusk and tangled forests, of huge pines and stately araucarians, of
the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculptured sigillaria,
and the hirsute lepidodendron. Wherever dry land, or shallow lake, or
running stream appeared, from where Melville Island now spreads out its
ice wastes under the star of the pole, to where the arid plains of
Australia lie solitary beneath the bright cross of the south, a rank and
luxuriant herbage cumbered every footbreadth of the dank and steaming
soil; and even to distant planets our earth must have shone through the
enveloping cloud with a green and delicate ray. Of this extraordinary
age of plants we have our cheerful remembrancers and witnesses in the
flames that roar in our chimneys when we pile up the winter fire,--in
the brilliant gas that now casts its light on this great assemblage, and
that lightens up the streets and lanes of this vast city,--in the
glowing furnaces that smelt our metals, and give moving power to our
ponderous engines,--in the long dusky trains that, with shriek and
snort, speed dart-like athwart our landscapes,--and in the great
cloud-enveloped vessels that darken the lower reaches of your noble
river, and rush in foam over ocean and sea. The geologic evidence is so
complete as to be patent to all, that the first great period of
organized being was, as described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly a
period of herbs and trees, "yielding seed after their kind."
The middle great period of the geologist--that of the Secondary
division--possessed, like the earlier one, its herbs and plants, but
they were of a greatly less luxuriant and conspicuous character than
their predecessors, and no longer formed the prominent trait or feature
of the creation to which they belonged. The period had also its corals,
its crustaceans, its molluscs, its fishes, and in some one or two
exceptional instances its dwarf mammals. But the grand existences of the
age,--the existences in which it excelled every other creation, earlier
or later, were its huge creeping things,--its enormous monsters of the
deep,--and, as shown by the impressions of their footprints stamped upon
the rocks, its gigantic birds. It was peculiarly the age of egg-bearing
animals, winged and wingless. Its wonderful _whales_, not, however, as
now, of the mammalian, but of the reptilian class,--ichthyosaurs,
plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs,--must have tempested the deep; its creeping
lizards and crocodiles, such as the teliosaurus, megalosaurus, and
iguanodon,--creatures some of which more than rivalled the existing
elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in bulk,--must
have crowded the plains or haunted by myriads the rivers of the period;
and we know that the footprints of at least one of its many birds are
fully twice the size of those made by the horse or camel. We are thus
prepared to demonstrate, that the second period of the geologist was
peculiarly and characteristically a period of whale-like reptiles of the
sea, of enormous creeping reptiles of the land, and of numerous birds,
some of them of gigantic size; and, in meet accordance with the fact, we
find that the second Mosaic period with which the geologist is called on
to deal was a period in which God created the fowl that flieth above the
earth, with moving [or creeping] creatures, both in the waters and on
the land, and what our translation renders great whales, but that I find
rendered, in the margin, great sea monsters.
The Tertiary period had also its prominent class of existences. Its
flora seems to have been no more conspicuous than that of the present
time; its reptiles occupy a very subordinate place; but its beasts of
the field were by far the most wonderfully developed, both in size and
numbers, that ever appeared upon earth. Its mammoths and its mastodons,
its rhinoceri and its hippopotami, its enormous dinotherium and colossal
megatherium, greatly more than equalled in bulk the largest mammals of
the present time, and vastly exceeded them in number. The remains of one
of its elephants (_Elephas primigenius_) are still so abundant amid the
frozen wastes of Siberia, that what have been not inappropriately termed
"ivory quarries" have been wrought among their bones for more than a
hundred years. Even in our own country, of which, as I have already
shown, this elephant was for long ages a native, so abundant are the
skeletons and tusks, that there is scarcely a local museum in the
kingdom that has not its specimens, dug out of the Pleistocene deposits
of the neighborhood. And with this ancient elephant there were meetly
associated in Britain, as on the northern continents generally all
around the globe, many other mammals of corresponding magnitude. "Grand
indeed," says an English naturalist, "was the fauna of the British
islands in those early days. Tigers as large again as the biggest
Asiatic species lurked in the ancient thickets; elephants of nearly
twice the bulk of the largest individuals that now exist in Africa or
Ceylon roamed in herds; at least two species of rhinoceros forced their
way through the primeval forest; and the lakes and rivers were tenanted
by hippopotami as bulky, and with as great tusks, as those of Africa."
The massive cave-bear and large cave-hyæna belonged to the same
formidable group, with at least two species of great oxen (_Bos
longifrons_ and _Bos primigenius_), with a horse of smaller size, and an
elk (_Megaceros Hibernicus_) that stood ten feet four inches in height.
Truly this Tertiary age--this third and last of the great geologic
periods--was peculiarly the age of great "beasts of the earth after
their kind, and of cattle after their kind."
Permit me at this stage, in addressing myself to a London audience, to
refer to what has been well termed one of the great _sights_ of London.
An illustration drawn from what must be familiar to you all may impart
to your conceptions, respecting the facts on which I build, a degree of
tangibility which otherwise they could not possess.
[Illustration: Fig. 90.
LEPIDODENDRON STERNBERGII.]
One of perhaps the most deeply interesting departments of your great
British Museum--the wonder of the world--is that noble gallery,
consisting of a suite of rooms, opening in line, the one beyond the
other, which forms its rich storehouse of organic remains. You must of
coarse remember the order in which the organisms of that gallery are
ranged. The visitor is first ushered into a spacious room devoted to
fossil plants, chiefly of the Coal Measures. And if these organisms are
in any degree less imposing in their aspect than those of the apartments
which follow in the series, it is only because that, from the exceeding
greatness of the Coal Measure plants, they can be exhibited in but bits
and fragments. Within less than an hour's walk of the Scottish capital
there are single trees of this ancient period deeply embedded in the
sandstone strata, which, though existing as mere mutilated portions of
their former selves, would yet fail to find accommodation in that great
apartment. One of those fossil trees,--a noble araucarian,--which occurs
in what is known as the Granton quarry, is a mere fragment, for it
wants both root and top, and yet what remains is sixty-one feet in
length by six feet in diameter; and beside it there lies a smaller
araucarian, also mutilated, for it wants top and branches, and _it_
measures seventy feet in length by four feet in diameter. I saw lately,
in a quarry of the Coal Measures about two miles from my dwelling-house,
near Edinburgh, the stem of a plant (_Lepidodendron Sternbergii_),
allied to the dwarfish club mosses of our moors, considerably thicker
than the body of a man, and which, reckoning on the ordinary proportions
of the plant, must have been at least seventy feet in height. And of a
kind of aquatic reed (calamites), that more resembles the diminutive
mare's tail of our marshes than aught else that now lives, remains have
been found in abundance in the same coal field, more than a foot in
diameter by thirty feet in length. Imposing, then, as are the vegetable
remains of this portion of the National Museum, they would be greatly
more imposing still did they more adequately represent the gigantic
flora of the remote age to which they belong.
[Illustration: Fig. 91.
CALAMITES CANNÆFORMIS.]
Passing onwards in the gallery from the great plants of the Palæozoic
division to the animals of the Secondary one, the attention is at once
arrested by the monstrous forms on the wall. Shapes that more than rival
in strangeness the great dragons, and griffins, and "laithly worms," of
mediæval legend, or, according to Milton, the "gorgons, hydras, and
chimeras dire," of classical fable, frown on the passing visitor; and,
though wrapped up in their dead and stony sleep of ages, seem not only
the most strange, but also the most terrible things on which his eye
ever rested. Enormous jaws, bristling with pointed teeth, gape horrid in
the stone, under staring eye-sockets a full foot in diameter. Necks that
half equal in length the entire body of the boa-constrictor stretch out
from bodies mounted on fins like those of a fish, and furnished with
tails somewhat resembling those of the mammals. Here we see a winged
dragon, that, armed with sharp teeth and strong claws, had careered
through the air on leathern wings like those of a bat; there an enormous
crocodilian whale, that, mounted on many-jointed paddles, had traversed,
in quest of prey, the green depths of the sea; yonder a herbivorous
lizard, with a horn like that of the rhinoceros projecting from its
snout, and that, when it browsed amid the dank meadows of the Wealden,
must have stood about twelve feet high. All is enormous, monstrous,
vast, amid the creeping and flying things and the great sea monsters of
this division of the gallery.
[Illustration: Fig. 92.
MEGATHERIUM CUVIERI.]
We pass on into the third and lower division, and an entirely different
class of existences now catch the eye. The huge mastodon, with his
enormous length of body, and his tusks projecting from both upper and
under jaw, stands erect in the middle of the floor,--a giant skeleton.
We see beside him the great bones of the megatherium,--thigh bones
eleven inches in diameter, and claw-armed toes more than two feet in
length. There, too, ranged species beyond species, are the extinct
elephants; and there the ponderous skull of the dinotherium, with the
bent tusks in its lower jaw, that give to it the appearance of a great
pickaxe, and that must have dug deeply of old amid the liliaceous roots
and bulbs of the Tertiary lakes and rivers. There also are the massive
heads and spreading horn-cores of the _Bos primigenius_, and the large
bones and broad plank-like horns of the great Irish elk. And there too,
in the same apartment, but leaning against its further wall,--last, as
most recent, of all the objects of wonder in that great gallery,--is the
famous human skeleton of Guadaloupe, standing out in bold relief from
its slab of gray limestone. It occurs in the series, just as the series
closes, a little beyond the mastodon and the mammoths; and, in its
strange character as a fossil man, attracts the attention scarce less
powerfully than the great Palæozoic plants, the great Secondary
reptiles, or the great Tertiary mammals.
[Illustration: Fig. 93.
SKULL OF DINOTHERIUM GIGANTEUM.
(_Miocene._)]
I last passed through this wondrous gallery at the time when the
attraction of the Great Exhibition had filled London with curious
visitors from all parts of the empire; and a group of intelligent
mechanics, fresh from some manufacturing town of the midland counties,
were sauntering on through its chambers immediately before me. They
stood amazed beneath the dragons of the Oolite and Lias; and, with more
than the admiration and wonder of the disciples of old when
contemplating the huge stones of the Temple, they turned to say, in
almost the old words, "Lo! master, what manner of great beasts are
these?" "These are," I replied, "the sea monsters and creeping things of
the second great period of organic existence." The reply seemed
satisfactory, and we passed on together to the terminal apartments of
the range appropriated to the Tertiary organisms. And there, before the
enormous mammals, the mechanics again stood in wonder, and turned to
inquire. Anticipating the query, I said, "And these are the huge beasts
of the earth, and the cattle of the third great period of organic
existence; and yonder, in the same apartment, you see, but at its
further end, is the famous fossil man of Guadaloupe, locked up by the
petrifactive agencies in a slab of limestone." The mechanics again
seemed satisfied. And, of course, had I encountered them in the first
chamber of the suite, and had they questioned me respecting the
organisms with which _it_ is occupied, I would have told them that they
were the remains of the herbs and trees of the _first_ great period of
organic existence. But in the chamber of the mammals we parted, and I
saw them no more.
There could not be a simpler incident. And yet, rightly apprehended, it
reads its lesson. You have all visited the scene of it, and must all
have been struck by the three salient points, if I may so speak, by
which that noble gallery lays strongest hold of the memory, and most
powerfully impresses the imagination,--by its gigantic plants of the
first period (imperfectly as these are represented in the collection),
by its strange misproportioned sea monsters and creeping things of the
second, and by its huge mammals of the third. Amid many thousand various
objects, and a perplexing multiplicity of detail, which it would
require the patient study of years even partially to classify and know,
these are the great prominent features of the gallery, that
involuntarily, on the part of the visitor, force themselves on his
attention. They at once pressed themselves on the attention of the
intelligent though unscientific mechanics, and, I doubt not, still dwell
vividly in their recollections; and I now ask you, when you again visit
the national museum, and verify the fact of the great prominence of
these classes of objects, to bear in mind, that the gallery in which
they occur represents, both in the order and character of its contents,
the course of creation. I ask you to remember that, had there been human
eyes on earth during the Palæozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary periods,
they would have been filled in succession by the great plants, the great
reptiles, and the great mammals, just as those of the mechanics were
filled by them in the museum. As the sun and moon, when they first
became visible in the heavens, would have seemed to human eyes--had
there been human eyes to see--not only the greatest of the celestial
lights, but peculiarly the prominent objects of the epoch in which they
appeared, so would these plants, reptiles, and mammals, have seemed in
succession the prominent objects of the several epochs in which _they_
appeared. And, asking the geologist to say whether my replies to the
mechanics were not, with all their simplicity, true to geological fact,
and the theologian to say whether the statements which they embodied
were not, with all their geology, true to the scriptural narrative, I
ask further, whether (of course, making due allowance for the laxity of
the terms botanic and zoological of a primitive language unadapted to
the niceties of botanic or zoologic science) the Mosaic account of
creation could be rendered more essentially true, than we actually find
it, to the history of creation geologically ascertained. If, taking the
Mosaic days as equivalent to lengthened periods, we hold that, in giving
their brief history, the inspired writer seized on but those salient
points that, like the two great lights of the day and night, would have
arrested most powerfully, during these periods, a human eye, we shall
find the harmony of the two records complete. In your visit to the
museum, I would yet further ask you to mark the place of the human
skeleton in the great gallery. It stands--at least it stood only a few
years ago--in the same apartment with the huge mammifers. And it is
surely worthy of remark, that while in both the sacred and geologic
records a strongly defined line separates between the period of plants
and the succeeding periods of reptiles, and again between the period of
reptiles and the succeeding period of mammals, no line in either record
separates between this period of mammals and the human period. Man came
into being as the lastborn of creation, just ere the close of that sixth
day--the third and terminal period of organic creation--to which the
great mammals belong. Let me yet further remark, that in each of these
three great periods we find, with respect to the classes of existences,
vegetable or animal, by which they were most prominently characterized,
certain well marked culminating points together, if I may so express
myself,--twilight periods of morning dawn and evening decline. The
plants of the earlier and terminal systems of the Palæozoic division are
few and small: it was only during the protracted _eons_ of the
Carboniferous period that they received their amazing development,
unequalled in any previous or succeeding time.[16] In like manner, in
the earlier or Triassic deposits of the Secondary division, the
reptilian remains are comparatively inconsiderable; and they are almost
equally so in its Cretaceous or later deposits. It was during those
middle ages of the division, represented by its Liassic, Oolitic, and
Wealden formations, that the class existed in that abundance which
rendered it so peculiarly, above every other age, an age of creeping
things and great sea monsters. And so also, in the Tertiary, regarded
as but an early portion of the human division, there was a period of
increase and diminution,--a morning and evening of mammalian life. The
mammals of its early Eocene ages were comparatively small in bulk and
low in standing; in its concluding ages, too, immediately ere the
appearance of man, or just as he had appeared, they exhibited, both in
size and number, a reduced and less imposing aspect. It was chiefly in
its middle and latter, or Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene ages, that
the myriads of its huger giants,--its dinotheria, mastodons, and
mammoths,--cumbered the soil. I, of course, restrict my remarks to the
three periods of organic life, and have not inquired whether aught
analogous to these mornings and evenings of increase and diminution need
be sought after in any of the others.
Such are a few of the geological facts which lead me to believe that the
_days_ of the Mosaic account were great periods, not natural days; and
be it remembered, that between the scheme of lengthened periods and the
scheme of a merely local chaos, which existed no one knows how, and of a
merely local creation, which had its scene no one knows where,
geological science leaves us now no choice whatever. It has been urged,
however, that this scheme of periods is irreconcileable with that Divine
"reason" for the institution of the Sabbath which he who appointed the
day of old has, in his goodness, vouchsafed to man. I have failed to see
any force in the objection. God the Creator, who wrought during six
periods, rested during the seventh period; and as we have no evidence
whatever that he recommenced his work of creation,--as, on the contrary,
man seems to be the last formed of creatures,--God may be resting still.
The presumption is strong that his Sabbath is an extended period, not a
natural day, and that the work of Redemption is his Sabbath day's work.
And so I cannot see that it in the least interferes with the integrity
of the reason rendered to read it as follows:--Work during six periods,
and rest on the seventh; for in six periods the Lord created the heavens
and the earth, and on the seventh period _He_ rested. The Divine periods
may have been very great,--the human periods very small; just as a vast
continent or the huge earth itself is very great, and a map or
geographical globe very small. But if in the map or globe the
proportions be faithfully maintained, and the scale, though a minute
one, be true in all its parts and applications, we pronounce the map or
globe, notwithstanding the smallness of its size, a faithful copy. Were
man's Sabbaths to be kept as enjoined, and in the Divine proportions, it
would scarcely interfere with the logic of the "reason annexed to the
fourth commandment," though in this matter, as in all others in which
man can be an imitator of God, the imitation should be a miniature one.
The work of Redemption may, I repeat, be the work of God's Sabbath day.
What, I ask, viewed as a whole, is the prominent characteristic of
geologic history, or of that corresponding history of creation which
forms the grandly fashioned vestibule of the sacred volume? Of both
alike the leading characteristic is progress. In both alike do we find
an upward progress from dead matter to the humbler forms of vitality,
and from thence to the higher. And after great cattle and beasts of the
earth had, in due order, succeeded inanimate plants, sea monsters, and
moving creatures that had life, the moral agent, man, enters upon the
scene. Previous to his appearance on earth, each succeeding elevation in
the long upward march had been a result of creation. The creative fiat
went forth, and dead matter came into existence. The creative fiat went
forth, and plants, with the lower animal forms, came into existence. The
creative fiat went forth, and the oviparous animals,--birds and
reptiles,--came into existence. The creative fiat went forth, and the
mammiferous animals,--cattle and beasts of the earth,--came into
existence. And, finally, last in the series, the creative fiat went
forth, and responsible, immortal man, came into existence. But has the
course of progress come, in consequence, to a close? No. God's work of
elevating, raising, heightening,--of making the high in due progression
succeed the low,--still goes on. But man's responsibility, his
immortality, his God-implanted instincts respecting an eternal future,
forbid that that work of elevation and progress should be, as in all the
other instances, a work of creation. To create would be to supersede.
God's work of elevation _now_ is the work of fitting and preparing
peccable, imperfect man for a perfect, impeccable, future state. God's
seventh day's work is the work of Redemption. And, read in this light,
his reason vouchsafed to man for the institution of the Sabbath is found
to yield a meaning of peculiar breadth and emphasis. God, it seems to
say, rests on _his_ Sabbath from his creative labors, in order that by
his Sabbath day's work he may save and elevate you. Rest ye also on your
Sabbaths, that through your co-operation with him in this great work ye
may be elevated and saved. Made originally in the image of God, let God
be your pattern and example. Engaged in your material and temporal
employments, labor in the proportions in which he labored; but, in order
that you may enjoy an eternal future with him, rest also in the
proportions in which he rests.
One other remark ere I conclude. In the history of the earth which we
inhabit, molluscs, fishes, reptiles, mammals, had each in succession
their periods of vast duration; and then the human period began,--the
period of a fellow worker with God, created in God's own image. What is
to be the next advance? Is there to be merely a repetition of the
past?--an introduction a second time of man made in the image of God?
No. The geologist, in those tables of stone which form his records,
finds no example of dynasties once passed away again returning. There
has been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish, of the reptile, of
the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its
inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty--"the _kingdom_"--not of
glorified man made in the image of God, but of God himself in the form
of man. In the doctrine of the two conjoined natures, human and Divine,
and in the further doctrine that the terminal dynasty is to be
peculiarly the dynasty of HIM in whom the natures are united, we find
that required progression beyond which progress cannot go. We find the
point of elevation never to be exceeded meetly coincident with the final
period never to be terminated,--the infinite in height harmoniously
associated with the eternal in duration. Creation and the Creator meet
at one point, and in one person. The long ascending line from dead
matter to man has been a progress Godwards,--not an asymptotical
progress, but destined from the beginning to furnish a point of union;
and occupying that point as true God and true man,--as Creator and
created,--we recognize the adorable Monarch of all the future!
LECTURE FOURTH.
THE MOSAIC VISION OF CREATION.
The history of creation is introduced into the "Paradise Lost" as a
piece of narrative, and forms one of the two great episodes of the poem.
Milton represents the common father of the race as "led on" by a desire
to know
"What within Eden or without was done
Before his memory;"
and straightway Raphael, "the affable archangel," in compliance with the
wish, enters into a description of the six days' work of the Divine
Creator,--a description in which, as Addison well remarks, "the whole
energy of our tongue is employed, and the several great scenes of
creation rise up to view, one after another, in such a manner, that the
reader seems present at this wonderful work, and to assist among the
choirs of angels who are spectators of it." In the other great episode
of the poem,--that in which the more prominent changes which were to
happen in after time upon the earth are made to pass before Adam, he is
represented as carried by Michael to the top of a great mountain, lofty
as that on which in a long posterior age the Tempter placed our Saviour,
and where the coming events are described as rising up in vision before
him. In the earlier episode, as in those of the Odyssey and Æneid, in
which heroes relate in the courts of princes the story of their
adventures, there is but narrative and description; in the later, a
series of magnificent pictures, that form and then dissolve before the
spectator, and comprise, in their vivid tints and pregnant outlines, the
future history of a world. And one of these two episodes,--that which
relates to the creation of all things,--must have as certainly had a
place in human history as in the master epic of England. Man would have
forever remained ignorant of many of those events related in the opening
chapters of Scripture, which took place ere there was a human eye to
witness, or a human memory to record, had he not been permitted, like
Adam of old, to hold intercourse with the intelligences that had
preceded him in creation, or with the great Creator himself, the Author
of them all; and the question has been asked of late, both in our own
country and on the Continent, What was the form and nature of the
revelation by which the pre-Adamic history of the earth and heavens was
originally conveyed to man? Was it conveyed, like the sublime story of
Raphael, as a piece of narrative, dictated, mayhap, to the inspired
penman, or miraculously borne in upon his mind? Or was it conveyed by a
succession of sublime visions like that which Michael is represented as
calling up before Adam, when, purging his "visual nerves with euphrasy
and rue," he enabled him to see, in a series of scenes, the history of
his offspring from the crime of Cain down to the destruction of the Old
World by a flood? The passages in which the history of creation is
recorded give no intimation whatever of their own history; and so we are
left to balance the probabilities regarding the mode and form in which
they were originally revealed, and to found our ultimate conclusions
respecting them on evidence, not direct, but circumstantial.
The Continental writers on this curious subject may be regarded as not
inadequately represented by Dr. J.H. Kurtz, Professor of Theology at
Dorpat,--one of the many ingenious biblical scholars of modern Germany.
We find him stating the question, in his _Bibel und Astronomie_ (second
edition, 1849), with great precision and clearness, but in a manner, so
far at least as the form of his thinking is concerned, strikingly
characteristic of what may be termed the theological fashion of his
country in the present day. "The source of all human history," he says,
"is _eye-witness_, be it that of the reporter, or of another whose
account has been handed down. Only what man has himself seen or
experienced can be the subject of man's historical compositions. So that
history, so far as man can write it, can begin with but the point at
which he has entered into conscious existence, and end with the moment
that constitutes the present time. Beyond these points, however, lies a
great province of historic development, existing on the one side as the
_Past_, on the other side as the _Future_. For when man begins to be an
observer or actor of history, he himself, and the whole circumstantials
of his condition, have already come historically into being. Nor does
the flow of development stop with what is his present. Millions of
influences are spinning the thread still on; but no one can tell what
the compound result of all their energies is to be. Both these sorts of
history, then, lie beyond the region of man's knowledge, which is shut
up in space and time, and can only call the present its own. It is God
alone who, standing beyond and above space and time, sees backwards and
forwards both the development which preceded the first _present_ of men,
and that which will succeed this our latest _present_. Whatever the
difference of the two kinds of history may be, they hold the same
position in relation both to the principle of the human ignorance and
the principle of the human knowledge. The principle of the ignorance is
man's condition as a creature; the principle of the knowledge is the
Divine knowledge; and the medium between ignorance and knowledge is
objectively Divine revelation, and subjectively prophetic vision by man,
in which he beholds with the eye of the mind what is shut and hid from
the eye of his body." From these premises Dr. Kurtz goes on to argue
that the pre-Adamic history of the past being _theologically_ in the
same category as the yet undeveloped history of the future, that record
of its leading events which occurs in the Mosaic narrative is simply
_prophecy_ described backwards; and that, coming under the prophetic
law, it ought of consequence to be subjected to the prophetic rule of
exposition. There are some very ingenious reasonings employed in
fortifying this point; and, after quoting from Eichhorn a passage to the
effect that the opening chapter in Genesis is much rather a creative
picture than a creative history, and from Ammon to the effect that the
author of it evidently takes the position of a beholder of creation, the
learned German concludes his general statement by remarking, that the
scenes of the chapter are prophetic tableaux, each containing a leading
phase of the drama of creation. "Before the eye of the seer," he says,
"scene after scene is unfolded, until at length, in the seven of them,
the course of creation, in its main _momenta_, has been fully
represented." The revelation has every characteristic of prophecy by
vision,--prophecy by eye-witnessing; and may be perhaps best understood
by regarding it simply as an exhibition of the actual phenomena of
creation presented to the mental eye of the prophet under the ordinary
laws of perspective, and truthfully described by him in the simple
language of his time.
In our own country a similar view has been taken by the author of a
singularly ingenious little work which issued about two years ago from
the press of Mr. Constable of Edinburgh, "The Mosaic Record in Harmony
with Geology."[17] The writer, however, exhibits, in dealing with his
subject, the characteristic sobriety of the Anglo-Saxon mind; and while
the leading features of his theory agree essentially with those of the
Continental one, he does not press it so far. In canvassing the _form_
of the revelation made to Moses in the opening of Genesis, he discusses
the nature of the inspiration enjoyed by that great prophet; and thus
retranslates literally from the Hebrew the passage in which the Divine
Being is himself introduced as speaking direct on the point in the
controversy raised by Aaron and Miriam. "And He [the Lord] said, hear
now my words: If he [Moses] were _your_ prophet [subordinate, or at
least not superior, to the prophetess and the high priest], I, Jehovah,
in the vision to him would make myself known: in the dream would I speak
to him. Not so _my_ servant Moses [God's prophet, not theirs]; in all my
house faithful is he. Mouth to mouth do I speak to him, and vision, but
not in dark speeches; and likeness of Jehovah he beholds." Moses, then,
was favored with "visions without dark speeches."
Now, as implied in the passage thus retranslated, there is a grand
distinction between symbolic and therefore _dark_ visions, and visions
not symbolic nor dark. Visions addressed, as the word indicates, to the
eye, may be obviously of a twofold character,--they may be either darker
than words, or a great deal clearer than words. The vision, for
instance, of future monarchies which Daniel saw symbolized under the
form of monstrous animals had to be explained in words; the vision of
Peter, which led to the general admission of the Gentiles into the
Christian Church, had also virtually to be explained in words; they were
both visions of the dark class; and revelation abounds in such. But
there were also visions greatly clearer than words. Such, for instance,
was the vision of the secret chamber of imagery, with its seventy men of
the ancients of Israel given over to idolatry, which was seen by the
prophet as he sat in his own house; and the vision of the worshippers of
the sun in the inner court of the temple, witnessed from what was
_naturally_ the same impossible point of view; with the vision of the
Jewish women in the western gate "weeping for Thammuz," when, according
to Milton's noble version,
"The love tale
Infected Sion's daughters with like heat,
Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch
Ezekiel saw, when, by the vision led,
His eye surveyed the dark idolatries
Of alienated Judah."
Here, then, were there visions of scenes actually taking place at the
time, which, greatly clearer than any merely verbal description,
substituted the seeing of the eye for the hearing of the ear. And
visions of this latter kind were enjoyed, argues the writer of this
ingenious treatise, by the prophet Moses.
One of the cases adduced may be best given in the author's own words.
"Moses," he says, "received directions from God how to proceed in
constructing the Tabernacle and its sacred furniture; and David also was
instructed how the Temple of Solomon should be built. Let us hear
Scripture regarding the nature of the directions given to these men:--
'According unto the _appearance_ [literally sight, vision] which the
Lord had showed unto Moses, so he made the _candlestick_.'--(Num. 5:4.)
'The whole in _writing_, by the hand of Jehovah upon me, he taught; the
whole works of the pattern.'--(1 Chron. 28:19.)
"There was thus a writing in the case of David; a sight or vision of the
thing to be made in that of Moses."
So far the author of the Treatise. He might have added further, that
from the nature of things, the revelation to Moses in this instance
_must_ have been "sight or vision," if, indeed, what is not in the least
likely, the peculiar architecture and style of ornament used in the
Tabernacle was not a borrowed style, already employed in the service of
idolatry. An old, long established architecture can be adequately
described by speech or writing; a new, original architecture can be
adequately described only by pattern or model, that is, by sight or
vision. Any intelligent cutter in stone or carver in wood could furnish
to order, though the order were merely a verbal one, a Corinthian or
Ionic capital; but no such mechanic, however skilful or ingenious, could
furnish to order, if unprovided with a pattern or drawing, a _facsimile_
of one of the ornately sculptured capitals of Gloucester Cathedral or
York Minster. To ensure a _facsimile_ in any such case, the originals,
or representations of them, would require to be submitted to the
eye,--not merely described to the ear. Nay, from the example given in
the text,--that of the golden candlestick,--we have an instance
furnished in recent times of the utter inadequacy of mere description
for the purposes of the sculptor or artist. Ever since copperplate
engravings and illustrated Bibles became comparatively common,
representations of the branched candlestick taken from the written
description have been common also. The candlestick on the arch of Titus,
though not deemed an exact representation of the original one described
in the Pentateuch, is now regarded,--correctly, it cannot be
doubted,--as at least the nearest approximation to it extant. Public
attention was first drawn to this interesting piece of sculpture in
comparatively modern times; and it was then found that all the previous
representations taken from the written description were widely
erroneous. They only served to show, not the true outlines of the golden
candlestick, but merely that inadequacy of verbal description for
artistic purposes which must have rendered _vision_, or, in other words,
optical representation, imperative in the case of Moses. Some of our
most sober minded commentators take virtually the same view of this
necessity of vision for ensuring the production of the true pattern of
the Tabernacle. "The Lord," says Thomas Scott, "not only directed Moses
by words how to build the Tabernacle and form its sacred furniture, but
showed him a model exactly representing the form of every part, and the
proportion of each to all the rest." There must have been clear optical
vision in the case,--"vision without dark speeches." Such, too, was the
character of other of the Mosaic visions, besides that of the "pattern"
seen in the Mount. The burning bush, for instance, was a vision
addressed to the eye; and seemed to come so palpably under the ordinary
optical laws, that the prophet _drew near_ to examine the extraordinary
phenomena which it exhibited.
The visual or optical character of _some_ of the revelations made to
Moses thus established, the writer goes on to inquire whether that
special revelation which exhibits the generations of the heavens and
earth in their order was not a visual revelation also. "Were the words
that Moses wrote," he asks, "merely impressed upon his mind? Did he hold
the pen, and another dictate? Or did he see in vision the scenes that he
describes? The freshness and point of the narrative," he continues, "the
freedom of the description, and the unlikelihood that Moses was an
unthinking machine in the composition, all indicate that he saw in
vision what he has here given us in writing. _He is describing from
actual observation._" The writer remarks in an earlier portion of his
treatise, that all who have adopted the theory advocated in the previous
lecture,--the "Two Records," which was, I may state, published in a
separate form, ere the appearance of his work, and which he does me the
honor of largely quoting,--go upon the supposition that things during
the Mosaic days are described as they would appear to the eye of one
placed upon earth; and he argues that, as no man existed in those
distant ages, a reason must be assigned for this _popular_ view of
creation which the record is rightly assumed to take. And certainly, if
it was in reality a view described from actual vision, the fact would
form of itself an adequate reason. What man had actually seen, though
but in dream or picture, would of course be described _as seen by man_:
like all human history, it would, to borrow from Kurtz, be founded on
eye-witnessing; and the fact that the Mosaic record of creation is
_apparently_ thus founded, affords a strong presumption that it was in
reality revealed, not by dictation, but by vision.
Nor, be it remembered, has the recognition of a purely _optical_
character in the revelation been restricted to the assertion of any one
theory of reconciliation. It was as certainly held by Chalmers and Dr.
Pye Smith, as by Dr. Kurtz and the author of this treatise; nay, it has
been recognized by not a few of their opponents also. Granville Penn,
for instance, does not scruple to avow his belief, in his elaborate
"Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaic Geologies," that both sun and moon
were created on the first day of creation, though they did not become
"_optically_ visible" until the fourth. "In truth, that the fourth day
only rendered visible the sidereal creation of the first day, is
manifested," he says, "by collating the transactions of the two days. On
the first day, we are told generally, 'God divided the light, or day,
and the darkness, or night;' but the physical agents which he employed
for that division are not there declared. On the fourth day, we are told
referentially, 'God commanded the lights [or luminaries] for dividing
day and night, to give their light upon earth.' Here, then, it is
evident from the retrospective implication of the latter description,
that the lights or luminaries for dividing day and night, which were to
give their light upon the earth for the first time on the fourth day,
were the unexpressed physical agents by which God divided the day and
night on the first day." Now, whatever may be thought of Mr. Penn's
argument here, there can be no doubt that it demonstrates at least his
own belief in the purely optical character of the Mosaic account of the
sidereal creation. It is an account, he held, not of what God wrought on
the first day in the heavens, but of what a human eye would have seen on
the fourth day from the earth. And Moses Stuart, in his philological
assault on the geologists, is scarce less explicit in his avowal of a
similar belief. "Every one sees," he says, "that to speak of the sun as
rising and setting, is to describe, in common parlance, what appears
_optically_, that is, to our sensible view, as reality. But the history
of creation is a different affair. In ONE RESPECT, indeed, there is a
resemblance. _The historian everywhere speaks as an optical observer
stationed on a point of our world, and surveying from this the heavens
and the earth, and speaking of them as seen in this manner by his bodily
eye._ The sun, and moon, and stars, are servants of the earth, lighted
up to garnish and to cheer it, and to be the guardians of its times and
seasons. Other uses he knows not for them: certainly of other uses he
does not speak. The distances, magnitudes, orbicular motions,
gravitating powers, and projectile forces of the planets and of the
stars, are all out of the circle of his history, and probably beyond his
knowledge. Inspiration does not make men _omniscient_. It does not teach
them the scientific truths of astronomy, or chemistry, or botany, nor
any science as such. Inspiration is concerned with teaching _religious_
truths, and such facts or occurrences as are connected immediately with
illustrating, or with impressing them on the mind." Thus far Dr. Stuart
and Mr. Penn,--men whose evidence on this special head must be
sufficient to show that it is not merely geologists who have recognized
an _optical_ or _visual_ character in the Mosaic history of creation.
And certainly the inference deduced from the admitted _fact_, that is,
the inference that the optical description must have been founded on a
revelation addressed to the eye,--a revelation by vision,--does seem a
fair and legitimate one. The revelation must have been either a
revelation in words or ideas, or a revelation of scenes and events
pictorially exhibited. Failing, however, to record its own history, it
leaves the student equally at liberty, so far as _external_ evidence is
concerned, to take up either view; while, so far as _internal_ evidence
goes, the presumption seems all in favor of revelation by vision; for,
while no reason can be assigned why, in a revelation by word or idea,
appearances which took place ere there existed a human eye should be
_optically_ described, nothing can be more natural or obvious than that
they should be so described, had they been revealed by vision as a piece
of _eye-witnessing_. It seems, then, at least eminently probable that
such was the mode or form of the revelation in this case, and that he
who saw by vision on the Mount the pattern of the Tabernacle and its
sacred furniture, and in the Wilderness of Horeb the bush burning but
not consumed,--types and symbols of the coming dispensation and of its
Divine Author,--saw also by vision the _pattern_ of those successive
pre-Adamic creations, animal and vegetable, through which our world was
fitted up as a place of human habitation. The _reason_ why the drama of
creation has been _optically_ described seems to be, that it was in
reality _visionally_ revealed.
A further question still remains: _If_ the revelation was by vision,
that circumstance affords of itself a satisfactory reason why the
description should be _optical_; and, on the other hand, since the
description is decidedly _optical_, the presumption is of course strong
that the revelation was by vision. But why, it may be asked, by vision?
Can the presumption be yet further strengthened by showing that this
visual mode or form was preferable to any other? Can there be a reason,
in fine, assigned _for_ the _reason_,--for that revelation by vision
which accounts for the optical character of the description? The
question is a difficult one; but I think there can. There seems to be a
peculiar fitness in a revelation made by vision, for conveying an
account of creation to various tribes and peoples of various degrees of
acquirement, and throughout a long course of ages in which the knowledge
of the heavenly bodies or of the earth's history, that is, the sciences
of astronomy and geology, did not at first exist, but in which
ultimately they came to be studied and known. We must recognize such a
mode as equally fitted for the earlier and the more modern times,--for
the ages anterior to the rise of science, and the ages posterior to its
rise. The prophet, by describing what he had actually seen in language
fitted to the ideas of his time, would shock no previously existing
prejudice that had been founded on the apparent evidence of the senses;
he could as safely describe the moon as the second great light of
creation, as he could the sun as its first great light, and both, too,
as equally subordinate to the planet which we inhabit. On the other
hand, an enlightened age, when it had come to discover this key to the
description, would find it _optically_ true in all its details. But how
differently would not a revelation have fared, in at least the earlier
time, that was strictly scientific in its details,--a revelation, for
instance, of the great truth demonstrated by Galileo, that the sun rests
in the centre of the heavens, while the apparently immoveable earth
sweeps with giddy velocity around it; or of the great truth demonstrated
by Newton, that our ponderous planet is kept from falling off into empty
space by the operation of the same law that impels a descending pebble
towards the ground! A great miracle wrought in proof of the truth of the
revelation might serve to enforce the belief of it on the generation to
whom it had been given; but the generations that followed, to whom the
miracle would exist as a piece of mere testimony, would credit, in
preference, the apparently surer evidence of their senses, and become
unbelievers. They would act, all unwittingly, on the principle of Hume's
famous argument, and prefer to rest rather on their own _experience_ of
the great phenomena of nature, than on the doubtful testimony of their
ancestors, reduced in the lapse of ages to a dim, attenuated tradition.
Nor would a geological revelation have fared better, in at least those
periods intermediate between the darker and more scientific ages, in
which ingenious men, somewhat skeptical in their leanings, cultivate
literature, and look down rather superciliously on the ignorance and
barbarism of the past. What would skeptics such as Hobbes and Hume have
said of an opening chapter in Genesis that would describe successive
periods,--first of molluscs, star-lilies, and crustaceans, next of
fishes, next of reptiles and birds, then of mammals, and finally of man;
and that would minutely portray a period in which there were lizards
bulkier than elephants, reptilian whales furnished with necks slim and
long as the bodies of great snakes, and flying dragons, whose spread of
wing greatly more than doubled that of the largest bird? The world would
assuredly not receive such a revelation. Nor, further, have scientific
facts or principles been revealed to man which he has been furnished
with the ability of observing or discovering for himself. It is
according to the economy of revelation, that the truths which it
exhibits should be of a kind which, lying beyond the reach of his ken,
he himself could never have elicited. From every view of the case, then,
a prophetic exhibition of the pre-Adamic scenes and events by vision
seems to be the one best suited for the opening chapters of a revelation
vouchsafed for the accomplishment of moral, not scientific purposes, and
at once destined to be contemporary with every stage of civilization,
and to address itself to minds of every various calibre, and every
different degree of enlightenment.
The statement of Dr. Kurtz, that as vision of pre-Adamic history comes
under the same laws as vision of history still future, it ought
therefore to be read by the same rules, craves reflection. "Since the
source of knowledge for both kinds of history," we find him saying, "and
not only the source, but the means, and manner, and way of coming to
know, is the same, viz., the _eye-witness_ of the prophet's mental eye,
it follows that the historical representation which he who thus comes to
know, _projects_ [or portrays], in virtue of this eye-witnessing of his,
holds the same relation to the reality in both the cases we speak of,
and must be subjected to the same laws of exposition. We thus get this
very important rule of interpretation, viz., that the representations of
pre-human events, which rest upon revelation, are to be handled from the
same point of view, and expounded by the same laws, as the prophecies
and representations of future times and events, which also rest upon
revelation. This, then, is the only proper point of view for scientific
exposition of the Mosaic history of creation; that is to say, if we
acknowledge that it proceeded from Divine revelation, not from
philosophic speculation or experimental investigation, or from the ideas
of reflecting men." There is certainly food for thought in this striking
and original view; and there is at least one simple rule of prophetic
exposition which may be applied to the pre-Adamic history, in accordance
with the principle which it suggests. After all that a scientific
theology has done for the right interpretation of prophecy, we find the
prediction always best read by the light of its accomplishment. The
event which it foretold forms its true key; and when this key is
wanting, all is uncertainty. The past is comparatively clear. The
hieroglyphic forms which crowd the anterior portions of the prophetic
tablet are found wonderfully to harmonize (men such as the profound
Newton being the judges) with those great historic events, already
become matter of history, which they foreshadowed and symbolized; but,
on the other hand, the hieroglyphics which occupy the tablet's
posterior portion,--the hieroglyphics that symbolize events still
future,--are invincibly difficult and inexplicable. I have read several
works on prophecy produced in the last age, in which the writers were
bold enough to quit the clue with which history furnishes the student of
fulfilled prophecy, and, with the prophecies yet unfulfilled as their
guide, to plunge into a troubled sea of speculation regarding the
history of the future. And I have found that in every instance they were
deplorably at fault regarding even the events that were nearest at hand
at the time. History is thus the surest interpreter of the revealed
prophecies which referred to events _posterior_ to the times of the
prophet. In what shall we find the surest interpretation of the revealed
_prophecies_ that referred to events _anterior_ to his time? In what
light, or on what principle, shall we most correctly read the prophetic
drama of creation? In the light, I reply, of scientific discovery,--on
the principle that the clear and certain must be accepted, when
attainable, as the proper exponents of the doubtful and obscure. What
fully developed history is to the prophecy which of old looked forwards,
fully developed science is to the prophecy which of old looked
backwards. Scarce any one will question whether that portion of the
creation drama which deals with the heavenly bodies ought to be read in
the light of established astronomic discovery or no; for, save by
perhaps a few of Father Cullen's monks, who can still hold that the sun
moves round the earth, and is only six feet in diameter, all theologians
have now received the astronomic doctrines, and know that they rest upon
a basis at least as certain as any of the historic events symbolized in
fulfilled prophecy. And were we to challenge for the established
geologic doctrines a similar place and position with respect to those
portions of the drama which deal with the two great kingdoms of nature,
plant and animal, we might safely do so in the belief that the claim
will be one day as universally recognized as the astronomic one is now.
On this principle there may, of course, be portions of the _prophetic_
pre-Adamic past of as doubtful interpretation at the present time, from
the imperfect development of physical science, as is any portion of the
prophetic future from the imperfect development of historic events. The
science necessary to the interpretation of the one may be as certainly
still to discover as the events necessary to the interpretation of the
other may be still to take place. Three centuries have not yet passed
since astronomic science was sufficiently developed to form a true key
to the various notices of the heavenly bodies which occur in Scripture;
among the others, to the notice of their final appearance on the
_fourth_ day of creation. Little more than half a century has yet passed
since geologic science was sufficiently developed to influence the
interpretation given of the three _other_ days' work. And respecting the
work of at least the first and second days, more especially that of the
second, we can still but vaguely guess. The science necessary to the
right understanding of these portions of the prophetic record has still,
it would seem, to be developed, if, indeed, it be destined at all to
exist; and at present we can indulge in but doubtful surmises regarding
them. What may be termed the three _geologic_ days,--the third, fifth,
and sixth,--may be held to have extended over those Carboniferous
periods during which the great plants were created,--over those Oolitic
and Cretacious periods during which the great sea monsters and birds
were created,--and over those Tertiary periods during which the great
terrestrial mammals were created. For the intervening or fourth day we
have that wide space represented by the Permian and Triassic periods,
which, less conspicuous in their floras than the period that went
immediately before, and less conspicuous in their faunas than the
periods that came immediately after, were marked by the decline, and
ultimate extinction, of the Palæozoic forms, and the first partially
developed beginnings of the Secondary ones. And for the first and second
days there remain the great Azoic period, during which the immensely
developed gneisses, mica schists, and primary clay slates, were
deposited, and the two extended periods represented by the Silurian and
Old Red Sandstone systems. These, taken together, exhaust the geologic
scale, and may be named in their order as, _first_, the Azoic day or
period; _second_, the Silurian and Old Red Sandstone day or period;
_third_, the Carboniferous day or period; _fourth_, the Permian and
Triassic day or period; _fifth_, the Oolitic and Cretaceous day or
period; and _sixth_, the Tertiary day or period. Let us attempt
conceiving how they might have appeared pictorially, if revealed in a
series of visions to Moses, as the successive scenes of a great
air-drawn panorama.
During the Azoic period, ere life appears to have begun on our planet,
the temperature of the earth's crust seems to have been so high, that
the strata, at first deposited apparently in water, passed into a
semi-fluid state, became strangely waved and contorted, and assumed in
its composition a highly crystalline character. Such is peculiarly the
case with the fundamental or gneiss deposits of the period. In the
overlying mica schist there is still much of contortion and disturbance;
whereas the clay slate, which lies over all, gives evidence, in its more
mechanical texture, and the regularity of its strata, that a gradual
refrigeration of the general mass had been taking place, and that the
close of the Azoic period was comparatively quiet and cool. Let us
suppose that during the earlier part of this period of excessive heat
the waters of the ocean had stood at the boiling point even at the
surface, and much higher in the profounder depths, and further, that
the half-molten crust of the earth, stretched out over a molten abyss,
was so thin that it could not support, save for a short time, after some
convulsion, even a small island above the sea level. What, in such
circumstances, would be the aspect of the scene, optically exhibited
from some point in space elevated a few hundred yards over the sea? It
would be simply a blank, in which the intensest glow of fire would fail
to be seen at a few yards' distance. An inconsiderable escape of steam
from the safety-valve of a railway engine forms so thick a screen, that,
as it lingers for a moment, in the passing, opposite the carriage
windows, the passengers fail to discern through it the landscape beyond.
A continuous stratum of steam, then, that attained to the height of even
our present atmosphere, would wrap up the earth in a darkness gross and
palpable as that of Egypt of old,--a darkness through which even a
single ray of light would fail to penetrate. And beneath this thick
canopy the unseen deep would literally "boil as a pot," wildly tempested
from below; while from time to time more deeply seated convulsion would
upheave sudden to the surface vast tracts of semi-molten rock, soon
again to disappear, and from which waves of bulk enormous would roll
outwards, to meet in wild conflict with the giant waves of other
convulsions, or return to hiss and sputter against the intensely heated
and fast foundering mass, whose violent upheaval had first elevated and
sent them abroad. Such would be the probable state of things during the
times of the earlier gneiss and mica schist deposits,--times buried deep
in that chaotic night or "evening" which must have continued to exist
for mayhap many ages after that beginning of things in which God created
the heavens and the earth, and which preceded the first day. To a human
eye stationed within the cloud, all, as I have said, must have been
thick darkness: to eyes Divine, that could have looked through the
enveloping haze, the appearance would have been that described by
Milton, as seen by angel and archangel at the beginning of creation,
when from the gates of heaven they looked down upon chaos:--
"On heavenly ground they stood, and from the shore
They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss,
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious _heat_
And surging waves, as mountains to assault
Heaven's height, and with the centre mix the pole."
At length, however, as the earth's surface gradually cooled down, and
the enveloping waters sunk to a lower temperature,--let us suppose,
during the latter times of the mica schist, and the earlier times of the
clay slate,--the steam atmosphere would become less dense and thick, and
at length the rays of the sun would struggle through, at first
doubtfully and diffused, forming a faint twilight, but gradually
strengthening as the latter ages of the slate formation passed away,
until, at the close of the great primary period, day and night,--the one
still dim and gray, the other wrapped in a pall of thickest
darkness,--would succeed each other as now, as the earth revolved on its
axis, and the unseen luminary rose high over the cloud in the east, or
sunk in the west beneath the undefined and murky horizon. And here again
the _optical_ appearance would be exactly that described by Milton:--
"'Let there be light,' said God, and forthwith light
Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure,
Sprung from the deep, and from her native east
To journey through the airy gloom began,
Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sun
Was not: she in a cloudy tabernacle
Sojourned the while. God saw the light was good,
And light from darkness by the hemisphere
Divided: light the day, and darkness night,
He named. This was the first day, even and morn."
The second day's work has been interpreted variously, according to the
generally received science of the times of the various commentators who
have dealt with it. Even in Milton, though the great poet rejected the
earlier idea of a solid firmament, we find prominence given to that of a
vast hollow sphere of "circumfluous waters," which, by encircling the
atmosphere, kept aloof the "fierce extremes of chaos." Later
commentators, such as the late Drs. Kitto and Pye Smith, hold that the
Scriptural analogue of the _firmament_ here--by the way, a Greek, not a
Hebrew idea, first introduced into the Septuagint--was in reality simply
the atmosphere with its clouds. "The historian" [Moses], says Dr. Kitto,
"speaks as things would have appeared to a spectator at the time of the
creation. A portion of the heavy watery vapor had flown into the upper
regions, and rested there in dense clouds, which still obscured the sun;
while below, the whole earth was covered with water. Thus we see the
propriety with which the firmament is said to have divided the waters
from the waters." It is certainly probable that in a vision of creation
the atmospheric phenomena of the second great act of the creation drama
might have stood out with much greater prominence to the prophetic eye
placed in the circumstances of a natural one, than any of its other
appearances. The invertebrate life of the Silurian period, or even the
ichthyic life of the earlier Old Bed Sandstone period, must have been
comparatively inconspicuous from any sub-ærial point of view elevated
but a few hundred feet over the sea level. Even the few islets of the
latter ages of the period, with their ferns, lepidodendra, and
coniferous trees, forming, as they did, an exceptional feature in these
ages of vast oceans, and of organisms all but exclusively marine, may
have well been excluded from a representative diorama that exhibited
optically the grand characteristics of the time. Further, it seems
equally probable that the introduction of organized existence on our
planet was preceded by a change in the atmospheric conditions which had
obtained during the previous period, in which the earth had been a
desert and empty void. We know that just before the close of the
Silurian ages terrestrial plants had appeared, and that before the close
of the Old Red Sandstone ages, air-breathing animals had been produced;
and infer that the atmosphere in which both could have existed must have
been considerably different from that which lay dark and heavy over the
bare hot rocks, and tenantless, steam-emitting seas, of the previous
time. Under a gray, opaque sky, in which neither sun nor moon appear, we
are not unfrequently presented with a varied drapery of clouds,--a
drapery varied in form, though not in color: bank often seems piled over
bank, shaded beneath and lighter above; or the whole breaks into dappled
cloudlets, which bear--to borrow from the poetic description of
Bloomfield--the "beauteous semblance of a flock at rest." And if such
ærial draperies appeared in this early period, with the clear space
between them and the earth which we so often see in gray, sunless days,
the optical aspect must have been widely different from that of the
previous time, in which a dense vaporous fog lay heavy upon rock and
sea, and extended from the earth's surface to the upper heights of the
atmosphere.
The third day's vision seems to be more purely geological in its
character than either of the previous two. Extensive tracts of dry land
appear, and there springs up over them, at the Divine command, a rank
vegetation. And we know that what seems to be the corresponding
Carboniferous period, unlike any of the preceding ones, was remarkable
for its great tracts of terrestrial surface, and for its extraordinary
flora. For the first time dry land, and organized bodies at once bulky
enough, and exhibited in a medium clear enough, to render them
conspicuous objects in a distant prospect, appear in the Mosaic drama;
and we still find at once evidence of the existence of extensive though
apparently very flat lands, and the remains of a wonderfully gigantic
and abundant vegetation, in what appear to be the rocks of this period.
The vision of the fourth day, like that of the second, pertained not to
the earth, but to the _heavens_; the sun, moon, and stars become
visible, and form the sole subjects of the prophetic description. And
just as, during the second period, the earth would in all probability
have failed to furnish any feature of mark enough to divert a human eye
placed on a commanding station from the conspicuous _atmospheric_
phenomena of the time, so it seems equally probable that during this
fourth period it would have failed to furnish any feature of mark enough
to divert a human eye from the still more conspicuous _celestial_
phenomena of the time. As has been already incidentally remarked, the
Permian and Triassic periods were "epochs"--to employ the language of
the late Professor Edward Forbes--"of great poverty of production of
generic types." On the other hand, the appearance for the first time of
sun, moon, and stars, must have formed a scene well suited to divert the
attention of the seer from every other. Nor (as has been somewhat rashly
argued by Dr. Kitto and several others) does it seem irrational to hold
that three very extended _periods_ should have elapsed ere the sidereal
heavens became visible on earth. Addison's popular illustration, drawn
from one of the calculations of Newton, made in an age when comets were
believed to be solid bodies, rendered the reading public familiar,
considerably more than a century ago, with the vast time which large
bodies greatly heated would take in cooling. "According to Sir Isaac
Newton's calculation," said the exquisitely classical essayist, "the
comet that made its appearance in 1680 imbibed so much heat by its
approaches to the sun, that it would have been two thousand times hotter
than red hot iron had it been a globe of that metal; and that, supposing
it as big as the earth, and at the same distance from the sun, it would
be fifty thousand years in cooling before it recovered its natural
temper." Such was an estimate of the philosopher, that excited no little
wonder in the days of our great grandfathers, for the vast time which it
demanded; and, now that the data on which such a calculation ought to be
founded are better known than in the age of Newton, yet more time would
be required still. It is now ascertained, from the circumstance that no
dew is deposited in our summer evenings save under a clear sky, that
even a thin covering of cloud,--serving as a robe to keep the earth
warm,--prevents the surface heat of the planet from radiating into the
spaces beyond. And such a cloud, thick and continuous, as must have
wrapped round the earth as with a mantle during the earlier geologic
periods, must have served to retard for many ages the radiation, and
consequently the reduction, of that internal heat of which it was itself
a consequence. Further, the rocks and soils that form the surface of our
globe would be much more indifferent conductors of heat than the iron
superficies of Newton's ball, and would serve yet more to lengthen out
the cooling process. Nor would a planet covered over for ages with a
thick screen of vapor be a novelty even yet in the universe. It is
doubtful whether astronomers have ever yet looked on the face of
Mercury: it is at least very generally held that hitherto only his
clouds have been seen. Even Jupiter, though it is thought his mountains
have been occasionally detected raising their peaks through openings in
his cloudy atmosphere, is known chiefly by the dark shifting bands that,
streaking his surface in the line of his trade winds, belong not to his
body, but to his thick dark covering. It is questionable whether a human
eye on the surface of Mercury would ever behold the sun, notwithstanding
his near proximity; nor would he be often visible, if at all, from the
surface of Jupiter. Nor, yet further, would a warm steaming atmosphere
muffled in clouds have been unfavorable to a rank, flowerless vegetation
like that of the Coal Measures. There are moist, mild, cloudy days of
spring and early Summer that rejoice the heart of the farmer, for he
knows how conducive they are to the young growth on his fields. The Coal
Measure climate would have consisted of an unbroken series of these,
with mayhap a little more of cloud and moisture, and a great deal more
of heat. The earth would have been a vast greenhouse covered with smoked
glass; and a vigorous though mayhap loosely knit and faintly colored
vegetation would have luxuriated under its shade.
The fifth and sixth days,--that of winged fowl and great sea monsters,
and that of cattle and beasts of the earth,--I must regard as adequately
represented by those Secondary ages, Oolitic and Cretaceous, during
which birds were introduced, and reptiles received their greatest
development, and those Tertiary ages during which the gigantic mammals
possessed the earth and occupied the largest space in creation. To the
close of this latter period,--the evening of the sixth day,--man
belongs,--at once the last created of terrestrial creatures, and
infinitely beyond comparison the most elevated in the scale; and with
man's appearance on the scene the days of creation end, and the Divine
Sabbath begins,--that Sabbath of rest from creative labor of which the
proper work is the moral development and elevation of the species, and
which will terminate only with the full completion of that sublime task
on the full accomplishment of which God's eternal purposes and the
tendencies of man's progressive nature seem alike directed. Now, I am
greatly mistaken if we have not in the six geologic periods all the
elements, without misplacement or exaggeration, of the Mosaic drama of
creation.
I have referred in my brief survey to extended periods. It is probable,
however, that the prophetic vision of creation, if such was its
character, consisted of only single representative scenes, embracing
each but a point of time; it was, let us suppose, a diorama, over whose
shifting pictures the curtain rose and fell six times in
succession,--once during the Azoic period, once during the earlier or
middle Palæozoic period, once during the Carboniferous period, once
during the Permian or Triassic period, once during the Oolitic or
Cretaceous period, and finally, once during the Tertiary period. Dr.
Kurtz holds, taking the Sabbath into the series, that the division into
_seven_ scenes or stages may have been regulated with reference to the
importance and sacredness of the mythic number seven,--the symbol of
completeness or perfection; but the suggestion will perhaps not now
carry much weight among the theologians of Britain, whatever it might
have done two centuries ago. It is true, that creation _might_ have been
exhibited, not by seven, but by seven hundred, or even by seven thousand
scenes; and that the accomplished man of science, skilled in every
branch of physics, might have found something distinct in them all. But
not the less do the seven, or rather the six, exhibited scenes appear to
be not symbolic or mystical, at least not exclusively symbolic or
mystical, but truly representative of successive periods, strongly
distinctive in their character, and capable, with the three geologic
days as given points in the problem, of being treated geologically.
Another of the questions raised, both by the German doctor and the
writer in our own country, must be recognized as eminently suggestive.
"We treat the history of creation," says Dr. Kurtz, "with its six days'
work, as a connected series of so many prophetic visions. The appearance
and evanishing of each such vision seem to the seer as a morning and an
evening, apparently because these were presented to him as an increase
and decrease of light, like morning and evening twilight." And we find
the Scottish writer taking essentially the same view. "Each day
contains," he says, "the description of what he [Moses] beheld in a
single vision, and when it faded it was twilight. There is nothing
forced in supposing that, after the vision had for a time illumined the
fancy of the seer, it was withdrawn from his eyes, in the same way that
the landscape becomes dim on the approach of evening.... From this point
of view, a 'day' can only mean the period during which the Divinely
enlightened fancy of the seer was active. When all continued bright and
manifest before his entranced but still conscious soul, it was 'day' or
'light.' When the dimness of departing enlightenment fell upon the
scene, it was the evening twilight." The _days_, then, are removed, we
find, by the holders of this view, altogether from the province of
chronology to the province of prophetic vision; they are represented
simply as parts of the exhibited scenery, or rather as forming the
measures of the apparent time during which the scenery _was_ exhibited.
We must also hold, however, that in the character of symbolic days they
were as truly representative of the lapse of foregone periods of
creation as the scenery itself was representative of the creative work
accomplished in these periods. For if the apparent days occurred in only
the vision, and were not symbolic of foregone periods, they could not
have been transferred with any logical propriety from the vision itself
to that which the vision represented, as we find done in what our
Shorter Catechism terms "the reason annexed to the Fourth
Commandment."[18] The days must have been prophetic days, introduced,
indeed, into the panorama of creation as mayhap mere openings and
droppings of the curtain, but not the less symbolic of that series of
successive periods, each characterized by its own productions and
events, in which creation itself was comprised. Nothing more probable,
however, than that even Moses himself may have been unacquainted with
the _extent_ of the periods represented in the vision; nay, he may have
been equally unconscious of the actual extent of the seeming days by
which they were symbolized. "Visions without dark speeches,"--visions,
not of symbolic apparitions, but of actual existences and events, past
or present,--may, nay must, have differed from what may be termed the
dark hieroglyphic visions; but we find in all visions an element of mere
representative value introduced when they deal with time, and that they
occur as if wholly outside its pale. These creation "days" seem, in
relation to what they typify, to have been, if I may so express myself,
the mere _modules_ of a graduated scale.
Such a description of the creative vision of Moses as the one given by
Milton of that vision of the future, which he represents as conjured up
before Adam by the archangel, would be a task rather for the scientific
poet than for the mere practical geologist or sober theologian. Let us
suppose that it took place far from man, in an untrodden recess of the
Midian desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush had been
vouchsafed; and that, as in the vision of St. John in Patmos, voices
were mingled with scenes, and the ear as certainly addressed as the eye.
A "great darkness" first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an
earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the "horror;" and, as the
Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildly troubled waters, as a
visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is
orally enunciated, that "in the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth." Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision into a few brief
moments, pass away; the creative voice is again heard, "Let there be
light," and straightway a gray diffused light springs up in the east,
and, casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming,
vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the west. One heavy,
sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint light waxes
fainter,--it sinks beneath the dim, undefined horizon; the first scene
of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits awhile on his hill-top in
darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless
night.
The light again brightens,--it is day; and over an expanse of ocean
without visible bound the horizon has become wider and sharper of
outline than before. There is life in that great sea,--invertebrate,
mayhap also ichthyic, life; but, from the comparative distance of the
point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves
can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a
gentle gale; and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change
which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. That lower stratum of
the heavens occupied in the previous vision by seething steam, or gray,
smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region,
where the previously invisible vapor of the tepid sea has thickened in
the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the
atmosphere they lie, thick and manifold,--an upper sea of great waves,
separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament, and, like
them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty advance has
taken place in creation; but its most conspicuous optical sign is the
existence of a transparent atmosphere,--of a firmament, stretched out
over the earth, that separates the waters above from the waters below.
But darkness descends for the third time upon the seer, for the evening
and the morning have completed the second day.
Yet again the light rises under a canopy of cloud; but the scene has
changed, and there is no longer an unbroken expanse of sea. The white
surf breaks, at the distant horizon, on an insulated reef, formed mayhap
by the Silurian or Old Red coral zoophytes ages before, during the
bygone yesterday; and beats in long lines of foam, nearer at hand,
against a low, winding shore, the seaward barrier of a widely spread
country. For at the Divine command the land has arisen from the
deep,--not inconspicuously and in scattered islets, as at an earlier
time, but in extensive though flat and marshy continents, little raised
over the sea level; and a yet further fiat has covered them with the
great carboniferous flora. The scene is one of mighty forests of
cone-bearing trees,--of palms, and tree-ferns, and gigantic club mosses,
on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clustering by the sides of
quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. There is deep gloom in the recesses
of the thicker woods, and low thick mists creep along the dank marsh or
sluggish stream. But there is a general lightening of the sky over head;
as the day declines, a redder flush than had hitherto lighted up the
prospect falls athwart fern covered bank and long withdrawing glade. And
while the fourth evening has fallen on the prophet, he becomes sensible,
as it wears on, and the fourth dawn approaches, that yet another change
has taken place. The Creator has spoken, and the stars look out from
openings of deep unclouded blue; and as day rises, and the planet of
morning pales in the east, the broken cloudlets are transmuted from
bronze into gold, and anon the gold becomes fire, and at length the
glorious sun arises out of the sea, and enters on his course rejoicing.
It is a brilliant day; the waves, of a deeper and softer blue than
before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with little else to
attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of brighter green; and as the sun
declines amid even richer glories than those which had encircled his
rising, the moon appears full orbed in the east,--to the human eye the
second great luminary of the heavens,--and climbs slowly to the zenith
as night advances, shedding its mild radiance on land and sea.
Again the day breaks; the prospect consists, as before, of land and
ocean. There are great pine woods, reed-covered swamps, wide plains,
winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines over all. But
the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked
before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far into the water
in quest of their ichthyic food; while birds of lesser size float upon
the lakes, or scream discordant in hovering flocks, thick as insects in
the calm of a summer evening, over the narrower seas, or brighten with
the sunlit gleam of their wings the thick woods. And ocean has its
monsters: great "_tanninim_" tempest the deep, as they heave their huge
bulk over the surface, to inhale the life-sustaining air; and out of
their nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a "seething pot or cauldron."
Monstrous creatures, armed in massive scales, haunt the rivers, or scour
the flat rank meadows; earth, air, and water are charged with animal
life; and the sun sets on a busy scene, in which unerring instinct
pursues unremittingly its few simple ends,--the support and preservation
of the individual, the propagation of the species, and the protection
and maintenance of the young.
