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Title: Time and Change
Author: John Burroughs
Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5706]
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[This file was first posted on August 12, 2002]
Edition: 10
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TIME AND CHANGE ***
Produced by Charles Aldarondo
TIME AND CHANGE
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
1912
PREFACE
I suspect that in this volume my reader will feel that I have given
him a stone when he asked for bread, and his feeling in this respect
will need no apology. I fear there is more of the matter of hard
science and of scientific speculation in this collection than of
spiritual and aesthetic nutriment; but I do hope the volume is not
entirely destitute of the latter. If I have not in some degree
succeeded in transmuting my rocks into a kind of wholesome literary
bread, or, to vary the figure, in turning them into a soil in which
some green thing or flower of human interest and emotion may take
root and grow, then, indeed, have I come short of the end I had in
view.
I am well aware that my own interest in geology far outruns my
knowledge, but if I can in some degree kindle that interest in my
reader, I shall be putting him on the road to a fuller knowledge
than I possess. As with other phases of nature, I have probably
loved the rocks more than I have studied them. In my youth I
delighted in lingering about and beneath the ledges of my native
hills, partly in the spirit of adventure and a boy's love of the
wild, and partly with an eye to their curious forms, and the
evidences of immense time that looked out from their gray and
crumbling fronts. I was in the presence of Geologic Time, and was
impressed by the scarred and lichen-coated veteran without knowing
who or what he was. But he put a spell upon me that has deepened as
the years have passed, and now my boyhood ledges are more
interesting to me than ever.
If one gains an interest in the history of the earth, he is quite
sure to gain an interest in the history of the life on the earth. If
the former illustrates the theory of development, so must the
latter. The geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist. As
science turns over the leaves of the great rocky volume, it sees the
imprint of animals and plants upon them and it traces their changes
and the appearance of new species from age to age. The biologic tree
has grown and developed as the geologic soil in which it is rooted
has deepened and ripened. I am sure I was an evolutionist in the
abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read
Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept
the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an
easy matter.
The essays on the subject in this volume are the outcome of the
stages of brooding and thinking which I have gone through in
accepting this doctrine. I am aware that there is much repetition in
them, but maybe on that very account they will help my reader to go
along with me over the long road we have to travel to reach this
conclusion.
July, 1912.
CONTENTS
I. THE LONG ROAD
II. THE DIVINE ABYSS
III. THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE
IV. THROUGH THE EYES OF THE GEOLOGIST
V. HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII
VI. THE OLD ICE FLOOD
VII. THE FRIENDLY SOIL
VIII. PRIMAL ENERGIES
IX. SCIENTIFIC FAITH
X. "THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN"
XI. THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US
XII. THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST
XIII. THE GOSPEL OF NATURE
TIME AND CHANGE
I
THE LONG ROAD
I
The long road I have in mind is the long road of evolution,--the
road you and I have traveled in the guise of humbler organisms, from
the first unicellular life in the old Cambrian seas to the complex
and highly specialized creature that rules supreme in the animal
kingdom to-day. Surely a long journey, stretching through
immeasurable epochs of geologic time, and attended by vicissitudes
of which we can form but feeble conceptions.
The majority of readers, I fancy, are not yet ready to admit that
they, or any of their forebears, have ever made such a journey. We
have all long been taught that our race was started upon its career
only a few thousand years ago, started, not amid the warrings of
savage elemental nature, but in a pleasant garden with everything
needed close at hand. This belief has faded a good deal in our time,
especially among thoughtful persons; but in a modified form, as the
special creation theory, it held sway in the minds of the older
naturalists like Agassiz and Dawson, long after Darwin had launched
his revolutionary doctrine of our animal origin, putting man in the
same zoological scheme as the lower orders.
We are slow to adjust our minds to the revelations of science, they
have been so long adjusted to a revelation, so-called, of an
entirely different character. It gives them a wrench more or less
violent when we try to make them at home and at their ease amid
these new and startling disclosures. To many good people evolution
seems an ungodly doctrine, like setting up a remorseless logic in
the place of an omnipresent Creator. But there is no help for it.
Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little
anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the
universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic
chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier
for it.
When we accepted Newton's discovery of the force called gravitation,
we virtually surrendered ourselves to the enemy, and started upon a
road, the road of natural causation, that traverses the whole system
of created things. We cannot turn back; we may lie down by the
roadside and dream our old dreams, but our children and their
children will press on, and will be exhilarated by the journey.
It is at first sight an unpalatable truth that evolution confronts
us with, and it requires courage calmly to face it. But it is in
perfect keeping with the whole career of physical science, which is
forever directing our attention to common near-at-hand facts for the
key to remote and mysterious occurrences.
It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life,
because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the
exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation. That
man should have been brought into existence by the fiat of an
omnipotent power is less an occasion for wonder than that he should
have worked his way up from the lower non-human forms. That the
manward impulse should never have been lost in all the appalling
vicissitudes of geologic time, that it should have pushed steadily
on, through mollusk and fish and amphibian and reptile, through
swimming and creeping and climbing things, and that the forms that
conveyed it should have escaped the devouring monsters of the earth,
sea, and air till it came to its full estate in a human being, is
the wonder of wonders.
In like manner, evolution raises immensely the value of the
biological processes that are everywhere operative about us, by
showing us that these processes are the channels through which the
creative energy has worked, and is still working. Not in the far-off
or in the exceptional does it seek the key to man's origin, but in
the sleepless activity of the creative force, which has been pushing
onward and upward, from the remotest time, till it has come to full
fruition in man.
It is easy to inject into man's natural history a supernatural
element, as nearly all biologists and anthropologists before
Darwin's time did, and as many serious people still do. It is too
easy, in fact, and the temptation to do so is great. It makes short
work of the problem of man's origin, and saves a deal of trouble.
But this method is more and more discredited, and the younger
biologists and natural philosophers accept the zoological
conception of man, which links him with all the lower forms, and
proceed to work from that.
When we have taken the first step in trying to solve the problem of
man's origin, where can we stop? Can we find any point in his
history where we can say, Here his natural history ends, and his
supernatural history begins? Does his natural history end with the
pre-glacial man, with the cave man, or the river-drift man, with the
low-browed, long-jawed fossil man of Java,--Pithecanthropus erectus,
described by Du Bois? Where shall we stop on his trail? I had almost
said "step on his tail," for we undoubtedly, if we go back far
enough, come to a time when man had a tail. Every unborn child at a
certain stage of its development still has a tail, as it also has a
coat of hair and a hand-like foot. But could we stop with the tailed
man--the manlike ape, or the apelike man? Did his Creator start him
with this appendage, or was it a later suffix of his own invention?
If we once seriously undertake to solve the riddle of man's origin,
and go back along the line of his descent, I doubt if we can find
the point, or the form, where the natural is supplanted by the
supernatural as it is called, where causation ends and miracle
begins. Even the first dawn of protozoic life in the primordial seas
must have been natural, or it would not have occurred,--must have
been potential in what went before it. In this universe, so far as
we know it, one thing springs from another; the sequence of cause
and effect is continuous and inviolable.
We know that no man is born of full stature, with his hat and boots
on; we know that he grows from an infant, and we know the infant
grows from a fetus, and that the fetus grows from a bit of nucleated
protoplasm in the mother's womb. Why may not the race of man grow
from a like simple beginning? It seems to be the order of nature; it
IS the order of nature,--first the germ, the inception, then the
slow growth from the simple to the complex. It is the order of our
own thoughts, our own arts, our own civilization, our own language.
In our candid moments we acknowledge the animal in ourselves and in
our neighbors,--especially in our neighbors,--the beast, the shark,
the hog, the sloth, the fox, the monkey; but to accept the notion of
our animal origin, that gives us pause. To believe that our remote
ancestor, no matter how remote in time or space, was a lowly
organized creature living in the primordial seas with no more brains
than a shovel-nosed shark or a gar-pike, puts our scientific faith
to severe test.
Think of it. For countless ages, millions upon millions of years, we
see the earth swarming with life, low bestial life, devouring and
devoured, myriads of forms, all in bondage to nature or natural
forces, living only to eat and to breed, localized, dependent upon
place and clime, shaped to specific ends like machines,--to fly, to
swim, to climb, to run, to dig, to drill, to weave, to wade, to
graze, to crush,--knowing not what they do, as void of conscious
purpose as the thorns, the stings, the hooks, the coils, and the
wings in the vegetable world, making no impression upon the face of
nature, as much a part of it as the trees and the stones, species
after species having its day, and then passing off the stage, when
suddenly, in the day before yesterday in the geologic year, so
suddenly as to give some color of truth to the special creation
theory, a new and strange animal appears, with new and strange
powers, separated from the others by what appears an impassable
gulf, less specialized in his bodily powers than the others, but
vastly more specialized in his brain and mental powers, instituting
a new order of things upon the earth, the face of which he in time
changes through his new gift of reason, inventing tools and weapons
and language, harnessing the physical forces to his own ends, and
putting all things under his feet,--man the wonder-worker, the
beholder of the stars, the critic and spectator of creation itself,
the thinker of the thoughts of God, the worshiper, the devotee, the
hero, spreading rapidly over the earth, and developing with
prodigious strides when once fairly launched upon his career. Can it
be possible, we ask, that this god was fathered by the low bestial
orders below him,--instinct giving birth to reason, animal ferocity
developing into human benevolence, the slums of nature sending forth
the ruler of the earth. It is a hard proposition, I say, undoubtedly
the hardest that science has ever confronted us with.
Haeckel, discussing this subject, suggests that it is the parvenu in
us that is reluctant to own our lowly progenitors, the pride of
family and position, like that of would-be aristocratic sons who
conceal the humble origin of their parents. But it is more than
that; it is the old difficulty of walking by faith where there is
nothing visible to walk upon: we lack faith in the efficiency of the
biologic laws, or any mundane forces, to bridge the tremendous chasm
that separates man from even the highest of the lower orders. His
radical unlikeness to all the forms below him, as if he moved in a
world apart, into which they could never enter, as in a sense he
does, is where the difficulty lies. Moreover, evolution balks us
because of the inconceivable stretch of time during which it has
been at work. It is as impossible for us to grasp geological time as
sidereal space. All the standards of measurement furnished us by
experience are as inadequate as is a child's cup to measure the
ocean.
Several million years, or one million years,--how can we take it in?
We cannot. A hundred years is a long time in human history, and how
we pause before a thousand! Then think of ten thousand, of fifty
thousand, of one hundred thousand, of ten hundred thousand, or one
million, or of one hundred million! What might not the slow but
ceaseless creative energy do in that time, changing but a hair in
each generation! If our millionaires had to earn their wealth cent
by cent, and carry each cent home with them at night, it would be
some years before they became millionaires. This is but a faint
symbol of the slow process by which nature has piled up her riches.
She has had no visions of sudden wealth. To clothe the earth with
soil made from the disintegrated mountains--can we figure that time
to ourselves? The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by saying
that when the Himalayas have been ground to powder by allowing a
gauze veil to float against them once in a thousand years, eternity
will only have just begun. Our mountains have been pulverized by a
process almost as slow. In our case the gauze veil is the air, and
the rains, and the snows, before which even granite crumbles. See
what the god of erosion, in the shape of water, has done in the
river valleys and gorges--cut a mile deep in the Colorado canyon,
and yet this canyon is but of yesterday in geologic time. Only give
the evolutionary god time enough and all these miracles are surely
wrought.
Truly it is hard for us to realize what a part time has played in
the earth's history,--just time, duration,--so slowly, oh, so
slowly, have the great changes been brought about! The turning of
mud and silt into rock in the bottom of the old seas seems to have
been merely a question of time. Mud does not become rock in man's
time, nor vegetable matter become coal. These processes are too slow
for us. The flexing and folding of the rocky strata, miles deep,
under an even pressure, is only a question of time. Allow time
enough and force enough, and a layer of granite may be bent like a
bow. The crystals of the rock seem to adjust themselves to the
strain, and to take up new positions, just as they do, much more
rapidly, in a cake of ice under pressure. Probably no human agency
could flex a stratum of rock, because there is not time enough, even
if there were power enough. "A low temperature acting gradually,"
says my geology, "during an indefinite age would produce results
that could not be otherwise brought about even through greater
heat." "Give us time," say the great mechanical forces, "and we will
show you the immobile rocks and your rigid mountain chains as
flexible as a piece of leather." "Give us time," say the dews and
the rains and the snowflakes, "and we will make you a garden out of
those same stubborn rocks and frowning ledges." "Give us time," says
Life, starting with her protozoans in the old Cambrian seas, "and I
will not stop till I have peopled the earth with myriad forms and
crowned them all with man."
Dana thinks that had "a man been living during the changes that
produced the coal, he would not have suspected their progress," so
slow and quiet were they. It is probable that parts of our own
sea-coast are sinking and other parts rising as rapidly as the
oscillation of the land and sea went on that resulted in the laying
down of the coal measures.
An eternity to man is but a day in the cosmic process. In the face
of geologic time, man's appearance upon the earth as man, with a
written history, is something that has just happened; it was in this
morning's paper, we read of it at breakfast. As evolution goes, it
will not be old news yet for a hundred thousand years or so, and by
that time, what will he have done, if he goes on at his present rate
of accelerated speed? Probably he will not have caught the gods of
evolution at their work, or witnessed the origin of species by
natural descent, these things are too slow for him; but he will
certainly have found out many things that we are all eager to know.
In nature as a whole we see results and not processes. We see the
rock strata bent and folded, we see the whole mountain-chains flexed
and shortened by the flexure; but had we been present, we should not
have suspected what was going on. Our little span of life does not
give us the parallax necessary. The rock strata, miles thick, may be
being flexed now under our feet, and we know it not. The earth is
shrinking, but so slowly! When, under the slow strain, the strata
suddenly give way or sink, and an earthquake results, then we know
something has happened.
A recent biologist and physicist thinks, and doubtless thinks
wisely, that the reason why we have never been able to produce
living from non-living matter in our laboratories, is that we cannot
take time enough. Even if we could bring about the conditions of the
early geologic ages in which life had its dawn, which of course we
cannot, we could not produce life because we have not geologic time
at our disposal.
The reaction which we call life was probably as much a cosmic or
geologic event as were the reactions which produced the different
elements and compounds, and demanded the same slow gestation in the
womb of time. During what cycles upon cycles the great mother-forces
of the universe must have brooded over the inorganic before the
organic was brought forth! The archean age, during which the
brooding seems to have gone on, was probably as long as all the ages
since.
How we are baffled when we talk about the beginning of anything in
nature or in our own lives! In our experience there must be a first,
but when did manhood begin; when did puberty, when did old age,
begin? When did each stage of our mental growth begin? When or where
did the English language begin, or the French, or the German? Was
there a first English word spoken? From the first animal sound, if
we can conceive of such, up to the human speech of to-day, there is
an infinite gradation of sounds and words.
Was there a first summer, a first winter, a first spring? There
could hardly have been a first day even for ages and ages, but only
slowly approximating day. After an immense lapse of time the air
must have cleared and the day become separated from the night, and
the seasons must have become gradually defined. Things slowly emerge
one after another from a dim, nebulous condition, both in our own
growth and experience and in the development of the physical
universe.
In nature there is no first and last. There is an endless beginning
and an endless ending. There was no first man or first woman, no
first bird, or fish, or reptile. Back of each one stretches an
endless chain of approximating men and birds and reptiles.
This talk about the time and place where man began his existence
seems to me misleading, because it appears to convey the idea that
he began as man at some time, in some place. Whereas he grew. He
began where and when the first cell appeared, and he has been on the
road ever since. There is no point in the line where he emerged from
the not-man and became man. He was emerging from the not-man for
millions of years, and when you put your finger on an animal form
and say, This is man, you must go back through whole geologic
periods before you reach the not-man. If Darwin is right, there is
no more reason for believing that the different species or forms of
animal life were suddenly introduced than there is for believing
that the soil, or the minerals, gold, silver, diamonds, or vegetable
mold and verdure were suddenly introduced.
II
If we know anything of the earth's past history, we know that the
continents were long in forming, that they passed through many
vicissitudes of heat and cold, of fire and flood, of upheaval and
subsidence--that they had, so to speak, their first low, simple
rudimentary or invertebrate life, that they were all slow in getting
their backbones, slower still in clothing their rock ribs with soil
and verdure, that they passed through a sort of amphibian stage, now
under water, now on dry land, that their many kinds of soils and
climes were not differentiated and their complex water-systems
established till well into Tertiary times--in short, that they have
passed more and more from the simple to the complex, from the
disorganized to the organized. When man comes to draw his sustenance
from their breasts, may they not be said to have reached the
mammalian stage?
The fertile plain and valley and the rounded hill are of slow
growth, immensely slow. But any given stage of the earth has
followed naturally from the previous stage, only more and more and
higher and higher forces took a hand in the game. First its elements
passed through the stage of fire, then through the stage of water,
then merged into the stage of air. More and more the aerial
elements--oxygen, carbon, nitrogen--have entered into its
constituents and fattened the soil. The humanizing of the earth has
been largely a process of oxidation. More than disintegrated rock
makes up the soil; the air and the rains and the snows have all
contributed a share.
The history of the soil which we turn with our spade, and stamp with
our shoes, covers millions upon millions of years. It is the ashes
of the mountains, the leavings of untold generations of animal and
vegetable life. It came out of the sea, it drifted from the heavens;
it flowed out from the fiery heart of the globe; it has been worked
over and over by frost and flood, blown by winds, shoveled by ice,
--mixed and kneaded and moulded as the house-wife kneads and moulds
her bread,--refining and refining from age to age. Much of it was
held in solution in the primordial seas, whence it was filtered and
used and precipitated by countless forms of marine life, making a
sediment that in time became rocks, that again in time became
continents or parts of them, which the aerial forces reduced to
soil. Indeed, the soil itself is an evolution, as much so as the
life upon it.
We probably have little conception of how intimate and cooperative
all parts of the universe are with one another,--of the debt we owe
to the farthest stars, and to the remotest period of time. We must
owe a debt to the monsters of Mesozoic and Caenozoic time; they
helped to fertilize the soil for us, and to discipline the ruder
forces of life. We owe a debt to all that has gone before: to the
heavens above and to the earth-fires beneath, to the ice-sheets that
ground down the mountains, and to the ocean currents. Just as we owe
a debt to the men and women in our line of descent, so we owe a debt
to the ruder primordial forces that shaped the planet to our use,
and took a hand in the game of animal life.
The gods of evolution had served a long apprenticeship; they had
gained proficiency and were master workmen. Or shall we say that the
elements of life had become more plastic and adaptable, or that the
life fund had accumulated, so to speak? Had the vast succession of
living beings, the long experience in organization, at last made the
problem of the origin of man easier to solve?
One fancies every living thing as not only returning its mineral
elements to the soil, but as in some subtle way leaving its vital
forces also, and thus contributing to the impalpable, invisible
store-house of vital energy of the globe.
At first among the mammalian tribes there was much muscle and little
brains. But in the middle Tertiary the mammal brain began suddenly
to enlarge, so that in our time the brain of the horse is more than
eight times the size of the brain of his progenitor, the dinoceras
of Eocene times.
Nature seems to have experimented with brains and nerve ganglia, as
she has with so many other things. The huge reptilian creatures of
Mesozoic time--the various dinosaurs--had ridiculously small heads
and brains, but they had what might be called supplementary brains
well toward the other end of the body,--great nervous masses near
the sacrum, many times the size of the ostensible brain, which no
doubt performed certain brain functions. But the principle of
centralization was at work, and when in later time we reach the
higher mammalian forms, we find these outlying nervous masses called
in, so to speak, and concentrated in the head.
Nature has tried the big, the gigantic, over and over, and then
abandoned it. In Carboniferous times there was a gigantic
dragon-fly, measuring more than two feet in the expanse of wings.
Still earlier, there were gigantic mollusks and sea scorpions, a
cephalopod larger than a man; then gigantic fishes and amphibians
and reptiles, followed by enormous mammals. But the geologic record
shows that these huge forms did not continue. The mollusks that last
unchanged through millions of years are the clam and the oyster of
our day. The huge mosses and tree-ferns are gone, and only their
humbler types remain. Among men giants are short-lived.
On the other hand, the steady increase in size of certain other
species of animals during the later geologic ages is a curious and
interesting fact. The first progenitors of the elephant that have
been found show a small animal that steadily grew through the ages
till the animal as we now find it is reached. Among the
invertebrates this same progressive increase in size has been noted,
a small shell in the Devonian becoming enormous in the Triassic.
Certain species of sharks of medium size in the lower Eocene
continue to increase till they attain the astounding dimensions in
the Miocene and Pliocene of over one hundred feet long. A certain
fish appearing in the Devonian as a small fish of seven centimetres
in length, becomes in the Carboniferous era a creature twenty-seven
centimetres in length. Among the mammals of Tertiary times this same
law of steady increase in size has been operative, as seen in the
Felidae, the stag, and the antelope. Man himself has, no doubt, been
under the same law, and is probably a much larger animal than any of
his Tertiary ancestors. In the vegetable world this process, in many
cases, at least, has been reversed, and the huge treelike
club-mosses and horsetails of Carboniferous times have dwindled in
our time to very insignificant herbaceous forms.
Animals of overweening size are handicapped in many ways, so that
nature in most cases finally abandons the gigantic and sticks to the
medium and the small.
III
Can we fail to see the significance of the order in which life has
appeared upon the globe--the ascending series from the simple to the
more and more complex? Can we doubt that each series is the outcome
of the one below it--that there is a logical sequence from the
protozoa up through the invertebrates, the vertebrates, to man? Is
it not like all that we know of the method of nature? Could we
substitute the life of one period for that of another without doing
obvious violence to the logic of nature? Is there no fundamental
reason for the gradation we behold?
All animal life lowest in organization is earliest in time, and vice
versa, the different classes of a sub-kingdom, and the different
orders of a class, succeeding one another, as Cope says, in the
relative order of their zoological rank. Thus the sponges are later
than the protozoa, the corals succeed the sponges, the sea-urchins
come after the corals, the shell-fish follow the sea-urchins, the
articulates are later than the shell-fish, the vertebrates are later
than the articulates. Among the former, the amphibian follows the
fish, the reptile follows the amphibian, the mammal follows the
reptile, and non-placental mammals are followed by the placental.
It almost seems as if nature hesitated whether to produce the mammal
from the reptile or from the amphibian, as the mammal bears marks of
both in its anatomy, and which was the parent stem is still a
question.
The heart started as a simple tube in the Leptocardii; it divides
itself into two cavities in the fishes, into three in the reptiles,
and into four in the birds and mammals. So the ossification of the
vertebral column takes place progressively, from the Silurian to the
middle Jurassic.
The same ascending series of creation as a whole is repeated in the
inception and development of every one of the higher animals to-day.
Each one begins as a single cell, which soon becomes a congeries of
cells, which is followed by congeries of congeries of cells, till
the highly complex structure of the grown animal with all its
intricate physiological activities and specialization of parts, is
reached. It is typical of the course of the creative energy from the
first unicellular life up to man, each succeeding stage flowing out
of, and necessitated by, the preceding stage.
How slowly and surely the circulatory system improved! From the
cold-blooded animal to the warm-blooded is a great advance. In the
warm-blooded is developed the capacity to maintain a fixed
temperature while that of the surrounding medium changes. The brain
and nervous system display the same progressive ascent from the
brainless acrania, up through the fishes, batrachia, reptiles, and
birds to the top in mammals. The same with the skeletons in the
invertebrates, from membrane to cartilage, from cartilage to bone,
so that the primitive cartilage remaining in any part of the
skeleton is considered a mark of inferiority.
According to Cope, there has been progressive improvement in the
mechanism of the body--it has become a better and better machine.
The suspension of the lower jaw, so as to bring the teeth nearer the
power,--the masseter and related muscles,--was a slow evolution and
a great advance. The fin is more primitive than the limb; the limbs
themselves display a constantly increasing differentiation of parts
from the batrachian to the mammalian. There was no good ankle joint
in early Eocene times. The model ankle joint is a tongue and groove
arrangement, and this is a later evolution. In Eocene times they
were nearly all flat. The arched foot, too, comes in; this is an
advance on the flat foot. The bones of the palms and soles are not
locked until the later Tertiary. The vertebral column progressed in
the same way, from flat to the double curve and the interlocking
process, thus securing greatest strength with greatest mobility. In
the earliest life locomotion was diffused, later it became
concentrated. The worm walks with its whole body.
IV
If we figure to ourselves the geologic history of the earth under
the symbol of a year of three hundred and sixty-five days, each day
a million years, which is probably not far out of the way, then man,
the biped, the Homo sapiens, in relation to this immense past, is of
to-day, or of this very morning; while the origin of the first
vertebrates, the fishes, from which he has arisen, falls nearer the
middle of the great year. Or, dividing this geologic year into four
divisions or seasons, primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary,
the fishes fall in the primary, the reptiles in the secondary, the
mammals in the tertiary, and man in the early quaternary.
If the fluid earth hardened, and the seas were formed in the first
month of this year, then probably the first beginning of life
appeared in the second month, the invertebrate in the third or
fourth,--March or April,--the vertebrates in May or June, the
amphibians in July or August, the reptiles in August or September,
the mammals in October or November, and man in December,--separated
from the first beginnings of life by all those millions upon
millions of years.
If life is a ferment, as we are told it is, how long it took this
yeast to leaven the whole loaf! Man is evidently the end of the
series, he is the top of the biological tree. His specialization
upon physical lines seems to have ended far back in geologic time;
his future specialization and development is evidently to be upon
mental and spiritual lines. Nature, as I have said, began to tend
more and more to brains in the early Tertiary,--the autumn of the
great year; her best harvest began to mature then, her grain began
to ripen. Indeed, this increased cephalization of animal life in the
fall of the great year does suggest a kind of ripening process, the
turning of the sap and milk, which had been so abundant and so
riotous in the earlier period, into fibre and fruit and seed.
May it not be that that long and sultry spring and summer of the
earth's early history, a time probably longer than has since
elapsed, played a part in the development of life analogous to that
played by our spring and summer, making it opulent, varied,
gigantic, and making possible the condensation and refinement that
came with man in the recent period?
The earth is a pretty big apple, and the solar tree upon which it
hangs is a pretty big tree, but why may it not have gone through a
kind of ripening process for all that? its elements becoming less
crude and acrid, and better suited to sustain the higher forms, as
the eons passed?
At any rate, the results seem to justify such a fancy. The earth has
slowly undergone a change that may fairly be called a ripening
process; its soil has deepened and mellowed, its harsher features
have softened, more and more color has come to its surface, the
flowers have bloomed, the more succulent fruits have developed, the
air has cleared, and love and benevolence and altruism have been
born in the world.
V
Life had to creep or swim long before it could walk, and it walked
long before it could fly; it had feeling long before it had eyes,
and it no doubt had eyes long before it could hear or smell. It was
capable of motion long before it had limbs; it assimilated food long
before it had a mouth or a stomach. It had a digestive tract long
before it had a spinal cord; it had nerve ganglia long before it had
a well-defined brain. It had sensation long before it had
perception; it was unisexual long before it was bisexual; it had a
shell long before it had a skeleton; it had instinct and reflex
action long before it had self-consciousness and reason. Always from
the lower to the higher, from the simple to the more complex, and
always slowly, gently.
Life has had its foetal stage, its stage of infancy, and childhood,
and maturity, and will doubtless have its old age. It took it
millions upon millions of years to get out of the sea upon dry land;
and it took it more millions upon dry land, or since the
Carboniferous age, when the air probably first began to be
breathable,--all the vast stretch of the Secondary and Tertiary
ages,--to get upright and develop a reasoning brain, and reach the
estate of man. Step by step, in orderly succession, does creation
move. In the rising and in the setting of the sun one may see how
nature's great processes steal upon us, silently and unnoticed, yet
always in sequence, stage succeeding stage, one thing following from
another, the spectacular moment of sunset following inevitably from
the quiet, unnoticed sinking of the sun in the west, or the
startling flash of his rim above the eastern horizon only the
fulfillment of the promise of the dawn. All is development and
succession, and man is but the sunrise of the dawn of life in
Cambrian or Silurian times, and is linked to that time as one hour
of the day is linked to another.
The more complex life became, the more rapidly it seems to have
developed, till it finally makes rapid strides to reach man. One
seems to see Life, like a traveler on the road, going faster and
faster as it nears its goal. Those long ages of unicellular life in
the old seas, how immense they appear to have been; then how the age
of invertebrates dragged on, millions upon millions of years; then
the age of fishes; the Palaeozoic age, how vast--put by Haeckel at
thirty-four millions of years, adding rock strata forty-one thousand
feet thick; then the Mesozoic or third period, the age of reptiles,
eleven million years, with strata twelve thousand feet thick. Then
came the Caenozoic age, or age of mammals, three million years, with
strata thirty-one hundred feet thick. The god of life was getting in
a hurry now; man was not far off. A new device, the placenta, was
hit upon in this age, and probably the diaphragm and the brain of
animals, all greatly enlarged. Finally comes the Anthropozoic or
Quaternary age, the age of man, three hundred thousand years, with
not much addition to the sedimentary rocks.
Man seems to be the net result of it all, of all these vast cycles
of Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Caenozoic life. He is the one drop
finally distilled from the vast weltering sea of lower organic
forms. It looks as if it all had to be before he could be--all the
delay and waste and struggle and pain--all that long carnival of sea
life, all that saturnalia of gigantic forms upon the land and in the
air, all that rising and sinking of the continents, and all that
shoveling to and fro and mixing of the soils, before the world was
ready for him.
In the early Tertiary, millions of years ago, the earth seems to
have been ripe for man. The fruits and vegetables and the forest
trees were much as we know them, the animals that have been most
serviceable to us were here, spring and summer and fall and winter
came and went, evidently birds sang, insects hummed, flowers
bloomed, fruits and grains and nuts ripened, and yet man as man was
not.
Under the city of London is a vast deposit of clay in which
thousands of specimens of fossil fruit have been found like our
date, cocoanut, areca, custard-apple, gourd, melon, coffee, bean,
pepper, and cotton plant, but no sign of man. Why was his
development so tardy? What animal profited by this rich vegetable
life? The hope and promise of the human species at that time
probably slept in some lowly marsupial. Man has gathered up into
himself, as he traveled his devious way, all the best powers of the
animal kingdom he has passed through. His brain supplies him with
all that his body lacks, and more. His specialization is in this
highly developed organ. It is this that separates him so widely from
all other animals.
Man has no wings, and yet he can soar above the clouds; he is not
swift of foot, and yet he can out-speed the fleetest hound or horse;
he has but feeble weapons in his organization, and yet he can slay
or master all the great beasts; his eye is not so sharp as that of
the eagle or the vulture, and yet he can see into the farthest
depths of siderial space; he has only very feeble occult powers of
communication with his fellows, and yet he can talk around the world
and send his voice across mountains and deserts; his hands are weak
things beside a lion's paw or an elephant's trunk, and yet he can
move mountains and stay rivers and set bounds to the wildest seas.
His dog can out-smell him and out-run him and out-bite him, and yet
his dog looks up to him as to a god. He has erring reason in place
of unerring instinct, and yet he has changed the face of the planet.
Without the specialization of the lower animals,--their wonderful
adaptation to particular ends,--their tools, their weapons, their
strength, their speed, man yet makes them all his servants. His
brain is more than a match for all the special advantages nature has
given them. The one gift of reason makes him supreme in the world.
VI
We have a stake in all the past life of the globe. It is no doubt a
scientific fact that your existence and mine were involved in the
first cell that appeared, that the first zoophyte furthered our
fortunes, that the first worm gave us a lift. Great good luck came
to us when the first pair of eyes were invented, probably by the
trilobite back in Silurian times; when the first ear appeared,
probably in Carboniferous times; when the first pair of lungs grew
out of a fish's air-bladder, probably in Triassic times; when the
first four-chambered heart was developed and double circulation
established, probably with the first warm-blooded animal in Mesozoic
times.
These humble forms started the brain, the nervous system, the
circulation, sight, hearing, smell; they invented the liver, the
kidneys, the lungs, the heart, the stomach, and led the way to every
organ and power my body and mind have to-day. They were the
pioneers, they were the dim remote forebears, they conserved and
augmented the fund of life and passed it along.
All their struggles, their discipline, their battles, their
failures, their successes, were for you and me. Man has had the
experience of all the animals below him. He has suffered and
struggled as a fish, he has groveled and devoured as a reptile, he
has fought and triumphed as a quadruped, he has lived in trees as a
monkey, he has inhabited caves with the wolf and the bear, he has
roamed the forests and plains as a savage, he has survived without
fire or clothes or weapons or tools, he has lived with the mastodon
and all the saurian monsters, he has held his own against great
odds, he has survived the long battles of the land and the sea, he
weathered the ice-sheet that overrode both hemispheres, he has seen
many forms become extinct. In the historic period he has survived
plague and pestilence, and want and famine. What must he have
survived in prehistoric times! What must he have had to contend with
as a cave-dweller, as a tree-dweller, as a river-drift man! Before
he had tools or weapons what must he have had to contend with!
Nature was full of sap and rioted in rude strength well up to
Quaternary times, producing extravagant forms which apparently she
had no use for, as she has discontinued them.
In all these things you and I had our part and lot; of this prodigal
outpouring of life we have reaped the benefit; amid these bizarre
forms and this carnival of lust and power, the manward impulse was
nourished and forwarded. In Eocene times nearly half the mammals
lived on other animals; it must have been an age of great slaughter.
It favored the development of fleetness and cunning, in which we too
have an interest. Our rude progenitor was surely there in some form,
and escaped the slaughter. Then or later it is thought he took to
the trees to escape his enemies, as the rats in Jamaica have taken
to the trees to escape the mongoose. To his tree-climbing we
probably owe our hand, with its opposing thumb.
In all his disguises he is still our ancestor. His story reads like
a fairy book. Never did nimble fancy of childhood invent such
transformations--only the transformations are so infinitely slow,
and attended with such struggle and suffering. Strike out the
element of time and we have before us a spectacle more novel and
startling than any hocus-pocus or legerdemain that ever set the
crowd agape.
In every form man has passed through, he left behind some old member
or power and took on some new. He left his air-bladder and his gills
and his fins with the fishes; he got his lungs from the dipnoans,
the precursors of the amphibians, and from these last he got his
four limbs; he left some part of his anatomy with the reptile, and
took something in exchange, probably his flexible neck. Somewhere
along his line he picked up the four-chambered heart, the warm
blood, the placenta, the diaphragm, the plantigrade foot, the
mammary glands--indeed, what has he not picked up on the long road
of his many transformations? He left some of his superfluous
forty-four teeth with his ancestral quadrumana of Eocene times, and
kept thirty-two. He picked up his brain somewhere on the road,
probably far back in Palaeozoic times, but how has he developed and
enlarged it, till it is now the one supreme thing in the world! His
fear, his cunning, his anger, his treachery, his hoggishness--all
his animal passions--he brought with him from his animal ancestors;
but his moral and spiritual nature, his altruism, his veneration,
his religious emotions, his aesthetic perceptions--have come to him
as a man, supplementing his lower nature, as it were, with another
order of senses--a finer sight, a finer touch, wrought in him by the
discipline of life, and the wonder of the world about him, beginning
de novo in him only as the wing began de novo in the bird, or the
color began de novo in the flower--struck out from preexisting
potentialities. The father of the eye is the light, and the father
of the ear is the vibration of the air, but the father of man's
higher nature is a question of quite another sort. About the only
thing in his physical make-up that man can call his own is his chin.
None of the orders below him seem to have what can strictly be
called a chin.
Man owes his five toes and five fingers to the early amphibians of
the sub-carboniferous times. The first tangible evidence of these
five toes upon the earth is, to me, very interesting. The earliest
record of them that I have heard of is furnished by a slab of shale
from Pennsylvania, upon which, while it was yet soft mud, our first
five-toed ancestor had left the imprint of his four feet. He was
evidently a small, short-legged gentleman with a stride of only
about thirteen inches, and he carried a tail instead of a cane. He
was probably taking a stroll upon the shores of that vast
Mediterranean Sea that occupied all the interior of the continent
when he crossed his mud flat. It was raining that morning--how many
million years ago?--as we know from the imprint of the raindrops
upon the mud. Probably the shower did not cause him to quicken his
pace, as amphibians rather like the rain. Just what his immediate
forbears were like, or what the forms were that connected him with
the fishes, we shall probably never know. Doubtless the great book
of the rocky strata somewhere holds the secret, if we are ever lucky
enough to open it at the right place. How many other secrets, that
evolutionists would like to know, those torn and crumpled leaves
hold!
It is something to me to know that it rained that day when our
amphibian ancestor ventured out. The weather was beginning to get
organized also, and settling down to business. It had got beyond the
state of perpetual mist and fog of the earlier ages, and the
raindrops were playing their parts. Yet, from all the evidence we
have, we infer that the climate was warm and very humid, like that
of a greenhouse, and that vegetation, mostly giant ferns and rushes
and lycopods, was very rank, but there was no grass, or moss, no
deciduous trees, or flowers, or fruit, as we know these things.
A German anatomist says that we have the vestiges of one hundred and
eighty organs which have stuck to us from our animal ancestors,--now
useless, or often worse than useless, like the vermiform appendix.
Eleven of these superannuated and obsolete organs we bring from the
fishes, four from amphibians and reptiles. The external ear is a
vestige--of no use any more. Our dread of snakes we no doubt
inherited from our simian ancestors.
How life refined and humanized as time went on, sobered down and
became more meditative, keeping step, no doubt, with the
amelioration of the soil out of which all life finally comes. Life's
bank account in the soil was constantly increasing; more and more of
the inorganic was wrought up into the organic; the value of every
clod underfoot was raised. The riot of gigantic forms ceased, and
they became ashes. The giant and uncouth vegetation ceased, and left
ashes or coal. The beech, the maple, the oak, the olive, the palm
came in. The giant sea serpents disappeared; the horse, the ox, the
swine, the dog, the quail, the dove came in. The placental mammals
developed. The horse grew in size and beauty. When we first come
upon his trail, he is a four-hoof-toed animal no larger than a fox.
Later on we find him the size of a sheep with one of his toes gone;
still later--many hundred thousand years, no doubt--we find him the
size of a donkey, with still fewer toes, and so on till we reach the
superb creature we know.
The creative energy seems to have worked in geologic time and in the
geologic field just as it works here and now, in yonder vineyard or
in yonder marsh,--blindly, experimentally, but persistently and
successfully. The winged seeds find their proper soil, because they
search in every direction; the climbing vines find their support,
because in the same blind way they feel in all directions. Plants
and animals and races of men grope their way to new fields, to new
powers, to new inventions.
Indeed, how like an inventor Nature has worked, constantly improving
her models, adding to and changing as experience would seem to
dictate! She has developed her higher and more complex forms as man
has developed his printing-press, or steam-engine, from rude,
simple beginnings. From the two-chambered heart of the fish she made
the treble-chambered heart of the frog, and then the four-
chambered heart of the mammal. The first mammary gland had no
nipples; the milk oozed out and was licked off by the young. The
nipple was a great improvement, as was the power of suckling in the
young.
Experimenting and experimenting endlessly, taking a forward step
only when compelled by necessity,--this is the way of
Nature,--experimenting with eyes, with ears, with teeth, with limbs,
with feet, with toes, with wings, with bladders and lungs, with
scales and armors, hitting upon the backbone only after long trials
with other forms, hitting upon the movable eye only after long ages
of other eyes, hitting on the mammal only after long ages of
egg-laying vertebrates, hitting on the placenta only
recently,--experimenting all around the circle, discarding and
inventing, taking ages to perfect the nervous system, ages and ages
to develop the centralized ganglia, the brain. First life was like a
rabble, a mob, without thought or head, then slowly organization
went on, as it were, from family to clan, from clan to tribe, from
tribe to nation, or centralized government--the brain of man--all
parts duly subordinated and directed,--millions of cells organized
and working on different functions to one grand end,--cooperation,
fraternization, division of labor, altruism, etc.
The cell was the first invention; it is the unit of life,--a speck
of protoplasm with a nucleus. To educate this cell till it could
combine with its fellows and form the higher animals seems to have
been the aim of the creative energy. First the cell, then
combinations of cells, then combinations of combinations, then more
and more complex combinations till the body of man is reached, where
endless confraternities of cells, all with different functions,
working to build and sustain different organs,--brain, heart,
liver, muscles, nerves,--yet all working together for one grand
end--the body and mind of man. In their last analysis, all made up
of the same cells--their combinations and organization making the
different forms.
Evolution touches all forms but tarries with few. Many are called
but few are chosen--chosen to lead the man-impulse upward. Myriads
of forms are left behind, like driftwood caught in the eddies of a
current. The clam has always remained a clam, the oyster remained an
oyster. The cockroach is about the same creature to-day that it was
untold aeons ago; so is the shark, and so are many other forms of
marine life. Often where old species have gone out and new come in,
no progress has been made.
Evolution concentrates along certain lines. The biological tree
behaves like another tree, branches die and drop off (species become
extinct), others mature and remain, while some central shoot pushes
upward. Many of the huge reptilian and mammalian branches perished
in comparatively late times.
As nothing is more evident than that the same measure of life or of
vital energy--power of growth, power of resistance, power of
reproduction--is not meted out equally to all the individuals of a
species, or to all species, so it is evident that this power of
progressive development is not meted out equally to all races of
mankind, or to all of the individuals of the same race. The central
impulse of development seems to have come from the East, in historic
times at least, and to have followed the line of the Mediterranean,
to have culminated in Europe. And this progress has certainly been
the work of a few minds--minds exceptionally endowed.
For the most part the barbarian races do not progress. Their
exceptional minds or characters do not lead the tribes to higher
planes of thought, In all countries we still see these barbarous
people which man in his progress has left behind. Our civilization
is like a field of light that fades off into shadows and darkness.
There is this margin of undeveloped humanity on all sides. Always
has it been so in the animal life of the globe; the higher forms
have been pushed up from the lower, and the lower have remained and
continued to multiply unchanged.
It seems as if some central and cherished impulse had pushed on
through each form, and by successive steps had climbed from height
to height, gaining a little here and a little there, intensifying
and concentrating as time went on, very vague and diffuse at first,
embryonic so to speak, during the first half of the great geologic
year, but quickening more and more, differentiating more and more,
delayed and defeated many times, no doubt, yet never destroyed,
leaving form after form unchanged behind it, till it at last reached
its goal in man.
After evolution has done all it can do for us toward solving the
mystery of creation, much remains unsolved.
Through evolution we see creation in travail-pains for millions of
years to bring forth the varied forms of life as we know them; but
the mystery of the inception of this life, and of the origin of the
laws that have governed its development, remains. What lies back of
it all? Who or what planted the germ of the biological tree, and
predetermined all its branches? What determined one branch to
eventuate in man, another in the dog, the horse, the bird, or the
reptile?
From the finite or human point of view we feel compelled to say some
vaster being or intelligence must have had the thought of all these
things from the beginning or before the beginning.
It is quite impossible for me to believe that fortuitous
variation--variation all around the circle--could have resulted in
the evolution of man. There must have been a predetermined tendency
to variation in certain directions. To introduce chance into the
world is to introduce chaos. No more would the waters of the
interiors of the continents find their way to the sea, were there
not a slant in that direction, than could haphazard variation,
though checked and controlled by natural selection, result in the
production of the race of man. This view may be only the outcome of
our inevitable anthropomorphism which we cannot escape from, no
matter how deep we dive or high we soar.
II
THE DIVINE ABYSS
I
In making the journey to the great Southwest,--Colorado, New
Mexico, and Arizona,--if one does not know his geology, he is pretty
sure to wish he did, there is so much geology scattered over all
these Southwestern landscapes, crying aloud to be read. The book of
earthly revelation, as shown by the great science, lies wide open in
that land, as it does in few other places on the globe. Its leaves
fairly flutter in the wind, and the print is so large that he who
runs on the California Limited may read it. Not being able to read
it at all, or not taking any interest in it, is like going to Rome
or Egypt or Jerusalem, knowing nothing of the history of those
lands.
Of course, we have just as much geology in the East and Middle West,
but the books are closed and sealed, as it were, by the enormous
lapse of time since these portions of the continent became dry land.
The eroding and degrading forces have ages since passed the meridian
of their day's work, and grass and verdure hide their footsteps. But
in the great West and Southwest, the gods of erosion and degradation
seem yet in the heat and burden of the day's toil. Their unfinished
landscapes meet the eye on every hand. Many of the mountains look as
if they were blocked out but yesterday, and one sees vast naked
flood-plains, and painted deserts and bad lands and dry
lake-bottoms, that suggest a world yet in the making.
Some force has scalped the hills, ground the mountains, strangled
the rivers, channeled the plains, laid bare the succession of
geologic ages, stripping off formation after formation like a
garment, or cutting away the strata over hundreds of square miles,
as we pry a slab from a rock--and has done it all but yesterday. If
we break the slab in the prying, and thus secure only part of it,
leaving an abrupt jagged edge on the part that remains, we have
still a better likeness of the work of these great geologic
quarrymen. But other workmen, invisible to our eyes, have carved
these jagged edges into novel and beautiful forms.
The East is old, old! the West, with the exception of the Rocky
Mountains, is of yesterday in comparison. The Hudson was an ancient
river before the Mississippi was born, and the Catskills were being
slowly carved from a vast plateau while the rocks that were to form
many of the Western ranges were being laid down as sediment in the
bottom of the sea. California is yet in her teens, while New England
in comparison is an octogenarian. Just as much geology in the East
as in the West, did I say? Not as much visible geology, not as much
by many chapters of earth history, not as much by all the later
formations, by most of the Mesozoic and Tertiary deposits. The vast
series of sedimentary rocks since the Carboniferous age, to say
nothing of the volcanic, that make up these periods, are largely
wanting east of the Mississippi, except in New Jersey and in some of
the Gulf States. They are recent. They are like the history of our
own period compared with that of Egypt and Judea. It is mainly these
later formations--the Permian, the Jurassic, the Triassic, the
Cretaceous, the Eocene,--that give the prevailing features to the
South-western landscape that so astonish Eastern eyes. From them
come most of the petrified remains of that great army of extinct
reptiles and mammals--the three-toed horse, the sabre-toothed
tiger, the brontosaurus, the fin-backed lizard, the imperial
mammoth, the various dinosaurs, some of them gigantic in form and
fearful in aspect--that of late years have appeared in our museums
and that throw so much light upon the history of the animal life of
the globe. Most of the sedimentary rocks of New York and New England
were laid down before these creatures existed.
Now I am not going to write an essay on the geology of the West, for
I really have little first-hand knowledge upon that subject, but I
would indicate the kind of interest in the country I was most
conscious of during my recent trip to the Pacific Coast and beyond.
Indeed, quite a geologic fever raged in me most of the time. The
rocks attracted me more than the birds, the sculpturing of the
landscapes engaged my attention more than the improvements of the
farms--what Nature had done more than what man was doing. The purely
scenic aspects of the country are certainly remarkable, and the
human aspects interesting, but underneath these things, and striking
through them, lies a vast world of time and change that to me is
still more remarkable, and still more interesting. I could not look
out of the car windows without seeing the spectre of geologic time
stalking across the hills and plains.
As one leaves the prairie States and nears the great Southwest, he
finds Nature in a new mood--she is dreaming of canyons; both cliffs
and soil have canyon stamped upon them, so that your eye, if alert,
is slowly prepared for the wonders of rock-carving it is to see on
the Colorado. The canyon form seems inherent in soil and rock. The
channels of the little streams are canyons, vertical sides of adobe
soil, as deep as they are broad, rectangle grooves in the ground.
Through all this arid region nature is abrupt, angular, and
sudden--the plain squarely abutting the cliff, the cliff walling the
canon; the dry water-course sunk in the plain like a carpenter's
groove into a plank. Cloud and sky look the same as at home, but the
earth is a new earth--new geologically, and new in the lines of its
landscapes. It seems by the forms she develops that Nature must use
tools that she long since discarded in the East. She works as if
with the square and the saw and the compass, and uses implements
that cut like chisels and moulding-planes. Right lines,
well-defined angles, and tablelike tops of buttes and mesas
alternate with perfect curves, polished domes, carved needles, and
fluted escarpments.
In the features of our older landscapes there is little or nothing
that suggests architectural forms or engineering devices; in the Far
West one sees such forms and devices everywhere.
In visiting the Petrified Forests in northern Arizona we stood on
the edge of a great rolling plain and looked down upon a wide,
deeply eroded stretch of country below us that suggested a vast army
encampment, covered as it was with great dome-shaped, tent-like
mounds of a light terra-cotta color, with open spaces like streets
or avenues between them. There were hundreds or thousands of these
earthy tents stretching away for twenty-five miles. Along the
horizon was a gigantic stockade of red, rounded pillars, or a solid
line of mosque-like temples. How unreal, how spectral it all seemed!
Not a sound or sign of life in the whole painted solitude--a
deserted camp, or one upon which the silence of death had fallen.
Here, in Carboniferous times, grew the gigantic fern-like trees, the
Sigillaria and Lepidodendron, whose petrified trunks, for aeons
buried beneath the deposit of the Permian seas, and then, during
other aeons, slowly uncovered by the gentle action of the eroding
rains, we saw scattered on the ground.
You first see Nature beginning to form the canon habit in Colorado
and making preliminary studies for her masterpiece, the Grand
Canon. Huge square towers and truncated cones and needles and
spires break the horizon-lines. Here all her water-courses, wet or
dry, are deep grooves in the soil, with striking and pretty carvings
and modelings adorning their vertical sides. In the railway cuts you
see the same effects--miniature domes and turrets and other canon
features carved out by the rains. The soil is massive and does not
crumble like ours and seek the angle of repose; it gives way in
masses like a brick wall. It is architectural soil, it seeks
approximately the right angle--the level plain or the vertical wall.
It erodes easily under running water, but it does not slide; sand
and clay are in such proportions as to make a brittle but not a
friable soil.
Before you are out of Colorado, you begin to see these novel
architectural features on the horizon-line--the canon turned bottom
side up, as it were. In New Mexico, the canon habit of the erosion
forces is still more pronounced. The mountain-lines are often as
architectural in the distance, or arbitrary, as the sky-line of a
city. You may see what you half persuade yourself is a huge brick
building notching the horizon,--an asylum, a seminary, a hotel,--but
it is only a fragment of red sandstone, carved out by wind and rain.
Presently the high colors of the rocks appear--high cliffs with
terra-cotta facades, and a new look in the texture of the rocks, a
soft, beaming, less frowning expression, and colored as if by the
Western sunsets. We are looking upon much younger rocks geologically
than we see at home, and they have the tints and texture of youth.
The landscape and the mountains look young, because they look
unfinished, like a house half up. The workmen have but just knocked
off work to go to dinner; their great trenches, their freshly opened
quarries, their huge dumps, their foundations, their cyclopean
masonry, their half-finished structures breaking the horizon-lines,
their square gashes through the mountains,--all impress the eyes of
a traveler from the eastern part of the continent, where the
earth-building and earth-carving forces finished their work ages
ago.
II
Hence it is that when one reaches the Grand canon of the Colorado,
if he has kept his eyes and mind open, he is prepared to see
striking and unusual things. But he cannot be fully prepared for
just what he does see, no matter how many pictures of it he may have
seen, or how many descriptions of it he may have read.
A friend of mine who took a lively interest in my Western trip wrote
me that he wished he could have been present with his kodak when we
first looked upon the Grand Canon. Did he think he could have got a
picture of our souls? His camera would have shown him only our
silent, motionless forms as we stood transfixed by that first view
of the stupendous spectacle. Words do not come readily to one's
lips, or gestures to one's body, in the presence of such a scene.
One of my companions said that the first thing that came into her
mind was the old text, "Be still, and know that I am God." To be
still on such an occasion is the easiest thing in the world, and to
feel the surge of solemn and reverential emotions is equally easy;
is, indeed, almost inevitable. The immensity of the scene, its
tranquillity, its order, its strange, new beauty, and the monumental
character of its many forms--all these tend to beget in the beholder
an attitude of silent wonder and solemn admiration. I wished at the
moment that we might have been alone with the glorious
spectacle,--that we had hit upon an hour when the public had gone to
dinner. The smoking and joking tourists sauntering along in apparent
indifference, or sitting with their backs to the great geologic
drama, annoyed me. I pity the person who can gaze upon the spectacle
unmoved. Some are actually terrified by it. I was told of a strong
man, an eminent lawyer from a Western city, who literally fell to
the earth at the first view, and could not again be induced to look
upon it. I saw a woman prone upon the ground near the brink at Hopi
Point, weeping silently and long; but from what she afterward told
me I know it was not from terror or sorrow, but from the
overpowering gladness of the ineffable beauty and harmony of the
scene. It moved her like the grandest music. Her inebriate soul
could find relief only in tears.
Harriet Monroe was so wrought up by the first view that she says she
had to fight against the desperate temptation to fling herself down
into the soft abyss, and thus redeem the affront which the very
beating of her heart had offered to the inviolable solitude. Charles
Dudley Warner said of it, "I experienced for a moment an
indescribable terror of nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to be
alone in such a presence."
It is beautiful, oh, how beautiful! but it is a beauty that awakens
a feeling of solemnity and awe. We call it the "Divine Abyss." It
seems as much of heaven as of earth. Of the many descriptions of it,
none seems adequate. To rave over it, or to pour into it a torrent
of superlatives, is of little avail. My companion came nearer the
mark when she quietly repeated from Revelation, "And he carried me
away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that
great city, the holy Jerusalem." It does, indeed, suggest a far-off,
half-sacred antiquity, some greater Jerusalem, Egypt, Babylon, or
India. We speak of it as a scene: it is more like a vision, so
foreign is it to all other terrestrial spectacles, and so
surpassingly beautiful.
To ordinary folk the sight is so extraordinary, so unlike everything
one's experience has yielded, and so unlike the results of the usual
haphazard working of the blind forces of nature, that I did not
wonder when people whom I met on the rim asked me what I supposed
did all this. I could even sympathize with the remark of an old
woman visitor who is reported to have said that she thought they had
built the canon too near the hotel. The enormous cleavage which the
canon shows, the abrupt drop from the brink of thousands of feet,
the sheer faces of perpendicular walls of dizzy height, give at
first the impression that it is all the work of some titanic
quarryman, who must have removed cubic miles of strata as we remove
cubic yards of earth. Go out to Hopi Point or O'Neil's Point, and,
as you emerge from the woods, you get a glimpse of a blue or
rose-purple gulf opening before you. The solid ground ceases
suddenly, and an aerial perspective, vast and alluring, takes its
place; another heaven, countersunk in the earth, transfixes you on
the brink. "Great God!" I can fancy the first beholder of it saying,
"what is this? Do I behold the transfiguration of the earth? Has the
solid ground melted into thin air? Is there a firmament below as
well as above? Has the earth veil at last been torn aside, and the
red heart of the globe been laid bare?" If this first witness was
not at once overcome by the beauty of the earthly revelation before
him, or terrified by its strangeness and power, he must have stood
long, awed, spellbound, speechless with astonishment, and thrilled
with delight. He may have seen vast and glorious prospects from
mountaintops, he may have looked down upon the earth and seen it
unroll like a map before him; but he had never before looked into
the earth as through a mighty window or open door, and beheld depths
and gulfs of space, with their atmospheric veils and illusions and
vast perspectives, such as he had seen from mountain-summits, but
with a wealth of color and a suggestion of architectural and
monumental remains, and a strange, almost unearthly beauty, such as
no mountain-view could ever have afforded him. Three features of the
canon strike one at once: its unparalleled magnitude, its
architectural forms and suggestions, and its opulence of color
effects--a chasm nearly a mile deep and from ten to twenty miles
wide, in which Niagara would be only as a picture upon your walls,
in which the Pyramids, seen from the rim, would appear only like
large tents, in which the largest building upon the earth would
dwindle to insignificant proportions. There are amphitheatres and
mighty aisles eight miles long and three or four miles wide and
three or four thousand feet deep. There are room-like spaces eight
hundred feet high; there are well-defined alcoves with openings a
mile wide; there are niches six hundred feet high overhung by arched
lintels; there are pinnacles and rude statues from one hundred to
two hundred feet high. Here I am running at once into allusions to
the architectural features and suggestions of the canon, which must
play a prominent part in all faithful attempts to describe it. There
are huge, truncated towers, vast, horizontal mouldings; there is the
semblance of balustrades on the summit of a noble facade. In one of
the immense halls we saw, on an elevated platform, the outlines of
three enormous chairs, fifty feet or more high, and behind and above
them the suggestion of three more chairs in partial ruin. Indeed,
there is such an opulence of architectural forms in this divine
abyss as one has never before dreamed of seeing wrought by the blind
forces of nature. These forces have here foreshadowed all the
noblest architecture of the world. Many of the vast carved and
ornamental masses which diversify the canon have been fitly named
temples, as Shiva's Temple, a mile high, carved out of the red
Carboniferous limestone, and remarkably symmetrical in its outlines.
Near it is the Temple of Isis, the Temple of Osiris, the Buddha
Temple, the Horus Temple, and the Pyramid of Cheops. Farther to the
east is the Diva Temple, the Brahma Temple, the Temple of Zoroaster,
and the Tomb of Odin. Indeed, everywhere are there suggestions of
temples and tombs, pagodas and pyramids, on a scale that no work of
human hands can rival. "The grandest objects," says Major Dutton,
"are merged in a congregation of others equally grand." With the
wealth of form goes a wealth of color. Never, I venture to say, were
reds and browns and grays and vermilions more appealing to the eye
than they are as they softly glow in this great canyon. The
color-scheme runs from the dark, sombre hue of the gneiss at the
bottom, up through the yellowish brown of the Cambrian layers, and
on up through seven or eight broad bands of varying tints of red and
vermilion, to the broad yellowish-gray at the top.
III
The north side of the canyon has been much more deeply and
elaborately carved than the south side; most of the great
architectural features are on the north side--the huge temples and
fortresses and amphitheatres. The strata dip very gently to the
north and northeast, while the slope of the surface is to the south
and southeast. This has caused the drainage from the great northern
plateaus to flow into the canyon and thus cut and carve the north
side as we behold it.
The visitor standing upon the south side looks across the great
chasm upon the bewildering maze of monumental forms, some of them as
suggestive of human workmanship as anything in nature well can be,
--crumbling turrets and foundations, forms as distinctly square as
any work of man's hands, vast fortress-like structures with salients
and entering angles and wing walls resisting the siege of time, huge
pyramidal piles rising story on story, three thousand feet or more
above their foundations, each successive story or superstructure
faced by a huge vertical wall which rises from a sloping talus that
connects it with the story next below. The slopes or taluses
represent the softer rock, the vertical walls the harder layers.
Usually four or five of these receding stories make up each temple
or pyramid. Some of the larger structures show all the strata from
the cap of light Carboniferous limestone at the top to the gray
Cambrian sandstone at the bottom. From others, such as the Temple of
Isis, all the upper formations are gone with a pile of disintegrated
red sandstone, like a mass of brick dust on the top where the
fragment of the old red wall made its last stand. In those masses,
which are still crowned with the light gray limestone, one sees how
surely the process of disintegration is going on by the fragments
and debris of light gray rock, like the chips of giant workmen, that
strew the deeper-colored slopes below them. These fragments fade out
as the eye drops down the slopes, as if they had melted like bits of
ice. Indeed, the melting of ice and the dissolution of a rock do not
differ much except that one is very rapid and the other infinitely
slow. In time (not man's time, but the Lord's time), all these light
masses that cap the huge temples will be weathered away, yea, and
all the vast red layers beneath them, and the huge structures will
be slowly consumed by time. The Colorado River will carry their
ashes to the sea, and where they once stood will be seen gray,
desert-like plateaus. Their outlines now stand out like skeletons
from which the flesh has been removed--sharp, angular, obtrusive,
but bound together as by ligaments of granite. The tooth of time
gnaws at them day and night and has been gnawing for thousands of
centuries, so that in some cases only their stumps remain. From the
Temple of Isis and the Tomb of Odin the two or three upper stories
are gone.
On the next page is the ground plan of the Temple of Isis, about
twenty-five hundred feet high. The first story is about a thousand
feet; the second, three hundred and fifty feet; the third, one
hundred and fifty feet; the fourth, five hundred feet; and the
fifth, five hundred feet. The finish at the top shows as a heavy
crumbling wall, probably one hundred feet or more high. How the mass
seems to be resisting the siege of time, throwing out its salients
here and there, and meeting the onset of the foes like a military
engineer.
The pyramidal form of these rock-masses is accounted for by the fact
that they were carved out from the top downward, and that each
successive story is vastly older than the one immediately beneath
it. The erosive forces have been working whole geologic ages longer
on the top layer of rock than on the bottom layer; hence the topmost
ones are entirely gone or else reduced to small dimensions. But what
feature or quality of the rock it is that lends itself so readily or
so inevitably to these architectural forms--the four square
foundations, the end pilasters and balustrades, and so on--is to me
not so clear. The peculiar rectangular jointings, the alternation of
soft and hard layers, the nearly horizontal strata, and other
things, no doubt, enter into the problem. Many of these features are
found in our older geology of the East, as in the Catskills
--horizontal strata, hard and soft layers alternating, but with the
vertical jointing less pronounced; hence the Catskills have few
canon-like valleys, though there are here and there huge gashes
through the mountains that give a canon effect, and there are
gigantic walls high up on the face of some of the mountains that
suggest one side of a mighty canon. In the climate of the Catskills
the rock-masses of the Colorado would crumble much more rapidly than
they do here. The lines of many of these natural temples or
fortresses are still more lengthened and attenuated than those of
the Temple of Isis, appearing like mere skeletons of their former
selves. The forms that weather out the formation above this, the
Permian, appear to be more rotund, and tend more to domes and
rounded hills.