Again the night descends, for the fifth day has closed; and morning
breaks on the sixth and last day of creation. Cattle and beasts of the
fields graze on the plains; the thick-skinned rhinoceros wallows in the
marshes; the squat hippopotamus rustles among the reeds, or plunges
sullenly into the river; great herds of elephants seek their food amid
the young herbage of the woods; while animals of fiercer nature,--the
lion, the leopard, and the bear,--harbor in deep caves till the evening,
or lie in wait for their prey amid tangled thickets, or beneath some
broken bank. At length, as the day wanes and the shadows lengthen, man,
the responsible lord of creation, formed in God's own image, is
introduced upon the scene, and the work of creation ceases forever upon
the earth. The night falls once more upon the prospect, and there dawns
yet another morrow,--the morrow of God's rest,--that Divine Sabbath in
which there is no more creative labor, and which, "blessed and
sanctified" beyond all the days that had gone before, has as its special
object the moral elevation and final redemption of man. And over _it_ no
evening is represented in the record as falling, for its special work is
not yet complete. Such seems to have been the sublime panorama of
creation exhibited in vision of old to
"The shepherd who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of chaos;"
and, rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth that
militates against even the minutest or least prominent of its details.
LECTURE FIFTH.
GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES.
PART I.
The science of the geologist seems destined to exert a marked influence
on that of the natural theologian. For not only does it greatly add to
the materials on which the natural theologian founds his deductions, by
adding to the organisms, plant and animal, of the present creation the
extinct organisms of the creations of the past, with all their
extraordinary display of adaptation and design; but it affords him,
besides, materials peculiar to itself, in the history which it furnishes
both of the appearance of these organisms in time, and of the wonderful
order in which they were chronologically arranged. Not only--to borrow
from Paley's illustration--does it enable him to argue on the old
grounds, from the contrivance exhibited in the _watch_ found on the
moor, that the watch could not have lain upon the moor forever; but it
establishes further, on different and more direct evidence, that there
was a time when absolutely the watch was not there; nay, further, so to
speak, that there was a previous time in which no watches existed at
all, but only water clocks; yet, further, that there was a time in which
there were not even water clocks, but only sundials; and further, an
earlier time still in which sundials were not, nor any measurers of time
of any kind. And this is distinct ground from that urged by Paley. For,
besides holding that each of these contrivances must have had in turn
an originator or contriver, it adds historic fact to philosophic
inference. Geology takes up the master volume of the greatest of the
natural theologians, and, after scanning its many apt instances of
palpable design, drawn from the mechanism of existing plants and
animals, authoritatively decides that not one of these plants or animals
had begun to be in the times of the Chalk; nay, that they all date their
origin from a period posterior to that of the Eocene. And the fact is,
of course, corroborative of the inference. "That well constructed
edifice," says the natural theologian, "cannot be a mere _lusus naturæ_,
or chance combination of stones and wood; it must have been erected by a
builder." "Yes," remarks the geologist, "it was erected some time during
the last nine years. I passed the way ten years ago, and saw only a
blank space where it now stands." Nor does the established fact of an
absolute beginning of organic being seem more pregnant with important
consequences to the science of the natural theologian than the fact of
the peculiar order in which they begin to be.
The importance of the now demonstrated fact, that all the living
organisms which exist on earth had a beginning, and that a time was when
they were not, will be best appreciated by those who know how much, and,
it must be added, how unsuccessfully, writers on the evidences have
labored to convict of an absurdity, on this special head, the atheistic
assertors of an infinite series of beings. Even Robert Hall (in his
famous Sermon on Modern Infidelity) could but play, when he attempted
grappling with the subject, upon the words _time_ and _eternity_, and
strangely argue, that as each member of an infinite series must have
begun in _time_, while the succession itself was _eternal_, it was
palpably absurd to ask us to believe in a _succession_ of beings that
was thus infinitely earlier than any of the beings themselves which
composed the succession. And Bentley, more perversely ingenious still,
could assert, that as each of the individuals in an infinite series must
have consisted of many parts,--that as each man in such a series, for
instance, must have had ten fingers and ten toes,--it was palpably
absurd to ask us to believe in an infinity which thus comprised many
infinities,--ten infinities of fingers, for example, and ten infinities
of toes. The infidels had the better in this part of the argument. It
was surely easy enough to show against the great preacher, on the one
hand, that _time_ in such a question is but a mere word that means
simply a certain limited or definite period which had a beginning,
whereas eternity means an unlimited and undefinable period which had no
beginning;--that his seeming argument was no argument, but merely a sort
of verbal play on this difference of signification in the
words;--further, that man could conceive of an infinite series, whether
extended in infinite space, or subsisting in infinite time, just as well
as he could conceive of any other infinity, and in the same way; and
that the only mode of disproving the possibility of such a series would
be to show, what of course cannot be shown, that in conceiving of it in
the progressive mode in which, according to Locke, man can alone
conceive of the infinite or the eternal, there would be a point reached
at which it would be impossible for him to go on adding millions on
millions to the previous sum. The symbolic "_ad infinitum_" could be
made as adequately representative in the case of an infinite series of
men or animals in unlimited time, as of an infinite series of feet or
inches in unlimited space, or of an infinite series of hours or minutes
in the past eternity. And as for Bentley, on the other hand, he ought
surely to have known that all infinities are not equal, seeing that
Newton had expressly told him so in the second of his four famous
letters; but that, on the contrary, one infinity may be not only ten
times greater than another infinity, but even infinitely greater than
another infinity; and that so the conception of an infinity of men
possessed of ten infinities of fingers and toes is in no respect an
absurdity. Of the three infinities possible in space, the second is
infinitely greater than the first, and the third infinitely greater than
the second. A line infinitely produced is capable of being divided
into--that is, consists of--an infinity of given parts; a plane
infinitely extended is capable of being divided into an infinity of
infinitely divisible lines; and a cube, that is, a solid, infinitely
expanded, is capable of being divided into an infinity of infinitely
divisible planes. In fine, metaphysic theology furnishes no argument
against the infinite series of the atheist. But geology does. Every
plant and animal that now lives upon earth began to be during the great
Tertiary period, and had no place among the plants and animals of the
great Secondary division. We can trace several of our existing
quadrupeds, such as the badger, the hare, the fox, the red deer, and the
wild cat, up till the earlier times of the Pleistocene; and not a few of
our existing shells, such as the great pecten, the edible oyster, the
whelk, and the Pelican's-foot shell, up till the greatly earlier times
of the Coraline Crag. But at certain definite lines in the deposits of
the past, representative of certain points in the course of time, the
existing mammals and molluscs cease to appear, and we find their places
occupied by other mammals and molluscs. Even such of our British shells
as seem to have enjoyed as species the longest term of life cannot be
traced beyond the times of the Pliocene deposits. We detect their
remains in a perfect state of keeping in almost every shell-bearing bed,
till we reach the Red and Coraline Crags, where we find them for the
last time; and, on passing into older and deeper lying beds, we see
their places taken by other shells, of species altogether distinct. The
very common shell _Purpura lapillus_, for instance, is found in our
raised beaches, in our Clyde beds, in our boulder clays and
mammaliferous crags, and, finally, in the Red Crag, beyond which it
fails to appear. And such also is the history of the common edible
mussel and common periwinkle; whereas the common edible cockle, and
common edible pecten (_P. opercularis_) occur not only in all these
successive beds, but in the Coral Crag also. They are older by a whole
deposit than their present contemporaries, the mussel and periwinkle;
and these, in turn, seem of older standing than shells such as _Murex
erinaceus_, that has not been traced beyond the times of the
mammaliferous crag, or than shells such as _Scrobicularia piperata_,
that has not been detected in more ancient deposits than raised sea
beaches of the later periods, and the elevated bottoms of old estuaries
and lagoons. We thus know, that in certain periods, nearer or more
remote, all our existing molluscs _began_ to exist, and that they had no
existence during the previous periods; which were, however, richer in
animals of the same great molluscan group than the present time. Our
British group of recent marine shells falls somewhat short of _four_
hundred species;[19] whereas the group characteristic of the older
Miocene deposits, largely developed in those districts of France which
border on the Bay of Biscay, and more sparingly in the south of England,
near Yarmouth, comprises more than six hundred species. Nearly an equal
number of still older shells have been detected in a single deposit of
the Paris basin,--the _Calcaire grossier_; and a good many more in a
more ancient formation still, the London Clay. On entering the Chalk, we
find a yet older group of shells, wholly unlike any of the preceding
ones; and in the Oolite and Lias yet other and different groups. And
thus group preceded group throughout all the Tertiary, Secondary, and
Palæozoic periods; some of them remarkable for the number of species
which they contained, others for the profuse abundance of their
individual specimens, until, deep in the rocks at the base of the
Silurian system, we detect what seems to be the primordial group,
beneath which only a single animal organism is known to occur,--the
_Oldhamia antiqua_,--a plant-like zoophyte, akin apparently to some of
our recent sertularia, (See fig. 5, page 48.) Each of the extinct groups
had, we find, a beginning and an end;--there is not in the wide domain
of physical science a more certain fact; and every species of the group
which now exists had, like all their predecessors on the scene, their
beginning also. The "infinite series" of the atheists of former times
can have no place in modern science: all organic existences, recent or
extinct, vegetable or animal, have had their beginning;--there was a
time when they were not. The geologist can indicate that time, if not by
years, at least by periods, and show what its relations were to the
periods that went before and that came after; and as it is equally a
recognized truth on both sides of the controversy, that as something now
exists, something must have existed forever, and as it must now be not
less surely recognized, that that something was not the race of man, nor
yet any other of the many races of man's predecessors or contemporaries,
the question, What then was that something? comes with a point and
directness which it did not possess at any former time. By what, or
through whom, did these races of nicely organized plants and animals
begin to be? Hitherto at least there has been but one reply to the
question originated on the skeptical side. All these races, it is said,
have been _developed_, in the long course of ages, into what they now
are, as the young animal is developed in the womb, or the young plant is
developed from the seed. Topsy, in the novel, "'spected that she was not
made, but growed;" and the only class of opponents which the geological
theist finds in the field which his science has laid open to the world
is a class that hold by the philosophy of Topsy.
Let me briefly remark regarding this development hypothesis, with which
I have elsewhere dealt at considerable length, that while the facts of
the geologist are demonstrably such, that is, truths capable of proof,
the hypothesis is a mere dream, unsupported by a shadow of evidence. A
man of a lively imagination could no doubt originate many such dreams;
nay, we know that in the dark ages dreams of the kind were actually
originated. The _Anser Bernicla_, or barnacle goose, a common winter
visitant of our coasts, was once believed to be developed out of
decaying wood long submerged in sea water: and one of our commonest
cirripedes or barnacles, _Lepas anatifera_, still bears, in its specific
name of the goose-producing _lepas_, evidence that it was the creature
specially recognized by our ancestors as the half-developed goose. As if
in memory of this old development legend, the bird still bears the name
of the barnacle, and the barnacle of the bird; and we know further, that
very intelligent men for their age, such as Gerardes the herbalist
(1597), and Hector Boece the historian (1524), both examined these
shells, and, knowing but little of comparative anatomy, were satisfied
that the animal within was the partially developed embryo of a fowl.
Such was one of the fables gravely credited as a piece of natural
history in Britain about three centuries ago, and such was the kind of
evidence by which it was supported. And we know that the followers of
Epicurus received from their master, without apparent suspicion, fables
still more extravagant, and that wanted even such a shadow of proof to
support them as satisfied the herbalist and the historian. The
Epicureans at least professed to believe that the earth, after
spontaneously producing herbs and trees, began to produce in great
numbers mushroom-like bodies, that, when they came to maturity, burst
open, giving egress each to a young animal, which proved the founder of
a race; and that thus, in succession, all the members of the animal
kingdom were ushered into existence. But whether the dream be that of
the Epicureans of classic times, or that of the naturalists of the
middle ages, or that of the Lamarckians of our own days, it is equally a
dream, and can have no place assigned to it among either the solid facts
or the sober deductions of science. Nay, the dream of the Lamarckians
labors under a special disadvantage, from which the dreams of the others
are free. If some modern Boece or Epicurus were to assert that at
certain definite periods, removed from fifteen to fifty thousand years
from the present time, all our existing animals were developed from
decaying wood, or from a wonderful kind of mushrooms that the earth
produced only once every ten thousand years, the assertion, if incapable
of proof, would be at least equally incapable of being _dis_-proven. But
when the Lamarckian affirms that all our recent species of plants and
animals were developed out of previously existing plants and animals of
species entirely different, he affirms what, if true, _would_ be capable
of proof; and so, if it cannot be proven, it is only because it is not
true. The trilobites have been extinct ever since the times of the
Mountain Limestone; and yet, by series of specimens, the individual
development of certain species of this family, almost from the extrusion
of the animal from the egg until the attainment of its full size, has
been satisfactorily shown. By specimen after specimen has every stage of
growth and every degree of development been exemplified; and the
Palæontologist has come as thoroughly to know the creatures, in
consequence, under their various changes from youth to age, as if they
had been his contemporaries, and had grown up under his eye. And had our
existing species, vegetable and animal, been derived from other species
of the earlier periods, it would have been equally possible to
demonstrate, by a series of specimens, _their_ relationship. Let us
again instance the British shells. Losing certain species in each of the
older and yet older deposits at which we successively arrive, we at
length reach the Red and Coraline Crags, where we find, mingled with the
familiar forms, a large per centage of forms now extinct; then going on
to the shells of the lower Miocene, more than six hundred species
appear, almost all of which are strange to us; and then, passing to the
Eocene shells of the _Calcaire grossier_, we find ourselves among well
nigh as large a group of yet other and older strangers, not one of which
we are able to identify with any shell now living in the British area.
There would be thus no lack of materials for forming such a genealogy of
the British shells, had they been gradually developed out of the extinct
species, as that which M. Barrande has formed of the trilobites. But no
such genealogy can be formed. We cannot link on a single recent shell to
a single extinct one. _Up_ to a certain point we find the recent shells
exhibiting all their present specific peculiarities, and beyond that
point they cease to appear. _Down_ to a certain point the extinct shells
also exhibit all _their_ specific peculiarities, and then they disappear
forever. There are no intermediate species,--no connecting links,--no
such connected series of specimens to be found as enables us to trace a
trilobite through all its metamorphoses from youth to age. All geologic
history is full of the beginnings and the ends of species,--of their
first and their last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of
development. The Lamarckian sets himself to grapple, in his dream, with
the history of all creation: we awaken him, and ask him to grapple,
instead, with the history of but a few individual species,--with that of
the mussel or the whelk, the clam or the oyster; and we find from his
helpless ignorance and incapacity what a mere pretender he is.
But while no hypothesis of development can neutralize or explain away
the great geologic fact, that every true species had a beginning
independently, apparently, of every preceding species, there was
demonstrably a general progress, in the course of creation, from lower
to higher forms, which seems scarce less fraught with important
consequences to the natural theologian than this fact of _beginning_
itself. For while the one fact effectually disposes of the "infinite
series" of the atheist, the other fact disposes scarce less effectually
of those reasonings on the skeptical side which, framed on the
assumption that creation is a "singular effect,"--an effect without
duplicate,--have been employed in urging, that from that one effect only
can we know aught regarding the producing cause. Knowing of the cause
from but the effect, and having experience of but one effect, we cannot
rationally hold, it has been argued, that the producing cause could have
originated effects of a higher or more perfect kind. The creation which
it produced we know; but, having no other measure of its power, we
cannot regard it, it has been contended, as equal to the production of a
better or nobler creation, or of course hold that it _could_ originate
such a state of things as that perfect future state which faith
delights to contemplate. It has been well said of the author of this
ingenious argument,--by far the most sagacious of the skeptics,--that if
we admit his premises we shall find it difficult indeed to set aside his
conclusions. And how, in this case, does geology deal with his premises?
By opening to us the history of the remote past of our planet, and
introducing us, through the present, to former creations, it breaks down
that _singularity_ of effect on which he built, and for one creation
gives us many. It gives us exactly that which, as he truly argued, his
contemporaries had not,--an _experience_ in creations. And let us mark
how, applied to each of these in succession, his argument would tell.
There was a time when life, animal or vegetable, did not exist on our
planet, and when all creation, from its centre to its circumference, was
but a creation of dead matter. What, in that early age, would have been
the effect of the argument of Hume? Simply this,--that though the
producing Cause of all that appeared was competent to the formation of
gases and earths, metals and minerals, it would be unphilosophic to deem
him adequate to the origination of a single plant or animal, even to
that of a spore or of a monad. Ages pass by, and the Palæozoic creation
is ushered in, with its tall araucarians and pines, its highly organized
fishes, and its reptiles of comparatively low standing. And how now, and
with what effect, does the argument apply? It is now rendered evident,
that in the earlier creation the producing Cause had exerted but a
portion of his power, and that he could have done greatly more than he
actually did, seeing that we now find him adequate to the origination of
vitality and organization in its two great kingdoms, plant and animal.
But, still confining ourselves with cautious skepticism within the
limits of our argument, we continue to hold that, as fishes of a high
and reptiles of a low order, with trees of the cone-bearing family, are
the most perfect specimens of their respective classes which the
producing Cause has originated, it would be rash to hold, in the absence
of proof, that he _could_ originate aught higher or more perfect. And
now, as yet other ages pass away, the creation of the great Secondary
division takes the place of that of the vanished Palæozoic; and we find
in its few dicotyledonous plants, in its reptiles of highest standing,
in its great birds, and in its some two or three humble marsupial
mammals, that in the previous, as in the earlier creation, the producing
Cause had been, if I may so express myself, working greatly under his
strength, and that in this third creation we have a still higher display
of his potency. With some misgivings, however, we again apply our
argument. And now yet another creation,--that of the Tertiary period,
with its noble forests of dicotyledonous trees and its sagacious and
gigantic mammals,--rises upon the scene; and as our experience in
creations has now become very considerable, and as we have seen each in
succession higher than that which preceded it, we find that,
notwithstanding our assumed skepticism, we had, compelled by one of the
most deeply seated instincts of our nature, been secretly anticipating
the advance which the new state of things actually realizes. But
applying the argument once more, we at least assume to hold, that as the
sagacious elephant is the highest example of animal life yet produced by
the originating Cause, it would be unphilosophic to deem him capable of
producing a higher example. And, while we are thus reasoning, man
appears upon creation,--a creature immeasurably superior to all the
others, and whose very nature it is to make use of his experience of the
past for his guidance in the future. And if that only be solid
experience or just reasoning which enables us truly to anticipate the
events which are to come, and so to make provision for them; and if that
experience be not solid, and that reasoning not just, which would serve
but to darken our discernment, and prevent us from correctly predicating
the cast and complexion of coming events; what ought to be our decision
regarding an argument which, had it been employed in each of the
vanished creations of the past, would have had but the effect of
arresting all just anticipation regarding the immediately succeeding
creation, and which, thus reversing the main end and object of
philosophy, would render the philosopher who clung to it less sagacious
in divining the future than even the ordinary man? But, in truth, the
existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer
those of Hume. The footprint on the sand--to refer to his happy
illustration--does not now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many
footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a
higher level; and, founding at once on an acquaintance with the past,
extended throughout all the periods of the geologist, and on that
instinct of our nature whose peculiar function it is to anticipate at
least one creation more, we must regard the expectation of "new heavens
and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness," as not unphilosophic,
but as, on the contrary, altogether rational and according to
experience.
Such is the bearing of geological science on two of the most important
questions that have yet been raised in the field of natural theology.
Nor does it bear much less directly on a controversy to which, during
the earlier half of the last century, there was no little importance
attached in Britain, and which engaged on its opposite sides some of the
finest and most vigorous intellects of the age and country.
The school of infidelity represented by Bolingbroke, and, in at least
his earlier writings, by Soame Jenyns, and which, in a modified form,
attained to much popularity through Pope's famous "Essay," assigned to
man a comparatively inconsiderable space in the system of the universe.
It regarded him as but a single link in a chain of mutual dependency,--a
chain which would be no longer an entire, but a broken one, were he to
be struck out of it, but as thus more important from his position than
from his nature or his powers. You will remember that one of the
sections of Pope's first epistle to his "good St. John" is avowedly
devoted to show what he terms the "absurdity of man's supposing himself
the final cause of the creation;" and though this great master of
condensed meaning and brilliant point is now less read than he was in
the days of our grandfathers, you will all remember the elegant stanzas
in which he states the usual claims of the species only to ridicule
them. It is human pride personified that he represents as exclaiming,--
"For me kind Nature wakes her genial power,
Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower,
Annual for me the grape, the rose, renew
The juice nectarious and the balmy dew.
For me the mine a thousand treasures brings;
For me health gushes from a thousand springs;
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
My footstool earth, my canopy the skies."
You will further remember how the poet, after thus reducing the claims
and lowering the position of the species, set himself to show that man,
viewed in relation to the place which he occupies, ought not to be
regarded as an imperfect being. Man is, he said, as perfect as he ought
to be. And, such being the case, the Author of all, looking, it would
seem, very little after him, has just left him to take care of himself.
A cold, unfeeling abstraction, like the gods of the old Epicurean, the
Great First Cause of this school is a being
"Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall;
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world."
Such, assuredly, was not that God of the New Testament whom the Saviour
of mankind revealed to his disciples as caring for all his creatures of
the dust, but as caring most for the highest of all. "Are not two
sparrows," he said, "sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall
to the ground without your Father. Fear ye not, therefore; ye are of
more value than many sparrows."
It was the error of this ingenious but very unsolid school, that it
regarded the mere _order_ of the universe as itself an end or final
cause. It reasoned respecting creation, as if it would be true
philosophy to account for the origin and existence of some great city,
such as the city of Washington in the United States, built, as we know,
for purely political purposes, by showing that,--as it was remarkable
for its order, for the rectilinear directness of its streets, and the
rectangularity of its squares,--it must have been erected simply to be a
perfect embodiment of regularity; and to urge further that, save in
their character as component parts of a perfect whole, the House of
Representatives and the mansion of the President were of no more
intrinsic importance, or no more decidedly the _end_ of the whole, than
any low tavern or outhouse in the lesser streets or lanes. The
destruction of either the outhouse or the House of Representatives would
equally form a void in the general plan of the city, regarded as an
admirably arranged whole. And it was thus with the grand scheme of
creation; for,
"From nature's chain whatever link we strike,
Tenth or tenth thousand, breaks the chain alike."
Nor is it in other than due keeping with such a view of creation, that
its great Author should be represented as a cold abstraction, without
love or regard, and equally indifferent to the man and the sparrow, to
the atom and the planet. Order has respect to but the _relations_ of
things or of beings,--not to the things or beings themselves; order is
the _figure_ which, as mere etched points or strokes, they compose,--the
legend which, as signs or characters, they form; and who cares anything
for the component strokes or dots irrespective of the print, or for the
component letters or words apart from the writing? The "equal eye," in
such a scheme, would of necessity be an indifferent one. Against this
strange doctrine, though in some measure countenanced by the glosses of
Warburton in his defence of Pope, the theologians protested,--none of
them, however, more vigorously than Johnson, in his famous critique on
the "Free Inquiry" of Soame Jenyns. Nor is it uninteresting to mark with
what a purely instinctive feeling of the right some of the better poets,
whose "lyre," according to Cowper, was their "heart," protested against
it too. Poor Goldsmith, when sitting a homeless vagabond on the slopes
of the Alps, could exclaim in a greatly truer tone than that of his
polished predecessor,--
"Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine!"
And in Cowper himself we find all Goldsmith's intense feeling of
appropriation, that "calls the delightful scenery all its own,"
associated
"With worthy thoughts of that unvaried love
That planned, and built, and still upholds, a world
So clothed with beauty, for rebellious man."
Strange to say, however, it is to the higher exponents of natural
science, and in especial to the geologists, that it has been left to
deal most directly with the sophistries of Bolingbroke and Pope.
Oken, a man quite as far wrong in some points as either the poet or his
master, was the first to remark, and this in the oracular, enigmatical
style peculiar to the German, that "man is the sum total of all the
animals." Gifted, as all allow, with a peculiarly nice eye for detecting
those analogies which unite the animal world into a harmonious whole, he
remarked, that in one existence or being all these analogies converge.
Even the humbler students of the heavens have learned to find for
themselves the star of the pole, by following the direction indicated by
what are termed the two pointer stars in the Great Bear. And to the eye
of Oken all the groups of the animal kingdom formed a sphere of
constellations, each of which has its pointer stars, if I may so speak,
turned towards man. Man occupies, as it were, the central point in the
great circle of being; so that those lines which pass singly through
each of the inferior animals stationed at its circumference, meet in
him; and thus, as the focus in which the scattered rays unite, he
imparts by his presence a unity and completeness to creation which it
would not possess were he away. You will be startled, however, by the
language in which the German embodies his view; though it may be not
uninstructive to refer to it in evidence of the fact that a man may be
_intellectually_ on the very verge of truth, and yet for every moral
purpose infinitely removed from it. "Man," he says, "is God manifest in
the flesh." And yet it may be admitted that there is a certain loose
sense in which man _is_ "God manifest in the flesh." As may be
afterwards shown, he is God's _image_ manifested in the flesh; and an
image or likeness _is_ a manifestation or making evident of that which
it represents, whether it be an image or likeness of body or of mind.
Not less extraordinary, but greatly more sound in their application,
are the views of Professor Owen,--supreme in his own special walk as a
comparative anatomist. We find him recognizing man as exemplifying in
his structure the perfection of that type in which, from the earliest
ages, nature had been working with reference to some future development,
and as _therefore_ a foreordained existence. "The recognition of an
ideal exemplar for the vertebrated animals proves," he says, "that the
knowledge of such a being as man must have existed before man appeared.
For the Divine mind that planned the archetype also foreknew all its
modifications. The archetypal idea was manifested in the flesh under
divers modifications, upon this planet, long prior to the existence of
those animal species that actually exemplify it." So far Owen. And not
less wonderful is the conclusion at which Agassiz has arrived, after a
survey of the geologic existences, more extended and minute, in at least
the ichthyic department, than that of any other man. "It is evident," we
find him saying, in the conclusion of his recent work, "The Principles
of Zoology,"[20] "that there is a manifest progress in the succession of
beings on the surface of the earth. This progress consists in an
increasing similarity to the living fauna, and among the vertebrates,
especially in their increasing resemblance to man. But this connection
is not the consequence of a direct lineage between the faunas of
different ages. There is nothing like parental descent connecting them.
The fishes of the Palæozoic age are in no respect the ancestors of the
reptiles of the Secondary age, nor does man descend from the mammals
which preceded him in the Tertiary age. The link by which they are
connected is of a higher and immaterial nature; and their connection is
to be sought in the view of the Creator himself, whose aim in forming
the earth, in allowing it to undergo the successive changes which
geology has pointed out, and in creating successively all the different
types of animals which have passed away, _was to introduce man upon the
surface of our globe_. MAN IS THE END TOWARDS WHICH ALL THE ANIMAL
CREATION HAS TENDED FROM THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE FIRST PALÆOZOIC
FISHES." These, surely, are extraordinary deductions. "In thy book,"
says the Psalmist, "all my members were written, which in continuance
were fashioned when as yet there was none of them." And here is natural
science, by the voice of two of its most distinguished professors,
saying exactly the same thing.
Of the earliest known vertebrates,--the placoidal fishes of the Upper
Silurian rocks,--we possess only fragments, which, however, sufficiently
indicate, from their resemblance to the corresponding parts of an
existing shark,--the cestracion,--that they belonged to fishes furnished
with the two pairs of fins now so generally recognized as the homologues
of the fore and hinder limbs in quadrupeds. With the second earliest
vertebrates,--the ganoids of the Old Red Sandstone,--we are more
directly acquainted, and know that they exhibited the true typical
form,--a vertebral column terminating in a brain-protecting skull; and
that, in at least the acanth, celacanth, and dipterian families, they
had the limb-like fins. In the upper parts of the system the earliest
reptiles leave the first known traces of the typical foot, with its five
digits. Higher still in one of the deposits of the Trias we are startled
by what seems to be the impression of a human hand of an uncouth massive
shape, but with the thumb apparently set in opposition, as in man, to
the other fingers; we next trace the type upwards among the wonderfully
developed reptiles of the Secondary periods; then among the mammals of
the Tertiary ages, higher and yet higher forms appear; the mute
prophecies of the coming being become with each approach clearer,
fuller, more expressive, and at length receive their fulfilment in the
advent of man. A double meaning attaches to the term type; and hence
some ambiguity in the writings which have appeared on this curious
subject. Type means a prophecy embodied in symbol; it means also what
Sir Joshua Reynolds well terms "one of the general forms of nature,"--a
pattern form, from which all others in the same class or family, however
numerous, are recognized as mere exceptions and aberrations. But in the
geologic series both meanings converge and become one. The form or
number typical as the _general_ form or number, is found typical also as
a _prophecy_ of the form or number that came at length to be exemplified
in the deputed lord of creation. Let us in our examples take typical
numbers, as more easily illustrated without diagrams than typical forms.
There are vertebrate animals of the second age of ichthyic existence,
that, like the _Pterichthys_ and _Coccosteus_, were furnished with but
two limbs. The murænidæ of recent times have no more; at least one of
their number, the muræna proper, wants limbs altogether; so also do the
lampreys. The snakes are equally limbless, save that the boas and
pythons possess the rudiments of a single pair; and such also is the
condition, among the amphibia, of all the known species of Coecilia.
And yet, notwithstanding these exceptional cases, the true typical
number of limbs, as shown by a preponderating majority of the
vertebrates of all ages of the world, is four. And this typical number
is the human number. There is as certainly a typical number of digits
too, as of the limbs which bear them. The exceptions are many. All the
species of the horse genus possess but a single digit; the cattle family
possess but two digits, the rhinoceros three digits, the hippopotamus
four digits; many animals, such as the dog and cat, have but four digits
on one pair of limbs and five on the other; whereas in some of the
fishes the number of digits is singularly great,--from ten to twenty in
most species, and in the rays from eighty to a hundred. And yet, as
shown in the rocks, in which, however, the aberrations appear early, the
true typical number is five on both the fore and hinder limbs. And such
is the number in man. There is also, in at least the mammalia, a typical
number of vertebræ in the neck. The three-toed sloth has nine cervical
vertebræ; the manati only six; but seven is the typical number. And
seven is the human number also. Man, in short, is pre-eminently what a
theologian would term the antetypical existence,--the being in whom the
types meet and are fulfilled. And not only do typical forms and numbers
of the exemplified character meet in man, but there are not a few parts
of his framework which in the inferior animals exist as but mere
symbols, of as little importance as dugs in the male animal, though they
acquire significancy and use in him. Such, for instance, are the
many-jointed but moveless and unnecessary bones of which the stiff
inflexible _fin_ of the dugong and the fore paw of the mole consist, and
which exist in his arm as essential portions, none of which could be
wanted, of an exquisitely flexible instrument. In other cases, the old
types are exemplified serially in the growth and development of certain
portions of his frame. Such is specially the case with that all
important portion of it, the organ of thought and feeling. The human
brain is built up by a wonderful process, during which it assumes in
succession the form of the brain of a fish, of a reptile, of a bird, of
a mammiferous quadruped; and, finally, it takes upon it its unique
character as a human brain. Hence the remark of Oken, that "man is the
sum total of all the animals;" hence, too, a recognition of type in the
_history_ of the successive vertebral periods of the geologist,
symbolical of the history of every individual man. It is not difficult
to conceive how, on a subject of such complexity, especially if
approached in an irreverent spirit, grave mistakes and misconceptions
should take place. Virgil knew just enough of Hebrew prophecy to
misapply, in his _Pollio_, to his great patron Octavius, those ancient
predictions which foretold that in that age the Messiah was to appear.
And I am inclined to hold, that in the more ingenious speculations of
the Lamarckians we have just a similar misapplication of what,
emboldened by the views of Owen and Agassiz, I shall venture to term the
_Geologic Prophecies_.
The term is new, but the idea which it embodies, though it at first
existed rather as a nice poetic instinct than as a scientifically based
thought, is at least as old as the times of Herder and Coleridge. In a
passage quoted from the former writer by Dr. M'Cosh, in his very
masterly work on typical forms, I find the profound German remarking of
the strange resemblances which pervade all nature, and impart a general
unity to its forms, that it would seem "as if on all our earth the
form-abounding mother had proposed to herself but one type,--one
proto-plasma,--according to which, and for which, she formed them all.
Know, then," he continues, "what this form is. It is the identical one
which man also wears." And the remark of Coleridge, in his "Aids to
Reflection," is still more definite. "Let us carry us back in spirit,"
he says, "to the mysterious week, the teeming work days of the Creator
(as _they rose in_ VISION _before the eye of the inspired historian_) of
the operations of the heavens and of the earth, in the day that the
Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And who that watched their ways
with an understanding heart could, as the vision evolved still advanced
towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee, the home-building,
wedded, and divorceless swallow, and, above all, the manifoldly
intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealths and confederacies,
their warriors and miners, the husband folk that fold in their tiny
flocks on the honey leaf, and the virgin sister with the holy instincts
of maternal love detached and in selfless purity, and not say in
himself, Behold the shadow of approaching humanity, the sun rising from
behind in the kindling morn of creation?" There is fancy here; but it is
that sagacious fancy, vouchsafed to only the true poet, which has so
often proved the pioneer of scientific discovery, and which is in
reality more sober and truthful, in the midst of its apparent
extravagance, than the gravest cogitations of ordinary men. It is surely
no incredible thing, that He who, in the dispensations of the human
period, spake by type and symbol, and who, when He walked the earth in
the flesh, taught in parable and allegory, should have also spoken in
the geologic ages by prophetic figures embodied in the form and
structure of animals. Nay, what the poet imagined, though in a somewhat
extreme form, the philosophers seem to be on the very eve of confirming.
The foreknown "archetypal idea" of Owen,--"the immaterial link of
connection" of all the past with all the present, which Agassiz resolves
into the foreordained design of the Creator,--will be yet found, I
cannot doubt, to translate themselves into one great general truth,
namely, that the Palæozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary dispensations of
creation were charged, like the patriarchal and Mosaic dispensations of
grace, with the "shadows of better things to come." The advent of man
simply as such was the great event prefigured during the old geologic
ages. The advent of that Divine Man "who hath abolished death, and
brought life and immortality to light," was the great event prefigured
during the historic ages. It is these two grand events, equally portions
of one sublime scheme, originated when God took counsel with himself in
the depths of eternity, that bind together past, present, and
future,--the geologic with the Patriarchal, the Mosaic, and the
Christian ages, and all together with that new heavens and new earth,
the last of many creations, in which there shall be "no more death nor
curse, but the throne of God and the Lamb shall be in it, and his
servants shall serve him."
"There is absurdity," said Pope, "in man's conceiting himself the final
cause of creation." Unless, however, man had the entire scheme of
creation before him, with the further partially known scheme of which
but a part constitutes the grand theme of revelation, how could he
pronounce on the absurdity? The knowledge of the geologist ascends no
higher than man. He sees all nature in the pre-Adamic past, pointing
with prophetic finger towards him; and on even the argument of
Hume,--just and solid within its proper limits,--he refuses to acquiesce
in the unfounded inference of Pope. In order to prove the absurdity of
"man's conceiting himself the final cause of creation," proof of an
ulterior cause,--of a higher end and aim,--must he adduced; and of aught
higher than man, the geologist, as such, knows nothing. The long vista
opened up by his science closes with the deputed lord of creation,--with
man as he at present exists; and when, casting himself full upon
revelation, the vail is drawn aside, and an infinitely grander vista
stretches out before him into the future, he sees man--no longer,
however, the natural, but the Divine man--occupying what is at once its
terminal point and its highest apex. Such are some of the bearings of
geologic science on the science of natural theology. Geology has
disposed effectually and forever of the oft-urged assumption of an
infinite series; it deals as no other science could have dealt with the
assertion of the skeptic, that creation is a "singular effect;" it casts
a flood of unexpected light on the somewhat obsolete plausibilities of
Bolingbroke and Jenyns, that exhibits their utterly unsolid character;
yet further, it exhibits in a new aspect the argument founded on design,
and invests the place and standing of man in _creation_ with a peculiar
significancy and importance, from its relation to the future. But on
this latter part of my subject--necessarily of considerable extent and
multiplicity, and connected rather with revealed than with natural
religion--I must not now expatiate. I shall, however, attempt laying
before you, on some future evening, a few thoughts on this portion of
the general question, which you may at least find suggestive of others,
and which, if they fail to elicit new truths, may have the effect of
opening up upon an old truth or two a few fresh avenues through which to
survey them. The character of man as a fellow-worker with his Creator in
the material province has still to be considered in the light of
geology. Man was the first, and is still the only creature of whom we
know anything, who has set himself to carry on and improve the work of
the world's original framer,--who is a planter of woods, a tiller of
fields, and a keeper of gardens,--and who carries on his work of
mechanical contrivance on obviously the same principles as those on
which the Divine designer wrought of old, and on which he works still.
It may not be wholly unprofitable to acquaint ourselves, through
evidence furnished by the rocks, with the remarkable fact, that the
Creator imparted to man the Divine image before he united to man's the
Divine nature.
LECTURE SIXTH.
GEOLOGY IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES.
PART II.
Up till the introduction of man upon our planet, the humbler creatures,
his predecessors, formed but mere figures in its various landscapes, and
failed to alter or affect by their works the face of nature. They were
conspicuous, not from what they _did_, but from what they _were_. At a
very early period reefs of coral, the work of minute zoophytes, whitened
the shallows of the ocean, or encircled with pale, ever broadening
frames, solitary islands green with the shrubs and trees of extinct
floras; but, though products of the animal world, they were not built up
under the direction of even an instinctive intelligence, but were as
entirely the results of a _vegetative_ process of mere growth as the
forests or reed brakes of the old Carboniferous savannahs. At a later
time an ant hill might be here and there descried, rearing its squat,
brown pyramid amid the recesses of some Oolitic forest; or, in a period
still more recent, the dam of the gigantic beaver might be seen
extending its minute eye-like circlet of blue amid the windings of some
bosky ravine of the Pliocene age; or existing as a little mound-skirted
pond, with the rude half-submerged _cottage_ of the creature, its
architect, rising beside it, on some rivulet of the Pleistocene. But how
inconsiderable such works, compared with the wide extent of prospect in
which they were included! How entirely inconspicuous rather, save when
placed in the immediate foreground of the pictures into whose
composition they entered! Not until the introduction of man upon earth
do we find a creature whose works sensibly affect and modify the aspects
of nature. But when man appears, how mighty the change which he effects!
Immediately on his creation he takes under his care the vegetable
productions of use and show: it becomes his business to keep and dress a
garden. He next becomes a tiller of fields, then a planter of vineyards:
here he cuts down great forests; there he rears extensive woods. He
makes himself places of habitation; and busy cities spring up as the
trophies of his diligence and skill. His labors, as they grow upon the
waste, affect the appearance of vast continents; until at length, from
many a hill-top and tall spire, scarce a rood of ground can be seen on
which he has not built, or sown, or planted, or around which lie has not
erected his walls or reared his hedges. Man, in this great department of
industry, is what none of his predecessors upon the earth ever were,--"a
fellow-worker" with the Creator. He is a mighty _improver_ of creation.
We recognize that as improvement which adapts nature more thoroughly to
man's own necessities and wants, and renders it more pleasing both to
his sense of the æsthetic and to his more material senses also. He adds
to the beauty of the flowers which he takes under his charge,--to the
delicacy and fertility of the fruits; the seeds of the wild grasses
become corn beneath his care; the green herbs grow great of root or
bulb, or bulky and succulent of top and leaf; the wild produce of nature
_sports_ under his hand; the rose and lily broaden their disks and
multiply their petals; the harsh green crab swells out into a delicious
golden-rinded apple, streaked with crimson; the productions of his
kitchen garden, strangely metamorphosed to serve the uses of his table,
bear forms unknown to nature; an occult law of change and development
inherent to these organisms meets in him with the developing instinct
and ability, and they are regenerated under his surveillance. Nor is his
influence over many of the animals less marked. The habits which he
imparts to the parents become _nature_, in his behalf, in their
offspring. The dog acquires, under his tutelage, the virtues of fidelity
to a master and affection to a friend. The ox and horse learn to assist
him in the labors of the fields. The udders of the cow and goat distend
beneath his care far beyond the size necessary in the wild state, and
supply him with rich milk, and the other various products of the dairy.
The fleece of the sheep becomes finer of texture and longer of fibre in
his pens and folds; and even the indocile silkworm spins, in his
sheltered conservatories, and among the mulberry trees which he has
planted, a larger, and brighter, and more glistening cocoon. Man is the
great creature-worker of the world,--its one created being, that, taking
up the work of the adorable Creator, carries it on to higher results and
nobler developments, and finds a field for his persevering ingenuity and
skill in every province in which his Maker had expatiated before him. He
is evidently--to adopt and modify the remark of Oken--God's image
"manifest in the flesh."
Surveyed from the special point of view furnished by this peculiar
nature of man, unique in creation, all the past of our planet divides
into two periods;--the period, inclusive of every age known to the
geologist, during which only the Creator wrought; and the period during
which man has wrought, and to which all human history belongs. In such a
view we are presented with two sets of works,--those of the
Creator-worker, and those of the creature-worker; and the vast fund of
materials on which the natural theologian frames his arguments
demonstrative of design or contrivance, assumes a new significancy and
interest when employed as evidence that there exists a certain
correspondence of nature and intellect between the two workers, human
and Divine. The ability of accomplishing the same ends by the same
means,--in other words, of thinking and acting in the same practical
tract,--indicates a similarity, if not identity, of intellectual nature.
In the Chinese centre of civilization, for instance, printing,
gunpowder, the mariner's compass, with the various chemical and
mechanical arts of elegant life, were originated without concert with
the European centre of civilization, simply because in China, as in
Europe, the same human faculties, prompted by the same tastes and
necessities, had expatiated in the same tracts of invention, and had, as
a consequence, educed the same results. I was much struck, when spending
half an hour in a museum illustrative of the arts in China, by the
identity of these with our own, especially in the purely mechanical
departments; and again, when similarly employed in that apartment
devoted, in the British Museum, to the domestic utensils of the ancient
Egyptians. The identity of the more common contrivances which I
witnessed, with familiar contrivances in our own country, I regarded as
altogether as conclusive of an identity of mind in the individuals who
had originated them, as if I had actually seen human creatures at work
on them all. One class of productions showed me that the potter's wheel
and the turning lathe had been known and employed as certainly in China
and ancient Egypt as in Britain. Another, that their weaving processes
must have been nearly the same. The Chinese know, for instance, as well
as ourselves, that patterns can be delicately brought out,--as in the
damasks,--without the assistance of color, simply by exposing silken or
flaxen fibre at different angles to the light; and they have fallen, as
their work shows, on the right methods of producing it. And the
Egyptians anticipated us in even our most homely household contrivances.
They even fermented their bread and trussed their fowls after the same
fashion; and thus gave evidence, in these familiar matters, that they
thought and contrived "after the manner of men." Now, in acquainting
myself with the organisms of the geologic periods, I have been similarly
but more deeply impressed by what I must be permitted to term the
_human_ cast and character of the contrivances which they exemplified.
Not only could I understand the principles on which they were
constructed, but further, not a few of them had, I found, been actually
introduced into works of human invention ages ere they were discovered
in the rock. What the great Creator-worker had originated in the
Palæozoic and Secondary periods, had been in after times originated by
the little creature-worker, wholly unaware that his contrivance had been
anticipated, and was but a repetition of a previously executed design.
In the later geologic ages the organization of the various extinct
animals so nearly resembled that of the animals which still live, that
we may regard it as not inadequately represented by the illustrations of
Paley. A few such exceptional contrivances appear among the mammals of
the Tertiary as that formed by the huge pickaxe-like tusks of the
Dinotherium, or a few such extraordinary modifications of the ordinary
mammalian framework as that exhibited in the enormously massive pelvic
arches and hinder limbs of the Mylodon and Megatherium. But not until we
pass into the deposits of the Secondary period, and get among its
cephalopoda, do we find a mechanism altogether unlike any with which we
are acquainted among living organisms. As admirably shown by Buckland,
the partitions which separate into chambers all the whorls of the
ammonite except the outermost one, were exquisitely adapted to
strengthen, by the tortuous windings of their outer edges, a shell which
had to combine great lightness with great powers of resistance. Itself a
continuous arch throughout, it was supported by a series of continuous
arches inside, somewhat resembling in form the groined ribs of the
Gothic roof, but which, unlike the ponderous stone work of the mediæval
architects, were as light as they were strong. And to this combination
of arches there was added, in the ribs and grooves of the shell, yet
another element of strength,--that which has of late been introduced
into iron roofs, which, by means of their corrugations,--ribs and
grooves like those of the ammonite,--are made to span over wide spaces,
without the support of beams or rafters. Still more recently, the same
principle has been introduced into metallic boats, which, when
corrugated, like the old ammonites, are found to be sufficiently strong
to resist almost any degree of pressure without the wonted addition of
an interior framework. Similar evidences of design appear in the other
extinct molluscs peculiar to these geologic ages, such as the hamite
and turrilite. The belemnite seems to have united the principle of the
float to that of the sinker, as we see both united in some of our modern
life boats, which are steadied on their keel by one principle, and
preserved from foundering by the other; or as we find them united by the
boy in his mimic smack, which he hollows out and decks, in order to
render it sufficiently light, while at the same time he furnishes it
with a keel of lead, in order to render it sufficiently steady. The old
articulata abound in marks of ingenious mechanical contrivance. The
trilobites were covered over back and head with the most exquisitely
constructed plate armor: but as their abdomens seem to have been soft
and defenceless, they had the ability of coiling themselves round on the
approach of danger, plate moving on plate with the nicest adjustment,
till the rim of the armed tail rested on that of the armed head, and the
creature presented the appearance of a ball defended at every point. In
some genera, as in Calymene, the tail consisted of jointed segments till
its termination; in others, as in Illænus, there was a great caudal
shield, that in size and form corresponded to the shield which covered
the head; the segments of Calymene, from the flexibility of their
joints, fitted close to the cerebral rim; while the same effect was
produced in the inflexible shields, caudal and cephalic, of Illænus, by
their exact correspondence, and the flexibility of the connecting rings,
which enabled them to fit together like two equal-sized cymbals brought
into contact at every point by the hand. Nor were the ancient crinoids
less remarkable for the amount of nice contrivance which their
structures exhibited, than the ancient molluscs or crustaceans. In their
calyx-like bodies, consisting always of many parts, we find the
principle of the arch introduced in almost every possible form and
modification, and the utmost flexibility secured to their stony arms by
the amazing number of the pieces of which they were composed, and the
nice disposition of the joints. In the Pentacrinites of the Secondary
period (see Fig. 97) an immense spread of arms, about a thousand in
number, and composed of about a hundred thousand separate pieces, had
all the flexibility, though formed of solid lime, of a _drift_ of nets,
and yet were so nicely jointed, tooth fitting into tooth in all their
numerous parts, and the whole so bound together by ligament, that, with
all the flexibility, they had also all the toughness and tenacity, of
pieces of thread network. Human ingenuity, with the same purposes to
effect, that is, the sweeping of shoals of swimming animals into a
central receptacle, would probably construct a somewhat similar machine;
but it would take half a lifetime to execute one equally elaborate.
[Illustration: Fig. 94.
AMMONITES HUMPHRIESIANUS.
(_Oolite._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 95.
ENCRINITES MONILIFORMIS.
(_Trias._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 96.
CUPRESSOCRINUS CRASSUS.
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 97.[21]
PENTACRINUS FASCICULOSUS.
(_Lias._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 98.
_a_, CHAMFERED SCALES. (_Osteolepis._)
_b_, IMBRICATED SCALES. (_Glyptolepis._)
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
In carefully examining, for purposes of restoration, some of the
earliest ganoidal fishes, I was not a little impressed by the peculiar
mechanical contrivances exhibited in their largely developed dermal
skeletons. In some cases these contrivances were sufficiently simple,
resembling those which we find exemplified in the humbler trades,
originated in comparatively unenlightened ages; and yet their simplicity
had but the effect of rendering the peculiarly _human_ cast of the mind
exhibited in their production all the more obvious. The bony scales
which covered fishes such as the Osteolepis and Diplopterus of the Old
Red Sandstone, or the Megalichthys of the Coal Measures, were of
considerable mass and thickness. They could not, compatibly with much
nicety of finish, be laid over each other, like the thin horny scales of
the salmon or herring; and so we find them curiously fitted together,
not like slates on a modern roof, but like hewn stones on an ancient
one. There ran on the upper surface of each, along the anterior side and
higher end, a groove of a depth equal to half the thickness of the
scale; and along the posterior side and lower end, on the under surface,
a sort of bevelled chamfer, which, fitting into the grooves of the
scales immediately behind and beneath it, brought their surfaces to the
same line, and rendered the shining coverings of these strongly armed
ganoids as smooth and even as those of the most delicately coated fishes
of the present day. In the scales of the Celacanth family the
arrangement was different. Though exceedingly massive in some of the
genera, they were imbricated, like those of the Pangolins; and were
chiefly remarkable for the combination of contrivances which they
exhibited for securing the greatest possible amount of strength from the
least possible amount of thickness. The scales of _Holoptychius
giganteus_ may be selected as representative of those of the family to
which it belonged. It consisted of three plates, or rather, like the
human skull, of two solid plates, with a _diploe_ or spongy layer
between. The outer surface was curiously fretted into alternate ridges
and furrows; and hence the name of the genus,--_wrinkled scale_; and
these imparted to the exterior plate on which they occurred, and which
was formed of solid bone, the strength which results from a corrugated
or fluted surface. Cromwell, in commissioning a friend to send him a
helmet, shrewdly stipulated that it should be a "fluted pot;" and we
find that the Holoptychius had got the principle of the fluted pot
exemplified in the outer plate of each of its scales, untold ages
before. The spongy middle plate must, like the diploe of the skull, have
served to deaden the vibrations of a blow dealt from the outside. It was
a stratum of sand bags piled up in the middle of a plank rampart. Their
innermost table was formed, like the outer, of solid bone, but had a
different arrangement. It was properly not one, but several tables, in
each of which the osseous fibres, spread out in the general plane of
the scale, lay at a diverse angle from those of the table immediately in
contact with it. The principle was evidently that of the double-woven
cloth, or cloth of two incorporated layers, such as _moleskin_, in
which, from the arrangement of the threads, what a draper would term the
_tear_ of the one layer or fold lies at a different angle in the general
fabric from that of the other. We are thus presented, in a single fossil
scale little more than the eighth part of an inch in thickness, with
three distinct strengthening principles,--the principle of Cromwell's
"fluted pot,"--the principle of a rampart lined with plank, and filled
with sand bags in the centre,--and the principle of the double-woven
fabrics of the "moleskin" manufacturer.[22] The contrivances exemplified
in the cuirass of the Pterichthys were scarce less remarkable. It was
formed of bony plates, strongly arched above, but comparatively flat
beneath; and along both its anterior and posterior rims a sudden
thickening of the plates formed a massive band, which served to
strengthen the entire structure, as transverse ribs of stone are found
strengthening Gothic vaults of the Norman age. The scale covered tail of
the creature issued from within the posterior rim, which formed around
it a complete though irregular ring, arched above and depressed beneath;
whereas the anterior rim, to which the head was attached, was incomplete
when separated from it. It was, in its detached state, an arch wanting
the keystone. A keystone, however, projected outwards from the occipital
plate of the head; and, as it had to form at once the bond of
connection between the cerebral armature of the creature and its
cuirass, and to complete the arch formed by the strengthening belt or
rib of the latter, it curiously combined the principle of both the
dovetail of the carpenter and the keystone of the mason. Viewed from
above, it was a dovetail, forming a strong attachment of the head to the
body; viewed in the transverse section, it was an efficient keystone,
that gave solidity and strength to the arched belt or rib. Both keystone
and dovetail are comparatively simple contrivances; but I know not that
they have been united in the same piece, save in the very ancient
instance furnished by the strong bony plate which connected the helmet
of the Pterichthys with its cuirass.
[Illustration: Fig. 99.
SCALE OF HOLOPTYCHIUS GIGANTEUS.
(Nat. size.)
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 100.
SECTION OF SCALE OF HOLOPTYCHIUS.
(Mag. eight diameters.)]
A brief anecdote, yet further illustrative of the framework of this
ancient ganoid, may throw some additional light on what I have ventured
to term the _human_ cast of the contrivances exhibited in the organisms
of the old geologic ages. After carefully examining many specimens, I
published a restoration of both the upper and under side of Pterichthys
fully fifteen years ago. The greatest of living ichthyologists, however,
misled by a series of specimens much less complete than mine, differed
from me in my conclusions; and what I had represented as the creature's
under or abdominal side, he represented as its upper or dorsal side;
while its actual upper side he regarded as belonging to another, though
closely allied, genus. I had no opportunity, as he resided on the
Continent at the time, of submitting to him the specimens on which I had
founded; though, at once certain of his thorough candor and love of
truth, and of the solidity of my data, I felt confident that, in order
to alter his decision, it was but necessary that I should submit to him
my evidence. Meanwhile, however, the case was regarded as settled
against me; and I found at least one popular and very ingenious writer
on geology, after referring to my description of the Pterichthys, going
on to say that, though graphic, it was not correct, and that he himself
could describe it at least more truthfully, if not more vividly, than I
had done. And then there followed a description identical with that by
which mine had been supplanted. Five years had passed, when one day our
greatest British authority on fossil fishes, Sir Philip Egerton, was
struck, when passing an hour among the ichthyic organisms of his
princely collection, by the appearance presented by a central plate in
the cuirass of the Pterichthys. It is of a lozenge form, and, occupying
exactly such a place in the nether armature of the creature as that
occupied by the lozenge shaped spot on the ace of diamonds, it comes in
contact with four other plates that lie around it, and represent, so to
speak, the white portions of the card. And Sir Philip now found, that
instead of lying over, it lay under, the four contiguous plates: they
overlapped it, instead of being overlapped by it. This, he at once said,
on ascertaining the fact, cannot be the _upper_ side of the Pterichthys.
A plate so arranged would have formed no proper protection to the
exposed dorsal surface of the creature's body, as a slight blow would
have at once sent it in upon the interior framework; but a proper enough
one to the under side of a heavy swimmer, that, like the flat fishes,
kept close to the bottom;--a character which, as shown by the massive
bulk of its body, and its small spread of fin, must have belonged to the
Pterichthys. Sir Philip followed up his observations on the central
plate by a minute examination of the other parts of the creature's
armature; and the survey terminated in a recognition of the earlier
restoration,--set aside so long before,--as virtually the true one;--a
recognition in which Agassiz, when made acquainted with the nature of
the evidence, at once acquiesced. Now, here was there a question which
had been raised regarding the true mechanism of one of the oldest
ganoidal fishes, and settled erroneously on wrong data, again opened up,
to be settled anew on one of the most obvious mechanical principles
exemplified in the simple art of the slater or tiler. The argument of
Sir Philip amounted simply to this:--If the accepted restoration be a
true one, then the Creator of the Pterichthys must have committed a
mistake in mechanics which an ordinary slater would have avoided; but as
the Creator commits no such blunders, the mistake probably occurs in but
the restoration. I may mention, that the dorsal surface of this ancient
fish had also its central plate,--a lozenge truncated at its two longer
ends; and that, moulded to meet the necessities of its position, it was
not flat, like the under one, but strongly arched; and that on four of
its six sides it overrode by a squamose suture the lower plates with
which it came in contact.
These are but humble illustrations of the designing principle, as
exhibited of old; and yet they impress none the less strongly on that
account. Among the many contrivances of the Chinese Museum, to which I
have already referred, none seemed more to excite the curiosity of
visitors than a set of tall-backed, elaborately carved chairs,
exceedingly like those which were used in our own country two centuries
ago, and which Cowper so exquisitely describes. For thousands of miles
in the wide tract that spreads out between European Christendom and the
great wall, the inhabitants squat upon mats or carpets, or loll on
divans; and the contrivance of the chair is unknown: it reappears in
China, however, and reappears, not as a mere seat or stool, but as, in
every bar and limb, the identical chair of Europe arrested a century or
two back in its development. And every corresponding tenon and mortise
exhibited by the Chinese and European examples of this simple piece of
furniture served more forcibly to show an identity of character in the
minds which had originated them in countries so far apart, than the more
elaborate contrivances which, though illustrative of the same principles
of invention, were less easily understood. It is so with the more simple
and familiar instances of adaptation furnished by the works of the
Creator. We infer from them, more directly than from the complex
mechanisms, that he who wrought of old after the manner of a man must
have, in his intellectual character, if I may so express myself, certain
man-like qualities and traits. In all those works on Natural Theology
that treat, like the work of Paley, on the argument of design, the
assumption of a certain unity of the intellectual nature of the Creator
and creature is made, tacitly at least, the basis of all the reasonings;
and it is in the cases in which the design is most simple that the
argument is most generally understood. It is in the lower _skirts_ of
the Divine nature that we most readily trace the resemblance to the
nature of man,--an effect, mayhap, of the narrow reach of our faculties
in their present infantile state.
[Illustration: Fig. 101.
SIGILLARIA GROESERI
(_Coal Measures._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 102.
Fig. 103. Fig. 104.
WHORLED SHELLS OF THE OLD RED SANDSTONE.[23]]
But the resemblance is not restricted to the constructive department.
Both in the Chinese collection and among the Egyptian antiquities
exhibited in the British Museum, I found color as certainly as
mechanical contrivance. And the color furnished not only a practical
example from both the early and the remote peoples of the same sort of
chemical science as exists at the present time among ourselves in our
dyeworks and pigment manufactories, but it also showed a certain
identity with our own of their sense of beauty. The Chinese satins are
gorgeous with green, blue, yellow, scarlet, crimson, and purple, and
have fringes heavy with thread of gold. Gilding is as common among this
distant people as among ourselves, and at once shows a familiarity with
the art of the gold beater, and a sensibility to the beauty of a golden
surface; and in the painted ornaments I detected the rich tints of
vermilion and crimson lake, with the mineral blues, yellows, and greens.
In the Egyptian department, though the blanching influences of three
thousand years had dimmed the tints and tarnished the metals, I found
evidence of the same regard to hue and lustre as exists still in China
and among ourselves; all that now pleases the eye in London and Pekin
had pleased it in Thebes during the times of the earlier Pharaohs. And
just as we infer from the mechanical contrivances of the Creative-Worker
that he possesses a certain identity of mind in the _constructive_
department with his creature-workers, and this upon the principle on
which we infer an identity of mind between the creature-workers of
China, ancient Egypt, and our own country, seeing that their works are
identical, must we not also infer, on the same principle, that he
possesses in the _æsthetic_ department a certain identity with them
also. True, this region of the beautiful, ever surrounded by an
atmosphere of obscure, ill-settled metaphysics, is greatly less clear
than that mechanical province of whose various machines, whether of
Divine or human contrivance, it can be at least affirmed that machines
they _are_, and that they effect their purposes by contrivances of the
same or of resembling kinds. And yet the appearance in nature, age after
age, of the same forms and colors of beauty which man, in gratifying his
taste for the lovely in shape and hue, is ever reproducing for himself,
does seem to justify our inference of an identity of mind in this
province also. The colors of the old geologic organisms, like those of
the paintings of ancient Egypt, are greatly faded. A few, however, of
the Secondary, and even Palæozoic shells, still retain the rich
prismatic hues of the original nacre. Many of the Tertiary division
still bear the distinctive painted spots. Some of the later fossil
fishes, when first laid open in the rock, exhibit the pearly gleam that
must of old have lighted up the green depths of the water as they darted
through. Not a few of the fossil corals preserve enough of their former
color to impart much delicacy of tint to the marbles in which they
occur. But it is chiefly in form, not in shade or hue, that we find in
the organisms of the geologic ages examples of that beauty in which man
delights, and which he is ever reproducing for himself. There is scarce
an architectural ornament of the Gothic or Grecian styles which may not
be found existing as fossils in the rocks. The Ulodendron was sculptured
into gracefully arranged rows of pointed and closely imbricated leaves,
similar to those into which the Roman architects fretted the torus of
the Corinthian order. The Sigillaria were fluted columns ornately
carved in the line of the channelled flutes; the Lepidodendra bore,
according to their species, sculptured scales, or lozenges, or egg-like
hollows, set in a sort of frame, and relieved into knobs and furrows;
all of them furnishing examples of a delicate diaper work, like that so
admired in our more ornate Gothic buildings, such as Westminster Abbey,
or Canterbury and Chichester Cathedrals, only greatly more exquisite in
their design and finish. The scroll shells, a very numerous section of
the class in the earlier ages, such as Maclurea, Euomphalus, Clymenia,
and the great family of the ammonites, were volutes of varying
proportions, but not less graceful than the ornament of similar
proportions so frequently introduced into Greek and Roman architecture,
and of which we have such prominent examples in the capitals of the
Ionic, Corinthian, and composite orders. In what is known as the modern
Ionic the spiral of the volute is not all on one plane; it is a
Euomphalus: in the central volutes of the Corinthian the spiral is an
open one; it is a Lituite or Gyroceras: in the ancient Ionic it is
either wholly flat, as in Planorbus or the upper side of Maclurea, or
slightly relieved, as in the ammonites. There is no form of the volute
known to the architect which may not be found in the rocks, but there
are many forms in the rocks unknown to the architect. Nor are the
spire-like shells (see Fig. 105) less remarkable for the rich and varied
style of their ornamentation than the whorled ones. They are spires,
pinnacles, turrets, broaches; ornate, in some instances, beyond the
reach of the architect, and illustrative, in almost all, of his happiest
forms and proportions. We detect among the fossils the germs of numerous
designs developed in almost every department of art; but merely to
enumerate them would require a volume. One form of the old classic lamp
was that of the nautilus; another, that of _Gyphæa incurva_; the zigzag
mouldings of the Norman Gothic may be found in the carinated oysters of
the Greensand; the more delicate frettings of similar form which
roughened the pillars of a somewhat later age occur on Conularia and the
dorsal spines of Gyracanthus. The old corals, too, abound in ornamental
patterns, which man, unaware of their existence at the time, devised
long after for himself. In an article on calico printing, which forms
part of a recent history of Lancashire, there are a few of the patterns
introduced, backed by the recommendation that they were the most
successful ever tried. Of one of these, known as "Lane's Net," there
sold a greater number of pieces than of any other pattern ever brought
into the market. It led to many imitations; and one of the most popular
of these answers line for line, save that it is more stiff and
rectilinear, to the pattern in a recently discovered Old Red Sandstone
coral, the _Smithia Pengellyi_. The beautifully arranged lines which so
smit the dames of England, that each had to provide herself with a gown
of the fabric which they adorned, had been stamped amid the rocks _eons_
of ages before. And it must not be forgotten, that all these forms and
shades of beauty which once filled all nature, but of which only a few
fragments, or a few faded tints, survive, were created, not to gratify
man's love of the æsthetic, seeing that man had no existence until long
after they had disappeared, but in meet harmony with the tastes and
faculties of the Divine Worker, who had in his wisdom produced them all.
[Illustration: Fig. 105.
MURCHISONIA BIGRANULOSA.
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 106.
CONULARIA ORNATA.
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 107.
CALICO PATTERN.
(_Manchester._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 108.
SMITHIA PENGELLYI.
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
You will, I trust, bear with me should I seek, in depths where the light
shed by science becomes obscure, to guide my steps by light derived from
another and wholly different source. In an assembly such as that which I
have now the honor of addressing, there must be many shades of religious
opinion. I shall, however, assail no man's faith, but simply lay before
you a few deductions which, founded on my own, have supplied me with
what I deem a consistent theory of the curious class of phenomena with
which this evening we have been mainly dealing. First, then, I must hold
that we receive the true explanation of the _man_-like character of the
Creator's workings ere man was, in the remarkable text in which we are
told that "God made man in his own image and likeness." There is no
restriction here to moral quality: the moral image man had, and in large
measure lost; but the intellectual image he still retains. As a
geometrician, as an arithmetician, as a chemist, as an astronomer,--in
short, in all the departments of what are known as the strict
sciences,--man differs from his Maker, not in kind, but in degree,--not
as matter differs from mind, or darkness from light, but simply as a
mere portion of space or time differs from _all_ space or _all_ time. I
have already referred to mechanical contrivances as identically the same
in the Divine and human productions; nor can I doubt that, not only in
the pervading sense of the beautiful in form and color which it is our
privilege as men in some degree to experience and possess, but also in
that perception of harmony which constitutes the _musical_ sense, and in
that poetic feeling of which Scripture furnishes us with at once the
earliest and the highest examples, and which we may term the _poetic_
sense, we bear the stamp and impress of the Divine image. Now, if this
be so, we must look upon the schemes of Creation, Revelation, and
Providence, not as schemes of mere adaptation to man's nature, but as
schemes also specially adapted to the nature of God as the pattern and
original nature. Further, it speaks, I must hold, of the harmony and
unity of one sublime scheme, that, after long ages of immaturity,--after
the dynasties of the fish, the reptile, and the mammal should in
succession have terminated,--man should have at length come upon the
scene in the image of God; and that, at a still later period, God
himself should have come upon the scene in the form of man; and that
thus all God's workings in creation should be indissolubly linked to God
himself, not by any such mere likeness or image of the Divinity as that
which the first Adam bore, but by Divinity itself in the Second Adam; so
that on the rainbow-encircled apex of the pyramid of created being the
Son of God and the Son of Man should sit enthroned forever in one
adorable person. That man should have been made in the image of God
seems to have been a meet preparation for God's after assumption of the
form of man. It was perhaps thus secured that _stock_ and _graft_, if I
may venture on such a metaphor, should have the necessary affinity, and
be capable of being united in a single person. The false gods of the
Egyptians assumed, it was fabled, the forms of brutes: it was the human
form and nature that was assumed by the true God;--so far as we know,
the only form and nature that could have brought him into direct union
with at once the matter and mind of the universe which he had created
and made,--with "true body and reasonable soul." Yet further, I learn by
inevitable inference from one of the more distinctive articles of my
creed, that as certainly as the dynasty of the fish was predetermined in
the scheme of Providence to be succeeded by the higher dynasty of the
reptile, and that of the reptile by the still higher dynasty of the
mammal, so it was equally predetermined that the dynasty of responsible,
fallible man should be succeeded by the dynasty of glorified, immortal
man; and that, in consequence, the present mixed state of things is not
a mere result, as some theologians believe, of a certain human act which
was perpetrated about six thousand years ago, but was, virtually at
least, the effect of a God-determined decree, old as eternity,--a decree
in which that act was written as a portion of the general programme. In
looking abroad on that great history of life, of which the latter
portions are recorded in the pages of revelation, and the earlier in the
rocks, I feel my grasp of a doctrine first taught me by our Calvinistic
Catechism at my mother's knee, tightening instead of relaxing. "The
decrees of God are his eternal purposes," I was told, "according to the
counsel of his will, whereby for his own glory he hath foreordained
whatsoever comes to pass." And what I was told early I still believe.
The programme of Creation and Providence, in all its successive periods,
is of God, not of man. With the arrangements of the old geologic
periods it is obvious man could have had nothing to do: the primeval
ages of wondrous plants and monster animals ran their course without
counsel taken of him; and in reading their record in the bowels of the
earth, and in learning from their strange characters that such ages
there were, and what they produced, we are the better enabled to
appreciate the impressive directness of the sublime message to Job, when
the "Lord answered him out of the whirlwind, and said, Where wast thou
when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast
understanding." And I can as little regard the present scene of things
as an ultimate consequence of what man had willed or wrought, as even
any of the pre-Adamic ages. It is simply one scene in a foreordained
series,--a scene intermediate in place between the age of the
irresponsible mammal and of glorified man; and to provide for the upward
passage to the ultimate state, we know that, in reference to the
purposes of the Eternal, he through whom the work of restoration has
been effected was in reality what he is designated in the remarkable
text, "The Lamb slain from the _foundations_ of the world." First in the
course of things, man in the image of God, and next, in meet sequence,
God in the form of man, have been equally from all eternity
predetermined actors in the same great scheme.
I approach a profound and terrible mystery. We can see how in the
pre-Adamic ages higher should have succeeded lower dynasties. To be low
was not to be immoral; to be low was not to be guilt-stained and
miserable. The sea anemone on its half-tide rock, and the fern on its
mossy hill-side, are low in their respective kingdoms; but they are,
notwithstanding, worthy, in their quiet, unobtrusive beauty, of the God
who formed them. It is only when the human period begins that we are
startled and perplexed by the problem of a lowness not innocent,--an
inferiority tantamount to moral deformity. In the period of
responsibility, to be low means to be evil; and how, we ask, could a
lowness and inferiority resolvable into moral evil have had any place in
the decrees of that Judge who ever does what is right, and in whom moral
evil can have no place? The subject is one which it seems not given to
man thoroughly to comprehend. Permit me, however, to remark in reply,
that in a sense so plain, so obvious, so unequivocally true, that it
would lead an intelligent jury, impannelled in the case, conscientiously
to convict, and a wise judge righteously to condemn, all that is evil in
the present state of things man may as certainly have wrought out for
himself, as the criminals whom we see sentenced at every justiciary
court work out for themselves the course of punishment to which they are
justly subjected.
It has been well said of the Author of all by the poet, that, "binding
nature fast in fate," he "left free the human will." And it is this
freedom or independency of will operating on an intellect moulded after
the image and likeness of the Divinity that has rendered men capable of
being what the Scriptures so emphatically term "fellow-workers with
God." In a humble and restricted sense, as I have already
remarked,--humble and restricted, but in that restricted sense obviously
true,--the surface of the earth far and wide testifies to this fact of
fellowship in working. The deputed lord of creation, availing himself of
God's natural laws, does what no mere animal of the old geologic ages
ever did, or ever could have done,--he adorns and beautifies the earth,
and adds tenfold to its original fertility and productiveness. In this
special sense, then, he is a fellow-worker with Him who, according to
the Psalmist, "causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for
the service of man, and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil
that maketh his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's
heart." But it is in a greatly higher sense, and in reference to God's
moral laws, that he is fitted to be his fellow-worker in the Scriptural
sense. And his proper employment in this department is the elevation and
development, moral and intellectual, of himself and his fellow-men, both
in adaptation to the demands of the present time, and in preparation for
a future state.
All experience, however, serves to show that in this paramount
department man greatly fails; nay, that he is infinitely less true to
his proper end and destiny than the beasts that perish to their several
instincts. And yet it may be remarked, that such of the lower animals as
are guided by pure instinct are greatly more infallible within their
proper spheres than the higher, half-reasoning animals. The mathematical
bee never constructs a false angle; the sagacious dog is not
unfrequently _out_ in his calculations. The higher the animal in the
scale, the greater its liability to error. But it is not the less true,
that no fish, no reptile, no mammal, of the geologic or the recent ages,
ever so failed in working out the purposes it was created to serve, as
man has failed in working out _his_; further, in no creature save in man
does there exist that war of the mind between appetite and duty of which
the Apostle so consciously complained. And we must seek an explanation
of these twin facts in that original freedom of the will which, while it
rendered man capable of being _of choice_ God's fellow-worker, also
conferred on him an ability of choosing _not_ to work with God. And his
choice of not working with him, or of working against him, being once
freely made, we may see how, from man's very constitution and nature, as
an intelligence united to matter that increases his kind from generation
to generation in virtue of the original law, the ability of again
working with God might be forever destroyed. And thus man's general
condition as a lapsed creature may be as unequivocally a consequence of
man's own act, as the condition of individuals born free, but doomed to
slavery in punishment of their offences, is a consequence of _their_ own
acts. A brief survey of the many-colored and variously-placed human
family, as at present distributed on the earth, may enable us in some
degree to conceive of a matter which, involving, as it does, that master
problem of moral science, the origin of evil, seems, as I have said, not
to be given to man fully to comprehend.
"The different races of mankind," says Humboldt, employing, let me
remark, the language of the distinguished German naturalist Müller, to
give expression to the view which he himself adopts,--"the different
races of mankind are not different species of a genus, but forms of one
sole species." "The human species," says Cuvier, "appears to be single."
"When we compare," says Pritchard, "all the facts and observations which
have been heretofore fully established as to the specific instincts and
separate psychical endowments of all the distinct tribes of sentient
beings in the universe, we are entitled to draw confidently the
conclusion, that all human races are of one species and one family."
"God hath made of one blood," said the Apostle Paul, in addressing
himself to the _élite_ of Athens, "all nations, for to dwell on the face
of all the earth." Such, on this special head, is the testimony of
Revelation, and such the conclusion of our highest scientific
authorities. The question has, indeed, been raised in these latter
times, whether each species of animals may not have been originally
created, not by single pairs or in single centres, but by several pairs
and in several centres, and, of course, the human species among the
rest? And the _query_,--for in reality it amounts to nothing more,--has
been favorably entertained on the other side of the Atlantic. On purely
scientific grounds it is of course difficult to prove a negative in the
case, just as it would be difficult to prove a negative were the
question to be, whether the planet Venus was not composed of quartz
rock, or the planet Mars of Old Red Sandstone? But the portion of the
problem really solvable by science,--the identity of the human race
under all its conditions, and in all its varieties,--science _has_
solved. It has determined that all the various tribes of man are but
forms of a single species. And in the definition of species,--waiving
the American _doubt_ until it shall at least become something more,--I
am content to follow the higher authorities. "We unite," says M. de
Candolle, "under the designation of a _species_, all those individuals
that mutually bear to each other so close a resemblance as to allow of
our supposing that they may have proceeded originally from a single
being or a single pair." "A _species_," says Buffon, "is a constant
succession of individuals similar to and capable of reproducing each
other." "A _species_," says Cuvier, "is a succession of individuals
which reproduces and perpetuates itself."
Now, all history and all tradition, so far as they throw light on the
question at all, agree in showing that the centre in which the human
species originated must have been somewhere in the temperate regions of
the East, not far distant from the Caucasian group of mountains. All the
old seats of civilization,--that of Nineveh, Babylon, Palestine, Egypt,
and Greece,--are spread out around this centre. And it is certainly a
circumstance worthy of notice, and surely not without bearing on the
_physical_ condition of primeval humanity, that in this centre we find a
variety of the species which naturalists of the highest standing regard
as fundamentally typical of the highest races of the globe. "The
natives of the Caucasus," says Cuvier, "are even now considered as the
handsomest on earth." And wherever man has, if I may so speak, _fallen_
least,--wherever he has retained, at least intellectually, the Divine
image,--this Caucasian type of feature and figure, with, of course,
certain national modifications, he also retains. It was developed in a
remarkable degree among the old Greeks, as may be seen from the busts of
some of their handsomer men; and still more remarkably in their _beau
ideal_ of beauty, as exemplified in the statues of their gods. We see it
also, though dashed with a shade of severity, in the strong forms and
stern features of monarchs that reigned of old in Nineveh and Babylon,
as brought to light in their impressive effigies by the excavations of
Rawlinson and Layard. And further, though somewhat modified by the
African dash, we detect it in the colossal statues of Egypt. Nor, as
shown by Egyptian paintings still fresh in color and outline, was it
less traceable in the ancient Jewish countenance and figure. It is still
palpable, too, amid all the minor peculiarities of national physiognomy,
in the various peoples of Europe. We may see it in our own country,
though, as Sir Walter Scott truly tells us,--
"The rugged form may mark the mountain band,
And harsher features and a mien more grave."
It walks, however, the boards of our Parliament House here in a very
respectable type of Caucasian man; and all agree that nowhere else in
modern Europe is it to be found more true to its original contour than
among the high-bred aristocracy of England, especially among the female
members of the class. Looking, then, at the entire evidence,--at the
admitted fact that the Circassians of the present day are an eminently
handsome people,--that the old Greeks, Ninevites, Egyptians, Jews,
Romans, and with these all the modern nations of Europe, are but the
varieties of the central race that have retained in greatest perfection
the original traits,--I do not see how we are to avoid the conclusion
that this Caucasian type was the type of Adamic man. Adam, the father of
mankind, was no squalid savage of doubtful humanity, but a noble
specimen of man; and Eve a soft Circassian beauty, but exquisitely
lovely beyond the lot of fallen humanity.
"The loveliest pair
That ever yet in love's embraces met:
Adam, the goodliest man of men since born
His sons; the fairest of her daughters Eve."
I know not whether I should add what follows. It has been said that
Luke, the "beloved physician," was also a painter. It has been said that
that traditionary, time-honored form, which we at once recognize in the
pictures of the old masters as that of the Saviour of mankind, he in
reality bore when he walked this earth in the flesh. I know not what
degree of probability attaches to the belief. I know not whether the
traditionary form be in reality the true one. This, however, I know,
that _if_ such was the form which the adorable Redeemer assumed when he
took to himself a real body and a reasonable soul, the second Adam, like
the first, exemplified, when upon earth, the perfect type of Caucasian
man.
Let me next remark, that the further we remove from the original centre
of the race, the more degraded and sunk do we find the several varieties
of humanity. We must set wholly aside, in our survey, the disturbing
element of modern emigration. Caucasian man has been pressing outwards.
In the backwoods of America, in Southern Africa, in Australia, and in
the Polynesian islands, the old Adamic type has been asserting its
superiority, and annihilating before it the degraded races. But taking
into account merely the aboriginal varieties, it seems to be a general
rule, that the further we remove in any direction from the Adamic
centre, the more animalized and sunk do we find the various tribes or
races. Contrary to the conceptions of the assertors of the development
hypothesis, we ascertain, as we proceed outwards, that the course is not
one of progression from the low to the high, but of descent from the
high to the low. Passing northwards, we meet, where the lichen-covered
land projects into the frozen ocean, with the diminutive Laps, squat,
ungraceful, with their flat features surmounted by pyramidal skulls of
small capacity, and, as a race, unfitted for the arts either of peace or
war. We meet also with the timid Namollas, with noses so flat as to be
scarce visible in the women and children of the race; and with the
swarthy Kamtschatkans, with their broad faces, protuberant bellies, and
thin, ill-formed legs. Passing southwards, we come to the negro tribes,
with their sooty skins, broad noses, thick lips, projecting jawbones,
and partially-webbed fingers. And then we find ourselves among the
squalid Hottentots, repulsively ugly, and begrimmed with filth; or the
still more miserable Bushmen. Passing eastwards, after taking leave of
the Persian and Indian branches of the Caucasian race, we meet with the
squat Mongolian, with his high cheek bones set on a broad face, and his
compressed, unintellectual, pig-like eyes; or encounter, in the Indian
Archipelago or the Australian interior, the pitiably low Alforian races,
with their narrow, retreating foreheads, slim, feeble limbs, and
baboon-like faces. Or, finally, passing westward, we find the
large-jawed, copper-colored Indians of the New World, vigorous in some
of the northern tribes as animals, though feeble as men, but gradually
sinking in southern America, as among the wild Caribs or spotted
Araucans; till at the extremity of the continent we find, naked and
shivering among their snows, the hideous, small-eyed, small-limbed,
flat-headed Fuegians, perhaps the most wretched of human creatures. And
all these varieties of the species, in which we find humanity "fallen,"
according to the poet, "into disgrace," are varieties that have lapsed
from the original Caucasian type. They are all the descendants of man as
God created him; but they do not exemplify man as God created him. They
do not represent, save in hideous caricature, the glorious creature
moulded of old by the hand of the Divine Worker. They are
fallen,--degraded; many of them, as races, hopelessly lost. For all
experience serves to show, that when a tribe of men falls beneath a
certain level, it cannot come into competition with civilized man,
pressing outwards from his old centres to possess the earth, without
becoming extinct before him. Sunk beneath a certain level, as in the
forests of America, in Van Dieman's Land, in New South Wales, and among
the Bushmen of the Cape, the experience of more than a hundred years
demonstrates that its destiny is extinction,--not restoration.
Individuals may be recovered by the labors of some zealous missionary;
but it is the fate of the race, after a few generations, to disappear.
It has fallen too hopelessly low to be restored. There remain curious
traces in the New World of these perished tribes. The Bible, translated
into an old Indian language, from which the devoted David Brainerd
taught so successfully a nation of Red Men, still exists; but it speaks
in a dead tongue, which no one can now understand; for the nation to
whom he preached has become extinct. And Humboldt tells us, in referring
to a perished tribe of South America, that there lived in 1806, when he
visited their country, an old parrot in Maypures, which could not be
understood, because, as the natives informed him, it spoke the language
of the Atures. Tribes of the aborigines of Australia have wholly
disappeared during the present generation; and I remember seeing it
stated in a newspaper paragraph, which appeared a few years ago, that
the last male survivor of the natives of Tasmania was at that time in
the latter stages of consumption.
But if man, in at least the more degraded varieties of the race, be so
palpably _not_ what the Creator originally made him, by whom, then, was
he made the poor lost creature which in these races we find him to be?
He was made what he is, I reply, by man himself; and this, in many
instances, by a process which we may see every day taking place among
ourselves in individuals and families, though happily, not in races.
Man's nature again,--to employ the condensed statement of the poet,--has
been bound fast in fate, but his will has been left free. He is free
either to resign himself to the indolence and self-indulgence so natural
to the species; or, "spurning delights, to live laborious days;"--free
either to sink into ignorant sloth, dependent uselessness, and
self-induced imbecility, bodily and mental, or to assert by honest labor
a noble independence,--to seek after knowledge as for hidden treasures,
and, in the search, to sharpen his faculties and invigorate his mind.
And while we see around us some men addressing themselves with stout,
brave hearts to what Carlyle terms, with homely vigor, their "heavy job
of work," and, by denying themselves many an insidious indulgence, doing
it effectually and well, and rearing up well-taught families in
usefulness and comfort, to be the stay of the future, we see other men
yielding to the ignoble solicitations of appetite or of indolence, and
becoming worse than useless themselves, and the parents of ignorant,
immoral, and worse than useless families. The wandering vagrants of
Great Britain at the present time have been estimated at from fifteen to
twenty thousand souls; the hereditary paupers of England,--a vastly
more numerous class,--have become, in a considerable degree, a sept
distinct from the general community; and in all our large towns there
are certain per centages of the population,--unhappily ever increasing
per centages,--that, darkened in mind and embruted in sentiment, are
widely recognized as emphatically the dangerous classes of the
community. And let us remember that we are witnessing in these instances
no new thing in the history of the species: every period since that of
the vagabond Cain has had its waifs and stragglers, who fell behind in
the general march. In circumstances such as obtained in the earlier ages
of the human family, all the existing nomades and paupers of our country
would have passed into distinct races of men. For in the course of a few
generations their forms and complexions would begin to tell of the
self-induced degradation that had taken place in their minds; and in a
few ages more they would have become permanent varieties of the species.
There are cases in which not more than from two to three centuries have
been found sufficient thoroughly to alter the original physiognomy of a
race. "On the plantation of Ulster in 1611, and afterwards, on the
success of the British against the rebels in 1641 and 1689," says a
shrewd writer of the present day, himself an Irishman, "great multitudes
of the native Irish were driven from Armagh and the south of Down, into
the mountainous tract extending from the Barony of Fleurs eastward to
the sea; on the other side of the kingdom the same race were exposed to
the worst effects of hunger and ignorance, the two great brutalizers of
the human race. The descendants of these exiles are now distinguished
physically by great degradation. They are remarkable for open,
projecting mouths, with prominent teeth and exposed gums; and their
advancing cheek bones and depressed noses bear barbarism on their very
front. In Sligo and northern Mayo the consequences of the two centuries
of degradation and hardship exhibit themselves in the whole physical
condition of the people, affecting not only the features, but the frame.
Five feet two inches on an average,--pot-bellied, bow-legged, abortively
featured, their clothing a wisp of rags,--these spectres of a people
that were once well-grown, able-bodied, and comely, stalk abroad into
the daylight of civilization, the annual apparition of Irish ugliness
and Irish want."
Such is man as man himself has made him,--not man as he came from the
hand of the Creator. In many instances the degradation has been
voluntary; in others it has been forced upon families and races by the
iron hand of oppression; in almost all,--whether self-chosen by the
parents or imposed upon them,--the children and the children's children
have, as a matter of inevitable necessity, been born to it. For,
whatever we may think of the Scriptural doctrine on this special head,
it is a fact broad and palpable in the economy of nature, that parents
_do_ occupy a federal position; and that the lapsed progenitors, when
cut off from civilization and all external interference of a missionary
character, become the founders of a lapsed race. The iniquities of the
parents are visited upon the children. And in all such instances it is
_man_ left to the freedom of his own will that is the deteriorator of
man. The doctrine of the Fall, in its purely theologic aspect, is a
doctrine which must be apprehended by faith; but it is at least
something to find that the analogies of science, instead of running
counter to it, run in exactly the same line. It is one of the inevitable
consequences of that nature of man which the Creator "bound fast in
fate," while he left free his will, that the free will of the parent
should become the destiny of the child.
But the subject is one in which we can see our way as but "through a
glass darkly." Nay, it is possible that the master problem which it
involves no created intelligence can thoroughly unlock. It has been well
said, that the "poet's heart" is informed by a "terrible sagacity;" and
I am at times disposed to regard Milton's conception of the perplexity
of the fallen spirits, when reasoning on "fixed fate, free will,
foreknowledge absolute," and finding "no end in wandering mazes lost,"
much rather as a sober truth caught from the invisible world, than as
merely an ingenious fancy. The late Robert Montgomery has rather
unhappily chosen Satan as one of the themes of his muse; and in his long
poem, designated in its second title "Intellect without God," he has set
that personage a-reasoning in a style which, I fear, more completely
demonstrates the absence of God than the presence of intellect. It has,
however, sometimes occurred to me, that a poet of the larger calibre,
who to the Divine faculty and vision added such a knowledge of geologic
science as that which Virgil possessed of the Natural History of his
time, or as that which Milton possessed of the general learning of
_his_, might find, in a somewhat similar subject, the materials of a
poem which "posterity would not willingly let die." There is one of the
satirists justly severe on a class of critics
"Who, drily plain, without invention's aid,
Write dull receipts how poems may be made."
But at some risk of rendering myself obnoxious to his censure, I shall
attempt indicating at least the general scope and character of what the
schoolmen might term a _possible_ poem; which, if vivified by the genius
of some of the higher masters of the lyre, broad of faculty, and at once
great poets and great men, might prove one precious boon more to the
world, suited, conformably to the special demands of these latter times,
to
"assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."
There has been war among the intelligences of God's spiritual creation.
Lucifer, son of the morning, has fallen like fire from heaven; and our
present earth, existing as a half-extinguished hell, has received him
and his angels. Dead matter exists, and in the unembodied spirits
vitality exists; but not yet in all the universe of God has the vitality
been united to the matter; animal life, to even the profound
apprehension of the fallen angel, is an inconceivable idea. Meanwhile,
as the scarce reckoned centuries roll by, vacantly and dull, like the
cheerless days and nights over the head of some unhappy captive, the
miserable prisoners of our planet become aware that there is a slow
change taking place in the condition of their prison-house. Where a low,
dark archipelago of islands raise their flat backs over the thermal
waters, the heat glows less intensely than of old; the red fire bursts
forth less frequently; the dread earthquake shakes more rarely; save in
a few centres of intenser action, the great deep no longer boils like a
pot; and though the heavens are still shut out by a gray ceiling of
thick vapor, through which sun or moon never yet appeared, a less gloomy
twilight struggles at noonday through the enveloping cloud, and falls
more cheerfully than heretofore upon land and sea. At length there comes
a morning in which great ocean and the scattered islands declare that
God the Creator had descended to visit the earth. The hitherto
verdureless land bears the green flush of vegetation; and there are
creeping things among the trees. Nor is the till now unexampled mystery
of animal life absent from the sounds and bays. It is the highest
intelligences that manifest the deepest interest in the works of the All
Wise. Nor can we doubt that on that morning of creative miracle, in
which matter and vitality were first united in the bonds of a strange
wedlock, the comprehensive intellect of the great fallen
spirit--profound and active beyond the lot of humanity--would have found
ample employment in attempting to fathom the vast mystery, and in vainly
asking what these strange things might mean.
With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed
creation,--as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,--must not
that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine
Worker,--scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the
inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to
depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately
to comprehend! Standing in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the
chill and withering shadow of that secret of the Lord which was not with
him, how thoroughly must he not have seen, and with what bitter
malignity felt, that the grasp of the Almighty was still upon him, and
that in the ever varying problem of creation, which, with all his
powers, he failed to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained
an unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he had
rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to flee, emphatically
spake to him, as in an after age to the patriarch Job, and, with the
quiet dignity of the Infinite, challenged him either to do or to know!
"Shall he that coutendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that
reproveth God, let him answer. Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? or
canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?" With what wild
thoughts must that restless and unhappy spirit have wandered amid the
tangled mazes of the old carboniferous forests! With what bitter
mockeries must he have watched the fierce wars which raged in their
sluggish waters, among ravenous creatures horrid with trenchant teeth,
barbed sting, and sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of
plate and scale! And how, as generation after generation passed away,
and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land had been, or the land
rose to possess the ancient seats of the ocean,--how, when looking back
upon myriads of ages, and when calling up in memory what once had been,
the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view than the
features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze-borne clouds,--how must
he have felt, as he became conscious that the earth was fast ripening,
and that, as its foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by
the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of existence,--how
must he have felt, if, like some old augur looking into the inner
mysteries of animal life, with their strange prophecies, the truth had
at length burst upon him, that reasoning, accountable man was fast
coming to the birth,--man, the moral agent,--man, the ultimate work and
end of creation,--man, a creature in whom, as in the inferior animals,
vitality was to be united to matter, but in whom also, as in no inferior
animal, responsibility was to be united to vitality! How must expectancy
have quickened,--how must solicitude have grown,--when, after the
dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the dynasty of the reptile,
and that of the reptile by the dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time
had at length arrived when the earth had become fixed and stable, and
the proud waves of ocean had been stayed,--when, after species and
genera in both kingdoms had been increased tenfold beyond the precedent
of any former age, the Creative Hand seemed to pause in its working, and
the finished creation to demand its lord! Even at this late period, how
strange may not the doubts and uncertainties have been that remained to
darken the mind of the lost spirit! It was according to his
experience,--stretched backwards to the first beginnings of organic
vitality, and coextensive, at a still earlier period, with God's
spiritual universe,--that all _animals_ should die,--that all _moral
agents_ should live. How, in this new creature,--this prodigy of
creation, who was to unite what never before had been united,--the
nature of the animals that _die_ with the standing and responsibility of
the moral agents that _live_,--how, in this partaker of the double
nature, was the discrepancy to be reconciled? How, in this matter, were
the opposite claims of life and death to be adjusted, or the absolute
_immortality_, which cannot admit of degrees, to be made to meet with
and shade into the _mortality_ which, let us extend the term of previous
vitality as we may, must forever involve the antagonistic idea of final
annihilation and the ceasing to be?
At length creation receives its deputed monarch. For, moulded by God's
own finger, and in God's own likeness, man enters upon the scene, an
exquisite creature, rich in native faculty, pregnant with the yet
undeveloped seeds of all wisdom and knowledge, tender of heart and pure
of spirit, formed to hold high communion with his Creator, and to
breathe abroad his soul in sympathy over all that the Creator had made.
And yet, left to the freedom of his own will, there is a weakness in the
flesh that betrays his earthly lineage. It is into the dust of the
ground that the living soul has been breathed. The son of the soil, who,
like the inferior animals, his subjects, sleeps and wakes, and can feel
thirst and hunger, and the weariness of toil, and the sweets of rest,
and who come under the general law, "increase and multiply," promulgated
of old to them, stands less firmly than the immaterial spirits stood of
old; and yet even they rebelled against Heaven, and fell. There awakes a
grim hope in the sullen lord of the first revolt. Ages beyond tale or
reckoning has this temple of creation been in building. Long have its
mute prophecies in fishes and in creeping things, in bird and in beast,
told of coming man, its final object and end. And now there needeth but
one blow, and the whole edifice is destroyed, God's purposes marred and
frustrated, and this new favorite of earth dashed back to the dust out
of which he was created, and brought, like the old, extinct races, under
the eternal law of death. Armed with the experience in evil of unsummed
ages, the Tempter plies his work: nor is it to low or ignoble appetites
that he appeals. It is to the newly-formed creature's thirst for
knowledge; it is to his love stronger than death. The wiles of the Old
Serpent prevail; man falls prostrate before him; creation trembles; and
then from amid the trees of the garden comes the voice of God. And lo!
in an enigma mysterious and dark a new dispensation of prophecy begins.
Victims bleed; altars smoke; the tabernacle arises amid the white tents
of the desert; the temple ascends all glorious on the heights of Mount
Zion; prophet after prophet declares his message. At length, in the
fulness of time, the Messiah comes; and, in satisfying the law, and in
fulfilling all righteousness, and in bringing life and immortality to
light, abundantly shows forth that the terminal dynasty of all creation
had been of old foreordained, ere the foundations of the world, to
possess for its eternal lord and monarch, not primeval man, created in
the image of God, but God, made manifest in the flesh, in the form of
primeval man. But how breaks on the baffled Tempter the sublime
revelation? Wearily did he toil,--darkly did he devise, and take, in his
great misery, deep counsel against the Almighty; and yet all the while,
while striving and resisting as an enemy, has he been wielded as a tool;
when, glaring aloof in his proud rebellion, the grasp of the Omnipotent
has been upon him, and the Eternal Purposes have encompassed him, and he
has been working out, all unwittingly, the foreordained decree, "For our
God maketh the wrath of the wicked to praise him, and the remainder
thereof doth he restrain."
But enough, for the present, of the poems that might be. Permit me,
however, to add, in the words of one of the most suggestive, and
certainly not least powerful, of English thinkers, that "a fall of some
sort or other,--the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute,--is the
fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this
hypothesis," he adds, "man is unintelligible,--with it every phenomenon
is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight."
Such, in this matter, was the ultimate judgment of a man who in youth
had entertained very opposite views,--the poet Coleridge.
It has been said that the inferences of the geologist militate against
those of the theologian. Nay, not those of our higher geologists and
higher theologians,--not what our Murchisons and Sedgwicks infer in the
one field, with what our Chalmerses and Isaac Taylors infer in the
other. Between the Word and the Works of God there can be no actual
discrepancies; and the seeming ones are discernible only by the men who
see worst.
"Mote-like they flicker in unsteady eyes,
And weakest his who best descries."
The geologist, as certainly as the theologian, has a province
exclusively his own; and were the theologian ever to remember that the
Scriptures could not possibly have been given to us as revelations of
scientific truth, seeing that a single scientific truth they never yet
revealed, and the geologist that it must be in vain to seek in science
those truths which lead to salvation, seeing that in science these
truths were never yet found, there would be little danger even of
difference among them, and none of collision. Nay, there is, I doubt
not, a time coming in which the Butlers and Chalmerses of the future
will be content to recognize the geologic field as that of their richest
and most pregnant analogies. It is with the history of the pre-Adamic
ages that geology sets itself to deal; and by carefully conning the
ancient characters graven in the rocks, and by deciphering the strange
inscriptions which they compose, it greatly extends the record of God's
doings upon the earth. And what more natural to expect, or rational to
hold, than that the Unchangeable One should have wrought in all time
after one general type and pattern, or than that we may seek, in the
hope of finding, meet correspondences and striking analogies between his
revealed workings during the human period, and his previous workings of
old during the geologic periods,--correspondences and analogies suited
to establish the identity of the worker, and, of course, from that
identity to demonstrate the authenticity of the revelation? Permit me to
bring out, in conclusion, what I have often thought on this subject, but
have not been able so tersely to express, in a brief quotation from one
of the most instructive works of the present age, the "Method of the
Divine Government," by the Rev. Dr. M'Cosh:--"Science has a foundation,"
says this solid thinker and accomplished writer, "and so has religion.
Let them unite their foundations, and the basis will be broader, and
they will be two compartments of one great fabric reared to the glory of
God. Let the one be the outer and the other the inner court. In the one
let all look, and admire, and adore; and in the other let those who have
faith kneel, and pray, and praise. Let the one be the sanctuary where
human learning may present its richest incense as an offering to God,
and the other, the holiest of all, separated from it by a veil now rent
in twain, and in which, on a blood-sprinkled mercy seat, we pour out the
love of a reconciled heart, and hear the oracles of the living God."
LECTURE SEVENTH.
THE NOACHIAN DELUGE.
PART I.
There are events so striking in themselves or from their accompaniments,
that they powerfully impress the memories of children but little removed
from infancy, and are retained by them in a sort of troubled
recollection ever after, however extended their term of life. Samuel
Johnson was only two and a half years old when, in accordance with the
belief of the time, he was touched by Queen Anne for the "Evil;" but
more than seventy years after, he could call up in memory a dream-like
recollection of the lady dressed in a black hood, and glittering with
diamonds, into whose awful presence he had been ushered on that
occasion, and who had done for the cure of his complaint all that
legitimate royalty could do. And an ancient lady of the north country,
who had been carried, when a child, in her nurse's arms, to witness the
last witch execution that took place in Scotland, could distinctly tell,
after the lapse of nearly a century, that the fire was surrounded by an
awe-struck crowd, and that the smoke of the burning, when blown about
her by a cross breeze, had a foul and suffocating odor. In this respect
the memory of infant tribes and nations seems to resemble that of
individuals. There are characters and events which impress it so
strongly, that they seem never to be forgotten, but live as traditions,
sometimes mayhap very vague, and much modified by the inventions of an
after time, but which, in floating downwards to late ages, always bear
about them a certain strong impress of their pristine reality. They are
shadows that have become ill defined from the vast distance of the
objects that cast them,--like the shadows of great birds flung, in a
summer's day, from the blue depths of the sky to the landscape far
below,--but whose very presence, however diffused they may have become,
testifies to the existence of the remote realities from which they are
thrown, and without which they could have had no being at all. The old
mythologies are filled with shadowy traditions of this kind,--shadows of
the world's "gray fathers,"--which, like those shadows seen reflected on
clouds by travellers who ascend lofty mountains, are exaggerated into
the most gigantic proportions, and bear radiant glories around their
heads.
There is, however, one special tradition which seems to be more deeply
impressed and more widely spread than any of the others. The destruction
of well nigh the whole human race, in an early age of the world's
history, by a great deluge, appears to have so impressed the minds of
the few survivors, and seems to have been handed down to their children,
in consequence, with such terror-struck impressiveness, that their
remote descendants of the present day have not even yet forgotten it. It
appears in almost every mythology, and lives in the most distant
countries, and among the most barbarous tribes. It was the laudable
ambition of Humboldt,--first entertained at a very early period of
life,--to penetrate into distant regions, unknown to the natives of
Europe at the time, that he might acquaint himself, in fields of
research altogether fresh and new, with men and with nature in their
most primitive conditions. In carrying out his design, he journeyed far
into the woody wilderness that surrounds the Orinoco, and found himself
among tribes of wild Indians whose very names were unknown to the
civilized world. And yet among even these forgotten races of the human
family he found the tradition of the deluge still fresh and distinct;
not confined to single tribes, but general among the scattered nations
of that great region, and intertwined with curious additions, suggestive
of the inventions of classic mythology in the Old World. "The belief in
a great deluge," we find him saying, "is not confined to one nation
singly,--the Tamanacs: it makes part of a system of historical
tradition, of which we find scattered notions among the Maypures of the
great cataracts; among the Indians of the Rio Erevato, which runs into
the Caura; and among almost all the tribes of the Upper Orinoco. When
the Tamanacs are asked how the human race survived this great
deluge,--'_the age of water_' of the Mexicans,--they say, a man and
woman saved themselves on a high mountain called Tamanacu, situated on
the banks of the Asiveru, and, _casting behind them over their heads_
the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, they saw the seeds contained in
these fruits produce men and women, who re-peopled the earth. Thus,"
adds the philosophic traveller, "we find in all simplicity, among
nations now in a savage state, a tradition which the Greeks embellished
with all the charms of imagination." The resemblance is certainly very
striking. "Quit the temple," said the Oracle to Deucalion and Pyrrha,
when they had consulted it, after the great deluge, regarding the mode
in which the earth was to be re-peopled,--"vail your heads, unloose your
girdles, and throw behind your backs the bones of your grandmother."
Rightly interpreting what seemed darkest and most obscure in the reply,
they took "stones of the earth," and, casting them behind them, the
stones flung by Deucalion became men, and those by Pyrrha became women,
and thus the disfurnished world was peopled anew. The navigator always
regards himself as sure of his position when he has _two_ landmarks to
determine it by, or when in the open ocean he can ascertain, not only
his latitude, but his longitude also. And this curious American
tradition seems to have its two such marks,--its two bisecting lines of
determination,--to identify it with the classic tradition of the Old
World that refers evidently to the same great event.
There are other portions of America in which the tradition of the Flood
is still more distinct than among the forests of the Orinoco. It is
related by Herrera, one of the Spanish historians of America, that even
the most barbarous of the Brazilians had some knowledge of a general
deluge; that in Peru the ancient Indians reported, that many years
before there were any Incas, all the people were drowned by a great
flood, save six persons, the progenitors of the existing races, who were
saved on a float; that among the Mechoachans it was believed that a
single family was preserved, during the outburst of the waters, in an
ark, with a sufficient number of animals to replenish the new world;
and, more curious still, that it used to be told by the original
inhabitants of Cuba, that "an old man, knowing the deluge was to come,
built a great ship, and went into it with his family and abundance of
animals; and that, wearying during the continuance of the flood, he sent
out a crow, which at first did not return, staying to feed on the dead
bodies, but afterwards returned bearing with it a green branch." The
resemblance borne by this last tradition to the Mosaic narrative is so
close as to awaken a doubt whether it may not have been but a mere
recollection of the teaching of some early missionary. Nor can its
genuineness now be tested, seeing that the race which cherished it has
been long since extinct. It may be stated, however, that a similar
suspicion crossed the mind of Humboldt when he was engaged in collecting
the traditions of the Indians of the Orinoco; but that on further
reflection and inquiry he dismissed the doubt as groundless. He even set
himself to examine whether the district was not a fossiliferous one, and
whether beds of sea shells, or deposits charged with the petrified
remains of corals or of fishes, might not have originated among the
aborigines some mere myth of a great inundation sufficient to account
for the appearances in the rocks. But he found that the region was
mainly a primary one, in which he could detect only a single patch of
sedimentary rock, existing as an unfossiliferous sandstone. And so,
though little prejudiced in favor of the Mosaic record, he could not
avoid arriving at the conclusion, simply in his character as a
philosophic inquirer, who had no other object than to attain to the real
and the true, that the legend of the wild Maypures and Tamanacs
regarding a great destructive deluge was simply one of the many forms of
that oldest of traditions which appears to be well nigh coextensive with
the human family, and which, in all its varied editions, seems to point
at one and the same signal event. Very varied some of these editions
are. The inhabitants of Tahiti tell, for instance, that the Supreme God,
a long time ago, being angry, dragged the earth through the sea, but
that by a happy accident _their_ island broke off and was preserved; the
Indians of Terra Firma believe, that when the great deluge took place,
one man, with his wife and children, escaped in a canoe; and the Indians
of the North American lakes hold, that the father of all their tribes
being warned in a dream that a flood was coming, built a raft, on which
he preserved his family, and pairs of all the animals, and which drifted
about for many months, until at length a new earth was made for their
reception by the "Mighty Man above."
In that widely extended portion of the Old World over which Christianity
has spread in its three great types,--Greek, Romish, and
Protestant,--and in the scarce less extended portion occupied by the
followers of Mohammed, the Scriptural account of the deluge, or the
imperfect reflection of it borrowed by the Koran, has, of course,
supplanted the old traditions. But outside these regions we find the
traditions existing still. One of the sacred books of the Parsees
(representatives of the ancient Persians) records, that "the world
having been corrupted by Ahriman the Evil One, it was thought necessary
to bring over it a universal flood of waters, that all impurity might be
washed away. Accordingly the rain came down in drops as large as the
head of a bull, until the earth was wholly covered with water, and all
the creatures of the Evil One perished. And then the flood gradually
subsided, and first the mountains, and next the plains, appeared once
more." In the Scandinavian Edda, between whose wild fables and those of
the sacred books of the Parsees there has been a resemblance traced by
accomplished antiquaries such as Mallet, the tradition of the deluge
takes a singularly monstrous form. On the death of the great giant Ymir,
whose flesh and bones form the rocks and soils of the earth, and who was
slain by the early gods, his blood, which now constitutes the ocean,
rushed so copiously out of his wounds, that all the old race of the
lesser giants, his offspring, were drowned in the flood which it
occasioned, save one; and he, by escaping on board his bark with his
wife, outlived the deluge. The tradition here is evidently allegorized,
but it is by no means lost in the allegory.
Sir William Jones, perhaps the most learned and accomplished man of his
age (such at least was the estimate of Johnson), and the first who
fairly opened up the great storehouse of eastern antiquities, describes
the tradition of the deluge as prevalent also in the vast Chinese
empire, with its three hundred millions of people. He states that it was
there believed that, just ere the appearance of Fohi in the mountains, a
mighty flood, which first "flowed abundantly, and then subsided, covered
for a time the whole earth, and separated the higher from the lower age
of mankind." The Hindu tradition, as related by Sir William, though
disfigured by strange additions, is still more explicit. An evil demon
having purloined the sacred books from Brahma, the whole race of men
became corrupt except the seven Nishis, and in especial the holy
Satyavrata, the prince of a maritime region, who, when one day bathing
in a river, was visited by the god Vishnu in the shape of a fish, and
thus addressed by him:--"In seven days all creatures who have offended
me shall be destroyed by a deluge; but thou shalt be secured in a
capacious vessel, miraculously formed. Take, therefore, all kinds of
medicinal herbs, and esculent grain for food, and, together with the
seven holy men, your respective wives, and pairs of all animals, enter
the ark without fear: then shalt thou know God face to face, and all thy
questions shall be answered." The god then disappeared; and after seven
days, during which Satyavrata had conformed in all respects to the
instructions given him, the ocean began to overflow the coasts, and the
earth to be flooded by constant rains, when a large vessel was seen
coming floating shore-wards on the rising waters; into which the Prince
and the seven virtuous Nishis entered, with their wives, all laden with
plants and grain, and accompanied by the animals. During the deluge
Vishnu preserved the ark by again taking the form of a fish, and tying
it fast to himself; and when the waters had subsided, he communicated
the contents of the sacred books to the holy Satyavrata, after first
slaying the demon who had stolen them. It is added, however, that the
good man having, on one occasion long after, by "the act of destiny,"
drunk mead, he became senseless, and lay asleep naked, and that Charma,
one of three sons who had been born to him, finding him in that sad
state, called on his two brothers to witness the shame of their father,
and said to them, What has now befallen? In what state is this our sire?
But by the two brothers,--more dutiful than Charma,--he was hidden with
clothes, and recalled to his senses; and, having recovered his
intellect, and perfectly knowing what had passed, he cursed Charma,
saying, "Thou shalt be a servant of servants." It would be difficult
certainly to produce a more curious legend, or one more strikingly
illustrative of the mixture of truth and fable which must ever be looked
for in that tradition which some are content to accept even in religion
as a trustworthy guide. In ever varying tradition, as in those difficult
problems in physical science which have to be wrought out from a
multitude of differing observations, it is, if I may so express myself,
the mean result of the whole that must be accepted as approximately the
true one. And the mean result of those dim and distorted recollections
of the various tribes of men which refer to the Flood is a result which
bears simply to this effect,--that in some early age of the world a
great deluge took place, in which well nigh the whole human family was
destroyed.
The ancient traditions which have come down to us embalmed in classic
literature form but a small portion of what seems once to have existed
in the wide region now overspread by Christianity and Mohammedanism. A
second deluge, more fatal to at least the productions of the human mind
than the first had been, overspread the earth during what are known as
the Middle Ages; and so signal was the wreck which it occasioned, that
of seven heathen writers[24] whose testimony regarding the Flood
Josephus cites as corroborative of his own, not one has descended in his
writings to these later times. We learn, however, from the Jewish
historian, that one of their number, Berosus, was a Chaldean; that two
of the others, Hieronymus and Manetho, were Egyptians; and that a third,
Nicolaus, whose history he quotes, was a citizen of Damascus. "There
is," said this latter writer, in his perished history, "a great mountain
in Armenia, over Minyas, called Baris, upon which it is reported that
many who fled at the time of the deluge were saved; and that one who was
carried in an ark came on shore on the top of it; and that the remains
of the timber were a great while preserved. This might be the man,"
added this forgotten writer, "about whom Moses, the legislator of the
Jews, wrote." The works of the Chaldean, Berosus, have long since been
lost, all save a few extracts preserved by the Patristic writers. One of
these, however, which embodies the Chaldean tradition of the Flood, is
very remarkable. Like the Scandinavian legend, it represents the
antediluvians as giants, all of whom, save one, became exceedingly
impious and depraved. "But there was one among the giants," says
Berosus, "that reverenced the gods, and was more wise and prudent than
all the rest. His name was Noa; he dwelt in Syria, with his three sons,
Sem, Japet, Chem, and their wives, the great Tidea, Pandora, Noela, and
Noegla. This man, fearing the destruction which, he foresaw from the
stars, would come to pass, began, in the seventy-eighth year before the
inundation, to build a ship covered like an ark. Seventy-eight years
from the time he began to build this ship, the ocean of a sudden broke
out, and all the inland seas and the rivers and fountains bursting from
beneath (attended by the most violent rains from heaven for many days),
overflowed all the mountains; so that the whole human race was buried in
the waters, except Noa and his family, who were saved by means of the
ship, which, being lifted up by the waters, rested at last upon the top
of the Gendyae or Mountain, on which, it is reported, there now
remaineth some part, and that men take away the bitumen from it, and
make use of it by way of charm or expiation, to avoid evil." A more
general Assyrian tradition, somewhat different in its details, also
survives.[25] The god Chronus, it was said, appeared in a vision to
Xisuthrus, the tenth king of Babylon; and, warning him that on a certain
day there would be a great flood upon the earth, by which mankind would
be destroyed, he enjoined him to build a vessel, and to bring into it
his friends and relatives, with everything necessary to sustain life,
and all the various animals, birds, and quadrupeds. In obedience to the
command, the king built a vessel about three quarters of a mile in
length and half a mile in breadth, which he loaded with stores and the
different kinds of animals; and into which, on the day of the flood, he
himself entered, accompanied by his wife and children, and all his
friends. The flood broke out. After, however, accomplishing its work of
destruction, it abated; and the king sent out birds from the vessel,
which, at first finding no food or place of rest, returned to him; but
which, when, after the lapse of some days, he sent them forth again,
came back to him with their feet tinged with mud. On a third trial they
returned no more; upon which, judging that the surface of the earth was
laid dry, he made an opening in the vessel, and, looking forth, found it
stranded on a mountain of the land of Armenia.
There seems to exist no such definite outline of the Egyptian tradition
referred to by Josephus as that preserved of the Chaldean one. Plato, In
his "Timæus," makes the Egyptian priest whom he introduces as
discoursing with Solon, to attribute that clear recollection of a remote
antiquity which survived in Egypt, to its comparative freedom from those
great floods which had at various times desolated Greece, and destroyed
the memory of remote events by the destruction of the people and their
records; and Bacon had evidently this passage in view when he poetically
remarked, in his magnificent essay on the "Vicissitude of Things," that
"the great winding sheets that bury all things in oblivion are
two,--deluges and earthquakes; from which two destructions is to be
noted," he adds, "that the remnant of people that happen to be preserved
are commonly ignorant and mountainous people, that can give no account
of the time past." Even in Egypt, however, the recollection of the
deluge seems to have survived, though it lay entangled amid what seem to
be symbolized memories of unusual floodings of the river Nile. "The Noah
of Egypt," says Professor Hitchcock, in his singularly ingenious essay
(Historical and Geological Deluges Compared), "appears to have been
Osiris. Typhon, a personification of the ocean, enticed him into an ark,
which, being closed, he was forced to sea; and it was a curious fact,
that he embarked on the seventeenth day of the month Athyr,--the very
day, most probably, when Noah entered the ark." The classical tradition
of Greece, as if the events whence it took its rise had been viewed
through a multiplying glass, appears to have been increased from one to
many. Plutarch enumerates no fewer than five great floods; and Plato
makes his Egyptian priest describe the Greek deluges as oft repeated and
numerous. There was the flood of Deucalion, the flood of Ogyges, and
several other floods; and no little time and learning have been wasted
in attempting to fix their several periods. But, lying far within the
mythologic ages,--the last of them to which any determining
circumstances are attached, in the days of that Prometheus who stole
fire from heaven, and was chained by Jupiter to Mount Caucasus,--it
appears greatly more probable that the traditions respecting them should
be the mere repeated and re-repeated echoes of one signal event, than
that many wide-spread and destructive floods should have taken place in
the obscure, fabulous ages of Grecian story, while not one such flood
has happened during its two thousand five hundred years of authentic
history. Nor is it difficult to conceive how such repetitions of the
original tradition _should_ have taken place. The traditions of the same
event preserved by tribes living in even the same tract of country come
in course of time considerably to differ from each other in their
adjuncts and circumstances; those, for instance, of the various tribes
of the Orinoco do so; and should these tribes come to be fused
ultimately into one nation, nothing seems more probable than that their
varying editions, instead of being also fused together, should remain
distinct, as the recollections of separate and independent catastrophes.
And thus the several deluges of Grecian mythology may in reality
testify, not to the occurrence of several floods, but to the existence
merely of several independent tribes, among whom the one great tradition
has been so altered and modified ere they came to possess a common
literature, that when at length they became skilful enough to place it
on record, it appeared to them not as one, but as many. The admirable
reflection of Humboldt suggested by the South American traditions seems,
incidentally at least, to bear out this view. "Those ancient traditions
of the human race," he says, "which we find dispersed over the whole
surface of the globe, like the relics of a vast shipwreck, are highly
interesting in the philosophical study of our own species. How many
different tongues belonging to branches that appear totally distinct
transmit to us the same facts! The traditions concerning races that have
been destroyed, and the renewal of nature, scarcely vary in reality,
though every nation gives them a local coloring. In the great
continents, as in the smallest islands of the Pacific Ocean, it is
always on the loftiest and nearest mountain that the remains of the
human race have been saved; and this event appears the more recent in
proportion as the nations are uncultivated, and as the knowledge they
have of their own existence has no very remote date." And it seems at
least not improbable, that the several traditions of apparently special
deluges,--deluges each with its own set of circumstances, and from which
the progenitors of one nation were saved on a hill-top, those of another
on a raft, and those of yet another in an ark or canoe, and which in one
instance destroyed only giants, and had in another the loss which they
occasioned repaired by date-stones, and in yet another by stones of the
earth,--should come to be regarded among a people composed of various
tribes, and but little accustomed to sift the evidence on which they
founded, rather as all diverse narratives of diverse events, than as in
reality but varied accounts of one and the same tremendous catastrophe.
Taking it for granted, then, that the several Greek traditions refer to
but one great event, let us accept that which records what is known as
the flood of Deucalion, as more adequately representative of the general
type of its class, especially in the edition given by Lucian (in his
work "De Dea Syria"), than any of the others. "The present world," says
this writer, "is peopled from the sons of Deucalion. In respect to the
former brood, they were men of violence, and lawless in their dealings;
they regarded not oaths, nor observed the rites of hospitality, nor
showed mercy to those who sued for it. On this account they were doomed
to destruction; and for this purpose there was a mighty eruption of
water from the earth, attended with heavy showers from above, so that
the rivers swelled and the sea overflowed, till the whole earth was
covered with a flood, and all flesh drowned. Deucalion alone was
preserved, to people the world. This mercy was shown him on account of
his justice and piety. His preservation was effected in this manner:--He
put all his family, both his sons and their wives, into a vast ark which
he had provided, and he then went into it himself. At the same time,
animals of every species,--boars, horses, lions, serpents,--whatever
lived upon the face of the earth,--followed him by pairs; all which he
received into the ark, and experienced no evil from them." Such is the
tradition of Deucalion, as preserved by Lucian. It is added by his
contemporary Plutarch, that "Deucalion, as his voyage was drawing to a
close, sent out a dove, which coming in a short time back to him,
indicated that the waters still covered the earth; but which on a second
occasion failed to return; or, as some say, returned to him with
mud-stained feet, and thus intimated the abatement of the flood." It
cannot, I think, be rationally doubted that we have in this ancient
legend one other tradition of the Noachian Deluge. Even as related by
Ovid, with all the license of the poet, we find in it the great leading
traits that indicate its parentage. I quote from the vigorous
translation of Dryden.
"Impetuous rain descends;
Nor from his patrimonial heaven alone
Is Jove content to pour his vengeance down;
But from his brother of the seas he craves
To help him with auxiliary waves.
Then with his mace the monarch struck the ground;
With inward trembling earth received the wound,
And rising streams a ready passage found.
Now seas and earth were in confusion lost,--
A world of waters, and without a coast.
A mountain of tremendous height there stands
Betwixt the Athenian and Boeotian lands:
Parnassus is its name, whose forky rise
Mounts through the clouds, and mates the lofty skies.
High on the summit of this dubious cliff,
Deucalion, wafting, moored his little skiff:
He, with his wife, were only left behind
Of perished man; they two were human kind:
The most upright of mortal men was he,--
The most serene and holy woman she."
[Illustration: Fig. 109.
APAMÆAN MEDAL.]
Such are some of the traditions of that great catastrophe which overtook
the human family in its infancy, and made so deep an impression on the
memories of the few awe-struck survivors, that the race never forgot it.
Ere the dispersal of the family it would have of course existed as but
one unique recollection,--a single reflection on the face of an unbroken
mirror. But the mirror has since been shattered into a thousand pieces;
and we now find the object, originally but one, pictured in each broken
fragment, with various degrees of distinctness, according to the various
degrees of injury received by the reflecting medium. _Picture_, too,
scarce less certainly than language spoken and written, testifies to the
wide extent of the tradition. Its symbols are found stamped on coins of
old classical Greece; they have been traced amid the ancient
hieroglyphics of Egypt, recognized in the sculptured caves of Hindustan,
and detected even in the far west, among the picture writings of Mexico.
The several glyphic representatives of the tradition bear, like its
various written or oral editions, a considerable resemblance to each
other. Even in the rude paintings of the old Mexican, the same leading
idea may be traced as in the classic sculpture of the Greek. On what is
known to antiquaries as the Apamæan medal, struck during the reign of
Philip the elder, we find the familiar name of _Noe_ inscribed on a
floating chest or ark, within which a man and woman are seen seated, and
to which a bird on the wing is represented as bearing a branch.[26] And
in an ancient Mexican painting, figured by Humboldt, "the man and woman
who survived the age of water" are shown similarly inclosed in a
leaf-tufted box, or hollow trunk of a tree; while a gigantic
female,--Matalcueje, the goddess of water,--is seen pouring down her
floods around them, and upon an overwhelmed human figure, representative
apparently of the victims of the catastrophe. All is classical in the
forms of the one representation, and uncouth in those of the other. They
bear the same sort of _artistic_ relation to each other that the rude
Tamanac tradition bears, in a _literary_ point of view, to the well
constructed story and elegant verse of Ovid; but they are charged
apparently with the same meaning, and shadow forth the same event.
[Illustration: Fig. 110.
OLD MEXICAN PICTURE.
(_Humboldt._)]
The tradition of the Flood may, I repeat, be properly regarded as
universal; seeing there is scarce any considerable race of man among
which, in some of its many forms, it is not to be found. Now, it has
been argued by some of the older theologians, with a not very cogent
logic, that the universality of the tradition establishes the
universality of the Flood,--that where the tradition _is to be found_,
the Flood _must have been_;--an argument which would have force if it
could also be shown that each tribe had had its own Noah, saved by ark,
raft, or canoe, or on some tall mountain summit, in the region in which
his descendants continued to reside; but of no force whatever if the
Noah of the race was but one, and if the scene of his danger and
deliverance was restricted, as of necessity it must have been in that
case, to a single locality. Further, if, as we believe, there was but
one Noah,--if, according to the Scriptural account, condensed into a
single sentence by the Apostle, only "eight souls" were saved in the
great catastrophe of the race,--there could have existed no human
testimony to determine whether the exterminating deluge that occasioned
their destruction was a universal deluge, or merely a partial one. It
could not be known by men shut up in an ark, nor even though from a mast
top they could have swept the horizon with a telescope, whether the
waters that spread out on every side of them, covering the old familiar
mountains, and occupying the entire range of their vision, extended all
around the globe, or found their limits some eight or ten hundred miles
away. The point is one respecting which, as certainly as respecting the
creation of the world itself, or of the world's inhabitants, there could
have existed no human _witness-bearing_: contemporary man, left to the
unassisted evidence of his senses, _must_ of necessity have been
ignorant of the extent of the deluge. True, what man could never have
known of himself, God could have told him, and in many cases _has_ told
him; but then, God's revelations have in most instances been made to
effect exclusively moral purposes; and we know that those who have
perilously held that, along with the moral facts, definite physical
facts, geographic, geologic, or astronomical, had also been imparted,
have almost invariably found themselves involved in monstrous error. And
in this matter of the Flood, though it be a fact of great moral
significancy that God in an early period of the human history destroyed
the whole race for their wickedness,--all save one just man and his
family,--it is not in the least a matter of moral significancy whether
or no the deluge by which the judgment was effected covered not only the
parts of the earth occupied by man at the time, but extended also to
Terra del Fuego, Tahiti, and the Falkland Islands. In fine, though the
question whether the Noachian deluge was universal, or merely partial,
is an interesting question in physics, it is in no higher degree a moral
one than those questions which relate to the right figure or age of the
earth, or to the true motions of the heavenly bodies. And it will be
found that the only passages in Scripture which refer to this strictly
physical subject, instead of determining the geographic extent of the
Flood, serve only to raise a question regarding their own extent of
meaning.
It is known to all students of the sacred writings, that there is a
numerous class of passages in both the Old and New Testaments in which,
by a sort of metonymy common in the East, a considerable part is spoken
of as the whole, though in reality often greatly less than a moiety of
the whole. Of this class are the passages in which it is said, that on
the day of Pentecost there were Jews assembled at Jerusalem "out of
_every nation under heaven_;" "that the gospel was preached to _every
creature under heaven_;" that the Queen of Sheba came to hear the wisdom
of Solomon from the "_uttermost parts of the earth_;" that God put the
dread and fear of the children of Israel upon the nations that were
"_under the whole heaven_;" and that "_all countries_ came into Egypt to
Joseph to buy corn." And of course the universally admitted existence
of such a class of passages, in which words are _not_ to be accepted in
their rigidly literal meanings, but with certain great modifications,
renders the task of determining and distinguishing such passages from
others in which the meaning is definite and strict, not only legitimate,
but also laudable; and justifies us in inquiring whether those passages
descriptive of the Flood or its effects, in which it is said that the
"waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth," so that "_all_ the high
hills that were under _the whole heavens_ were covered," or that "_all_
flesh died that moved upon the earth," belong to their number or no.
There are some instances in which the Scriptures themselves reveal the
character and limit the meaning of the metonymic passages. They do so
with respect to the passage already quoted regarding the stranger Jews
assembled in Jerusalem at the Pentecostal feast,--"out of every nation
under heaven." For further on we read that these Jews had come from but
the various countries extending around Judea, as far as Italy on the one
hand, and the Persian Gulf on the other;--an area large, indeed, but
scarce equal to a one fiftieth part of the earth's surface. But there is
no such explanation given to limit or restrict most of the other
passages; the modifying element must be sought for outside the sacred
volume,--in ancient history or ancient geography. The reader must, for
instance, acquaint himself with the progress of discovery in early ages,
or the boundaries of the Roman Empire under the first Cæsars, ere he can
form a probable conjecture regarding the extent of that "all the earth"
which sought the presence of Solomon, or a correct estimate respecting
the limits of that "all the world" which Cæsar Augustus could have
taxed. And to this last class, which fail to explain themselves, the
passages respecting the Flood evidently belong. Like the passages cited,
and, with these, almost all the texts of Scripture in which questions
of physical science are involved, the limiting, modifying, explaining
facts and circumstances must be sought for in that outside region of
secular research, historic and scientific, from which of late years so
much valuable biblical illustration has been derived, and with which it
is so imperatively the duty of the Church to keep up an acquaintance at
least as close and intimate as that maintained with it by her gainsayers
and assailants.
That the Noachian deluge might have been but partial, not universal, was
held, let me here remark, by distinguished theologians in our own
country, at least as early as the seventeenth century. It was held, for
instance, by the learned biblical commentator, old Matthew Poole, whom
we find saying, in his Synopsis on Genesis, that "it is not to be
supposed that the entire globe of the earth was covered with water;" for
"where," he adds, "was the need of overwhelming those regions in which
there were no human beings?" It was held also by that distinguished
Protestant churchman of the reign of Charles II., Bishop Stillingfleet,
whom Principal Cunningham of Edinburgh well describes, in his elaborate
edition of the Bishop's work, "The Doctrines and Practices of the Church
of Rome," as a divine of "great talents and prodigious learning." "I
cannot see," says the Bishop, in his "Origines Sacra," "any urgent
necessity from the Scriptures to assert that the Flood did spread over
all the surface of the earth. That all mankind, those in the ark
excepted, were destroyed by it, is most certain, according to the
Scriptures. The Flood was universal as to mankind; but from thence
follows no necessity at all of asserting the universality of it as to
the globe of the earth, unless it be sufficiently proved that the whole
earth was peopled before the Flood, which I despair of ever seeing
proved." It was not, however, until the comparatively recent times in
which the belief entertained by Poole and Stillingfleet was adopted and
enforced by writers such as Dr. Pye Smith, and Professor Hitchcock of
the United States, that there was any show of argument displayed against
the theory of a partial deluge which would now be deemed worthy of
consideration. And these modern objections may be found ingeniously
arrayed by the late Dr. John Kitto, in his "Daily Bible Illustrations,"
published only six years ago (in 1850), and by the learned Dr. William
Hamilton of Mobile, in his "Friend of Moses," published in 1852. Both
these writers, however, virtually agree with their opponents in holding
that the strict meaning of the terms employed by Moses in describing the
deluge is to be determined on considerations apart from the mere
philological ones. After marshalling his objections to the theory of a
local flood, Dr. Kitto goes on to say, "We yield our judgment to what
appears to us the _force of these arguments_ as to the _meaning_ of
Scripture;" and we find Dr. Hamilton prefacing his objections as
follows:--"Were the mere universality of some of the terms employed in
the Mosaic narrative the _sole_ ground of objection to the hypothesis of
a _local_ inundation only in the days of Noah, that hypothesis might
perhaps be deemed admissible. But there are," he adds, "other and more
serious difficulties attending it." Let us, then, briefly examine these
supposed difficulties and objections; and as they have been better and
more amply stated by Dr. Kitto than by any other writer with whom I am
acquainted,--for Dr. Hamilton takes up rather the arguments in favor of
a universal, than the objections against a merely partial flood,--let us
take them as they occur in his writings, especially in the excellent
work now before me,--his "Daily Bible Illustrations." It will scarce be
suspected that such an accomplished writer, who did so much for
Biblical Illustration, and whose admirable Pictorial Bible formed, with
but four works more, what Chalmers used to term with peculiar emphasis
his "Biblical Library,"[27] would do injustice to any cause, or any line
of argument which he adopted, if it was in reality a good and sound one.