One of the most surprising features of the Grand canon is its
cleanness--its freedom from debris. It is a home of the gods, swept
and garnished; no litter or confusion or fragments of fallen and
broken rocky walls anywhere. Those vast sloping taluses are as clean
as a meadow; rarely at the foot of the huge vertical walls do you
see a fragment of fallen rock. It is as if the processes of erosion
and degradation were as gentle as the dews and the snows, and carved
out this mighty abyss grain by grain, which has probably been the
case. That much of this red sandstone, from the amount of iron it
contains, or from some other cause, disintegrates easily and
rapidly, is very obvious. Looking down from Hopi Point upon a vast
ridge called the "Man-of-War," one sees on the top, where once there
must have been a huge wall of rock, a long level area of red soil
that suggests a garden, the more so because it is regularly divided
up into sections by straight lines of huge stone placed as if by the
hands of man.
One's sense of the depths of the canyon is so great that it almost
makes one dizzy to see the little birds fly out over it, or plunge
down into it. One seems to fear that they too will get dizzy and
fall to the bottom. We watched a line of tourists on mules creeping
along the trail across the inner plateau, and the unaided eye had
trouble to hold them; they looked like little red ants. The eye has
more difficulty in estimating sizes and distances beneath it than
when they are above or on a level with it, because it is so much
less familiar with depth than with height or lateral dimensions.
Another remarkable and unexpected feature of the canyon is its look
of ordered strength. Nearly all the lines are lines of greatest
strength. The prevailing profile line everywhere is that shown
herewith. The upright lines represent lines of cyclopean masonry,
and the slant is the talus that connects them, covered with a short,
sage-colored growth of some kind, and as soft to the eye as the turf
of our fields. The simple, strong structural lines assert themselves
everywhere, and give that look of repose and security characteristic
of the scene. The rocky forces always seem to retreat in good order
before the onslaught of time; there is neither rout nor confusion;
everywhere they present a calm upright front to the foe. And the
fallen from their ranks, where are they? A cleaner battlefield
between the forces of nature one rarely sees.
The weaker portions are, of course, constantly giving way. The
elements incessantly lay siege to these fortresses and take
advantage of every flaw or unguarded point, so that what stands has
been seven times, yea, seventy times seven times tested, and hence
gives the impression of impregnable strength. The angles and curves,
the terraces and foundations, seem to be the work of some master
engineer, with only here and there a toppling rock.
I was puzzled to explain to myself the reason of a certain friendly
and familiar look which the great abyss had for me. One sees or
feels at a glance that it was not born of the throes and convulsions
of nature--of earthquake shock or volcanic explosion. It does not
suggest the crush of matter and the wreck of worlds. Clearly it is
the work of the more gentle and beneficent forces. This probably
accounts for the friendly look. Some of the inner slopes and
plateaus seemed like familiar ground to me: I must have played upon
them when a school-boy. Bright Angel Creek, for some inexplicable
reason, recalled a favorite trout-stream of my native hills, and the
old Cambrian plateau that edges the inner chasm, as we looked down
upon it from nearly four thousand feet above, looked like the brown
meadow where we played ball in the old school-days, friendly,
tender, familiar, in its slopes and terraces, in its tints and
basking sunshine, but grand and awe-inspiring in its depths, its
huge walls, and its terrific precipices.
The geologists are agreed that the canyon is only of yesterday in
geologic time,--the Middle Tertiary,--and yet behold the duration of
that yesterday as here revealed, probably a million years or more!
We can no more form any conception of such time than we can of the
size of the sun or of the distance of the fixed stars.
The forces that did all this vast delving and sculpturing--the air,
the rains, the frost, the sunshine--are as active now as they ever
were; but their activity is a kind of slumbering that rarely makes a
sign. Only at long intervals is the silence of any part of the
profound abyss broken by the fall of loosened rocks or sliding
talus. We ourselves saw where a huge splinter of rock had recently
dropped from the face of the cliff. In time these loosened masses
disappear, as if they melted like ice. A city not made with hands,
but as surely not eternal in the earth! In our humid and severe
Eastern climate, frost and ice and heavyrains working together, all
these architectural forms would have crumbled long ago, and fertile
fields or hill-slopes would have taken their place. In the older
Hawaiian Islands, which probably also date from Tertiary times, the
rains have carved enormous canons and amphitheatres out of the hard
volcanic rock, in some places grinding the mountains to such a thin
edge that a man may literally sit astride them, each leg pointing
into opposite valleys. In the next geologic age, the temples and
monuments of the Grand Canon will have largely disappeared, and the
stupendous spectacle will be mainly a thing of the past.
It seems to take millions of years to tame a mountain, to curb its
rude, savage power, to soften its outlines, and bring fertility out
of the elemental crudeness and barrenness. But time and the gentle
rains of heaven will do it, as they have done it in the East, and as
they are fast doing it in the West.
An old guide with whom I talked, who had lived in and about the
canon for twenty-six years, said, "While we have been sitting here,
the canon has widened and deepened"; which was, of course, the
literal truth, the mathematical truth, but the widening and
deepening could not have been apprehended by human sense.
Our little span of human life is far too narrow for us to be a
witness of any of the great earth changes. These changes are so
slow,--oh, so slow,--and human history is so brief. So far as we are
concerned, the gods of the earth sit in council behind closed doors.
All the profound, formative, world-shaping forces of nature go on in
a realm that we can reach only through our imaginations. They so far
transcend our human experiences that it requires an act of faith to
apprehend them. The repose of the hills and the mountains, how
profound! yet they may be rising or sinking before our very eyes,
and we detect no sign. Only on exceptional occasions, during
earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, is their dreamless slumber rudely
disturbed.
Geologists tell us that from the great plateau in which the Grand
Canon is cut, layers of rock many thousands of feet thick were cut
away before the canon was begun.
Starting from the high plateau of Utah, and going south toward the
canon, we descend a grand geologic stairway, every shelf or tread of
which consists of different formations fifty or more miles broad,
from the Eocene, at an altitude of over ten thousand feet at the
start, across the Cretaceous, the Jurassic, the Triassic, the
Permian, to the Carboniferous, which is the bottom or landing of the
Grand Canon plateau at an altitude of about five thousand feet. Each
step terminates more or less abruptly, the first by a drop of eight
hundred feet, ornamented by rows of square obelisks and pilasters of
uniform pattern and dimension, "giving the effect," says Major
Dutton, "of a gigantic colonnade from which the entablature has been
removed or has fallen in ruins."
The next step, or platform, the Cretaceous, slopes down gradually or
dies out on the step beneath it; then comes the Jurassic, which ends
in white sandstone cliffs several hundred feet high; then the
Triassic, which ends in the famous vermilion cliffs thousands of
feet high, most striking in color and in form; then the Permian
tread, which also ends in striking cliffs, with their own style of
color and architecture; and, lastly, the great Carboniferous
platform in which the canon itself is carved. Now, all these various
strata above the canon, making at one time a thickness of over a
mile, were worn away in Pliocene times, before the cutting of the
Grand Canon began. Had they remained, and been cut through, we
should have had a chasm two miles deep instead of one mile.
The cutting power of a large, rapid volume of water, like the
Colorado, charged with sand and gravel, is very great. According to
Major Dutton, in the hydraulic mines of California, the escaping
water has been known to cut a chasm from twelve to twenty feet deep
in hard basaltic rock, in a single year. This is, of course,
exceptional, but there have, no doubt, been times when the Colorado
cut downward very rapidly. The enormous weathering of its side walls
is to me the more wonderful, probably because the forces that have
achieved this task are silent and invisible, and, so far as our
experience goes, so infinitely slow in their action. The river is a
tremendous machine for grinding and sawing and transporting, but the
rains and the frost and the air and the sunbeams smite the rocks as
with weapons of down, and one is naturally incredulous as to their
destructive effects.
Some of the smaller rivers in the plateau region flow in very deep
but very narrow canons. The rocks being harder and more homogeneous,
the weathering has been slight. The meteoric forces have not taken a
hand in the game. Thus the Parunuweap Canon is only twenty to
thirty feet wide, but from six hundred to fifteen hundred feet deep.
I suppose the slow, inappreciable erosion to which the old guide
alluded would have cut the canon since Middle Tertiary times. The
river, eating downward at the rate of one sixteenth of an inch a
year, would do it in about one million years. At half that rate it
would do it in double that time. In the earlier part of its history,
when the rainfall was doubtless greater, and the river fuller, the
erosion must have been much more rapid than it is at present. The
widening of the canon was doubtless a slower process than the
downward cutting. But, as I have said, the downward cutting would
tend to check itself from age to age, while the widening process
would go steadily forward. Hence, when we look into the great abyss,
we have only to remember the enormous length of time that the aerial
and subaerial forces have been at work to account for it.
Two forces, or kinds of forces, have worked together in excavating
the canon: the river, which is the primary factor, and the meteoric
forces, which may be called the secondary, as they follow in the
wake of the former. The river starts the gash downward, then the
aerial forces begin to eat into the sides. Acting alone, the river
would cut a trench its own width, and were the rocks through which
it saws one homogeneous mass, or of uniform texture and hardness,
the width of the trench would probably have been very uniform and
much less than it is now. The condition that has contributed to its
great width is the heterogeneity of the different formations--some
hard and some soft. The softer bands, of course, introduce the
element of weakness. They decay and crumble the more rapidly, and
thus undermine the harder bands overlying them, which, by reason of
their vertical fractures, break off and fall to the bottom, where
they are exposed to the action of floods and are sooner or later
ground up in the river's powerful maw. Hence the recession of the
banks of the canon has gone steadily on with the downward cutting of
the river. Where the rock is homogeneous, as it is in the inner
chasm of the dark gneiss, the widening process seems to have gone on
much more slowly. Geologists account for the great width of the main
chasm when compared with the depth, on the theory that the forces
that work laterally have been more continuously active than has the
force that cuts downward. There is convincing evidence that the
whole region has been many times lifted up since the cutting began,
so that the river has had its active and passive stages. As its
channel approached the sea level, its current would be much less
rapid, and the downward cutting would practically cease, till the
section was elevated again. But all the time the forces working
laterally would be at work without interruption, and would thus gain
on their checked brethren of the river bottom.
There is probably another explanation of what we see here. Apart
from the mechanical weathering of the rocks as a result of the arid
climate, wherein rapid and often extreme changes of temperature take
place, causing the surface of the rocks to flake or scale off, there
has doubtless been unusual chemical weathering, and this has been
largely brought about by the element of iron that all these rocks
possess. Their many brilliant colors are imparted to them by the
various compounds of iron which enter into their composition. And
iron, though the symbol of hardness and strength, is an element of
weakness in rocks, as it causes them to oxidize or disintegrate more
rapidly. In the marble canon, where apparently the rock contains no
iron, the lateral erosion has been very little, though the river has
cut a trench as deep as it has in other parts of its course.
How often I thought during those days at the canon of the geology of
my native hills amid the Catskills, which show the effects of
denudation as much older than that shown here as this is older than
the washout in the road by this morning's shower! The old red
sandstone in which I hoed corn as a farm-boy dates back to Middle
Palaeozoic time, or to the spring of the great geologic year, while
the canon is of the late autumn. Could my native hills have replied
to my mute questionings, they would have said: "We were old, old,
and had passed through the canon stage long before the Grand Canon
was born. We have had all that experience, and have forgotten it
ages ago. No vestiges of our canons remain. They have all been worn
down and obliterated by the strokes of a hand as gentle as that of a
passing cloud. Where they were, are now broad, fertile valleys, with
rounded knolls and gentle slopes, and the sound of peaceful
husbandry. The great ice sheet rubbed us and ploughed us, but our
contours were gentle and rounded aeons before that event. When the
Grand Canon is as old as we are, all its superb architectural
features will have long since disappeared, its gigantic walls will
have crumbled, and rolling plains and gentle valleys will have taken
its place." All of which seems quite probable. With time enough, the
gentle forces of air and water will surely change the whole aspect
of this tremendous chasm.
On the second day we made the descent into the canon on mule-back.
There is always satisfaction in going to the bottom of things. Then
we wanted to get on more intimate terms with the great abyss, to
wrestle with it, if need be, and to feel its power, as well as to
behold it. It is not best always to dwell upon the rim of things or
to look down upon them from afar. The summits are good, but the
valleys have their charm, also; even the valley of humiliation has
its lessons. At any rate, four of us were unanimous in our desire to
sound that vast profound on mule-back, trusting that the return trip
would satisfy our "climbing" aspirations, as it did.
It is quite worth while to go down into the canon on mule-back, if
only to fall in love with a mule, and to learn what a sure-footed,
careful, and docile creature, when he is on his good behavior, a
mule can be. My mule was named "Johnny," and there was soon a good
understanding between us. I quickly learned to turn the whole
problem of that perilous descent over to him. He knew how to take
the sharp turns and narrow shelves of that steep zigzag much better
than I did. I do not fancy that the thought of my safety was
"Johnny's" guiding star; his solicitude struck nearer home than
that. There was much ice and snow on the upper part of the trail,
and only those slender little legs of "Johnny's" stood between me
and a tumble of two or three thousand feet. How cautiously he felt
his way with his round little feet, as, with lowered head, he seemed
to be scanning the trail critically! Only when he swung around the
sharp elbows of the trail did his forefeet come near the edge of the
brink. Only once or twice at such times, as we hung for a breath
above the terrible incline, did I feel a slight shudder. One of my
companions, who had never before been upon an animal's back, so fell
in love with her "Sandy" that she longed for a trunk big enough in
which to take him home with her.
It was more than worth while to make the descent to traverse that
Cambrian plateau, which from the rim is seen to flow out from the
base of the enormous cliffs to the brink of the inner chasm, looking
like some soft, lavender-colored carpet or rug. I had never seen the
Cambrian rocks, the lowest of the stratified formations, nor set my
foot upon Cambrian soil. Hence a new experience was promised me.
Rocky layers probably two or three miles thick had been worn away
from the old Cambrian foundations, and when I looked down upon that
gently undulating plateau, the thought of the eternity of time which
it represented tended quite as much to make me dizzy as did the drop
of nearly four thousand feet. We found it gravelly and desert-like,
covered with cacti, low sagebrush, and other growths. The dim trail
led us to its edge, where we could look down into the
twelve-hundred-foot V-shaped gash which the river had cut into the
dark, crude-looking Archaean rock. How distinctly it looked like a
new day in creation where the horizontal, yellowish-gray beds of the
Cambrian were laid down upon the dark, amorphous, and twisted older
granite! How carefully the level strata had been fitted to the
shapeless mass beneath it! It all looked like the work of a master
mason; apparently you could put the point of your knife where one
ended and the other began. The older rock suggested chaos and
turmoil; the other suggested order and plan, as if the builder had
said, "Now upon this foundation we will build our house." It is an
interesting fact, the full geologic significance of which I suppose
I do not appreciate, that the different formations are usually
marked off from one another in just this sharp way, as if each one
was, indeed, the work of a separate day of creation. Nature appears
at long intervals to turn over a new leaf and start a new chapter in
her great book. The transition from one geologic age to another
appears to be abrupt: new colors, new constituents, new qualities
appear in the rocks with a suddenness hard to reconcile with Lyell's
doctrine of uniformitarianism, just as new species appear in the
life of the globe with an abruptness hard to reconcile with Darwin's
slow process of natural selection. Is sudden mutation, after all,
the key to all these phenomena?
We ate our lunch on the old Cambrian table, placed there for us so
long ago, and gazed down upon the turbulent river hiding and
reappearing in its labyrinthian channel so far below us. It is worth
while to make the descent in order to look upon the river which has
been the chief quarryman in excavating the canon, and to find how
inadequate it looks for the work ascribed to it. Viewed from where
we sat, I judged it to be forty or fifty feet broad, but I was
assured that it was between two and three hundred feet. Water and
sand are ever symbols of instability and inconstancy, but let them
work together, and they saw through mountains, and undermine the
foundations of the hills.
It is always worth while to sit or kneel at the feet of grandeur, to
look up into the placid faces of the earth gods and feel their
power, and the tourist who goes down into the canon certainly has
this privilege. We did not bring back in our hands, or in our hats,
the glory that had lured us from the top, but we seemed to have been
nearer its sources, and to have brought back a deepened sense of the
magnitude of the forms, and of the depth of the chasm which we had
heretofore gazed upon from a distance. Also we had plucked the
flower of safety from the nettle danger, always an exhilarating
enterprise.
In climbing back, my eye, now sharpened by my geologic reading,
dwelt frequently and long upon the horizon where that cross-bedded
Carboniferous sandstone joins the Carboniferous limestone above it.
How much older the sandstone looked! I could not avoid the
impression that its surface must have formed a plane of erosion ages
and ages before the limestone had been laid down upon it.
We had left plenty of ice and snow at the top, but in the bottom we
found the early spring flowers blooming, and a settler at what is
called the Indian Gardens was planting his garden. Here I heard the
song of the canon wren, a new and very pleasing bird-song to me. I
think our dreams were somewhat disturbed that night by the
impressions of the day, but our day-dreams since that time have at
least been sweeter and more comforting, and I am sure that the
remainder of our lives will be the richer for our having seen the
Grand Canon.
III
THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE
I
Yosemite won my heart at once, as it seems to win the hearts of all
who visit it. In my case many things helped to do it, but I am sure
a robin, the first I had seen since leaving home, did his part. He
struck the right note, he brought the scene home to me, he supplied
the link of association. There he was, running over the grass or
perching on the fence, or singing from a tree-top in the old
familiar way. Where the robin is at home, there at home am I. But
many other things helped to win my heart to the Yosemite--the whole
character of the scene, not only its beauty and sublimity, but the
air of peace and protection, and of homelike seclusion that pervades
it; the charm of a nook, a retreat, combined with the power and
grandeur of nature in her sternest moods.
After passing from the hotel at El Portal along the foaming and
roaring Merced River, and amid the tumbled confusion of enormous
granite boulders shaken down from the cliffs above, you cross the
threshold of the great valley as into some vast house or hall carved
out of the mountains, and at once feel the spell of the brooding
calm and sheltered seclusion that pervades it. You pass suddenly
from the tumultuous, the chaotic, into the ordered, the tranquil,
the restful, which seems enhanced by the power and grandeur that
encompass them about. You can hardly be prepared for the hush that
suddenly falls upon the river and for the gentle rural and sylvan
character of much that surrounds you; the peace of the fields, the
seclusion of the woods, the privacy of sunny glades, the enchantment
of falls and lucid waters, with a touch of human occupancy here and
there--all this, set in that enormous granite frame, three or four
thousand feet high, ornamented with domes and spires and peaks still
higher,--it is all this that wins your heart and fills your
imagination in the Yosemite.
As you ride or walk along the winding road up the level valley amid
the noble pines and spruces and oaks, and past the groves and bits
of meadow and the camps of many tents, and the huge mossy granite
boulders here and there reposing in the shade of the trees, with the
full, clear, silent river winding through the plain near you, you
are all the time aware of those huge vertical walls, their faces
scarred and niched, streaked with color, or glistening with
moisture, and animated with waterfalls, rising up on either hand,
thousands of feet high, not architectural, or like something
builded, but like the sides and the four corners of the globe
itself. What an impression of mass and of power and of grandeur in
repose filters into you as you walk along! El Capitan stands there
showing its simple sweeping lines through the trees as you approach,
like one of the veritable pillars of the firmament. How long we are
nearing it and passing it! It is so colossal that it seems near
while it is yet far off. It is so simple that the eye takes in its
naked grandeur at a glance. It demands of you a new standard of size
which you cannot at once produce. It is as clean and smooth as the
flank of a horse, and as poised and calm as a Greek statue. It
curves out toward the base as if planted there to resist the
pressure of worlds--probably the most majestic single granite
column or mountain buttress on the earth. Its summit is over three
thousand feet above you. Across the valley, nearly opposite, rise
the Cathedral Rocks to nearly the same height, while farther along,
beyond El Capitan, the Three Brothers shoulder the sky at about the
same dizzy height. Near the head of the great valley, North Dome,
perfect in outline as if turned in a lathe, and its brother, the
Half Dome (or shall we say half-brother?) across the valley, look
down upon Mirror Lake from an altitude of over four thousand feet.
These domes suggest enormous granite bubbles if such were possible
pushed up from below and retaining their forms through the vast
geologic ages. Of course they must have weathered enormously, but as
the rock seems to peel off in concentric sheets, their forms are
preserved.
II
One warm, bright Sunday near the end of April, six of us walked up
from the hotel to Vernal and Nevada Falls, or as near to them as we
could get, and took our fill of the tumult of foaming waters
struggling with the wreck of huge granite cliffs: so impassive and
immobile the rocks, so impetuous and reckless and determined the
onset of the waters, till the falls are reached, when the obstructed
river seems to find the escape and the freedom it was so eagerly
seeking. Better to be completely changed into foam and spray by one
single leap of six hundred feet into empty space, the river seems to
say, than be forever baffled and tortured and torn on this rack of
merciless boulders.
We followed the zigzagging trail up the steep side of the valley,
touching melting snow-banks in its upper courses, passing huge
granite rocks also melting in the slow heat of the geologic ages,
pausing to take in the rugged, shaggy spruces and pines that
sentineled the mountain-sides here and there, or resting our eyes
upon Liberty Cap, which carries its suggestive form a thousand feet
or more above the Nevada Fall. What beauty, what grandeur attended
us that day! the wild tumult of waters, the snow-white falls, the
motionless avalanches of granite rocks, and the naked granite shaft,
Liberty Cap, dominating all!
And that night, too, when we sat around a big camp-fire near our
tents in the valley, and saw the full moon come up and look down
upon us from behind Sentinel Rock, and heard the intermittent
booming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the spruce trees that
towered around us, and felt the tender, brooding spirit of the great
valley, itself touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on every
hand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls--surely that was a
night none of us can ever forget. As Yosemite can stand the broad,
searching light of midday and not be cheapened, so its enchantments
can stand the light of the moon and the stars and not be rendered
too vague and impalpable.
III
Going from the Grand Canon to Yosemite is going from one sublimity
to another of a different order. The canon is the more strange,
unearthly, apocryphal, appeals more to the imagination, and is the
more overwhelming in its size, its wealth of color, and its
multitude of suggestive forms. But for quiet majesty and beauty,
with a touch of the sylvan and pastoral, too, Yosemite stands alone.
One could live with Yosemite, camp in it, tramp in it, winter and
summer in it, and find nature in her tender and human, almost
domestic moods, as well as in her grand and austere. But I do not
think one could ever feel at home in or near the Grand Canon; it is
too unlike anything we have ever known upon the earth; it is like a
vision of some strange colossal city uncovered from the depth of
geologic time. You may have come to it, as we did, from the
Petrified Forests, where you saw the silicified trunks of thousands
of gigantic trees or tree ferns, that grew millions of years ago,
most of them uncovered, but many of them protruding from banks of
clay and gravel, and in their interiors rich in all the colors of
the rainbow, and you wonder if you may not now be gazing upon some
petrified antediluvian city of temples and holy places exhumed by
mysterious hands and opened up to the vulgar gaze of to-day. You
look into it from above and from another world and you descend into
it at your peril. Yosemite you enter as into a gigantic hall and
make your own; the canon you gaze down upon, and are an alien,
whether you enter it or not. Yosemite is carved out of the most
majestic and enduring of all rocks, granite; the Grand Canon is
carved out of one of the most beautiful, but perishable, red
Carboniferous sandstone and limestone. There is a maze of beautiful
and intricate lines in the latter, a wilderness of temple-like forms
and monumental remains, and noble architectural profiles that
delight while they bewilder the eye. Yosemite has much greater
simplicity, and is much nearer the classic standard of beauty. Its
grand and austere features predominate, of course, but underneath
these and adorning them are many touches of the idyllic and the
picturesque. Its many waterfalls fluttering like white lace against
its vertical granite walls, its smooth, level floor, its noble pines
and oaks, its open glades, its sheltering groves, its bright, clear,
winding river, its soft voice of many waters, its flowers, its
birds, its grass, its verdure, even its orchards of blooming apple
trees, all inclosed in this tremendous granite frame--what an
unforgettable picture it all makes, what a blending of the sublime
and the homelike and familiar it all is! It is the waterfalls that
make the granite alive, and bursting into bloom as it were. What a
touch they give! how they enliven the scene! What music they evoke
from these harps of stone!
The first leap of Yosemite Falls is sixteen hundred feet--sixteen
hundred feet of a compact mass of snowy rockets shooting downward
and bursting into spray around which rainbows flit and hover. The
next leap is four hundred feet, and the last six hundred. We tried
to get near the foot and inspect the hidden recess in which this
airy spirit again took on a more tangible form of still, running
water, but the spray over a large area fell like a summer shower,
drenching the trees and the rocks, and holding the inquisitive
tourist off at a safe distance. We had to beat a retreat with
dripping garments before we had got within fifty yards of the foot
of the fall. At first I was surprised at the volume of water that
came hurrying out of the hidden recess of dripping rocks and
trees--a swiftly flowing stream, thirty or forty feet wide, and four
or five feet deep. How could that comparatively narrow curtain of
white spray up there give birth to such a full robust stream? But I
saw that in making the tremendous leap from the top of the
precipice, the stream was suddenly drawn out, as we stretch a rubber
band in our hands, and that the solid and massive current below was
like the rubber again relaxed. The strain was over, and the united
waters deepened and slowed up over their rocky bed.
Yosemite for a home or a camp, the Grand Canon for a spectacle. I
have spoken of the robin I saw in Yosemite Valley. Think how forlorn
and out of place a robin would seem in the Grand Canon! What would
he do there? There is no turf for him to inspect, and there are no
trees for him to perch on. I should as soon expect to find him amid
the pyramids of Egypt, or amid the ruins of Karnak. The bluebird was
in the Yosemite also, and the water-ouzel haunted the lucid waters.
I noticed a peculiarity of the oak in Yosemite that I never saw
elsewhere [Footnote: I have since observed the same trait in the
oaks in Georgia--probably a characteristic of this tree in southern
latitudes.]--a fluid or outflowing condition of the growth
aboveground, such as one usually sees in the roots of trees--so that
it tended to envelop and swallow, as it were, any solid object with
which it came in contact. If its trunk touched a point of rock, it
would put out great oaken lips several inches in extent as if to
draw the rock into its maw. If a dry limb was cut or broken off, a
foot from the trunk, these thin oaken lips would slowly creep out
and envelop it--a sort of Western omnivorous trait appearing in the
trees.
Whitman refers to "the slumbering and liquid trees." These Yosemite
oaks recall his expression more surely than any of our Eastern
trees.
The reader may create for himself a good image of Yosemite by
thinking of a section of seven or eight miles of the Hudson River,
midway of its course, as emptied of its water and deepened three
thousand feet or more, having the sides nearly vertical, with
snow-white waterfalls fluttering against them here and there, the
famous spires and domes planted along the rim, and the landscape of
groves and glades, with its still, clear winding river, occupying
the bottom.
IV
One cannot look upon Yosemite or walk beneath its towering walls
without the question arising in his mind, How did all this happen?
What were the agents that brought it about? There has been a great
geologic drama enacted here; who or what were the star actors? There
are two other valleys in this part of the Sierra, Hetch-Hetchy and
King's River, that are almost identical in their main features,
though the Merced Yosemite is the widest of the three. Each of them
is a tremendous chasm in the granite rock, with nearly vertical
walls, domes, El Capitans, and Sentinel and Cathedral Rocks, and
waterfalls--all modeled on the same general plan. I believe there
is nothing just like this trio of Yosemites anywhere else on the
globe.
Guided by one's ordinary sense or judgment alone, one's judgment as
developed and disciplined by the everyday affairs of life and the
everyday course of nature, one would say on beholding Yosemite that
here is the work of exceptional and extraordinary agents or
world-building forces. It is as surprising and exceptional as would
be a cathedral in a village street, or a gigantic sequoia in a grove
of our balsam firs. The approach to it up the Merced River does not
prepare one for any such astonishing spectacle as awaits one. The
rushing, foaming water amid the tumbled confusion of huge granite
rocks and the open V-shaped valley, are nothing very remarkable or
unusual. Then suddenly you are on the threshold of this hall of the
elder gods. Demons and furies might lurk in the valley below, but
here is the abode of the serene, beneficent Olympian deities. All is
so calm, so hushed, so friendly, yet so towering, so stupendous, so
unspeakably beautiful. You are in a mansion carved out of the
granite foundations of the earth, with walls two or three thousand
feet high, hung here and there with snow-white waterfalls, and
supporting the blue sky on domes and pinnacles still higher. Oh, the
calmness and majesty of the scene! the evidence of such tremendous
activity of some force, some agent, and now so tranquil, so
sheltering, so beneficent!
That there should be two or three Yosemites in the Sierra not very
far apart, all with the main features singularly alike, is very
significant--as if this kind of valley was latent in the granite of
that region--some peculiarity of rock structure that lends itself
readily to these formations. The Sierra lies beyond the southern
limit of the great continental ice-sheet of late Tertiary times, but
it nursed and reared many local glaciers, and to the eroding power
of these its Yosemites are partly due. But water was at work here
long before the ice--eating down into the granite and laying open
the mountain for the ice to begin its work. Ice may come, and ice
may go, says the river, but I go on forever. Water tends to make a
V-shaped valley, ice a U-shaped one, though in the Hawaiian Islands,
where water erosion alone has taken place, the prevailing form of
the valleys is that of the U-shaped. Yosemite approximates to this
shape, and ice has certainly played a part in its formation. But the
glacier seems to have stopped at the outlet of the great valley; it
did not travel beyond the gigantic hall it had helped to excavate.
The valley of the Merced from the mouth of Yosemite downward is an
open valley strewn with huge angular granite rocks and shows no
signs of glaciation whatever. The reason of this abruptness is quite
beyond my ken. It is to me a plausible theory that when the granite
that forms the Sierra was lifted or squeezed up by the shrinking of
the earth, large fissures and crevasses may have occurred, and that
Yosemite and kindred valleys may be the result of the action of
water and ice in enlarging these original chasms. Little wonder that
the earlier geologists, such as Whitney, were led to attribute the
exceptional character of these valleys to exceptional and
extraordinary agents--to sudden faulting or dislocation of the
earth's crust. But geologists are becoming more and more loath to
call in the cataclysmal to explain any feature of the topography of
the land. Not to the thunder or the lightning, to earthquake or
volcano, to the forces of upheaval or dislocation, but to the still,
small voice of the rain and the winds, of the frost and the
snow,--the gentle forces now and here active all about us, carving
the valleys and reducing the mountains, and changing the courses of
rivers,--to these, as Lyell taught us, we are to look in nine cases
out of ten, yes, in ninety-nine out of a hundred, to account for the
configuration of the continents.
The geologists of our day, while not agreeing as to the amount of
work done respectively by ice and water, yet agree that to the
latter the larger proportion of the excavation is to be ascribed. At
any rate between them both they have turned out one of the most
beautiful and stupendous pieces of mountain carving to be found upon
the earth.
IV
THROUGH THE EYES OF THE GEOLOGIST
I
How habitually we go about over the surface of the earth, delving it
or cultivating it or leveling it, without thinking that it has not
always been as we now find it, that the mountains were not always
mountains, nor the valleys always valleys, nor the plains always
plains, nor the sand always sand, nor the clay always clay. Our
experience goes but a little way in such matters. Such a thought
takes us from human time to God's time, from the horizon of place
and years to the horizon of geologic ages. We go about our little
affairs in the world, sowing and reaping and building and
journeying, like children playing through the halls of their
ancestors, without pausing to ask how these things all came about.
We do not reflect upon the age of our fields any more than we do
upon the size of the globe under our feet: when we become curious
about such matters and look upon the mountains as either old or
young, or as the subjects of birth, growth, and decay, then we are
unconscious geologists. It is to our interest in such things that
geology appeals and it is this interest that it stimulates and
guides.
What an astonishing revelation, for instance, that the soil was born
of the rocks, and is still born of the rocks; that every particle of
it was once locked up in the primitive granite and was unlocked by
the slow action of the rain and the dews and the snows; that the
rocky ribs of the earth were clothed with this fertile soil out of
which we came and to which we return by their own decay; that the
pulling-down of the inorganic meant the building-up of the organic;
that the death of the crystal meant the birth of the cell, and
indirectly of you and me and of all that lives upon the earth.
Had there been no soil, had the rocks not decayed, there had been no
you and me. Such considerations have long made me feel a keen
interest in geology, and especially of late years have stimulated my
desire to try to see the earth as the geologist sees it. I have
always had a good opinion of the ground underfoot, out of which we
all come, and to which we all return; and the story the geologists
tell us about it is calculated to enhance greatly that good opinion.
I think that if I could be persuaded, as my fathers were, that the
world was made in six days, by the fiat of a supernatural power, I
should soon lose my interest in it. Such an account of it takes it
out of the realm of human interest, because it takes it out of the
realm of natural causation, and places it in the realm of the
arbitrary, and non-natural. But to know that it was not made at all,
in the mechanical sense, but that it grew--that it is an evolution
as much as the life upon the surface, that it has an almost infinite
past, that it has been developing and ripening for millions upon
millions of years, a veritable apple upon the great sidereal tree,
ameliorating from cycle to cycle, mellowing, coloring,
sweetening--why, such a revelation adds immensely to our interest in
it.
As with nearly everything else, the wonder of the world grows the
more we grasp its history. The wonder of life grows the more we
consider the chaos of fire and death out of which it came; the
wonder of man grows the more we peer into the abyss of geologic time
and of low bestial life out of which he came.
Not a tree, not a shrub, not a flower, not a green thing growing,
not an insect of an hour, but has a background of a vast aeon of
geologic and astronomic time, out of which the forces that shaped it
have emerged, and over which the powers of chaos and darkness have
failed to prevail.
The modern geologist affords us one of the best illustrations of the
uses of the scientific imagination that we can turn to. The
scientific imagination seems to be about the latest phase of the
evolution of the human mind. This power of interpretation of
concrete facts, this Miltonic flight into time and space, into the
heavens above, and into the bowels of the earth beneath, and bodying
forth a veritable history, a warring of the powers of light and
darkness, with the triumph of the angels of light and life, makes
Milton's picture seem hollow and unreal. The creative and poetic
imagination has undoubtedly already reached its high-water mark. We
shall probably never see the great imaginative works of the past
surpassed or even equaled. But in the world of scientific discovery
and interpretation, we see the imagination working in new fields and
under new conditions, and achieving triumphs that mark a new epoch
in the history of the race. Nature, which once terrified man and
made a coward of him, now inspires him and fills him with love and
enthusiasm.
The geologist is the interpreter of the records of the rocks. From a
bit of strata here, and a bit there, he re-creates the earth as it
was in successive geologic periods, as Cuvier reconstructed his
extinct animals from fragments of their bones; and the same
interpretative power of the imagination is called into play in both
cases, only the palaeontologist has a much narrower field to work
in, and the background of his re-creations must be supplied by the
geologist.
Everything connected with the history of the earth is on such a vast
scale--such a scale of time, such a scale of power, such a scale of
movement--that in trying to measure it by our human standards and
experience we are like the proverbial child with his cup on the
seashore. Looked at from our point of view, the great geological
processes often seem engaged in world-destruction rather than in
world-building. Those oft-repeated invasions of the continents by
the ocean, which have gone on from Archaean times, and during which
vast areas which had been dry land for ages were engulfed, seem like
world-wide catastrophes. And no doubt they were such to myriads of
plants and animals of those times. But this is the way the
continents grew. All the forces of the invading waters were engaged
in making more land.
The geologist is bold; he is made so by the facts and processes with
which he deals; his daring affirmations are inspired by a study of
the features of the earth about him; his time is not our time, his
horizons are not our horizons; he escapes from our human experiences
and standards into the vast out-of-doors of the geologic forces and
geologic ages. The text he deciphers is written large, written
across the face of the continent, written in mountain-chains and
ocean depths, and in the piled strata of the globe. We untrained
observers cannot spell out these texts, because they are written
large; our vision is adjusted to smaller print; we are like the
school-boy who finds on the map the name of a town or a river, but
does not see the name of the state or the continent printed across
it. If the geologist did not tell us, how should we ever suspect
that probably where we now stand two or more miles of strata have
been worn away by the winds and rains; that the soil of our garden,
our farm, represents the ashes of mountains burned up in the slow
fires of the geologic ages.
Geology first gives us an adequate conception of time. The
limitations which shut our fathers into the narrow close of six
thousand years are taken down by this great science and we are
turned out into the open of unnumbered millions of years. Upon the
background of geologic time our chronological time shows no more
than a speck upon the sky. The whole of human history is but a mere
fraction of a degree of this mighty arc. The Christian era would
make but a few seconds of the vast cycle of the earth's history.
Geologic time! The words seem to ring down through the rocky strata
of the earth's crust; they reverberate under the mountains, and make
them rise and fall like the waves of the sea; they open up vistas
through which we behold the continents and the oceans changing
places, and the climates of the globe shifting like clouds in the
sky; whole races and tribes of animal forms disappear and new ones
come upon the scene. Such a past! the imagination can barely skirt
the edge of it. As the pool in the field is to the sea that wraps
the earth, so is the time of our histories to the cycle of ages in
which the geologist reckons the events of the earth's history.
Through the eyes of the geologist one may look upon his native hills
and see them as they were incalculable ages ago, and as they
probably will be incalculable ages ahead; those hills, so unchanging
during his lifetime, and during a thousand lifetimes, he may see as
flitting as the cloud shadows upon the landscape. Out of the dark
abyss of geologic time there come stalking the ghosts of lost
mountains and lost hills and valleys and plains, or lost rivers and
lakes, yea, of lost continents; we see a procession of the phantoms
of strange and monstrous beasts, many of them colossal in size and
fearful in form, and among the minor forms of this fearful troop of
spectres we see the ones that carried safely forward, through the
vicissitudes of those ages, the precious impulse that was to
eventuate in the human race.
Only the geologist knows the part played by erosion in shaping the
earth's surface as we see it. He sees, I repeat, the phantoms of
vanished hills and mountains all about us. He sees their shadow
forms wherever he looks. He follows out the lines of the flexed or
folded strata where they come to the surface, and thus sketches in
the air the elevation that has disappeared. In some places he finds
that the valleys have become hills and the hills have become
valleys, or that the anticlines and synclines, as he calls them,
have changed places--as a result of the unequal hardness of the
rocks. Over all the older parts of the country the original features
have been so changed by erosion that, could they be suddenly
restored, one would be lost on his home farm. The rocks have melted
into soil, as the snow-banks in spring melt into water. The rocks
that remain are like fragments of snow or ice that have so far
withstood the weather. Geologists tell us that the great Appalachian
chain has been in the course of the ages reduced almost to a base
level or peneplain, and then reelevated and its hills and mountains
carved out anew.
We change the surface of the earth a little with our engineering,
drain a marsh, level a hill, sweep away a forest, or bore a
mountain, but what are these compared with the changes that have
gone on there before our race was heard of? In my native mountains,
the Catskills, all those peaceful pastoral valleys, with their farms
and homesteads, lie two or three thousand feet below the original
surface of the land. Could the land be restored again to its first
condition in Devonian times, probably the fields where I hoed corn
and potatoes as a boy would be buried one or two miles beneath the
rocks.
The Catskills are residual mountains, or what Agassiz calls
"denudation mountains." When we look at them with the eye of the
geologist we see the great plateau of tableland of Devonian times
out of which they were carved by the slow action of the sub-aerial
forces. They are like the little ridges and mounds of soil that
remain of your garden-patch after the waters of a cloudburst have
swept over it. They are immeasurably old, but they do not look it,
except to the eye of the geologist. There is nothing decrepit in
their appearance, nothing broken, or angular, or gaunt, or rawboned.
Their long, easy, flowing lines, their broad, smooth backs, their
deep, wide, gently sloping valleys, all help to give them a look of
repose and serenity, as if the fret and fever of life were long
since passed with them. Compared with the newer mountains of uplift
in the West, they are like cattle lying down and ruminating in the
field beside alert wild steers with rigid limbs and tossing horns.
They sleep and dream with bowed heads upon the landscape. Their
great flanks and backs are covered with a deep soil that nourishes a
very even growth of beech, birch, and maple forests. Though so old,
their tranquillity never seems to have been disturbed; no
storm-and-stress period has left its mark upon them. Their strata
all lie horizontal just as they were laid down in the old seas, and
nothing but the slow gentle passage of the hand of time shows in
their contours. Mountains of peace and repose, hills and valleys
with the flowing lines of youth, coming down to us from the fore-
world of Palaeozoic time, yet only rounded and mellowed by the aeons
they have passed through. Old, oh, so old, but young with verdure
and limpid streams, and the pastoral spirit of to-day!
To the geologist most mountains are short-lived. When he finds great
sturdy ranges, like the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, he knows
they are young,--mere boys. When they get old, they will be cut
down, and their pride and glory gone. A few more of these geologic
years and they will be reduced to a peneplain,--only their stumps
left. This seems to hold truer of mountains that are wrinkles in the
earth's crust--squeezed up and crumpled stratified rock, such as
most of the great mountain-systems are--than of mountains of
erosion like the Catskills, or of upheaval like the Adirondacks. The
crushed and folded and dislocated strata are laid open to the
weather as the horizontal strata, and as the upheaved masses of
Archaean rock are not. Moreover, strata of unequal hardness are
exposed, and this condition favors rapid erosion.
In imagination the geologist is present at the birth of whole
mountain-ranges. He sees them gestating in the womb of their mother,
the sea. Where our great Appalachian range now stands, he sees, in
the great interior sea of Palaeozoic time, what he calls a
"geosyncline," a vast trough, or cradle, being slowly filled with
sediment brought down by the rivers from the adjoining shores. These
sediments accumulate to the enormous depth of twenty-five thousand
feet, and harden into rock. Then in the course of time they are
squeezed together and forced up by the contraction of the earth's
crust, and thus the Appalachians are born. When Mother Earth takes a
new hitch in her belt, her rocky garment takes on new wrinkles. Just
why the earth's crust should wrinkle along lines of rock of such
enormous thickness is not a little puzzling. But we are told it is
because this heavy mass of sediment presses the sea-bottom down till
the rocks are fused by the internal heat of the earth and thus a
line of weakness is established. In any case the earth's forces act
as a whole, and the earth's crust at the thickest points is so
comparatively thin--probably not much more than a heavy sheet of
cardboard over a six-inch globe--that these forces seem to go their
own way regardless of such minor differences.
The Alps and the Himalayas, much younger than our Appalachians, were
also begotten and nursed in the cradle of a vast geosyncline in the
Tertiary seas. We speak of the birth of a mountain-range in terms of
a common human occurrence, or as if it were an event that might be
witnessed, measurable in human years or days, whereas it is an event
measurable only in geologic periods, and geologic periods are marked
off only on the dial-face of eternity. The old Hebrew writer gave
but a faint image of it when he said that with the Lord a thousand
years are as one day; it is hardly one hour of the slow beat of that
clock whose hours mark the periods of the earth's development.
The whole long period during which the race of man has been rushing
about, tickling and scratching and gashing the surface of the globe,
would make but a small fraction of one of the days that make up the
periods with which the geologist deals. And the span of human life,
how it dwindles to a point in the face of the records of the rocks!
Doubtless the birth of some of the mountain-systems of the globe is
still going on, and we suspect it not; an elevation of one foot in a
century would lift up the Sierra or the Rocky Mountains in a
comparatively short geologic period.
II
It was the geologist that emboldened Tennyson to sing,--
"The hills are shadows and they flow
From form to form and nothing stands,
They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go."
But some hills flow much faster than others. Hills made up of the
latest or newest formations seem to take to themselves wings the
fastest.
The Archaean hills and mountains, how slowly they melt away! In the
Adirondacks, in northern New England, in the Highlands of the
Hudson, they still hold their heads high and have something of the
vigor of their prime.
The most enduring rocks are the oldest; and the most perishable are,
as a rule, the youngest. It takes time to season and harden the
rocks, as it does men. Then the earlier rocks seem to have had
better stuff in them. They are nearer the paternal granite; and the
primordial seas that mothered them were, no doubt, richer in the
various mineral solutions that knitted and compacted the sedimentary
deposits. The Cretaceous formations melt away almost like snow. I
fancy that the ocean now, compared with the earlier condition when
it must have been so saturated with mineral elements, is like
thrice-skimmed milk.
The geologist is not stinted for time. He deals with big figures. It
is refreshing to see him dealing out his years so liberally. Do you
want a million or two to account for this or that? You shall have it
for the asking. He has an enormous balance in the bank of Time, and
he draws upon it to suit his purpose. In human history a thousand
years is a long time. Ten thousand years wipe out human history
completely. Ten thousand more, and we are probably among the rude
cave-men or river-drift men. One hundred thousand, and we
are--where? Probably among the simian ancestors of man. A million
years, and we are probably in Eocene or Miocene times, among the
huge and often grotesque mammals, and our ancestor, a little
creature, probably of the marsupial kind, is skulking about and
hiding from the great carnivorous beasts that would devour him.
"Little man, least of all,
Among the legs of his guardians tall,
Walked about with puzzled look.
Him by the hand dear Nature took,
Dearest Nature, strong and kind,
Whispered, 'Darling, never mind!
To-morrow they will wear another face,
The founder thou; these are thy race!'"
I fancy Emerson would be surprised and probably displeased at the
use I have made of his lines. I remember once hearing him say that
his teacher in such matters as I am here touching upon was Agassiz,
and not Darwin. Yet did he not write that audacious line about "the
worm striving to be man"? And Nature certainly took his "little man"
by the hand and led him forward, and on the morrow the rest of the
animal creation "wore another face."
III
In my geological studies I have had a good deal of trouble with the
sedimentary rocks, trying to trace their genealogy and getting them
properly fathered and mothered. I do not think the geologists fully
appreciate what a difficult problem the origin of these rocks
presents to the lay mind. They bulk so large, while the mass of
original crystalline rocks from which they are supposed to have been
derived is so small in comparison. In the case of our own continent
we have, to begin with, about two million of square miles of
Archaean rocks in detached lines and masses, rising here and there
above the primordial ocean; a large triangular mass in Canada, and
two broken lines of smaller masses running south from it on each
side of the continent, inclosing a vast interior sea between them.
To end with, we have the finished continent of eight million or more
square miles, of an average height of two thousand feet above the
sea, built up or developed from and around these granite centres
very much as the body is built up and around the bones, and of such
prodigious weight that some of our later geologists seek to account
for the continental submarine shelf that surrounds the continent on
the theory that the land has slowly crept out into the sea under the
pressure of its own weight. And all this,--to say nothing of the
vast amount of rock, in some places a mile or two in thickness, that
has been eroded from the land surfaces of the globe in later
geological time, and now lies buried in the seas and lakes,--we are
told, is the contribution of those detached portions of Archaean
rock that first rose above the primordial seas. It is a greater
miracle than that of the loaves and the fishes. We have vastly more
to end with than we had to begin with. The more the rocks have been
destroyed, the more they have increased; the more the waters have
devoured them, the more they have multiplied and waxed strong.
Either the geologists have greatly underestimated the amount of
Archaean rock above the waters at the start, or else there are
factors in the problem that have not been taken into the account.
Lyell seems to have appreciated the difficulties of the problem,
and, to account for the forty thousand feet of sediment deposited in
Palaeozoic times in the region of the Appalachians, he presupposes a
neighboring continent to the east, probably formed of Laurentian
rocks, where now rolls the Atlantic. But if such a continent once
existed, would not some vestige of it still remain? The fact that no
trace of it as been found, it seems to me, invalidates Lyell's
theory.
Archaean time in geologic history answers to pre-historic time in
human history; all is dark and uncertain, though we are probably
safe in assuming that there was more strife and turmoil among the
earth-building forces than there has ever been since. The body of
unstratified rock within the limits of North America may have been
much greater than is supposed, but it seems to me impossible that it
could have been anything like as massive as the continent now is. If
this had been the case there would have been no great interior sea,
and no wide sea-margins in which the sediments of the stratified
rocks could have been deposited. More than four fifths of the
continent is of secondary origin and shows that vast geologic eras
went to the making of it.
It is equally hard to believe that the primary or igneous rocks,
where they did appear, were sufficiently elevated to have furnished
through erosion the all but incalculable amount of material that
went to the making of our vast land areas. But the geologists give
me the impression that this is what we are to believe.
Chamberlin and Salisbury, in their recent college geology, teach
that each new formation implies the destruction of an equivalent
amount of older rock--every system being entirely built up out of
the older one beneath it. Lyell and Dana teach the same thing. If
this were true, could there have been any continental growth at all?
Could a city grow by the process of pulling down the old buildings
for material to build the new? If the geology is correct, I fail to
see how there would be any more land surface to-day then there was
in Archaean times. Each new formation would only have replaced the
old from which it came. The Silurian would only have made good the
waste of the Cambrian, and the Devonian made good the waste of the
Silurian, and so on to the top of the series, and in the end we
should still have been at the foot of the stairs. That vast interior
sea that in Archaean times stretched from the rudimentary
Appalachian Mountains to the rudimentary Rocky Mountains, and which
is now the heart of the continent, would still have been a part of
the primordial ocean. But instead of that, this sea is filled and
piled up with sedimentary rocks thousands of feet thick, that have
given birth on their surfaces to thousands of square miles of as
fertile soil as the earth holds.
That the original crystalline rocks played the major part in the
genealogy of the subsequent stratified rocks, it would be folly to
deny. But it seems to me that chemical and cosmic processes, working
through the air and the water, have contributed more than they have
been credited with.
It looks as if in all cases when the soil is carried to the
seabottom as sediment, and again, during the course of ages,
consolidated into rocks, the rocks thus formed have exceeded in bulk
the rocks that gave them birth. Something analogous to vital growth
takes place. It seems as if the original granite centres set the
world-building forces at work. They served as nuclei around which
the materials gathered. These rocks bred other rocks, and these
still others, and yet others, till the framework of the land was
fairly established. They were like the pioneer settlers who plant
homes here and there in the wilderness, and then in due time all the
land is peopled.
The granite is the Adam rock, and through a long line of descent the
major part of all the other rocks directly or indirectly may be
traced. Thus the granite begot the Algonquin, the Algonquin begot
the Cambrian, the Cambrian begot the Silurian, the Silurian begot
the Devonian, and so on up through the Carboniferous, the Permian,
the Mesozoic rocks, the Tertiary rocks, to the latest Quaternary
deposit.
But the curious thing about it all is the enormous progeny from so
small a beginning; the rocks seem really to have grown and
multiplied like organic beings; the seed of the granite seems to
have fertilized the whole world of waters, and in due time they
brought forth this huge family of stratified rocks. There stands the
Archaean Adam, his head and chest in Canada, his two unequal legs
running, one down the Pacific coast, and one down the Atlantic
Coast, and from his loins, we are told, all the progeny of rocks and
soils that make up the continent have sprung, one generation
succeeding another in regular order. His latest offspring is in the
South and Southwest, and in the interior. These are the new
countries, geologically speaking, as well as humanly speaking.
The great interior sea, epicontinental, the geologists call it,
seems to have been fermenting and laboring for untold aeons in
building up these parts of the continent. In the older Eastern
States we find the sons and grandsons of the old Adam granite; but
in the South and West we find his offspring of the twentieth or
twenty-fifth generation, and so unlike their forebears; the Permian
rocks, for instance, and the Cretaceous rocks, are soft and
unenduring, for the most part. The later slates, too, are
degenerates, and much of the sandstones have the hearts of
prodigals. In the Bad Lands of Arizona I could have cut my way into
some of the Eocene formations with my pocket-knife. Apparently the
farther away we get from the parent granite, the more easily is the
rock eroded. Nearly all the wonderful and beautiful sculpturing of
the rocks in the West and Southwest is in rocks of comparatively
recent date.
Can we say that all the organic matter of our time is from
preexisting organic matter? one organism torn down to build up
another? that the beginning of the series was as great as the end?
There may have been as much matter in a state of vital organization
in Carboniferous or in Cretaceous times as in our own, but there is
certainly more now than in early Palaeozoic times. Yet every grain
of this matter has existed somewhere in some form for all time. Or
we might ask if all the wealth of our day is from preexisting
wealth--one fortune pulled down to build up another,--too often the
case, it is true,--thus passing the accumulated wealth along from
one generation to another. On the contrary, has there not been a
steady gain of that we call wealth through the ingenuity and the
industry of man directed towards the latent wealth of the earth? In
a parallel manner has there been a gain in the bulk of the secondary
rocks through the action of the world-building forces directed to
the sea, the air, and the preexisting rocks. Had there been no gain,
the fact would suggest the ill luck of a man investing his capital
in business and turning it over and over, and having no more money
at the end than he had in the beginning.
Nothing is in the sedimentary rock that was not at one time in the
original granite, or in the primordial seas, or in the primordial
atmosphere, or in the heavens above, or in the interior of the earth
beneath. We must sweep the heavens, strain the seas, and leach the
air, to obtain all this material. Evidently the growth of these
rocks has been mainly a chemical process--a chemical organization of
preexisting material, as much so as the growth of a plant or a tree
or an animal. The color and texture and volume of each formation
differ so radically from those of the one immediately before it as
to suggest something more than a mere mechanical derivation of one
from the other. New factors, new sources, are implied. "The farther
we recede from the present time," says Lyell, "and the higher the
antiquity of the formations which we examine, the greater are the
changes which the sedimentary deposits have undergone." Above all
have chemical processes produced changes. This constant passage of
the mineral elements of the rocks through the cycle of erosion,
sedimentation, and reinduration has exposed them to the action of
the air, the light, the sea, and has thus undoubtedly brought about
a steady growth in their volume and a constant change in their color
and texture. Marl and clay and green sand and salt and gypsum and
shale, all have their genesis, all came down to us in some way or in
some degree, from the aboriginal crystalline rocks; but what
transformations and transmutations they have undergone! They have
passed through Nature's laboratory and taken on new forms and
characteristics.
"All sediments deposited in the sea," says my geology, "undergo more
or less chemical change," and many chemical changes involve notable
changes in volume of the mineral matter concerned. It has been
estimated that the conversion of granite rock into soil increases
its volume eighty-eight per cent, largely as the result of
hydration, or the taking up of water in the chemical union. The
processes of oxidation and carbonation are also expansive processes.
Whether any of this gain in volume is lost in the process of
sedimentation and reconsolidation, I do not know. Probably all the
elements that water takes from the rocks by solution, it returns to
them when the disintegrated parts, in the form of sediment in the
sea, is again converted into strata. It is in this cycle of rock
disintegration and rock re-formation that the processes of life go
on. Without the decay of the rock there could be no life on the
land. Water and air are always the go-betweens of the organic and
inorganic. After the rains have depleted the rocks of their soluble
parts and carried them to the sea, they come back and aid vegetable
life to unlock and appropriate other soluble parts, and thus build
up the vegetable and, indirectly, the animal world.
That the growth of the continents owes much to the denudation of the
sea-bottom, brought about by the tides and the ocean-currents, which
were probably much more powerful in early than in late geologic
times, and to submarine mineral springs and volcanic eruptions of
ashes and mud, admits of little doubt. That it owes much to
extra-terrestrial sources--to meteorites and meteoric dust--also
admits of little doubt.
It seems reasonable that earlier in the history of the evolution of
our solar system there should have been much more meteoric matter
drifting through the interplanetary spaces than during the later
ages, and that a large amount of this matter should have found its
way to the earth, in the form either of solids or of gases. Probably
much more material has been contributed by volcanic eruptions than
there is any evidence of apparent. The amount of mineral matter held
in solution by the primordial seas must have been enormous. The
amount of rock laid down in Palaeozoic times is estimated at fifty
thousand feet, and of this thirteen thousand feet were limestone;
while the amount laid down in Mesozoic times, for aught we know a
period quite as long, amounts to eight thousand feet, indicating, it
seems to me, that the deposition of sediment went on much more
rapidly in early geologic times. We are nearer the beginning of
things. All chemical processes in the earth's crust were probably
more rapid. Doubtless the rainfall was more, but the land areas must
have been less. The greater amount of carbon dioxide in the air
during Palaeozoic times would have favored more rapid carbonation.
When granite is dissolved by weathering, carbon unites with the
potash, the soda, the lime, the magnesia, and the iron, and turns
them into carbonates and swells their bulk. The one thing that is
passed along from formation to formation unchanged is the quartz
sand. Quartz is tough, and the sand we find to-day is practically
the same that was dissolved out of the first crystalline rocks.
Take out of the soil and out of the rocks all that they owe to the
air,--the oxygen and the carbon,--and how would they dwindle! The
limestone rocks would practically disappear.
Probably not less that one fourth of all the sedimentary rocks are
limestone, which is of animal origin. How much of the lime of which
these rocks were built was leached out of the land-areas, and how
much was held in solution by the original sea-water, is of course a
question. But all the carbon they hold came out of the air. The
waters of the primordial ocean were probably highly charged with
mineral matter, with various chlorides and sulphates and carbonates,
such as the sulphate of soda, the sulphate of lime, the sulphate of
magnesia, the chloride of sodium, and the like. The chloride of
sodium, or salt, remains, while most of the other compounds have
been precipitated through the agency of minute forms of life, and
now form parts of the soil and of the stratified rocks beneath it.
If the original granite is the father of the rocks, the sea is the
mother. In her womb they were gestated and formed. Had not this
seesaw of land and ocean taken place, there could have been no
continental growth. Every time the land took a bath in the sea, it
came up enriched and augmented. Each new layer of rocky strata taken
on showed a marked change in color and texture. It was a kind of
evolution from that which preceded it. Whether the land always went
down, or whether the sea at times came up, by reason of some
disturbance of the ocean floors in its abysmal depths, we have no
means of knowing. In any case, most of the land has taken a sea bath
many times, not all taking the plunge at the same time, but
different parts going down in successive geologic ages. The original
granite upheavals in British America, and in New York and New
England, seem never to have taken this plunge, except an area about
Lake Superior which geologists say has gone down four or five times.
The Laurentian and Adirondack ranges have never been in pickle in
the sea since they first saw the light. In most other parts of the
continent, the seesaw between the sea and the land has gone on
steadily from the first, and has been the chief means of the
upbuilding of the land.
To the slow and oft-repeated labor-throes of the sea we owe the
continents. But the sea devours her children. Large areas, probably
continental in extent, have gone down and have not yet come up, if
they ever will. The great Mississippi Valley was under water and
above water time after time during the Palaeozoic period. The last
great invasion of the land by the sea, and probably the greatest of
all, seems to have been in Cretaceous times, at the end of the
Mesozoic period. There were many minor invasions during Tertiary
times, but none on so large a scale as this Cretaceous invasion. At
this time a large part of North and South America, and of Europe,
and parts of Asia and Australia went under the ocean. It was as if
the earth had exhaled her breath and let her abdomen fall. The sea
united the Gulf of Mexico with the Arctic Ocean, and covered the
Prairie and the Gulf States and came up over New Jersey to the foot
of the Archaean Highlands. This great marine inundation probably
took place several million years ago. It was this visitation of the
sea that added the vast chalk beds to England and France. In parts
of this country limestone beds five or six thousand feet thick were
laid down, as well as extensive chalk beds. The earth seems to have
taken another hitch in her girdle during this era. As the land went
down, the mountains came up. Most of the great Western
mountain-chains were formed during this movement, and the mountains
of Mexico were pushed up. The Alps were still under the sea, but the
Sierra and the Alleghanies were again lifted.
It is very interesting to me to know that in Colorado charred wood,
and even charcoal, have been found in Cretaceous deposits. The fact
seems to give a human touch to that long-gone time. It was, of
course, long ages before the evolution of man, as man, had taken
place, yet such is the power of association, that those charred
sticks instantly call him to mind, as if we had come upon the place
of his last campfire. At any rate, it is something to know that man,
when he did come, did not have to discover or invent fire, but that
this element, which has played such a large part in his development
and civilization, was here before him, waiting, like so many other
things in nature, to be his servant and friend. As Vulcan was
everywhere rampant during this age, throwing out enough lava in
India alone to put a lava blanket four or five feet thick over the
whole surface of the globe, it was probably this fire that charred
the wood. It would be interesting to know if these enormous
lava-flows always followed the subsidence of some part of the
earth's crust. In Cretaceous times both the subsidence and the lava-
flows seem to have been worldwide.
IV
We seem to think that the earth has sown all her wild oats, that her
riotous youth is far behind her, and that she is now passing into a
serene old age. Had we lived during any of the great periods of the
past, we might have had the same impression, so tranquil, for the
most part, has been the earth's history, so slow and rhythmical have
been the beats of the great clock of time. We see this in the
homogeneity of the stratified rocks, layer upon layer for thousands
of feet as uniform in texture and quality as the goods a modern
factory turns out, every yard of it like every other yard. No hitch
or break anywhere. The bedding-planes of many kinds of rock occur at
as regular intervals as if they had been determined by some kind of
machinery. Here, on the formation where I live, there are alternate
layers of slate and sandstone, three or four inches thick, for
thousands of feet in extent; they succeed each other as regularly as
the bricks and mortar in a brick wall, and are quite as homogeneous.