It may be well, however, not to test too rigidly the value of the
remark,--meant to be at least of the nature of argument,--when we find
him saying that "a plain man sitting down to read the Scripture account
of the deluge would have no doubt of its universality." Perhaps not. But
it is at least equally certain, that plain men who set themselves to
deduce from Scripture the figure of the planet we inhabit had as little
doubt, until corrected by the geographer, that the earth was a great
plane,--not a sphere; that plain men who set themselves to acquire from
Scripture some notion of the planetary motions had no doubt, in the same
way, until corrected by the astronomer, that it was the earth that
rested, and the sun that moved round it; and that plain men who have
sought to determine from Scripture the age of the earth have had no
doubt, until corrected by the geologist, that it was at most not much
more than six thousand years old. In fine, when plain men, who,
according to Cowper, "know, and know no more, their Bible true," have in
perhaps every instance learned from it what it was in reality intended
to teach,--the way of salvation,--it seems scarce less certain, that in
every instance in which they have sought to deduce from it what it was
_not_ intended to teach,--the truths of physical science,--they have
fallen into extravagant error. And as any question which, bearing, not
on the punitory extent and ethical consequences of the Flood, but merely
on its geographic limits and natural effects, is not a moral, but a
purely physical question, it would be but a fair presumption, founded on
the almost invariable experience of ages, that the deductions from
Scripture of the "plain men" regarding it would be, not true, but false
deductions. Of apparently not more real weight and importance is the
doctor's further remark, that there seems, after all, to be a marked
difference between the terms in which the universality of the deluge is
spoken of, and the terms employed in those admittedly metonymic passages
in which the whole is substituted for a part. "What limitation," he
asks, "can we assign to such a phrase as this:--'all the high hills that
were UNDER THE WHOLE HEAVENS were covered?' If here the phrase had been,
'upon the face of the whole earth,' we should have been told that 'the
whole earth' had sometimes the meaning of 'the whole land;' but, as if
designedly to obviate such a limitation of meaning, we have here the
largest phrase of universality which the language of man
affords,--'under the whole heavens!'" So far Dr. Kitto. But his argument
seems to be not more valuable in this case than in the other. It was
upon the nations that were "UNDER THE WHOLE HEAVENS" that Deity
represented himself as putting the fear and dread of the children of
Israel; but he would be certainly a very "plain man" who would infer
from the universality of a passage so evidently metonymic, that that
fear extended to the people of Japan on the one hand, or to the Red
Indians of the Rocky Mountains on the other. The phrase "_under the
whole heavens_" seems to be but coextensive in meaning with the phrase
"upon the face of the whole earth." The "whole earth" is evidently
tantamount to the whole terrestrial floor,--the "whole heavens," to the
whole celestial roof that arches over it; and on what principle the
whole terrestrial floor is to be deemed less extensive than the floor
under the whole celestial roof, really does not appear. Further, nothing
can be more certain than that both the phrases contrasted by Dr. Kitto
are equally employed in the metonymic form.
When, however, the doctor passes to argument based upon natural science,
we find what he adduces worthy of our attention, were it but for the
inquiries which it suggests. "If the deluge were but local," we find him
saying, "what was the need of taking _birds_ into the ark; and among
them birds so widely diffused as the raven and the dove? A deluge which
could overspread the region which these birds inhabit could hardly have
been less than universal. If the deluge were local, and all the birds of
these kinds in that district perished,--though we should think they
might have fled to the uninundated regions,--it would have been useless
to encumber the ark with them, seeing that the birds of the same species
which survived in the lands not overflowed would speedily replenish the
inundated tract as soon as the waters subsided." It will be found that
the reasoning here is mainly based upon an error in natural science,
into which even naturalists of the last century, such as Buffon, not
unfrequently fell, and which was almost universal among the earlier
voyagers and travellers,--the error of confounding as identical the
merely allied birds and beasts of distant countries, and of thus
assigning to _species_ wide areas in creation which in reality they do
not occupy. The grouse, for instance, is a widely spread genus, or
rather _family_; for it consists of more genera than one. It is so
extensively present over the northern hemisphere, that Siberia, Norway,
Iceland, and North America, have all their grouse,--the latter
continent, indeed, from five to eight different kinds; and yet so
restricted are some of the species of which they consist, that, were the
British islands to be submerged, one of the best known of the
family,--the red grouse, or moor-fowl (_Lagopus Scoticus_),--would
disappear from creation. This bird, which, rated at its money value, is
one of the most important in Europe,--for the barren moors which it
frequents in the Highlands of Scotland alone are let every season almost
entirely for its sake for hundreds of thousands of pounds,--is
exclusively a British bird; and, unless by miracle a new migratory
instinct were given to it, a complete submersion of the British islands
would secure its destruction. If the submergence amounted to but a few
hundred miles in lateral extent, the moor-fowl would to a certainty not
seek the distant uninundated land. Nor is it at all to be inferred, that
in a merely local but wide spread deluge, birds occupying a more
extensive area than that overspread by the Flood would, according to Dr.
Kitto, "speedily replenish the inundated tract as soon as the waters had
subsided." The statement must have been hazarded in ignorance of the
peculiar habits of many of the non-migratory birds. Up till about the
middle of the last century, the capercailzie, or great cock of the
woods, was a native of Scotland. It was exterminated, however, about the
time of the last Rebellion, or not long after: the last specimen seen
among the pine forests of Strathspey was killed, it is said, in the year
1745: the last specimen seen among the woods of Strathglass survived
till the year 1760. Pennant relates that he saw in 1769 a specimen,
probably a stuffed one, that had been killed shortly before in the
neighborhood of Inverness. But from at least that time the species
disappeared from the British islands; and, though it continued to exist
in Norway, did not "replenish the tracts from which it had been
extirpated." The late Marquis of Breadalbane was at no small cost and
trouble in re-introducing the species, and to some extent he succeeded;
but the capercailzie is, I understand, still restricted to the
Breadalbane woods. I have seen the golden eagle annihilated as a species
in move than one district of the north of Scotland; nor, though it still
exists in other parts of the kingdom, and is comparatively common among
the mountains of Norway, have I known it in any instance to spread anew
over the tracts from which it had been extirpated. So much for the
general reasonings of Dr. Kitto. Further, we find him stating, that a
deluge which could overspread the region inhabited by birds so widely
diffused as the raven and the dove, could hardly have been less than
universal. The doctor, however, ought to have known that the _dove_ is a
_family_, not a _species_. All the American species of doves, for
example, differ from the six European species, three of which are to be
found in Scotland. Of even the American passenger pigeons (_Ectopistes
migratoria_), which occur in such numbers in their native country as
actually to eclipse, during their migratory flights, the light of day,
only a single straggler,--the one whose chance visit has been recorded
by Dr. Fleming,--seems to have been ever seen in Britain. And the East
has also its own peculiar species, unknown to Europe. The golden-green
pigeons and the great crowned pigeons of the Indian isles are never seen
in northern and western latitudes, save in stuffed specimens in a
museum. The Vinago pigeons, with their vividly bright plumes, though
they exist in several species, are all restricted to the woods of the
torrid zone. Even the collared dove of Africa and the Levant rarely
visits, and then only as a straggler, the western and northern parts of
Europe. The blue-capped turteline pigeon is restricted, as a species, to
the island of Celebes; the blue and green turteline pigeon is a native
of New Guinea; the Cape turtle occurs in but the southern parts of
Africa; the Nicobar ground pigeon in but the Indian Archipelago; the
magnificent fruit pigeon in the eastern parts of Australia; and the
crowned goura pigeon, the giant of its family, in the Molucca Islands.
No single species of dove seems to be so widely spread but that it might
be exterminated in a merely partial deluge; and of course conjecture may
in vain weary itself in striving to determine what that particular
species was which Noah sent forth as a messenger from the ark, or in
inquiring what was the extent of the area which it occupied? The common
raven is more widely spread than any single species of pigeon. Even the
raven, however, seems restricted to the northern hemisphere. India and
Southern Africa have both their ravens; but the species differ from each
other, and from the widely spread northern one. It is a question whether
even the pied raven of the Faroe Isles be not a distinct bird from the
black raven of our own country: if not an independent species, it is at
least a very remarkable variety. Further, when extirpated in a district,
it is found that, as in the case of the capercailzie and the golden
eagle, the neighboring regions in which the raven continues to exist
fail for ages to furnish a fresh supply. There are counties in England
in which the raven is now never seen; and I am acquainted with a
district in the north of Scotland from which, when a pair that were
known to breed for more than a century in a tall cliff were destroyed by
the fowler, the species disappeared.[28] Such, when examined, are the
arguments drawn by Dr. Kitto from natural science; nor is he in any
degree happier when he resorts to arguments more restrictedly physical.
"If," we find him saying, "the waters of the Deluge rose fifteen cubits
above all the mountains of the countries which the raven and the dove
inhabit, _the level must have been high enough to give universality to
the Deluge_." The only point here not already dealt with,--for I have
just shown that certain species of the dove and the raven might have of
necessity been inmates of the ark, though the Flood had been only a
partial one,--is that which refers to the submergence of the hills over
at least an extensive tract, and to the inference, evident in the
passage, that if lofty mountains were covered in one portion of the
globe, mountains of similar altitude must have been equally covered in
every other portion of it.
The inference here seems to be founded on a common but altogether
mistaken view of some of the grandest operations of nature with which
modern science has brought us acquainted. It has been well remarked,
that when two opposing explanations of extraordinary natural phenomena
are given,--one of a simple and seemingly common sense character, the
other complex and apparently absurd,--it is almost always safer to adopt
the apparently absurd than the seemingly common sense one. Dr. Kitto's
"plain man," yielding to the dictates of what he would deem common
sense,--which, of course, in questions of natural science is tantamount
to common nonsense,--would be sure to go wrong. And we find the remark
not inaptly illustrated by the now well established fact, that while the
medium level of the ocean is one of the most fixed lines in nature, the
level of the great continents, with their table-lands and mountains, is
an ever fluctuating line. It may seem strange that land should be less
stable than water. We see the tide rising and falling twice every
twenty-four hours, and the rock ever remaining in its place;--we speak
of the fixed earth and the unstable sea. And yet, while we have no
evidence whatever that the sea level has changed during at least the
ages of the Tertiary formations, and absolutely know that it could not
have varied more than a few yards, or at most a few fathoms, we have
direct evidence that during that time great mountain chains, many
thousand feet in height, such as the Alps, have arisen from the bottom
of the ocean, and that great continents have sunk beneath it and
disappeared. The larger part of northern Europe and America have been
covered by the sea since our present group of shells began to exist; and
it seems not improbable that the lower portion of the valley of the
Jordan was depressed to its present low level of thirteen hundred feet
beneath the Mediterranean since the times of the deluge. On several
parts of the coasts of Britain and Ireland the voyager can look down
through the clear sea, in depths to which the tide never falls, on the
remains of submerged forests; and it is a demonstrable fact, that even
during the present age there are certain extensive tracts of land which
have sunk beneath the sea level, while certain other extensive tracts
have been elevated over it. In 1819, a wide expanse of country in the
delta of the Indus, containing fully two thousand square miles of flat
meadow, was converted by a sudden depression of the land, accompanied by
an earthquake, into an inland sea; and the tower of a small fort, which
occupied nearly the middle of the sunken area, and on which many of the
inhabitants of a neighboring village succeeded in saving themselves, may
still be seen raising its shattered head over the surface,--the only
object visible in a waste of waters of which the eye fails to determine
the extent. About three years after this event, a tract of country,
interposed between the foot of the Andes and the Pacific, more than
equal in area to all Great Britain, was elevated from two to seven feet
over its former level, and rocks laid bare in the sea, which the pilots
and fishermen of the coast had never before seen. On the Indian coast
the sea _seemed_ to be rising at nearly the same time when it _appeared_
to be falling on the American one; and on the latter such was the actual
impression entertained by the people. It is stated by Sir Charles Lyell,
in his "Elements," that he was informed by Mr. Cruickshanks, an English
botanist who resided in Chili at the time, "that it was the general
belief of the fishermen and inhabitants, _not_ that the land had risen,
but that the ocean had permanently retreated." But if it had retreated
from the Chilian shore, how could it have risen on the Indian one? In
like manner the sea appears to be receding from the north-eastern shores
of Sweden at the rate of nearly four vertical feet in the century; while
it seems to be advancing on the western coasts of Greenland at
apparently a rate more considerable, though there the ratio of its rise
has not been marked with equal care. It seems to be rising on even the
Swedish province of Scania; while all the time, however, the actual
motion,--upwards in one region, downwards in another,--is in the solid
earth,--not in the unstable water, which merely serves as a sort of
hydrostatic _level_, to indicate this fact of subsidence or elevation in
the land. And of course all the reasoning, founded on mere appearances,
that would reverse the process by assigning permanency to the level of
the land, and fluctuation to that of the sea, would lead to inevitable
error.
Let us, for the illustration's sake, suppose that the British islands
had been the scene of the Deluge; and that it had been occasioned by a
gradual depression in the earth's surface of about fifteen hundred miles
in length, a thousand miles in breadth, five thousand feet in depth in
its centre, and which gradually trended all around towards the sides.
Such a depression would form a scarce appreciable inequality on the
surface of even a three feet globe; in a twelve inch globe it might be
represented by the abrasion of a small patch of the varnish; nor would
it have in nature one sixth the depth, or one sixteenth the area, of the
bed of the Atlantic Ocean. Let us suppose further, that it had been
produced by an equable sinking of the surface, prolonged for forty days
at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five feet per day,--a motion not
equal to that of the minute-hand of a clock whose dial plate measures
two feet in diameter. Further, let us suppose that a thoroughly
intelligent man,--let us say Dr. Kitto himself,--secure from all
personal danger in an ark perched on some such commanding eminence as
Arthur's Seat, had been a witness of the catastrophe; and that, instead
of having merely to reason respecting it after the lapse of more than
four thousand years, he had been enabled to bear testimony regarding it
from the evidence of his senses. In the first place, let me remark that
the sinking or downward motion of the earth's crust would be altogether
inappreciable by sense; in the next, that the depression, even when it
had reached its acme, would in no sensible degree affect the contour of
surrounding objects. Even at the end of the forty days, when the five
thousand feet of depression had been reached, the gradient of
declination across the sunken area would not exceed _ten_ feet per mile,
and across the larger diameter would amount to but _six feet eight
inches_ per mile. Of course, at the end of the twentieth day the
gradients would be represented by but one half these sums, and would be
altogether inappreciable in the landscape; the hills would seem quite as
high as before, and the valleys not more profound. The only sensible
sign felt or visible of what was taking place would be simply a
persistent rising of the sea at somewhat less than twice its rate of
flow during stream tides. Ocean, as if forgetful of its ancient bounds,
would continue to encroach upon the land. On the second day the greater
part of what is now the site of Edinburgh would be covered; on the
seventh day the tide would have reached the vessel perched on the top of
the hill now known as Arthur's Seat; on the sixteenth day the highest
peak of the Pentlands would have disappeared; and in nine days more the
distant summit of Ben Lomond. From the roof of the slowly drifting ark
nothing would then have appeared save a shoreless ocean. But it would
have taken yet other eleven days ere the proud crest of Ben Nevis, the
highest land in the British islands, would have been submerged; and the
eve of the fortieth day would have seen it covered by little more than
five hundred feet of water. An actual witness, in such circumstances,
however intelligent, could have but testified to the persistent rise of
the sea, accompanied mayhap by rain and tempest; he could but tell how
that for many days together it had been flood without ebb, as if the
fountains of the great deep had been broken up; and that at length he
was encompassed by what seemed a shoreless ocean. But he would certainly
depart perilously from his position as a witness-bearer, were he to
argue, that when his ark had begun to float on a hill eight hundred feet
in height, all hills upon the surface of the globe of a corresponding
altitude must have been also covered; or that, from what was in reality
but a local depression, a universal deluge might be legitimately
inferred. His error would be of the same nature (though of course
immensely greater) as that of the native of Chili who held, that
because the ocean had retreated from the coasts of his own country, it
had of necessity also retreated from the delta of the Indus; or as that
of the inhabitant of Cutch who held, that as the sea had risen high over
his native districts, it had also of necessity overflowed the coasts of
Chili and Aracan.
Dr. Kitto brings forward but one other objection to a Flood only
partial, and that the one virtually disposed of by Bishop Stillingfleet
in the terminal half of a short sentence. The Bishop "despaired," as he
well might, "of ever seeing it proved that the whole earth had been
peopled before the Deluge." "It has been much urged of late," says Dr.
Kitto, "that the Deluge was not universal, but was confined to a
particular region, which man inhabited. It may be freely admitted that,
seeing the object of the Flood was to drown mankind, there was no need
that it should extend beyond the region of man's habitation. But this
theory necessarily assigns to the world before the Flood a lower
population, and a more limited extension of it, than we are prepared to
concede." He then goes on to argue, that, as the species increased very
rapidly immediately after the Deluge, it must have increased in a ratio
at least equally rapid before that catastrophe took place. But how
gratuitous the assumption! It would be quite as safe to infer, that as
the human race multiplied greatly in Ireland during the first half of
the present century, it must have also multiplied greatly in Italy, a
much finer country, during the first half of the fifth century, or in
the wealthier portions of Kurdistan during the first half of the
thirteenth. Ere applying, however, the Irish ratio of increase to either
the Italy of thirteen hundred years ago, or to the Kurdistan of five
hundred years ago, it would surely be necessary to take into account the
important fact, that these were the ages of Zingis Khan and of Attila;
of Zingis Khan, who, on possessing himself of the three capitals of the
one country, coolly butchered four millions three hundred and
forty-seven thousand persons, their inhabitants; and of that Attila,
"the scourge of God," who used to say, more especially in reference to
the other country, that "whenever his horse-hoofs had once trod, the
grass never afterwards grew," and before whose ravages the human race
seemed melting away. The terms in which the great wickedness of the
antediluvians is described indicate a period of violence and
outrage;--the age which preceded the Flood was an age of "giants" and of
"mighty men," and of "men of renown,"--forgotten Attilas, Alarics, and
Zingis Khans, mayhap,--"giants of mighty bone and bold emprise," who
became famous for their "infinite manslaughter," and the thousands whom
they destroyed. Such is decidedly the view which the brief Scriptural
description suggested to the poets; and certainly, when a question comes
to be one of guess work, no other class of persons guess half so
sagaciously as they. It has not unfrequently occurred to me,--and in a
question of this kind one suggestion may be quite as admissible as
another,--that the Deluge may have been more a visitation of mercy to
the race than of judgment. Even in our own times, as happened in New
Zealand during the present century, and in Tahiti about the close of the
last, tribes restricted to one tract of country, when seized by the
madness of conquest, have narrowly escaped extermination. We know that
in some instances better have been destroyed by worse races,--that the
more refined have at times yielded to the more barbarous,--yielded so
entirely, that all that survived of vast populations and a comparatively
high civilization have been broken temples, and great burial mounds
locked up in the solitudes of deep forests; and further, that whole
peoples, exhausted by their vices, have sunk into such a state of
depression and decline, that, unable any longer to supply the inevitable
waste of nature, they have dropt into extinction. And such may have been
the condition of the human race during that period of portentous evil
and violence which preceded the deluge. We know that the good came at
length to be restricted to a single family; and even the evil, instead
of being numbered, as now, by hundreds of millions, may have been
comprised in a few thousands, or at most a few hundred thousands, that
were becoming fewer every year, from the indulgence of fierce and evil
passions, in a time of outrage and violence. The Creator of the race may
have dealt with it on this occasion of judgment, as a florist does with
some decaying plant, which he cuts down to the ground in order to secure
a fresh shoot from the root. At all events, the _proof_ of an
antediluvian population at once enormously great and very largely spread
must rest with those who hold, with Dr. Kitto, that its numbers and
extent were such as to militate against the probability of a deluge
merely partial; and any such proof we may, with the good old Bishop of
Worcester, well "despair of ever seeing" produced. Even admitting,
however, for the argument's sake, that the inhabitants of the Old World
may have been as numerous as those of China are now,--a number estimated
by the recent authorities at more than three hundred and fifty
millions,--and the admission is certainly greatly larger than there is
argument enough on the other side to extort,--a comparatively partial
deluge would have been sufficient to secure their destruction. In short,
it may be fairly concluded, that if there be a show of reason against
the theory of a flood merely local, it has not yet been exhibited. Even
Dr. Kitto, with all his ingenuity and learning, has failed to array
against it arguments of any real weight or cogency; and in my next
address I may be perhaps able to show you that the objections which, on
the other hand, bear against the antagonist hypothesis, are at once
solid and numerous. I may be mistaken in my estimate; but for some years
past I have regarded them as altogether insurmountable.
LECTURE EIGHTH.
THE NOACHIAN DELUGE.
PART II.
A century has not yet gone by since all the organic remains on which the
science of Palæontology is now founded were regarded as the wrecks of a
universal deluge, and held good in evidence that the waters had
prevailed in every known country, and risen over the highest hills.
Intelligent observers were not wanting at even an earlier time who
maintained that a temporary flood could not have occasioned phenomena so
extraordinary. Such was the view taken by several Italian naturalists of
the seventeenth century, and in Britain by the distinguished
mathematician Hooke, the contemporary, and in some matters rival, of
Newton. But the conclusions of these observers, now so generally
adopted, were regarded both in Popish and Protestant countries as but
little friendly to Revelation; and so strong was the opposite opinion,
and so generally were petrifactions regarded as so many proofs of a
universal deluge, that Voltaire felt himself constrained, first in his
Dissertation drawn up for the Academy at Bologna, and next in his
article on shells in the Philosophical Dictionary, to take up the
question as charged with one of the evidences of that Revelation which
it was the great design of his life to subvert. And with an unfairness
too characteristic of his sparkling but unsolid writings, we find him
arguing, that all fossil shells were either those of fresh water lakes
and rivers evaporated during dry seasons, or of land snails developed in
unusual abundance during wet ones; or that they were shells which had
been dropped from the hats of pilgrims on their way from the Holy Land
to their homes; or that they were shells that had gone astray from
cabinets and museums; or, finally, that they were not shells at all, but
mere shell-like forms, produced by some occult process of nature in the
bowels of the earth. In fine, in order to destroy the credibility of the
Noachian deluge, the brilliant Frenchman exhausted every expedient in
his attempts to neutralize that Palæontologic evidence on which
geologists now found some of their most legitimate conclusions. But he
only succeeded, instead, in producing compositions of which every
sentence contains either an absurdity or an untruth, and in raising a
reaction against the special school of infidelity which he had founded,
that at length bore it down. He wrote in the middle of the Paris basin,
with its multitude of fossil shells and bones; and, when penning his
article for the Encyclopædia, he had, he tells us, a boxful of the
shell-charged soil of the Faluns of Touraine actually before him; but
the deluge had to be put down, whatever the nature or bearing of the
facts; and so he could find in either no evidence of a time when the sea
had covered the land. He found, instead, only "some mussels, because
there were ponds in the neighborhood." As for the "spiral petrifactions
termed _cornu ammonis_," of which the Jurassic Alps are full, they were
not nautili, he said; they could be nothing else than reptiles; seeing
that reptiles take almost always the form of a spiral when not in
motion; and it was surely more likely, that when petrified they should
still retain the spiral disposition, than that "the Indian Ocean should
have long ago overflowed the mountains of Europe." Were there not,
however, real shells of the Syrian type in France and Italy? Perhaps
so. But ought "we not to recollect," he asked, "the numberless bands of
pilgrims who carried their money to the Holy Land, and brought back
shells? or was it preferable to think that the sea of Joppa and Sidon
had covered Burgundy and Milanais?" As for the seeming shells of the
less superficial deposits, "Are we sure," he inquired, "that the soil of
the earth cannot produce fossils?" Agate in some specimens contains its
apparent sprigs of moss, which, we know, never existed as the vegetable
they resemble; and why should not the earth have, in like manner,
produced its apparent shells? Or are not many of these shells mere lake
or river petrifactions?--one never sees among them "true marine
substances"!! "If there _were_ any, why have we never seen bones of sea
dogs, sharks, and whales?"!!! And thus he ran on, in the belief
apparently that he had to deal with but an ignorant priesthood, too
little acquainted with the facts to make out a case against him in
behalf of the Mosaic narrative, and whom at least, should argument fail
him, he could vanquish with a joke.
There was, however, a young German, who had not at the time quite made
up his mind either for the French school or against it, who was no
uninterested reader of Voltaire's disquisitions on fossil shells. And
this young man was destined to be in the coming age what the Frenchman
had been in the closing one,--the leading mind of Europe. He, too, had
been looking at fossils; and having no case to make out either for or
against Moses, or any one else, he had received in a fair and candid
spirit the evidence with which they were charged. And the gross
dishonesty of Voltaire in the matter formed so decided a turning point
with him, that from that time forward he employed his great influence in
bearing down the French school of infidelity, as a school detestably
false and hollow;--a warning, surely, to all, whether they stand up for
Revelation or against it, of the danger of being, like the witty
Frenchman, "wicked overmuch." "To us youths," says Goethe, in his
Autobiography, "with our German love of truth and nature, the factious
dishonesty of Voltaire, and the perversion of so many worthy subjects,
became more and more annoying, and we daily strengthened ourselves in
our aversion from him. He could never have done with degrading religion
and the sacred books for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as he called
it; and thus produced in me many an unpleasing sensation. But when I now
learned, that to weaken the tradition of a Deluge, he had denied all
petrified shells, and only admitted them as _lusus naturæ_, he entirely
lost my confidence; for my own eyes had on the Baschberg plainly enough
shown me that I stood on the bottom of an old dried-up sea, among the
_exuviæ_ of its ancient inhabitants. These mountains had certainly been
once covered with waves,--whether before or during the Deluge did not
concern me: it was enough that the valley of the Rhine had been a
monstrous lake,--a bay extending beyond the reach of eyesight: out of
this I was _not_ to be talked. I thought much more of advancing in the
knowledge of lands and mountains, let what would be the result." I know
not in the whole history of opinion a more instructive passage than
this. Little could Voltaire have known what he was in reality doing, or
how egregiously he was overreaching himself, when, in laboring to bear
down the evidence borne by fossils to the ancient upheavals and
cataclysms, he suffered himself to make use of assertions and arguments
so palpably unfair. And those who employ, in their zeal against the
geologists, what is still exceedingly common,--the Voltairean style of
argument,--especially if they employ it in what they deem the behalf of
religion, might do well to inquire whether they are not in some little
danger of producing the Voltairean result.
No man acquainted with the general outlines of Palæontology, or the true
succession of the sedimentary formations, has been able to believe,
during the last half century, that any proof of a general deluge can be
derived from the _older_ geologic systems,--Palæozoic, Secondary, or
Tertiary. It has been held, however, by accomplished geologists, within
even the last thirty years, that such proof might be successfully sought
for in what are known as the superficial deposits. Such was the belief
of Cuvier,--a man who, even in geologic science, which was certainly not
his peculiar province, exerted a mighty influence over the thinking of
other men. "I agree with MM. Deluc and Dolomieu in thinking," we find
him saying, in his widely famed "Theory of the Earth," "that if anything
in geology be established, it is, that the surface of our globe has
undergone a great and sudden revolution, the date of which cannot be
referred to a much earlier period than five or six thousand years ago."
But from the same celebrated work we learn that Cuvier held that this
sudden catastrophe,--occasioned, as he supposed, by an elevation of the
sea bottom and a submergence of the previously existing land,--had _not_
been universal; seeing he could entertain the belief that the three
great races of the human family,--Ethiopian, Mongolian, and
Caucasian,--had all escaped from it in several directions. In referring
to the marked peculiarities of the Mongolian race, so very distinct from
the Caucasian, he merely intimates, that he was "tempted to believe
their ancestors and ours had escaped the great catastrophe on different
sides;" but in dwelling on the still more marked peculiarities of the
Negroes, we find him explicitly stating, that, "all their characters
clearly show that they had escaped from the overwhelming deluge at
another point than the Caucasian and Altaic races; from which they had
perhaps been separated," he adds, "for a long time previous to the
occurrence of that event." For a season, geologists of high standing in
our own country, such as Buckland and Conybeare, followed Cuvier so far
as to hold, that the superficial deposits bore evidence everywhere of a
great cataclysm, the last of the geologic catastrophes; and which might
be identified, they believed, with the Noachian Deluge. Against this
view one of the most distinguished of Scottish naturalists, Dr. John
Fleming, raised a vigorous protest as early as the year 1826, and
conclusively showed that no temporary flood could have produced the
existing appearances. And so thoroughly were his facts and reasonings
confirmed by subsequent discovery, that the geologists of name who had
acquiesced, wholly or in part, in the Cuvierian view, read in succession
their recantations: Dr. Buckland in especial, who had written most
largely on the subject, and committed himself most thoroughly, did so a
very few years after: nor does the hypothesis of Cuvier appear to have
been since adopted by any writer of scientific reputation. Instead,
therefore, of contending with arguments or inferences which there are
now no parties in the field to maintain, I shall briefly refer to a few
of the leading characteristics of those superficial deposits on which
the abandoned conclusions were originally based, and show, in the
passing, that they are not such as a temporary deluge could have
produced.
The superficial deposits include what is known as the mammaliferous
crag, the drift, the boulder and brick clays, the stratified sands and
gravels, the travelled rocks, the ösars, and moraines of the _higher_
latitudes. For it is a fact very significant in its bearings on the
diluvial controversy, that it is in the higher latitudes in both
hemispheres that these peculiar deposits are chiefly to be found. They
have been traced in Patagonia in the one hemisphere, from the southern
limits of the country to the forty-first degree of south latitude; and
in Europe in the other, to the fortieth; and in America to even the
thirty-eighth degree of north latitude. But in the great belt, nearly
eighty degrees in breadth, which, encircling the globe from east to
west, includes with the torrid the warmer portions of the temperate
zones, they have scarce any existence at all, or exist at least in
different forms and exceedingly reduced proportions. The superficial
deposits, in their most characteristic conditions, are deposits of the
colder portions of the globe, and in many parts indicate that there
prevailed during their formation a much severer climate than now obtains
in the regions in which they occur. The shells which they contain in
Britain, for instance, though almost all of existing species, are many
of them such as are not now to be found in the British seas, but in seas
about ten degrees further to the north; and there is evidence that the
line of perpetual snow must have descended at the time to a lower level
than that attained by our second-class hills, and that almost every
Highland valley had its glacier. They represent, too, vast periods of
time;--earlier periods, during which the land gradually sank, till only
its higher eminences were uncovered, and great floats of icebergs went
careering over its submerged plains and lower hills; and later periods,
during which the land as gradually arose, after apparently many pauses
and oscillations, until at length, when it had reached a level scarce
eighty feet higher than that which it at present maintains, the climate
softened, and the glaciers which had formed in the later times among its
hills ultimately disappeared. Beds of sea-shells of the boreal type,
that belong to those ice ages, may be still found occupying the places
in which they had lived and died, many miles inland, and hundreds of
feet over the sea level. Boring shells, such as the pholodadidæ, may be
detected far out of sight of the ocean, still occupying the cells which
they had scooped out for themselves in hard limestone or yielding shale;
and serpula and nuliporate encrustations may be seen still adhering to
rocks raised to giddy elevations over the sea. The group of mammals,
however, which lived during this period, and to whose abundant tusks and
skeletons one of its older deposits (the mammaliferous crag) owes its
name, was marked by so peculiar a character, that evidence of a
universal deluge has been often sought for in their remains. The
group,--that which immediately preceded the animals of our own times,
and included not a few of the indigenous species which still inhabit our
country,--was chiefly remarkable for containing many genera, all of
whose existing species are exotic. It had its great elephant, its two
species of rhinoceros, its hippopotamus, its hyæna, its tiger, and its
monkey; and much ingenious calculation has been employed by writers such
as Granville Penn, in attempting to show how these remains might have
been transported from the intertropical regions during the Flood, not
only to Britain, but even to the northern wastes of Siberia,--a voyage
of from four to five thousand miles. There are instances on record in
which the bodies of the drowned have been drifted from ninety to a
hundred and fifty miles from the spot where they had been first
submerged; but they have always been found, in these cases, in a
condition of sad mutilation and decay; whereas the carcass of the
ancient elephant which was discovered, a little ere the commencement of
the present century, locked up in ice in Siberia, three thousand six
hundred miles from where elephants now live, was in such a state of
excellent keeping, that the bears and dogs fed upon its flesh. It seems
a significant circumstance too, that the remains of these fossil
elephants, tigers, and hyænas, should be associated in even our own
country with those of well known northern species,--with the remains of
the reindeer, of the red deer, of the Lithuanian auroch, of the European
beaver, of the European wolf, of the wild cat, the fox, and the otter.
Writers, however, such as Mr. Penn, got over both difficulties. He
showed, for instance, how a ship had once run across the Atlantic under
bare poles, during an almost continued hurricane, at the rate of two
hundred and eighty-eight miles in twenty-four hours,--nearly the rate at
which the great American steamers cross the same ocean now; and why, he
asked, might not the carcasses of elephants have drifted northwards at
an equal rate on the tides of the deluge? And as for the mixed character
of the group with which these remains are found associated, _that_ was
exactly what Mr. Penn would have expected in the circumstances. It was
the result of a tumultuary flood, which had brought together in our
northern region the floating carcasses of the animals of all climates,
to sink in unwonted companionship, when putrefaction had done its work,
into the same deposits. He had, however, unluckily overlooked the fact,
that comparative anatomy is in reality a science; and further, that it
is a science of which men such as Cuvier and Owen know a great deal more
than the men who never studied it, however respectable. It is the
recorded decision of these great anatomists,--a decision which has been
many times tested and confirmed,--that the northern species of elephant,
rhinoceros, tiger, and hyæna, were entirely different from the
intertropical species; that they differed from them very considerably
more than the ass differs from the horse, or the dog from the wolf; and
that, while there is a preponderating amount of evidence to show that
they were natives of the countries in which their remains are now found,
there is not a shadow of evidence to show that they had ever lived, or
_could_ have lived, in an intertropical country. Of the northern
elephant, it is positively known, from the Siberian specimen, that
it was covered, like many other sub-arctic animals, with long
hair, and a thick crisp undergrowth of wool, about three inches in
length,--certainly not an intertropical provision; and so entirely
different was it in form from either of the existing species, African or
Indian, that a child could be taught in a single lesson to distinguish
it by the tusks alone. In fine, the assumption that challenges the
remains of the old Pleistocene carnivora and pachydermata as those of
intertropical species brought northwards by a universal deluge, is about
as well based and sound as if it challenged the bones of foxes
occasionally found in our woods for the remains of dogs of Aleppo or
Askalon brought into Britain by the Crusaders, or as if it pronounced a
dead ass to be one of the cavalry horses of the fatal charge of
Balaklava, transported to England from the Crimea as a relic of the
fight. The hypothesis confounds as a species the Rosinante of Quixote
with the Dapple of Sancho Panza, and frames its argument on the mistake.
That this extinct group of animals inhabited for ages the countries in
which their remains are now embedded, is rendered evident by their great
numbers in some localities, and from their occurrence in various states
of preservation, and in beds of various ages. The five hundred mammoths
whose tusks and grinders were dragged up in thirteen years by the oyster
dredgers of the Norfolk coast from a tract of submerged drift, could not
all have been contemporary in a small corner of England, but must have
represented several generations. And of course the two thousand
grinders brought up from the exposed surface of the drift must have
borne but a small proportion to the thousands still dispersed throughout
the entire depth of the deposit. Any argument, however, founded on the
mere numbers of these elephantine tusks and grinders, and which evaded
the important question of species, might be eluded, however unfairly, by
the assertors of a universal deluge. Floods certainly do at times
accumulate, in great heaps, bodies of the same specific gravity; and why
might not a universal flood have accumulated on this special tract of
drift, the carcasses of many elephants? But it will be found greatly
more difficult to elude the ingenious argument on the general question
of Professor Owen. Next, perhaps, to the extinct elephant, one of the
most numerous animals of this ancient group was the great Irish elk,
_Megaceros Hibernicus_, a creature that, measured to the top of its
enormous antlers, stood ten feet four inches in height, and exceeded in
bulk and size the largest horses. Like all other species of the deer
family, the creature annually shed and renewed its horns; "and a male
deer may be reckoned," says Professor Owen, "to have left about eight
pairs of antlers, besides its bones, to testify its former existence
upon the earth. But as the female has usually no antlers, our
expectations might be limited to the discovery of four times as many
pairs of antlers as skeletons in the superficial deposits of the
countries in which such deer have lived and died. The actual proportion
of the fossil antlers of the great extinct species of British Pliocene
deer (which antlers are proved by the form of their base to have been
shed by the living animals) to the fossil bones of the same species, is
somewhat greater than in the above calculation. Although, therefore, it
may be contended that the swollen carcass of a drowned exotic deer might
be borne along a diluvial wave to a considerable distance, and its
bones ultimately deposited far from its native soil, _it is not credible
that all the solid shed antlers of such species of deer could be carried
by the same cause to the same distance_; or that any of them could be
rolled for a short distance, with other heavy debris of a mighty
torrent, without fracture and signs of friction. But the shed antlers of
the large extinct species of deer found in this island and in Ireland
have commonly their parts or branches entire as when they fell; and the
fractured specimens are generally found in caves, and _show marks of the
teeth of the ossivorous hyænas_ by which they had been gnawed; thus at
the same time revealing the mode in which they were introduced into
those caves, and _proving the contemporaneous existence in this island
of both kinds of mammalia_."
[Illustration: Fig. 111.
MEGACEROS HIBERNICUS.
(_Irish Elk._)]
But the contents of the bone caves, consisting in large part of the
extinct mammals, ought of themselves to be decisive in this question. As
the opening of the Kirkdale cavern is only about four feet each way, a
diluvial wave, charged with the wreck of the lower latitudes, could
scarce have washed into such an orifice any considerable number of the
intertropical animals. And yet there has been found in this cave,--with
the teeth of a very young mammoth, of a very great tiger, of a
tiger-like animal whose genus is extinct, of a rhinoceros, and of a
hippopotamus,--the fragmentary remains of from two to three hundred
hyænas. Further, even supposing, what is impossible, that a diluvial
wave had swept them all from the tropics into the four-feet hole, on
what principle is it to be explained that the bones thus washed into the
cave should be all gnawed bones, even those of the hyænas themselves,
whereas the bones of the same creatures found in the mammaliferous
deposits of the country bear no marks of teeth? Mr. Granville Penn,
however, gets over the difficulty of the cave, which is hollowed, I may
mention, in a limestone of the Oolitic series, inclosing the ammonite
and belemnite, by asserting that its mammaliferous contents may be
_somewhat older than itself_! The limestone existed, he holds, as but a
mere unformed pulp at the time the intertropical animals came floating
northwards: they sank into it; the gasses evolved during putrefaction
blew up the plastic lime above them into a great oblong bubble,
somewhat as a glass-blower blows up a bottle; and hence the Kirkdale
cavern, with its gnawed bones and its amazing number of teeth. And
certainly a _geologic_ argument of this ingenious character has one
signal advantage,--it is in no danger whatever of being answered by the
geologists. Mr. Penn, in a second edition of his work, expressed some
surprise that an Edinburgh Reviewer should have merely stated his
_argument_ without replying to it!!
But I need not dwell on the arguments for a universal deluge which have
been derived from the superficial deposits. They all belong to an
immature age of geologic science, and are of no value whatever. Let us
pass rather to the consideration of the facts and arguments which
militate against the universality of the catastrophe.
The form and dimensions of Noah's ark are definitely given in the sacred
record. It seems to have been a great oblong box, somewhat like a wooden
granary, three stories high, and furnished with a roof apparently of the
ordinary angular shape, but with a somewhat broader ridge than common;
and it measured three hundred cubits in length, fifty cubits in breadth,
and thirty cubits in height. A good deal of controversy has, however,
arisen regarding the cubit employed; some holding, with Sir Walter
Raleigh, and most of the older theologians, such as Shuckford and Hales,
that the Noachian cubit was what is known as the common or natural
cubit, "containing," says Sir Walter, "one foot and a half, or a length
equal to that of the human fore-arm measured from the sharp of the elbow
to the point of the middle finger;" others contending that it was the
palm-cubit, "which taketh," adds my authority, "one handful more than
the common;" yet others, the royal or Persian cubit of twenty-one
inches; and so on; for there are, it seems, five several kinds of cubit
to choose from, all differing each from the others. The controversy is
one in which there is exceeding little footing for any party. I am
inclined, however, to adopt, with Raleigh and Hales, the _natural_
cubit, for the following reason. The given dimensions of the ark form
the oldest example of measurement of which we have any record; and all,
or almost all, the older and simpler standards of measure bear reference
to portions of the human frame. There is the span, the palm, the
hand-breadth, the thumb-breadth (or inch), the hair-breadth, and the
_foot_. The simple fisherman on our coasts still measures off his
fathoms by stretching out both his arms to the full; the village
sempstress still tells off her cloth-breadths by finger-lengths and
_nails_; the untaught tiller of the soil still estimates the area of his
little field by _pacing_ along its sides. Man's first and most obvious
expedient, when he sets himself to measure, is to employ his own person
as his standard; and the first or common cubit was a measure of this
natural description equal in length to the extended fore-arm and hand.
All the other cubits were artificial compounds of after introduction;
and so, in the absence of direct evidence on the point, I accept the
most natural and oldest cubit as in all probability the one employed in
the oldest recorded piece of cubit measurement. And the ark, if measured
by the common or natural cubit, must have been a vessel four hundred and
fifty feet in length, seventy-five feet in breadth, and forty-five feet
in height. Dr. Kitto, however, though we find him remarking that in
computations of Scripture measures the cubit may be regarded as half a
yard (Sir Walter's estimate), adopts, in his own computation of the size
of the ark, without assigning any reason why, the palm-cubit, or cubit
of twenty-one inches and nearly nine lines (21.888 inches); and, waving
all controversy on the question, let us, for the argument's sake, admit
the larger measure. Let us,--however much inclined to hold with Raleigh,
Shuckford, and Hales,--agree with Dr. Kitto that the ark was five
hundred and forty-seven feet in length, by ninety-one feet in breadth.
Such dimensions, multiplied by three, the number of stories in the
vessel, would give an area equal to about one seventh that of the great
Crystal Palace of 1851. Or, to take a more definite illustration from
the same vast building, the area of the three floors of the ark, taken
together, would fall short by about twenty-eight thousand square feet of
that of the northern gallery of the Palace, which measured one thousand
eight hundred and forty-eight feet in length, by ninety-six feet in
breadth. And thus, yielding to our opponents their own large
measurements, let us now see whether the non-universality of the deluge
cannot be fairly predicated from the dimensions of the ark.
I may first remark, however, that measures so definite as those given by
Moses (definite, of course, if we waive the doubt regarding the cubit
employed) were effectual in setting the arithmeticians to work in all
ages of the Church, in order to determine whether all the animals in the
world, by sevens and by pairs, with food sufficient to serve them for a
twelvemonth, could have been accommodated in the given space. It was a
sort of stock problem, that required, it was thought, no very high
attainments to solve. Eighty years have not yet passed since kind old
Samuel Johnson, in writing to little Miss Thrale a nice little letter,
recommending her to be a good girl, and to mind her arithmetic, advised
her to try the ark problem. "If you can borrow 'Wilkins' Real
Character,'" we find him saying to the young lady, "a folio which
perhaps the booksellers can let you have, you will have a very curious
calculation, _which you are qualified to consider_, to show that Noah's
ark was capable of holding all the known animals of the world, with
provision for all the time in which the earth was under water."
Unluckily, however, though the dimensions of the ark were known, the
animals of the world were not; and so the question, in at least one of
its terms, had to be very frequently restated. Let us take it as we find
it presented (drawn, however, from a much older source), in Sir Walter
Raleigh's magnificent "History of the World." "If in a ship of such
greatness," says this distinguished man, "we seek room for eighty-nine
distinct species of beasts, or, lest any should be omitted, for a
hundred several kinds, we shall easily find place both for them and for
the birds, which in bigness are no way answerable to them, and for meat
to sustain them all. For there are three sorts of beasts whose bodies
are of a quantity well known; the beef, the sheep, and the wolf; to
which the rest may be reduced by saying, according to Aristotle, that
one elephant is equal to four beeves, one lion to two wolves, and so of
the rest. Of beasts, some feed on vegetables, others on flesh. There are
one-and-thirty kinds of the greater sort feeding on vegetables, of which
number only three are clean, according to the law of Moses, whereof
seven of a kind entered into the ark, namely, three couples for breed,
and one odd one for sacrifice; the other eight-and-twenty kinds were
'taken by two of each kind; so that in all there were in the ark
one-and-twenty great beasts clean, and six-and-fifty unclean; estimable
for largeness as ninety-one beeves; yet, for a supplement (lest,
perhaps, any species be omitted), lot them be valued as a hundred and
twenty beeves. Of the lesser sort feeding on vegetables were in the ark
six-and-twenty kinds, estimable, with good allowance for supply, as
fourscore sheep. Of those which devour flesh were two-and-thirty kinds,
answerable to threescore and four wolves. All these two hundred and
eighty beasts might be kept in one story or room of the ark, in their
several cabins; their meat in a second; the birds and their provision in
a third, with space to spare for Noah and his family, and all their
necessaries." Such was the calculation of the great voyager Raleigh,--a
man who had a more practical acquaintance with _stowage_ than perhaps
any of the other writers who have speculated on the capabilities of the
ark; and his estimate seems sober and judicious. It will be seen,
however, that from the vast increase in our knowledge of the mammals
which has taken place since the age in which the "History of the World"
was written, the calculation which embraced all the eighty-nine known
animals of that time would embrace those of but a single centre of
creation now; and that the estimate of Sir Walter tells, in consequence,
on the side, not of a universal, but of a partial deluge.
As man extended his acquaintance with the mammals, he found their number
greatly increasing on his hands. Button, like Raleigh, though a
professed naturalist, and a writer of admirable genius, had no very
distinct notions of species. He was inclined to question whether even
the ass might not be merely a degraded horse; and confounded many of the
mammals of the New World with their representative congeners in the Old.
And yet, in summing up his history of the mammaliferous division, he
could state, that though it included descriptions of "a hundred and
thirty-four different species of creatures that suckled their young,
many of which had not been observed or described before," it was
necessarily incomplete, as there were still others to add to the list,
for whose history there existed no materials. At the same time he
remarked, however, that the "number of quadruped animals whose existence
is certain and well established does not amount to more than two
hundred on the surface of the known world." Yet here was the extreme
estimate made by Raleigh, with what he deemed large allowance for the
unknown animals, fairly doubled; and under the hands of more
discriminating naturalists, and in the inevitable course of discovery,
the number has so enormously increased, that the "eighty-nine distinct
species" known to the great voyager have been represented during the
last thirty years by the one thousand mammals of Swainson's estimate,
the one thousand one hundred and forty-nine mammals of Charles
Bonaparte's estimate, the one thousand two hundred and thirty mammals of
Winding's estimate, and the one thousand five hundred mammals of Oken's
estimate. In the first edition of the admirable "Physical Atlas" of
Johnston (published in 1848) there are one thousand six hundred and
twenty-six different species of mammals enumerated; and in the second
edition (published in 1856), one thousand six hundred and fifty-eight
species. And to this very extraordinary advance on the eighty-nine
mammals of Raleigh, and the two hundred mammals of Buffon, we must add
the six thousand two hundred and sixty-six birds of Lesson, and the six
hundred and fifty-seven reptiles of Charles Bonaparte; or at
least,--subtracting the sea snakes, and perhaps the turtles, as fitted
to live outside the ark,--his six hundred and _forty-two_ reptiles.[29]
Such is the number of the known vertebrates, exclusive of the fishes,
with which in this question we have now to deal. Still, however, there
are a few lingering theologians, some of them very intelligent men, who
continue to regard the ark as quite big enough for them all. Dr.
Hamilton of Mobile, for instance, after fairly stating Swainson's
estimate, namely, one thousand mammalia, six thousand birds, and one
thousand five hundred reptiles and amphibiæ, goes on to say, that "it
must not be forgotten, that of all these, the vastly greater proportion
are small; and that numbers of them could be placed together in the same
compartment of the ark." This, however, permit me to say with all
respect, is not meeting the real difficulty. No doubt many of the birds
are small,--many of the reptiles are small,--many even of the mammals
are small,--many small animals were known in the days of Raleigh, and
a much greater number of small animals are known now; but the question
proper to the case seems to be, What proportions do both the large
and the small animals now known bear to the large and small animals
known in the days of Raleigh or Buffon; and how much additional
accommodation-room would they require during their supposed voyage of a
twelvemonth? There are two different ways in which the list of the
known animals has been increased, especially of the known mammals. They
have been increased in a certain appreciable proportion by _discovery_;
and as discovery has been made chiefly in islands,--for the great
continents had been previously known,--and as the mammals of islands, as
has been well remarked by Cuvier, are usually small, of this appreciable
proportion the bulk is comparatively not great. The great kangaroo
(_Macropus giganteus_), though the inhabitant of an island which ranks
among the continents, would not much exceed in bulk, tried by Raleigh's
quaint scale of measurement, a sheep and a half, or at most two sheep;
and yet I know not that discovery in the islands has added a larger
animal to the previously known ones than the great kangaroo. Mr.
Waterhouse, when he published, in 1841, his "History of the
Marsupialia," reckoned up one hundred and five distinct species of
pouched animals; and eighteen species more,--in all one hundred and
twenty-three,--have been since added to the order. With the exception of
an opossum or two, all these marsupiata may be regarded as discoveries
made since the time of Buffon; most of them, as I have said, are small.
And such, generally, has been the nature of the revelations made during
the last seventy years by positive _discovery_. It is not, however, by
discovery, but by scientific scrutiny into the true nature and
distinctions of species, that the recent enormous increase in the number
of the known mammals has mainly taken place. And in these cases it will
generally be found that the new species, which had been previously
confounded with some old ones, so nearly resemble the latter in bulk, as
well as aspect, as to justify in some degree the mistake. Let us take
two of the greatest animals as examples,--the elephant and the
rhinoceros. Buffon confounded the African with the Asiatic elephant. We
now know that they represent two well marked species, _Elephas
Africanus_ and _Elephas Indicus_; and that an ark which contained the
ancestors of all the existing animals would require to have its _two_
pair of elephants, not the one pair only which would have been deemed
sufficient eighty years ago. Again, with respect to the rhinoceros,
Buffon was acquainted with the single horned animal, and had _heard_ of
the animal with two horns; and so, though by no means certain that the
"_variety_ was constant," he yet held that "two distinct species might
possibly be established." But we now know that there are six species of
rhinoceros (seven, according to the "Physical Atlas,")--_Rh. Indicus_,
_Rh. Javanus_, _Rh. Sumatrensis_, _Rh. Africanus_, _Rh. simus_, and _Rh.
ketloa_; and that, instead of _possibly_ four, at least twelve, or more
probably fourteen, animals of the genus would require, on the hypothesis
of a universal deluge, to have been accommodated in the ark. Buffon even
held that the bison of America might be identical with not simply the
auroch of Europe, which it closely resembles, but with even the European
ox, which it does _not_ resemble. But it is now known, that while the
European aurochs are provided by nature with but fourteen pairs of ribs,
the American bison is furnished with fifteen. Of each of the ruminants
that divide the hoof, there were _seven_ introduced into the ark; and it
may be well to mark how, even during the last few years, our
acquaintance with this order of animals has been growing, and how
greatly the known species, in their relation to human knowledge, have in
consequence increased. In 1848 (in the first edition of the "Physical
Atlas") Mr. Waterhouse estimated the oxen at thirteen species; in 1856
(in the second edition) he estimates them at twenty. In 1848 he
estimated the sheep at twenty-one species; in 1856 he estimates them at
twenty-seven. In 1848 he estimated the goats at fourteen species; in
1856 he estimates them at twenty. In 1846 he estimated the deer at
thirty-eight species; in 1856 he estimates them at fifty-one. In short,
if, excluding the lamas and the musks as doubtfully _clean_, tried by
the Mosaic test, we but add to the sheep, goats, deer, and cattle, the
forty-eight species of unequivocally _clean_ antelopes, and multiply the
whole by seven, we shall have as the result a sum total of one thousand
one hundred and sixty-two individuals,--a number more than four times
greater than that for which Raleigh made provision in the ark, and
considerably more than twice greater than that provided for by the
students of Buffon. Such is the nature and amount of the increase which
has taken place during the last half century in the mammaliferous fauna.
In so great a majority of cases has it increased its _bulk_ in the ratio
in which it has increased its numbers, that if one ark was not deemed
more than sufficient to accommodate the animal world known to the French
naturalist of eighty years ago, it would require at least from five to
six arks to accommodate the animal world known in the present day.
Even in the days of Buffon, however, and at a still earlier period, the
ark, regarded as a natural means of preservation from death by
_drowning_, was usually coupled, in the case of at least the carnivorous
animals, with certain miraculous provisions against death by _starving_.
It seems to have been generally taken for granted, that the flesh-eating
animals, when introduced to the shelter of the ark, entirely changed the
nature indicated by their form of teeth, the character of their
stomachs, and the shortness of their bowels, and fed, for the time they
remained in it, exclusively on vegetable substances, which, in ordinary
circumstances, their lacteals could not have converted into chyle.
Certain figurative expressions in Scripture taken literally, which refer
to a class of wild animals whose real destiny is rather, it would seem,
to be extirpated than to be changed, coupled with the belief, now no
longer tenable, that there was a time, ere man had sinned, when there
was no death among the inferior creatures, and of course no eaters of
flesh, rendered the belief easy of reception; but it involved a miracle
nowhere recorded; and the burden of the proof that such a miracle
actually took place in the circumstances lies of necessity on the
assertors of a universal deluge. Further, of even the creatures that
live on vegetables, many are restricted in their food to single plants,
which are themselves restricted to limited localities and remote regions
of the globe. Dr. Hamilton has not referred, in his list of animals, to
the insects,--a class which, though they were estimated in 1842 to
consist of no fewer than five hundred and fifty thousand species, might
yet be accommodated in a comparatively limited space. But how
extraordinary an amount of miracle would it not require to bring them
all together into any one centre, or to preserve them there! Many of
them, like the myriapoda and the thysanura, have no wings, and but
feeble locomotive powers; many of them, such as the ephemera and the
male ants, live after they have got their wings only a few hours, or at
most a few days; and there are myriads of them that can live upon but
single plants that grow in very limited botanic centres. Even supposing
them all brought into the ark by miracle as eggs, what multitudes of
them would not, without the exertion of further miracle, require to be
sent back to their proper habitats as wingless grubs, or as insects
restricted by nature to a few days of life! Or, supposing the eggs all
left in their several localities to lie under water for a twelvemonth
amid mud and debris,--though certain of the hardier kinds might survive
such treatment, by miracle alone could the preponderating majority of
the class be preserved. And be it remembered, that the expedient of
having recourse to supposititious miracle in order to get over a
difficulty insurmountable on every natural principle, is not of the
nature of argument, but simply an evidence of the want of it. Argument
is at an end when supposititious miracle is introduced.
But the very inadequate size of the ark, though a conclusive proof that
all, or nearly all, the progenitors of our existing animals could not
have harbored within it from any general cataclysm, does not furnish a
stronger argument against the possibility of any such assemblage, than
the peculiar manner in which we now find these animals distributed over
the earth's surface. Linnæus held, early in the last century, that all
creatures which now inhabit the globe had proceeded originally from some
such common centre as the ark might have furnished; but no zoologist
acquainted with the distribution of species can acquiesce in any such
conclusion now. We now know that every great continent has its own
peculiar fauna; that the original centres of distribution must have
been, not one, but many; further, that the areas or circles around these
centres must have been occupied by their pristine animals in ages long
anterior to that of the Noachian Deluge; nay, that in even the latter
geologic ages, they were preceded in them by animals of the same general
type. There are fourteen such areas or provinces enumerated by the later
naturalists. It may be well, however, instead of running any risk of
losing ourselves amid the less nicely defined provinces of the Old
World, to draw our illustrations from two and a half provinces of later
discovery, whose limits have been rigidly fixed by nature. "The great
continents," says Cuvier, "contain species peculiar to each; insomuch
that whenever large countries of this description have been discovered,
which their situation had kept isolated from the rest of the world, the
class of quadrupeds which they contained has been found extremely
different from any that had existed elsewhere. Thus, when the Spaniards
first penetrated into South America, they did not find a single species
of quadruped the same as any of Europe, Asia, or Africa. The puma, the
jaguar, the tapir, the cabiai, the lama, the vicuna, the sloths, the
armadilloes, the opossums, and the whole tribe of sapajous, were to them
entirely new animals, of which they had no idea. Similar circumstances
have recurred in our own time, when the coasts of New Holland and the
adjacent islands were first explored. The various species of kangaroo,
phascolomys, dasyurus, and perameles, the flying phalangers, the
ornithorynchi, and echidnæ, have astonished naturalists by the
strangeness of their conformations, which presented proportions contrary
to all former rules, and were incapable of being arranged under any of
the systems then in use." New Zealand, though singularly devoid of
indigenous mammals and reptiles,--for the only native mammal seems to be
a peculiar species of rat, and the only native reptile a small, harmless
lizard,--has a scarce less remarkable fauna than either of these great
continents. It consists almost exclusively of birds, some of them so ill
provided with wings, that, like the _wika_ of the natives, they can only
run along the ground. And it is a most significant fact, that both in
the two great continents and the New Zealand islands there existed, in
the later geologic ages, extinct faunas that bore the peculiar generic
characters by which their recent ones are still distinguished. The
sloths and armadilloes of South America had their gigantic predecessors
in the enormous megatherium and mylodon, and the strongly armed
glyptodon; the kangaroos and wombats of Australia had their extinct
predecessors in a kangaroo nearly twice the size of the largest living
species, and in so huge a wombat, that its bones have been mistaken for
those of the hippopotamus; and the ornithic inhabitants of New Zealand
had their predecessors in the monstrous birds, such as the dinornis, the
aptornis, and the palapteryx,--wingless creatures like the ostrich,
that stood from six to twelve feet in height. In these several regions
two _generations_ of species of the genera peculiar to them have
existed,--the recent generation by whose descendants they are still
inhabited, and the extinct gigantic generation, whose remains we find
locked up in their soils and caves. But how are such facts reconcileable
with the hypothesis of a universal deluge?
[Illustration: Fig. 112.
MYLODON ROBUSTUS.]
[Illustration: Fig. 113.
GLYPTODON CLAVIPES.]
The deluge was an event of the existing creation. Had it been universal,
it would either have broken up all the diverse centres, and substituted
one great general centre instead,--that in which the ark rested; or
else, at an enormous expense of miracle, all the animals preserved by
_natural_ means by Noah would have had to be returned by _supernatural_
means to the regions whence by means _equally supernatural_ they had
been brought. The sloths and armadilloes,--little fitted by nature for
long journeys,--would have required to be ferried across the Atlantic to
the regions in which the remains of the megatherium and glyptodon lie
entombed; the kangaroo and wombat, to the insulated continent that
contains the bones of the extinct macropus and phalcolomys; and the New
Zealand birds, including its heavy flying quails and its wingless
wood-hen, to those remote islands of the Pacific in which the skeletons
of _Palapteryx ingens_ and _Dinornus giganteus_ lie entombed. Nor will
it avail aught to urge, with certain assertors of a universal deluge,
that during the cataclysm, sea and land changed their places, and that
what is now land had formed the bottom of the antediluvian ocean, and,
_vice versa_, what is now sea had been the land on which the first human
inhabitants of the earth increased and multiplied. No geologist who
knows how very various the ages of the several table-lands and mountain
chains in reality are could acquiesce in such an hypothesis; our own
Scottish shores,--if to the term of the existing we add that of the
ancient coast line,--must have formed the limits of the land from a time
vastly more remote than the age of the deluge. But even supposing, for
the argument's sake, the hypothesis recognized as admissible, what, in
the circumstances of the case, would be gained by the admission? A
continuous tract of land would have stretched,--when all the oceans were
continents and all the continents oceans,--between the South American
and the Asiatic coasts. And it is just possible that, during the hundred
and twenty years in which the ark was in building, a pair of sloths
might have crept by inches across this continuous tract, from where the
skeletons of the great megatheria are buried, to where the great vessel
stood. But after the Flood had subsided, and the change in sea and land
had taken place, there would remain for them no longer a roadway; and
so, though their journey outwards might, in all save the impulse which
led to it, have been altogether a natural one, their voyage homewards
could not be other than miraculous. Nor would the exertion of miracle
have had to be restricted to the transport of the _remoter_ travellers.
How, we may well ask, had the Flood been universal, could even such
islands as Great Britain and Ireland have ever been replenished with
many of their original inhabitants? Even supposing it possible that
animals, such as the red deer and the native ox _might_ have swam across
the Straits of Dover or the Irish Channel, to graze anew over deposits
in which the bones and horns of their remote ancestors had been entombed
long ages before, the feat would have been surely far beyond the power
of such feeble natives of the soil as the mole, the hedgehog, the shrew,
the dormouse, and the field-vole.
Dr. Pye Smith, in dealing with this subject, has emphatically said, that
"all land animals having their geographical regions, to which their
constitutional natures are congenial,--many of them being unable to
live in any other situation,--we cannot represent to ourselves the idea
of their being brought into one small spot from the polar regions, the
torrid zone, and all the other climates of Asia, Africa, Europe, and
America, Australia, and the thousands of islands,--their preservation
and provision, and the final disposal of them,--without bringing up the
idea of miracles more stupendous than any that are recorded in
Scripture. The great decisive miracle of Christianity," he adds,--"the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus,--sinks down before it." And let us
remember that the preservation and redistribution of the land animals
would demand but a portion of the amount of miracle absolutely necessary
for the preservation, in the circumstances, of the entire fauna of the
globe. The fresh water fishes, molluscs, crustacea, and zoophytes, could
be kept alive in a universal deluge only by miraculous means. It has
been urged that, though the living individuals were to perish, their
spawn might be preserved by natural means. It must be remembered,
however, that even of some fishes whose proper habitat is the sea, such
as the salmon, it is essential for the maintenance of the species that
the spawn should be deposited in fresh water, nay, in running fresh
water; for in still water, however pure, the eggs in a few weeks addle
and die. The eggs of the common trout also require to be deposited in
running fresh water; while other fresh water fishes, such as the tench
and carp, are reared most successfully in still, reedy ponds. The fresh
water fishes spawn, too, at very different seasons, and the young remain
for very different periods in the egg. The perch and grayling spawn in
the end of April or the beginning of May; the tench and roach about the
middle of June; the common trout and powan in October and November. And
while some fishes, such as the salmon, remain from ninety to a hundred
days in the egg, others, such as the trout, are extruded in five weeks.
Without special miracle the spawn of all the fresh water fishes could
not be in existence _as such_ at one and the same time; without special
miracle it could not maintain its vitality in a universal deluge; and
without special miracle, even did it maintain its vitality, it could not
remain in the egg state throughout an entire twelvemonth, but would be
developed into fishes of the several species to which it belonged at
very different periods. Further, in a universal deluge, without special
miracle vast numbers of even the salt water animals could not fail to be
extirpated; in particular, almost all the molluscs of the littoral and
laminarian zones. Nor would the vegetable kingdom fare greatly better
than the animal one. Of the one hundred thousand species of known
plants, few indeed would survive submersion for a twelvemonth; nor would
the seeds of most of the others fare better than the plants themselves.
There are certain hardy seeds that in favorable circumstances maintain
their vitality for ages; and there are others, strongly encased in
water-tight shells or skins, that have floated across oceans to
germinate in distant islands; but such, as every florist knows, is not
the general character of seeds; and not until after many unsuccessful
attempts, and many expedients had been resorted to, have the more
delicate kinds been brought uninjured, even on shipboard, from distant
countries to our own. It is not too much to hold that, without special
miracle, at least three fourths of the terrestrial vegetation of the
globe would have perished in a universal deluge that covered over the
dry land for a year. Assuredly the various vegetable centres or
regions,--estimated by Schouw at twenty-five,--bear witness to no such
catastrophe. Still distinct and unbroken, as of old, either no effacing
flood has passed over them, or they were shielded from its effects at an
expense of miracle many times more considerable than that at which the
Jews were brought out of Egypt and preserved amid the nations, or
Christianity itself was ultimately established.[30]
There is, however, a class of learned and thoroughly respectable
theologians who seem disposed to accept rather of any amount of
unrecorded miracle, than to admit of a merely partial deluge,
coextensive with but the human family. "Were the difficulty attending
this subject tenfold greater, and seemingly beyond all satisfactory
explanation," says Dr. William Hamilton, "if I yet find it recorded in
the Book of Revelation, that in the deluge '_every living thing in which
is the breath of life perished, and Noah only remained alive, and they
which were with him in the ark_,' I could still believe it implicitly,
satisfied that the difficulty of explanation springs solely from the
imperfection of human knowledge, and not from any limitation in the
power or the wisdom of God, nor yet from any lack of trustworthiness in
the document given us in a revelation from God,--a document given to men
by the hands of Moses, the learned, accomplished, and eminently devout
Jewish legislator." Here again, however, Dr. Hamilton seems to have
mistaken the question actually at issue. The true question is, not
whether or no Moses is to be believed in the matter, but whether or no
we in reality understand Moses. The question is, whether we are to
regard the passages in which he describes the Flood as universal, as
belonging to the very numerous metonymic texts of Scripture in which a
part--sometimes a not very large part--is described as the whole, or to
regard them as strictly and severely literal. Or, in other words,
whether we are, with learned and solid divines of the olden time, such
as Poole and Stillingfleet, and with many ingenious and accomplished
divines of the passing age, such as the late Dr. Pye Smith and the Rev.