What does this mean but that for an incalculable period the
processes of erosion and deposition went on as tranquilly as a
summer day? There was no strike among the workmen, and no change in
the plan of the building, or in the material.
The Silurian limestone, the old red sandstone, the Hamilton flag,
the Oneida conglomerate, where I have known them, are as homogeneous
as a snowbank, or as the ice on a mountain lake; grain upon grain,
all from the same source in each case, and sifted and sorted by the
same agents, and the finished product as uniform in color and
quality as the output of some great mill.
Then, after a vast interval, there comes a break: something like an
end and a new beginning, as if one day of creation were finished and
a new one begun. The different formations lie unconformably upon
each other, which means revolution of some sort. There has been a
strike or a riot in the great mill, or it has lain idle for a long
period, and when it has resumed, a different product is the result.
Something happened between each two layers. What?
Though in remote geological ages the earth-building and
earth-shaping forces were undoubtedly more active than they are now,
and periods of deformation and upheaval were more frequent, yet had
we lived in any of those periods we should probably have found the
course of nature, certainly when measured by human generations, as
even and tranquil as we find it to-day. The great movements are so
slow and gentle, for the most part, that we should not have been
aware of them had we been on the spot. Once in a million or a
half-million years there may have been terrific earthquakes and
volcanic eruptions, such as seem to have taken place in Tertiary
time, and at the end of the Palaeozoic period. Yet the vast
stretches of time between were evidently times of tranquillity.
It is probable that the great glacial winter of Pleistocene times
came on as gradually as our own winter, or through a long period of
slowly falling temperature, and as it seems to have been many
hundred thousand times as long, this preceding period, or great
fall, was probably equally long--so long that the whole of recorded
human history would form but a small fraction of it. It may easily
be, I think, that we are now living in the spring of the great cycle
of geologic seasons. The great ice-sheet has withdrawn into the Far
North like snowbanks that linger in our wood in late spring, where
it still covers Greenland as it once covered this country. When the
season of summer is reached, some hundreds of thousands of years
hence, it may be that tropical life, both animal and vegetable, will
again flourish on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, as it did in
Tertiary times. And all this change will come about so quietly and
so slowly that nobody will suspect it.
That the crust of the earth is becoming more and more stable seems a
natural conclusion, but that all folding and shearing and disruption
of the strata are at an end, is a conclusion we cannot reach in the
face of the theory that the earth is shrinking as it cools.
The earth cools and contracts with almost infinite slowness, and the
great crustal changes that take place go on, for the most part, so
quietly and gently that we should not suspect them were we present
on the spot, and long generations would not suspect them. Elevations
have taken place across the beds of rivers without deflecting the
course of the river; the process was so slow that the river sawed
down through the rock as fast as it came up. Nearly all the great
cosmic and terrestrial changes and revolutions are veiled from us by
this immeasurable lapse of time.
Any prediction about the permanence of the land as we know it, or as
the race has known it, or of our immunity from earthquakes or
volcanic eruptions, or of a change of climate, or of any cosmic
catastrophe, based on human experience, is vain and worthless. What
is or has been in man's time is no criterion as to what will be in
God's time. The periods of great upheaval and deformation in the
earth's crust appear to be separated by millions of years. Away back
in pre-Cambrian times, there appear to have been immense periods
during which the peace and repose of the globe were as profound as
in our own time. Then at the end of Palaeozoic time--how many
millions of years is only conjectural--the truce of aeons was
broken, and the dogs of war let loose; it was a period of revolution
which resulted in the making of one of our greatest
mountain-systems, the Appalachian, and in an unprecedented
extinction of species. Later eras have witnessed similar
revolutions. Why may they not come again? The shrinking of the
cooling globe must still go on, and this shrinking must give rise to
surface disturbances and dislocations, maybe in the uplift of new
mountain-ranges from the sea-bottom, now undreamed of, and in
volcanic eruptions as great as any in the past. Such a shrinkage and
eruption made the Hawaiian Islands, probably in Tertiary times; such
a shrinkage may make other islands and other continents before
another period of equal time has elapsed.
Of course the periods and eras into which the geologists divide
geologic time are as arbitrary as the months and seasons into which
we divide our year, and they fade out into each other in much the
same way; but they are really as marked as our seasonal divisions.
Not in their climates--for the climate of the globe seems to have
been uniformly warm from pole to pole, without climatic zones,
throughout the vast stretch of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic times--but in
the succession of animal and vegetable life which they show. The
rocks are the cemeteries of the different forms of life that have
appeared upon the globe, and here the geologist reads their
succession in time, and assigns them to his geologic horizons
accordingly. The same or allied forms appeared upon all parts of the
earth at approximately the same time, so that he can trace his
different formations around the world by the fossils they hold. Each
period had its dominant forms. The Silurian was the great age of
trilobites; the Devonian, the age of fishes; Mesozoic times swarm
with the gigantic reptiles; and in Tertiary times the mammals are
dominant. Each period and era has its root in that which preceded
it. There were rude, half-defined fishes in the Silurian, and
probably the beginning of amphibians in the Devonian, and some small
mammalian forms in the Mesozoic time, and doubtless rude studies of
the genus Homo in Tertiary times. Nature works up her higher forms
Jike a human inventor from rude beginnings. Her first models barely
suggest her later achievements.
In the vegetable world it has been the same; from the first simple
algae in the Cambrian seas up to the forests of our own times, the
gradation is easily traced. Step by step has vegetable life mounted.
The great majority of the plants and animals of one period fail to
pass over into the next, just as our spring flowers fail to pass
over into summer, and our summer flowers into fall. But the law of
evolution is at work, and life always rises on stepping-stones of
its dead self to higher things.
V
HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII
I
On the edge of the world my islands lie," sings Mrs. Frear in her
little lyric on the Hawaiian Islands.
"On the edge of the world my islands lie,
Under the sun-steeped sky;
And their waving palms
Are bounteous alms
To the soul-spent passer-by.
"On the edge of the world my islands sleep
In a slumber soft and deep.
What should they know
Of a world of woe,
And myriad men that weep?"
On the rim of the world my fancy seemed to see them that May day
when we went aboard the huge Pacific steamship in San Francisco
Harbor, and she pointed her prow westward toward the vast wilderness
of the Pacific--on the edge of the world, looking out and down
across the vast water toward Asia and Australia. I wondered if the
great iron ship could find them, and if we should realize or
visualize the geography or the astronomy when we got there, and see
ourselves on the huge rotundity of the globe not far above her
equatorial girdle.
Yes, on the rim of the world they lie to the traveler steaming
toward them, and on the rim of the world they lie in his memory
after his return, basking there in that tropical sunlight, forever
fanned by those cooling trade winds, and encompassed by that
morning-glory sea. With my mind's eye I behold them rising from that
enormous abyss of the Pacific, fire-born and rain-carved, vast
volcanic mountains miles deep under the sea, and in some cases miles
high above it, clothed with verdure and teeming with life, the scene
of long-gone cosmic strife and destruction, now the abode of rural
and civic peace and plenty.
The Pacific treated me so much better than the Atlantic ever had
that I am probably inclined to overestimate everything I saw on the
voyage. It was the first trip at sea that ever gave me any pleasure.
The huge vessels are in themselves a great comfort, and in the
placid waters and the sliding down the rotund side of the great
globe under warmer and warmer skies one gains a very agreeable
experience. The first day's run must have carried us out and over
that huge Pacific abyss, the Tuscarora Deep, where there were nearly
four miles of water under us. Some of our aeroplanes have gone up
half that distance and disappeared from sight. I fancy that our
ship, more than six hundred feet long, would have appeared a very
small object, floating across this briny firmament, could one have
looked up at it from the bottom of that sea.
The Hawaiian Islands rise from the border of that vast deep, and one
can fancy how that huge pot must have boiled back in Tertiary times,
when the red-hot lava of which they are mainly built up was poured
from the interior of the globe.
Softer and more balmy grew the air every day, more and more placid
and richly tinted grew the sea, till, on the morning of the sixth
day, we saw ahead of us, low on the horizon, the dim outlines of the
mountains of Molokai. The island of Oahu, upon which Honolulu is
situated, was soon in sight. It was not long before we saw Diamond
Head, a vast crater bowl, eight hundred feet high on its ocean side,
and half a mile across, sitting there upon the shore like some huge,
strange work of man's hand, running back through the hills with a
level rim, and seaward with a sloping base, brown and ribbed, and in
every way unique and striking.
We were approaching a land the child of tropic seas and volcanic
lava, and many of the features were new and strange to us. The
mountains looked familiar in outline, but the colors of the
landscape, the soft lilacs, greens, and browns, and the whole
atmosphere of the scene, were unlike anything we had ever before
seen. And Diamond Head, what a feature it was! Had it only had a
head, one could easily have seen in it a suggestion of a couchant
lion, bony, huge, and tawny, looking seaward, and guarding the
harbor of Honolulu which lies just behind it. Into this harbor, in
the soft morning air, our ship soon found its way, and the monotony
of the vast, unpeopled sea was quickly succeeded by human scenes of
the most varied and animated character, not the least novel of which
were the swarms of half-amphibious native boys who surrounded the
vessel as she lay at the wharf, and with brown, upturned faces and
beckoning hands tempted the passengers to toss dimes into the water.
As the coins struck the surface they would dive with the ease and
quickness of seals, and seize the silver apparently before it had
gone a yard toward the bottom. Holding the coins up to view between
the thumb and finger, they would slip them into their mouths and
solicit more.
On shore we were greeted with the music of the Royal Hawaiian Band,
and a motley crowd of Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and
Americans, bearing colored leis, or wreaths of flowers, which they
waved at friends on board, and with which they bedecked them as soon
as they came off the gangplank. It was a Babel of tongues in which
the strange, vowel-choked language of the Hawaiians was conspicuous.
Honolulu is a beautiful city, clean, bright, well ordered, and well
appointed,--electric lights, good streets, electric cars, fine
hotels and clubs, excellent fire protection, mountain water,
libraries, parks, handsome buildings, attractive homes,--in fact,
all that we boast of in our home cities. Embosomed in palms, with
mangoes, and other tropical trees, with a profusion of gorgeously
colored vines and hedges, with spacious, well-kept grounds about the
large and comfortable houses in the residential portion--these
features, with the ready hospitality of the people, made our hearts
warm towards it at once.
Volcanic heights on all the land side look down upon the city. Mount
Tantalus, rising four thousand feet above the sea, is just back of
it, with its long slopes of volcanic ash and sand now clothed by
forests and fertile fields, and a huge ancient crater called the
Punch Bowl, born probably on the selfsame day, the geologists think,
as Diamond Head, dominates the city in the immediate foreground. If
the Punch Bowl were again to overflow with the fiery liquid, the
city would soon go up in smoke. But its bowl-like interior is now
covered with grass and trees, and presents a scene of the most
peaceful, rural character.
The Orient and the Occident meet in Honolulu. There Asia and America
join hands. The main features of the city are decidedly American,
but the people seen upon the street and at work indoors and out are
more than half Oriental. The native population cuts only a small
figure. The real workers--carpenters, masons, field hands, and
house servants--are mostly Japanese. Virtually all the work of the
immense sugar plantations is done by the little brown men and women,
while China supplies some of the merchants in the city and the
sailors and stewards on the ocean steamers. What admirable servants
the Chinese make, so respectful, so prompt, so silent, so quick to
comprehend! The Japanese house servants on the islands also give
efficient and gracious service.
I had gone to Honolulu reluctantly, but tarried there joyfully. The
fine climate, with its even temperature of about eighty degrees
Fahrenheit, and with all that is enervating or oppressive in that
degree of heat winnowed out of it by the ceaseless trade winds; the
almost unbroken sunshine, perfumed now and then by a sprinkle of
sunlit rain from the mountains; the wonderful sea laving the shores
on the one hand and the cool, cloud-capped, and rain-drenched
heights within easy reach on the other; the green, cozy valleys; the
broad sweep of plain; the new, strange nature on every side; the
novel and delicious fruits; the pepsin-charged papaya, or tree
melon, which tickles the palate while it heals and renews the whole
digestive system; the mangoes (oh, the mangoes!); the cordiality of
the people; the inviting bungalows; the clean streets; the good
service everywhere--all made me feel how mistaken was my reluctance.
Most of the Americans one meets there are descendants of the
missionaries who went out from New England and New York early in the
last century, and one feels at home with them at once. Many of the
residents there have been educated in the States. The Governor, Mr.
Frear, is a graduate of Yale; his wife is a graduate of Wellesley.
One day a charming Southern woman, president of the College Club,
invited us to meet the college women of the city. The gathering took
place under the trees upon the lawn of one of the older homesteads.
There were forty college women present, many of them teachers, from
Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard. Among them were
two girls who had visited me at my cabin, "Slabsides," while they
were at Vassar.
Wide as is the world, the traveler is pretty sure to strike threads
of relation with his home country wherever he goes. I made the
acquaintance in Honolulu of a man from my own county; another, who
showed us great kindness, was from an adjoining county; while one
day upon the street I was called by name by a man whom I had known
as a boy in the town where I now live.
One Saturday a walking-club, largely made up of men and women
teachers, whose native Hawaiian name meant "Walkers in Unfrequented
Places," asked us to join them in a walk up Palola Valley to the
site of an extinct crater well up in the mountains. These walkers in
unfrequented places proved to be real walkers, and gave us all and
more than we had bargained for--more mud and wet and slippery trails
through clinging vines and rank lantana scrub than was good for our
shoes and garments or for the bodies inside them. It was a long pull
of many miles, at first up the valley over a fair highway, then into
the woods on the mountain-side along a trail that was muddy and
slippery from the recent showers, and most of the time was buried
out of sight beneath the high, coarse stag-horn fern and a thick
growth of lantana that met above it as high as our shoulders. A more
discouraging mountain climb I never undertook. The vegetation was
all novel, but it had that barbaric rankness of all tropical woods,
with nothing of the sylvan sweetness and simplicity of our home
woods. There were no fine, towering trees, but low, gnarled, and
tortuous ones, which, with their hanging vines, like the broken
ropes of a ship's rigging, and their parasitic growths, presented a
riotous, disheveled appearance.
Nature in the tropics, left to herself, is harsh, aggressive,
savage; looks as though she wanted to hang you with her dangling
ropes, or impale you on her thorns, or engulf you in her ranks of
gigantic ferns. Her mood is never as placid and sane as in the
North. There is a tree in the Hawaiian woods that suggests a tree
gone mad. It is called the hau-tree. It lies down, squirms, and
wriggles all over the ground like a wounded snake; it gets up, and
then takes to earth again. Now it wants to be a vine, now it wants
to be a tree. It throws somersaults, it makes itself into loops and
rings, it rolls, it reaches, it doubles upon itself. Altogether it
is the craziest vegetable growth I ever saw. Where you can get it up
off the ground and let it perform its antics on a broad skeleton
framework, it makes a cover that no sunbeam can penetrate, and forms
a living roof to the most charming verandas--or lanais, as they are
called in the islands--that one can wish to see.
But I saw and heard one thing on this walk that struck a different
note: it was one of the native birds, the Oahu thrush. The moment I
heard it I was reminded of our brown thrasher, though the song, or
whistle, was much finer and richer in tone than that of our bird.
The glimpse I got of the bird showed it to be of about the size and
shape of our thrasher, but much brighter in color. It seems as
though the two species must have had a common origin some time,
somewhere. I was attracted by no other native bird on this walk. In
the valley below we had seen and heard the Chinese workmen going
about their rice-fields making strange sounds to drive away the
rice-birds, a small, brown species that has been introduced from
India.
When we reached the mountain-top, we found it enveloped in fog and
mist, and the scene was cold and cheerless. We looked down through a
screen of foliage into a deep valley that seemed almost beneath us,
and which is supposed to have been an ancient crater. There, on the
brink, the walkers had a rude cabin, where we ate our lunch beside a
fire and tried to dry our bedraggled garments.
From this point some of the party continued their walk, looking for
more unfrequented places, but some of us had longings the other way,
and retraced our steps toward the sunlight and the drier winds we
had left. We reached town footsore and bedraggled, and the little
Japanese who cleaned and pressed my suit of clothes, and made them
look as good as new for seventy-five cents, well earned his money.
The walk of eight or ten miles which we took two weeks later with
Governor Frear and his wife, up the new Castle trail to the
mountain-top behind Tantalus, had some features in common with the
first walk,--the increasing mist and coolness as we entered the
mountains, the dripping bushes, and the slippery paths,--but we got
finer views, and found a better-kept trail. Our walk ended on the
top of a narrow ridge of the mountain, where we ate our lunch in a
cold, driving mist and were a bit uncomfortable. I was interested in
the character of the ridge upon which we sat. It was not more than
six feet wide, a screen of volcanic rock worn almost to an edge, and
separated two valleys six or seven hundred feet deep. The Governor
said he could take me where the dividing ridge between the two
valleys was so narrow that one could literally sit astride of it, so
that one leg would point to one valley and the other to the other.
This is a feature of a new country geologically; the rains and other
agents of erosion have whittled the mountains to sharp edges, but
have not yet rounded or leveled them.
The northeast trade winds which blow upon these islands nine months
in the year bring a burden of moisture from the Pacific which is
condensed into rain and mist by the mountains, and which, with the
rank vegetation that it fosters, carves them and sharpens them like
a great grindstone revolving against their sides. At a place called
the Pali--and at the Needles, on the island of Maui--it has worn
through the mountain-chain and made deep and very picturesque gorges
where, in the case of the Pali, the wind is so strong and steady
that you can almost lie down upon it.
It was near the Pali that I saw what I had never seen or heard of
before--a waterfall reversed, going up instead of down. It suggested
Stockton's story of negative gravity. A small brook comes down off
the mountain and attempts to make the leap down a high precipice;
but the winds catch it and carry it straight up in the air like
smoke. It is translated; it becomes a mere wraith hovering above the
beetling crag. Night and day this goes on, the wind snatching from
the mountains in this summary way the water it has brought them.
On the walk with the Governor we made the acquaintance of some of
the land shells for which these islands are famous--pretty,
pearl-like little whorls living on the largest trees, and about the
size of a chipping sparrow's egg, with pointed ends, variously
colored. There are more than two hundred species on the different
islands, I think, each valley having varieties peculiar to itself,
showing what a factor isolation is in the evolution of new species.
The Governor and his wife, and a young man who had specialized in
conchology, plucked them from nearly every bush and tree; but my
eye, being untrained in this kind of work, was very slow in finding
them.
Coming down from these Hawaiian mountains is like coming out of a
dripping tent of clouds into the clear, warm sunshine. The change is
most delightful. Your clothing dries very quickly, and chilliness
gives place to genial warmth. And the prospects that open before
you, the glimpses down into these deep, yellow-green, crater-like
valleys, checkered with neat little Chinese farms, the panorama of
the city and the sea unrolling as you come down, and always Diamond
Head standing guard there to the east--how the vision of it all
lingers in the memory!
In climbing the heights, it was always a surprise to me to see the
Pacific rise up as I rose, till it stood up like a great blue wall
there against the horizon. A level plain unrolls in the same way as
we mount above it, but it does not produce the same illusion of
rising up like a wall or a mountain-range; the blue, facile water
cheats the eye.
One of the novel pleasures in which most travelers indulge while in
Honolulu is surf-riding at Waikiki, near Diamond Head. The sea, with
a floor of lava and coral, is here shallow for a long distance out,
and the surf comes in at intervals like a line of steeds cantering
over a plain. We went out in our bathing-suits in a long, heavy
dugout, with a lusty native oarsman in each end. When several
hundred yards from shore, we saw, on looking seaward, the long,
shining billows coming, whereupon our oarsmen headed the canoe
toward shore, and plied their paddles with utmost vigor, uttering
simultaneously a curious, excited cry. In a moment the breaker
caught us and, in some way holding us on its crest, shot us toward
the shore like an arrow. The sensation is novel and thrilling. The
foam flies; the waters leap about you. You are coasting on the sea,
and you shout with delight and pray for the sensation to continue.
But it is quickly over. The hurrying breaker slips from under you,
and leaves you in the trough, while it goes foaming on the shore.
Then you turn about and row out from the shore again, and wait for
another chance to be shot toward the land on the foaming crest of a
great Pacific wave.
I suppose the trick is in the skill of the oarsmen in holding the
boat on the pitch of the billow so that in its rush it takes you
with it. The native boys do the feat standing on a plank. I was
tempted to try this myself, but of course made a comical failure.
One of my pleasant surprises in Honolulu--one that gave the touch of
nature which made me feel less a stranger there--was learning that
the European skylark had been introduced and was thriving on the
grassy slopes back of the city. The mina, a species of starling from
India as large as our robin and rather showily dressed, with a loud,
strident voice, I had seen and heard everywhere both in town and
country, but he was a stranger and did not appeal to me. But the
thought of the skylark brought Shelley and Wordsworth, and English
downs and meadows, near to me at once, and I was eager to hear it.
So early one morning we left the Pleasanton, our tarrying-place, and
climbed the long, pastoral slope above the city, where cattle and
horses were grazing, and listened for this minstrel from the
motherland. We had not long to wait. Sure enough, not far from us
there sprang from the turf Shelley's bird, and went climbing his
invisible spiral toward the sky, pouring out those hurried, ecstatic
notes, just as I had heard him above the South Downs of England. It
was a moment of keen delight to me. The bird soared and hovered,
drifting about, as it were, before the impetuous current of his
song, with all the joy and abandon with which the poets have
credited him. It was like a bit of English literature vocal in the
air there above these alien scenes. Presently another went up, and
then another, and still another, the singers behaving in every
respect as they do by the Avon and the Tweed, and for a moment I
seemed to be breathing the air that Wordsworth and Shelley breathed.
If our excursion had taken us only to the island of Oahu and its
beautiful city, it would have been eminently worth while, but the
last week in May we took what is called the inter-island trip, a six
days' voyage among the various islands, when we visited the great
extinct crater of Haleakala on Maui, and the active volcano Kilauea
on Hawaii. It is a voyage over several rough channels in a small
steamer, and my friends said, "If you have not yet paid tribute to
Neptune, you will pay it now." But I did not. My companions were
prostrated, but I see Neptune respects age, and my slumbers were
undisturbed. A wireless message had gone to Mr. Aiken, on the island
of Maui, to meet us with his automobile in the morning at the
landing at Kahului. We were taken to the shore on a lighter, along
with the horses and cargo, and there found our new friend awaiting
us.
The great mountain of Haleakala rose up in a long line against the
sky on the left, and the deeply eroded and canyoned mountains of the
older, or west, end of the island on our right. Toward the latter
our guide took us. It was a pleasant spin along the good roads, in
the fresh morning air, near the beach, to Wailuku, the shire town of
the island, two or three miles distant. Here we were most hospitably
entertained in the home of Mr. Penhallow, the director of a large
sugar plantation.
Here for the first time in my life I saw a gang of steam plows
working, pulled by a stationary engine at each end of the field, and
turning over the red, heavy volcanic soil. The work was mainly in
the hands of Japanese, and was well done. We afterward saw Japanese
by the score, both men and women, planting a large area of newly
plowed land with sugar-cane.
After we were rested and refreshed, and had sampled the mangoes that
had fallen from a tree near the house, Mr. Aiken took us in his
automobile up into the famous Iao Valley, at the mouth of which
Wailuku is situated. It is a deep, striking chasm carved out of the
mountain by the stream, rank with verdure of various kinds, and
looked down upon by sharp peaks and ridges five or six thousand feet
high. We soon reached the clear rapid, brawling stream, as bright as
a Catskill mountain trout brook, and after a mile or two along its
course we came to the end of the road, where we left the machine and
took a trail that wound onward and upward over a slippery surface
and through dripping bushes, for we here began to reach the skirts
of the little showers that almost constantly career over and about
the interior of these mountains. I neither saw nor heard a bird or
other live thing. Guava apples lay on the ground all along the
trail, and one could eat them and not make faces. Some of the sharp,
knife-blade ridges that cut down toward us from the higher peaks
were very startling, and so steep and high that they could be
successfully scaled only by the aid of ropes and ladders. A more
striking object-lesson in erosion by rain would be hard to find.
There were no naked rocks; short, thick vegetation covered even the
steepest slopes, and the vegetable acids which this generated, and
the perpetual rains, weathered the mountains down. It soon became so
wet that we stopped far short of the head of the valley, and turned
back. I wished to look into the great, deep, green amphitheatre
which seems to lie at the head, but had glimpses of it only from a
distance. How many millenniums will it be, I said to myself, before
erosion will have completed its work here, and these thin, high
mountain-walls will be in ruins? Surely not many.
We returned to the hospitable home we had left, and passed the
midday there. In the afternoon Mr. Aiken, guiding our eyes by the
forms of trees that cut the horizon-line on the huge flank of
Haleakala, pointed out the place of his own homestead, twenty or
more miles away. From this point the great mountain appeared like a
vast landscape tilted up at an easy angle against the horizon. One
could hardly believe it was ten thousand feet high. The machine
climbed easily more than half the distance to Mr. Aiken's
plantation, which we reached in good time in the afternoon, and
where we passed a very enjoyable night. It was a surprise to find
swarms of mosquitoes at this altitude, so free from all
mosquito-breeding waters. But the house was well protected against
them. Mosquitoes, as well as flies and vermin, are not native to the
island. They came in ships not very long ago, and are now very
troublesome in certain parts. They came round the Horn. Mr. Aiken's
house itself came round the Horn seventy or eighty years ago. It is
a quaint, New England type of house, and has a very homelike look.
In front of it, near the gate, stands a Japanese pine which is an
object of veneration to all Japanese who chance to come that way.
Often their eyes fill with tears on beholding it, so responsive are
the little yellow men to associations of home.
In the morning Mr. Aiken drove us in a wagon to a place he has
called "Idlewild," six miles farther up the great slope of the
mountain. This slope of Haleakala is like a whole township,
diversified with farms and woods, valleys and hills, resting on its
elbows, so to speak, and looking out over the Pacific. We could look
up to the cloud-line, about seven thousand feet above the sea, and
occasionally get a glimpse of the long line of the summit through
rifts in the clouds. At Idlewild our expedition, consisting of six
mules and four people, was fitted out, and in the early afternoon we
started on the trail up the mountain.
For several miles our way led over grassy slopes where cattle were
grazing, and above which skylarks were singing. This was one of the
happy surprises of the trip--the soaring and singing skylarks. All
the way till we reached the cloud-belt, we had the larks pouring
down their music from the sky above us. They seemed specially
jubilant. It was May in England, too, and they sang as though the
spirit of those downs and fells was stirring in their hearts, under
alien skies, but true to the memories of home.
Before we reached the summit we came upon another introduction from
overseas--the English pheasant. One started up from some bushes only
a few yards from the trail, went booming away, and disappeared in a
deep gully. A little later another sprang up, uttering a cackling
cry as it flew away. We saw three altogether. The only home thing we
saw was white clover in patches here and there, and it gave a most
welcome touch to the unfamiliar scenes.
The cattle we passed on the way were suffering dreadfully from
another introduction from the States--the Texas horn-fly, which had
recently made its appearance. The poor beasts were driven half-crazy
by it, as their sunken eyes and poor condition plainly showed.
The trail became rougher and steeper as we ascended, and the grass
and trees gave place to low, scrubby bushes. We were half an hour or
more in the cloud-belt, where the singing skylarks did not follow
us. The clouds proved to be as loose of texture and as innocent as
any summer fog that loiters in our valleys; but it was good to
emerge into the sunshine again, and see the jagged line of the top
sensibly nearer, and the canopy of clouds unroll itself beneath us.
Far ahead of us and near the summit we saw a band of wild
goats--twenty-two, I counted--leisurely grazing along, and now and
then casting glances down upon us. They were domestic animals gone
wild, and still retained their bizarre colors of white and black.
One big black leader with a long beard looked down at us and shook
his head threateningly. We reached the summit before the sun reached
the horizon, and our eyes looked forth upon a strange world, indeed.
On one hand the vast sea of cloud, into which the sun was about to
drop, rolled away from the mountain below us, with its white surface
and the irregular masses rising up from it, suggesting a sea of
floating ice. Through rifts in it we caught occasional glimpses of
the Pacific--blue, vague, mystical gulfs that seemed filled with
something less substantial than water. On the other hand was the
vast crater of Haleakala, two thousand feet deep, and many miles
across, in which the shadows were deepening, and which looked like
some burned-out Hades.
We stood or sat on the jagged edge and saw the day depart and the
night come down, the glory of cloud and sea and sunset on the one
hand, and on the other side the fearful chasm of the extinct
volcano, red and black and barren, with the hosts of darkness
gathering in it. It was like a seat between heaven and hell. Then
later, when the Southern Cross came out and rose above the awful
gulf, the scene was most impressive.
The crater of Haleakala is said to be the largest extinct crater in
the world. To follow all its outlines would lead one a distance of
more than twenty miles, but it is so irregular in shape that one
gets only a poor conception of its extent in a view from its brink.
At its widest part it cannot be more than four or five miles across.
It was evidently formed by the whole top of the mountain having been
blown out or else sunk down in recent geologic times. The fragments
of jagged rock that thickly strew the surface all about the summit
look as if they might have fallen there. The floor of the interior
of the crater is thickly studded with many minor craters, through
which the internal fires found vent after the crater as a whole had
ceased to act. They are of the shape of huge haystacks, with a hole
in the top, and looked soft and yielding in outline, and in color as
though they were composed of soot and brick-dust. One of them is
much larger than any of the rest. I thought it might be two hundred
feet high. "It is eight hundred," said our guide; yet its summit was
more than a thousand feet below the rim upon which we sat.
There has been no eruption in Haleakala since early in the last
century. Over a large area of the interior the black lava, cracked
and crumpled, meets the eye. Miles down one of its great arms toward
the sea, we could see the green lines of vegetation, mostly rank
ferns, advancing like an invading army. Far ahead were the
skirmishers, loose bands of ferns, with individual plants here and
there pushing on over the black, uneven surface toward the secondary
craters of the centre. Vegetation was also climbing down the ragged
sides of the crater, dropping from rock to rock like an invading
host. The ferns, those pioneers of the vegetable world, appear to
come first. Their giant progenitors subdued the rocks and made the
soil in Carboniferous times, and prepared the way for higher
vegetable forms, and now these striplings take up the same task in
this primitive world of the crater of Haleakala. Their task is a
long and arduous one, much more so than in those parts of the island
where the rainfall is more copious; but give them time enough, and
the barren lava will all be clothed with verdure. When decomposed
and ripened by time, it makes a red, heavy soil that supports many
kinds of plants and trees.
The ferns come slowly marching in from without, but in the centre of
the crater, on the slopes of the red cones and at their bases, is
another plant that seems indigenous, born of the ash and the scoria
of the volcano, and that apparently has no chlorophyl in its
make-up. This is a striking plant, called the silver sword, from the
shape and color of its long, narrow leaves. They are the color of
frosted silver, and are curved like a sword. It is a strange
apparition, white and delicate and rare, springing up in the crater
of a slumbering volcano. A more striking contrast with the
atmosphere of the surroundings would be hard to find--a suggestion
of peace and purity above the graves of world-destroying forces, an
angel of light nourished by the ashes of the demons of death and
darkness.
It is claimed by the people of the island that this plant is found
in no other place on the globe, but this can hardly be possible. If
its evolution took place in one crater, it would take place in
another. It consists of a great mass of silvery-white, bristling
leaves resting upon the ground, from which rises a stalk, strung
with flowers, to the height of five or six feet. It is evidently of
the Yucca type of plant, and has met with a singular transformation
in the sleeping volcano's mouth, all its harsh and savage character
turned into gentleness and grace, its armament of needles and
daggers giving place to a soft, silvery down. We did not see the
plant growing except at a great distance, through field-glasses, but
we saw a photograph of it and a dried specimen after we came down
from the summit.
It is an all day's trip down into the crater and back, climbing over
sliding sands and loose scoria, and our time was too limited to
undertake it. We passed the night on the summit in a rude stone hut,
which had a fireplace where the guide made coffee, but we had only
the volcanic rock for floor. Upon this we spread our ample supply of
blankets, and got such sleep as is to be had on high, cold
mountain-tops, where the ribs of the mountain prove to be so much
harder than one's own ribs--not a first-class quality of sleep, but
better than none.
I arose about two o'clock, and made my way out into the star-blazing
night. Such glory of the heavens I had never before seen. I had
never before been lifted up so near them, and hence had never before
seen them through so rarefied an atmosphere. The clouds and vapors
had disappeared, and all the hosts of heaven were magnified. The
Milky Way seemed newly paved and swept. There was no wind and no
sound. The mighty crater was a gulf of blackness, but the sky blazed
with light.
The dawn comes early on such a mountain-top, and before four o'clock
we were out under the fading stars. As we had seen the day pass into
night, surrounded by these wonderful scenes, now we saw the night
pass into day, and the elemental grandeur on every hand reborn
before us. There was not a wisp of cloud or fog below us or about us
to blur the great picture. The sun came up from behind the vast,
long, high wall of the Pacific that filled the eastern horizon, and
the shadows fled from the huge pile of mountain in the west. We hung
about the rim of the great crater or sat upon the jagged rocks,
wrapped in our blankets, till the sun was an hour high.
We got another glimpse of the band of goats picking their way from
ledge to ledge far below us on the side of the crater. I saw and
heard two or three mina birds fly past, apparently seeking new
territory to occupy. These birds are more enterprising than the
English sparrows, which also swarm in the island towns but do not
brave the mountain-heights. The bird from India seems at home
everywhere.
After breakfast we still haunted for an hour or more the brink of
the great abyss, where one seemed to feel the pulse of primal time,
loath to tear ourselves away, loath also to take a last view of the
panorama of land and sea, lit by the morning sun, which spread out
far below us. To the southeast we could dimly see the outlines of
the island of Hawaii, with a faint gleam of snow on its great
mountain Mauna Loa, nearly fourteen thousand feet high. In the
northwest a dim, dark mass low in the horizon marked the place of
Oahu. The ocean rose in the vast horizon and blended with the sky.
The eye could not tell where one ended and the other began.
The mules had had a comfortable night in a rude stone stable against
the rocks, and were more eager to hit the down trail than were we.
The descent proved more fatiguing than the ascent, the constant
plunging motion of the animals' shoulders being a sore trial. We
dropped down through the belt of clouds that had begun to form, and
out into the grassy region of the singing skylarks, past herds of
grazing cattle, and at noon were again at Idlewild, resting our
weary limbs and comforting the inner man.
In the afternoon Mr. Aiken drove us back to his home farm, where we
again passed a very pleasant night. In the morning I walked with him
through his pineapple plantation. It was a new kind of farming and
fruit-growing to me. I forget now how many hundred thousand plants
his field contained. They are set and cultivated much as cabbage is
with us, but present a strangely stiff and forbidding aspect. The
first cutting is when the plants are about eighteen months old, one
large solid apple from each plant. The second crop is called the
"raggoon" crop, and yields two apples from each plant, but smaller
and less valuable than the first. The field is then reset. I also
walked with Mr. Aiken over some new land he was getting ready for
pineapples. It had been densely covered with lantana scrub, and
clearing it and grubbing it out had been an heroic task. The lantana
takes complete possession of the soil, grows about four or five feet
high, and makes a network of roots in the soil that defies anything
but a steam plow. The soil is a red, heavy clay, and it made the
farmer in me sweat to think of the expenditure of labor necessary to
turn a lantana bush into a pineapple field. The redness of this
volcanic soil is said to be owing to the fact that the growth of
vegetation brings the iron into new combinations with organic acids.
Later in the day we visited the large Baldwin pineapple-canning
plant, and were shown the whole process of preparing and canning the
fruit, and all but surfeited with the most melting and delicious
pineapples it was ever my good luck to taste. The Hawaiian pineapple
probably surpasses all others in tenderness and lusciousness, and it
loses scarcely any of these qualities in the cans. Ripened in the
field, where it grew on the flanks of great Haleakala, and eaten out
of hand, it is a dream of tropic lusciousness. The canning is done
by an elaborate system of machinery managed by Japanese men and
women, the naked hand never coming in contact with the peeled fruit,
but protected from it by long, thin rubber gloves. There ought to be
a great future for this industry, when Eastern consumers really find
out the superior quality of the Hawaiian product.
From Mr. Aiken's house one has a view of the great wall of mountains
that form the western and older--older geologically--end of the
island, in which lies the famous Iao Valley, which I have already
described. We judge, from the much deeper marks of rain erosion,
that this end of the island is vastly older than the butt end upon
which Haleakala is situated. Haleakala is eroded comparatively
little. On all its huge northern slope there is only one
considerable gash or gully, and this is probably not many thousand
years old; but the northwestern end of the island is worn and carved
in the most striking manner. Looking at it that morning, I compared
it to my extended, relaxed hand, the northern end being gashed and
grooved like the sunken spaces between the fingers, while the
southwest end, not more than ten miles distant, was only slightly
grooved and more like the solid wrist and back hand. All the rains
brought by the northeast trades fall upon the northeast end of the
islands. The mountain-peaks on the end hold the clouds and strip
them dry, so that little or no rain falls upon the south and
southwest sides. This is true of all the islands. One end of each is
arid and barren, while the other is wet and verdant. One of the
smaller islands, Kahoolawe, I believe, dominated by Maui on the
northeast, is said to be drying up and blowing away by inches.
What a spell the mountains do lay upon the clouds everywhere,--the
robber mountains,--in these islands exacting the last drop of water
of all the ocean-born vapors that pass over them! On the northeast
side of the Lahaina district there are valleys four or five thousand
feet deep; on the southwest side there are no valleys worth
mentioning. The difference in this respect was forcibly brought home
to me when, later in the day, we made an automobile trip from
Wailuku to Lahaina on the southwest side; in going less than twenty
miles we quickly passed from the region of verdant valleys and
mountain-slopes into a hard, raw, barren, unweathered region, where
there was no soil, and where the rocks looked as crude and
forbidding as they must have looked the day they flowed out from the
depths as molten lava. In outline the island of Maui suggests a
truncated statue, the west end representing the head, very old and
wrinkled and grooved by time and trouble, the peninsula the
well-proportioned neck, and broad-breasted Haleakala forming the
trunk. What a torso it is, fire-born and basking there in the
tropic seas!
The oldest island of the Hawaiian group is Kauai, called the garden
island, because it has much the deepest and most fertile soil. It
shows much more evidence of erosion than any of the other islands.
The next in point of erosion, and hence in point of age, is Oahu,
upon which Honolulu is situated. Then come Molokai and Maui, the two
ends of the latter being of vastly unequal age. Hawaii, the largest
of them all, nearly as large as Connecticut, is the youngest of the
group, and shows the least effects of erosion. When it is as old as
Kauai is now, its two huge mountains, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, will
probably be cut up into deep valleys and canons and sharp, high
ridges, as are the mountains of Kauai and Oahu. The lapse of time
required to bring about such a result is beyond all human
calculation. Whether one million or two millions of years would do
it, who knows? Those warm tropical rains, aided by the rank
vegetation which they beget and support, dissolve the volcanic rock
slowly but inevitably.
Through the courtesy of Mr. Lowell, the superintendent, we had that
day the pleasure of going through a large sugar-making plant at
Paia--one that turns out nearly fifty thousand tons of sugar a year.
We saw the cane come in from the fields in one end of the plant, and
the dry, warm product being put up in bags at the other. All the
latest devices and machinery for sugar-making we saw here in full
operation, affording a contrast to the crude and wasteful methods I
had seen in the island of Jamaica a few years before.
In the afternoon we availed ourselves of the five or six miles of
narrow-gauge railway, the only one on the island, to go from Paia to
Wailuku, where we were met by another automobile, which hurried us
to Lahaina, where we were to meet the steamer that was to convey us
to Hilo, on Hawaii. I say "hurried," but before the journey of
twenty-odd miles was half over, we realized the truth of the old
adage, "The more haste, the less speed." The automobile began to
sulk and finally could be persuaded to go only on the low gear, and
to rattle along at about the speed of a man with a horse and buggy.
We reached Lahaina just as the boat was entering the harbor.
The next morning we found ourselves steaming along past the high,
verdant shores of Hawaii. For fifty miles or more the land presented
one unbroken expanse of sugar-cane, suggesting fields of some
gigantic yellow-green grass. At Hilo the sun was shining between
brief showers, and the air was warm and muggy. It is said to rain
there every day in the year, and the lush vegetation made the
statement seem credible. Judge Andrews met us at the steamer, and
took us to his home for rest and dinner, and was extremely kind to
us.
In the mid-afternoon we took the train for Glenwood, thirty miles on
our way to the volcano of Kilauea. A large part of the way the road
leads through sugar plantations, newly carved out of the koa and
tree-fern wilderness that originally covered the volcanic soil.
Clusters of the little houses of the Japanese laborers, perched high
above the ground on slender posts, were passed here and there.
Everywhere we saw wooden aqueducts, or flumes, winding around the
contours of the hills and across the little valleys, often on high
trestle-work, and partly filled with clear, swift-running water, in
which the sugar-cane was transported to the mills.
At Glenwood stages meet the tourists and convey them over a fairly
good road that winds through the tree-fern forests to the Volcano
House, ten miles away. The beauty of that fern-lined forest, the
long, stately plumes of the gigantic ferns meeting the eye
everywhere, I shall not soon forget. I saw what appeared to be a
large, showy red raspberry growing by the roadside, but I did not
find it at all tempting to the taste.
It was dark when we reached the Volcano House, and we saw off to the
left a red glow upon the fog-clouds, like the reflected light from
a burning barn or house in the country, and inferred at once that it
came from the volcano, which it did. From my window that night, as I
lay in bed, I could see this same angry glow upon the clouds. The
smell of sulphur was in the air about the hotel, and very hot steam
was issuing from cracks in the rocks. A party of tourists on
horseback, in the spirit of true American hurry, visited the volcano
that night, but we chose to wait until the morrow.
The next morning the great crater of Kilauea was filled with fog,
but it lifted, and the sun shone before noon. We passed a pleasant
forenoon strolling along the tree-fringed brink, looking down eight
or nine hundred feet upon its black lava floor, and plucking ohelo
berries, which grew there abundantly, a kind of large, red
huckleberry that one could eat out of hand, but that one could not
get excited over. They were better in a pie than in the hand. Their
name seemed to go well with the suggestion of the scenes amid which
they grew. Kilauea is a round extinct crater about three miles
across and seven or eight hundred feet deep. It has been the scene
of terrific explosions in past ages, but it has now dwindled to the
small active crater of Halemaumau, which is sunk near the middle of
it like a huge pot, two hundred or more feet deep and a thousand
feet across.
In the mid-afternoon a party of eight or ten of us on horseback set
out to visit the volcano. The trail led down the broken and shelving
side of the crater, amid trees and bushes, till it struck the floor
of lava at the bottom. In going down I was aware all the time of a
beautiful bird-song off on my left, a song almost as sweet as that
of our hermit thrush, but of an entirely different order. I think it
was the song of one of the honey-suckers, a red bird with black
wings that in flight looked like our scarlet tanager.
Our course took us out over the cracked and contorted lava-beds,
where no green thing was growing. The forms of the lava-flow
suggested mailed and writhing dragons, with horrid, gaping mouths
and vicious claws. The lava crunched beneath the horses' feet like
shelly and brittle ice. At one point we passed over a wide, jagged
crack on a bridge. As we neared the crater, the rocks grew warm, and
sulphur and other fumes streaked the air.
When a half-mile from the crater we dismounted, and, leaving our
horses in charge of the guide, proceeded on foot over the cracked
and heated lava rocks toward the brink of this veritable devil's
caldron. The sulphur fumes are so suffocating that it can be
approached only on the windward side. The first glance into that
fearful pit is all that your imagination can picture it. You look
upon the traditional lake of brimstone and fire, and if devils were
to appear skipping about over the surface with pitchforks, turning
their victims as the cook turns her frying crullers in the
sputtering fat, it would not much astonish you. This liquid is
rather thick and viscid, but it is boiling furiously. Great masses
of it are thrown up forty or fifty feet, and fall with a crash like
that of the surf upon the shore. Livid jets are thrown up many feet
high against the sides and drip back, cooling quickly as the lava
descends. We sat or stood upon the brink, at times almost letting
our feet hang over the sides, and shielding our faces from the
intense heat with paper masks and veils. It is probably the only
place in the world where you can come face to face with the heart of
an active volcano. There are no veils of vapor to hide it from you.
It appears easy enough to cast a stone into the midst of it, but
none of us could quite do it.
The mass of boiling lava is said to be about one and one half acres
in extent. Its surface is covered with large masses of floating
crust, black and smooth, like leather or roofing-paper, and between
these masses, or islands, the molten lava shows in broad, vivid
lines. It is never quiet. When not actually boiling, there is a slow
circulatory movement, and the great flakes of black crust,
suggesting scum, drift across from one end to the other and are
drawn under the rocks. At one moment only this movement is apparent,
then suddenly the mass begins to boil furiously all over the
surface, and you hear dimly the sound of the bursting bubbles and
the crash of the falling lava. When this takes place, the black
floating masses are broken up and scattered as they are in boiling
maple-syrup, but they quickly reunite, and are carried on by the
current as before.
Looking upon this scene with the thought of the traditional lake of
fire and brimstone of our forefathers in mind, you would say that
these black, filthy-looking masses floating about on the surface
were the accumulation of all the bad stuff that had been fried out
of the poor sinners since hell was invented. How much wickedness and
uncharity and evil thought it would represent! If the poor victims
were clarified and made purer by the process, then it would seem
worth while.
At the Volcano House they keep a book in which tourists write down
their impressions of the volcano. A distinguished statesman had been
there a few days before us, and had written a long account of his
impressions, closing with this oratorical sentence: "No pen, however
gifted, can describe, no brush, however brilliant, can portray, the
wonders we have been permitted to behold." I could not refrain from
writing under it, "I have seen the orthodox hell, and it's the real
thing."
That huge kettle of molten metal, mantling and bubbling, how it is
impressed upon my memory! It is a vestige of the ancient cosmic fire
that once wrapped the whole globe in its embrace. It had a kind of
brutal fascination. One could not take one's eyes from it. That
network of broad, jagged, fiery lines defining those black, smooth
masses, or islands, of floating matter told of a side of nature we
had never before seen. We lingered there on the brink of the fearful
spectacle till night came on, and the sides of the mighty caldron,
and the fog-clouds above it, glowed in the infernal light. Not so
white as the metal pouring from a blast furnace, not so hot, a more
sullen red, but welling up from the central primordial fires of the
earth. This great pot has boiled over many times in the recent past,
as the lava-beds we traveled over testify, and it will probably boil
over again. It has been unusually active these last few years.
About nine o'clock we rode back, facing a cold, driving mist, the
back of each rider, protected by the shining yellow "slickers,"
glowing to the one behind him, in the volcano's light, till we were
a mile or more away.
The next morning came clear, and the sight of the mighty slope of
Mauna Loa, lit up by the rising sun, was a grand spectacle. It
looked gentle and easy of ascent, wooded here and there, and here
and there showing broad, black streaks from the lava overflows at
the summit in recent years; but remembering that it was nearly four
thousand feet higher than Haleakala, I had no desire to climb it.
This mountain and its companion, Mauna Kea, are the highest island
mountains in the world.
The stage rolled us back through the fern forest to the railway
station and thence on to Hilo again, where in good time, in the
afternoon, we went aboard the steamer; and the next morning we were
again in the harbor of Honolulu, glad we had made the inter-island
trip, and above all glad that we had seen Haleakala.
VI
THE OLD ICE-FLOOD
I
He was a bold man who first conceived the idea of the great
continental ice-sheet which in Pleistocene times covered most of the
northern part of the continent, and played such a part in shaping
the land as we know it. That bold man was Agassiz, who, however, was
not bold enough to accept the theory of evolution as propounded by
Darwin. The idea of the great glacier did not conflict with
Agassiz's religious predilections, and the theory of evolution did.
It was a bold generalization, this of the continental ice-sheet, one
of the master-strokes of the scientific imagination. It was about
the year 1840 that Agassiz, fresh from the glaciers of the Alps,
went to Scotland looking for the tracks of the old glaciers, and he
found them at once when he landed near Glasgow. We can all find them
now on almost every walk we take to the fields and hills; but until
our eyes are opened, how blind we are to them! We are like people
who camp on the trail of an army and never suspect an army has
passed, though the ruts made by their wagons and artillery and the
ruins of their intrenchments are everywhere visible.
When I was a boy on the farm we never asked ourselves questions
about the stones and rocks that encumbered the land--whence they
came, or what the agency was that brought them. The farmers believed
the land was created just as we saw it--stones, boulders, soil,
gravel-pits, hills, mountains, and all--and doubtless wished in
their hearts that the Creator had not been so particular about the
rocks and stones, or had made an exception in favor of their own
fields. Rocks and stones were good for fences and foundations, and
for various other uses, but they were a great hindrance to the
cultivation of the soil. I once heard a farmer boast that he had
very strong land--it had to be strong to hold up such a crop of
rocks and stones. When the Eastern farmer moved west into the
prairie states, or south into the cotton-growing states, he probably
never asked himself why the Creator had not cumbered the ground with
rocks and stones in those sections, as he had in New York and New
England. South of the line that runs irregularly through middle New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and so on to
the Rockies, he will find few loose stones scattered over the soil,
no detached boulders sitting upon the surface, no hills or mounds of
gravel and sand, no clay banks packed full of rounded stones, little
and big, no rocky floors under the soil which look as if they had
been dressed down by a huge but dulled and nicked jack-plane. The
reason is that the line I have indicated marks the limit of the old
ice-sheet which more than a hundred thousand years ago covered all
the northern part of the continent to a depth of from two to four
thousand feet, and was the chief instrument in rounding off
mountain-tops, scattering rock-fragments, little and big, over our
landscapes, grinding down and breaking off the protruding rock
strata, building up our banks of mingled clay and stone, changing
the courses of streams and rivers, deepening and widening our
valleys, transplanting boulders of one formation for hundreds of
miles, and dropping them upon the surface of another formation. When
it began to melt and retreat, it was the chief agent in building up
our river terraces, and our long, low, rounded hills of sand and
gravel and clay, called kames and drumlins. In many of our valleys
its flowing waters left long, low ridges, gentle in outline, made up
entirely of sand and gravel, or of clay. In other places it left
moraines made up of earth, gravel, and rock-fragments that make a
very rough streak through the farmer's land. All those high, level
terraces along the Hudson, such as that upon which West Point
stands, were the work of the old ice-sheet that once filled the
river valley. The melting ice was also the chief agent in building
up the enormous clay-banks that are found along the shores of the
Hudson. The clay formed in very still waters, the sand and gravel in
more active waters.
This great ice-sheet not only covered our northern farms with rocks
and stones, and packed the soil with rounded boulders, but it also
carried away much of the rock decay that goes to the making of the
soil, so that the soil is of greater depth in the non-glaciated than
in the glaciated areas of the country. The New-Englander or
New-Yorker in traveling in the Southern States may note the enormous
depth of soil as revealed by the water-courses or railroad cuts. The
ice-sheet was a huge mill that ground up the rocks in the North
probably as fast or faster than the rains and the rank vegetation
reduced them in the South, but the floods of water which it finally
let loose carried a great deal of the rock-waste into the sea.
The glacier milk which colors the streams that flow from beneath it
finally settles and makes clay. Off the great Malaspina Glacier in
Alaska the ocean is tinged by the glacier milk for nearly fifty
miles from the shores. Very few country people, even among the
educated, are ready to believe that this enormous ice-sheet ever
existed. To make them believe that it is just as much a fact in the
physical history of this continent as the war of the Revolution is a
fact in our political history is no easy matter. It certainly is a
crushing proposition. It so vastly transcends all our experience
with ice and snow, or the experience of the race since the dawn of
history, that only the scientific imagination and faith are equal to
it. The belief in it rests on indubitable evidence, its record is
written all over our landscape, but it requires, I say, the
scientific imagination to put the facts together and make a
continuous history.
Three or four hundred feet above my cabin, five or six hundred feet
above tidewater, there is a bold rocky point upon which the old
ice-sheet bore heavily. It has rubbed it down and flattened it as a
hand passing over a knob of soft putty might do. The great hand in
this case moved from the northeast and must have fairly made this
rocky prominence groan with its weight. The surface, scratched and
grooved and planed by the ice, has weathered away, leaving the rock
quite rough; its general outlines alone tell the tale of the battle
with the ice. But on the east side a huge mass of rock, that had
been planed and gouged by the glacier, was detached and toppled
over, turning topsy-turvy before it had weathered, and it lies in
such a position, upheld by two rock fragments, that its glaciated
surface, though protected from the weather, is clearly visible. You
step down two or three feet between the two upholding rocks and are
at the entrance of a little cave, and there before you, standing at
an angle of thirty or forty degrees, is this rocky page written over
with the history of the passing of the great ice plane. The surface
exposed is ten or twelve feet long, and four or five feet wide, and
it is as straight and smooth, and the scratches and grooves are as
sharp and distinct as if made yesterday. I often take the college
girls there who come to visit me, to show them, as I tell them,
where the old ice gods left their signatures. The girls take turns
in stooping down and looking along the under surface of the rock,
and feeling it with their hands, and marveling. They have read or
heard about these things, but the reading or hearing made little
impression upon their minds. When they see a concrete example, and
feel it with their hands, they are impressed. Then when I tell them
that there is not a shadow of a doubt but that the ice was at one
time two or three thousand feet thick above the place where they now
stand, and that it bore down upon Julian's Rock with a weight of
thousands of tons to the square foot, that it filled all the Hudson
River Valley, and covered the landscape for thousands of miles
around them, riding over the tops of the Catskills and of the
Adirondacks, and wearing them down and carrying fragments of rock
torn from them hundreds of miles to the south and southwest,--when
I have told them all of this, I have usually given them a mouthful
too big for them to masticate or swallow. As a sort of abstract
proposition contained in books, or heard in the classroom, they do
not mind it, but as an actual fact, here in the light of common day
on the hill above Slabsides, with the waters of the Hudson
glistening below, and the trees rustling in the wind all about us,
that is quite another matter. It sounds like a dream or a fable.
Many of the processes that have made our globe what we see it have
been so slow and on such a scale that they are quite beyond our
horizon--beyond the reach of our mental apprehension. The mind has
to approach them slowly and tentatively, and become familiar with
the idea of them, before it can give any sort of rational assent to
them. It has taken the geologist a long time to work out and clear
up and confirm this conception of the great continental glacier
which in Pleistocene times covered so large a part of the northern
hemisphere. It is now as well established as any event in the remote
past well can be. In Alaska, and in the Swiss Alps, one may see the
ice doing exactly what the Pleistocene ice-sheet did over this
country.
II
The other day in passing a farmer's house I saw where he had placed
a huge, roundish boulder, nearly as high as a man's head, by the
roadside and had cut upon it his own name and date, and that of his
father before him, and that of the first settler upon the farm, in
the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was an interesting
monument. I learned that the rock had been found in the bed of a
small creek near by, and that the farmer had given a hundred dollars
to have it moved to its place in front of his house. Had I seen the
old farmer I am sure I could have added to his interest and pride in
his monument by telling him that it was Adiron-dack gneiss, and had
been brought from that region on the back, or in the maw, of a
glacier, many tens of thousands of years ago. But it is highly
probable that, were he an uneducated man, he would have treated my
statement with contempt or incredulity. Education does at least this
for a man: it opens his mind and makes him less skeptical about
things not dreamed of in his philosophy.
This boulder had been rolled and worn in its long, slow ride till it
was nearly round. I have a much smaller boulder, probably from the
same quarry, which I planted at the head of my garden for a seat
when the hoe gets tired. When it was dropped here on the land that
is now my field, the bed and valley of the Hudson were occupied by
the old glacier which, during its decline and recession, built up
the terraces opposite me (where now stands a multimillionaire's copy
of an Italian palace), and which added to and uncovered the river
slopes where now my own vineyards are planted.
The flowing or the creeping of this old ice-sheet, so that it could
transport large boulders hundreds of miles, is one of the most
remarkable things about it: as slow or slower than the hour-hand of
the clock, yet an actual progression, carrying it, in the course of
thousands of years, from its apex in Labrador well down into New
Jersey, where its terminal moraine is still clearly traceable.
A river of ice, under the right conditions, flows as literally as a
river of water, fastest in the middle, and slowest along its margins
where the friction is greatest. The old ice-sheet, or ice sea,
flowed around and over mountains as a river flows around and over
rocks. Where a mountain rose above the glacier, the ice divided and
flowed round it, and reunited again beyond it. One may see all this
in Alaska at the present time. Water, of course, flows because of
its own pressure; so does ice, only the pressure has to be vastly
greater. A drop of water on the table does not flow, but, pile it
high enough, and it will. The old ice sea flowed mainly south, not
because it was downhill in that direction, but because the
accumulation of ice and snow at the North was so great. If through
any climatic changes, the snowfall were ever again to be so great
that more snow should fall in winter than could melt in summer,
after the lapse of thousands of years, we should have another ice
age.
VII
THE FRIENDLY SOIL
I never tire of contemplating the soil itself, the mantle rock, as
the geologist calls it. It clothes the rocky framework of the earth
as the flesh clothes our bones. It is the seat of the vitality of
the globe, the youngest part, the growing, changing part. Out of it
we came, and to it we return. It is literally our mother, as the sun
is our father.
The soil!--the residuum of the rocks, the ashes of the mountains. We
know what a vast stretch of time has gone to the making of it; that
it has been baked and boiled and frozen and thawed, acted upon by
sun and star and wind and rain; mixed and remixed and kneaded and
added to, as the housewife kneads and moulds her bread; that it has
lain under the seas in the stratified rocks for incalculable ages;
that chemical and mechanical and vital forces have all had a hand in
its preparation; that the vast cycles of animal and vegetable life
of the foreworld have contributed to its fertility; that the life of
the sea, and the monsters of the earth, and the dragons of the air,
have left their ashes here, so that when I stir it with my hoe, or
turn it with my spade, I know I am stirring or turning the meal of a
veritable grist of the gods.
From its primal source in the Archaean rock, up through all the vast
series of sedimentary rocks to our own time, what vicissitudes and
transformations it has passed through; how many times it has died,
so to speak, and been reborn from the rocks; how many times the
winds and the rains have transported it, and infused invisible,
life-giving gases into it; how many of the elements have throbbed
with life, climbed and bloomed in trees, walked or flown or swam in
animals, or slumbered for thousands upon thousands of years beneath
the great ice-sheet of Pleistocene time! A handful of the soil by
your door is probably the most composite thing you can find in a
day's journey. It may be an epitome of a whole geological formation,
or of two or more of them. If it happens to be made up of decomposed
limestone, sandstone, slate, and basalt rock, think what a history
would be condensed in it!
Our lawns are made up of ashes from the funeral pyre of mountains,
of dust from the tombs of geologic ages. What masses of rock does
this sandbank represent! what an enormous grist in the great glacier
mill do these layers of clay stand for! Two feet of soil probably
represent a hundred feet or more of rock. Strictly speaking, the
soil is the insoluble parts of the ground-up and decomposed rocks,
after the rains and the winds have done their work and taken their
toll of the grist they have ground. Sometimes these mills take the
whole grist and leave the rocks bare; but usually they leave a
residuum in which life strikes its roots. We do not see all that the
waters take from the soil. They have invisible pockets in which they
carry away all the more soluble parts, such as lime, soda, potash,
silica, magnesia, and others, and leave for the land the more
insoluble parts. These, too, in times of flood they carry away in
suspension, in the shape of sand, silt, mud, gravel, and the like.
When the waters really digest the rocks, they hold the various
minerals in solution, and run limpid and dancing to the sea; when
they have an undigested burden, they run angry and turbid.
It is estimated that the Hudson River deposits in the sea each year
four hundred and forty thousand tons of mineral matter in solution
which it has taken from the land, and the Mississippi one hundred
and twelve million tons. Each carries away about four times as much
in suspension. The digestive or chemical power of water, then, is
only about one fourth as great as its mechanical power. Between the
two the land is made to pay heavy toll to the sea. But in time, in
geologic time, it all comes back. The suspended particles are
dropped and go to make up the sedimentary rocks, while the solutes
help cement the material of these rocks together, and also nourish
the sea life from which limestone and other organic rocks are made.
When these rocks are again lifted to the surface and disintegrated
into soil, then the debt of the sea to the land is paid. This
process, this cycle of soil loss and soil growth, has gone on
through all time, and must continue as long as the rain continues to
fall, or as long as the sea continues to send its tax-gatherers to
the land. In this great cycle of give and take of the elements, the
affairs of men cut but a momentary figure; how puny they are, how
transient! How the great changes, which in time amount to
revolutions, go on over our heads and under our feet, and we rarely
heed them, and are powerless to stay them! A summer shower carries
the soil of my side-hill, which is mainly disintegrated Silurian
rock and shale, into the river, and some millions of years hence,
when it has become stratified rock, and been lifted up into the
light of day, some other, and, I trust, wiser husbandman, will be
gathering his harvest from it, and be worried over the downpour that
robs him of it. The farmer's worry is bound to come back with the
soil, and be passed along with it.