Professor Hitchcock, to regard these passages as merely metonymic; or,
with Drs. Hamilton and Kitto, to regard them as strictly literal, and to
call up in support of the literal reading an amount of supposititious
miracle, compared with which all the recorded miracles of the Old and
New Testaments sink into insignificance. The controversy does not lie
between Moses and the naturalists, but between the _readings_ of
theologians such as Matthew Poole and Stillingfleet on the one hand, and
the _readings_ of theologians such as Drs. Hamilton and Kitto on the
other. And finding all natural science arrayed against the conclusions
of the one class, and in favor of those of the other, and believing,
further, that there has been always such a marked economy shown in the
exercise of miraculous powers, that there has never been more of miracle
employed in any one of the dispensations than was needed,[31] I must
hold that the theologians who believe that the deluge was but
coextensive with the moral purpose which it served are more in the
right, and may be more safely followed, than the theologians who hold
that it extended greatly further than was necessary. It is not with
Moses or the truth of revelation that our controversy lies, but with the
opponents of Stillingfleet and of Poole.
To only one of the other arguments employed in this controversy need I
at all refer. The cones of volcanic craters are formed of loose
incoherent scoriæ and ashes, and, when exposed, as in the case of
submarine volcanoes, such as Graham's Island and the islands of Nyoe and
Sabrina, to the denuding force of waves and currents, they have in a few
weeks, or at most a few months, been washed completely away. And yet in
various parts of the world, such as Auvergne in central France, and
along the flanks of Ætna, there are cones of long extinct or long
slumbering volcanoes, which, though of at least triple the antiquity of
the Noachian deluge, and though composed of the ordinary incoherent
materials, exhibit no marks of denudation. According to the calculations
of Sir Charles Lyell, no devastating flood could have passed over the
forest zone of Ætna during the last twelve thousand years,--for such is
the antiquity which he assigns to its older lateral cones, that retain
in integrity their original shape; and the volcanic cones of Auvergne,
which inclose in their ashes the remains of extinct animals, and present
an outline as perfect as those of Ætna, are deemed older still. Graham
Island arose out of the sea early in July, 1831; in the beginning of the
following August it had attained to a circumference of three miles, and
to a height of two hundred feet; and yet in less than three months from
that time the waves had washed its immense mass down to the sea level;
and in a few weeks more it existed but as a dangerous shoal. And such
inevitably would have been the fate of the equally incoherent cone-like
craters of Ætna and Auvergne during the seven and a half months that
intervened between the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep
and the reappearance of the mountain-tops, had they been included within
the area of the deluge. It is estimated that even the newer Auvergne
lavas are as old as the times of the Miocene. It is at least a
demonstrable fact, that the slow action of streams had hollowed them in
several places into deep chasms nearly two thousand years ago; for the
remains of Roman works of about that age survive, to show that they had
then, as now, to be spanned over by bridges, and that baths had been
erected in their denuded recesses; and yet the craters out of which
these lavas had flowed retain well nigh all their original sharpness of
outline. No wave ever dashed against their symmetrically sloping sides.
Now, I have in no instance seen the argument derivable from this class
of facts fairly met. The supposed mistake of the Canonico Recupero, or
rather of Brydone, who argued that the "lowest of a series of seven
distinct lavas of Ætna, most of them covered by thick intervening beds
of rich earth, must have been fourteen thousand years old," has been
often referred to in the controversy. Brydone or the Canon mistook, it
has been said, beds of brown ashes, each of which might have been
deposited during a single shower, for beds of rich earth, each of which
would have taken centuries to form. The oldest of the series of lava
beds, therefore, instead of being fourteen thousand, might be scarce
fourteen hundred years old. And if Brydone or the Canon were thus
mistaken in their calculations, why may not the modern geologists be
also mistaken in theirs? Now, altogether waiving the question as to
whether the ingenious traveller of eighty-six years ago was or was not
mistaken in his estimate,--for to those acquainted with geologic fact in
general, or more particularly with the elaborate descriptions of Ætna
given during the last thirty years by Elie de Beaumont, Hoffmann, and
Sir Charles Lyell, the facts of Brydone, in their bearing on either the
age of the earth or the age of the mountain, can well be
spared,--waiving, I say, the question whether the traveller was in
reality in mistake, I must be permitted to remark, that the concurrent
testimony of geologists cannot in fairness be placed on the same level
as the testimony of a man who, though accomplished and intelligent, was
not only no geologist, but who observed and described ere geology had
any existence as a science. Further, I must be allowed to add, that
geology _is_ now a science; and that individuals unacquainted with it in
its character as such place themselves in positions greatly more
perilous than they seem to think, when they enter on the field of
argument with men who for many years have made it a subject of special
study. It is not by "bidding down" the age of the extinct or quiescent
volcanoes by a species of blind haggling, or by presuming mistake in the
calculations regarding them, simply because mistakes are possible and
have sometimes been made, that that portion of the cumulative evidence
against a universal deluge which they furnish is to be neutralized or
set aside. The argument on the general question _is_ a cumulative one;
and while many of its component portions are of themselves so
conclusive, that only supposititious miracle, and not presentable
argument, can be arrayed against them, its aggregate force seems wholly
irresistible. In passing, however, from the facts and reasonings that
bear against the hypothesis of a universal deluge, to indicate in a few
sentences both the possible mode in which a merely partial flood might
have taken place, and the probable extent of area which it covered, I
shall have to remove from very strong to comparatively weak
ground,--from what can be maintained as argument, to what can at best be
but offered as conjecture.
There is a remarkable portion of the globe, chiefly in the Asiatic
continent, though it extends into Europe, and which is nearly equal to
all Europe in area, whose rivers (some of them, such as the Volga, the
Oural, the Sihon, the Kour, and the Amoo, of great size) do not fall
into the ocean, or into any of the many seas which communicate with it.
They are, on the contrary, all _turned inwards_, if I may so express
myself; losing themselves, in the eastern parts of the tract, in the
lakes of a rainless district, in which they supply but the waste of
evaporation, and falling, in the western parts, into seas such as the
Caspian and the Aral. In this region there are extensive districts still
under the level of the ocean. The shore line of the Caspian, for
instance, is rather more than eighty-three feet beneath that of the
Black Sea; and some of the great flat steppes which spread out around
it, such as what is known as the Steppe of Astracan, have a mean level
of about thirty feet beneath that of the Baltic. Were there a
trench-like strip of country that communicated between the Caspian and
the Gulf of Finland to be depressed beneath the level of the latter sea,
it would _so open up the fountains of the great deep_ as to lay under
water an extensive and populous region, containing the cities of
Astracan and Astrabad, and many other towns and villages. Nor is it
unworthy of remark, surely, that one of the depressed steppes of this
peculiar region is known as the "Low Steppe of the Caucasus," and forms
no inconsiderable portion of the great recognized centre of the human
family. The Mount Ararat on which, according to many of our
commentators, the ark rested, rises immediately on the western edge of
this great hollow; the Mount Ararat selected as the scene of that event
by Sir Walter Raleigh, certainly not without some show of reason, lies
far within it. Vast plains, white with salt, and charged with sea
shells, show that the Caspian Sea was at no distant period greatly more
extensive than it is now. In an outer region, which includes the vast
desert of Khiva, shells also abound; but they seem to belong, as a
group, rather to some of the later Tertiary eras than to the recent
period. It is quite possible, however, that,--as on parts of the western
shores of our own country, where recent marine deposits lie over marine
deposits of the Pleistocene age, while a terrestrial deposit,
representative of an intervening paroxysm of upheaval, lies between,--it
is possible, I say, that in this great depressed area, the region
covered of old by a Tertiary sea, which we know united the Sea of Aral
with the Caspian, and rolled over many a wide steppe and vast plain, may
have been again covered for a brief period (after ages of upheaval) by
the breaking in of the great deep during that season of judgment when,
with the exception of one family, the whole human race was destroyed. It
seems confirmatory of this view, that during even the historic period,
at least one of the neighboring inland seas, though it belongs to a
different system from that of the Caspian and the Aral, covered a vastly
greater area than it does now,--a consequence, apparently, of a more
considerable depression in the Caucasian region than at present exists.
Herodotus, as quoted by Cuvier in his "Theory of the Earth," represents
the Sea of Azoff as equal in extent to the Euxine.
With the known facts, then, regarding this depressed Asiatic region
before us, let us see whether we cannot originate a theory of the
Deluge free from at least the palpable monstrosities of the older ones.
Let us suppose that the human family, still amounting to several
millions, though greatly reduced by exterminating wars and exhausting
vices, were congregated in that tract of country which, extending
eastwards from the modern Ararat to far beyond the Sea of Aral, includes
the original Caucasian centre of the race: let us suppose that, the hour
of judgment having at length arrived, the land began gradually to sink,
as the tract in the run of Cutch sank in the year 1819, or as the tract
in the southern part of North America, known as the "sunk country," sank
in the year 1821: further, let us suppose that the depression took place
slowly and equably for forty days together, at the rate of about four
hundred feet per day,--a rate not twice greater than that at which the
tide rises in the Straits of Magellan, and which would have rendered
itself apparent as but a persistent inward flowing of the sea: let us
yet further suppose, that from mayhap some volcanic outburst coincident
with the depression, and an effect of the same deep seated cause, the
atmosphere was so affected, that heavy drenching rains continued to
descend during the whole time, and that, though they could contribute
but little to the actual volume of the flood,--at most only some five or
six inches per day,--they at least _seemed_ to constitute one of its
main causes, and added greatly to its terrors, by swelling the rivers,
and rushing downwards in torrents from the hills. The depression, which,
by extending to the Euxine Sea and the Persian Gulf on the one hand, and
to the Gulf of Finland on the other, would open up by three separate
channels the fountains of the great deep, and which included, let us
suppose, an area of about two thousand miles each way, would, at the end
of the fortieth day, be sunk in its centre to the depth of sixteen
thousand feet,--a depth sufficiently profound to bury the loftiest
mountains of the district; and yet, having a gradient of declination of
but sixteen feet per mile, the contour of its hills and plains would
remain apparently what they had been before,--the doomed inhabitants
would see but the water rising along the mountain sides, and one refuge
after another swept away, till the last witness of the scene would have
perished, and the last hill-top would have disappeared. And when, after
a hundred and fifty days had come and gone, the depressed hollow would
have begun slowly to rise,--and when, after the fifth month had passed,
the ark would have grounded on the summit of Mount Ararat,--all that
could have been seen from the upper window of the vessel would be simply
a boundless sea, roughened by tides, now flowing outwards, with a
reversed course, towards the distant ocean, by the three great outlets
which, during the period of depression, had given access to the waters.
Noah would of course see that "the fountains of the deep were stopped,"
and "the waters returning from off the earth continually;" but whether
the Deluge had been partial or universal, he could neither see nor know.
His prospect in either case would have been equally that described by
the poet Bowles:--
"The mighty ark
Rests upon Ararat; but nought around
Its inmates can behold, save o'er the expanse
Of boundless waters the sun's orient orb
Stretching the hull's long shadow, or the moon
In silence through the silver-curtained clouds
Sailing, as she herself were lost and left
In hollow loneliness."
Let me further remark, that in one important sense a partial Flood, such
as the one of which I have conceived as adequate to the destruction, in
an early age, of the whole human family, could scarce be regarded as
miraculous. Several of our first geologists hold, that some of the
formidable cataclysms of the remote past may have been occasioned by the
sudden upheaval of vast continents, which, by displacing great bodies of
water, and rolling them outwards in the character of enormous waves,
inundated wide regions elevated hundreds of feet over the sea level, and
strewed them over with the rock boulders, clays, gravels, and organic
debris of deep sea bottoms. And these cataclysms they regard as
perfectly natural, though of course very unusual, events. Nor would the
gradual depression of a continent, or, as in the supposed case, of a
portion of a continent, be in any degree less natural than the sudden
upheaval of a continent. It would, on the contrary, be much more
according to experience. Nay, were such a depression and elevation of
the great Asiatic basin to take place during the coming twelvemonth as
that of which I have conceived as the probable cause of the Deluge,
though the geologists would have to describe it as beyond comparison the
most remarkable oscillation of level which had taken place within the
historic period, they would certainly regard it as no more miraculous
than the great earthquake of Lisbon, or than that exhibition of the
volcanic forces which elevated the mountain of Jorullo in a single night
sixteen hundred feet over the plain. And why have recourse, in
speculating on the real event of four thousand years ago, to
supposititious miracle, if an event of apparently the same kind would
not be regarded as miraculous now? May we not in this matter take our
stand beside the poet, who, when recognizing a Providence in the great
Calabrian earthquake, and in the overwhelming wave by which it was
accompanied, pertinently inquired of the skeptics,--
"Has not God
Still wrought by means since first he made the world?
_And did he not of old employ his means
To drown it?_ What is his creation less
Than a capacious reservoir of means,
Formed for his use, and ready at his will?"
The revelation to Noah, which warned him of a coming Flood, and taught
him how to prepare for it, was evidently miraculous: the Flood itself
may have been purely providential. But on this part of the subject I
need not dwell. I have accomplished my purpose if I have shown, as was
attempted of old by divines such as Stillingfleet and Poole, that there
"seems to be no reason why the Deluge should be extended beyond the
occasion of it, which was the corruption of man," but, on the contrary,
much reason against it; and that, on the other hand, a Flood restricted
and partial, and yet sufficient to destroy the race in an early age,
while still congregating in their original centre, cannot be regarded as
by any means an incredible event. The incredibility lies in the mere
human glosses and misinterpretations in which its history has been
enveloped. Divested of these, and viewed in its connection with those
wonderful traditions which still float all over the world regarding it,
it forms, not one of the stumbling-blocks, but one of the evidences, of
our faith; and renders the exercise a not unprofitable one, when,
according to the poet,--
"Back through the dusk
Of ages Contemplation turns her view,
To mark, as from its infancy, the world
Peopled again from that mysterious shrine
That rested on the top of Ararat."
LECTURE NINTH.
THE DISCOVERABLE AND THE REVEALED.
It seems natural, nay, inevitable, that false revelations, which have
descended from remote, unscientific ages, should be committed to a false
science. Natural phenomena, when of an extraordinary character,
powerfully impress the untutored mind. In operating, through the
curiosity or the fears of men, upon that instinct of humanity--never
wholly inactive in even the rudest state--which cannot witness any
remarkable effect without seeking to connect it with its producing
cause, they excite into activity in the search the imaginative
faculty,--always of earlier development than the judgment in both
peoples and individuals, and which never fails, when so employed, to
conduct to delusions and extravagances. And this state of mind gives
birth simultaneously to both false religion and false science. Great
tempests, inundations, eclipses, earthquakes, thunder and lightning,
famine and pestilence, the births of monsters, or the rare visitation of
strange fishes or wild animals, come all to be included in the
mythologic domain. Even the untutored Indian "sees God in clouds, and
hears him in the wind." And when an order of priesthood springs up, a
portion of the leisure of the class is usually employed in speculating
on these phenomena; and to their speculations they give the form of
direct revelation. Thus almost all the false religions of the old
world--not grafted, like Mohammedanism, on the true one--have their
pretended revelations regarding the form, structure, and origin of the
earth, the mechanism of the heavens, the electric and meteoric
phenomena, and even the arrangement of oceans and continents on the
surface of our planet.
The old extinct forms of heathenism,--Etrurian, Egyptian, Phoenician,
and Babylonian,--had all their cosmogonies.[32] In the wild mythology of
ancient Scandinavia, of which we find such distinct traces in the
languages and superstitions of northern Europe, and which even in our
own country continues to give the names of its uncouth deities to the
days of our week, there is a strange genesis of not only the heavens and
earth, but of the gods also. It has, besides, its scheme of the universe
in its great mundane tree of three vast roots,--celestial, terrestrial,
and infernal,--which supports the land, the sea, the sky, and all
things. The leading religions of the East which still survive, such as
Buddhism, Brahminism, and Parseeism, have all their astronomy,
geography, meteorology, and geology, existing as component parts of
their several systems. Nor have there been wanting ingenious men who,
though little tolerant of the various attempts made to reconcile the
Mosaic account of creation with the discoveries of modern science, have
looked with a favorable eye on the wild science of the false religions,
and professed to detect in it at least striking analogies with the
deductions of both the geologist and the astronomer. When the skeptical
wits of the last century wished to produce, by way of foil, a morality
vastly superior, as they said, to that of Christianity, they had
recourse to the Brahmins and the Chinese. And though we hear less of the
ethics of these people since we have come to know them better, we are
still occasionally reminded of the superiority of their science.
Hinduism has been regarded as furnishing examples of the geologic
doctrine of a succession of creations extended over immensely protracted
geologic periods; and Buddhism represented as charged with both the
geologic doctrine and the perhaps less certain astronomic deduction of a
plurality of worlds. And before entering on our general argument, it may
be well to show by specimen what mere chance hits these are, and how
enormous the amount of the nonsense and absurdity really is in which
they are set.
When Brahma, wearied with the work of producing and maintaining the
universe, goes to sleep, say the Hindus,--an occurrence which happens at
the end of every four millions of years,--a deluge of water rises high
above the sun and moon, and the worlds and their inhabitants are
destroyed. When he awakes, however, he immediately sets himself to
produce anew; and another universe springs up, consisting, like the
former one, of ten worlds placed over each other, like the stories of a
tall building, and replenished with plants and animals. Of these our own
world is the eighth in number, reckoning from the ground floor upwards;
there are seven worlds worse than itself beneath it, and two better ones
above; with a few worlds more higher up still, to which the destroying
flood does not reach, save once or twice in an eternity or so; and
which, in consequence, have not to be re-created each time with the
others. The special forms which the upper and nether worlds exhibit do
not seem to be very well known; but that which man inhabits is "flat,
like the flower of the water-lily, in which the petals project beyond
each other;" and it has in all, including sea and land, a diameter of
several hundred thousand _millions_ of miles. It has its many great
oceans,--one of these (unfortunately the only one in contact with man's
place of habitation) of salt water, one of sugar-cane juice, one of
spirituous liquor, one of clarified butter, and one of sour curds. It
has, besides, its very great ocean of sweet water. And around all,
forming a sort of gigantic hoop or ring, there extends a continent of
pure gold. Of all the luminaries that rise over this huge world, the sun
is the nearest: the distance of the moon is twice as great; the lesser
fixed stars occur immediately beyond; then Mercury, then Venus, then
Mars, then Jupiter, then Saturn; and finally, the great bear and the
polar star. And such is that cosmogony and astronomy of the Brahmins to
which their religion, in its character as a revelation, stands
committed, and in which a very lenient criticism has found the geologic
revolutions. Let me draw my next illustration from Buddhism, the most
ancient and most widely spread religion of the East; for, though
partially overlaid in the great Indian peninsula by the more modern
monstrosities of Brahminism, it extends in one direction from the
Persian Gulf to Formosa and Japan, and in the other from the wastes of
Siberia to the Gulf of Siam. Scarce any of the other forms of heathenism
darken so large a portion of the map as Buddhism,--a superstition which
is estimated to include within its pale nearly one third of the whole
human species.
It has been held, I need scarce say, by most astronomers since the times
of Newton, that the universe consists of innumerable systems of worlds,
furnished each with its own sun; and held by most geologists during the
last fifty years, that the past duration of our earth was divided into
periods of vast extent, each of which had a creation of its own. And
certainly in Buddhism we find both these ideas,--the idea of the
existence of separate systems, each with its own sun; and the idea of
successive periods, each with its own creation. We ascertain on
examination; however, that in the superstition they are not scientific
ideas at all, but mere chance guesses, set, like those of Brahminism,
in a farago of wild and monstrous fable. Each of the many systems of
which the universe is composed consists, say the Buddhists, of three
worlds of a circular form, joined together at the edges, so that there
intervenes between them an angular interspace, which constitutes their
common hell; and to each of these systems there is a sun and moon
apportioned, that take their daily journeys over them, returning at
night through a void space underneath. And each of the bygone successive
creations was a creation originated, it is added, out of chaos, through
the stored-up merits of the Buddhas, and the effects of a
life-invigorating rain, and which sank into chaos again when the old
stock of merit, accumulated in the previous period, was exhausted. The
creatures of each period, too, whether brute or human, were animated by
but the souls of former creatures embodied anew. In the centre of each
of the three worlds of which a system or _sackwala_ consists, there is a
vast mountain, more than forty thousand miles in height, surrounded by a
circular sea, which is in turn surrounded by a ring of land and rock.
Another circular sea lies outside the ring, and a second solid ring
outside the sea; and thus rings of land and water alternate from the
centre to the circumference. According to the geography of the Buddhas,
a model of our own earth would exactly resemble that old-fashioned
ornament,--a work of the turning-lathe,--which some of my auditors must
have seen roughening the upper board of the ornate parlor bellows of the
last century, and which consisted of a large central knob, surrounded by
alternate circular rings and furrows. And as in the old-fashioned
bellows each ring flattened, and each furrow became shallower, in
proportion as it was removed from the centre, so in the Buddhist earth,
the seas, from being many thousand miles deep in the inner rings,
shallow so greatly, that in the outer rings their depth is only an
inch; while the continents, from being forty thousand miles high, sink
into mere plains, almost on the level of the surrounding ocean. Such is
the geography to which this religion pledges itself. Its astronomy, on
the other hand, is not quite so bad as that to which Father Cullen has
affixed his imprimatur, seeing that, though it gives the same sort of
diurnal journey to the sun, it confers upon it a diameter, not of only
six feet, but of four hundred miles. Nor is its geology a great deal
worse than that of many Christians. It makes the earth consist,
reckoning from its foundations upwards, of a layer of wind, a layer of
water, a layer of substance resembling honey, a layer of rock, and a
layer of soil. Such is a small portion of the natural science of
Buddhism: the minute details of its monstrous cosmogony, with its
descriptions of fabulous oceans, inhabited by fishes thousands of miles
in length, and of wonderful forests abounding in trees four hundred
miles high, and haunted by singing lions that leap two miles at a bound,
occupy many chapters of the sacred volumes. Every form of faith has its
heretics; and there are, it would seem, heretics among even the
Buddhists, who, instead of adopting the nonsense of the priests in this
physical department, originate a nonsense equally great of their own.
The error of concluding that the worlds of the universe are finite in
number, say the sacred books, is the heresy _antawada_; the error of
concluding that the world itself is infinite is the heresy _anantawada_;
the error of concluding that the world is finite vertically but infinite
horizontally is the heresy _anantanantawada_; and the error of
concluding the world to be neither finite nor infinite is the heresy
_nawantanantawada_. A name equally formidable would be, of course, found
for the students of modern astronomy and the other kindred sciences,
among the professed believers in Buddh, did not these contrive to get
over the difficulty by observing, "that certain things, as stated in
the _Sastras_, must have been so formerly; but great changes have taken
place in these in latter times; and for astronomical purposes
astronomical rules must be followed."
Believers in Buddhism may be still found by tens of millions on the
shores of the Yellow Sea. Let me select my third specimen of a
universe-fashioning mythology from a faith, long since extinct, that had
its seat on the opposite side of the Old World, along the coasts of the
Northern Atlantic. The old Teutonic religion professed to reveal, like
that of Buddh and of Brahma, _how_ the heavens and earth were formed,
and of _what_. Ymir, the great frost-giant, a being mysteriously
engendered out of frozen vapor, was slain by the god Odin and his
brothers; and, dragging his body into the middle of the universe, they
employed the materials of which it was composed in forming the earth. Of
his blood they made the vast ocean, and all the lakes and rivers; of his
flesh they constructed the land, placing it in the midst of the waters;
of his bones they built up the mountains; his teeth and jaws they broke
up into the stones and pebbles of the earth and shore; of his great
skull they fashioned the vault of the heavens; and, tossing his brains
into the air, they became the clouds. Earth, sea, and sky, however, thus
made, were supported by the great ash-tree Yggdrasill, which, with its
roots anchored deep in the primordial abyss, rose up through the vast
central mountains of the world, and, stretching forth its branches to
the furthest heaven, bore the stars as its fruit. Encircling the whole
earth like a ring, lay the huge snake Midgard,--always hidden in the
sea, save when half drawn forth on one occasion by the god Thor; outside
the snake a broader ring of ice-mountains swept round both land and
ocean, and formed the outer frame of the world,--for there lay only
blank space beyond; and over all, the sun and moon performed their
journeys, chased through the sky by ravenous wolves, that ever sought to
devour them. Such was the wild dream of our Scandinavian ancestors,--a
dream, however, that occupied as prominent a place in their Edda as any
of their other religious beliefs, and which, with the first dawn of
science, would not only have fallen itself, but would have also dragged
down the others along with it.
Now this physical department has ever proved the vulnerable portion of
false religions,--the portion which, if I may use the metaphor, their
originators could not dip in the infernal river. The ability of drawing
the line, in the early and ignorant ages of the world, between what man
can of himself discover and what he cannot, is an ability which man
cannot possibly possess. The ancient Chaldeans, who first watched the
motions of the planets, could not possibly have foreseen, that while on
the one hand men would be one day able of themselves to measure and
weigh these bodies, and to determine their distances from the earth and
from each other, men might never be able of themselves to demonstrate
the fact of their authorship, or to discover the true character of their
author. Nay, if they could have at all thought on the subject, the
latter would have seemed to them by much the simpler discovery of the
two. To know at such a time what was in reality discoverable and what
was not, would be to know by anticipation what is not yet known,--the
limits of all human knowledge. It would be to trace a line non-existent
at the period, and untraceable, in the nature of things, until the
history of the human race shall be completed. It was held by even the
sagacious Socrates, that men cannot arrive at any certainty in questions
respecting the form or motion of the earth, or the mechanism of the
heavens; and so he set himself to elucidate what he deemed much simpler
matters,--to prove, for instance, as we find in the Phedon, that human
souls existed ere they came to inhabit their mortal bodies, and retained
faint recollections of great misfortunes that had overtaken them ere
their embodiment as men, and of sufferings to which they had been
subjected in a primevous state. And lacking this ability of
distinguishing between the naturally discoverable and what cannot be
naturally discovered, the originators of the old mythologic beliefs
obtruded into provinces in which ultimately the lawless nature of the
obtrusion could not fail to be detected; and thus, by making their false
science a portion of their false religion, they created what was
afterwards to prove its weakest and most vulnerable part. We absolutely
know that the course at present pursued by enlightened Christian
missionaries in India is to bring scientific truth into direct
antagonism with the monstrously false science of the pretended
revelations of Parseeism, Brahminism, and Buddhism; and that by this
means the general falsity of these systems has been so plainly shown,
that it has become a matter of doubt whether a single educated native of
any considerable ability in reality believes in them. They seem to have
lost their hold of all the minds capable of appreciating the weight and
force of scientific evidence.
Let us further remark, that since it seems inevitable that pretended
revelations of ancient date should pledge themselves to a false science,
the presumption must be strong that an ancient revelation of great
multiplicity of detail, which has _not_ so pledged itself, is not a
false, but a true revelation. Nay, if we find in it the line drawn
between what man can know of himself and what he cannot know, and
determine that this line was traced in a remote and primitive age, we
have positive evidence in the circumstance, good so far as it extends,
of its Divine origin. Now, it will be ultimately found that this line
was drawn with exquisite precision in the Hebrew Scriptures,--not
merely the most ancient works that profess to be revelations, but
absolutely the most ancient of all writings. Unfortunately, however,
what God seems to have done for his Revelation, influential theologians
of both the Romish and Orthodox Churches have labored hard to undo; and,
from their mistaking, in not a few remarkable passages, the scope and
object of the vouchsafed message, they have at various times striven to
pledge it to a science as false as even that of Buddhist, Teuton, or
Hindu. And so, not only has the argument been weakened and obscured
which might be founded on the rectitude of the line drawn of old between
what ought and what ought not to be the subject of revelation, but even
a positive argument has been furnished to the infidel,--ever ready to
identify the glosses of the theologian with the enunciations of
revelation itself,--similar to that which the Christian missionary
directs against the false religions of India. It may be well briefly to
inquire how this unlucky mistake has originated.
It is of first importance often to the navigator that he should have a
good chronometer, seeing that his ability of determining his exact
position on wide seas, and, in consequence, of determining also the
exact place and bearing of the rocks and reefs which he must avoid, and
of the lands and harbors on which he must direct his course, must very
much depend upon the rectitude of his instrument. But it may be of very
little importance to him to know how chronometers are made. And so a
friend may reveal to him where the best chronometers are to be
purchased, with the name of the maker, without at the same time
revealing to him the principle on which they are constructed. Let us
suppose, however, that from some peculiarity in the mode of the
revelation, the navigator has come to believe that it includes both
items,--an enunciation regarding the place where and the maker from
whom the best chronometers are to be had, and a further enunciation
regarding the true mechanism of chronometers. Let us suppose further,
that while the good faith and intelligence of his friend are
unquestionable, the supposed revelation regarding the construction of
chronometers, which he thinks he owes to him, is altogether erroneous
and absurd. The chronometer mainly differs from the ordinary watch in
being formed of a mixture of metals, which preserve so nice a chemical
balance, that those changes of temperature which quicken or retard the
movements of common time-pieces fail to affect it. Now, let us suppose
that the friend and adviser of the sailor had said to him,--using a
common metonymy,--there are no chronometers anywhere constructed that so
_completely neutralize the temperature_ as the ones I recommend to you;
and that the sailor had at once leaped to the conclusion, that the
remark was authority enough for holding that it is the principle of
chronometers, not to be composed of such counteractive combinations of
metals as that the expansion of one shall be checked by the contraction
of another, but to keep up an equal temperature within through a
heat-engendering quality in the amalgamated metals. Such a mistake might
be readily enough originated in this way; and yet it would be a very
serious mistake indeed; seeing that it would substitute an active for a
passive principle,--a principle of equalizing the temperature by acting
upon it, for a principle of inert impassibility to the temperature. And
of course not only would the sailor himself be in error in taking such a
view, but he might seriously compromise the intelligence or integrity of
his friend in the judgment of all who held, on his testimony, that it
was with his friend, and not from his own misconception of his friend's
meaning, that the view had originated. And how, let us ask, ere
dismissing our lengthened illustration, is an error such as the
supposed one here to be tested, and its erroneousness exposed? There can
be but one reply to such a query. It might be wholly in vain to fall
back upon the _ipsissima verba_ of the revelation made by the sailor's
friend. Though in reality but an enunciation regarding the _authorship_
of certain chronometers, it might possibly enough appear, from its
metonymic character, to be also a revelation regarding the
_construction_ of chronometers. The sailor's error respecting the
construction of chronometers is to be tested and exposed, not by any
references to what his friend had said, but by the art of the
chronometer maker. The demonstrable principles of the art, as practised
by the makers of chronometers, must be the test of all supposed
_revelations_ regarding the principles and mechanism of chronometer
making.
[Illustration: Fig. 114.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF COSMAS.[33]
(_From a reduced facsimile of the original print in the British
Museum._)]
Now, it will be found that those mistakes of the theologians to which I
refer have been exactly similar to that of the navigator in the supposed
case, and that they are mistakes which must be corrected on exactly the
same principle. The departments in which the mistakes have been made,
have, as in the false religious, been chiefly three,--the geographic,
astronomic, and geologic provinces. The geographic errors are of
comparatively ancient date. They belong mainly to the later patristic
and earlier middle ages, when the monk Cosmas, as the geographer of the
Church, represented the earth as a parallelogrammical plain, twice
longer than it was broad, deeply indented by the inland seas,--the
Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf,--and
encompassed by a rectangular trench occupied by the oceans. Some of my
audience will, however, remember that of the council of clergymen which
met in Salamanca in 1486 to examine and test the views of Christopher
Columbus, a considerable portion held it to be grossly heterodox to
believe that by sailing westwards the eastern parts of the world could
be reached. No one could entertain such a view without also believing
that there were antipodes, and that the world was round, not
flat,--errors denounced by not only great theologians of the golden age
of ecclesiastical learning, such as Lactantius and St. Augustine, but
also directly opposed, it was said, to the very letter of Scripture.
"They observed," says Washington Irving, in his "Life of Columbus,"
"that in the Psalms the heavens are said to be extended like a
hide,--that is, according to commentators, the curtain or covering of a
tent, which among the ancient pastoral nations was formed of the hides
of animals; and that St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, compares
the heavens to a tabernacle or tent extended over the earth, which they
thence inferred must be flat." In the sectional view of Cosmas the
heavens are represented as a semicircular vault or tent raised on
perpendicular walls; a vast mountain beyond the "Great Sea," lofty as
the innermost continent of the Buddhist cosmogony, rises immediately
under it; when the sun passed behind this mountain it was night, and
when it emerged from it, it was day. And certainly under the crystal box
of the monk it would be in vain to attempt, by passing westwards, to
arrive at the far east. The cosmogony of Cosmas was also that of the
doctors of Salamanca; and the views of Columbus were denounced as
heterodox because they failed to conform to it. Such was one of the
earlier mistakes of the theologians. When merely told regarding the
authorship of the chronometer, they held that they had been told also
respecting the mechanism of the chronometer. Attaching literal meanings
to what we now recognize as merely poetic or oratorical figures, they
believed that not only was it revealed to them that God had created the
heavens and earth, but also that he had created the earth in the form of
an extended plain, and placed a semi-globular heavens over it, just as
one places a semi-globular case of glass over a piece of flower-plot or
a miniature thicket of fern. And how, I ask, was this error ultimately
corrected? Simply by that science of the geographer which demonstrates
that the earth is not flat, but spherical, and that the heavens have not
edges, like a skin-tent or glass-case, to come anywhere in contact with
it, but consist mainly of a diffused atmosphere, with illimitable space
beyond.
[Illustration: Fig. 115.
THE HEAVENS AND EARTH OF COSMAS.[34]
(_Sectional View._)]
The second great error to which the theologians would fain have pledged
the truth of Scripture was an error in the astronomical province. I need
scarce refer to the often-adduced case of Galileo. The doctrine which
the philosopher had to "abjure, curse, and detest," and which he was
never again to teach, "because erroneous, heretical, and contrary to
Scripture," was the doctrine of the earth's motion and the sun's
stability. But to the part taken by our Protestant divines in the same
controversy,--men still regarded as authorities in their own proper
walk,--I must be allowed to refer, as less known, though not less
instructive, than that enacted by the Romish Church in the case of
Galileo. "This, we affirm, that is, that the earth rests, and the sun
moves daily around it," said Voetius, a great Dutch divine of the middle
of the seventeenth century, "with all divines, natural philosophers,
Jews and Mohammedans, Greeks and Latins, excepting one or two of the
ancients, and the modern followers of Copernicus." And we detect
Heideggeri, a Swiss theologian, who flourished about half an age later,
giving expression, a few years ere the commencement of the last century,
to a similar view, as the one taken by himself and many others, and as a
view "from which," he states, "our pious reverence for the Scriptures,
the word of truth, will not allow us to depart." A still more remarkable
instance occurs in Turrettine, whom we find in one of his writings
arguing in the strictly logical form, "in opposition to certain
philosophers," and in behalf of the old Ptolemaic doctrine that the sun
moves in the heavens and revolves round the earth, while the earth
itself remains at rest in the midst. "_First_," he remarks, "the sun is
said in Scripture to move in the heavens, and to rise and set. 'The sun
is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong
man to run a race.' 'The sun knoweth his going down.' 'The sun also
ariseth, and the sun goeth down.' _Secondly_, The sun by a miracle stood
still in the time of Joshua; and by a miracle it went back in the time
of Hezekiah. _Thirdly_, The earth is said to be fixed immovably. 'The
earth is also established that it cannot be moved.' 'Thou hast
established the earth, and it abideth.' 'They continue this day
according to their ordinance.' _Fourthly_, Neither could birds, which
often fly off through an hour's circuit, be able to return to their
nests. _Fifthly_, Whatever flies or is suspended in the air ought (by
this theory) to move from west to east; but this is proved not to be
true, from birds, arrows shot forth, atoms made manifest in the sun, and
down floating in the atmosphere." The theologian, after thus laying down
the law, sets himself to meet objections. If it be urged that the
Scriptures in natural things speak according to the common opinion,
Turrettine answers, "_First_, The Spirit of God best understands
natural things. _Secondly_, That in giving instruction in religion, he
meant these things should be used, not abused. _Thirdly_, That he is not
the author of any error. _Fourthly_, Neither is he to be corrected on
the pretence of our blind reason." If it be further urged, that birds,
the air, and all things are moved with the earth, he answers, "_First_,
That this is a mere fiction, since air is a fluid body; and _secondly_,
if so, by what force would birds be able to go from east to west?"
Now this I must regard as a passage as instructive as it is
extraordinary. Turrettine was one of the most accomplished theologians
of his age; nor is that age by any means a remote one. Tycho Brahe,
Kepler, and Galileo, had all finished their labors long ere he published
this passage; nay, at the time when his work issued from the Amsterdam
press (1695), Isaac Newton had attained his fifty-third year; and fully
ten years previous, Professor David Gregory, nephew of the inventor of
the Gregorian telescope, had begun to teach, from his chair in the
University of Edinburgh, the doctrine of gravitation and the true
mechanism of the heavens, as unfolded in the Newtonian philosophy. The
learned theologian, had he applied himself to astronomical science,
could have found at the time very enlightened teachers; but falling into
exactly the mistake of the sailor of my illustration, or that into
which, two centuries before, the doctors of Salamanca had fallen, he set
himself, instead, to contend with the astronomers, and, to the extent of
his influence, labored to pledge revelation to an astronomy as false as
that of the Buddhist, Hindu, or old Teuton. His mistake, I repeat, was
exactly that of the sailor. Though in the Scriptures only the fact of
the _authorship_ of the great chronometer set in the heavens "to be a
sign for seasons, and for days and years," is revealed, he regarded
himself as also informed respecting the principles on which the
chronometer was constructed, or at least respecting the true nature of
its movements; and several very important deductions may, I think, be
drawn from the carefully constructed passage in which he so unwittingly
records his error, and the grounds of it. In the first place, we may
safely hold that the texts of Scripture quoted by so able a theologian
are those which have most the appearance of being revelations to men
respecting the motions of the heavenly bodies. We may conclusively
infer, that if _they_ do not reveal the character of those motions, then
nowhere in Scripture is their character revealed. In the second place,
it is obvious that the cited texts do _not_ reveal the nature of the
motions. It would be as rational to hold that our best almanacs reveal
the Ptolemaic astronomy. In the scientific portion of our almanacs there
occur many phrases which are perfectly well understood, and indicate
very definitely what the writer really intends to express by them, that
yet, taken literally, are not scientifically true. The words, "Sun
rises," and "Sun sets," and "Moon rises," and "Moon sets," occur in
every page; there are two pages--those devoted to the months of March
and September--in which the phrase occurs, "Sun crosses the equinoctial
line;" and further, in the other pages, such phrases as "Sun enters
Aries," "Sun enters Taurus," "Sun enters Gemini," &c., &c., are not
unfrequent. The phrase, "new moon," is also of common occurrence. And
these phrases, interpreted after the manner of Turrettine, and according
to their strict grammatical meaning, would of course imply that the sun
has a motion round our planet,--that the moon moves round it every
twenty-four hours,--and that the earth is provided every month with a
new satellite. And yet we know that none of these ideas are in the mind
of the writer who, in compiling the almanac, employs the phrases. He
employs them to indicate, not the nature of the heavenly motions, but
the exact time when, from the several motions of the earth, the sun and
moon are brought into certain apparent positions with respect to either
the earth itself or to the celestial signs; or to indicate the time at
which the moon completes its monthly revolution, and presents a wholly
darkened disk to the earth. The commentator skilful enough to pledge the
almanac, in virtue of the literal meaning of the specified phrases, to
the old Ptolemaic hypothesis, would pledge it to a false science, which
its author never held. And such, evidently, has been the part enacted by
Turrettine and the elder theologians. The Scriptural phrases are in no
degree more express respecting the motion of the sun and the other
heavenly bodies than those of the almanac, which, we know, do not refer
to motion at all, but to time. Nor are we less justified in holding that
the cited Scriptures do not refer to _motion_, but to _authorship_. In
the third place, however, it is not by any mere reconsideration of the
adduced passages that the error, once made, is to be corrected. In a
purely astronomic question the appeal lies, not to Scripture, but to
astronomic science. And in the fourth place, the reasonings of
Turrettine, when, quitting his own proper walk, he discourses, not as a
theologian, but as a natural philosopher, are such as to read a lesson
not wholly unneeded in the present day. They show how in a department in
which it demanded the united life-long labors of a Kepler, Galileo, and
Newton to elicit the truth, the hasty guesses of a great theologian,
rashly ventured in a polemic spirit, gave form and body to but ludicrous
error. It is not after a fashion so impetuous and headlong that the
elaborately wrought key must be plied which unlocks the profound
mysteries of nature. But of this more anon.
Let me remark in the passing, that while Turrettine, one of the
greatest of theologians, failed, as we have seen, to find in Scripture
the fact of astronomic _construction_, La Place, one of the greatest of
the astronomers, failed in a manner equally signal to find in his
science the fact of astronomic _authorship_. The profound Frenchman
(whom Sir David Brewster well characterizes as "the philosopher to whom
posterity will probably assign the place next to Newton "), by
demonstrating that certain irregularities in the motion of the heavenly
bodies, which had been supposed to indicate a future termination to the
whole, were but mere oscillations, subject to periodic correction, and
indicative of no such termination in consequence, demonstrated also
that, from all that appears, the present astronomical movements might go
on forever. And as he could find in the solar system no indications of
an end, so was he unable, he said, to find in it any trace of a
beginning. He failed in discovering in all astronomy the fact of
authorship, just as Turrettine had failed in finding in all Scripture
the fact of astronomic construction. And here lies, I am inclined to
think, the true line between revelation and science,--a line drawn of
old with a God-derived precision, which can be rightly appreciated
neither by mere theologians like Turrettine, nor by mere men of science
like La Place, but which is notwithstanding fraught with an evidence
direct in its bearing on the truth of Scripture. That great fact, moral
in its influence, of the authorship of the heavens and earth, which the
science of La Place failed of itself to discover, and which was equally
unknown to the ancient philosophers, God has revealed. It is "through
faith we understand that the worlds were formed by the word of God, so
that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear."
And, on the other hand, the great truths, physical in their bearing, to
the discovery of which science is fully competent, God did not reveal,
but left them to be developed piecemeal by the unassisted human
faculties. And that ability of nicely drawing the line between the two
classes of truths in a very remote age of the world, which we find
manifested in the oldest of the Scriptural books, I must regard as an
ability which could have been derived only through inspiration, and from
God alone.
Let us, however, pursue our argument. Questions of geography, such as
those entertained by the theologians of Salamanca, must be tested, we
conclude, not by a revelation never intended by its Divine Author to
teach geography, but by the findings of geographic science. Questions in
astronomy, such as those which Turrettine and the opponents of Galileo
entertained, must be tried, we hold, not by a revelation never intended
to teach astronomy, but by the findings of astronomic science. But how
deal, I next ask, with the theologian who holds that geologic fact has
been revealed to him? Geology is as thoroughly a physical science as
either geography or astronomy. Its facts are equally capable of being
educed and established by the unassisted human intellect. It seems quite
as unlikely that it should have been made a special subject of
revelation, in its character as a science, as either of these sciences;
or that the line so nicely maintained with respect to _them_ should have
been transgressed with regard to _it_. In short, in order satisfactorily
to answer our query, it seems but necessary satisfactorily to answer
another, namely, What, in this special department, are truth and fact
scientifically ascertained?
There are, however, certain texts that appear to have a more direct
bearing on the successive periods of the geologist than any of those
that were once held to refer to the form of the earth, or to the nature
of the heavenly bodies, are now believed to have on geography or
astronomy. No one now holds that there is a geography revealed in
Scripture, or regards the cavils of the Salamanca doctors as other than
mere aberrations of the human mind. Nor, save mayhap in the darker
corners of the Greek and Romish Churches, are there men in the present
day who hold that there is a revealed astronomy. The texts so
confidently quoted by Turrettine, such as "The sun also ariseth and the
sun goeth down," are regarded in every Protestant Church as simply
tantamount, in their bearing on the question at issue, to the "Sun
rises" and "Sun sets" of the almanac. But while the Scriptures do not
reveal the form of the earth or the motions of the planets, they do
reveal the fact that the miracle of creation was effected, not by a
single act, but in several successive acts. And it is with the organisms
produced by successive acts of creation, and the formations deposited
during the periods in which these acts took place, that the geologist is
called on by his science to deal. And hence, while there are now no
attempts made to reconcile geographic or astronomic fact with the
Scripture passages which refer, in the language of the time, to the
glory of the heavens or the stability of the earth, just because it is
held that there is really nothing geographic or astronomic in the
passages to conflict with the geographic or astronomic facts, we still
seek to reconcile the facts of geologic science with what is termed the
Mosaic geology. We inquire whether, in its leading features, the Mosaic
does not correspond with the geologic record; and whether the _days_ of
the retrospective prophecy of creation are to be regarded as coextensive
with the vast periods of the geologist, or as merely representative
portions of them, or as literal days of twenty-four hours each? But
though we thus seek to harmonize the two records, we continue to regard
their grounds and objects as entirely different. The object of geology
is simply the elucidation of the history of the earth, and of the story
of its various creations; and its grounds are, like those of astronomy
or geography, or of any other physical science, facts and inferences
scientifically determined or deduced; while, on the other hand, the
grounds of the Mosaic record are those on which the other Scriptures
rest, and which have been so well laid down in what we may term the
higher literature of the "Evidences," while at least some of its
objects,--for who shall declare them all?--seem to be, first, to
establish the all-important fact of the Divine authorship of the
universe, and to show that all its various forces are not self-existent,
but owe their origin to a Great First Cause; next, to exhibit the
progressive character of God's workings,--a character which equally
applies to his works of creation and providence; and, in the third
place, to furnish a basis and precedent, in the Divine example, for that
institution of the Sabbath which bears not only a prophetic reference to
the great dynasty to come,--last of all the dynasties, and of which
re-created men are to be the happy subjects, and the Divine Man the
adorable Monarch,--but which has also been specially established in
order that right preparation may be made for the terminal state which it
symbolizes and foreshadows. Here, as certainly as in the other physical
sciences, the line has been drawn with perfect precision between what
man could and what he could not have known of himself. What he could
have known, and in part already knows, is geologic science; what in all
probability he never could have known is the fact of the Divine
authorship of the universe, and the true nature of the institution of
the Sabbath, as a time of preparation for the final state, and as alike
representative of God's workings in the past, and of his eternally
predetermined scheme for the future. "Is it not certain," Socrates is
represented as inquiring, in "the first Alcibiades," of his gay and
confident pupil, "that you know nothing but what has been told you by
others, or what you have found out for yourself?" There is at once
exquisite simplicity and great terseness in this natural division of the
only modes in which men can acquire knowledge; and we find it
wonderfully exemplified in all revelation. Scripture draws practically a
broad line between the two modes; and while it tells man all that is
necessary to his wants and welfare as a religious creature, it does not
communicate to him a single scientific fact which he is competent to
find out for himself.
About an age previous to the times of Turrettine, the danger of
"corrupting philosophy through an intermixed divinity" was admirably
shown by Bacon in his "Novum Organum;" and the line indicated was
exactly what we now find was laid down of old with such precision in
Scripture. "To deify error and to adore vain things," said the great
philosopher, "may be well accounted the plague of the understanding.
Some modern men, guilty of much levity, have so indulged this vanity,
that they have essayed to find natural philosophy in the first chapter
of Genesis, the Book of Job, and other places of holy writ, seeking the
living among the dead. Now this vanity is so much the more to be checked
and restrained, because, by unadvised mixture of Divine and human
things, not only a phantastical philosophy is produced, but also an
heretical religion. Therefore it is safe to give unto Faith, with a
sober mind, the things that are Faith's." The passage, partially quoted,
has been not unfrequently misapplied, as if it bore, not against
theologians such as Turrettine and the Franciscans, but against
theologians such as Chalmers, Dr. Bird Sumner, and Dr. Pye Smith,--not
against the men who derive a false science from Scripture, into which
God never introduced natural science of any kind, but against the men
who, having sought and acquired their science where it is alone to be
found, have striven to bring Scripture, in the misinterpreted passages,
into harmony with its findings. Taken, however, as a whole, its true
meaning is obvious. It is the men who have "essayed to find natural
philosophy" positively revealed in Genesis and the other sacred
books,--not the men who have merely shown that there is nothing in
Scripture which conflicts with the natural philosophy legitimately found
elsewhere,--that are obnoxious to the censure conveyed in the remark. It
is they only, and not the others, that are "_phantastical_" in their
philosophy and "_heretical_" in their religion. I say heretical in their
religion. The Ptolemaic doctrine which ascribed to the earth a central
place in the universe was only scientifically false, whereas the same
doctrine in Turrettine and the Franciscans, from the circumstance that
they pledged the Scripture to its falsity, and professed to derive it
direct from revelation, was not only scientifically false, but a heresy
to boot. And, in like manner, it is the class who term themselves the
"Mosaic geologists,"--men such as the Granville Penns, Moses Stewarts,
Eleazar Lords, Dean Cockburns, and Peter Macfarlanes,--who essay to
"find natural philosophy in the first chapter of Genesis," and that too
a demonstrably false natural philosophy, who are obnoxious to the
Baconian censure now. No true geologist ever professes to deduce his
geology from Scripture. It is from the earth's crust, with its numerous
systems, always invariable in their order, and its successive groups of
fossil remains, always (in accordance with their place and age) of a
certain determinable character,--not in a revelation never intended by
its Divine Author to teach any natural science as such,--that he derives
the materials with which he builds. Had there been no Divine Revelation,
geology would be as certainly what it now is as either geography or
astronomy. That it comes in the present time more in contact with
revealed truth than either of these sciences, is, as I have shown,
merely a consequence of the fact that there is a history given in the
opening passages of Scripture, for far other than geological purposes,
of the authorship of the heavens and earth, and of the successive stages
of creation; and further, from the circumstance that, from various
motives, men are ever and anon inquiring how the geologic agrees with
the Scriptural record. It may be well here to remind the
anti-geologists, in connection with this part of my subject, of what at
the utmost they may hope to accomplish. Judging from all I have yet seen
of their writings, they seem to be as certainly impressed by the belief
that they are settling textually the geologic question of the world's
antiquity, as the doctors of Salamanca held that they were settling
textually the question of the world's form; or Turrettine and the
Franciscans, that they were settling textually the question of the
world's motion, or rather want of motion. But the mistake is quite as
gross in their case as in that of Turrettine and the doctors. Geology
rests on a broad, ever extending basis of evidence, wholly independent
of the revelation on which they profess, very unintelligently, in all
the instances I have yet known, to found their objections. What they
need at most promise themselves is, to defeat those attempts to
reconcile the two records which are made by geologists who respect and
believe the Scripture testimony,--not a very laudable feat, even could
it be accomplished, and certainly worthy of being made rather a subject
of condolence than of congratulation. And though, of course, men should
pursue the truth simply for its own sake, and independently either of
the consequences which it may be found to involve, or of the company
with which it may bring them acquainted, the anti-geologists might be
worse employed than in scanning the character and aims of the
associates with whom they virtually league themselves when they declare
war against the Christian geologist.
There are three different parties in the field, either directly opposed,
or at least little friendly, to the men who honestly attempt reconciling
the Mosaic with the geologic record. First, there are the
anti-geologists,--men who hold that geological questions are to be
settled now as the Franciscans contemporary with Galileo held that
astronomical questions were to be settled in the seventeenth century, or
as the doctors of Salamanca contemporary with Columbus held that
geographic questions were to be settled in the fifteenth. And _they_
believe that geology, as interpreted by the geologists, is entirely
false, because, as they think, irreconcilable with Scripture; further,
that our planet had no existence some seven or eight thousand years
ago,--that the apparent antiquity of the various sedimentary systems and
organic groups of the earth's crust is wholly illusive,--and that the
very oldest of them cannot be more than a few days older than the human
period. In fine, just as it was held two centuries ago by Turrettine and
the Franciscans, that the Bible as interpreted by _them_ was the only
legitimate authority in astronomic questions, so this class now hold
that the Bible as interpreted by _them_ is the only legitimate authority
in geologic questions; and further, that the Bible being, as they
contend, wholly opposed to the deductions of the geologist, these
deductions must of necessity be erroneous. Next, there is a class, more
largely represented in society than in literature, who, looking at the
general bearings of the question, the character and standing of the
geologists, and the sublime nature of their discoveries, believe that
geology ranks as certainly among the sciences as astronomy itself; but
who, little in earnest in their religion, are quite ready enough, when
they find theologians asserting the irreconcilability of the geologic
doctrines with those of Scripture, to believe them; nay, not only so,
but to repeat the assertion. It is not fashionable in the present age
openly to avow infidelity, save mayhap in some modified rationalistic or
pantheistic form; but in no age did the thing itself exist more
extensively; and the number of individuals is very great who, while they
profess an outward respect for revelation, have no serious quarrel with
the class who, in their blind zeal in its behalf, are in reality
undermining its foundations. Nor are there avowed infidels awanting who
also make common cause with the party so far as to assert that the
results of geologic discovery conflict irreconcilably with the Mosaic
account of creation. But there is yet another class, composed of
respectable and able men, who, from the natural influence of their
acquirements and talents, are perhaps more dangerous allies still, and
whom we find represented by writers such as Mr. Babbage and the Rev.
Baden Powell. It is held by both these accomplished men, that it is in
vain to attempt reconciling the Mosaic writings with the geologic
discoveries: both are intimately acquainted with the evidence adduced by
the geologist, and entertain no doubt whatever regarding what it
establishes; but though in the main friendly to at least the moral
sanctions of the New Testament, both virtually set aside the Mosaic
cosmogony; the one (Mr. Babbage) on the professed grounds that we really
cannot arrive with any certainty at the meaning of that old Hebrew
introduction to the Scriptures in which the genesis of things is
described; and the other (Mr. Powell) on the assumption that that
introduction is but a mere picturesque myth or parable, as little
scientifically true as the parables of our Saviour or of Nathan the seer
are historically so. Now, I cannot think that the anti-geologists are
quite in the place in which they either ought or intend to be when
engaged virtually in making common cause with either of these latter
classes.[35]
Be this as it may, however, it may be not uninstructive, and perhaps not
wholly unamusing, to examine what the claims really are of some of our
later anti-geologists to be recognized as the legitimate and qualified
censors of geologic fact or inference. It will be seen, that in the
passage which I have quoted from Turrettine, the theologian, in three of
his five divisions, restricts himself to the theologic province, and
that when in his own proper sphere even his errors are respectable; but
that in the two concluding divisions he passes into the province of the
natural philosopher, and that there his respectability ceases for the
time, and he becomes eminently ridiculous. The anti-geologists,--men of
considerably smaller calibre than the massive Dutch divine of the
seventeenth century,--also enter into a field not their own. Passing
from the theologic province, they obtrude into that of the geologist,
and settle against him, apparently after a few minutes' consideration,
or as mere special pleaders, questions on which he has been
concentrating the patient study and directing the laborious explorations
of years. And an exhibition by specimen of the nonsense to which they
have in this way committed themselves in their haste, may not be wholly
uninstructive. But I must defer the display till another evening. I
shall do them no injustice; but I trust it will be forgiven me should I
exhibit, as they have exhibited themselves, a class of writers to whose
assaults I have submitted for the last fourteen years without
provocation and without reply.
LECTURE TENTH.
THE GEOLOGY OF THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS.
It has been well remarked, that that writer would be equally in danger
of error who would assign very abstruse motives for the conduct of great
bodies of men, or very obvious causes for the great phenomena of nature.
The motives of the masses,--on a level always with the average
comprehension,--are never abstruse; the causes of the phenomena, on the
other hand, are never obvious. And when these last are hastily sought
after, not from any devotion to scientific truth, or any genuine love of
it, but for some purpose of controversy, we may receive it as a sure and
certain fact that they will not be found. Some mere plausibility will be
produced instead, bearing on its front an obviousness favorable mayhap
to its reception for the time by the vulgar, but in reality fatal to its
claims in the estimate of all deep thinkers; while truth will meanwhile
lie concealed far below, in the bottom of her well, until patiently
solicited forth by some previously unthought of process, in the
character of some wholly unanticipated result. Such, in the history of
science, has been the course and character of error on the one hand, and
of actual discovery on the other: the error has been always
comparatively obvious,--the discovery unexpected and abstruse. And as
men descend in the scale of accomplishment or intellect, a nearer and
yet nearer approximation takes place between their conceptions of the
causes of the occult processes of nature, and the common and obvious
motives which influence large masses of their fellows; until at length
the sublime contrivances of the universe sink, in their interpretation
of them, into the clumsy expedients of a bungling mechanism.
Tested by their reading of the phenomena on this principle, we find
curious gradations between the higher and the humbler orders of minds.
The vortices of Descartes, for instance, involve but a simple idea, that
might have been struck out by almost any individual of a tolerably
lively fancy, who had walked by the side of a winding river, and seen
sticks and straws revolving in its eddies. But no fancy, however active,
or no reach of mere common sense, however respectable, could have
originated, or conducted to a successful conclusion, that profound
contemplation into which Newton fell in the garden of Woolsthorpe, when
he saw the loosened apple drop from the tree, and succeeded in
demonstrating that the planets are retained in their orbits by the same
law which impels a falling pebble towards the ground. So little obvious,
indeed, was the Newtonian scheme, that most of the contemporary
generation of philosophers,--some of them, such as Fontenelle and his
brother academicians of France, men of no mean standing,--died rejecting
it. And the objections of Turrettine to the motion of the earth on its
axis are, we find, still more obvious than even the idea of the
vortices. It does at first seem natural enough to suppose, that if the
earth's surface be speeding eastwards at the rate of several hundred
miles in the hour (a thousand miles at the equator), the birds which
flutter over it should be somewhat in danger of being left behind; and
that atoms and down flakes floating in the atmosphere in a time of calm,
instead of appearing, as they often do, either in a state of rest, or
moving with equal freedom in every direction, ought to be seen hurrying
westwards, as if puffed by the breath of a tornado. Such an objection
must for a time have appeared as just as it seems obvious, especially in
one's study on a Saturday night, with much of one's lecture still to
write, and the Sabbath too near to permit of verification or experiment.
Fontenelle, however, though he could not get over the difficulty of
conceiving how the same gravitation which made a stone fall also kept
the moon in its place, fairly surmounted that which puzzled Turrettine;
and in his "Plurality of Worlds,"--a publication of the same age as the
"Compendium Theologica,"--he makes his Marchioness surmount it too.
"'But I have a difficulty to solve,' he represents the lady as saying,
'and you must be serious. As the earth moves, the air changes every
moment; so we breathe the air of another country.' 'Not at all,' replied
I; 'for the air which encompasses the earth follows with us, and turns
with us. Have you not seen the labors of the silkworm? The shell or
cocoon which it weaves around itself with so much art is of a down very
loose and soft; and so the earth, which is solid, is covered, from the
surface twenty leagues upwards, with a kind of down, which is the air,
and, like the shell of the silkworm, turns along with it.'" Even
Turrettine, however, was as far in advance of some of our contemners of
science in the present day, as Fontenelle was in advance of Turrettine,
or Newton in advance of Fontenelle. The old theologian could scarce have
held, with a living ecclesiastic of the Romish Church in Ireland, Father
Cullen, that the sun is _possibly_ only a fathom in diameter; or have
asserted with a most Protestant lecturer who addressed an audience in
Edinburgh little more than three years ago, that, though God created all
the wild animals, it was the devil who made the flesh-eaters among them
fierce and carnivorous; and, of course, shortened their bowels,
lengthened their teeth, and stuck formidable claws into the points of
their digits.[36] Further, the error of Turrettine was but that of his
age, whereas our modern decriers of scientific fact and inference are
always men greatly in the rear of theirs, and as far inferior to the
ancient assertors of the same errors as the few untutored peasants and
fishermen of our own time, located in remote parts of the country, who
still retain the old faith in witchcraft, are inferior to the great
lawyers, poets, and divines,--the Fairfaxes, Henry Mores, Judge Haleses,
and Sir George Mackenzies,--who in the seventeenth century entertained a
similar belief. And so it may seem somewhat idle work to take any pains
in "scattering" such a "rear of darkness thin" as this forlorn phalanx
composes. "Let them alone," said a lunatic in the lucid fit, to a
soldier who had told him, when asked why he carried a sword, that it was
to kill his enemies,--"let them alone, and they will all die of
themselves." But though very inconsiderable, there is a comparatively
large proportion of the class perilously posted, on both sides of the
Atlantic, in what used to be termed of old in Scotland "the chair of
verity;" and there they sometimes succeed in doing harm, all
unwittingly, not to the science which they oppose, but to the religion
which they profess to defend. I was not a little struck lately by
finding in a religious periodical of the United States, a worthy
Episcopalian clergyman bitterly complaining, that whenever his sense of
duty led him to denounce from his pulpit the gross infidelity of modern
geology, he could see an unbelieving grin rising on the faces of not a
few of his congregation. Alas! who can doubt that such ecclesiastics as
this good clergyman must virtually be powerful preachers on the
skeptical side, to all among their people who, with intelligence enough
to appreciate the geologic evidence, are still unsettled in their minds
respecting that of the Christian faith. And so on this consideration
alone it may be found not uninstructive to devote the address of the
present evening to an exposure of the errors and nonsense of our modern
anti-geologists,--the true successors and representatives, in the
passing age, of the Franciscan and Salamanca doctors of the fifteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
Let me first remark, that no one need expect to be original simply by
being absurd. There is a cycle in nonsense, as certainly as in opinion
of a more solid kind, which ever and anon brings back the delusions and
errors of an earlier time: the follies of the present day are
transcripts, unwittingly produced, and with of course a few variations,
of follies which existed centuries ago; and it seems to be on this
principle,--a consequence, mayhap, of the limited range of the human
mind, not only in its elucidations of truth, but also in its forms of
error,--that scarce an explanation of geologic phenomena has been given
by the anti-geologists of our own times, that was not anticipated by
writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was held, for
instance,--in opposition to the great painter, Leonardo da Vinci, who
flourished early in the sixteenth century, and was one of the first who,
after the revival of learning, asserted the true character of organic
remains,--that fossils were formed in the rocks through the planetary
influences, or a certain plastic force in nature, and had never entered
into the composition of living creatures or plants. And this view
obtained very generally till about the middle of the seventeenth
century, when, save for a brief space long after, in the times of
Voltaire, it ceased to be regarded as any longer tenable. Curiously
enough, however, it was virtually reproduced by one of the extant
anti-geologists,--a clergyman of the English Church,--only three years
ago, in a publication written, he says, to counteract "the immense
mischief occasioned by the infidel works of geologists, _especially
among the lower classes_," and which he has termed "a brief and complete
refutation" of their "anti-scriptural theory."[37] "Fossils," says this
courageous writer, "were not necessarily animated structures:" some of
them were in all probability "formed of stone from the very first;"
others, of inanimate flesh and bone. "The mammoth found under the ice in
arctic regions had not necessarily been a living creature: it was
created under the ice, and then preserved in that peculiar form of
preservation, instead of being transmuted into stone, like the rest of
its class." Such was the state of keeping of this famous mammoth, when
discovered a little ere the beginning of the present century, that, as I
had occasion formerly to remark, dogs and bears fed upon its flesh; and
its bones, and part of its skin, covered with long red hair, are now in
the museum of Petersburg. But there is no evidence whatever, according
to this writer, that it had ever been a living creature: it was simply a
created carcass. All organisms are, he holds, models or archetypes,
fashioned during the first day in the depths of chaos, to typify or
foreshadow the living plants and animals that were to be called into
existence a few days later. "What," he asks, "do the cocoa-nuts, melons,
and gourds, which have been found in the strata, show, but that the
vegetable had its perfect archetype in chaos as well as the animal?"