VIII
PRIMAL ENERGIES
How puny and meagre is the utmost power man can put forth, even by
the aid of all his mechanical appliances, when compared with the
primal earth forces! Think, or try to think, of the force of
pressure that causes the rock-strata to buckle or crumple or
bend--layers of rock, thousands of feet thick, made to fold and bend
like the leaves of a book--vast mountain-chains flexed and
foreshortened, or ruptured and faulted as the bending of one's body
wrinkles or rips one's clothes. Think of the over-thrusts and the
folding and shearing of the earth's crust. The shrinking of the
earth squeezes the rocks to an extent quite beyond our power of
conception. "So overpowering has been the horizontal movement in
some cases," says Dana, "that masses of rock thousands of feet in
thickness have been buckled up and sheared, or, simply yielding to
pressure, have sheared without folding, and been thrust forward for
miles along a gently inclined plane. These great reversed faults are
termed over-thrusts or thrust-planes. Sometimes such thrust-planes
occur singly, at other times the rocks have yielded again and again,
great sheets having been sliced off successively, and driven forward
one upon the other." In northern Montana there is an over-thrust of
the Cambrian rocks upon the late Cretaceous, of seven or eight
miles, carrying with it what is now called "Chief Mountain," which
has been carved out of the extreme end of the over-thrust. The
contemplation of such things gives one a sense of power in Nature
beyond anything else I know of. The shrinking of the globe as a
whole makes its rocky garment too big for it, and this titanic
wrinkling and folding results. When the strata snap asunder under
the strain, we have earthquakes. During the recent San Francisco
earthquake, Mount Tamalpais, across the bay, and all the neighboring
heights, were permanently shifted eight or ten feet. The sides of
the mountain, it is said, undulated like a curtain. And this shaking
and twitching of the great rocky skin of the earth was vastly less,
in proportion to the size of the globe, than the twitching and
trembling of the skin of a horse when he would shake off the flies,
in comparison with the animal's body.
We see another exhibition of the magnitude of the earth's forces in
what the geologist calls a "laccolite"--a great cave or cistern deep
beneath the surface of stratified rock filled with hardened lava.
The lava is forced up from an unknown depth under such pressure
that, not finding an outlet at the surface, the rock strata,
hundreds or thousands of feet thick, are lifted up and arched like
so much paper, and in the cavity thus formed the pent-up molten lava
finds relief. These lava cisterns or pockets are sometimes uncovered
by the process of erosion. The Henry Mountains in Utah are all
laccolites. One of them, Mount Hillers, has a volume of about ten
cubic miles. Much of the overarching sedimentary strata still covers
it. Geologists read the evidence of a similar formation called a
"sill" on the west side of the Hudson in New Jersey, forming the
Palisades. The lava worked like a giant mole up through and then
beneath the Triassic sandstone, lifting the strata up and arching
them over a large area. During the millions of years that have
elapsed since that time, the layers of superincumbent sandstone have
been worn away so that now one sees a wide, smooth, gentle slope of
basaltic rock covered by a very thin coat of soil. As one goes by on
the train, one sees where the workmen of a stone-crushing plant have
cut into the slope and uncovered the junction of the two kinds of
rock, one born of water, and one born of fire. The igneous rock sits
squarely upon the level sandstone, like a row of upright books
standing upon a shelf. I never pass the place but that I want to
stop the train and get out and have a close look at the precise spot
where this son of Vulcan sat down so heavily and so hot upon his
brother of the sedimentary deposits.
Probably no two chapters of the earth's history differ more than
those of the two sides of the Hudson at New York. There is a great
break here--a leap from Archaean times on the east side to Mesozoic
times on the west. The east side is millions of years the older.
Here is the original Plutonic or Azoic rock which apparently has
never been under the sea since it was first thrust up out of the
fiery depths. The west shore, including the Palisades, belongs to a
much later geologic era. The original granite here is buried under
vast deposits of sedimentary rock of the Triassic age--the age of
the giant reptiles, the remains of one of which has recently been
found embedded in this sandstone, near the river's edge. As the
traveler's eye follows along the even, almost level line of this
escarpment of the Palisades, let it re-create for him the strata of
the old Triassic sandstone that were millions of years ago piled
high upon it,--how high can only be conjectured,--but which have
been removed grain by grain under the eroding power of the forces of
air and water that now seem to caress the huge wall so gently. Ah!
geologic Time, what can it not do? what has it not done? The old
sill of Vulcan now presents a nearly vertical front to the Hudson,
forming the Palisades, showing that some leaves of the earth's
history here are missing, buried probably beneath the waters of the
river. There is evidently a line of fault here, and the west side
has been lifted up out of the old Mesozoic seas, probably in the
convulsions that poured out the lava of the trap rock.
IX
SCIENTIFIC FAITH
I find myself accepting certain things on the authority of science
which so far transcend my experience, and the experience of the race
and all the knowledge of the world, in fact which come so near being
unthinkable, that I call my acceptance of them an act of scientific
faith. One's reason may be convinced and yet the heart refuse to
believe. It is not so much a question of evidence as a question of
capacity to receive evidence of an unusual kind.
One of the conclusions of science which I feel forced to accept, and
yet which I find very hard work to believe, is that of the animal
origin of man. I suppose my logical faculties are convinced, but
what is that in me that is baffled, and that hesitates and demurs?
The idea of the origin of man from some lower form requires such a
plunge into the past, and such a faith in the transforming power of
the biological laws, and in the divinity that lurks in the soil
underfoot and streams from the orbs overhead, that the ordinary mind
is quite unequal to the task. For the book of Genesis of the old
Bible we have substituted the book of genesis of the rocky scripture
of the globe--a book torn and mutilated, that has been through fire
and flood and earthquake shock, that has been in the sea and on the
heights, and that only the palaeontologist can read or decipher
correctly, but which is a veritable bible of the succession of life
on the earth. The events of the days of creation are recorded here,
but they are days of such length that they are to be reckoned only
in millions of years.
The evolution of the horse, according to the best and latest
research, from the eohippus of Eocene times--a small mammal no
larger than the fox--to the proud and fleet creature that we prize
to-day, occupied four or five millions of years. Think of that first
known progenitor of the horse as never dying, but living on through
the geological ages and being slowly, oh, so slowly, modified by its
environment, changing its teeth, its hoofs, enlarging its body,
lengthening its limbs, and so on, till it becomes the horse we know
to-day.
In accepting the theory of the animal origin of man we have got to
follow man back, not only till we find him a naked savage like the
Fuegians as Darwin describes them,--naked, bedaubed with paint, with
matted hair and looks wild and distrustful,--but we cannot stop
there, we must follow him back till he becomes a troglodyte, a
cave-dweller, contending with the cave bear, the cave lion, and the
hyena for the possession of this rude shelter; back still, till we
find him in trees living like the anthropoid apes; then back to the
earth again to some four-footed creature, probably of the marsupial
kind; still the trail leads downward and ever downward, till we lose
it in that maze of marine forms that swarm in the Palaeozoic seas,
or until the imagination is baffled and refuses to proceed. It
certainly is a hard proposition, and it puts one upon his mettle to
accept it.
Should we not find equal difficulty in believing the life-history of
each one of us,--the start in the germ, then the vague suggestion of
fish, and frog, and reptile, in our foetal life,--were it not a
matter of daily experience? Let it be granted that the race of man
was born as literally out of the animal forms below him as the child
is born out of these vague, prenatal animal forms in its mother's
womb. Yet the former fact so far transcends our experience, and even
our power of imagination, that we can receive it only by an act of
scientific faith, as our fathers received the dogmas of the Church
by an act of religious faith.
I confess that I find it hard work to get on intimate terms with
evolution, familiarize my mind with it, and make it thinkable. The
gulf that separates man from the orders below him is so impassable,
his intelligence is so radically different from theirs, and his
progress so enormous, while they have stood still, that believing it
is like believing a miracle. That the apparently blind groping and
experimentation which mark the course of evolution as revealed by
palaeontology--the waste, the delay, the vicissitudes, the
hit-and-miss method--should have finally resulted in this supreme
animal, man, puts our scientific faith to the test. In the light of
evolution how the halo with which we have surrounded our origin
vanishes!
Man has from the earliest period believed himself of divine origin,
and by the divine he has meant something far removed from this earth
and all its laws and processes, something quite transcending the
mundane forces. He has invented or dreamed myths and legends to
throw the halo of the exceptional, the far removed, the mystical, or
the divine around his origin. He has spurned the clod with his foot;
he has denied all kinship with bird and beast around him, and looked
to the heavens above for the sources of his life. And then unpitying
science comes along and tells him that he is under the same law as
the life he treads under foot, and that that law is adequate to
transform the worm into the man; that he, too, has groveled in the
dust, or wallowed in the slime, or fought and reveled, a reptile
among reptiles; that the heavens above him, to which he turns with
such awe and reverence, or such dread and foreboding, are the source
of his life and hope in no other sense than they are the source of
the life and hope of all other creatures. But this is the way of
science; it enhances the value or significance of everything about
us that we are wont to treat as cheap or vulgar, and it discounts
the value of the things far off upon which we have laid such stress.
It ties us to the earth, it calls in the messengers we send forth
into the unknown; it makes the astonishing revelation--
revolutionary revelation, I may say--that the earth is embosomed in
the infinite heavens the same as the stars that shine above us, that
the creative energy is working now and here underfoot, the same as
in the ages of myth and miracle; in other words, that God is really
immanent in his universe, and inseparable from it; that we have been
in heaven and under the celestial laws all our lives, and knew it
not. Science thus kills religion, poetry, and romance only so far as
it dispels our illusions and brings us back from the imaginary to
the common and the near at hand. It discounts heaven in favor of
earth. It should make us more at home in the world, and more
conscious of the daily beauty and wonders that surround us, and, if
it does not, the trouble is probably in the ages of myth and fable
that lie behind us and that have left their intoxicating influence
in our blood.
We are willing to be made out of the dust of the earth when God
makes us, the God we have made ourselves out of our dreams and fears
and aspirations, but we are not willing to be made out of the dust
of the earth when the god called Evolution makes us. An impersonal
law or process we cannot revere or fear or worship or exalt; we can
only study it and put it to the test. We can love or worship only
personality. This is why science puts such a damper upon us; it
banishes personality, as we have heretofore conceived it, from the
universe. The thunder is no longer the voice of God, the earth is no
longer his footstool. Personality appears only in man; the universe
is not inhuman, but unhuman. It is this discovery that we recoil
from, and blame science for; and until, in the process of time, we
shall have adjusted our minds, and especially our emotions, to it,
mankind will still recoil from it.
We love our dreams, our imaginings, as we love a prospect before our
houses. We love an outlook into the ideal, the unknown in our lives.
But we love also to feel the solid ground beneath our feet.
Whether life loses in charm as we lose our illusions, and whether it
gains in power and satisfaction as we more and more reach solid
ground in our beliefs, is a question that will be answered
differently by different persons.
We have vastly more solid knowledge about the universe amid which we
live than had our fathers, but are we happier, better, stronger? May
it not be said that our lives consist, not in the number of things
we know any more than in the number of things we possess, but in the
things we love, in the depth and sincerity of our emotions, and in
the elevation of our aspirations? Has not science also enlarged the
sphere of our love, and given us new grounds for wonder and
admiration? It certainly has, but it as certainly has put a damper
upon our awe, our reverence, our veneration. However valuable these
emotions are, and whatever part they may have played in the
development of character in the past, they seem doomed to play less
and less part in the future. Poetry and religion, so called, seem
doomed to play less and less part in the life of the race in the
future. We shall still dream and aspire, but we shall not tremble
and worship as in the past.
We see about us daily transformations as stupendous as that of the
evolution of man from the lower animals, and we marvel not. We see
the inorganic pass into the organic, we see iron and lime and potash
and silex blush in the flowers, sweeten in the fruit, ripen in the
grain, crimson in the blood, and we marvel not. We see the spotless
pond-lily rising and unfolding its snowy petals, and its trembling
heart of gold, from the black slime of the pond. We contemplate our
own life-history as shown in our pre-natal life, and we are not
disturbed. But when we stretch this process out through the geologic
ages and try to see ourselves a germ, a fish, a reptile, in the womb
of time, we are balked. We do not see the great mother, or the great
father, or feel the lift of the great biologic laws. We are beyond
our depth. It is easy to believe that the baby is born of woman,
because it is a matter of daily experience, but it is not easy to
believe that man is born of the animal world below him, and that
that is born of inorganic Nature, because the fact is too big and
tremendous.
What we call Nature works in no other way; one law is over big and
little alike. What Nature does in a day typifies what she does in an
eternity. It is when we reach the things done on such an enormous
scale of time and power and size that we are helpless. The almost
infinitely slow transformations that the theory of evolution demands
balk us as do the size and distance of the fixed stars.
No observation or study of evolution on a small scale and near at
hand in the familiar facts of the life about us can prepare us for
it, any more than lake and river can prepare us for the ocean, or
the modeling of miniature valleys and mountains by the rain in the
clay bank can open our minds to receive the tremendous facts of the
carving of the face of the continent by the same agents.
We do not see evolution working in one day, or in a century, or in
many centuries. Neither do we catch the gods of erosion at their
Herculean tasks. They always seem to be having a holiday, or else to
be merely toying with their work.
When we see a mound of earth or a bank of clay worn into miniature
mountain-chains and canons and gulches by the rains of a season, we
do not doubt our eyes; we know the rains did it. But when we see the
same thing copied in a broad landscape, or on the face of a state or
a continent, we find it hard to believe the evidence of our own
senses. The scale upon which it is done, and the time involved, put
it so far beyond the sphere of our experience that something in us,
probably the practical, everyday man, refuses to be convinced.
The lay mind can hardly have any adequate conception of the part
erosion, the simple weathering of the rocks, has played in shaping
our landscapes, and in preparing the earth for the abode of man. The
changes in the surface of the land in one's lifetime, or even in the
historic period, are so slight that the tales the geologists tell us
are incredible.
When, during a recent trip through the great Southwest, I saw the
earth laid open by erosion as I had never before dreamed of,
especially when I visited those halls of the gods, the Grand Canon
and Yosemite Valley, I found my capacity to believe in the erosive
power of water and the weather quite overtaxed. It must be true, I
said, what the geologists tell us, that water and air did all this;
but while you look and wait, and while generations before you have
looked and waited, all is as quiet and passive as if the slumber of
ages wrapped hill and vale. Invisible giants have wrought and delved
here of whom we never catch a glimpse, nor shall we, wait and watch
we never so long. No sound of their hammers or picks or shovels or
of the dynamite ever breaks the stillness of the air.
I have to believe that the valleys and mountains of my native
Catskills were carved out of a great elevated plain or plateau;
there is no other explanation of them. Here lie the level strata,
without any bending or folding, or sign of convulsion and upheavals,
horizontal as the surface of the sea or lake in which their
sediments were originally laid down; and here are these deep, wide
valleys cut down through these many sheets of stratified rock; and
here are these long, high, broad-backed mountains, made up of the
rock that the forces of air and water have left, and with no forces
of erosion at work that would appreciably alter a line of the
landscape in ten thousand years; and yet we know, if we know
anything about the physical history of the earth, that erosion has
done this work, carved out these mountains and valleys, from the
Devonian strata, as literally as the sculptor carves his statue from
the block of marble.
Above my lodge on the home farm the vast layers of the gray,
thin-sheeted Catskill rock crop out and look across the valley to
their fellows two or more miles away where they crop out in a
similar manner on the opposite slope of the mountain. With the eye
of faith I see the great sheets restored, and follow them across on
the line which they made aeons ago, till they are joined again to
their fellows as they were before the agents of erosion had so
widely severed them.
These physical forces have worked as slowly and silently in
sculpturing the landscapes as the biological laws have worked in
evolving man from the lower animals, or the vertebrates from the
invertebrates. The rains, the dews, the snows, the winds--how could
these soft, gently careering agents have demolished these rocks and
dug these valleys? One would almost as soon expect the wings and
feet of the birds to wear away the forests they flit through. The
wings of time are feathered also, and as they brush against the
granite or the flinty sandstone no visible particle is removed while
you watch and wait. Come back in a thousand years, and you note no
change, save in the covering of trees and verdure. Return in ten
thousand, and you would probably find the hills carrying their heads
as high and as proudly as ever. Here and there the face of the cliff
may have given way, or a talus slid into the valley, or a stream or
river changed its course, or sawed deeper into the rock, and a lake
been turned into a marsh, or the delta of a river broadened--minor
changes, such as a shingle from your roof or a brick from your
chimney, while your house stands as before. In one hundred thousand
years what changes should we probably find? Here in the Catskills,
where I write, the weathering of the hills and mountains would
probably have been but slight. It must be fifty thousand years or
more since the great ice-sheet left us. Where protected by a thin
coat of soil, its scratches and grooves upon the surface rock are
about as fresh and distinct as you may see them made in Alaska at
the present time. Where the rock is exposed, they have weathered
out, one eighth of an inch probably having been worn away. The
drifting of the withered leaves of autumn, or of the snows of winter
over them, it really seems, would have done as much in that stretch
of time. Then try to fancy the eternity it has taken the subaerial
elements to cut thousands of feet through this hard Catskill
sandstone! No, the evolution of the landscape, the evolution of the
animal and vegetable kingdoms, the evolution of the suns and
planets, involve a process so slow, and on such a scale, that it is
quite unthinkable. How long it took evolution to bridge the chasm
between the vertebrate and the invertebrate, between the fish and
the frog, between the frog and the reptile, between the reptile and
the mammal, or between the lowest mammal and the highest, who can
guess?
But the gulf has been passed, and here we are in this teeming world
of life and beauty, with a terrible past behind us, but a brighter
and brighter future before us.
X
"THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN"
When our minds have expanded sufficiently to take in and accept the
theory of evolution, with what different feelings we look upon the
visible universe from those with which our fathers looked upon it!
Evolution makes the universe alive. In its light we see that
mysterious potency of matter itself, that something in the clod
under foot that justifies Emerson's audacious line of the "worm
striving to be man." We are no longer the adopted children of the
earth, but her own real offspring. Evolution puts astronomy and
geology in our blood and authenticates us and gives us the backing
of the whole solar system. This is the redemption of the earth: it
is the spiritualization of matter.
In imagination stand off in vacant space and see the earth rolling
by you, a huge bubble with all its continents and seas and changing
seasons and countless forms of life upon it, and remember that you
are looking upon a great cosmic organism, pulsing with the vital
currents of the universe, and that what it holds of living forms
were not arbitrarily imposed upon it from without, but vitally
evolved from within and that man himself is one of its products as
literally as are the trees that stand rooted to the soil. Revert to
the time when life was not, when the globe was a half-incandescent
ball, or when it was a seething, weltering waste of heated water,
before the land had yet emerged from the waves, and yet you and I
were there in the latent potencies of the chemically and dynamically
warring elements. We were there, the same as the heat and flame are
in the coal and wood and as the explosive force of powder is in the
grains. The creative cosmic chemistry in due time brought us forth,
and started us on the long road that led from the amoeba up to man.
There have been no days of creation. Creation has been a continuous
process, and the creator has been this principle of evolution
inherent in all matter.
Man himself was born of this principle. His genealogy finally runs
back to the clod under his feet. One has no trouble in accepting the
old Biblical account of his origin from the dust of the earth when
one views that dust in the light of modern science.
Man is undoubtedly of animal origin. He is embraced in the same
zoological scheme as are all other creatures, and did not start as
man any more than you and I started with our present stature, or
than the earth sprang from chaos as we now behold it.
His complete physical evolution must have been achieved thousands of
centuries ago, but his full mental and spiritual evolution is not
yet.
I think of his physical evolution as completed when he assumed the
upright attitude or passed from a quadruped to a biped, which must
of itself have been a long, slow process. Probably our whole
historic period would form but a fraction of this cycle of
unrecorded time. Man's complete emergence from the lower orders, so
that he stood off in sharp contrast to them in his physical form
probably occurred in later Tertiary times, and what the meaning of
this stretch of time is in human years we can only conjecture.
During this cycle of numberless millenniums till the dawn of
history, man's development was mainly mental. He left the brute
creature behind because his mind continued to develop after his
physical form was complete, while the brute stood still. Whence the
impulse that sent man forward? Why was one animal form endowed with
the capacity for endless growth and development, and all the others
denied it? Ah! that is the question of questions. Compared with the
development of his bodily powers, man's mental and spiritual growth
has been very rapid. He seems to have been millions of years in
getting his body, while he has been only millenniums in getting his
reason and intelligence. What progress since the dawn of history!
Compare the Germans of the time of Tacitus, or the Gauls of the time
of Caesar, or the Britons of the time of Hadrian with the people of
those countries to-day.
We are prone to speak of man's emergence from the lower orders as if
it were a simple thing, almost like the going from one country into
another. But try to think what it means; try to think of the slow
transformation, of the long, toilsome road even from the halfway
house of our simian ancestors. If we do not give him the benefit of
the sudden mutation theory of the origin of species, then think of
the slow process, hair by hair, as it were, by which a tailed,
apelike arboreal animal was transformed into a hairless, tailless,
erect, tool-using, fire-using, speech-forming animal. We see in our
own day in the case of the African negro, that centuries of our
Northern climate have hardly any appreciable effect toward making a
white man of him; nor, on the other hand, has exposure to the
tropical sun had much more effect in making a negro of the white
man. Probably it would take ten thousand years or more of these
conditions to bleach the pigments out of the one skin and put them
in the other. There is convincing proof from painting and figures
found in Egypt that neither the African negro nor the Egyptian has
changed in features in five thousand years.
The most marvelous thing about man's evolution is the inborn upward
impulse in some one low organism that rested not till it reached its
goal in him. The mollusk remains, but some impulse went out from the
mollusk that begat the fish. The fish remains, but some impulse went
out from the fish that begat the amphibian. The amphibian remains,
but some impulse went out from the amphibian that begat the reptile.
The reptile remains, but some impulse went out from the reptile that
begat the mammal; and so on up to man. Man must have had a specific
line of descent. One golden thread must connect him with the lowest
forms of life. And the wonder is that this golden thread was never
snapped or lost through all the terrible vicissitudes of the
geologic ages. But I suppose it is just as great a wonder that the
line of descent of the horse, or the sheep, or the dog, or the bird,
was not snapped or lost. Some impulse or tendency was latent or
potential in the first unicellular life that rested not till it
eventuated in each of these higher forms. Did any terrestrial or
celestial calamity endanger the line of descent of any of the higher
creatures? Was any form cut off in the world-wide crustal
disturbances of the earth at the end of palaeozoic and mesozoic
time, when so many forms of animal life appear to have been wiped
out, that might in time have given birth to a kind unlike or
superior to any now upon the earth? Species after species have
become extinct, whole orders and families have gone out, often
rather suddenly. Why we know not. Why the line of man's descent was
not cut off, who knows? It is a vain speculation. There can be
little doubt that in early Tertiary times our ancestor was a small,
feeble mammal, maybe of the lemur, maybe of the marsupial kind,
powerless before the great carnivorous mammals of that time, and
probably escaping them by his greater agility, perhaps by his
arboreal habits. The ancestor of the horse was also a small creature
at that time, not larger than a fox. It was not cut off; the line of
descent seems complete to the horse of our day. Small beginnings
seem to be the rule in all provinces of life. There is little doubt
that the great animals of our day--the elephant, the whale, the
lion,--all had their start in small forms. Many of these small forms
have been found. But a complete series of any of the animal forms
that eventuated in any of the dominant species is yet wanting. It is
quite certain that the huge, the gigantic, the monstrous in animal,
as in vegetable life, lies far behind us. Is it not quite certain
that evolution in the life of the globe has run its course, and that
it will not again bring forth reptiles or mammals of the terrible
proportions of those of past geologic ages? nor ferns, nor mosses,
nor as gigantic trees as those of Carboniferous times? Probably the
redwoods of the Far West, the gigantic sequoias, are the last race
of gigantic trees. The tide of life of the globe is undoubtedly at
the full. The flood has no doubt been checked many times. The
glacial periods, of which there seem to have been several in
different parts of the earth, and in different geological periods,
no doubt checked it when it occurred. But the tide as a whole must
have steadily risen, because the progression from lower to higher
forms has gone steadily forward. The lower forms have come along;
Nature has left nothing behind. The radiates, the articulates, the
mollusca, are still with us, but in the midst of these the higher
and higher forms have been constantly appearing. The great
biological tree has got its growth. Many branches and twigs have
died and dropped off, and many more will do so, are doing so before
our eyes, but I cannot help doubting that any new branches of
importance are yet to appear--any new families or orders of birds,
or fishes, or reptiles, or mammals. The horse, the stag, the sheep,
the dog, the cat, as we know them, are doubtless the end of the
series. One arrives at this conclusion upon general principles. Life
as a whole must run its course or reach its high-water mark, the
same as life in its particular phases. Man has arrived and has
universal dominion; all things are put under his feet. The destiny
of life upon the globe is henceforth largely in his hands. Not even
he can avert the final cosmic catastrophe which physicists foresee,
and which, according to Professor Lowell, the beings upon Mars are
now struggling to ward off.
Man has taken his chances in the clash of forces of the physical
universe. No favor has been shown him, or is shown him to-day, and
yet he has come to his estate. He has never been coddled; fire,
water, frost, gravity, hunger, death, have made and still make no
exceptions in his favor. He is on a level with all other animals in
this respect. He has his life and well-being on the same terms as do
the fowls of the air and the beasts of the fields.
Archbishop Whately thought that primitive man could never have
raised himself to a higher condition without external aid--some
"elementary instruction to enable his faculties to begin their
work." He must have had a boost. Well, the boost was forthcoming,
but it was not from without, but from within, through this principle
of development, this upward striving that was innate from the first
in certain forms of life and of which Whately had no conception. It
was the conception of his time that creation was like a watch made
and wound up by some power external to itself.
The physical evolution of man, as I have said, is no doubt complete.
He will never have wings, or more legs, or longer arms, or a bigger
brain. The wings and the extra legs and the keener sense he has left
behind him. His development henceforth must be in the mental and
spiritual. He is bound to have more and more dominion over Nature,
and see more and more clearly his own relation to her. He will in
time completely subdue and possess the earth. Yes, and probably
exhaust her? But he will see in time that he is squandering his
inheritance and will mend his ways. He will conserve in the future
as he has wasted in the past. He will learn to conserve his own
health. He will banish disease; he will stamp out all the plagues
and scourges, through his scientific knowledge; he will double or
treble the length of life. Man has undoubtedly passed through and
finished certain phases of his emotional and mental development. He
will never again be the religious enthusiast and fanatic he has been
in the past; he has not worshiped his last, but he has worshiped his
best. He will build no more cathedrals; he will burn no more martyrs
at the stake. His religion as such is on the wane. But his
humanitarianism is a rising tide. He is becoming less and less a
savage, revolts more and more at the sight of blood and suffering.
The highly religious ages were ages of blood and persecution. Man's
tenderness for man has vastly increased. The sense of the sacredness
of human life has increased as his faith in his gods has declined.
He has grown more human as he has grown less superstitious. Science
has atrophied his faith, but it has softened his heart. His fear of
Nature has given place to love. Man never loved as he does now. He
has withdrawn his gaze from heaven and fixed it upon the earth. As
his interest in other worlds has diminished, his interest in this
has increased. As the angels have departed, the children have come
in.
When the nations, too, cease to be savage and selfish, and become
altruistic, then the new birth of humanity will actually have
occurred. As an artist and a creator of beautiful forms, man has
also had his day; he loved the beautiful, the artistic, or the
ornamental long before he loved the true and the just. He was proud
before he was kind; he was chivalrous before he was decent; he was
tattooed before he was washed; he was painted before he was clothed;
he built temples before he built a home; he sacrificed to his gods
before he helped his neighbor; he was heroic before he was
self-denying; he was devout before he was charitable. We are losing
the savage virtues and vanities and growing in the grace of all the
humanities, and this process will doubtless go on, with many
interruptions and setbacks of course, till the kingdom of love is at
last fairly established upon the earth.
XI
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US
I
I take the title of this paper from those great lines in Whitman
beginning--
"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me"--
in which he launches in vivid imaginative form the whole doctrine of
evolution some years before Darwin had published his epoch-making
work on the "Origin of Species."
"I see afar down the huge first Nothing, and I know I was even
there."
I do not know that Whitman had any concrete belief in the truth of
the animal origin of man. He read as picture and parable that which
the man of science reads as demonstrable fact. He saw and felt the
great truth of evolution, but he saw it as written in his own heart
and not in the great stone book of the earth, and he saw it written
large. He felt its cosmic truth, its truth in relation to the whole
scheme of things; he felt his own kinship with all that lives, and
had a vivid personal sense of his debt to the past, not only of
human history, but also to the past of the earth and the spheres.
And he felt this as a poet and not as a man of science.
The theory of evolution as applied to the whole universe and its
inevitable corollary, the animal origin of man, is now well
established in most of the leading minds of the world, but it is
still rejected by many timid and sensitive souls, and it will be a
long time before it becomes universally accepted.
Doubtless one source of the trouble we have in accepting the theory
comes from the fact that our minds have not been used to such
thoughts; in the mind of the race they are a new thing: they are not
in the literature nor in the philosophy nor in the sacred books in
which our minds have been nurtured; they are of yesterday; they came
to us raw and unhallowed by the usage of ages; more than that, they
savor of the materialism of all modern science, which is so
distasteful to our finer ideals and religious sensibilities. In
fact, these ideas are strangers of an alien race in our intellectual
household, and we look upon them coldly and distrustfully. But
probably to our children, or to our children's children, they will
wear quite a different countenance; they will have become an
accepted part of the great family of ideas of the race.
Another hindrance is the dullness and opacity of our own minds. We
are slow to wake up to a sense of the divinity that hedges us about.
The great office of science has been to show us this universe as
much more wonderful and divine than we have been wont to believe;
shot through and through with celestial laws and forces; matter,
indeed, but matter informed with spirit and intelligence; the
creative energy inherent and active in the ground underfoot not less
than in the stars and nebulae overhead.
We look for the divine afar off. We gaze upon the beauty and purity
of the heavenly bodies without thinking that we are also in the
heavens. We must open our minds to the stupendous fact that God is
immanent in his universe and that it is literally and exactly true,
as we were taught long ago, that, during every moment of our lives,
in Him we live and move and have our being.
Moreover, we are staggered by the element of vast time that is
implied in the history of development. Were it not for the records
in the rocks, we could not believe it at all. All the grand
movements and processes of nature are quite beyond our ken. In the
heavens only the astronomer with his prisms and telescopes traces
them; only the geologist and palaeontologist read their history in
the earth's crust. The soil we cultivate was once solid rock, but
not in one lifetime, not in many lifetimes, do we see the
transformation of the rocks into soil. Nations may rise and fall,
and the rocks they looked upon and the soil they tilled remain
practically unchanged. Geologists talk about the ancient continents
that have passed away. What an abyss of time such things open! They
talk about the birth of a mountain or the decay of a mountain as we
talk of the birth and death of a man, but in doing so they reckon
with periods of time for which we have no standards of measurement.