Nay, further, the geologist has but got into the apartment in which the
original architect stored up his plans and models,--many of them,
however, rejected ones. For "though every animal is formed after his
archetype," we find him saying, "the converse is not true, that every
chaotic structure is represented by its living _facsimile_." But they
typify, if not living organisms, much more important things,--"they
represent," says our writer, "the land of the shadow of death;" and the
strata containing them, which geologists have opened, are symbolical of
the "gates of death." "The state of preservation in which most fossils
are, instead of having mouldered away, foreshadows immortality. The
gradation, too, from the organisms whose types are _said to be_ lost or
destroyed, and confused in innumerable heaps, up to the perfect and
complete specimen, is no fanciful representation of the resurrection;
while the isolated bones and parts of skeletons which, though found far
apart, as they were created, have been fitted together by the skill of
the accomplished anatomist, give assurance of the fact that our
scattered dust--our _membra disjecta_--shall come together at the sound
of the last trump." And this is "geology on Scripture principles,"
soberly expounded by a man who respects facts, while he gives no place
to fancy.
The "English clergyman" then goes on to show in his pamphlet, that the
Coal Measures furnish no evidence of the earth's antiquity. They were
formed, he says, by the finger of the Creator, "immediately and at once.
A carboniferous tree of gigantic size has been discovered," he adds, "in
the interior of the earth, of such a shape as entirely to prove the
absurdity of a theory [that of the earth's antiquity] which has not a
single valid argument to support it. It is described as having its trunk
rising from the earth perpendicularly ten feet, and then bending over
and extending horizontally sixty feet. Now, what living tree thus
lopsided could support such a weight in such a direction? It seems to
have been _created on purpose to silence the_ HORRID BLASPHEMIES _of
geologists_; for it proves to a demonstration, that the upper, nether,
and surrounding matter came into existence with it at the same instant;
for how else could it have been preserved in such a position?" The
triumph secured by the carboniferous tree, however,--though it does not
seem wholly impossible that a tree might in any age of the world have
been broken over some ten feet from its root, and bent in a horizontal
position,--seems in some danger of being neutralized, as we read on, by
the circumstance that geologists find not unfrequently, among their
fossils, the dung of the carnivorous vertebrates, charged in many
instances with the teeth, bones, and scales of the creatures on which
they had preyed, and strongly impressed, in at least the coprolites of
the larger Palæozoic ganoids, and of the enaliosaurs of the Secondary
period, by the screw-like markings of a spiral intestine, similar in
form to that now exemplified by the sharks and rays. And in maintaining
his hypothesis that most fossils are mere archetypes--mere plans or
models--of existences to be, the archetypal dung proves rather a
stumbling-block, and the English clergyman waxes exceedingly wroth
against the geologists. "We cannot," he says, "believe in such things
as coprolites. They are only a curious form of matter commanded by Him
who has made the flower to assume all shapes as well as all hues. He who
would not allow so much as a tool to be lifted up on the stones that
composed his altar, would certainly not allow the _work_ of animals to
compose his creation, much less, then, their dung. The geological
assertion that the Creator of this world formed it in some parts of
coprolites savors very much of Satan or Beelzebub, the god of dung.
Geologists could scarcely have made a more unfortunate self-refuting
assertion than this." I question, however, whether the clergyman does
well to be angry with the geologists here. That fossils are mere models
and archetypes, is _his_ hypothesis, not theirs; and so it is he himself
who is answerable, not they, for what he deems the impiety of the
archetypal dung. His next statement is of a kind suited somewhat to
astonish the practical geologist. "_It is the constant language of
geologists_," he says, in giving the result of their discoveries, "_that
no young have been found!!!_ while the larger fossils have been detected
isolated, or in the company of others, all differing in kind."
"Archetypal resemblances of ova have been found, and such things as
_moths_; but these are distinct and perfect in their kind. The
occurrence of the young, which are imperfect, is a fact which has not
been, and never can be, established; _therefore it never can be proved
that this world has had a longer existence than six thousand years_." It
is "the constant language of geologists" that "no young have been found"
in the fossil state. Amazing assertion! "Therefore it never can be
proved that this world has had a longer existence than six thousand
years." Astonishing inference! There is not a tyro in geology who ever
looked over a set of fossils, or ever spent an hour in exploring a
fossiliferous deposit, who does not know that the remains of organisms
in every stage of growth may be found lying side by side in the same
bed,--that almost every museum contains its series of molluscs,
crustaceans, fishes, and corals, formed to illustrate species in their
various stages of growth,--that, in especial, among the ammonites of the
Secondary ages, and the trilobites of the Palæozoic ones, these series
have been made with great care, in order to prevent the erroneous
multiplication of species,--and that, in short, every richly
fossiliferous stratum in the earth's crust repeats the lesson so often
deduced from our churchyards, where graves of all sizes, from that of
the infant of a day to that of the aged adult, may be found lying side
by side. What the English clergyman represents as "the constant language
of geologists," is a language which _no_ geologist ever yet used, or
ever will. And his inference is in every way worthy of his premises. The
flourish with which he concludes his pamphlet would be infinitely
amusing had his language been just a little less solemn. "The writer of
the above remarks has felt it his duty," we find him saying, "to publish
them, not only to refute the arguments of the vain and puffed-lip
geologist, who fancies himself wiser than God, but also to prevent, by
God's blessing, the evil that must ensue from tampering with the sacred
text. And now, what has Satan to say? Why, THE TABLES ARE TURNED. Let
men beware. Why did not the British Association, at their twenty-third
meeting, in September, 1853, acknowledge their error as a body, in
applauding so loudly the assertion of one of their geological members at
a previous meeting, that this earth existed ages before man? They may
now have the satisfaction of thinking that, in spite of themselves,
those impious plaudits have been turned by the wrath of God into
hisses." Strange as the fact may seem, this passage was written, not in
grave joke, but in serious earnest.
The belief that fossil remains had never entered into the composition
of living organisms, but had been formed in the rocks just as we find
them, gradually gave place, during the seventeenth century, to the
belief that they were the debris of the Noachian Deluge, and evidences,
as they occurred in almost every known country, and were found on the
top of lofty hills, of at once its universality and the height to which
its waters had prevailed. And this hypothesis, like the others, has been
reproduced by some of the anti-geologists of the present day. The known
fact,--a result of modern science,--that the several formations (always
invariable in their order of succession) have their groups of organisms
peculiar to themselves, has, however, interposed a difficulty from which
the earlier cosmogonists were exempt. It has become necessary to show
that the Noachian cataclysm was strangely selective, in burying in the
beds which it is held by the class to have formed, now one group of
plants and animals, now quite another group, and anon yet another and
different group still; and all this many times repeated with such nice
care and discrimination, that not a single organism of the lower beds is
to be detected in the middle ones, nor yet a single organism of either
the middle or lower in the beds that lie above. Even this task, however,
just a little lightened by here and there a suppression of the facts,
has been attempted by the redoubtable Dean of York.[38] Fire and water
were, he conceives, equally agents in the great catastrophe that
destroyed the old world,--a circumstance which, if true, would have
furnished with an admirable apology the class of persons who, according
to the wit, would have cried out "Fire, fire," at the deluge. The dean
conceives that at the commencement of the Flood, when torrents of rain
were falling upon the land, numerous submarine volcanoes began to
disgorge their molten contents into the sea, destroying the fish, and
all other marine productions, by the intensity of the heat, and at the
same time locking them up in strata formed of the erupted matter. This
process took place ere the land floods, laden with the spoils of island
and continent, and the accompanying mud and sand, could arrive at the
remoter depths; which, however, they ultimately reached, and formed a
second formation, overlying the first. There were thus two formations
originated,--a marine formation below, and a terrestrial or fresh water
formation above; but as these two deposits could not be made to include
all the geological phenomena with which even the dean was acquainted, he
had nicely to parcel out the work of his volcanoes on the one hand, and
that of his land floods on the other, into separate fits or paroxysms,
each of which served to entomb a distinct class of creatures, and
originate a definite set of rocks. Thus, the first work of his volcanoes
was to form the Transition series of strata. As a commencement of the
whole, the internal fire blew up from the bed of the ocean, in
tremendous explosions, vast quantities of pulverized rock mixed with
clay, which, slowly subsiding, and covering up, as it sank, shells,
stone-lilies, and trilobites, formed the Silurian rocks. A second
explosion brought up the vents of the volcanoes to the level of the
ocean; and while the Old Red Sandstone, thus produced, and charged with
fish killed by the heat, was settling on their flanks, they themselves,
as if seized by black vomit, began to disgorge in vast quantities, coal
in the liquid state. Very opportunely, just ere it cooled, enormous
quantities of vegetables, washed out to sea by the extraordinary land
floods, were precipitated immediately over it; and, sticking in its
viscid surface, or sinking into its substance through cracks formed in
it during the cooling, they became attached to it in such considerable
masses, as to lead long after to the very mistaken notion that coal
itself was of vegetable origin. Then there ensued another deposit of red
sand, with salt boiled into it; and then a deposition of lime and clay.
The land floods still continuing, the great Sauroid reptiles which had
haunted the rivers and lower plains began to yield to their force, and
their carcasses, floating out to sea, sank amid the slowly subsiding
lime and clay, now known as the Lias. The volcanoes too were still very
active; and the lighter shells, ammonites, and the like, which had been
previously bobbing up and down on the boiling surface, now sank by
myriads; for the viscid argillaceous mud thrown up by the fiery
ebullitions from beneath stuck fast to them, and dragged them down. Then
came the formation of the Oolite, rolled into little egg-like pellets by
the waves; and last of all, the Green sand and Chalk; after which the
waters ran off, and sank into the deep hollow which now forms the bed of
the ocean, but which previous to the cataclysm had been the place of the
land. The dean, as he went on, fell into some little confusion regarding
the true place of some of his animals, such as the megatherium, which
arrived in his arrangement a little too soon. He spoke, too--if a
newspaper report is to be credited--of a heavy creature soon overtaken
and drowned by the rising waters, which he termed the _pterogactylus_,
and which does not seem to have turned up, either in the body or out of
it, since it was lost on that memorable occasion. Nor did he make any
provision in his arrangement for the formation of the various Tertiary
deposits. But then all these are slight matters, that could be very
easily woven into his hypothesis. As the flood rose along the hill
sides, first such of the weightier animals would perish as could not
readily climb steep acclivities; and then the oxen, the horses, the
deer, and the goats, with the lighter carnivora, who, as they would die
last,--some of them not until the final disappearance of the
hill-tops,--would of course be entombed in the upper deposits. Such is
the hypothesis of the Dean of York,--a hypothesis of which it may be
justly affirmed, that it is well nigh as ingenious as the circumstances
of the case permit, and against which little else can be urged than that
it must seem rather cumbrous and fanciful to the class who do not know
geology, and, on the whole, somewhat inadequate to the class who do.
The Flood, however, is not left to do the whole geologic work, by even
such of the anti-geologists as assign to it the largest share. A great
unrecorded convulsion which accompanied the Fall is held by some of
their number to have greatly assisted, by laying down the older
formations of the fossiliferous rocks; and very much is said to have
been done during the extended antediluvian period that succeeded it. One
of perhaps the most amusing though least known of the writers that take
this special view is a Scotchman, resident in a secluded provincial
town, who for the last twelve or fifteen years has been printing
ingenious little books against the infidel geologists, and getting
letters of similar character inserted in such of our country newspapers
as are ambitious of rendering their science equal to their literature.
And from the great trouble which he has taken with the writings of the
individual who now addresses you, he seems to regard them as peculiarly
unsolid and dangerous. According to this profound cosmogonist, the world
before the Fall was rather more than twice its present size, and very
artificially constructed.[39] It was a hollow ball, supported inside by
a framework of metal wrought into hexagonal reticulations, somewhat like
the framework of the great iron bridge over the river Wear at
Sunderland; and which had an open space in its centre, occupied by a
vast tubular furnace lying direct south and north, which threw out huge
volumes of flame towards the poles. Over the reticulated framework there
rose a great, thick _firmament_ of metal, which formed the inner shell
of the globe; over the metal there lay a considerably thicker shell of
granite; and over the granite, a thinner shell of a substance not
specified, perhaps not known, but which, from its being completely
water-tight, served the purpose of the layer of asphalt or _terra cotta_
which the architect spreads over his flat roofs, or on the tops of his
sloping terraces, afterwards to be covered with soil and laid out into
gardens. Such, it seems, was that portion of the framework of our great
globe which corresponded to the hollow lath and plaster framework of the
little globes used in schools; while its uppermost layer,--correspondent
with the slips of the map which the geographer pastes on the model and
then varnishes,--was formed of earth and water, economically laid out
into "most useful and tasteful configurations,"--the earth into pretty
little rising grounds and valleys, and the water into seas and lakes of
no great extent, but which formed, from their very handsome
combinations, "a terraqueous surface all over PERFECTLY PARADISAICAL."
Over this exquisitely neat earth there lay an enveloping atmosphere,
greatly thinner and less dense than the air at present is, and
incapable, in consequence, of being agitated by storms; while directly
over the northern and southern extremities of the world the polar
auroras, now so fitful and broken, extended in a permanent arch, and
gave light, during the long dark winters, to the regions lying below.
And as warmth was as necessary to the paradisaical perfection of these
districts as light, they received the necessary heat from the great
double-acting furnace in the interior, which, belching out flames at
both ends, acted powerfully against the polar portions of the metallic
crust or shell, and thus maintained the necessary glow in the absence of
the sun, on the principle on which a frying-pan or Scotch _girdle_ is
heated when placed by the cookmaid over the fire. And such, according to
this excellent world-fashioner and very zealous man, was the
construction of that unblighted and unbroken earth which was of old
pronounced to be "very good." The Fall, however, produced a most
remarkable and singularly disastrous change. The earth was somehow
partially crushed and broken, contemporaneously with the event,--like a
strong fishing basket when it accidentally falls from a coach-top under
the wheel; and, from a most interesting colored copperplate that
illustrates one of the author's treatises (for he draws as well as he
writes), the exact damage which it received can be minutely estimated.
The interior network was compressed into all sorts of irregular
polygons; the iron firmament was broken into great fragments,--some of
which may be seen in the print hanging down into the hollow interior,
like patches of broken plaster dangling from a ceiling, suspended by the
hairs originally employed to give the necessary tenacity to the lime.
The great granitic shell was also broken, but broken so nicely, on the
principle of the arch, that the pieces remained in nearly their original
places. Finally, vast rents are seen to occur in the cement and soil of
the outer crust; and these great rents, which must have formed enormous
gulfs and deep interminable ravines, were destined, it would seem, to
perform a most important part in the future geology of the globe.
Forming impassable lines of demarcation between the several portions
into which they broke up the earth's surface, they imprisoned the
recently created animals in separate groups, kept as completely from
mixing together as the fallow-deer of one loftily-walled park are kept
from mixing with the white oxen of another loftily-walled park, or as
the kangaroos or duck-billed quadrupeds of Australia are kept by the
surrounding ocean from mixing with the tigers of Sumatra or the
tortoises of Madagascar. I employ the writer's own happy
illustration:--"In some places these fragments" of the earth's crust
"would be piled more or less above each other, and in others quite
detached and isolated, like fragments of ice on the bank of a river
after a thaw." They would of course be on very different levels, each
having, as I have said, a distinct group of animals of its own; and
when, after the lapse of nearly two thousand years, the great
catastrophe of the Flood came on, it would necessarily find, as it rose
along the levels, and submerged platform after platform in succession, a
different and yet different set of creatures to kill. To borrow from the
description of this ingenious cosmogonist, "those on the lower fragments
would be first engulphed, and their races completely extinguished from
off the surface, and deposited in the earth; then those on higher and
higher upwards, till the whole became submerged. And we have only to
suppose that man, with the present survivors, were those that occupied
one of the higher table-lands when the Flood commenced (and of course in
that case Noah could collect into the ark only out of those of his own
country); then the result would be, that man and his present
contemporaries would be among the last overwhelmed. This will
sufficiently account for the fact of his and their remains not being
found deep in the earth....
"The two most interesting geological facts therefore, namely, that
distinct organisms are to be found in distinct formations respectively;
and secondly, _that no remains of man, and few or none of the other
races at present surviving, are to be found in any but comparatively
recent formations,_--these two grand facts of geology, we say, instead
of pointing back to vast cycles of ages before the creation, seem to
point merely to the peculiar physical circumstances of the fallen planet
in the interval between those two eventful stages in its history, the
Fall and Flood, and the natural consequences of these circumstances in
causing distinct divisions, and some of these of different elevations,
among the organic living creatures, during the interval." One other
circumstance completes this really original and beautiful hypothesis.
The cosmogonist holds that the Flood,--no mere tranquil rising of the
waters, as some suppose,--was accompanied by terrible convulsions, which
reduced to utter ruin the already shattered earth. The granitic dome
fell inwards upon the central furnace; and the fires, bursting outwards
under the enormous pressure, found vent at the surface, and made the
volcanoes. And this collapsed and diminished world,--scarce half the
bulk of the old one,--with no heating furnace under its polar regions,
nor aught save the merest tatters of an aurora flitting occasionally
over them,--greatly too dense in itself, and surrounded by a greatly too
dense atmosphere,--with its huge mountains, vast oceans, wide steppes,
and arid deserts, with its snows, its frosts, its drenching rains, its
horrible tempests, its terrible thunder storms, and devastating
earthquakes,--all alike frightful defects, not in the original plan,--is
not only unlike the primeval world, not very good, or, unlike the
antediluvian world, tolerably good, but not good at all. "On taking a
bird's-eye view of the geographical and hydrographical features or
superficies of the globe," says this bold writer, "any unprejudiced
person must at once admit, that in either of these departments there is
scarce a trace of that beautiful, tasteful, and economical design which
we have a right to expect from the admitted qualities of the great
Author, and his avowed object in the structure and report of it when
newly finished." It is added, however, that "its _present object_, as
the _Siberia_--the penal settlement--of expatriated rebels, it is in its
_present state_ well calculated to fulfil."
It may be worth mentioning, that the writer who sets himself after a
fashion so peculiar to assert and justify the ways of Providence against
the geologists resides in one of the loveliest districts in Scotland,--a
district, however, shaggy with rock, and overshadowed by great
mountains, and occasionally visited by earthquake tremors, and both snow
and thunder storms, and so, with all its wild beauty to other eyes,
merely, I must suppose, one of the rougher districts of the penal
Siberia in his. He is, indeed, particularly severe upon mountains;
though not, as he tells us, wholly devoid of a lurking prejudice in
their favor. But what weak prejudice might palliate or plead for, his
better judgment condemns. "See," says this judicious writer, "vast
districts of the globe disfigured by tremendous masses of rugged and
almost barren mountains.... What, cry some, would you bury as
deformities the lofty peak and rugged mountain brow, nature's
palaces,--generally the grandest and most sublime objects in natural
scenery! We cordially assure the reader we are by no means prejudiced
against these grand objects; _for if prejudice we have on the subject,
it is rather on the other side_. It is therefore the force of evidence
alone makes us,--reluctantly we admit,--give up these to rank among the
derangements and deformities of nature. She, according to her usual
_taste_ and _economy_, would never be at the expense of rearing, and
that upon ground _that might have otherwise been much better occupied_,
such unwieldy, useless masses of matter, merely for the sake of
gratifying the taste for grandeur and sublimity in a few of her sons,
nor, indeed, for any other use we ever heard ascribed to them....
According to _our_ test, a rich and gently undulatory surface,
intersected with rivulets and sheets of water, in the places taken up by
these elevations, would be far better, as combining in the highest
degree the _utile cum dulce_."[40] To such of my audience as are
familiar with Dr. Thomas Burnet's "Sacred Theory of the Earth" (1684),
that revolution in the cycle of hypothesis to which I have referred, and
through which the visionaries of the later ages return to the dreams
which had occupied the visionaries of an earlier time, must be
sufficiently apparent in this passage. For not only does Burnet speak
after the same manner of hills and mountains, but also of an idle,
ill-founded prejudice entertained in their favor. We find him thus
summing up a general survey of the mountains of the globe:--"Look upon
these great ranges: in what confusion do they lie! They have neither
form nor beauty, nor shape, nor order, no more than the clouds in the
air. Then, how barren, how desolate, how naked are they! How they stand
neglected by nature! Neither the rains can soften them, nor the dews
from heaven make them fruitful. I give this short survey of the
mountains of the earth _to help to remove that prejudice we are apt to
have_, or that conceit that the present earth is regularly formed....
There is nothing in nature," adds this writer, "more shapeless and
ill-figured than an old rock or a mountain."
I leave it to my audience to determine how far this depreciatory
view,--whether regarded as that of Dr. Burnet or of the modern
anti-geologist,--agrees with the estimate of the higher minds, or
whether it manifests the proper respect for the adorable Being who, in
his infinite wisdom, made our world what it is. Let me next show that
some of even the abler and more respectable anti-geologists exhibit no
very profound veneration for the letter of Scripture, when, instead of
bearing, as they think, against the deductions of their opponents, they
find it directly opposed to fancies of their own. It is held by not a
few among them, that at the Deluge the sea and land changed places. When
the waters receded, it was found, they allege, that the old land had
become ocean, and the old ocean had become land; and as there are
certain rivers which are described in Scripture as flowing beside Eden,
and which, judging by the names given them, still exist, it has become
imperative on the assertors of the hypothesis to show that the rivers
which now drain tracts of what they hold was then sea, and that fall
into seas which they hold were then land, could not by any possibility
have formed the boundaries of the old Adamic garden. Let us mark how Mr.
Granville Penn,--certainly one of the most extensively informed of his
class,--deals with this difficulty.[41] There are, he argues, certain
great corruptions of Scripture. What had been at first written as
marginal notes by uninspired men, and were in some cases very erroneous
and absurd, came in the course of transcription to be transferred,
wholly by mistake, from the side of the page into the body of the text;
and thus, in at least a few places, the Scriptures were vitiated, and
now declare, instead of Divine truth, what is neither sense nor fact.
And on this very general, and certainly most perilous ground, he goes on
to argue, unsupported by a single ancient manuscript, and solely on what
he terms internal evidence, that the verses in Genesis which conflict
with his hypothesis must be regarded as mere idle glosses, ignorantly or
surreptitiously introduced into the text by the ancient copyists. "In
the second chapter of Genesis," we find him saying, "_there appears an
internal critical evidence_ of an insertion of the 11th, 12th, 13th, and
14th verses, similar to that of the 4th verse of the 5th chapter of St.
John, and constituting, in a similar manner, a _parenthesis_
intersecting the thread of the narrative, and introduced solely for a
similar purpose of illustration. It does not wear the character of the
simple narrative in which it appears, but _of the surcharge of the gloss
or note of a later age, founded upon the fanciful traditions then
prevailing with respect to the situation of the ancient Paradise_." This
certainly is cutting the knot; and, if erected into a precedent by the
geologist, would no doubt greatly facilitate the labor of
reconciliation. It would, however, be perilous work for _him_. "A wolf,"
says Plutarch, "peeping into a hut where a company of shepherds were
assembled, saw them regaling themselves with a joint of mutton. 'Ye
gods!' he exclaimed, 'what a clamor these men would have raised if they
had caught _me_ at such a banquet.'" I need scarcely add, that the
hypothesis in whose behalf Scripture is thus divested of its authority,
and recklessly cast aside, is entirely a worthless one; and that the
various continents of the globe, instead of all dating from one period
little more than four thousand years back, are of very various
ages,--some of them comparatively modern, though absolutely old in
relation to human history; and some of so hoar an antiquity, that the
term since man appeared upon earth might be employed as a mere unit to
measure it by.
It need not surprise us that a writer who takes such strange liberties
with a book which he professes to respect, and which he must have had
many opportunities of knowing, should take still greater liberties with
a science for which he entertains no respect whatever, and of whose
first principles he is palpably ignorant. And yet the wild recklessness
of some of his explanations of geological phenomena must somewhat
astonish all sufficiently acquainted with the science to know that the
place and relations of its various formations have been long since
determined, and now as certainly form the regulating data of the
practical miner, as the places and relations long since determined by
the geographer form the regulating data of the practical navigator or
engineer. It is as certain, for instance, that the Oolitic system
underlies the Green Sand and the Chalk, with all the various formations
of the Tertiary division,--Eocene Miocene, Pliocene, and
Pleistocene,--as that York is situated to the south of Edinburgh, or
that both these cities lie very considerably to the north of London and
Paris. And the anti-geologist who would argue, in the heat of
controversy, that the Oolite and the Pleistocene were contemporaneous
deposits, would be no more worthy of reply than the anti-geographer who
would assert, in order to serve some argumentative purpose, that the
North Cape lies in the same latitudinal parallel as South California, or
that Terra del Fuego is but a day's sailing from Iceland. And yet such,
as I intimated on a former evening, is the line taken up by Mr.
Granville Penn, in dealing with the difficulties of the Kirkdale Cave,
so remarkable for its accumulations of gnawed bones of the Pleistocene
ages,--especially for its bones of hyænas, tigers, bears, wolves,
rhinoceroses, and elephants. The cave occurs in the moorlands of
Yorkshire, in a limestone rock of that Oolitic division to which the
Oxford Clay and the Coral Rag belong, and contains corals and shells
that had passed into extinction long even ere the Tertiary period began;
while in the cave itself, mixed with bones of the extinct mammals of the
geologic age in immediate advance of the present one, there have been
found the contemporary remains of animals that still live in our fields
and woods, such as the hare, the rabbit, the weasel, and the water rat.
And we find Mr. Penn assigning both the Oolitic rock in which the cave
is hollowed, and the mammalian remains of the cave itself, equally to
the period of the deluge. The limestone existed at that time, it would
seem, as a soft calcareous paste, into which the animal remains, floated
northwards from intertropical regions on the waters of the Flood, were
precipitated in vast quantities, and sank, and then, fermenting under
the putrefactive influences, the gas which they formed blow up the
yielding lime and mud around them into a long narrow cave, just as a
glass-blower blows up a bottle, or as a little yeast blows up into
similar but greatly smaller cavities a bit of leaven. And the
stalactites and stalagmites which encrust the Kirkdale Cave are, Mr.
Penn holds, simply the last runnings of the lime that exuded after the
general mass had begun to set. Certainly any one disposed to take such
liberties with the Bible on the one hand, and with geologic science on
the other, as those taken in the given instances by this most formidable
of the anti-geologists, could have but little difficulty in making
either Scripture as geological or geology as Scriptural as he had a
mind. His chief danger would be that of making the sounder theologians
just a little angry, and of escaping, unless quoted for the joke's sake,
the notice of the geologists altogether. In truth, the extreme absurdity
of our later anti-geologists in virtually contending, in the
controversy, that _their_ ignorance of an interesting science, founded
on millions of determined facts, ought to be permitted to weigh against
the knowledge of the men who have studied it most thoroughly, forms
their best defence. It secures them against all save neglect. As,
however, some of their number are well meaning men, who would not be
ridiculous if they could help it, and only oppose themselves to the
geologists because they deem them mischievous and in error, it may be
worth while showing them, by an example or two, the ludicrous nature of
the positions which in their honest ignorance they permit themselves to
occupy, and the real scope and bearing of the arguments which they
unwittingly permit themselves to use. I shall adduce two several
instances of reasoning, directed by the anti-geologists _against_ their
antagonists (as they themselves believed), but which, from their
ignorance of the true state of the argument, and of the bearing of the
facts with which they dealt, in reality made out for these antagonists
as strong a case as they could possibly have made out for themselves.
And I am sure that, rather than be found siding with their opponents,
the anti-geologists would be content even to acquire a little geology.
I shall select my first instance from the records of the annual
controversy which used to rage some ten or fifteen years ago, in
sermons, newspapers, and magazines, immediately after every meeting of
the British Association. A religious Dublin newspaper,--the "Statesman
and Record,"--since extinct, took always an active part in these
discussions on the anti-geological side, and boldly affirmed, as in a
number now before me, that geology had the devil for its author. A
learned correspondent of the paper, who was, however, somewhat more
charitable, thought that at least the _facts_ of the science might be
exempted from a condemnation so sweeping; nay, that, well interpreted,
they might be found decidedly opposed to at least the more mischievous
deductions of the geologists; and in illustrating the point, we find him
thus arguing, from certain appearances in the valley of the Nile, that
the globe which we inhabit cannot possibly be more than six thousand
years old.[42] "The valley of the Nile," says this writer, "is known to
be covered with a bed of slime which the river has deposited in its
periodical inundations, and which rests on a foundation of sand, like
that of the adjacent desert. The French savans who accompanied Bonaparte
in his Egyptian expedition made several experiments to ascertain the
thickness and depth of this superincumbent bed. They dug about two
hundred pits, and carefully measured the thickness in the transversal
section of the valley, where the deposit had been free from obstacles,
and had not been materially increased or lessened by local causes. They
found the mean of all these measurements to be six and a half metres, or
rather more than twenty feet. M. Gironde endeavored to determine the
quantity of slime deposited in a century; and he found that the
elevation of soil in that period was rather less than four inches and a
half! Dividing the total thickness of the bed by the centenary
elevation, he found the quotient 56.50; whence it followed that the
inundations had commenced 5650 years before the year 1800, when the
experiments were made,--a number which only differed 159 years from the
Mosaic date. The difference is not very important, when it is considered
that the most trifling error, whether in the measure of the entire
superincumbent bed, or in the valuation of the quantity of slime
deposited in a century, affects the final results. Notwithstanding this,
the coincidence between the sacred historian and the computations of
science is remarkable, and furnishes one proof more of the harmony
existing between nature and revelation. An honest experimentalist was
constrained to arrive at this conclusion at a period when the infidel
school of our continental neighbors was in high feather. I am sorry to
add, that the result of his own calculation had not that effect on the
philosopher himself, or his free-thinking associates, which, for their
own sakes, was desirable; but it is no less valuable to us on that
account; for we know that an unwilling witness to the truth is worth a
score of evidences already prejudiced in its favor."
Now, this is clear, distinct statement; and nothing can be more evident
than that the theologian who makes it holds he is reasoning with
conclusive effect in behalf of what may be termed the short
chronology,--not in its legitimate connection with the recent
introduction of the human species, but in its supposed bearing on the
age of the earth. And in doing so he commits himself to the apparent
positive fact, determined on what may be regarded as geologic data, that
the river Nile has been flowing over its bed for about as many years as
have elapsed, according to the Hebrew chronology adopted by Usher, since
the creation of man, and no more. To the integrity of this inference he
pledges himself, as an inference to which the infidel ought to have
yielded, as conclusive in its bearing on the question of the earth's
age, and as of singular value to the believer who sets himself to deal
with the evidences of his faith. Now, without referring to the
circumstance that the data on which the French savans under Napoleon
founded have since been challenged by geologists, such as Lieutenant
Newbold and Sir G. Wilkinson, who have carefully surveyed the rocks and
soils of Egypt with the assistance of clearer light than existed at the
commencement of the century, let us, for the argument's sake, hold the
inference to be quite as good as this theologian regards it. And see, we
urge upon him, that you yourself do not suffer it to drop should you
find that it commits you to the other side of the argument. Be at least
as fair and honest as you say the infidels ought to have been. The six
and a half metres of silt and slime,--representative, let us hold, of
from five to six thousand years,--rest, you say, on "a foundation of
sand like that of the adjacent desert." But have you ascertained on what
the sand rests? I know nothing of that, replies the theologian; I had
not even thought of that. But the geologist has thought of it, we reply;
and has spent much time under the hot sun in ascertaining the point. For
nearly three hundred miles,--from the inner boundaries of the delta to
within a few hours' journey of the cataracts,--the silt and sand rest on
what is known as the "marine" or nummulitic limestone,--a formation of
great extent, for it runs into the Nubian desert on the one hand, and
into the Libyan desert on the other; and which, though it abounds in the
animalcules of the European chalk, is held to belong, in at least its
upper beds, which are charged with nummulites, to the earlier Eocene.
Over this marine limestone there rests a newer formation, of later
Tertiary age, which contains the casts of sea shells, and whole forests
of dicotyledonous trees, converted into a flint-like chert; and over all
repose the sands and gravels of the desert. Underneath the silt of the
river, then, and the sand of the desert, lie these two formations of the
Tertiary division. The lower, which is of great thickness, must have
been of slow formation. It is composed almost exclusively, in many
parts, of microscopic animals, and abounds in others in fossil
shells,--nautili, ostreadæ, turritella, and nummulites, with corals,
sponges, the remains of crustacea, and the teeth of fishes. And between
the period of its deposition and that of the formation which rests upon
it the surface of what is now Egypt must have been elevated over the
surface of the sea, to be covered, in the course of ages, by great
forests, which, ere the land assumed its present form and level, were
submerged by another oscillation of the surface, and petrified amid beds
of a siliceous sand at the bottom of the ocean. Nor is the underlying
marine limestone by any means the oldest of the sedimentary rocks of
Egypt. It rests on a sandstone of Permian or Triassic age; the sandstone
rests, in turn, on the famous Breccia de Verde of Egypt; and the Breccia
on a group of Azoic rocks, gneisses, quartzes, mica schists, and clay
slates, that wrap round the granitic nucleus of Syene. The formations of
Egypt constitute a well-determined part of that great series of systems
which compose the upper portion of the earth's crust: its silt is by far
the most inconsiderable of its deposits; and if five thousand six
hundred and fifty years were exhausted in laying down layer after layer
of the twenty feet which form _its_ average thickness, what enormous
periods must we not demand in addition for the laying down of the forest
formation, of the marine limestone formation, of the New Red Sandstone
formation, of the Breccia de Verde formation, and, in short, for the
some ten miles of fossiliferous rock of which those deposits form such
definite, well-determined portions; besides the time necessary for the
production of the enormously developed Azoic rocks which lie under all!
The theologian, in this instance, instead of reasoning, as he himself
supposed, in behalf of the short chronology, has been making out a very
formidable case for the long one; and all that the geologist can have to
urge upon him in the circumstances is simply that he should act as he
holds the infidel ought to have done, and yield to the force of
evidence. I may mention in the passing, that some of the most ancient
buildings of Egypt are formed of the Tertiary marine limestones of the
country; the stones of the pyramids are charged with nummulites, known
to the Arabs as "Pharaoh's beans;" and these organisms stand out in high
relief on the weathered portions of the Great Sphinx. Some of the oldest
things in the world in their relation to human history,--erections, many
of which had survived the memory of their founders even in the days of
Herodotus,--are formed of materials so modern in their relation to the
geologic epochs, that they had no existence as rock until after the
Palæozoic and Secondary ages had gone by. Not only the Carboniferous
sandstone of the High Church and Parliament House of Edinburgh, but even
the Oolitic (that is, Portland stone) of Somerset House and St. Paul's,
are of an antiquity incalculably vast compared with the stone out of
which the oldest of the pyramids were fashioned.
[Illustration: Fig. 116.
NUMMULITES LÆVIGATA.
(_Pharaoh's Beans._)]
The second example which I shall adduce is one with which many of my
auditors must be already familiar. The Falls of Niagara are gradually
eating their way through an elevated tract of table-land, upwards
towards Lake Erie, at the rate of about fifty yards in forty years; and
it has been argued by Sir Charles Lyell, that as they are now seven
miles distant from Queenston, where the elevation of the plateaux
begins, they must have taken about ten thousand years to scoop out their
present deep channel through that space.[43] Ten thousand years ago the
Falls were, he infers, at Queenston; and the grounds on which he reasons
are exactly those on which one would infer that a laborer who had cut a
ditch two hundred yards long at the rate of ten yards per day, and was
still at work without pause or intermission, had begun to cut it just
twenty days previous. A reverend anti-geologist takes up Sir
Charles;[44] and, after denouncing the calculation as "a stab at the
Christian religion," seeing it involves the assertion that the "Falls
were actually at Queenston four thousand years before the creation of
the world according to Moses," he brings certain facts, adduced both by
other writers and Sir Charles himself, to bear on the calculation, such
as the fact that the deep trench through which the Niagara runs is much
narrower in its lower than in its upper reaches, and that the river must
have performed its work of excavation, when the breadth was less, at a
greatly quicker rate than now. And thus the work of excavating the
trench is brought fairly within six thousand years. Nor is the principle
of the reasoning bad. In our illustration of the ditch excavated by the
laborer we of course take it for granted that it is a ditch of the same
depth and breadth throughout, and excavated in the same sort of soil;
for if greatly narrower and shallower at one place than at another, or
dug in a greatly softer mould, the rate of its excavation at different
times might be very different indeed, and the general calculation widely
erroneous, if based on the ratio of progress when it went on most
slowly, taken as an average ratio for the whole. But the anti-geologist
provokes only a smile when, in his triumph, he exultingly exclaims, "It
is on grounds such as these that the most learned and voluminous among
English geologists disputes the Mosaic history of the Creation and
Deluge,--a strong proof that even men of argument on other subjects
often reason in the most childish and ridiculous manner, and on grounds
totally false, when they undertake to deny the truth of the Holy
Scriptures." Now, it must be wholly unnecessary to remark here, that it
is surely one thing to "undertake to deny the truth of the Holy
Scriptures," and quite another and different thing to hold that the
Niagara Falls may have been at Queenston ten thousand years ago; or
further, that it seems not in the least wise to stake the truth of
Revelation on any such issue. Let me request you, however, to observe,
that in one important respect this writer resembles the former one. The
former, ignorant of the various phenomena exhibited by the great
deposits of Egypt, exhausted all his five thousand six hundred years of
available time in accounting for the formation of one of the least of
them,--the silt of the Nile; and the latter, though he bids down Sir
Charles some four thousand four hundred years or so in the one item of
scooping out the bed of the St. Lawrence, at least expends the remainder
of the ten thousand,--his five thousand six hundred years,--in that work
of excavation alone, and leaves himself no further sums to set off
against the various geologic processes that may have preceded it.
In this case, as in the other, let us grant, for the argument's sake,
all the facts. Let us admit that the trench through which the St.
Lawrence now flows has been cut by the river in somewhat less than six
thousand years. But through what, let us ask, has it been cut? There can
exist no doubt on the subject: it has been cut through an ancient
graveyard of the Upper Silurian system, charged with the peculiar
fossils characteristic of what are known as the Clinton and Niagara
groups, and common, many of them, to the Upper Silurian of our own
country and of the European continent. _Leptæna depressa_ and
_Pentamerus oblongus_, two of the most frequent shells of the deposit,
occur also in equal abundance in the Dudley and Caradoc formations of
England; its prevailing encrinite, _Ichthyocrinus lævis_, is scarce
distinguishable from an encrinite which I have often picked up in the
quarries of the "Wren's Nest" (_Ichthyocrinus pyriformis_); while its
prevailing trilobite, _Phacops limulurus_, seems to be but a
transatlantic variety of our well known _Asaphus (Phacops) caudatus_.
Further, the sequence of the various formations both above and below the
Niagara group, is shown with remarkable distinctness in that part of the
world along the shores of the great lakes. They may be traced downward,
on the one hand, along the Lower Silurian deposits, to the
non-fossiliferous base on which the system rests, and upwards, on the
other, through the Old Red Sandstone and the Carboniferous Limestone, to
the workable Coal Measures. Both stratigraphically and palæontologically
the place in the scale of the Niagara graveyard can be definitely
determined; and a superficial deposit on the heights in its immediate
neighborhood shows that the river did not begin its work of excavation
among its long extinct shells, trilobites, and corals, until after not
only the great Palæozoic, but also the Secondary and Tertiary divisions
had been laid down, and the recent period ushered in. The superficial
shells of the adjacent heights belong to the Pleistocene age, and show
that in even that comparatively modern time the lower lands of Upper
Canada were submerged beneath the level of the ocean, and that a series
of deep seas, connected by broad sounds, occupied the place of the great
lakes. Not until the last upheaval of the land was the river now known
as the St. Lawrence called into existence, to begin its work of
excavation; and ere that event took place, fully ten miles of
fossiliferous rock had been deposited on the earth's surface, charged
with the remains of many succeeding creations. The deposit through which
the St. Lawrence is slowly mining its way is older than the river itself
by the vast breadth of the four Tertiary periods, by that of all the
Secondary ages,--Cretaceous, Oolitic, and Triassic,--by the periods,
too, of the Permian system, of the Carboniferous system, of the Old Red
system, and of the uppermost beds of the Upper Silurian system. But a
simple illustration may better serve to show the true character of the
conclusion urged here by the opponent of Sir Charles, than any such line
of statement as that which I employ, however clear to the geologist. In
the year 1817, Prince's Street, in Edinburgh, was opened up to the
Calton Hill, and the Calton burying-ground cut through to the depth of
many feet by the roadway. Let us suppose that when the excavation has
been carried a hundred yards into the cemetery, a geologist, finding the
laborers cutting on the average about a yard per day, simply intimates
as his opinion that the laborers have been a hundred days at work. "No,"
replies a controversialist on the anti-geological side; "for the first
fifty yards, so soft was the subsoil, and so shallow the covering of
mould, that the laborers must have cut at the rate of two yards a day;
it has been merely for the last fifty yards that they have been
excavating at the present slow rate: they cannot have been more than
seventy-five days at work. I marvel exceedingly at the absurdity of
geological reasoners: _palpably the burying-ground of the Calton is only
seventy-five days old._" Now, such, in no exaggerated, but, on the
contrary, greatly modified form, is the argument that would limit the
age of the earth to the period during which the St. Lawrence has been
scooping out a channel for itself, from Queenston to Niagara, through an
ancient Silurian burying-ground. Both arguments alike confound the age
of the ancient burying-grounds with the date of the modern excavations
opened up through them; but in order to render the argument of my
illustration equally absurd with the other, it would be not only
necessary to infer that the Calton cemetery was only seventy-five days
old, but also that the rock on which it rested was no older.
But enough of follies such as these! I had marked a good many other
passages of similar character in the writings of the recent
anti-geologists, and would have little difficulty in filling a volume
with such; but it would be a useless, though mayhap curious work, and is
much better exhibited by specimen than as a whole. A little folly is
amusing, but much of it fatigues. There is a time coming, and now not
very distant, when the vagaries of the anti-geologists will be as
obsolete as those of the geographers of Salamanca, or as those of the
astronomers who upheld the orthodoxy of Ptolemy against Galileo and
Newton; and when they will be regarded as a sort of curious fossils,
very monstrous and bizarre, and altogether of an extinct type, but which
had once not only life, but were formidable. It will then be seen by all
what a noble vestibule the old geologic ages form to that human period
in which moral responsibility first began upon earth, and a creature
destined to immortality anticipated an eternal hereafter. There is
always much of the mean and the little in the worlds which man creates
for himself, and in the history which he gives them. Of all the
abortions of the middle ages which have come down to us, I know not a
more miserable one,--at once ludicrous and sad,--than that heavens and
earth of Cosmas _Indicopleustes_, the monk, which I illustrated by
diagrams in my last lecture (Figs. 114, 115). They are just such heavens
and earth as a monk might have made, and made too at a sitting. The
heavens, represented as a solid arch raised on tall walls, resemble, as
a whole, the arch which figures in the middle of a freemason's apron,
or, more homely still, the section of a wine cellar; while the earth
lies beneath as a great plain or floor, with a huge hill in the
distance, behind which the sun passes when it is night. And yet this
scheme gave law to the world for more than six centuries, and lay like a
nightmare on physical discovery, astronomic and geographical. The
anti-geologists have been less mischievous, for they live in a more
enlightened age; and we already see but the straggling remains of the
body, and know that the time cannot be far distant when it will be as
completely extinct as any of the old faunas. The great globe, ever
revolving on itself, and journeying in space round the sun, in obedience
to laws which it immortalized a Newton to discover and demonstrate, is
an infinitely more sublime and noble object than the earth of Cosmas
the monk, with its conical mountain and its crypt-like firmament; nor
can I doubt that its history throughout the long geologic ages,--its
strange story of successive creations, each placed in advance of that
which had gone before, and its succeeding organisms, vegetable and
animal, ranged according to their appearance in time, on principles
which our profounder students of natural science have but of late
determined,--will be found in an equal degree more worthy of its Divine
Author than that which would huddle the whole into a few literal days,
and convert the incalculably ancient universe which we inhabit into a
hastily run-up erection of yesterday.
LECTURE ELEVENTH.
ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND.[45]
PART I.
Scotland has its four fossil floras,--its flora of the Old Red
Sandstone, its Carboniferous flora, its Oolitic flora, and that flora of
apparently Tertiary age of which his Grace the Duke of Argyll found so
interesting a fragment overflown by the thick basalt beds and trap tuffs
of Mull. Of these, the only one adequately known to the geologist is the
gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures,--probably the richest, in at least
individual plants, which the world has yet seen. The others are all but
wholly unknown; and the Association may be the more disposed to tolerate
the comparative meagreness of the few brief remarks which I purpose
making on two of their number,--the floras of the Old Red Sandstone and
the Oolite,--from the consideration that that meagreness is only too
truly representative of the present state of our knowledge regarding
them; and that if my descriptions be scanty and inadequate, it is only
because the facts are still few. How much of the lost may yet be
recovered I know not; but the circumstance that two great
floras,--remote predecessors of the existing one,--which once covered
with their continuous mantle of green the dry land of what is now
Scotland, should be represented by but a few coniferous fossils, a few
cycadaceous fronds, a few ferns and club mosses, must serve to show what
mere fragments of the past history of our country we have yet been able
to recover from the rocks, and how very much in the work of exploration
and discovery still remains for us to do. We stand on the further edge
of the great floras of by-past creations, and have gathered but a few
handfuls of faded leaves, a few broken branches, a few decayed cones.
The Silurian deposits of our country have not yet furnished us with any
unequivocal traces of a terrestrial vegetation. Professor Nicol of
Aberdeen, on subjecting to the microscope the ashes of a Silurian
anthracite which occurs in Peeblesshire, detected in it minute tubular
fibres, which seem, he says, to indicate a higher class of vegetation
than the algæ; but these may have belonged to a marine vegetation
notwithstanding. I detected some years ago, in the Trilobite-bearing
schists of Girvan, associated with graptolites of the Lower Silurian
type, a vegetable organism somewhat resembling the leaf of one of the
pond weeds,--an order of plants, some of whose species, such as Zostera,
find their proper habitats in salt water. I have placed beside this
specimen a fragment of the same graptolite-bearing rock, across which I
have pasted part of a leaf of _Zostera marina_, the only plant of our
Scottish seas which is furnished with true roots, bears real flowers
inclosed in herbaceous spathes, and produces a well formed farinaceous
seed. It will be seen, that in the few points of comparison which can be
instituted between forms so exceedingly simple, the ancient very closely
resembles the recent organism. It is not impossible, therefore, that
the Silurian vegetable may have belonged to some tribe of plants allied
to Zostera; and if so, we can easily conceive how the Silurian
anthracite of our country may be altogether of marine origin, and may
yet exhibit in its microscopic tubular fibres vestiges of a vegetation
higher than the algæ.
[Illustration: Fig. 117.
_a_, SILURIAN ORGANISM. _b_, GRAPTOLITE. _c_, PORTION OF THE LEAF OF
ZOSTERA MARINA.]
[It were well, in dealing with the very ancient floras, in which
equivocal forms occur that might have belonged to either the land or the
sea, to keep in view those curious plants of the present time, the
habitats of which are decidedly marine, but which are marked by many of
the peculiarities of the seed-bearing plants of the land. The
superiority of Zostera to the common sea weeds of our coasts appears to
have struck in the north of Scotland eyes very little practised in such
matters, and seems to have given rise, in consequence, to a popular
myth. _Zostera marina_ abounds on a series of sand banks, partially
uncovered by the larger stream tides, which lie directly opposite the
town of Cromarty, near the spot pointed out by tradition as the site of
an earlier town, which was swept away some two or three hundred years
ago by the encroachments of the sea. And these banks, with their thick
covering of green Zostera, used to be pointed out by the fishermen of
the place, in my younger days, as the _meadows_ of the old town, still
bearing their original coverings of vegetation,--a vegetation altered no
doubt by the "sea change" that had come over it, but still essentially
the same, it was said, as that which had smiled around the old burgh,
and not at all akin to the brown kelp or tangle that every storm from
the boisterous north-east heaps along the shore. It was virtually
affirmed that the luxuriant terrestrial grasses of ancient Cromarty had
made a virtue of necessity in their altered circumstances; and that,
settling down into grasses of the sea, they remained to testify that an
ancient Cromarty there had _once been_. _Zostera marina_, like most
plants of the land, ripens its seeds towards the close of autumn; and I
have seen a smart night's frost at this season, when coincident with a
stream tide that laid bare the beds, nip its seed-bearing stems by
thousands; and have found them strewed along the beach a few days after,
with all their grass-like spikes fully developed, and their grain-like
seeds charged with a farinaceous substance, which one would scarce
expect to find developed in the sea. In the higher reaches of the
Cromarty Firth, the Zostera beds, which are of great extent, are much
frequented, during the more protracted frosts of a severe winter, by
wild geese and swans, that dig up and feed upon the saccharine roots of
the plant. The Zostera of the warmer latitudes attain to a larger size
than those of our Scottish seas. "A southern species," says Loudon,
"_Zostera oceanica_, has leaves a foot long and an inch broad. It is
used as a thatch, which is said to last a century; bleaches white with
exposure; and furnishes the rush-like material from which the envelops
of Italian liquor flasks are prepared." The simple rectilinear venation
of ribbon-like fronds, usually much broken, that occurs in the Lower Old
Red Sandstone, has often reminded me of that exhibited by this exotic
species of Zostera.]
[Illustration: Fig. 118.
FUCOID.]
[Illustration: Fig. 119.
FUCOIDS.]
Associated with the earliest ichthyic remains of the Old Red Sandstone,
we find vegetable organisms in such abundance, that they communicate
often a fissile character to the stone in which they occur. But,
existing as mere carbonaceous markings, their state of keeping is
usually so bad, that they tell us little else than that the
antiquely-formed fishes of this remote period swam over sea bottoms
darkened by forests of algæ. The prevailing plant was one furnished with
a long, smooth stem, which, though it threw off, in the alternate order,
numerous branches at least half as stout as itself, preserved its
thickness for considerable distances without diminution,--a common
fucoidal characteristic. We find its remains mixed in the rock, though
sparingly, with those of a rough-edged plant, knobbed somewhat like the
thong-like receptacles of _Himanthalia lorea_, which also threw off
branches like the other, but diminished more rapidly. A greatly more
minute vegetable organism of the same beds, characterized by its bifid
partings, which strike off at angles of about sixty, somewhat resembles
the small-fronded variety of _Dictyota dichotoma_, save that the slim
terminations of the frond are usually bent into little hooks, like the
tendrils of the pea just as their points begin to turn. Another rather
rare plant of the period, existing as a broad, irregularly cleft frond,
somewhat resembling that of a modern _Cutleria_ or _Nitophyllum_,
betrays at once, in its outline and general appearance, its marine
origin; as does also an equally rare contemporary, which, judging from
its appearance, seems to have been a true fucus. It exists in the rock
as if simply drawn in Indian ink; for it exhibits no structure, though,
as in some of the ferns of the Coal Measures, what were once the curls
of its leaflets continue to exist as sensible hollows on the surface. It
broadens and divides atop into three or four lobes, and these, in turn,
broaden and divide into minor lobes, double or ternate, and usually
rounded at their terminations. In general appearance the plant not a
little resembles those specimens of _Fucus vesiculosus_ which we find
existing in a diminutive form, and divested of both the receptacles and
the air vessels, at the mouth of rivers. Of two other kinds of plants I
have seen only confused masses, in which the individuals were so crowded
together, and withal so fragmentary and broken, that their separate
forms could not be traced. In the one the general appearance was such as
might be produced by compressed and tangled masses of _Chorda filium_,
in which the linear and even tubular character of the plant could be
determined, but not its continuous, cord-like aspect; in the other, the
fragments seemed well nigh as slim as hairs, and the appearance was such
as might be produced by branches of that common ectocarpus, _E.
littoralis_, which may be seen on our rocky coasts roughening at low
water the stems of laminaria. When highly magnified, a mesial groove
might be detected running along each of the hair-like lines. With these
marine plants we occasionally find large rectilinear stems, resolved
into a true coal, but retaining no organic character by which to
distinguish them. As I have seen some of these more than three inches in
diameter, and, though existing as mere fragments, several feet in
length, they must, if they were also plants of the sea, have exceeded in
size our largest laminaria.[46] And such are the few vegetable
organisms, of apparently aquatic origin, which I have hitherto succeeded
in detecting in the Lower Old Red Sandstone of Scotland.[47] Their
individual numbers, however, must have been very great, though, from the
destructible character of their tissues, their forms have perished in
the stone. The immensely developed flagstones of Caithness seem to owe
their dark color to organic matter mainly of vegetable origin. So
strongly bituminous, indeed, are some of the beds of dingier tint, that
they flame in the fire like slates steeped in oil.
[Illustration: Fig. 120.]
The remains of a terrestrial vegetation in this deposit are greatly
scantier than those of its marine plants; but they must be regarded as
possessing a peculiar interest, as, with the exception of the spore
cases of the Ludlow rocks, the oldest of their class, in at least the
British islands, whose true place in the scale can be satisfactorily
established. In the flagstones of Orkney there occurs, though very
rarely, a minute vegetable organism, which I have elsewhere described as
having much the appearance of one of our smaller ferns, such as the
maidenhair-spleenwort, or dwarf moonwort. It consists of a minute stem,
partially covered by what seems to be a small sheath or hollow bract,
and bifurcates into two fronds or pinnæ, fringed by from ten to twelve
leaflets, that nearly impinge on each other, and somewhat resemble in
their mode of arrangement the leaflets of one of our commonest
Aspleniums,--_Asplenium trichomanes_. One of our highest authorities,
however, in such matters (Professor Balfour of Edinburgh) questions
whether this organism be in reality a fern, and describes it from the
specimen on the table, in the Palæontological chapter of his admirable
Class Book, simply as "a remarkable pinnate frond." (Fig. 13, p. 56.) We
find it associated with the remains of a terrestrial plant allied to
lepidodendron, and which in size and general appearance not a little
resembles one of our commonest club mosses,--_Lycopodium clavatum_.[48]
It sends out its branches in exactly the same style,--some short and
simple, others branched like the parent stem,--in an arrangement
approximately alternate; and is everywhere covered, stem and branch, by
thickly set scale-like leaflets, that, suddenly narrowing, terminate in
exceedingly slim points. It has, however, proportionally a stouter stem
than Lycopodium; its leaves, when seen in profile, seem more rectilinear
and thin; and none of its branches yet found bear the fructiferous stalk
or spike. Its resemblance, however, to this commonest of the
Lycopodia,--a plant that may be gathered by handfuls on the moors by
which the flagstones are covered,--is close enough to suggest a new
reading of the familiar adage on the meeting of extremes. Between the
times of this ancient fossil,--one of the oldest of land plants yet
known,--and those of the existing club moss that now scatters its light
spores by millions over the dead and blackened remains of its remote
predecessor, many creations must have intervened, and many a prodigy of
the vegetable world appeared, especially in the earlier and middle
periods,--Sigillaria, Favularia, Knorria, and Ulodendron,--that have had
no representatives in the floras of latter times; and yet here, flanking
the immense scale at both its ends, do we find plants of so nearly the
same form and type, that it demands a careful survey to distinguish
their points of difference. Here, for instance, to illustrate the fact,
is there a specimen of _Lycopodium clavatum_, from one of these
Caithness moors, that agrees branch for branch, and both in the
disposition of its scales and in general outline, with the specimen in
the stone. What seems to be an early representative of the Calamites
occurs in the same beds. Some of the specimens are of large size,--at
least from nine inches to a foot in circumference,--and retain their
thickness, though existing as fragments several feet in length, with but
little diminution throughout. They resembled the interior casts of
Calamites in being longitudinally furrowed; but the furrows are flatter,
and are themselves minutely striated lengthwise by lines as fine as
hairs; and, instead of presenting any appearance of joints, there run
diagonally across the stems, interrupted and very irregular lines of
knobs. These I find referred to by Dr. Joseph Hooker, in describing a
set of massive but ill preserved remains of the same organism detected
in South Ness quarry, near Lerwick, by the Hon. Mr. Tuffnell, as taking,
in two of the specimens, "the appearance of transverse knobs and bars
(mayhap spirally arranged) that cross the striæ obliquely. But though
the knobs," he adds, "may perhaps indicate a peculiar character of the
plants, they have more probably been caused by pressure during
silicification." As, however, they also occur in the best preserved
fragment of the plant which I have yet seen,--a Thurso specimen which I
owe to my friend Mr. Dick,--I deem it best to regard them, provisionally
at least, as one of the characteristics of the plant. I may mention,
that while I disinterred one of my specimens from the Thurso flagstones,
where it occurred among remains of Dipterus and Asterolepis, I derived
another specimen from the great overlying formation of pale Red
Sandstone to which the lofty hills of Hoy and the tall mural precipices
of Dunnet Head belong; and that this plant is the only organism which
has yet been found in this uppermost member of the Lower Old Red, to at
least the north of the Moray Firth. Another apparently terrestrial
organism of the lower formation, of, however, rare occurrence, very much
resembles a sheathing bract or spathe. It is of considerable size,--from
four to six inches in length, by from two to three inches in
breadth,--of a broadly elliptical and yet somewhat lanceolate form,
deeply but irregularly corrugated, the rugæ exhibiting a tendency to
converge towards both its lower and upper terminations, and with, in
some instances, what seems to be the fragment of a second spathe
springing from its base. Another and much smaller vegetable organism of
the same beds presents the form of a spathe-enveloped bud or unblown
flower wrapped up in its calyx; but all the specimens which I have yet
seen are too obscure to admit of certain determination. I may here
mention, that curious markings, which have been regarded as impressions
made by vegetables that had themselves disappeared, have been detected
during the last twelvemonth in a quarry of the Lower Old Red Sandstone
near Huntly, by the Rev. Mr. Mackay of Rhynie. They are very curious and
very puzzling; but though some of the specimens present the appearance
of a continuous midrib, that throws off, with a certain degree of
regularity, apparent leaflets, I am inclined to regard them rather as
lying within the province of the ichnologist than of the fossil
botanist. They bear the same sort of resemblance to a long,
thickly-leaved frond, like that of the "hard fern," that the cast of a
many-legged annelid does to a club moss; and I was struck, on my first
walk along the Portobello beach, after examining a specimen kindly sent
me by Mr. Mackay, to see how nearly the tract of a small shore crab
(_Carcinus Mænas_) along the wet sand resembled them, in exhibiting what
seemed to be an obscure midrib fringed with leaflets.
But the genuine vegetable organism of the formation, indicative of the
highest rank of any yet found in it, is a true wood of the cone-bearing
order. I laid open the nodule which contains this specimen, in one of
the ichthyolite beds of Cromarty, rather more than eighteen years ago;
but though I described it, in the first edition of my little work on the
Old Red Sandstone, in 1841, as exhibiting the woody fibre, it was not
until 1845 that, with the assistance of the optical lapidary, I
subjected its structure to the test of the microscope. It turned out, as
I had anticipated, to be the portion of a tree; and on my submitting the
prepared specimen to one of our highest authorities,--the late Mr.
William Nicol,--he at once decided that the "reticulated texture of the
transverse section, though somewhat compressed, clearly indicated a
coniferous origin." I may add, that this most ancient of Scottish
lignites presents several peculiarities of structure. Like some of the
Araucarians of the warmer latitudes, it exhibits no lines of yearly
growth; its medullary rays are slender, and comparatively inconspicuous;
and the discs which mottle the sides of its sap-chambers, when viewed in
the longitudinal section, are exceedingly minute, and are ranged, so far
as can be judged in their imperfect state of keeping, in the alternate
order peculiar to the Araucarians. On what perished land of the early
Palæozoic ages did this venerably antique tree cast root and flourish,
when the extinct genera Pterichthys and Coccosteus were enjoying life by
millions in the surrounding seas, long ere the flora or fauna of the
Coal Measures had begun to be?
I may be here permitted to mention, that in a little volume, written in
reply to a widely known and very ingenious work on the Development
hypothesis, I described and figured this unequivocally genuine lignite,
in order to show that a true wood takes its place among the earliest
terrestrial plants known to the geologist. I at the same time
mentioned,--desirous, of course, that the facts of the question should
be fairly stated, whatever their bearing,--that the nodule in which it
occurred had been partially washed out of the fish bed in which I found
it, by the action of the surf; and my opponent, fixing on the
circumstance, insinuated, in the answer with which he honored me, that
it had _not_ belonged to the bed at all, but had been derived from some
other formation of later date. He ought, however, to have taken into
account my further statement, namely, that the same nodule which
enclosed the lignite contained part of another fossil, the well marked
scales of _Diplacanthus striatus_, an ichthyolite restricted, like the
Coccosteus (a specimen of which occurred in a neighboring nodule), to
the Lower Old Red Sandstone exclusively. If there be any value whatever
in palæontological evidence, this Cromarty lignite must have been
deposited in a sea inhabited by the Coccosteus and Diplacanthus. It is
demonstrable that, while yet in the recent state, a Diplacanthus lay
down and died beside it; and the evidence in the case is unequivocally
this, that in the oldest portion of the oldest terrestrial flora yet
known, there occurs the fragment of a tree quite as high in the scale as
the stately Norfolk Island pine, or the noble cedar of Lebanon.
[I have failed hitherto in finding any remains of terrestrial
plant-covered surfaces in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland, though
decided traces of desiccated sub-ærial ones are not rare. Shallows and
banks seem to have been numerous during the period of at least the Lower
formation. The flagstones of Caithness and Orkney, and the argillaceous
fish beds of Cromarty and Ross, not only abound in the ripple-marked
surfaces of a shallow sea, but also in cracked and flawed planes that
must have dried and split into polygonal partings in the air and the
sun. The appearance of these in the neighborhood of the town of Thurso,
about half a mile to the east of the river, is not a little curious.
Bearing throughout the general dingy hue of the flagstones, they yet
consist of alternating beds of two distinct characters and qualities.
The one kind, fissile, finely grained, and sharply ripple-marked, seems
to have been deposited in shallow water; the other, not fissile, but, if
I may so speak, felted together so as to yield with difficulty to the
hammer in any direction, and traversed by polygonal partings, filled up
usually by the substance of the overlying stratum, appears to have had a
different origin. The state of keeping, too, in which the ichthyic
remains of these alternating beds occur is always very different. The
smaller and more delicately organized fishes are never found entire,
save in the fissile, finely grained beds; in the others we detect only
scattered fragments; and even these, unless they belonged to the robust
Asterolepis or his congeners,--which, however, in these beds they
usually do,--much broken. The polygonal partings seem to indicate that
these toughly-felted beds, whose very style of weathering--rough,
gnarled, fretted into globose protuberances and irregular hollows--shows
that it had not been formed by quiet deposition, must have had their
broad backs raised for a time above the surface of the water, to be
desiccated in the hot sun. And the fragmentary state of the fossils
which they contain seems to point, with the roughnesses of their
weathered surfaces, to some peculiarity in their origin. The
recollection which they awoke in my mind with each visit I paid them for
three years together, may probably indicate what that origin was. I had
a relation who died more than a quarter of a century ago, who passed
many years in British Guiana, in the colony of Berbice, and whose
graphic descriptions of that part of South America made a strong
impression upon me when a boy, and still dwells in my memory. He was
settled on a cotton plantation near the coast side; and so exceedingly
flat was the surrounding country, that the house in which he dwelt,
though nearly two miles distant from the shore, stood little more than
five feet above its level. The soil consisted of a dark gray
consolidated mud; and in looking seawards from the margin of the land,
there was nothing to be seen, when the tide fell, save dreary mud flats
whole miles in extent, with the line of blue water beyond stretching
along the distant horizon. These mud flats were much frequented by birds
of the wader family, that used to come and fish in the shallow pools for
the small fry that had lingered behind when the tide fell; and my
cousin, a keen sportsman in his day, has told me that he used to steal
upon them in his mud shoes,--flat boards attached to the soles, like the
snow shoes of the higher latitudes,--and enjoy rare sport in knocking
down magnificent game, such as "the roseate spoonbill" and "gorgeous
flamingo." There were times, however, when the mud shoe proved of no
avail, and the flat expanse remained impassable for weeks,--
"A boggy syrtis, neither sea
Nor good dry land."
The coast,--directly impinged on by the drift current, and beaten by the
long roll of waves which had first begun to rise under the impulsions of
the trade winds on the African coast two thousand miles away,--was much
exposed to tempests; and after every fresh storm from the east, a huge
bank of mud used to come rolling in from the sea, three or four feet
abreast, and remain wholly impassable until, during some two or three
neap tides, its surface had been exposed to a tropical sun, and
partially consolidated by the heat. And then the waste would become
passable as before, and the chopped and broken surface, exposed to the
ordinary action of the sea, and to gradual depositions during flood,
would begin to be smoothed over, and the birds would find themselves no
longer safe. Now, I am inclined to think that we have here the
conditions necessary to the formation of the Thurso deposits. Let us
suppose, near where Thurso now stands, a wide tract of flat mud banks in
a sea so shallow as to be laid dry at ebb for miles together. Let us
further suppose periods of tranquil deposition or re-arrangement, during
which one ripple-marked stratum is laid quietly down over another, and
the fish, killed by accident, or left stranded by the evaporation of the
little pools, are covered up, like the plants in a botanist's
drying-book, in a state of complete entireness. Let us yet further
suppose great mud banks driven by occasional tempests from the deeper
water beyond, and so heaped up over these sedimentary beds as to be
exposed during even the flood of neap tides to the desiccating
influences of the atmosphere and the sun, until the surface has become
hard as a sun-burned brick, and has chopped into polygonal partings,
with wide rents between. And finally, let us suppose the whole in this
state laid under water at the return of stream tides, and exposed to the
ordinary sedimentary action. Does it not seem probable that the
alternating beds in all their conditions would be given us by such a
process? In the stratum represented by the mud bank, the stone would be
of what I have termed a _felted_, not a fissile character; its organic
remains would exist in a fragmentary and scattered state,--for, torn up
from their places of original deposition, and rolled onwards in the
storm-impelled mud, they could not fail to be broken up and dispersed;
and further, they would be in large part those of bulky deep-sea fishes.
And lastly, the surface of these beds would be polygonally cracked and
flawed, and the wider cracks filled up by the substance of the overlying
strata. And these overlying strata, on the other hand,--the result of
a period of quiet deposition in shallow water,--would be regularly
bedded, and their ichthyic remains, consisting mainly of small littoral
fishes, would be preserved in a state of comparative entireness.
For, however, such numerous repetitions of alternately _felted_
and fissile ripple-marked strata as we find in the neighborhood of
Thurso,--repetitions carried on for hundreds of feet in vertical
extent,--we require yet another condition,--that condition of gradual
subsidence in the general crust which can alone account for the fact so
often pressed upon the geologist in exploring the Coal Measures, that in
deposits thousands of feet in thickness, each stratum in succession had
been laid down in a shallow sea.]
It is a curious circumstance, that the Old Red flagstones which lie
along the southern flanks of the Grampians, and are represented by the
gray stone known in commerce as the Arbroath Pavement, have not, so far
as is yet known, an organism in common with the Old Red flagstones of
the north. I at one time supposed that the rectilinear, smooth-stemmed
fucoid, already described, occurred in both series, as the gray stones
have also their smooth-stemmed, rectilinear, tape-like organism; but the
points of resemblance were too few and simple to justify the conclusion
that they were identical, and I have since ascertained that they were
entirely different plants. The fucoid of the Caithness flagstones threw
off, as I have shown, in the alternate order, numerous ribbon-like
branches or fronds; whereas the ribbon-like fronds or branches of the
Forfarshire plant rose by dozens from a common root, like the fronds of
Zostera, and somewhat resembled a scourge of cords fastened to a handle.
Contemporary with this organism of the gray flagstone formation, and
thickly occupying the planes on which it rests, there occur fragments of
twisted stems, some of them from three to four inches in diameter
(though represented by but mere films of carbonaceous matter), and
irregularly streaked, or rather _wrinkled_, longitudinally, like the
bark of some of our forest trees, though on a smaller scale. With these
we find in considerable abundance irregularly-shaped patches, also of
carbonaceous matter, reticulated into the semblance of polygonal, or, in
some instances, egg-shaped meshes, and which remind one of pieces of ill
woven lace. When first laid open, these meshes are filled each with a
carbonaceous speck; and, from their supposed resemblance, in the
aggregated form, to the eggs of the frog in their albuminous envelop,
the quarriers term them "puddock [frog] spawn." The slabs in which they
occur, thickly covered over with their vegetable impressions, did
certainly remind me, when I first examined them some fifteen years ago,
of the bottom of some stagnant ditch beside some decaying hedge, as it
appears in middle spring, when paved with fragments of dead branches and
withered grass, and mottled with its life-impregnated patches of the
gelid substance regarding which a provincial poet tells his readers, in
classical Scotch, that
"Puddock-spue is fu' o' e'en,
An' every e'e 's a pu-head."[49]
Higher authorities than the quarriers,--among the rest, the late Dr.
Mantell,--have been disposed to regard these polygonal markings as the
fossilized spawn of ancient Batrachians; but there now seems to be
evidence enough from which to conclude that they are the remains, not of
the eggs of an animal, but of the seed of a plant. Such was the view
taken many years ago by Dr. Fleming,--the original discoverer, let me
add, of fossils both in those Upper and Middle Old Red Sandstone
deposits that lie in Scotland to the south of the Grampians. "These
organisms," we find him saying, in a paper published in "Cheek's
Edinburgh Journal" (1831), "occur in the form of circular flat patches,
not equalling an inch in diameter, and composed of numerous smaller
contiguous pieces. They are not unlike what might be expected to result
from a compressed berry, such as the bramble or the rasp. As, however,
they are found adjacent to the narrow leaves of gramineous [looking]
vegetables, and chiefly in clay slate, originally lacustrine silt, it is
probable that they constituted the conglobate panicles of extinct
species of the genus Junicus or Sparzanium." From specimens subsequently
found by Dr. Fleming, and on which he has erected his species _Parka
decipiens_, it seems evident that the nearly circular bodies (which in
all the better preserved instances circumscribe the small polygonal
ones) were set in receptacles somewhat resembling the receptacle or
calyx of the strawberry or rasp. Judging from one of the specimens, this
calyx appears to have consisted of five pieces, which united in a
central stem, and were traversed by broad irregularly diverging striæ.
And the spawn-like patches of Carmylie appear to be simply ill preserved
specimens of this fruit, whatever its true character, in which the
minute circular portions, divested of the receptacle and stem, had been
thrown into irregular forms by the joint agency of pressure and decay.
The great abundance of these organisms,--for so abundant are they, that
visitors to the Carmylie quarries find they can carry away with them as
many specimens as they please,--may be regarded as of itself indicative
of a vegetable origin.[50] It is not in the least strange, however, that
they should have been taken for patches of spawn. The large-grained
spawn of fishes, such as the lump-fish, salmon, or sturgeon, might be
readily enough mistaken, in even the recent state, for the detached
spherical-seed vessels of fruit, such as the bramble-berry, the
stone-bramble, or the rasp. "Hang it!" I once heard a countryman
exclaim, on helping himself at table to a spoonful of Caviare, which he
had mistaken for a sweet-meat, and instantly, according to Milton, "with
sputtering noise rejected,"--"Hang it for nasty stuff!--I took it for
bramble berry jam."
[Illustration: Fig. 121.
PARKA DECIPIENS.]
[Illustration: Fig. 122.]
[Illustration: Fig. 123.]
Along with these curious remains Dr. Fleming found an organism which in
form somewhat resembles the spike of one of the grasses, save that the
better preserved bracts terminate in fan or kidney-shaped leaflets, with
a simple venation radiating from the base. It is probably a fern, more
minute in its pinnules than even our smallest specimens of true
maidenhair. Its stipes, however, seems proportionally stouter than that
of any of the smaller ferns with which I am acquainted. But the state of
keeping of the specimen is not good, nor do I know that another has yet
been found. Further, in the same beds Dr. Fleming found a curious
nondescript vegetable, or rather part of a vegetable, with smooth narrow
stems, resembling those of the smooth-stemmed organism of the Caithness
flagstones, but unlike it in the circumstance that its detached nearly
parallel stalks anastomose with each other by means of cross branches,
that unite them in the middle, somewhat in the style of the Siamese
twins. I have heard the doctor suggest, but know not whether he has
placed the remark on record, that these parallel stems may have been but
the internal fibres of some larger plant, whose more succulent portions
have disappeared; and certainly, while such instances of anastomosis are
rare among the _stems_ of plants, they are common enough among their
_internal fibres_, as all who have examined the macerated _debris_ of a
kitchen-garden or a turnip-field must have had occasion to remark. We
sometimes, however, find cases of anastomosis among the stems of even
the higher plants. I have seen oftener than once, in neglected hawthorn
hedges, the branch of one plant entering into the stem of another, and
becoming incorporated with its substance; and we are told by Professor
Balfour, that this kind of chance adhesion is often seen in the branches
of the ivy; and that not unfrequently, by a similar process, the roots
of contiguous trees are united. Nor does it seem improbable, that what
occasionally takes place among the higher plants of the present time may
have been common among some of the comparatively low plants of so
ancient a period as that of the Middle Old Red Sandstone. This formation
of the gray tilestones has furnished one vegetable organism apparently
higher in the scale than those just described, in a well marked
Lepidodendron, which exhibits, like the Araucarian of the Lower Old Red,
though less distinctly, the internal structure. It was found about
sixteen years ago in a pavement quarry near Clockbriggs,--the last
station on the Aberdeen and Forfar Railway as the traveller approaches
the town of Forfar from the north. I owe my specimen of this ancient
Lepidodendron to Mr. William Miller, banker, Dundee, an accomplished
geologist, who has taken no little trouble in determining its true
history. He has ascertained that it occurred deep in the rock,
seventy-one feet from the surface; that the beds which rested over it
were composed, in the descending order, first, of a conglomerate thirty
feet thick; secondly, of a red rock four feet thick; thirdly, of
twenty-eight feet of the soft shaly substance known to the quarriers as
caulm; and fourthly, of more than nine feet of gray pavement,
immediately under which, in a soft, argillaceous stratum, lay the
organism. It was about four feet in length, bulged out at the lower end
into a bulb-like protuberance, which may have been, however, merely an
accidental result of its state of keeping; and threw off, at an acute
angle, two branches about a foot from the top. It was covered with a
bark of brittle coal, which is, however, wanting in all the fragments
that have been preserved; and was resolved internally into a brown
calcareous substance of about the hardness of ordinary marble, and very
much resembling that into which the petrifactive agencies have
consolidated the fossil trees of Granton and Craigleith. From the
decorticated condition of the surviving fragments, and the imperfect
preservation of the interior structure, in all save the central portions
of its transverse sections, it yields no specific marks by which to
distinguish it; but enough remains in its irregular network of cells,
devoid of linear arrangement, and untraversed by medullary rays, to
demonstrate its generic standing as a Lepidodendron.
[It has been questioned whether the lower place in the Old Red System
should be assigned to the flagstones of Caithness and Ross, with their
characteristic Dipterus and Coccosteus beds, or to the gray tilestones
of Forfar and Kincardineshires, with their equally characteristic
Cephalaspis. The evidence on the point is certainly not so conclusive as
I deemed it fifteen years ago, when our highest authority on the subject
not only regarded the tilestone of the Silurian regions of England as a
member of the Old Red Sandstone (an arrangement which I am still
disposed to deem the true one), but also held further, that there had
been detected in this formation near Downtown Castle, Herefordshire,
broken remains of _Dipterus macrolepidotus_, one of the best marked
ichthyolites of the flagstones of Caithness and Orkney. A great and
unbroken series of fossiliferous rocks, with Dipterus at its base,
Cephalaspis in its medial spaces, and Holoptychius at its top, might
well be regarded as the analogue of the Old Red of Scotland, with the
Caithness flagstones ranged at its bottom, the Cephalaspis beds of
Forfarshire placed in its middle, and the Holoptychius beds of Scot-Crag
and Clashbinnie on its upper horizon; but since that time the tilestones
have been transferred to the Upper Silurian division of rocks, and the
evidence furnished by their supposed Dipterus has not been confirmed.
And as the Old Red Sandstones of Scotland have no true fossiliferous
base, but rest on primary rocks both to the south and north of the
Grampians, it may be regarded as in some degree a moot point whether the
lowest fossiliferous beds to the north be older or newer than those to
the south, or, what is quite possible, of the same age. Provisionally,
however, I have arranged my paper on the supposition that the Coccostean
formation of the north is the lowest and oldest of the three; and this
from the following considerations. In the first place, the Coccosteus
and its contemporaries appear in the north at a very short distance
above the base of the system. I have disinterred an Osteolepis from a
fish bed near Cromarty only thirty-three feet over the great
conglomerate, and only a hundred and twenty-nine feet over the granitic
gneiss beneath; whereas the Cephalaspis beds occur high above the
primary base of the system in the south,--at some distance over even the
thick conglomerate of Stonehaven and Dunnottar; and under this
conglomerate, as shown in the section furnished by the valley of the
North Esk, there lies a pale red sandstone member of the system,
estimated by Colonel Imrie at seven hundred and eighty feet in
thickness. The conglomerate itself he estimates at twelve hundred feet.
Adopting as correct Colonel Imrie's section, taken along the banks of
the North Esk,--and the colonel was unquestionably a truthful
observer,--the Cephalaspis beds of the south lie nearly two thousand
(nineteen hundred and eighty) feet above the Azoic slates on which the
Old Red Sandstone of Forfarshire rests, whereas the Coccosteus and
Osteolepis beds of the north lie only one hundred and twenty-nine feet
over the Azoic gneiss on which the Old Red Sandstone of Cromarty rests.
There is thus at least _room_ in the south for an underlying
fossiliferous formation between that of the Cephalaspis and the base of
the system, but none in the north beneath that of the Coccosteus and its
base. In the north we find the _room_ lying above, between the
Coccostean and Holoptychian formations, and represented by that great
unfossiliferous deposit of pale sandstone to which the hills of Hoy and
the rocks of Duncansbay Head and of Tarbet Ness belong. Further, in the
second place, while the upper or Holoptychian formation is found
_directly_ overlying that of the Coccosteus in only one
locality,--Moray,--we find it directly overlying that of the Cephalaspis
in _two_ widely separated localities;--in the vast band of Old Red which
runs diagonally across the island from sea to sea, parallel to the
Grampian chain, and in the immensely developed Red Sandstones of England
and Wales. And it is of course more probable that the two corroborative
instances should represent the natural succession of the formations, and
the single instance the accidental gap in the scale consequent on the
missing formation, than that, _vice versa_, the solitary instance should
represent the natural succession, while the two mutually corroborative
ones should represent, in localities widely apart, the mere accident of
the gap. But, in the third place, I attach more weight to a conclusion
founded on the positive character of the groups of organic remains by
which the three great formations of the Old Red System are
characterized, than I do to either of these considerations. The
organisms of the Cephalaspian deposits differ _generically_, and in
their whole aspect, from both those of the Coccostean and Holoptychian
formations; whereas the organisms of the Coccostean formations, while
they resemble generically and in the group those of the Holoptychian
one, mainly differ from them _specifically_. The extreme _generic_
difference in the one case argues evidently a great difference in
_condition_,--the lesser specific difference in the other, a great
difference in point _of time_. The Cephalaspian formation might, as a
fresh water formation, be nearly contemporary with either of the other
two, or, as seems more probable, interposed between them; while they
themselves, on the other hand, generically similar and decidedly marine
in their character, must have been so widely separated in time, that all
the species of the lower group became extinct ere those of the upper one
had been ushered into being. And such are some of the considerations
that still lead me, notwithstanding the failure of previous evidence, to
hold, at least, provisionally, that our Scottish flagstones to the north
of the Grampians occupy a lower horizon than our Scottish tilestones to
the south. It must, however, be stated, on the other hand, that the
crustaceans of the gray tilestones of Forfar and Kincardine not a little
resemble those of the Upper Silurian and red tilestone beds of England;
and that, judging from the ichthyodorulites found in both, their fishes
must have been at least generically allied. The crustaceans of the upper
Silurian of Lesmahagow, too, seem certainly much akin to those of the
Forfarshire tilestones.]
[Illustration: Fig. 124.
CYCLOPTERUS HIBERNICUS.]
Above this gray tilestone formation lies the Upper Old Red Sandstone,
with its peculiar group of ichthyic organisms, none of which seem
specially identical with those of either the Caithness or the
Forfarshire beds. For it is an interesting circumstance, suggestive
surely of the vast periods which must have elapsed during its
deposition, that the great Old Red System has, as I have just said, its
three distinct platforms of organic existence, each wholly different
from the others. Generically and in the group, however, the Upper fishes
much more closely resemble, I repeat, the fishes of the Lower or
Caithness and Cromarty platform, than they do those of the Forfarshire
and Kincardine one. The vegetable remains of the Upper formation in
Scotland are both rare and ill preserved. I have seen what I deemed
fucoidal markings dimly impressed on the planes of some of the strata,
not in the carbonaceous form so common in the other two formations, but
as mere colored films of a deeper red than the surrounding matrix.
Further, I have detected in the same beds, and existing in the same
state, fragments of a striated organism, which may have formed part of
either a true calamite, like those of the Coal Measures, or of some such
striated but jointless vegetable as that of the Lower Old Red of Thurso
and Lerwick.[51] With these markings ferns are occasionally found; and
to one of these, from the light which it throws on the true place in the
scale of a series of deposits in a sister country, there attaches no
little interest. I owe my specimen to Mr. John Stewart of Edinburgh, who
laid it open in a micaceous red sandstone in the quarry of Prestonhaugh,
near Dunse, where it is associated with some of the better known
ichthyic organisms of the Upper Old Red Sandstone, such as _Pterichthys
major_ and _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_. Existing as but a deep red film
in the rock, with a tolerably well defined outline, but without trace of
the characteristic venation on which the fossil botanist, in dealing
with the ferns, founds his generic distinctions, I could only determine
that it was either a Cyclopterus or Neuropterus. My collection was
visited, however, by the late lamented Edward Forbes, only a few weeks
before his death; and he at once recognized in my Berwickshire fern, so
unequivocally an organism of the Upper Old Red, the _Cyclopterus
Hibernicus_ of those largely developed beds of yellow sandstone which
form so marked a feature in the geology of the south of Ireland, and
whose true place, whether as Upper Old Red or Lower Carboniferous, has
been the subject of so much controversy. I had been previously
introduced by Professor Forbes, in the Museum of Economic Geology in
Jermyn Street, London, to an interesting collection of plants from these
yellow beds, and had an opportunity afforded me of examining the only
ichthyic organism hitherto found associated with them; and was struck,
though I could not identify its species, with its peculiarly Old Red
aspect; but the evidence of the Cyclopterus is of course more conclusive
than that of the fish; and we may, I think, legitimately conclude, that
in Ireland, as in our own country, it was a contemporary of the great
Pterichthys (_P. major_),--the hugest, and at least one of the last, of
his race,--and gave its rich green to the hill sides of what is still
the Emerald Island during the latter ages of the Old Red Sandstone, and
ere the Carboniferous period had yet begun. The _Cyclopterus
Hibernicus_, as shown both by the Prestonhaugh specimen and those of
Ireland, was a bipinnate fern of very considerable size,--probably a
tree fern. Its pinnæ, opposite in the lower part of the frond, are
alternate in the upper; while its leaflets, which are of a
sub-rhomboidal form, and so closely ranged as to impinge on each other,
are at least generally alternate in their arrangement throughout. Among
living plants it seems most nearly represented by a South American
species,--_Didymocloena pulcherrima_,--one of the smaller tree ferns.
The leaves of this graceful species are bipinnate, like those of the
fossil; and the pinnæ (thickly set with simple, alternately arranged
leaflets) are opposite in the lower part of the frond, and alternate in
the upper. Widely as they are separated in time, the recent South
American Didymocloena and the Old Red Sandstone Cyclopterus, that
passed into extinction ere the times of the Coal, might be ranged
together, so far at least as appears from their forms, as kindred
species. It were very desirable that we had a good monograph of the
Irish Old Red plants, the contemporaries of the latter, as the
completest and best preserved representatives of the Middle Palæozoic
flora yet found. Sir Roderick Murchison has figured a single pinnæ of
this Cyclopterus in his recently published "Siluria;" and Sir Charles
Lyell, both that and one of its contemporary Lepidodendra, in the last
edition of his "Elements." These interesting fragments, however, serve
but to excite our curiosity for more. When urging Professor Edward
Forbes on the subject, ere parting from him for, alas! what proved to be
the last time, he intimated an intention of soon taking it up; but I
fear his purposed monograph represents only one of many works, important
to science, which his untimely death has arrested for mayhap long years
to come.
In the uppermost beds of the Upper Old Red formation in Scotland, which
are usually of a pale or light yellow color, the vegetable remains again
become strongly carbonaceous, but their state of preservation continues
bad,--too bad to admit of the determination of either species or genera;
and not until we rise a very little beyond the system do we find the
remains of a flora either rich or well preserved. But very remarkable is
the change which at this stage at once occurs. We pass at a single
stride from great poverty to great wealth. The suddenness of the change
seems suited to remind one of that experienced by the voyager,
when,--after traversing for many days some wide expanse of ocean,
unvaried save by its banks of floating sea weed, or, where occasionally
and at wide intervals, he picks up some leaf-bearing bough, or marks
some fragment of drift weed go floating past,--he enters at length the
sheltered lagoon of some coral island, and sees all around the deep
green of a tropical vegetation descending in tangled luxuriance to the
water's edge,--tall, erect ferns, and creeping lycopodiaceæ, and the
pandanus, with its ærial roots and its screw-like clusters of narrow
leaves, and, high over all, tall palms, with their huge pinnate fronds,
and their curiously aggregated groups of massive fruit. And yet the
more meagre vegetation of the earlier time is not without its special
interest. The land plants of the Old Red Sandstone seem to compose, all
over the world, the most ancient of the terrestrial floras. It was held
only a few years ago, that the Silurians of the United States had their
plants allied to the Lepidodendron. But the group in which these occur
has since been transferred from the Upper Silurian to the Old Red
System; and we find it expressly stated by Professor H. D. Rogers, in
his valuable contribution to the "Physical Atlas" (second edition,
1856), that "the Cadent [or Lower Old Red] strata are the oldest
American formations in which remains of a true terrestrial vegetation
have yet been discovered." It has been shown, too, by Sir Roderick
Murchison, that the supposed Silurian plants of Oporto are in reality
Carboniferous, and owe their apparent position to a reverse folding of
the strata. I have already referred to the solitary spore-cases of the
Ludlow Rocks; and beneath these rocks, says Sir Roderick (1854), "no
remains of plants have been discovered which are recognizably of
terrestrial origin." Scanty, too, as the terrestrial flora of the Old
Red Sandstone everywhere is, we find it exhibiting very definitely the
leading Palæozoic features. Its prevailing plants are the ferns and
their apparent allies. It has in our own country, as has been just
shown, its ferns, its lepidodendra, its striated plants allied to the
calamites, and its decided araucanite; in America, in the Cadent series,
it had its "plants allied to ferns and lepidodendra;" and in the
Devonian basin of Sabero in Spain, its characteristic organisms are, a
lepidodendron (_L. Chemungensis_), and a very peculiar fern
(_Sphenopteris laxus_).[52] But while in its main features it resembled
the succeeding flora of the Carboniferous period, it seems in all its
forms to have been specifically distinct. It was the independent flora
of an earlier creation than that to which we owe the coal. For the
meagreness of the paper in which I have attempted to describe it as it
occurs in Scotland, I have but one apology to offer. My lecture contains
but little; but then, such is the scantiness of the materials on which I
had to work, that it could not have contained much: if, according to the
dramatist, the "amount be beggarly," it is because the "boxes are
empty." Partly, apparently, from the circumstance that the organisms of
this flora were ill suited for preservation in the rocks, and partly
because, judging from what appears, the most ancient lands of the globe
were widely scattered and of narrow extent, this oldest of the floras is
everywhere the most meagre.
LECTURE TWELFTH.
ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND.
PART II.
In the noble flora of the Coal Measures much still remains to be done in
Scotland. Our Lower Carboniferous rocks are of immense development; the
Limestones of Burdiehouse, with their numerous terrestrial plants, occur
many hundred feet beneath our Mountain Limestones; and our list of
vegetable species peculiar to these lower deposits is still very
incomplete. Even in those higher Carboniferous rocks with which the many
coal workings of the country have rendered us comparatively familiar,
there appears to be still a good deal of the new and the unknown to
repay the labor of future exploration. It was only last year that Mr.
Gourlay[53] of this city (Glasgow) added to our fossil flora a new
Volkmannia from the coal field of Carluke; and I detected very recently
in a neighboring locality (the Airdrie coal field), though in but an
indifferent state of keeping, what seems to be a new and very peculiar
fern. It presents at first sight more the appearance of a Cycadaceous
frond than any other vegetable organism of the Carboniferous age which I
have yet seen. From a mid stem there proceed at right angles, and in
alternate order, a series of sessile, lanceolate, acute leaflets, nearly
two inches in length by about an eighth part of an inch in breadth, and
about three lines apart. Each is furnished with a slender midrib; and,
what seems a singular, though not entirely unique, feature in a fern,
their edges are densely hirsute, and bristle with thick, short hair,
nearly as stiff as prickles. The venation is not distinctly preserved;
but enough remains to show that it must have been peculiar,--apparently
radiating outwards from a series of centres ranged along the midrib.
Nay, the apparent hairs seem to be but prolongations of the nerves
carried beyond the edges of the leaflets. There is a Stigmaria, too, on
the table, very ornate in its sculpture, of which I have now found three
specimens in a quarry of the Lower Coal Measures near Portobello, that
has still to be figured and described. In this richly ornamented
Stigmaria the characteristic areolæ present the ordinary aspect. Each,
however, forms the centre of a sculptured star, consisting of from
eighteen to twenty rays, or rather the centre of a sculptured flower of
the composite order, resembling a meadow daisy or sea-aster. The minute
petals,--if we are to accept the latter comparison,--are of an
irregularly lenticular form, generally entire, but in some instances
ranged in two, or even three, concentric lines round the depressed
centre of the areolæ; while the interspaces outside are occupied by
numerous fretted markings, resembling broken fragments of petals, which,
though less regularly ranged than the others, are effective in imparting
a richly ornate aspect to the whole.
[Illustration: Fig. 125.]
[Illustration: Fig. 126.
STIGMARIA.]
[Illustration: Fig. 127.
THE SAME, MAGNIFIED.]
Ever since the appearance, in 1846, of Mr. Binney's paper on the
relations of stigmaria to sigillaria as roots and stems, I have been
looking for distinguishing specific marks among the former; and, failing
for a time to find any, I concluded that, though the stems of the
sigillarian genus were variously sculptured, their roots might in all
the species have been the same. The present rich specimen does seem,
however, to bear the specific stamp; and, from the peculiar character of
the termination of another specimen on the table, I am inclined to hold
that the stigmaria may have borne the appearance rather of underground
stems than of proper roots. This specimen suddenly terminates, at a
thickness of two and a half inches, in a rounded point, abrupt as that
of one of the massier cacti; and every part of the blunt sudden
termination is thickly fretted over with the characteristic areolæ. The
slim tubular rootlets must have stuck out on every side from the obtuse
rounded termination of this underground stem, as we see, on a small
scale, the leaflets of our larger club mosses sticking out from what are
comparatively the scarce less abrupt terminations of their creeping
stems and branches. In at least certain stages of growth the sub-ærial
stems of Lepidodendron also terminated abruptly (see Fig. 24); and the
only terminal point of Ulodendron I ever saw was nearly as obtuse as
that of Stigmaria.
[Illustration: Fig. 128.
STIGMARIA.]
I have been long desirous of acquainting myself with the true character
of this latter plant (Ulodendron), but hitherto my labors have not been
very successful. A specimen of _Ulodendron minus_, however, now on the
table, which I disinterred several years ago from out a bed of
ferruginous shale in the Water of Leith, a little above the village of
Colinton, exhibits several peculiarities which, so far as I know, have
not yet been described. Though rather less than ten inches in length by
about three inches in breadth, it exhibits no fewer than seven of those
round, beautifully sculptured scars, ranged rectilinearly along the
trunk, by which this ancient genus is so remarkably characterized. It
is covered with small, sharply relieved, obovate scales, most of them
furnished with an apparent midrib, and with their edges slightly turned
up; from which peculiarities, and their great beauty, they seem suited
to remind the architect of that style of sculpture adopted by Palladio
from his master Vitruvius, when, in ornamenting the Corinthian and
composite torus, lie fretted it into closely imbricated obovate leaves.
These scales are ranged in elegant curves, not unlike those ornamental
curves,--a feat of the turning-lathe,--which one sees roughening the
backs of ladies' watches of French manufacture. My fossil exhibited, as
it lay in the rock, what I never saw in any other specimen,--a true
branch sticking out at an acute angle from the stem, and fretted with
scales of a peculiar form, which in one little corner appear also on the
main stem, but which differ so considerably from those of the obovate,
apparently imbricated type, that, if found on a separate specimen, they
might be held to indicate difference of species. It has been shown by
Messrs. Lindley and Hutton, on the evidence of one of the specimens
figured in the "Fossil Flora," that the line of circular scars so
remarkable in this genus, and which is held to be the impressions made
by a rectilinear range of almost sessile cones, existed in duplicate on
each stem,--a row occurring on two of the sides of the plant directly
opposite each other. The branch in my specimen struck off from one of
the intermediate sides at right angles with the cones. We already know
that these were ranged in one plane; nor, if the branches were ranged in
one plane also,--certainly the disposition of branch which would consort
best with such a disposition of cone,--would the arrangement be without
example in the vegetable kingdom as it even now exists. "Our host," says
the late Captain Basil Hall, in his brief description of the island of
Java, "carried us to see a singular tree, which had been brought from
Madagascar, called familiarly the _Traveller's Friend_, Urania being, I
believe, its botanic name. We found it to differ from most other trees
in having all its branches in one plane, like the sticks of a fan or the
feathers of a peacock's tail." I may further mention, that the specimen
which showed me the abrupt cactus-like terminations of Ulodendron
repeated the evidence of Messrs. Lindley and Hutton's specimen regarding
the arrangement of the cone scars on opposite sides, and showed also
that these scars ascended to within little more than an inch of the top
of the plant.
As there are cases in which the _position_ of a fossil plant may add,
from its bearing on geologic history, a threefold interest to the fossil
itself, regarded simply as an organism, I may be permitted to refer to a
circumstance already recorded, that there was a well marked Bechera
detected about two years ago by Dr. Macbean of Edinburgh, an
accomplished naturalist and careful observer, in a thin argillaceous
stratum, interposed, in the Queen's Park, between a bed of columnar
basalt and a bed of trap-tuff, in the side of the eminence occupied atop
by the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel. The stratified bed in which it
occurs seems, from its texture and color, to be composed mainly of
trappean materials, but deposited and arranged in water; and abounds in
carbonaceous markings, usually in so imperfect a state of keeping that,
though long known to some of the Edinburgh geologists, not a single
species, or even genus, were they able to determine. All that could be
said was, that they seemed fucoidal, and might of course belong to any
age. The Bechera, however, shows that the deposit is one of the Lower
Coal Measures. There was found associated with it a tooth of a
Carboniferous Holoptychius, whose evidence bore out the same conclusion;
and both fossils derive an importance from the light which they throw
on the age of the bed of tuff which underlies the stratum in which they
occur. At least this trap-rock must be as old as the fossiliferous layer
which rests upon it, or rather, as shown by its underlying position, a
little older: it must be a trap of the earlier Carboniferous period.
Further, it must have been, not injected among the strata, but poured
out over the surface,--in all probability covered at the time by water;
and there must have formed over it, ere another overflow of trap took
place, a thin sedimentary bed charged with fragments of the plants of
the period, and visited, when in the course of deposition, by some of
its fishes.
[Illustration: Fig. 129.
SPHENOPTERIS BIFIDA.
(_Burdiehouse._)]
Even among the vegetable organisms of our Coal Measures, already
partially described and figured, much remains to be accomplished in the
way of restoration. Portions of _Sphenopteris bifida_, for instance, a
fern of the Lower Carboniferous rocks have been repeatedly figured; but
a beautiful specimen on the table, which exhibits what seems to be the
complete frond of the plant, will give, I doubt not, fresh ideas
respecting the general framework, if I may so speak, of this skeleton
fern, to even those best acquainted with the figures; and an elaborate
restoration of its contemporary, _Sphenopteris affinis_ (see
frontispiece) which I completed from a fine series of specimens in my
collection, will be new, as a whole, to those most familiar with this
commonest of the Burdiehouse fossils. From comparisons instituted
between minute portions of this Sphenopteris and a recent fern, it has
been held considerably to resemble a Davallia of the West Indies;
whereas it will be seen from the entire frond that it was characterized
by very striking peculiarities, exemplified, say some of our higher
botanical authorities, to whom I have submitted my restoration, by no
fern that now lives. The frond of _Davallia Canariensis_, though unlike
in its venation, greatly resembles in general outline one of the larger
pinnæ of _Sphenopteris affinis_; but these pinnæ form only a small part
of the entire frond of this Sphenopteris. It was furnished with a stout
leafless rachis, or leaf-stalk, exceedingly similar in form to that of
our common brake (_Pteris aquilina_). So completely, indeed, did it
exhibit the same club-like, slightly bent termination, the same gradual
diminution in thickness, and the same smooth surface, that one
accustomed to see this part of the bracken used as a thatch can scarce
doubt that the stipes of Sphenopteris would have served the purpose
equally well; nay, that were it still in existence to be so employed, a
roof thatched with it, on which the pinnæ and leaflets were concealed,
and only the club-like stems exposed, row above row, in the style of the
fern-thatcher, could not be distinguished, so far as form and size went,
from a roof thatched with brake. High above the club-like termination of
the rachis the stem divided into two parts, each of which, a little
higher up, also divided into two; these in turn, in at least the larger
fronds, also bifurcated; and this law of bifurcation,--a marked, mayhap
unique, peculiarity in a fern,--regulated all the larger divisions of
the frond, though its smaller pinnæ and leaflets were alternate. It was
a further peculiarity of the plant that, unlike the brake, it threw off,
ere the main divisions of its rachis took place, two pinnæ placed in the
alternate order, and of comparatively small size. The frond of
_Sphenopteris bifida_ was of a more simple form than that of its larger
congener, and not a little resembled a living fern of New Zealand,
_Coenopteris vivipara_. It was tripinnate; its secondary stems were
placed directly opposite on the midrib, but its tertiary ones in the
alternate arrangement; and its leaflets which were also alternate, were
as rectilinear and slim as mere veins, or as the thread-like leaflets of
asparagus. Like the fronds of Coenopteris when not in seed, it must
have presented the appearance of the mere macerated framework of a fern.
I need scarce remark that, independently of the scientific interest
which must attach to restorations of these early plants, they speak
powerfully to the imagination, and supply it with materials from which
to construct the vanished landscapes of the Carboniferous ages. From one
such restored fern as the two now submitted to the Association, it is
not difficult to pass in fancy to the dank slopes of the ancient land of
the Lower Coal Measures, when they waved as thickly with graceful
Sphenopteres as our existing hill sides with the common brake; and when
every breeze that rustled through the old forests bent in mimic waves
their slim flexible stems and light and graceful foliage.
In 1844, when Professor Nicol, of Marischal College, Aberdeen, appended
to his interesting "Guide to the Geology of Scotland," a list of the
Scottish fossils known at the time, he enumerated only two vegetable
species of the Scotch Oolitic system,--_Equisetum columnare_ and
_Pinites_ or _Peuce Eiggensis_; the former one of the early discoveries
of our distinguished President, Sir Roderick Murchison; the latter, of
the late Mr. William Nicol of Edinburgh. Chiefly from researches in the
Lias of Eathie, near Cromarty, and in the Oolites of Sutherland and the
Hebrides, I have been enabled to increase the list from two to rather
more than fifty species,--not a great number, certainly, regarded as the
sole representative of a flora; and yet it may be deemed comparatively
not a very small one by such as may remember, that in 1837, when Dr.
Buckland published the second edition of his "Bridgewater Treatise,"
Adolphe Brogniart had enumerated only seventy species of plants as
occurring in all the Secondary formations of Europe, from the Chalk to
the Trias inclusive. In a paper such as the present I can of course do
little more than just indicate a few of the more striking features of
the Scottish flora of the middle Secondary ages. Like that of the period
of the true Coal, it had its numerous coniferous trees. As shown by the
fossil woods of Helmsdale and Eigg, old Oolitic Scotland, like the
Scotland of three centuries ago, must have had its mighty forests of
pine;[54] and in one respect these trees seem to have more nearly
resembled those of the recent pine forests of our country than the trees
of the coniferous forests of the remote Carboniferous era. For while we
scarce ever find a cone associated with the coniferous woods of the Coal
Measures,--Lindley and Hatton never saw but one from all the English
coal fields, and Mr. Alexander Bryson of Edinburgh, only one from all
the coal fields of Scotland,--tree-cones of at least four different
species, more probably of five, are not rare in our Scottish deposits of
the Lias and Oolite. It seems not improbable that in the Carboniferous
genera Pinites, Pitus, and Anabathra, which approach but remotely to
aught that now exists, the place of the ligneous scaly cone may have
been taken, as in the junipers and the yews, by a perishable berry;
while the Pines and Araucarians of the Oolite were, like their congeners
in recent times, in reality coniferous, that is, cone-bearing trees. It
is another characteristic of these Secondary conifers, that while the
woods of the Palæozoic periods exhibit often, like those of the
tropics, none of the dense concentric lines of annual growth which mark
the reign of winter, these annual lines are scarce less strongly
impressed on the Oolitic woods than on those of Norway or of our own
country in the present day. In some of the fossil trees these yearly
rings are of great breadth; they seem to have sprung up in the rich soil
of sheltered hollows and plains, and to have increased in diameter from
half an inch to three quarters of an inch yearly; while in other trees
of the same species the yearly zones of growth are singularly
narrow,--in some instances little more than half a line in thickness.
Rooted on some exposed hill side, in a shallow and meagre soil, they
increased their diameter during the twelvemonth little more than a line
in the severer seasons, and little more than an eighth part of an inch
even when the seasons were most favorable. Further, whether the rings be
large or small, we ordinarily find them occurring in the same specimens
in groups of larger and smaller. In one of my Helmsdale specimens,
indicative generally of rapid growth, there are four contiguous annual
rings, which measure in all an inch and two twelfths across, while the
four contiguous rings immediately beside them measure only half an inch.
"If, at the present day," says a distinguished fossil botanist, "a warm
and moist summer produces a broader annual layer than a cold and dry
one, and if fossil plants exhibit such appearances as we refer in recent
plants to a diversity of summers, then it is reasonable to suppose that
a similar diversity formerly prevailed." The same reasoning is of course
as applicable to _groups_ of annual layers as to _single_ annual layers;
and may we not venture to infer from the almost invariable occurrence of
such groups in the woods of this ancient system, that that
ill-understood law of the weather which gives us in irregular
succession groups of colder and warmer seasons, and whose operation, as
Bacon tells us, was first remarked in the provinces of the Netherlands,
was as certainly in existence during the ages of the Oolite as at the
present time?
[Illustration: Fig. 130.
CONIFERS?]
[Illustration: Fig. 131.
CONIFER TWIGS.]
Twigs which exhibit the foliage of these ancient conifers seem to be
less rare in our Scotch deposits than in those of England of the same
age. My collection contains fossil sprigs, with the slim needle-like
leaves attached, of what seem to be from six to seven different
species; and it is worthy of notice, that they resemble in the group
rather the coniferæ of the southern than those of the northern
hemisphere. One sprig in my collection seems scarcely distinguishable
from that of the recent _Altingia excelsa_; another, from that of the
recent _Altingia cunninghami_. Lindley and Hutton figure in their fossil
flora a minute branch of _Dacrydium cupressinum_, in order to show how
nearly the twigs of a large tree, from fifty to a hundred feet high, may
resemble some of the "fossils referable to Lycopodiaceæ." More than one
of the Oolitic twigs in my collection are of a resembling character, and
may have belonged either to cone-bearing trees or to club mosses.
Respecting, however, the real character of at least one of the
specimens,--a minute branch from the Lias of Eathie, with the leaflets
attached,--there can be no mistake. The thicker part of the stem is in
such a state of keeping, that it presents to the microscope, in a sliced
preparation, the internal structure, and exhibits, as in recent
coniferous twigs of a year's growth, a central pith, a single ring of
reticulated tissue arranged in lines that radiate outwards, and a thin
layer of enveloping bark. Nothing, then, can be more certain than that
this ancient twig, which must be accepted as representative of the
foliage of whole forests of the Secondary ages in Scotland, formed part
of a conifer of the Lias; and the foliage of several of the other twigs,
its contemporaries, though I have failed to demonstrate their true
character in the same way, bear a scarce less coniferous aspect. The
cones of the period, from the circumstance that they are locked up in a
hard limestone that clings closely around their scales, and from the
further circumstance that the semi-calcareous lignite into which they
are resolved is softer and less tenacious than the enclosing matrix,
present, when laid open, not their outer surfaces, but mere sections of
their interior; and give, in consequence, save in their general
proportions and outline, but few specific marks by which to distinguish
them. We see, however, in some cases in these sections what would be
otherwise unseen,--the flat naked seeds lying embedded in their hollow
receptacles between the scales, and in as perfect a state of keeping as
the seeds of recent pines that had ripened only a twelvemonth ago. Had
not the vitality of seeds its limits in time, like life of all other
kinds, one might commit these perfect fossil germs to the soil, in the
hope of seeing the old extinct forests called, through their agency, a
second time into existence. Of three apparent species of cones which
occur in the Eathie Lias, the smallest seems to have resembled in size
and appearance that of the Scotch fir; the largest, which consisted from
bottom to top, as seen in section, of from nine to ten scales, appears
to have been more in the proportions of the oblong oval cones of the
spruce family; while a cone of intermediate length, but of considerably
greater breadth, assumed the rounded form of the cones of the cedar. I
have found in the same deposit what seems to be the sprig of a conifer,
with four apparently embryo cones attached to it in the alternate order.
These are rather more sessile than the young cones of the larch; but the
aspect of the whole is that of a larch twig in early summer, when the
minute and tender cones, possessed of all the beauty of flowers, first
appear along its sides.
[Illustration: Fig. 132.]
[Illustration: Fig. 133.
ZAMIA.]
[Illustration: Fig. 134.
ZAMIA.]
Among conifers of the Pine and Araucarian type we mark the first
appearance in this system, in at least Scotland, of the genus Thuja. One
of the Helmsdale plants of this genus closely resembles the common Arbor
Vitæ (_Thuja occidentalis_) of our gardens and shrubberies. It exhibits
the same numerous slim, thick-clustered branchlets, covered over by the
same minute, sessile, scale-like leaves; and so entirely reminds one of
the recent Thuja, that it seems difficult to conceive of it as the
member of a flora so ancient as that of the Oolite. But not a few of the
Oolitic plants in Scotland bear this modern aspect. The great
development of its Cycadaceæ,--an order unknown in our Coal
Measures,--also forms a prominent feature of the Oolitic flora. One of
the first known genera of this curious order,--the genus
Pterophyllum,--appears in the Trias. It distinctively marks the
commencement of the Secondary flora, and intimates that the once great
Palæozoic flora, after gradually waning throughout the Permian ages, and
becoming extinct at their close, had been succeeded by a vegetation
altogether new. At least one of the Helmsdale forms of this family is
identical with a Yorkshire species already named and figured,--_Zamia
pectinata_: a well marked Zamia which occurs in the Lias of Eathie
appears to be new. Its pinnate leaves were furnished with a strong woody
midrib, so well preserved in the rock, that it yields its internal
structure to the microscope. The ribbon-like pinnæ or leaflets were
rectilinear, retaining their full breadth until they united to the stem
at right angles, but set somewhat awry; and, like several of the recent
Zamiæ, they were striped longitudinally with cord-like lines. (Fig.
133.) Even the mode of decay of this Zamia, as shown by the abrupt
termination of its leaflets, exactly resembled that of its existing
congeners. (Fig. 134.) The withered points of the pinnæ of recent Zamiæ
drop off as if clipped across with a pair of scissors; and in fossil
fronds of this Zamia of the Lias we find exactly the same clipped-like
appearance. (Fig. 135.) Another Scotch Zamia (Fig. 136), which occurs in
the Lower Oolite of Helmsdale, resembles the Eathie one in the breadth
of its leaflets, but they are not wholly so rectilinear, diminishing
slightly towards their base of attachment; they are ranged, too, along
the stem or midrib, not at a right angle, but at an acute one; the line
of attachment is not set awry, but on the general plane of the leaf; and
the midrib itself is considerably less massive and round. A third
species from the same locality bears a general resemblance to the
latter; but the leaflets are narrower at the base, and, as the print
indicates (Fig. 136), so differently attached to the stem, that from the
pressure in the rock most of them have become detached; while yet a
fourth species (Fig. 137), very closely resembles a Zamia of the
Scarborough Oolite,--_Z. lanceolata_. The leaflets, however, contract
much more suddenly from their greatest breadth than those of
_lanceolata_, into a pseudo-footstalk; and the contraction takes place
not almost equally on both sides, as in that species, but almost
exclusively on the upper side. And so, provisionally at least, this
Helmsdale Zamia may be regarded as specifically new.
[Illustration: Fig. 135.]
[Illustration: Fig. 136.]
[Illustration: Fig. 137.]
[Illustration: Fig. 138.
CONE.]
With the leaves of the Eathie Zamia, we find, in this northern outlier
of the Lias, cones of a peculiar form, which, like the leaves
themselves, are still unfigured and undescribed, and some of which could
scarce have belonged to any coniferous tree. In one of these (Fig. 138),
the ligneous bracts or scales, narrow and long, and gradually tapering
till they assume nearly the awl-shaped form, cluster out thick from the
base and middle portions of the cone, and, like the involucral
appendages of the hazel-nut, or the sepals of the yet unfolded rose-bud,
sweep gracefully upwards to the top, where they present at their margins
minute denticulations. In another species the bracts are broader,
thinner, and more leaf-like: they rise, too, more from the base of the
cone, and less from its middle portions; so that the whole must have
resembled an enormous bud, with strong woody scales, some of which
extended from base to apex. The first described of these two species
seems to have been more decidedly a _cone_ than the other; but it is
probable that they were both connecting links between such leathern
seed-bearing flowers as we find developed in _Cycas revoluta_, and such
seed-bearing cones as we find exemplified in _Zamia pungens_. The
bud-like cone, however, does not seem to have been that of a Cycadaceous
plant, as it occupied evidently not a terminal position on the plant
that bore it, like the cones of Zamia or the flowers of Cycas, but a
lateral one, like the lateral flowers of some of the Cactus tribe.
Another class of vegetable forms, of occasional occurrence in the
Helmsdale beds, seems intermediate between the Cycadaceæ and the ferns:
at least, so near is the approach to the ordinary fern outline, while
retaining the stiff ligneous character of Zamia, that it is scarce less
difficult to determine to which of the two orders of plants such
organisms belonged, than to decide whether some of the slim graceful
sprigs of foliage that occur in the rocks beside them belonged to the
conifers or the club mosses. And I am informed by Sir Charles Lyell,
that (as some of the existing conifers bear a foliage scarce
distinguishable from that of Lycopodiaceæ), so a recently discovered
Zamia is furnished with fronds that scarce differ from those of a fern.
Even _Zamia pectinata_ may, as Sternberg remarks, have been a fern.
Lindley and Hutton place it merely provisionally among the Cycadaceæ, in
deference to the judgment of Adolphe Brogniart, and point out its
resemblance to _Polypodium pectinatum_; and a small Helmsdale frond
which I have placed beside it bears the impress of a character scarce
less equivocal. The flora of the Oolite was peculiarly a flora of
intermediate forms.
[Illustration: Fig. 139.]
[Illustration: Fig. 140.]
We recognize another characteristic of our Oolitic flora in its
simple-leaved fronds, in some of the species not a little resembling
those of the recent Scolopendrium, or Hart's-Tongue fern,--a form
regarded by Adolphe Brogniart as peculiarly characteristic of his third
period of vegetation. These simple ferns are, in the Helmsdale deposits,
of three distinct types. There is first a lanceolate leaf, from two and
a half to three inches in length, of not unfrequent occurrence, which
may have formed, however, only one of the four leaflets, united by their
pseudo-footstalks, which compose the frond of Glossopteris,--a
distinctive Oolitic genus. There is next a simple ovate lanceolate
leaf, from four to five and a half inches in length, which in form and
venation, and all save its _thrice_ greater size, not a little resembles
the leaflets of a Coal Measure neuropteris,--_N. acuminata_. And, in the
third place, there are the simple leaves that in general outline
resemble, as I have said, the fronds of the recent Hart's-Tongue fern
(_Scolopendrium vulgare_), except that their base is lanceolate, not
cordate. Of these last there are two kinds in the beds, representative
of two several species, or, as their difference in general aspect and
detail is very great, mayhap two several genera. The smaller of the two
has a slender midrib, depressed on its upper side, and flanked on each
side by a row of minute, slightly elongated protuberances, but elevated
on the under side, and flanked by rows of small but well marked grooves,
that curve outwards to the edges of the leaf. The larger resemble a
Tæniopteris of the English and Continental Oolites, save that its midrib
is more massive, its venation less at right angles with the stem, its
base more elongated, and its size much greater. Some of the Helmsdale
specimens are of gigantic proportions. From, however, a description and
figure of a plant of evidently the same genus,--a Tæniopteris of the
Virginian Oolite, given by Professor W.B. Rogers of the United
States,--I find that some of the American fronds are larger still. My
largest leaf from Helmsdale must have been nearly five inches in
breadth; and if its proportions were those of some of the smaller ones
of apparently the same species from the same locality, it must have
measured about thirty inches in length. But fragments of American leaves
have been found more than six inches in breadth, and whose length cannot
have fallen short of forty inches. The Tæniopteris, as its name bears,
is regarded as a fern. From, however, the leathern-like thickness of
some of the Sutherland specimens,--from the great massiveness of their
midrib,--from the rectilinear simplicity of their fibres,--and, withal,
from, in some instances, their great size,--I am much disposed to
believe that in our Scotch, mayhap also in the American species, it may
have been the frond of some simple-leaved Cycas or Zamia. But the point
is one which it must be left for the future satisfactorily to settle;
though provisionally I may be permitted to regard these leaves as
belonging to some Cycadaceous plant, whose fronds, in their venation
and form, resembled the simple fronds of Scolopendrium, just as the
leaves of some of its congeners resembled the fronds of the pinnate
ferns.
[Illustration: Fig. 141.]
[Illustration: Fig. 142.]
I have already referred to the close resemblance which certain
Cycadaceous genera bear to certain of the fern family. In at least two
species of Pterophyllum,--_P. comptum_ and _P. minus_,--the divisions of
the leaflets seem little else than accidental rents in a simple frond;
in _P. Nelsoni_ they are apparently _nothing_ more; and similar
divisions, evidently, however, the effect of accident, and less rounded
at their extremities than in at least _P. comptum_, we find exhibited by
some of the Helmsdale specimens of Tæniopteris (See Fig. 142, p. 488.)
But whatever the nature of these simple fronds, they seem to impart much
of its peculiar character, all the world over, to the flora of the
Oolitic ages.
[Illustration: Fig. 143.
PECOPTERIS OBTUSIFOLIA.]
[Illustration: Fig. 144.]
[Illustration: Fig. 145.
PACHYPTERIS.]
The compound ferns of the formation are numerous, and at least
proportionally a considerable part of them seem identical in species
with those of the Oolite of England. (See Fig. 143.) Among these there
occur _Pecopteris Whitbiensis_, _Pecopteris obtusifolia_, _Pecopteris
insignis_,--all well marked English species; with several others. It
has, besides, its apparent ferns, that seem to be new--(Fig. 144)--that
are at least not figured in any of the fossil floras to which I have
access,--(Fig. 145),--such as a well defined Pachypteris, with leaflets
broader and rounder than the typical _P. lanceolata_, and a much stouter
midrib; a minute Sphenopteris too, and what seems to be a Phlebopteris,
somewhat resembling _P. propinqua_, but greatly more massive in its
general proportions. The equisetacea we find represented in the Brora
deposits by _Equisetum columnare_,--a plant the broken remains of which
occur in great abundance, and which, as was remarked by our President
many years ago, in his paper on the Sutherlandshire Oolite, must have
entered largely into the composition of the bed of lignite known as the
Brora Coal. We find associated with it what seems to be the last of the
Calamites,--_Calamites arenaceus_,--a name, however, which seems to have
been bestowed both on this Oolitic plant and a resembling Carboniferous
species. The deposit has also its Lycopodites, though, from their
resemblance in foliage to the conifers, there exists that difficulty in
drawing the line between them to which I have already adverted. One of
these, however, so exactly resembles a lycopodite of both the Virginian
and Yorkshire Oolite,--_L. uncifolius_,--that I cannot avoid regarding
it as specifically identical; and it seems more than doubtful whether
the stem which I have placed among the conifers is not a lycopodite
also. It exhibits not only the general outline of the true club moss,
but, like the fossil club mosses too, it wants that degree of
ligniferous body in the rock which the coniferous fossils almost always
possess. Yet another of the organisms of the deposit seems to have been
either a lycopodite or a fern. Its leaflets are exceedingly minute, and
set alternately on a stem slender as a hair,--circumstances in which it
resembles some of the tiny lycopodites of the tropics, such as
_Lycopodium apodium_. I must mention, however, that the larger plant of
the same beds which I have placed beside it, and which resembles it so
closely that my engraver finds it difficult to indicate any other
difference between them than that of size, appears to be a true fern,
not a lycopodium. To yet another vegetable organism of the system,--an
organism which must be regarded, if I do not mistake its character, as
at once very interesting and extraordinary, occurring as it does so low
in the scale, and bearing an antiquity so high,--I shall advert, after a
preliminary remark on a general characteristic of the flora to which it
belongs, but to which it seems to furnish a striking exception.
[Illustration: Fig. 146.
PHLEBOPTERIS.]
[Illustration: Fig. 147.]
[Illustration: Fig. 148.]
From the disappearance of many of those anomalous types of the Coal
Measures which so puzzle the botanist, and the extensive introduction of
types that still exist, we can better conceive of the general features
and relations of the flora of the Oolite than of those of the earlier
floras. And yet the general result at which we arrive may be found not
without its bearing on the older vegetations also. Throughout almost all
the families of this Oolitic flora, there seems to have run a curious
bond of relationship, which, like those ties which bound together some
of the old clans of our country, united them, high and low, into one
great sept, and conferred upon them a certain wonderful unity of
character and appearance. Let us assume the ferns as our central group.
Though less abundant than in the earlier creation of the Carboniferous
system, they seem to have occupied, judging from their remains, very
considerable space in the Oolitic vegetation; and with the ferns there
were associated in great abundance the two prevailing families of the
Pterides,--Equiseta and Lycopodia,--plants which, in most of our modern
treatises on the ferns proper, take their place as the fern allies. (See
Fig. 148.) Let us place these along two of the sides of a pentagon,--the
Lycopodia on the right side of the ferns, the Equiseta on the left;
further, let us occupy the two remaining sides of the figure by the
Coniferæ and the Cycadaceæ,--placing the Coniferæ on the side next the
Lycopodia, and the Cycadaceæ, as the last added keystone of the
erection, between these and the Equiseta. And now, let us consider how
very curious the links are which give a wonderful unity to the whole. We
still find great difficulty in distinguishing between the foliage of
some of even the existing club mosses and the conifers; and the ancient
Lepidodendra are very generally recognized as of a type intermediate
between the two. Similar intermediate types, exemplified by extinct
families, united the conifers and the ferns. The analogy of _Kirchneria_
with the _Thinnfeldia_, says Dr. Braun, is very remarkable,
notwithstanding that the former is a fern, and that the latter is ranked
among conifers. The points of resemblance borne by the conifers to the
huge Equiseta of the Oolitic period seem to have been equally striking.
The pores which traverse longitudinally the channelled grooves by which
the stems of our recent Equiseta are so delicately fluted, are said
considerably more to resemble the discs of pines and araucarians than
ordinary stomata. Mr. Francis does not hesitate to say, in his work on
British Ferns, that the relation of this special family to the Coniferæ
is so strong, both in external and internal structure, that it is not
without some hesitation he places them among the fern allies; and it has
been ascertained by Mr. Dawes, in his researches regarding the calamite,
that in its internal structure this apparent representative of Equiseta
in the earlier ages of the world united "a network of quadrangular
tissue similar to that of Coniferæ to other quadrangular cells arranged
in perpendicular series," like the cells of plants of a humbler order.
The relations of the Cycadacean order to ferns on the one hand, and to
the Coniferæ on the other, are equally well marked. As in the ferns, the
venation of its fronds is circinate, or scroll-like,--they have in
several respects a resembling structure,--in at least one recent species
they have a nearly identical form; and fronds of this fern-like type
seem to have been comparatively common during the times of the Oolite.
On the other hand, the Cycadaceæ manifest close relations to the
conifers. Both have their seeds originally naked; both are cone-bearing;
both possess discs on the sides of their cellules; and in both, in the
transverse section, these cellules are subhexagonal, and radiate from a
centre. Such were the very curious relations that united into one great
sept the prevailing members of the Oolitic flora; and similar bonds of
connection seem to have existed in the floras of the still earlier ages.
[Illustration: Fig. 149.
IMBRICATED STEM.
(_Helmsdale._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 150.
(_Helmsdale._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 151.]
In the Oolite of Scotland I have, however, at length found trace of a
vegetable organism that _seems_ to have lain, if I may so express
myself, outside the pentagon, and was not a member of any of the great
families which it comprised. (See Fig. 151.) I succeeded about four
years ago in disinterring from the limestone of Helmsdale what
_appears_ to be a true dicotyledonous leaf, with the fragment of another
leaf, which I at first supposed might have belonged to a plant of the
same great class, but which I now find might have been a portion of a
fern. When _Phlebopteris Phillipsii_ was first detected in the Oolite of
Yorkshire, Lindley and Hatton, regarding it as dicotyledonous,
originated their term Dictyophillum as a general one for all such
leaves. But it has since been assigned to a greatly lower order,--the
ferns; and Sir Charles Lyell has kindly shown me that an exotic fern of
the present day exhibits exactly such a reticulated style of venation as
my Helmsdale fragment. (See Fig. 152, p. 497.) The other leaf, however,
though also fragmentary, and but indifferently preserved, seems to be
decidedly marked by the dicotyledonous character; and so I continue to
regard it, provisionally at least, as one of the first precursors in
Scotland of our great forest trees, and of so many of our flowering and
fruit-bearing plants, and as apparently occupying the same relative
place in advance of its contemporaries as that occupied by the conifer
of the Old Red Sandstone in advance of the ferns and Lycopodaceæ with
which I found it associated. In the arrangement of its larger veins the
better preserved Oolitic leaf somewhat resembles that of the buckthorn;
but its state of keeping is such that it has failed to leave its
exterior outline in the stone.
[Illustration: Fig. 152.]
One or two general remarks, in conclusion, on the Oolite flora of
Scotland may be permitted me by the Association. In its aspect as a
whole it greatly resembles the Oolite flora of Virginia, though
separated in space from the locality in which the latter occurs by a
distance of nearly four thousand miles. There are several species of
plants common to both, such as _Equisetum columnare_, _Calamites
arenaceus_, _Pecopteris Whitbiensis_, _Lycopodites uncifolius_, and
apparently _Tæniopteris magnifolia_; both, too, manifest the great
abundance in which they were developed of old by the beds of coal into
which their remains have been converted. The coal of the Virginia Oolite
has been profitably wrought for many years: it is stated by Sir Charles
Lyell, who carefully examined the deposit, and has given as the results
of his observation in his second series of Travels in the United States,
that the annual quantity taken from the Oolitic pits by Philadelphia
alone amounted to ten thousand tons; and though, on the other hand, the
Sutherlandshire deposit has never been profitably wrought, it has been
at least wrought more extensively than any other in the British Oolite.
The seam of Brora, varying from three feet three to three feet eight
inches in thickness, furnished, says Sir Roderick Murchison, between the
years 1814 and 1826, no less than seventy thousand tons of coal. Such is
its extent, too, that nearly thirty miles from the pit's mouth (in
Ross-shire under the Northern Sutor) I have found it still existing,
though in diminished proportions, as a decided coal seam, which it must
have taken no small amount of vegetable matter to form. And almost on
the other side of the world, nearly five thousand miles from the
Sutherland beds, and more than eight thousand miles from the Carolina
ones, the same Oolitic flora again appears, associated with beds of
coal. At Nagpur in Central India the Oolitic Sandstones abound in simple
fronded ferns, such us Tæniopteris and Glossopteris, and has its
Zamites, its coniferous leaves, and its equisetaceæ.
Compared with existing floras, that of our Scottish Oolite seems to have
most nearly resembled the flora of New Zealand,--a flora remarkable for
the great abundance of its ferns, and its vast forests of coniferous
trees, that retain at all seasons their coverings of acicular spiky
leaves. It is to this flora that _Dacrydium cupressinum_,--so like a
club moss in its foliage,--belongs; and _Podocarpus ferrugineus_,--a
tree which more closely resembles in its foliage the Eathie conifer,
save that its spiky leaves are somewhat narrower and longer than any
other with which I am acquainted. About two thirds of the plants which
cover the plains, or rise on the hill-sides of that country, are
cryptogamic, consisting mainly of ferns and their allies; and it is a
curious circumstance,--which was, however, not without precedent in the
merely physical conditions of the Oolitic flora of Scotland,--that so
shallow is the soil even where its greatest forests have sprung up, and
so immediately does the rock lie below, that the central axes of the
trees do not elongate downwards into a tap, but throw out horizontally
on every side a thick network of roots, which rises so high over the
surface as to render walking through the woods a difficult and very
fatiguing exercise. The flora of the Oolite, like that of New Zealand,
seems to have been in large part cryptogamic, consisting of ferns and
the allied horse-tail and club moss families. Its forests seem to have
contained only cone-bearing trees; at least among the many thousand
specimens of its fossil woods which have been examined, no tissue of the
true, dicotyledonous character has yet been found; and with the
exception of the leaves just described, all those yet found in the
System, which could have belonged to true trees, are of the acicular
form common to the Coniferæ, and show in their dense ligneous structure
that they were persistent, not deciduous. Nor is there evidence wanting
that many of the Coniferæ of the period grew in so shallow a soil, that
their tap-roots were flattened and bent backwards, and they were left to
derive their sole support, like the trees of the New Zealand forests,
from such of their roots as shot out horizontally. We even know the
nature of the rock upon which they rested. As shown by fragments still
locked up among the interstices of their petrified roots, it was an Old
Red flagstone similar to that of Caithness in the neighborhood of Wick
and Thurso, and containing the same fossil remains. In the water-rolled
pebbles of the Conglomerate of Helmsdale and Port Gower,--pebbles
encrusted by Oolitic corals, and enclosed in a calcareous paste,
containing Oolitic belemnites and astreæ,--I have found the well marked
fishes and fucoids of the Old Red Sandstone. As shown by the appearance
of the rounded masses in which these lay, they must have presented as
ancient an appearance in the times of the Lower Oolite as they do now;
and the glimpse which they lent of so remote an antiquity, through the
medium of an antiquity which, save for the comparison which they
furnished the means of instituting, might be well deemed superlatively
remote, I have felt singularly awe-inspiring and impressive. Macaulay
anticipates a time when the traveller from some distant land shall take
his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to survey the ruins of St.
Paul's. In disinterring from amid the antique remains of the Oolite the
immensely more antique remains of the Old Red Sandstone, I have felt as
such a traveller would feel if, on setting himself to dig among the
scattered heaps for memorials of the ruined city, he had fallen on what
had been once the Assyrian Gallery of the British Museum, and had found
mingling with the antiquities of perished London the greatly older and
more venerable antiquities of Nineveh or of Babylon. The land of the
Oolite in this northern locality must have been covered by a soil
which,--except that from a lack of the boulder clays it must have been
poorer and shallower,--must have not a little resembled that of the
lower plains of Cromarty, Caithness, and Eastern Ross. And on this
Palæozoic platform, long exposed, as the Oolitic Conglomerates
abundantly testify, to denuding and disintegrating agencies,--a platform
beaten by the surf where it descended to the sea level, and washed in
the interior by rivers, with here a tall hill or abrupt precipice, and
there a flat plain or sluggish morass,--there grew vast forests of
cone-bearing trees, tangled thickets of gigantic equisetaceæ, numerous
forms of Cycas and Zamia, and wide-rolling seas of fern, amid whose open
spaces club mosses of extinct tribes sent forth their long, creeping
stems, spiky and dry, and thickly mottled with pseudo-spore-bearing
catkins.
The curtain drops over this ancient flora of the Oolite in Scotland; and
when, long after, there is a corner of the thick enveloping screen
withdrawn, and we catch a partial glimpse of one of the old Tertiary
forests of our country, all is new. Trees of the high dicotyledonous
class, allied to the plane and the buckthorn, prevail in the landscape,
intermingled, however, with dingy funereal yews; and the ferns and
equisetæ that rise in the darker openings of the wood approach to the
existing type. And yet, though _eons_ of the past eternity have elapsed
since we looked out upon Cycas and Zamia, and the last of the Calamites,
the time is still early, and long ages must lapse ere man shall arise
out of the dust, to keep and to dress fields waving with the productions
of yet another and different flora, and to busy himself with all the
labor which he taketh under the sun. Our country, in this Tertiary time,
has still its great outbursts of molten matter, that bury in fiery
deluges many feet in depth, and many square miles in extent, the debris
of wide tracts of woodland and marsh; and the basaltic columns still
form in its great lava bed; and ever and anon, as the volcanic agencies
awake, clouds of ashes darken the heavens, and cover up the landscape as
if with accumulated drifts of a protracted snow storm. Who shall
declare what, throughout those long ages, the history of creation has
been? We see at wide intervals the mere fragments of successive floras;
but know not how what seem the blank interspaces were filled, or how, as
extinction overtook in succession one tribe of existences after another,
and species, like individuals, yielded to the great law of death, yet
other species were brought to the birth, and ushered upon the scene, and
the chain of being was maintained unbroken. We see only detached bits of
that green web which has covered our earth ever since the dry land first
appeared; but the web itself seems to have been continuous throughout
all time; though ever as breadth after breadth issued from the creative
loom, the pattern has altered, and the sculpturesque and graceful forms
that illustrated its first beginnings and its middle spaces have yielded
to flowers of richer color and blow, and fruits of fairer shade and
outline; and for gigantic club mosses stretching forth their hirsute
arms, goodly trees of the Lord have expanded their great boughs; and for
the barren fern and the calamite, clustering in thickets beside the
waters, or spreading on flowerless hill slopes, luxuriant orchards have
yielded their ruddy flush, and rich harvests their golden gleam.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Prayer will be found at the end of these Memorials.
[2] The same revolver proved to be the instrument of death to another
person, two days after. The circumstances are thus related in the
_Edinburgh Witness_ of December 27:--
"A most melancholy event, arising out of the following circumstances,
occurred yesterday in the shop of Mr. Thomson, gunmaker. In the
beginning of July, last year, Mr. Hugh Miller bought a six-shot
revolving chamber pistol, size of ball ninety-two to the pound, from the
late firm of Messrs. Alexander Thomson & Son, gunmakers, 16 Union Place.
A few days after, he called and said he thought it a little stiff in its
workings, and got it made to revolve more readily. The pistol has not
been seen by Mr. Thomson since then; but in his absence a few minutes at
dinner yesterday, Professor Miller called about twenty minutes from two,
and asked Mr. Thomson's foreman how many of the six shots had been
fired. He added, 'Mind, it is loaded.' The foreman, instead of removing
the breech or chamber to examine it, bad incautiously turned the pistol
entire towards his own person, and lifting up the hammer with his
fingers, while he counted the remaining loaded chambers, he must have
slipped his fingers while the pistol was turned to his own head. It
exploded, and the ball lodging in the angle of his right eye, he fell
back a lifeless corpse. The pistol is a bolted one, which permits of
being carried loaded with perfect safety. Having been wet internally,
rust may have stopped the action of the bolt. It is a singular fact that
Hugh Miller dropped the pistol into the bath, where it remained for
several hours. This may account for the apparent incaution of Mr.
Thomson's foreman."
[3] See _ante_, p. 9.
[4] The horizontal lines in this diagram indicate the divisions of the
various geologic systems; the vertical lines the sweep of the various
classes or sub-classes of plants across the geologic scale, with, so far
as has yet been ascertained, the place of their first appearance in
creation; while the double line of type below shows in what degree the
order of their occurrence agrees with the arrangement of the botanist.
The single point of difference indicated by the diagram between the
order of occurrence and that of arrangement, viz., the transposition of
the gymnogenous and monocotyledonous classes, must be regarded as purely
provisional. It is definitely ascertained that the Lower Old Red
Sandstone has its coniferous wood, but not yet definitely ascertained
that it has its true monocotyledonous plants; though indications are not
awanting that the latter were introduced upon the scene at least as
early as the pines or araucarians; and the chance discovery of some
fossil in a sufficiently good state of keeping to determine the point
may, of course, at once retranspose the transposition, and bring into
complete correspondence the geologic and botanic arrangements.
[5] The horizontal lines of the diagram here indicate, as in Fig. 1, the
divisions of the several geologic systems; the vertical lines represent
the leading divisions and classes of animals, and, as shown by the
formations in which their earliest known remains occur, the probable
period of their first appearance in creation; while the double line of
text below exhibits the complete correspondence which obtains between
their occurrence, in nature and the Cuvierian arrangement. The line
representative of the Radiata ought perhaps to have been elevated a
little higher than either of its two neighbors.
[6] Fig. 14, Neuropteris Loshii. Fig. 15, Neuropteris gigantea. Fig. 16,
Neuropteris acuminata. Fig. 17, Sphenopteris affinis. Fig. 18,
Pecopteris heterophylla. Fig. 19, Sphenopteris dilitata.
[7] Fig. 21, _r a_, Rachis, greatly thickened towards its base by
numerous ærial roots, shot downwards to the soil, and which closely
cover the stem.
[8] Fig. 22, _m_, Cellular tissue of the centre of rachis; _d_, similar
tissue of the circumference; _f_, _v_, darkly-colored woody fibres of
great strength, the "internal buttresses" of the illustration; _e_, the
outer cortical portion formed by the bases of the leaves.
[9] Fig. 23, Branching stem, with bark and leaves. Fig. 24. Extremity of
branch. Fig. 25, Extremity of another branch, with indication of
cone-like receptacle of spores or seed.
[10] No true fossil palms have yet been detected in the great Oolitic
and Wealden systems, though they certainly occur in the Carboniferous
and Permian rocks, and are comparatively common in the earlier and
middle Tertiary formations. Much cannot be founded on merely negative
evidence; but it would be certainly a curious circumstance should it be
found that this graceful family, first ushered into being some time in
the later Palæozoic periods, was withdrawn from creation during the
Middle ages of the earth's history, to be again introduced in greatly
more than the earlier proportions during the Tertiary and recent
periods.
[11] Leaf of a tree allied to the maple.
[12] Leaf of a tree allied to the elm.
[13] Here, as in the former diagrams (Figs. 1 and 4), the horizontal
lines represent the divisions of the great geologic systems; while the
vertical lines indicate the sweep of the several orders of fishes across
the scale, and the periods, so far as has yet been determined, of their
first occurrence in creation.
[14] Some of these _dragons_ of the Secondary ages were of very
considerable size. The wings of a Pterodactyle of the Chalk, in the
possession of Mr. Bowerbank, must have had a spread of about eighteen
feet; those of a recently discovered Pterodactyle of the Greensand, a
spread of not less than twenty-seven feet. The _Lammer-geyer_ of the
Alps has an extent of wing of but from ten to eleven feet; while that of
the great Condor of the Andes, the largest of flying birds, does not
exceed twelve feet.
[15] _a_, Palæotherium magnum. _b_, Palæotherium minus. _c_,
Anoplotherium commune.
[16] It will be seen that there is no attempt made in this lecture to
represent the great Palæozoic division as characterized _throughout its
entire extent_ by a luxuriant flora. It is, on the contrary, expressly
stated here, that the "plants of its earlier and terminal formations
(_i.e._ those of the Silurian, Old Red, and Permian Systems) were _few
and small_," and that "it was _only during the protracted eons of the
carboniferous period that they received their amazing development,
unequalled in any previous or succeeding time_." Being thus express in
my limitation, I think I have just cause of complaint against any one
who represents me us unfairly laboring, in this very composition, to
make it be believed that the _whole_ Palæozoic period was characterized
by a gorgeous flora; and as thus sophistically generalizing in the first
instance, in order to make a fallacious use of the generalization in the
second, with the intention of misleading non-geologic readers. Such,
however, as may be seen from the following extracts from the
"Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Science at Philadelphia," is the
charge preferred against me by a citizen of the United States.
"Mr. William Parker Foulke asked the attention of the Society to a
lecture by Mr. Hugh Miller, recently republished in the United States
under the title of 'The Two Records, Mosaic and Geological,' and made
some remarks upon the importance of maintaining a careful scrutiny of
the logic of the natural sciences.... Mr. Miller teaches that, in the
attempt to reconcile the two 'records,' there are only three periods to
be accounted for by the geologist, viz. 'the period of _plants_; the
period of _great sea monsters and creeping things_; and the period of
_cattle and beasts of the earth_;' and that the first of these periods
is represented by the rocks grouped under the term _Palæozoic_, and is
distinguished from the _Secondary_ and _Tertiary_ chiefly by its
gorgeous flora; and that the geological evidence is so complete as to be
patent to all, that the first great period of organized being was, as
described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly a period of herbs and trees,
yielding seed after their kind. The general reader, not familiar with
the details of geological arrangement, could not fail to infer from such
a statement, used for such a purpose, that the Palæozoic rocks are
regarded by geologists as forming one group representative of one
period, which can properly be said to be distinguished as a _whole_ by
its gorgeous flora; and that it is properly so distinguished _for the
argument in question_. It was familiar to the Academy, as well as to Mr.
Miller, that from the _carboniferous_ rocks downward (backward in order
of time), there have been discriminated a large number of periods,
differing from one another in mineral and in organic remains; and that
the proportion of the _carboniferous_ era to the whole series is small,
whether we regard the thickness of its deposits or its conjectural
chronology. It in only of this _carboniferous_ era, _the latest of this
series_, that the author's remarks could be true; and even of this, if
taken for the entire surface of the earth, it could not be truly
asserted that 'the evidence is so complete as to be patent to all,' that
the quantity of its vegetable products distinguishes it from the earth's
surface during the era in which we live. To confound by implication all
this periods termed Palæozoic, so as to apply to them as a whole what
could be true, if at all, only of the _carboniferous_ period, is a
fallacious use of a generalization _made for a purpose_, and upon a
principle not properly available for the writer's argument," &c. So far
the "Proceedings" of the Academy.
This, surely, is very much the reverse of fair. I, however, refer the
matter, without note or comment (so far at least as it involves the
question whether Mr. Foulke has not, in the face of the most express
statement on my part, wholly misrepresented me), to the judgment of
candid and intelligent readers on both sides of the Atlantic.
I know not that I should recognize Mr. Foulke as entitled, after such a
display, to be dealt with simply as the member of a learned society who
differs from me on a scientific question; nor does his reference to the
"carboniferous era" as "the _latest_ of the" Palæozoic "series," and his
apparent unacquaintance with that Permian period, in reality the
terminal one of the division during which the Palæozoic forms seem to
have gradually died away, in order to give place to those of the
Secondary division, inspire any very high respect for his acquirements
as a geologist. Waiving, however, the legitimacy of his claim, I may be
permitted to repeat, for the further information of the non-geological
reader, that the _carboniferous_ formations, _wherever they have yet
been detected_, justify, in the amazing abundance of their carbonized
vegetable organisms, the name which they bear. Mr. Foulke, in three
short sentences, uses the terms "carboniferous era," "carboniferous
rocks," "carboniferous period," four several times; and these terms are
derived from the predominating amount of carbon (elaborated of old by
the plants of the period) which occurs in its several formations. The
very language which he has to employ is of itself a confirmation of the
statement which he challenges. For so "patent" is this _carboniferous_
character of the system, that it has given to it its universally
accepted designation,--the verbal sign by which it is represented
wherever it is known. Mr. F. states, that "if taken for the entire
surface of the earth," it cannot be truly asserted that the
carboniferous flora preponderated over that of the present time, or, at
least, that its preponderance could not be regarded as "patent to all,"
The statement admits of so many different meanings, that I know not
whether I shall succeed in replying to the special meaning intended by
Mr. Foulke. There are no doubt carboniferous deposits on the earth's
surface still unknown to the geologist, the evidence of which on the
point must be regarded, in consequence, not as "patent to all," but as
_nil_. They are witnesses absent from court, whose testimony has not yet
been tendered. But equally certain it is, I repeat, that wherever
carboniferous formations _have_ been discovered and examined, they have
been found to bear the unique characteristic to which the system owes
its name,--they have been found charged with the carbon, existing
usually as great beds of coal, which was elaborated of old by its
unrivalled flora from the elements. And as this evidence is certain and
positive, no one would be entitled to set off against it, as of equal
weight, the merely negative evidence of some one or two deposits of the
carboniferous age that did not bear the carboniferous character, even
were such known to exist; far less is anyone entitled to set off against
it the _possibly_ negative evidence of deposits of the carboniferous age
not yet discovered nor examined; for that would be simply to set off
against good positive evidence, what is no evidence at all. It would be
to set off the _possible_ evidence of the absent witnesses, not yet
precognosced in the case, against the express declarations of the
witnesses already examined, and strong on the positive side.
Surely an American, before appealing, in a question of this kind, to the
bare possibility of the existence somewhere or other of barely negative
evidence, ought to have bethought him of the very extraordinary positive
evidence furnished by the carboniferous deposits of his own great
country. The coal fields of Britain and the European continent had been
wrought for ages ere those of North America were known, and for ages
more after it had been but ascertained that the New, like the Old World,
has its Coal Measures. And during the latter period the _argument_ of
Mr. Foulke might have been employed, just as now, and some member of a
learned society might have urged that, though the coal fields of Europe
bore evidence to the former existence of a singularly luxuriant flora,
beyond comparison more vast than the European one of the present day,
the same could not be predicated of the American coal fields, whose
carbonized remains _might_ be found representative of a flora which had
been at least not more largely developed than that existing American
flora to which the great western forests belong. Now, however, the time
for any such argument has gone by; the American coal fields have been
carefully explored; and what is the result? The geologist has come to
know, that even the mighty forests of America are inconsiderable,
compared with its deposits of coal; nay, that all its forests gathered
into one heap would fail to furnish the materials of a single coal seam
equal to that of Pittsburg; and that centuries after all its thick woods
shall have disappeared before the axe, and it shall have come to present
the comparatively bare, unwooded aspect of the long civilized countries
of Southern Europe, it will continue to derive the elements of its
commercial greatness, and the cheerful blaze of its many millions of
domestic hearths, from the unprecedentedly luxurious flora of the old
carboniferous ages. Truly, very wonderful are the coal fields of
Northern America! If geologists inferred, as they well might, that the
extinct flora which had originated the European coal vastly outrivalled
in luxuriance that of the existing time, what shall be said of that
flora of the same age which originated the coal deposits of Nova Scotia
and the United States,--deposits _twenty times as great_ as all those of
all Europe put together!
[17] Such is also the view taken by the author of a recently published
work, "The Genesis of the Earth and of Man." "Christian philosophers
have been compelled to acknowledge," says this writer, "that the Mosaic
account of creation is only reconcileable with demonstrated facts, by
its being regarded as a record of _appearances_; and if so, to vindicate
the truth of God, we must consider it, so far as the acts are concerned,
as the relation of a revelation to the _sight_, which was sufficient for
all its purposes, rather than as one in words; though the words are
perfectly true as describing the revelation itself, and the revelation
is equally true as showing man the principal phenomena which he would
have seen had it been possible for him to be a witness of the events.
Further, if we view the narrative as the description of a series of
visions, while we find it to be perfectly reconcileable with the
statement in other parts of Scripture, that in six days the Lord made
heaven and earth, we remove, with other difficulties, the only strong
objection to the opinion of those who regard the 'six days' as periods
of undeflnable duration, and who may even believe that we are now in the
'seventh day,'--the day of rest or of cessation from the work of
creation. Certainly, 'the day of God,' and 'the day of the Lord,' and
the 'thousand two hundred and threescore days,' of the Revelation of St.
John, and the 'seventy weeks' in the Prophecy of Daniel, are not to be
understood in their primary and natural senses," &c., &c.
[18] "For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all
that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed
the Sabbath day, and hallowed it."
[19] Forbes and Hanley enumerate one hundred and sixty bivalves, and two
hundred and thirty-two univalves,--in all three hundred and ninety-two
species, as the only known shell-bearing molluscs of the existing
British seas.
[20] Principles of Zoology: touching the Structure, Development,
Distribution, and Natural Arrangement of the Races of Animals, living
and extinct. With numerous Illustrations. For the Use of Schools and
Colleges. Part I., "Comparative Physiology." By Louis Agassiz and
Augustus A. Gould. Boston: Gould & Lincoln.
[21] _a_, Articulating surface of joint. _b_, Fragment of column,
exhibiting laterally the tooth processes, so fitted into each other as
to admit of flexure without risk of dislocation. The uppermost joint
shows two lateral cavities for the articulation of auxiliary arms.
[22] Perhaps one strengthening principle more might be enumerated as
occurring in this curious piece of mechanism. In the layer of the nether
plate, the fibres, instead of being laid in parallel lines, like the
threads in the moleskin of my illustration, seem to be _felted_
together,--an arrangement which must have added considerably to their
coherency and powers of resistance.
[23] Fig. 102, Clymenia Sedwicki; Fig. 103, Gyroceras Eifelensis; Fig.
104, Cirrus Goldfussii.
[24] Berosus, Hieronymus, Mnaseas, Nicolaus, Manetho, Mochus, and
Hestæus.
[25] See Cory's "Ancient Fragments."
[26] As was common in Bible illustrations published in our own country a
century and a half ago, the old Greek artist has introduced into his
medal two points of time. Two of the figures represent _Noe_ and his
wife quitting the ark; while the other two exhibit them as seated within
it. An English print of the death of Abel, now before me, which dates a
little after the times of the Revolution, shows, on the same principle,
the two brothers, represented by four figures,--two of these quietly
offering up their respective sacrifices in the background, and the other
two grappling in deadly warfare in front.
[27] "In preparing the 'Horæ Biblicæ Quotidianæ,' he [Dr. Chalmers] had
beside him, for use and reference, the Concordance, the Pictorial Bible,
Poole's Synopsis, Henry's Commentary, and Robertson's Researches in
Palestine. These constituted what he called his Biblical Library.
'There,' said he to a friend, pointing, as he spoke, to the above named
volumes as they lay together on his library table, with a volume of the
'Quotidianæ,' in which he had just been writing, lying open beside
them,--'these are the books I use: all that is Biblical is
there.'"--_Dr. Hanna's Preface to "Daily Scripture Readings."_
[28] The raven is said to live for more than a hundred years. I am,
however, not prepared to say that it was the same pair of birds that
used, year after year, to build on the same rock-shelf among the
precipices of Navity, from the times of my great-grandfather's boyhood
to those of my own.
[29] The following estimate of the air-breathing vertebrates (that of
the "Physical Atlas," second edition, 1856) may be regarded as the
latest. It will he seen that it does not include the cetacea or the
seals:--
SPECIES.
Quadrumana 170
Marsupialia 123
Edentata 28
Pachydermata 39
Terrestrial Carnivora 514
Rodentia 604
Ruminantia 180
---- 1658
Birds 6266
Reptiles 657
Turtles 8}
Sea Snakes 7} 15
---- 642
Great as is this number of animals, compared with those known a century
ago, there are indications that the list is to be increased rather than
diminished. Even by the latest European authorities the reindeer is
represented as consisting of but a single species, common to the
sub-arctic regions of both the Old and New Worlds; whereas in the
"Canadian Naturalist" for 1856 I find it stated, on what seems to be
competent authority, that America has its two species of reindeer, and
that they both differ from the European species.
[30] If I do not introduce here the argument founded on the great age of
certain gigantic trees, such as the Baobab of intertropical Africa, or
the Taxodium of South America, it is not because I have any reason to
challenge the estimates of Adamson or Candolle. The one tree may have
lived its five thousand, the other its six thousand, years; but as the
grounds have been disputed on which the calculations respecting their
vast age have been founded, and as they cannot be reëxamined anew by the
reader, I wholly omit the evidence, in the general question, which they
have been supposed to furnish.
[31] The following excellent remarks on the economy of miracle, by
Chalmers, bear very directly on this subject:--"It is remarkable that
God is sparing of miracles, and seems to prefer the ordinary processes
of nature, if equally effectual for the accomplishment of his purposes.
He might have saved Noah and his family by miracles; but he is not
prodigal of these, and so he appointed that an ark should be made to
bear up the living cargo which was to be kept alive on the surface of
the waters; and not only so, but he respects the laws of the animal
physiology, as he did those of hydrostatics, in that he put them by
pairs into the ark, male and female, to secure their transmission to
after ages, and food was stored up to sustain them during their long
confinement. In short, he dispenses with miracles when these are not
requisite for the fulfilment of his ends; and he never dispenses with
the ordinary means when these are fitted, and at the same time
sufficient, for the occasion."--_Daily Scripture Readings_, vol. i. p.
10.
[32] For a brief but masterly view of these ancient cosmogonies, see the
Rev. D. Macdonald's "Creation and the Fall." Edinburgh: Constable & Co.
[33]
1. The great surrounding oceans.
2. Caspian Sea.
3. River Phison.
4-4. Points of the Compass.
5. Mediterranean Sea.
6. Red Sea.
7-8. Persian Gulf, with the rivers Tigris and Euphrates.
9. River Gihon.
[34]
1. The sun Occident.
2. The sun orient.
3. The Heavens.
4. Great mountain behind which the sun is hidden when it is night.
5. The Mediterranean Sea.
6. Red Sea.
7. Persian Gulf.
8. Garden of Eden.
9. Great surrounding ocean
10. The Creator looking down upon his work, and seeing that all was good.
[35] The very different terms which Mr. Powell employs in characterizing
the anti-geologists, from those which he makes use of in denouncing the
men honestly bent on reconciling the enunciations of revelation with the
findings of geologic science,--a class which included in the past,
divines such as Chalmers, Buckland, and Pye Smith, and comprises divines
such as Hitchcock and the Archbishop of Canterbury now,--is worthy of
being noted. In two sermons, "Christianity without Judaism," written by
this clergyman of the Church of England, to show that all days of the
week are alike, and the Christian Sabbath a mere blunder, I find the
following passage:--"Some divines have consistently rejected all geology
and all science as profane and carnal; and some even, when pretending to
call themselves men of science, have stooped to the miserable policy, of
tampering with the truth, investing the real facts in false disguises,
to cringe to the prejudices of the many, and to pervert science into a
seeming accordance with popular prepossessions." I cannot believe that
this will be regarded as justifiable language: it seems scarce worthy of
a man of science; and will, I fear, only be accepted as good in evidence
that the _odium theologicum_ is not restricted to what is termed the
orthodox side of the Church.
[36] The gentleman here referred to lectured no later than October,
1853, against the doctrines of the geologists; and modestly chose as the
scene of his labors the city of Hutton and Playfair. What he set himself
specially to "demonstrate" was, as he said, that the geologic "theories
as to antiquity of the earth, successive eras, &c., were not only
fallacious and unphilosophical, but rendered nugatory the authority of
the sacred Scriptures." Not only, however, did he exert himself in
demolishing the geologists as infidel, but he denounced also as unsound
the theology of good old Isaac Watts. The lines taught us in our
infancy,--
"Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
For God hath made them so,"
were, he remarked, decidedly heterodox. They ought to have run
instead,--
"Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
_Satan_ hath made them so"!!!
[37] "A Brief and Complete Refutation of the Anti-Scriptural Theory of
Geologists." By a Clergyman of the Church of England. London: Wertheim &
Macintosh. 1853.
[38] Newspaper Report of Meeting of the British Association held at York
in September, 1844.
[39] See "Primary and Present State of the Solar System, particularly of
our own Planet;" and "Exposure of the Principles of Modern Geology." By
P. M'Farlane, Author of the "Primary and Present State of the Solar
System." Edinburgh: Thomas Grant.
[40] One of the more brilliant writers of the present day,--a native of
the picturesque village in which this anti-geologist resides,--describes
in a recent work, with the enthusiasm of the poet, the noble mountains
which rise around it. I know not, however, whether my admiration of the
passage was not in some degree dashed by a few comic notions suggestive
of an "imaginary conversation," in the style of Landor, between this
popular author and his anti-geologic townsman, on the merits of hills in
general, and in especial on the claims of those which encircle Comrie
"as the mountains are round about Jerusalem." The two gentlemen would, I
suspect, experience considerable difficulty in laying down, in such a
discussion, their common principles.
[41] "Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies." By
Granville Penn, Esq. London, 1825.
[42] "Statesman and Record," October 6th, 1846.
[43] Sir Charles Lyell's statement is by no means so express or definite
as it is represented to be in this passage, in which I have taken the
evidence of his opponents regarding it. What he really says (see his
"Principles," second edition, 1832) is what follows:--"_If_ the ratio of
recession had never exceeded fifty yards in forty years, it must have
required nearly ten thousand years for the excavation of the whole
ravine; but no probable conjecture can be offered as to the quantity of
time consumed in such an operation, because the retrograde movement may
have been much more rapid when the whole current was confined within a
space not exceeding a fourth or fifth of that which the Falls now
occupy." In the eighth edition of the same work, however, published in
1850, after he had examined the Falls, there occurs the following
re-statement of the case:--"After the most careful inquiries I was able
to make during my visit to the spot in 1841-42, I came to the conclusion
that the average [recession] of one foot a year would be a much more
probable conjecture than that of one and a quarter yards. In that case
it would have required _thirty-five thousand years_ for the retreat of
the Falls from the escarpment of Queenston to their present site. It
seems by no means improbable that such a result would be no exaggeration
of the truth, although we cannot assume that the retrograde movement has
been uniform. At some points it may have receded much faster than at
present; but in general its progress was probably slower, because the
cataract, when it began to recede, must have been nearly twice its
present height."
[44] "Scottish Christian Herald," 1838, vol. iii., p. 766.
[45] The substance of this and the following lecture was originally
given in a single paper, before the Geological Section of the British
Association, held at Glasgow in September 1855. So considerable have
been the additions, however, that the one paper has swelled into two
lectures. Most of the added matter was at first thrown into the form of
Notes; but it was found, that from their length and frequency, they
would have embarrassed the printer, mayhap the reader also; and so most
of the larger ones have been introduced into the text within brackets.
[46] A curious set of these, with specimens of the smooth-stemmed fucoid
collected by Mr. John Miller of Thurso,--a meritorious laborer in the
geologic field,--were exhibited at Glasgow to the Association. The
larger stems were thickly traversed in Mr. J. Miller's specimens by
diagonal lines, which seemed, however, to be merely lines of rhomboidal
fracture in the glassy coal into which the plants were converted, and
not one of their original characters.
[47] I must, however, add, that there was found in the neighborhood of
Stromness about fifteen years ago, by Dr. John Fleming, a curious
nondescript vegetable organism, which, though equivocal in character and
appearance, was in all probability a plant of the sea. It consisted of a
flattened cylinder, in some of the specimens exceeding a foot in length
by an inch in breadth, and traversed on both the upper and under sides
by a mesial groove extending to the extremities. It bore no external
markings, and the section exhibited but an indistinct fibrous structure,
sufficient, however, to indicate its vegetable origin. I have not
hitherto succeeded in finding for myself specimens of this organism,
which has been named provisionally, by Dr. Fleming, _Stroma obscura_;
but it seems not improbable that certain supposed fragments of wood,
detected by Mr. Charles Peach in the Caithness Flagstones, but which do
not exhibit the woody structure, may have belonged to it.
[48] I figured this species from an imperfect Cromarty specimen fifteen
years ago. (See "Old Red Sandstone," first edition, 1841, Plate VII.
Fig. 4). Of the greatly better specimens now figured I owe the larger
one (Fig. 120) to Mrs. Mill, Thurso, who detected it in the richly
fossiliferous flagstones of the locality in which she resides, and
kindly made it over to me; and the specimen of which I have given a
magnificent representation (Fig. 12, p. 55) to my friend Mr. Robert
Dick. I have, besides, seen several specimens of the same organism, in a
better or worse state of keeping, in the interesting collection of the
Rev. Charles Clouston, Sandwick, near Stromness.
[49] "Frogspawn is full of eyes [that is, black eye-like points], and
every eye is a tadpole."
[50] Mr. Page figures, in his "Advanced Text Book of Geology" (p. 127),
a few circular markings from the Forfarshire beds, which he still
regards as spawn, probably that of a Crustacean, and which certainly
differ greatly in appearance from the markings found enclosed in the
apparent spathes.
[51] Since these sentences were written I have seen a description of
both the plants of the Upper Old Red to which they refer, in an
interesting sketch of the geology of Roxburgshire by the Rev. James
Duncan, which forms part of a recent publication devoted to the history
and antiquities of the shire. "In the red quarry of Denholm Hill there
occurs," says Mr. Duncan, "a stratum of soft yellowish sandstone, which
contains impressions of an apparent fucoid in considerable quantity. One
or several linear stems diverge from a point, and throw off at acute
angles, as they grow upwards, branches or leaves very similar to the
stem, which are in turn subdivided into others. The width of the stalks
is generally about a quarter of an inch, the length often a foot. The
color is brown, blackish-brown, or grayish. The same plant also occurs
in the whitestone quarry [an overlying bed] in the form of Carbonaceous
impressions. There can be little doubt that it is a fucoid. The general
mode of growth greatly resembles that of certain seaweeds; and in some
specimens we have seen the branches dilated a little at the extremities,
like those of such of the living fuci as expand in order to afford space
for the fructification. It is deserving of remark, that the plant is
seldom observed lying horizontally on the rock in a direction parallel
to its stratification, but rising up through the layers, so as only to
be seen when the stone is broken across; as if it had been standing
erect, or kept buoyant in water, while the stony matter to which it owes
its preservation was deposited around it." Mr. Duncan, after next
referring to the remains of what he deems a land plant, derived from the
same deposit, and which, though sadly mutilated, presents not a little
of the appearance of the naked framework of a frond of Cyclopterus
Hibernicus divested of the leaflets, goes on to describe the apparent
calamite of the formation. "The best preserved vegetable remain yet
found in Denholm Hill quarry," he says, "is the radical portion of what
we cannot hesitate to call a species of calamite. The lower part is
regularly and beautifully rounded, bulging and prominent, nearly four
inches in diameter. About an inch from the bottom it contracts somewhat
suddenly in two separate stages, and, from the uppermost sends up a stem
about an inch in diameter, and nearly of the same length, where it is
broken across. At the origin of this stem the small longitudinal ridges
are distinctly marked; and the whole outline of the figure, though
converted into stone, is as well defined as it could have been in the
living plant." Mr. Duncan accompanies his description with a figure of
the organism described, which, however, rather resembles the bulb of a
liliaceous plant than the root of a calamite, which in all the better
preserved, specimens contracts, instead of expanding, as it descends.
The apparent expansion, however, in the Old Red specimen may be simply a
result of compression in its upper part: the under part certainly much
resembles, in the dome-like symmetry of its outline, the radical
termination of a solitary calamite.
[52] "Though the coal of Sabero is apparently included in Devonian
rocks," says Sir Roderick Murchison, "M. Casiano de Prado thinks that
this appearance may be do to inverted folds of the strata." On the other
hand, M. Alcide D'Orbigny regards it us decidedly Old Red; and certainly
its Sphenopteris and Lepidodendron bent much more the aspect of Devonian
than of Carboniferous plants.
[53] Now, alas! no more. In Mr. Gourlay the energy and shrewd business
habits of the accomplished merchant were added to an enlightened zeal
for general science, and no inconsiderable knowledge in both the
geologic and botanic provinces. The marked success, in several respects,
of the brilliant meeting of the British Association which held in
Glasgow in September 1855, was owing in no small measure to the
indefatigable exertions and well calculated arrangements of Mr. Gourlay.
[54] Trees must have been very abundant in what is now Scotland in these
Secondary ages. Trunks of the common Scotch fir are of scarce more
frequent occurrence in our mosses than the trunks of somewhat resembling
trees among the shales of the Lower Oolite of Helmsdale. On examining in
that neighborhood, about ten years since, a huge heap of materials which
had been collected along the sea shore for burning into lime in a
temporary kiln, I found that more than three fourths of the whole
consisted of fragments of coniferous wood washed out of the shale beds
by the surf, and the remainder of a massive Isastrea. And only two years
ago, after many kilnfuls had been gathered and burnt, his grace the Duke
of Argyll found that fossil wood could still he collected by cartloads
along the shore of Helmsdale. The same woods also occur at Port Gower,
Kintradwell, Shandwick, and Eathie. In the Island of Eigg, too, in an
Oolite deposit, locked up in trap, and whose stratigraphical relations
cannot in consequence be exactly traced, great fragments of _Pinites
Eiggensis_ are so abundant, that, armed with a mattock, I have dug out
of the rock, in a few minutes, specimens enough to supply a dozen of
museums. In short, judging from its fossiliferous remains, it seems not
improbable that old Oolitic Scotland was as densely covered with
coniferous trees as the Scotland of Roman times, when the great
Caledonian forest stretched northwards from the wall of Antoninus to the
furthest Thule.
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DR. BUCKLAND said, "He would give his left hand to possess such powers
of description as this man."
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SPECIES.
Its Typical Forms and Primeval Distribution. By CHARLES HAMILTON SMITH,
With an Introduction, containing an Abstract of the Views of Blumenbach,
Prichard, Bachman, Agassiz, and other writers of repute. By SAMUEL
KNEELAND, Jr., M.D. With elegant Illustrations. 12mo, cloth, $1.25.
It is a book of learning, and full of interest, and may be regarded
as among the comparatively few real contributions to
science--[Christian Witness.]
THESAURUS OF ENGLISH WORDS AND PHRASES.
So classified and arranged as to facilitate the expression of ideas, and
assist in literary composition. By PETER MARK ROGET. Revised and Edited,
with a List of Foreign Words Defined in English, and other additions, by
BARNAS SEARS, D.D., President of Brown University. A New American, from
the late stereotype London edition, with ADDITIONS AND IMPROVEMENTS.
12mo, cloth, $1.50.
This edition contains Important additions of words and phrases NOT
IN THE ENGLISH EDITION, making it in all respects MORE FULL AND
PERFECT THAN THE AUTHOR'S EDITION. The work has already become one
of standard authority, both in this country and in Great Britain.
THE ELEMENTS OF GEOLOGY.
Adapted to Schools and Colleges. With numerous Illustrations. By J.R.
LOOMIS. Lewisburg University, Pa. 12mo, cloth, 75 cts.
It is surpassed by no work before the American public. We hope that
every teacher among our readers will examine the work and put the
justness of our remarks to the test of his judgment and
experience.--M.B. ANDERSON, LL. D.--[Pres. of Rochester University,
N.Y.]
This is just such a work as is needed for all our schools. It
should take its place as a text-book in all the schools of the
land.--[N.Y. Observer.]
THE EARTH AND MAN.
By Prof. ARNOLD GUYOT. With Illustrations. 12mo, cloth, $1.25.
INFLUENCE OF THE HISTORY OT SCIENCE UPON INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION.
By WILLIAM WHEWELL, D.D. 16mo, cloth, 25 cents.
PRINCIPLES OF ZOÖLOGY.
With illustrations. By LOUIS AGASSIZ and AUGUSTUS A. GOULD. 12mo, cloth,
$1.
This work places us in possession of information half a century in
advance of all our elementary works on this subject.--PROF. JAMES
HALL.
A work emanating from so high a source hardly requires commendation
to give it currency. Simple and elementary in its style, full in
its illustrations, comprehensive in its range.--[Silliman's
Journal.]
The best book of the kind in our language.--[Christian Examiner.]
Zoology is an interesting science, and is here treated with a
masterly hand.--[Scientific American.]
THE LANDING AT CAPE ANNE;
Or, The Charter of the First Permanent Colony on the Territory of the
Massachusetts Company. Now discovered and first published from the
_original manuscript_. By JOHN WINGATE THORNTON. Octavo, Cloth, $1.50.
GEOLOGICAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES AND BRITISH PROVINCES.
With an Explanatory Text, Geological Sections, and Plates of the Fossils
which characterize the Formations. By JULES MARCOU. Two volumes. Octavo,
cloth, $3.00.
--> The Map is elegantly colored, and done up with
linen cloth back, and folded in octavo form, with thick cloth
covers.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.
A view of the Productive Forces of Modern Society, and the Results of
Labor, Capital and Skill. By CHARLES KNIGHT. With numerous
Illustrations. American edition. Revised, with Additions, by DAVID A.
WELLS, editor of the "Annual of Scientific Discovery." 12mo, cloth,
$1.25.
CYCLOPÆDIA OF ANECDOTES OF LITERATURE AND THE FINE ARTS.
A choice selection of Anecdotes of the various forms of Literature, of
the Arts, of Architecture, Engravings, Music, Poetry, Painting and
Sculpture, and of the most celebrated Literary Characters and Artists of
different Countries and Ages, &c. By KAZLITT ARVINE, A.M. With numerous
Illustrations. 725 pages, octavo, cloth, $3.00.
This is unquestionably the choicest collection of ANECDOTES ever
published. It contains THREE THOUSAND AND FORTY ANECDOTES, and more
than ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY ILLUSTRATIONS. It is admirably adapted
to literary and scientific men, to artists, mechanics, and others,
as a DICTIONARY FOR REFERENCE, in relation to facts on the
numberless subjects and characters introduced.
KITTO'S POPULAR CYCLOPÆDIA OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE.
Condensed from the larger work, by the author, JOHN KITTO, D.D. Assisted
by JAMES TAYLOR, D.D. With _over_ 500 _Illustrations_. Octavo, 812 pp.,
cloth, $3.00.
This work answers the purpose of a commentary, while at the same
time it furnishes a complete DICTIONARY OF THE BIBLE, embodying the
products of the best and most recent researches in biblical
literature, in which the scholars of Europe and America have been
engaged. It is not only intended for ministers and theological
students, but is also particularly adapted to parents,
Sabbath-school teachers, and the great body of the religious
public.
HISTORY OF PALESTINE.
With the Geography and Natural History of the Country, the Customs and
Institutions of the Hebrews, etc. By JOHN KITTO, D.D. With upwards of
200 Illustrations. 12mo, cloth. $1.25.
Beyond all dispute this is the best historical compendium of the
Holy Land, from the days of Abraham, to those of the late Pasha of
Egypt, Mehemet Ali.--[Edinburgh Review.]
--> In the numerous notices and reviews, the work has been strongly
recommended, as not only admirably adapted to the FAMILY, but also as
a text-book for SABBATH and WEEK DAY SCHOOLS.
CHAMBERS'S CYCLOPÆDIA OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.
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This work embraces about ONE THOUSAND AUTHORS, chronologically
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from their writings, connected by a Biographical, Historical, and
Critical Narrative; thus presenting a complete view of English
literature from the earliest to the present time. Let the reader
open where he will, he cannot fail to find matter for profit and
delight. The selections are gems--infinite riches in a little room;
in the language of another, "A WHOLE ENGLISH LIBRARY FUSED DOWN
INTO ONE CHEAP BOOK!"
CHAMBERS'S MISCELLANY OF USEFUL AND ENTERTAINING KNOWLEDGE.
By WILLIAM CHAMBERS. With Illustrations. Ten vols., 16mo, cloth, $7.00.
CHAMBERS'S HOME BOOK AND POCKET MISCELLANY.
A choice Selection of Interesting and Instructive Reading for the Old
and the Young. Six vols. 16mo, cloth, $3.00.
This work is fully equal, if not superior, to either of the
Chamber's other works in interest, containing a vast fund of
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readers.
CHAMBERS'S REPOSITORY OF INSTRUCTIVE AND AMUSING PAPERS.
With Illustrations. 16mo, cloth, bound. 4 vols. in two, $1.75; and 4
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THE CRUISE OF THE NORTH STAR;
A Narrative of the Excursion of Mr. Vanderbilt's Party, in her Voyage to
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etc. By Rev. JOHN OVERTON CHOULES, D.D. With elegant Illustrations, etc.
12mo, cloth, gilt back and sides, $1.50.
VISITS TO EUROPEAN CELEBRITIES.
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an account of the individual's appearance and manners; in short,
defining as well as I could, the whole impression which his
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SIMILE OF THE SIGNATURE of each of the persons introduced.
PILGRIMAGE TO EGYPT; EXPLORATIONS OF THE NILE.
With Observations, illustrative of the Manners, Customs, etc. By Hon.
J.V.C. SMITH, M.D. With numerous elegant Engravings, 12mo; cloth, $1.25.
THE STORY OF THE CAMPAIGN.
A complete Narrative of the War in Southern Russia. Written in a Tent in
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With a new and complete Map of the Seat of War. 12mo. paper covers,
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POETICAL WORKS.
MILTON'S POETICAL WORKS. With Life and Elegant Illustrations. 16mo,
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POETICAL WORKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. With Life, and Illustrations on
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COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM COWPER. With a Life, and Critical
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16mo. cloth, $1.00; fine cloth, gilt, $1.25.
--> The above Poetical Works, by standard authors, are all of uniform
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plain; thus rendering them, in connection with the exceedingly LOW
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LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF JOHN FOSTER.
Edited by J.E. RYLAND, with Notices of Mr. Foster as a Preacher and a
Companion. By JOHN SHEPPARD. Two volumes in one, 700 pages. 12mo, cloth,
$1.25.
In simplicity of language, in majesty of conception, in the
eloquence of that conciseness which conveys in a short sentence
more meaning than the mind dares at once admit,--his writings are
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GUIDO AND JULIUS.
Tho Doctrine of Sin and the Propitiator; or, the True Consecration of
the Doubter. Exhibited in the Correspondence of two Friends. By
FREDERICK AUGUSTUS O. THOLUCH, D.D. Translated by JONATHAN EDWARDS
RYLAND. With an Introduction by JOHN PYE SMITH, D.D. 16mo, cloth, 60
cents.
NEW AND COMPLETE CONDENSED CONCORDANCE
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Rev. DAVID KING, L.L.D. Octavo, cloth backs, $1.25, sheep, $1.50.
VALUABLE WORKS
PUBLISHED BY
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THE CHRISTIAN'S DAILY TREASURY.
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A work for every Christian. It is indeed a "Treasury" of good
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THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST;
Or, Christianity Viewed in its Leading Aspects. By the Rev. A.L.R.
FOOTE, author of "Incidents in the Life of our Saviour," etc. 16mo,
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THE CHRISTIAN LIFE.
Social and Individual. By PETER BAYNE, M.A. 12mo, cloth, $1.25.
The demand for this extraordinary work, commencing before its
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respecting it; men of all denominations agree in pronouncing it one
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GOD REVEALED IN THE PROCESS OF CREATION.
And by the Manifestation of Jesus Christ. Including an Examination of
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of Creation," By JAMES B. WALKER, author of "Philosophy of the Plan of
Salvation." 12mo, cloth, $1.00.
PHILOSOPHY OF THE PLAN OF SALVATION.
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This book is generally admitted to be one of the best in the
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A WREATH AROUND THE CROSS;
Or, Scripture Truths Illustrated. By A. MORTON BROWN, D.D.
Recommendatory Preface, by JOHN ANGELL JAMES. Beautiful Frontispiece.
16mo, cloth, 60 cents.
THE BETTER LAND;
Or, The Believer's Journey and Future Home. By REV. A.C. THOMPSON. 12mo,
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A most charming and instructive book for all now journeying to the
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THE MISSION OF THE COMFORTER.
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DR. WAYLAND'S UNIVERSITY SERMON
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THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD.
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SACRED RHETORIC;
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THE PREACHER AND THE KING;
Or, Bourdalone in the Court of Louis XIV. An Account of that
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Likeness, and a Sketch of the Author's Life. 12mo, cloth, $1.25.
It combines substantial history with the highest charm of romance.
Its attractions are so various that it can hardly fail to find
readers of almost every description.--[Puritan Recorder.]
THE PRIEST AND THE HUGUENOT;
Or, Persecution in the Age of Louis XV. Translated from the French of
L.F. BUNGENER. 2 vols., 12mo, cloth, $2.25.
--> This is truly a masterly production, full of interest, and may be
set down as one of the greatest Protestant works of the age.
FOOTSTEPS OF OUR FOREFATHERS.
What they Suffered and what they Sought. Describing Localities and
portraying Personages and Events conspicuous in the Struggles for
Religious Liberty. By JAMES G. MIALL. Thirty-six fine Illustrations.
12mo, $1.00.
An exceedingly entertaining work. The reader soon becomes so deeply
entertained that he finds it difficult to lay aside the book till
finished,--[Ch. Parlor Mag.]
A work absorbingly interesting, and very instructive.--[Western
Lit. Magazine.]
MEMORIALS OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY.
Presenting, in a graphic, compact, and popular form, Memorable Events of
Early Ecclesiastical History, etc. By JAMES G. MIALL. With numerous
elegant Illustrations. 12mo, cloth, $1.00.
--> This, like the "Footsteps of our Forefathers," will be found a
work of uncommon interest.
WORKS BY JOHN HARRIS, D.D.
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MAN PRIMEVAL; or, the Constitution and Primitive Condition of the Human
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THE GREAT COMMISSION; or, the Christian Church constituted and charged
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ZEBULON; Or, the Moral Claims of Seamen. 18mo, cloth, 25 cts.
PHILIP DODDRIDGE.
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THE EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY.
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WORKS BY DR. TWEEDIE.
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THE MORN OF LIFE; or, Examples of Female Excellence. A Book for Young
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A LAMP TO THE PATH; or, the Bible in the Heart, the Home, and the Market
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SEED TIME AND HARVEST; or, Sow Well and Reap Well. A Book for the Young.
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--> The above works, by Dr. Tweedie, are of uniform size and style.
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WORKS BY JOHN ANGELL JAMES.
THE CHURCH MEMBER'S GUIDE; Edited by J.O. CHOULES, D.D. New edition.
With an Introductory Essay by Rev. HUBBARD WINSLOW. Cloth, 33c.
CHRISTIAN PROGRESS. A Sequel to the Anxious Inquirer. 18mo, cloth, 31c.
--> One of the best and most useful works of this popular author.
THE CHURCH IN EARNEST. Seventh thousand. 18mo, cloth, 40 cents
MOTHERS OF THE WISE AND GOOD.
By JABEZ BURNS, D.D. 16mo, cloth, 75 cents.
We wish it were in every family, and read by every mother in the
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MY MOTHER;
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THE EXCELLENT WOMAN.
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splendid Illustrations. 12mo. cloth, $1.00; cloth, gilt, $1.75; extra
Turkey, $2.50.
--> This elegant volume is an appropriate and valuable "gift book"
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MEMORIES OF A GRANDMOTHER. By a Lady of Massachusetts. l6mo, cloth, 50
cents.
THE MARRIAGE RING;
Or, How to make Home Happy. By JOHN ANGELL JAMES. Beautiful illustrated
edition 16mo, cloth, gilt, 75 cents.
A beautiful volume, and a very suitable present to a newly-married
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WORKS BY WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS, D.D.
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This work is from the pen of one of the brightest lights of the
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LECTURES ON THE LORD'S PRAYER Third edition. 12mo, cloth, 85 cts.
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Every page is full of suggestions as well as eloquence.--Ch. Parlor
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MISCELLANIES. New improved edition. _Price reduced._ 12mo, $1.25.
VALUABLE WORKS.
THE HALLIG; OR, THE SHEEPFOLD IN THE WATERS. A Tale of Humble Life on
the Coast of Schleswig. Translated from the German of Biernatzski, by
Mrs. GEORGE P. MARSH. With a Biographical Sketch of the Author. 12mo.
cloth. $1.00.
The author of this work was the grandson of an exiled Polish
nobleman. His own portrait is understood to be drawn in one of the
characters of the Tale, and indeed the whole work has a substantial
foundation in fact. In Germany it has passed through several
editions, and is there regarded as the chef-d'oeuvre of the
author. As a revelation of an entire new phase of human society, it
will strongly remind the reader of Miss Bremer's tales. In
originality and brilliancy of imagination, it is not inferior
those;--its aim is far higher. The elegance of Mrs. Marsh's
translation will at once arrest the attention of every competent
judge.
HON. ROBERT C. WINTHROP. "I have read it with deep interest. Mrs.
Marsh has given us an admirable version of a most striking and
powerful work."
FROM PROF. F.D. HUNTINGTON, D.D., IN THE RELIGIOUS MAGAZINE.
"Wherever the work goes it fascinates the cultivated and the
illiterate, the young and the old, the devout and the careless. Our
own copy is in brisk circulation. The vivid and eloquent
description of the strange scenery, the thrilling accounts of the
mysterious action of the waters and vapors of the Schleswig coast,
&c., all form a story of uncommon attractions and unmingled
excellence."
DR. SPRAGUE IN ALBANY SPECTATOR. "A rare and beautiful work. It is
an interesting contribution to the physical geography of a part of
Europe lying quite beyond the reach of ordinary observation, and as
a genial and faithful sketch of human life under conditions which
are hardly paralleled elsewhere."
The tale is a novel one, containing thrilling scenes, as well as
religious teachings.--PRESBYTERIAN.
A beautiful and exquisite natural tale. In novelty of life and
customs, as well as in nicely drawn shades of local and personal
character the Hallig, is equalled by very few works of
fiction.--BOSTON ATLAS.
The story, which is deeply thrilling, is exclusively
religious.--CH. SECRETARY.
Here we have another such book as makes the reading of it a luxury,
even in hot summer weather. It takes us to an island home, in the
chill regions of the North Sea, and introduces us to pastoral
scenes as lively and as edifying as those of Oberlin, in the Ban de
la Roche.--SOUTHERN BAP.
THE CAMEL: His Organization, Habits and Uses, considered with reference
to his Introduction into the United States. BY GEORGE P. MARSH, late U.
S. Minister at Constantinople. 16mo, cloth. 75 cents.
This book treats of a subject of great interest, especially at the
present time. It furnishes the only complete and reliable account
of the Camel in the language. It is the result of extensive
research and personal observation, and it has been prepared with
special reference to the experiment now being made by our
Government, of domesticating the Camel in this country.
A repository of interesting information respecting the Camel. The
author collected the principal materials for his work during his
residence and travels for some years in the East. He describes the
species, size, color, temper, longevity, useful products, diet,
powers, training and speed of the Camel, and treats of his
introduction into the United States.--PHIL. CHRISTIAN OBSERVER.
This is a most interesting book, on several accounts. The subject
is full of romance and information; the treatment is able and
thorough.--TEXAS CH. ADVOCATE.
Our Government have taken measures for introducing the Camel into
this country, and an appropriation of $30,000 has been made by
Congress. It becomes a matter of practical importance, therefore,
to obtain the fullest and most reliable information possible
respecting the animal and his adaptation to this country. His
advent among us will stimulate general curiosity, and raise a
thousand questions respecting his character and habits of life, his
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fecundity, the methods of managing and using him, the cost of
keeping him, the value of his carcass after death, &c. This work
furnishes, in a small compass, all the desired information.--BOSTON
ATLAS.
A complete sketch of the habits and nature of the Camel is given,
which has great interest. The value of the camel as a beast of
burden is abundantly confirmed.--N.Y. EVANGELIST.
IMPORTANT WORKS.
ANALYTICAL CONCORDANCE OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES; or, The Bible presented
under Distinct and Classified Heads or Topics. By JOHN EADIE, D.D., LL.
D., Author of "Biblical Cyclopædia," "Dictionary of the Bible," &c., &c.
One volume, royal octavo, 836 pp. Cloth. $3.00; sheep, $3.50. _Just
published._
The publishers would call the special attention of clergymen and
others to some of the peculiar features of this great work.
1. It is a concordance of _subjects_, not of _words_. In this it
differs from the common concordance, which, of course, it does not
supersede. Both are necessary to the Biblical student.
2. It embraces all the topics, both secular and religious, which
are naturally suggested by the entire contents of the Bible. In
this it differs from Scripture Manuals and Topical Text-books,
which are confined to religious or doctrinal topics.
3. It contains _the whole of the Bible without abridgment_,
differing in no respect from the Bible in common use, except in the
classification of its contents.
4. It contains a synopsis, separate from the concordance,
presenting within the compass of a few pages a bird's-eye view of
the whole contents.
5. It contains a table of contents, embracing nearly two thousand
heads, arranged in alphabetical order.
6. It is much superior to the only other work in the language
prepared on the same general plan, and is offered to the public at
much less cost.
The purchaser gets not only a _Concordance_, but also a _Bible_, in
this volume. The superior convenience arising out of this
fact,--saving, as it does, the necessity of having two books at
hand and of making two references, instead of one,--will be readily
apparent.
The general subjects (under each of which there are a vast number
of sub-divisions) are arranged as follows, viz.:
Agriculture,
Animals,
Architecture,
Army, Arms,
Body,
Canaan,
Covenant,
Diet and Dress,
Disease and Death,
Earth,
Family,
Genealogy,
God,
Heaven,
Idolatry, Idols,
Jesus Christ,
Jews,
Laws,
Magistrates,
Man,
Marriage,
Metals and Minerals,
Ministers of Religion,
Miracles,
Occupations,
Ordinances,
Parables and Emblems,
Persecution,
Praise and Prayer,
Prophecy,
Providence,
Redemption,
Sabbaths and Holy Days,
Sacrifice,
Scriptures,
Speech,
Spirits,
Tabernacle and Temple,
Vineyard and Orchard,
Visions and Dreams,
War,
Water.
That such a work as this is of exceeding great convenience is
matter of obvious remark. But it is much more than that; it is also
an instructive work. It is adapted not only to assist the student
in prosecuting the investigation of preconceived ideas, but also to
impart ideas which the most careful reading of the Bible in its
ordinary arrangement might not suggest. Let him take up any one of
the subjects--"Agriculture," for example--and see if such be not
the case. This feature places the work in a higher grade than that
of the common Concordance. It shows it to be, so to speak, a work
of more mind.
No Biblical student would willingly dispense with this Concordance
when once possessed. It is adapted to the necessities of all
classes,--clergymen and theological students; Sabbath-school
superintendents and teachers; authors engaged in the composition of
religious and even secular works; and, in fine, common readers of
the Bible, intent only on their own improvement.
A COMMENTARY ON THE ORIGINAL TEXT OF THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. By
HORATIO B. HACKETT, D.D., Professor of Biblical Literature and
Interpretation, in the Newton Theological Institution. --> A new,
revised, and enlarged edition. _In Press._
--> This most important and very popular work, has been thoroughly
revised (some parts being entirely rewritten), and considerably
enlarged by the introduction of important new matter, the result of
the Author's continued, laborious investigations since the publication
of the first edition, aided by the more recent published criticisms
on this portion of the Divine Word, by other distinguished Biblical
Scholars, in this country and in Europe.
AMOS LAWRENCE.
DIARY AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THE LATE AMOS LAWRENCE; with a brief account
of some Incidents in his Life. Edited by his son, WILLIAM R. LAWRENCE,
M.D. With fine steel Portraits of AMOS and ABBOTT LAWRENCE, an Engraving
of their Birth-place, a Fac-simile page of Mr. Lawrence's Hand-writing,
and a copious Index. Octavo edition, cloth, $1.50. Royal duodecimo
edition, $1.00.
This work was first published in an elegant octavo volume, and sold at
the unusually low price of $1.50. At the solicitation of numerous
benevolent individuals who were desirous of circulating the work--so
remarkably adapted to do good, especially to young men--_gratuitously_,
and of giving those of moderate means, of every class, an opportunity of
possessing it, the royal duodecimo, or "_cheap edition_," was issued,
varying from the other edition, only in a reduction in the size
(allowing less margin), and the _thickness_ of the paper.
Within six months after the first publication of this work, _twenty-two
thousand_ copies had been sold. This extraordinary sale is to be
accounted for by the character of the man and the merits of the book. It
is the memoir of a Boston merchant, who became distinguished for his
great wealth, but more distinguished for the manner in which he used it.
It is the memoir of a man, who, commencing business with only $20, gave
away in public and private charities, _during his lifetime_ more,
probably, than any other person in America. It is substantially an
_autobiography_, containing a full account of Mr. Lawrence's career as a
merchant, of his various multiplied charities, and of his domestic life.
"We have by us another work, the 'Life of Amos Lawrence.' We heard
it once said in the pulpit, 'There is no work of art like a noble
life,' and for that reason he who has achieved one, takes rank with
the great artists and becomes the world's property. WE ARE PROUD OF
THIS BOOK. WE ARE WILLING TO LET IT GO FORTH TO OTHER LANDS AS A
SPECIMEN OF WHAT AMERICA CAN PRODUCE. In the old world, reviewers
have called Barnum THE characteristic American man. We are willing
enough to admit that he is a characteristic American man; he is ONE
fruit of our soil, but Amos Lawrence is another. Let our country
have credit for him also. THE GOOD EFFECT WHICH THIS LIFE MAY HAVE
IN DETERMINING THE COURSE OF YOUNG MEN TO HONOR AND VIRTUE IS
INCALCULABLE."--MRS. STOWE, IN N.Y. INDEPENDENT.
"We are glad to know that our large business houses are purchasing
copies of this work for each of their numerous clerks. Its
influence on young men cannot be otherwise than highly salutary. As
a business man, Mr. Lawrence was a pattern for the young
clerk."--BOSTON TRAVELLER.
"We are thankful for the volume before us. It carries us back to
the farm-house of Mr. Lawrence's birth, and the village store of
his first apprenticeship. It exhibits a charity noble and active,
while the young merchant was still poor. And above all, it reveals
to us a beautiful cluster of sister graces, a keen sense of honor,
integrity which never knew the shadow of suspicion, candor in the
estimate of character, filial piety, rigid fidelity in every
domestic relation, and all these connected with and flowing from
steadfast religious principle, profound sentiments of devotion, and
a vivid realization of spiritual truth."--NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
"We are glad that American Biography has been enriched by such a
contribution to its treasures. In all that composes the career of
'the good man,' and the practical Christian, we have read few
memoirs more full of instruction, or richer in lessons of wisdom
and virtue. We cordially unite in the opinion that the publication
of this memoir was a duty owed to Society."--NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE.
"With the intention of placing it within the reach of a large
number, the mere cost price is charged, and a more beautifully
printed volume, or one calculated to do more good, has not been
issued from the press of late years."--EVENING GAZETTE.
"This book, besides being of a different class from most
biographies, has another peculiar charm. It shows the inside life
of the man. You have, as it were, a peep behind the curtain, and
see Mr. Lawrence as he went in and out among business men, as he
appeared on change, as he received his friends, as he poured out,
'with liberal hand and generous heart,' his wealth for the benefit
of others, as he received the greetings and salutations of
children, and as he appeared in the bosom of his family at his own
hearth stone."--BRUNSWICK TELEGRAPH.
"It is printed on new type, the best paper, and is illustrated by
four beautiful plates. How it can be sold for the price named is a
marvel."--NORFOLK CO. JOURNAL.
"It was first privately printed, and a limited number of copies
were distributed among the relatives and near friends of the
deceased. This volume was read with the deepest interest by those
who were so favored as to obtain a copy, and it passed from friend
to friend as rapidly as it could be read. Dr. Lawrence has yielded
to the general wish, and made public the volume. It will now be
widely circulated, will certainly prove a standard work, and be
read over and over again."--BOSTON DAILY ADVERTISER.
MODERN ATHEISM.
MODERN ATHEISM, under its Forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism,
Development, and Natural Laws. By JAMES BUCHANAN, D.D., LL. D. 12mo,
cloth, $1.25.
The Author of this work is the successor of Dr. Chalmers in the
Chair of Divinity in the New College, Edinburgh, and the
intellectual leader of the Scottish Free Church.
FROM HUGH MILLER, AUTHOR OF "OLD RED SANDSTONE," &c., &c.,--The
work before us is one of at once the most readable and solid which
we have ever perused.
FROM THE "NEWS OF THE CHURCHES."--It is a work of which nothing
less can be said, than that, both in spirit and substance, style
and argument, it fixes irreversibly the name of the author as a
leading classic in the Christian literature of Britain.
FROM HOWARD MALCOM, D.D., PRESIDENT OF LEWISBURG UNIVERSITY.--No
work has come into my hands, for a long time, so helpful to me as a
teacher of metaphysics and morals. I know of nothing which will
answer for a substitute. The public specially needs such a book at
this time, when the covert atheism of Fichte, Wolfe, Hegel, Kant,
Schelling, D'Holbach, Comte, Crousse, Atkinson, Martineau, Leroux,
Mackay, Holyoake, and others, is being spread abroad with all
earnestness, supported, at least in some places, both by church
influence and university honors. I cannot but hope that a work so
timely, scholarly, and complete, will do much good.
It is one of the most solid and remarkable books in its department
of literature; one of the most scholarly and profound inductions of
modern Christian literature.--WORCESTER TRANSCRIPT.
Dr. Buchanan has earned a high and well-deserved reputation as a
classical writer and close logical reasoner. He deals heavy, deadly
blows on atheism in all its various forms; and wherever the work is
read it cannot fail to do good.--CHRISTIAN SECRETARY.
It is a work which places its author at once in the highest rank of
modern religious authors. His analyses of the doctrines held by the
various schools of modern atheism are admirable, and his criticism
original and profound; while his arguments in defence of the
Christian Faith are powerful and convincing. It is an attractive as
well as a solid book; and he who peruses a few of its pages is, as
it were, irresistibly drawn on to a thorough reading of the
book.--BOSTON PORTFOLIO.
The style is very felicitous, and the reasoning clear and cogent.
The opposing theories are fairly stated and combated with
remarkable case and skill. Even when the argument falls within the
range of science, it is so happily stated that no intelligent
reader can fail to understand it. Such a profound, dispassionate
work is particularly called for at the present time.--BOSTON
JOURNAL.
It is justly described as "a great argument," "magnificent in its
strength, order, and beauty," in defence of truth, and against the
variant theories of atheism. It reviews the doctrines of the
different schools of modern Atheism, gives a fair statement of
their theories, answers and refutes them, never evading, but
meeting and crushing their arguments.--PHILA. CHRISTIAN OBSERVER.
Dr. Buchanan is candid and impartial, too, as a strong a man can
afford to be, evades no argument, undertakes no opposing view, but
meets his antagonists with the quiet and unswerving confidence of a
locomotive on iron tracks, pretty sure to crush them.--CHRISTIAN
REGISTER.
We hail this production of a master mind as a lucid, vigorous,
discriminating, and satisfactory refutation of the various false
philosophies which have appeared in modern times to allure
ingenuous youth to their destruction. Dr. Buchanan has studied them
thoroughly, weighed them dispassionately, and exposed their falsity
and emptiness. His refutation is a clear stream of light from
beginning to end.--PHILA. PRESBYTERIAN.
We recommend "Modern Atheism" as a book for the times, and as
having special claims on theological students.--UNIVERSALIST
QUARTERLY.
It is remarkable for the clearness with which it apprehends and the
fairness with which it states, not less than for the ability with
which it replies to, the schemes of unbelief in its various modern
forms. It will be found easy to read--though not light reading--and
very quickening to thought, while it clears away, one by one, the
mists which the Devil has conjured around the great doctrines of
our Faith, by the help of some of his ingenious modern coadjutors,
and leaves the truth of God standing in its serene and pristine
majesty, as if the breath of hatred never had been breathed forth
against it.--CONGREGATIONALIST.
Dr. Buchanan has here gone into the enemy's camp, and defeated him
on his own ground. The work is a masterly defence of faith against
dogmatic unbelief on the one hand, and that universal skepticism on
the other, which neither affirms nor denies, on the ground of an
assumed deficiency of evidence as to the reality of God and
religion.--N.Y. CHRISTIAN CHRONICLE.
It is a clearly and vigorously written book. It is particularly
valuable for its clear statement and masterly refutation of the
Pantheism of Spinoza and his School.--CHRISTIAN HERALD.
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