They walk and talk with the Eternal. To us the mountains seem as
fixed as the stars. But the stars, too, are flitting. Look at Orion
some millions of years hence, and he will have been torn limb from
limb. The combination of stars that forms that striking
constellation and all other constellations is temporary as the
grouping of the clouds. The rise of man from the lower orders
implies a scale of time almost as great. It is unintelligible to us
because it belongs to a category of facts that transcends our
experience and the experience of the race as the interstellar spaces
transcend our earthly measurements.
We now gaze upon the order below us across an impassable gulf, but
that gulf we have crossed and without any supernatural means of
transportation. We may say it has been bridged or filled with the
humble ancestral forms that carried forward the precious
evolutionary impulse of the vertebrate series till it culminated in
man. All vestiges of that living bridge are now gone, and the legend
of our crossing seems like a dream or a miracle. Biological
evolution has gone hand in hand with geological evolution, and both
are on a scale of time of which our hour-glass of the centuries
gives us but a faint hint. Our notions of time are not formed on the
pattern of the cosmic processes, or the geologic processes, or the
evolutionary processes; they are formed on the pattern of our own
brief span of life. In a few cases in the familiar life about us we
see the evolutionary process abridged, and transformations like
those of unrecorded time take place before our eyes, as when the
tadpole becomes the frog or the grub becomes the butterfly. These
rapid changes are analogous to those which in the depths of geologic
time have evolved the bird from the fish or the reptile, or the seal
and the manatee from a fourfooted land animal. Our common bluebird
has long been recognized as a descendant of the thrush family; this
origin is evident in the speckled breast of the young birds and in
the voices of the mature birds. I have heard a bluebird with an
unmistakable thrush note. The transformation has doubtless been so
slow that an analogous change taking place in any of the bird forms
of our own time would entirely escape observation. The bluebird may
have been as long in getting his blue coat as man has been in
getting his upright position.
Looking into the laws and processes of the common nature about us
for clues to the origin of man is not unlike looking into the
records of the phonograph for the secret of the music which that
wonderful instrument voices for us. Something, some active principle
or agent, has to invoke the music that slumbers or is latent in
these lines.
In like manner some principle or force that we do not see is active
in the ground underfoot and in the forms of life about us which is
the final secret of the origin of man and of all other creatures.
This something is the evolutionary impulse, this innate aspiration
of living matter to reach higher and higher forms. "Urge and urge,"
says Whitman, "always the procreant urge of the world." It is in
Emerson's worm "striving to be man." This "striving" pervades
organic nature. Whence its origin science does not assume to say.
[Footnote: This passage was written long before I had read Bergson's
Creative Evolution, as were several others of the same import in
this volume.]
Then the difference in kind between the mind of man and that of the
lower orders makes evolution a doubly hard problem.
Look over the globe and see what a gulf separates man from all other
creatures. All the other animals seem akin--as if the product of the
same workman. Man, in contrast, seems like an introduction from some
other sphere or the outcome of quite other psychological laws; his
dominion over them all is so complete and universal. Without their
specialization of structure or powers, he yet masters them all and
uses them; without their powers of speed, he yet outstrips them;
without their strength of tusk and limb, he yet subdues them;
without their inerrant instinct, he yet outwits them; without their
keenness of eye, ear, and nose, he yet wins in the chase; without
their special adaptation to environment, he survives when they
perish. A man is marked off from the animals below him, I say, as if
he were a being of another sphere. He looks into their eyes and they
into his, and no recognition passes; and yet we have to believe that
he and they are fruit of the same biologic tree and that their stem
forms unite in the same trunk somewhere in the abyss of biologic
time.
The rise of man from the lower orders taxes our powers of belief and
our faith in the divinity that lurks underfoot far more than did the
special creation myth. Creation by omnipotent fiat seems easy when
you have the omnipotent being to begin with, but creation through
evolution is a kind of cosmic or biologic legerdemain that baffles
and bewilders us. It so far transcends all our earthly knowledge and
experience and all the flights of our philosophy that we stand
speechless before it. It opens a gulf that the imagination cannot
clear; it opens vistas from which we instinctively shrink; it opens
up abysms of time in which our whole historic period would be but a
day; it opens up a world of struggle, delay, waste, failure that
palls the imagination. It challenges our faith in the immanency and
in the ceaseless activity of God in his world; it brings the
creative energy down from its celestial abode and clothes it with
the flesh and blood of animal life. It may chill and shock us; it
shows us that we are of the earth earthy; yea, that we are of the
animal beastly; it presses us down in matter; it puts out the lights
to which we have so long turned as lighting our origin; the words
"sacred," "divine," "holy," and "celestial," as applied to our
origin and development, we have no longer any use for, nor for any
words or ideas that set us apart from the rest of creation--above it
in our origin or apart from it in our relations. The atmosphere of
mystery and miracle and sanctity that our religious training has
thrown around our introduction upon this planet and around our
relations and destiny science dispels. Our language and many of our
ideas and habits of thought date back to pre-scientific times--when
there were two worlds, the heavenly and the earthly, separated by a
gulf. Now we know that the two worlds are one, that they are
inseparably blended; that the celestial and the terrestrial are
under the same law; that we can never be any more in the heavens
than we are here and now, nor any nearer the final sources of life
and power; that the divine is underfoot as well as overhead; that we
are part and parcel of the physical universe, and take our chances
in the cosmic processes the same as the rest, and draw upon the same
fund of animal life that the other creatures do. We are identified
with the worm underfoot no less than with the stars overhead. We are
not degraded by such a thought, but the whole of creation is lifted
up. Our minds and bodies are not less divine, but all things are
more divine. We have to gird up our loins and try to summon strength
to see this tremendous universe as it is, alive and divine to the
last particle and embosomed in the Infinite.
II
Evolution is not the final explanation of the universe, but it is
probably the largest generalization of the modern mind. Science has
to start somewhere, and it starts with the universe as it finds it
and seeks to trace secondary or proximate causes; the evolutionist
seeks to trace the footsteps of creative energy in the world of
animal life. How did God make man? Out of the dust of the earth,
says the Bible of our fathers. The evolutionist teaches essentially
the same thing, only he does not abridge the process as the
catechism has abridged it for us; he would fain unfold the whole
long road that man has traveled from the first protozoic cell to the
vast communities of cells that now make up his physical life. He
would show how man has risen on stepping-stones of his dead self.
These stepping-stones have been the animal forms below him. In them
and through them something, some impulse, some force, has mounted
and mounted through all the enormous lapse of geologic time. In
imagination we see the dim, shadowy man, restless and struggling in
a vast number of earlier forms. He has struggled upward through the
invertebrates, through the fish, through the reptile, through the
lower mammals, through his simian ancestors till he reaches his goal
in the man we know.
Darwin was not the author of the theory of evolution, but he made
the theory alive and real to the imagination. He showed us what a
master key it is for unlocking the riddle of the life of the globe.
He launched biological science upon a new career and made it worthy
of its place in the great trilogy of sciences, astronomy, geology,
and biology, of which Tennyson, in his poem "Parnassus," recognized
only the first two. Had Tennyson written his poem in our day he
would undoubtedly have included biology among his "terrible Muses"
that tower above all others, eclipsing the glory of the great poets.
Or is it true that we find it easier to accept the theory of the
evolution of the worlds and suns from nebulous matter than to accept
the theory of the evolution of man from the maze of the lower animal
forms? It is less personal to us. The astronomer has the advantage
of the biologist in one important respect: he can show us in the
heavens now the process of the evolution of worlds actually going
on, but the biologist cannot show us the transformation of one
species into another taking place to-day. We can sound the abysses
of astronomic space easier than we can sound the abysses of geologic
time. The stars and the nebulae we have always with us, but where
are the myriad earlier forms that were the antecedents of the
present animal life of the globe? True, the palaeontologist finds a
more or less disjointed record of them in the stratified rocks and
sees in a measure the course evolution has taken, but he does not
actually see it at work as does the astronomer. More than that, the
forces the astronomer deals with are mechanical and chemical, but
the biologist deals with a new force called life that often reverses
or defies mechanical and chemical forces, but which is yet so
identified and blended with them that we cannot conceive it apart
from them. The stomach does not digest itself, nor gravity hold the
blood in the lower extremities. The tree lifts up its weight of
fluids and solids and holds aloft its fruit and foliage in spite of
gravity; its growing roots split and lift the rocks; mosses and
lichens disintegrate granite; vital energy triumphs over chemical
and mechanical energy.
Biological laws are much more subtle and difficult to trace and
formulate than chemical and mechanical laws. Hence the student of
organic evolution can rarely arrive at the demonstrable certainties
in this field that he can in the sphere of chemistry and mechanics.
It is very doubtful if life can ever be explained in terms of these
things. Life works through chemical combinations and affinities, and
yet is it not more than chemistry? It works with and through
mechanical principles and forces, and yet it is evidently more than
mechanics. It is manifested through matter, and yet no analysis of
matter can reveal its secret. It comes and goes while matter stays;
we destroy life, but cannot destroy matter. It is as fugitive as the
wind which fills all sails one minute and is gone the next. It
avails itself of fluids and gases and the laws which govern them,
but fluids and gases do not explain it. It waits upon the rains and
the dews, but it is more than they are; it follows in the footsteps
of the decay and disintegration of the inorganic, and yet it is not
the gift of these things; it transforms the face of the earth, and
yet the earth has been and will be when it was not and when it will
not be. Through his knowledge and his science man performs wonders
every day; he can reduce mountains to powder and seas to dry land,
but he cannot create or start de novo the least throb of life. At
least, he has not yet done so. With all his vast resources of
mechanics and chemistry, and his insight into the mechanism of the
universe, he has not yet made the least particle of inorganic matter
thrill with the mysterious something we call life.
There must have been a time when life was not upon the earth and
there must again come a time when it will not be. It has probably
vanished from the moon and all inferior planets, and it has not yet
come to the superior planets, except maybe to Mars. It must be and
must have always been potential in matter, but this fact leaves the
mystery as profound as ever.
Yet if the artificial production of life were to happen to-day--if
in some of our laboratories living matter were produced from
non-living, should we not still have to credit the event to some
mysterious potency residing in matter itself? If by a lucky stroke
man were to evoke the organic from the inorganic, be assured he
would not evoke something from nothing, or add anything to the
latent possibilities of the elements with which he works. Does not
the question still remain who or what made this feat possible? One
dare affirm that man cannot create life de novo any more than he can
create matter. He may yet evoke life as he evokes the spark from the
flint and the flame from the match or as he evokes force from the
food he eats. In this latter case he does not create the force; he
liberates it through the vital forces of his body. The spark from
the flint and the flame from the match were called forth by a
mechanical process, but the process was set going by the will which
waits upon the vital process. The body with all its many functions
is a complicated system of mechanical devices and chemical
processes, but that which is back of all and governs all is not
mechanical; the body is a machine plus something else.
The chemist or biologist who shall produce a speck of protoplasm
to-day will have the credit of unlocking a power in inorganic
nature; he will prove by a short cut how immanent the creative
energy or the vital force of the universe is in matter. He will not
have eliminated the creative energy; he will only have disclosed it
and availed himself of it.
We behold spontaneous combustion, a fire self-kindled, but we do
not see the activity of the particles of matter that preceded it or
penetrate the secret of their mysterious affinities. The fire was
potential there in the very constitution of the elements. We flout
at miracles, and then we disclose an unending miracle in the life
about us.
All the life upon the globe, including man with all his marvelous
powers, surely originated upon the globe, surely arose out of the
non-living and the non-thinking, not by the fiat of some power
external to nature, but through the creative energy inherent in
nature and ever active there. The great physical instrumentality was
heat--without heat the reaction called life could never have taken
place. This fact has led a French biologist to say that life is only
a surface accident in the history of the thermic evolution of the
globe. Without the disintegration of the rocks and the formation of
the soil and the precipitation of watery vapor, which was indirectly
the work of heat, the vegetable and the animal could not have
developed. If we succeed in proving that all these things are of
chemico-mechanical origin, we still want to know who or what
instituted these chemical and mechanical powers and the laws that
govern them. Creation by chemistry and mechanics is as mysterious as
creation by miracle. We must still have a creator, while we can do
nothing with him nor find any place for him in an endless,
beginningless, infinite series of events. So there we are. We go out
of the same door by which we came in.
When all life vanishes from the earth, as it will when the condition
of heat and moisture has radically changed, and eternal
refrigeration sets in--what then? The potencies of matter will not
have changed and life will reappear and go through its cycle again
on some other sphere.
Life began upon this earth not by miracle in the old sense, but by
miracle in the new scientific sense--by the immanence and ceaseless
activity of the creative energy in the physical world about us--in
the sunbeam, in the rains, in the snows, in the air currents, and in
the soil underfoot; in oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, in lime,
iron, silex, phosphorus, and in all the rest of them. Each has its
laws, its ways, its fixed mode of procedure, its affinities, its
likes and dislikes, and life is bound up with all of them. If we
hypothesize the ether to explain certain phenomena, why should we
not hypothesize a vital force to account for other mysteries?
The inorganic passes into the organic as night passes into day.
Where does one end and the other begin? No man can tell. There is no
beginning and no ending of either, and yet night comes and goes and
day comes and goes--a constant becoming and a constant ending. We
are probably in the midday of the life of the globe--life huge and
rank and riotous--the youth of life has passed, life more sedate and
aspiring and spiritual has come. The gigantic has gone or is going,
the huge monsters of the sea and of the land have had their day, man
appears at the end of the series of lesser but more complete forms.
Many intelligent persons who have been rocked in the cradle of the
old creeds still look upon evolution as a godless doctrine and
accuse it of vulgarizing high and sacred things. This state of mind
can only be slowly outgrown by familiarizing ourselves with the
processes of nature or of the creative energy in the world of life
and matter about us; with our own origin in the low fishlike or
apelike creature in the maternal womb; with the development of every
plant, tree, and animal from a microscopic germ; with the unbroken
sequence of natural law; with the waste, the delays, the pains, the
failures on every hand; with the impersonal and the impartial
character of all the physical forces; with the transformations and
metamorphoses that marked the course of animal life; and, above all,
with the thought that evolution is not self-caused or in any true
sense a cause in itself, but the instrument or plan of the power
that works in and through all things. The ways of God in all these
details are past finding out, but science watches the unfolding of a
bud, the development of a grain of wheat, the growth of the human
embryo, the succession of life-forms upon the globe as revealed in
the records of the stratified rocks, or observes in the heavens the
condensation of nebulous matter into suns and systems, and it says
this is one of his ways. Evolution--an endless unfolding and
transformation. "Urge and urge and urge," says Whitman (I love to
repeat this saying; it is so significant), "always the procreant
urge of the world." Always the labor and travail pains of the
universe to bring forth higher forms; always struggle and pain and
failure and death, but always a new birth and an upward reach.
Strike out the element of time and we see evolution as the great
prestidigitator of the biologic ages. The creative energy
manipulates a fish and it turns into a reptile; it covers a mollusk
as with a vapor and behold, a backboned creature instead! Now we see
a little creature no larger than a fox and when we look again,
behold the horse; a wolf or some kindred animal is plunged into the
water, and behold, the seal! Some small creature of the lemur kind
is covered with a capacious hand, and we look again, and behold man!
We have only to minimize time and minimize space to see the
impossible happening all about us or to see the Mosaic account of
creation repeated; we have only the clay and water to begin with,
when, presto! behold what we have now! We see the rocks covered with
verdure, the mountains vanishing into plains, the valleys changing
into hills or the plains changing into mountains, tropic lands
covered with ice and snow.
Lord Salisbury thought he had discredited natural selection, which
is one of the feet upon which evolution goes, when he charged that
no one had ever seen it at work. We have not seen it at work because
our little span of life is too short. Only the palaeontologist
traces in the records of the rocks the footsteps of this god of
change. And rarely if ever does he find a continuous and complete
record--only a footprint here and there, but he sees the direction
in which they are going and many of the places where the traveler
tarried. The palaeontologist, that detective of the rocks, works up
his case with the same thoroughness and caution and the same power
of observation as does the detective in human affairs and with a
greater sweep of scientific imagination.
An agent of evolution is the influence of the environment, but who
sees the environment set its stamp upon animal life? After many
generations we may see the accumulated results. In a few instances
the results are rapid. Thus sheep lose their wool in tropical
climates and a northern fur-bearing animal its fur. The well-being
of the animal demands this change, and demands it quickly. Fish lose
their sense of sight in underground streams; this loss is not so
vital and it comes about much more slowly. A tropical climate sets
its stamp upon the complexion and character of man, but this again
is a slow process, as the same stress of necessity does not exist.
In the tendency to variation--in form, size, disposition, power,
fertility--man differs from all other animals. In the same race, in
the same family, we find infinitely varied types. Among the wild
creatures all the individuals of a species are practically alike. We
can hardly tell one fox, or one marmot, or one chipmunk, or one
crow, or one hawk, or one black duck from another of the same
species. Of course there are slight individual differences, but they
are hardly distinguishable. Among the insects, one bee, one beetle,
one ant, one butterfly seems the exact copy of every other
individual of its kind. The law of variation seems practically
annulled in the insect world.
It is the wide and free range of this law in the human species that
has undoubtedly led to the great progress of the race. There has
been no dead level--no democracy of talent--no equality of gifts,
but only equality of opportunity. Men differ from one another in
their mental endowments, capacities, and dispositions vastly more
than do any other creatures upon the earth. This difference makes
man's chances of progress so much the greater; he has so many more
stakes in the game. If one type of talent fails, another type may
win; if the lymphatic temperament is not a success, try the sanguine
or the bilious; blue eyes and black eyes and brown eyes will win
more triumphs than blue or black or brown alone. Arms or legs extra
long, sight or hearing extra sharp, wit extra keen, judgment extra
sure--all these things open doors to more progress. Variation gives
natural selection a chance to take hold, and where the struggle for
life is the most severe the changes will be the most rapid and the
most radical. Without the pressure of the environment natural
selection would not select. The tendency to physical variation in
man is probably no greater than in other creatures, but his tendency
to mental variation is enormous. He varies daily from mediocrity to
genius, hence the enormous range of his chances of progress. From
the first variation that started him on his way in his line of
descent, variation must have been more and more active till he
varied in the direction of reason, long before the dawn of history,
since which time his progress has been by rapid strides--and more
and more rapid till we see his leaps forward in recent times. The
race owes its rapid progress to its exceptional men, its men of
genius and power, and these have often been like sports or the
sudden result of mutations--a man like Lincoln springing from the
humblest parentage. No such extreme variations are seen in any of
the lower orders. Indeed, in one's lifetime one sees but very slight
variation in any of the wild or domestic creatures, less in the wild
than in the domestic because they are less under the influence of
that most variable of animals, man. And man's variations are mainly
mental and not physical. The higher we go in the scale of powers,
the greater the variation and hence the more rapid the evolution.
Probably man's body has not changed radically in vast cycles of
time, but his mind has developed enormously since the dawn of
history.
IV
Biologists are coming more and more to recognize some unknown factor
in evolution, probably some unknowable factor. The four factors of
Osborn--heredity, ontogeny, environment, selection--play upon and
modify endlessly the new form when it is started, but what about the
original start? Whence comes this inborn momentum, this evolutionary
send-off? What or who set the whole grand process going?
Bergson sees an internal psychological principle of development,
hence the name of his book, "Creative Evolution." Osborn uses the
word "directed." Certain characters, he says, are adaptive or suited
to their purpose from the start; they do not have to be fitted to
their place by natural selection. Huxley uses the word
"predestined"--all the life of the globe and all the starry hosts of
heaven are working out in boundless space and in endless time "their
predestined course of evolution." Darwin must have had in mind the
same mysterious something when he said that man had risen to the
very summit of the animal scale, but not through his own exertions.
Not by his own will or exertion, surely, any more than the embryo in
its mother's womb develops into the full-grown child by its own
exertion or than our temperaments and complexions and statures are
matters of our own wills and choice. Something greater than man and
before him, to which he sustains the relation that the unborn child
sustains to its mother, must enter into our thought of his origin
and development.
The great evolutionists have been very cautious about seeking to go
behind evolution and name the Primal Cause. In such an attempt
science would at once be beyond soundings. Darwin and Huxley were
reverent, truth-loving men, but they hesitated as men of science to
put themselves in a position where no step could be taken.
Slowly man emerges out of the abyss of geologic time into the dawn
of history, and science gropes about like a man feeling his way in
the dark or, at most, by the aid now and then of a dim flash of
light, to trace the path he has come. He has surely arrived, and we
are, I believe, safe in saying he has come by the way of the lower
orders; but the precise forms through which he has come, the houses
in which he has tarried by the way, and all the adventures and
vicissitudes that befell him on the journey--can we ever hope to
know these things? In any case, man has his antecedents; life has
its antecedents; every beat of one's heart has its antecedent cause,
which again has its antecedent. We can thus traverse the chain of
causation only to find it is an endless chain; the separate links we
can examine, but the first link or the last we see, by the very
nature of things, and the laws of our own minds, must forever elude
us. Science cannot admit of a break in the chain of causation,
cannot admit that miracles or the supernatural in the old sense, as
external and arbitrary interference with the natural order, can play
or ever have played any part in this universe. Yet science has to
postulate a First Cause when it knows, or metaphysics knows for it,
that with the Infinite there can be no first and no last, no
beginning and no ending, only endless succession.
To science man is not a fallen creature, but a many times risen
creature and all the good of the universe centres in him. The mind
that pervades all nature and is active in plant and animal alike
first comes to know itself and regard itself and achieve
intellectual appreciation in man. While all nature below man is wise
only to its own ends and goes its appointed way as void of
self-consciousness as the stone that falls or the wind that blows,
the mind of man attains to disinterested wisdom and turns upon
itself and upon the universe the power of objective thought; it
alone achieves understanding.
In our studies of life and of the universe as soon as we begin to
bridge chasms by an appeal to the miraculous, or to the
extra-natural powers, we are traitors to the scientific spirit which
we seek to serve. There are many things that science cannot explain.
Perhaps I may say that it cannot give the ultimate explanation of
anything. It can do little more than tell us of the action, the
interaction, and the reaction of things, but of the things
themselves, their origin and ultimate nature, or the source of the
laws that govern them, what does it or what can it know?
Man is the heir of all the geologic ages; he inherits the earth
after countless generations of animals and plants, and the
beneficent forces of wind and rain, air and sky, have in the course
of millions of years prepared it for him. His body has been built
for him through the lives and struggles of the countless beings who
are in the line of his long descent; his mind is equally an
accumulated inheritance of the mental growth of the myriads of
thinking men and unthinking animals that went before him. In the
forms of his humbler forebears he has himself lived and died myriads
of times to make ready the soil that nurses and sustains him to-day.
He is a debtor to Cambrian and Silurian times, to the dragons and
saurians and mastodons that have roamed over the earth. Indeed, what
is there or has there been in the universe that he is not indebted
to? The remotest star that shines has sent a ray that has entered
into his life. All things are under his feet, and the keys of the
heavens are in his hands.
V
One would fain arrive at some concrete belief or image of his line
of descent in geologic time as he does in the historic period. But
how hard it is to do so! Can we form any mental picture of the
actual animal forms that the manward impulse has traveled through?
With all the light that palaeontology throws upon the animal life of
the past, can we see where amid the revel of these bizarre forms our
ancestor hid himself? Can we see him as a reptile in the slime of
the jungle or in the waters of the Mesozoic world? What was he like
or what akin to? What mark or sign was there upon him at that time
of the future that was before him? Can we see him as a fish in the
old Devonian seas or lakes? Was he a big fish or a little fish? The
primitive fishes were mostly of the shark kind. Is there any
connection between that fact and the human sharks of to-day? Much
less can one picture to one's self what his ancestor was like in the
age of the invertebrates, amid the trilobites, etc., of the earlier
Palaeozoic seas. But we must go back even earlier than that, back to
unicellular life and to original protoplasm, and finally back to
fiery nebulous matter. What can we make of it all by way of concrete
conception of what actually took place--of the visible, eating,
warring, breeding animal forms in whose safekeeping our heritage
lay? Nothing. We are not merely at sea, we are in abysmal depths,
and the darkness is so thick we can cut it.
We meet the same difficulty when we try to figure to ourselves the
line of descent of any of the animal forms of to-day. How did they
escape the world-wild catastrophe of earlier geologic times? Or
did the creative impulse bank upon life as a whole and never become
bankrupt, no matter what special lines or forms failed?
The first appearance of the primates is in Eocene times and the
anthropoid apes in the Miocene, probably five millions of years ago.
The form which may have been in our line of descent, the
Dryopithecus, later appears to have become extinct. Did our fate
hang upon the success of any of these forms? The monkeys and
anthropoid apes appeared at the same time in different countries.
Nature seems to have been making preliminary studies of man in these
various forms, but when and where she hit upon the form that she
perfected in man, who knows?
The horse appears to have been evolved in North America, true cattle
in Asia, elephants in Africa. Can we narrow their line of descent
down to a single pair for each? Many forms allied to the horse
appeared in Europe and Asia in Miocene times. We find monkeys in
different parts of the world in the same geologic horizons; did they
all have a common origin?
Life's apprenticeship has been a long one. The earlier forms of
vertebrate life were very large; later they became very small.
Nature seems to have experimented with bulk, as if she thought size
would win in the race. Hence those huge uncouth forms among the
reptiles and early mammals. The scheme did not work well; bulk was
not the thing, after all. Most of the gigantic forms became extinct.
Then she tried smaller and more agile forms with larger brains--less
flesh and more wit. On this line Nature continued to work till she
produced her masterpiece in man--a rather feeble and nearly
weaponless animal, but with an intangible armory of weapons and
tools in his brain that enables him to put all creatures under his
feet.
XII
THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST
I
Bergson, the new French philosopher, thinks we all had a narrow
escape, back in geologic time, of having our eggs spoiled before
they were hatched, or, rather, rendered incapable of hatching by too
thick a shell. This was owing to the voracity of the early
organisms. As they became more and more mobile, they began to take
on thick armors and breastplates and shells and calcareous skins to
protect themselves from one another. This tendency resulted, he
thinks, in the arrest of the entire animal world in its evolution
toward higher and higher forms. These shells and armors begat a kind
of torpor and immobility which has continued down to our day with
the echinoderms and mollusks, but the arthropods and vertebrates
escaped it by some lucky stroke. Now you and I are here without
imprisoning shells on our backs; but how or why did we escape?
Bergson does not say. Was it a matter of luck or chance? Was there
ever a time when the stream of life tended to harden and become
fixed in its own forms like a stream of cooling lava, or has the
innate plasticity of life been easily equal to its own ends? True,
the clam remains a clam, and the starfish remains a starfish; some
other forms have carried the evolutionary impulse forward till it
flowered in man. Was this impulse ever really checked or endangered?
Was the golden secret ever intrusted to the keeping of any single
form? and, had that form been cut off, would the earth have been
still without its man? These are puzzling questions.
Thus, when we have come to look upon life and nature in the light of
evolution, what vistas are opened to us where before were only blank
walls! The geologic ages take on a new interest to us. We know that
in some form we were even there. The systems of sedimentary rocks
which the geologist portrays, piled one upon the other to a depth of
fifty miles or more, seem like the stairway by which we have
ascended, taking on some new and more developed form at each rise.
What we were at the first step in Cambrian times only the Lord
knows, but whatever we were, we crept up or floated up to the next
rise. In the Silurian seas we may have been a trilobite for aught we
know; at any rate, we were the outcome of the life impulse that
begat the trilobites, but our fate was not bound up with theirs, as
their race came to an end in those early geologic ages, and our stem
form did not. Whether or not we were a fish in the Devonian seas,
there is little doubt that we had gills, because we have the gill
slits yet in our early foetal life, and it is quite certain that in
some way we owe our backbones to the fishes.
When the rocks that form my native Catskills were being laid down in
the Devonian waters, I fancy that my aquatic embryo was swimming
about somewhere and slowly waxing strong. Up and up I climbed across
the sandstone steps, across the limestone, the conglomerate, the
slate, up into Carboniferous times. The upper and nether millstones
of the "millstone grit" did not crush me, neither did the floods and
the convulsions of Carboniferous times that buried the vast
vegetable growths that resulted in our coal measures engulf or
destroy me. About that time probably, I emerged from the water and
became an amphibian, and maybe got my five fingers and five toes on
each side.
Nor did the wholesale destruction of animal life at the end of
Palaeozoic time cut off my line of descent. The monstrous reptiles
of the succeeding or Mesozoic age, the petrified remains of one of
which was recently found in the sandstone rocks near the river's
edge under the Palisades of the Hudson, do not seem to have
endangered the golden thread by which our fate hung. Still "I mount
and mount." The stairs by which I climb were rent by earthquakes and
volcanoes, the strata were squeezed up and overturned and folded in
the great mountain-chains; the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, the
Coast Range were born; the earth-throes must have been tremendous at
times; yet I escaped it all. The huge and fearful mammals of the
third or Tertiary period passed me by unharmed. Eruptions and
cataclysms, the sinking of the land, the inundations of the sea,
world-wide deformations of the earth's crust, fire and ice and
floods, monsters of the deep and dragons of the land and the air
have beset my course from the first, and yet here I am, here we all
are, and apparently none the worse for the appalling dangers we have
passed through.
Evolution thus makes the world over for us. It shows us in what a
complex web of vital and far-reaching relations we stand. It gives
us an outlook upon the past that is startling, and in some ways
forbidding, yet one that ought to be stimulating and inspiring. If
we look back with a shudder we should look forward with a thrill. If
the past is terrible, the future is in the same degree cheering and
inviting. If we came out of those lowly and groveling forms, to
what heights of being may we not be carried by the impetus that
brought us thus far? In fact, to what heights has it already carried
us!
II
That the hazards of the past, to many forms of life, at least, have
been real and no myth, is evident from the vast number of forms that
have been cut off and become extinct; various causes, now hard to
decipher, have worked together to the end, such as changed
geographical conditions, changes of climate, affecting the
food-supply, extreme specialization, like that of the sabre-toothed
tiger whose petrified remains have been found in various parts of
this continent, and who apparently was finally handicapped by his
huge dental sabre. Probably many more species of animals have become
extinct than have survived, but none of these could have been in the
line of man's descent, else the human race would not have been here.
If the Eocene progenitor of the horse, the little four-toed
eohippus, had been cut off, would not the world have been horseless
to-day? The horse in America became extinct, from some cause only
conjectural, many tens of thousands of years ago. Had the same fate
befallen the horse in Europe and Asia, it seems probable that our
civilization would have been far less advanced to-day than it is.
The fate of every species of mammal in our time seems to have been
in the keeping of a single form in early Tertiary times. The end of
the Cretaceous or chalk period saw the extinction of the giant
reptiles both of sea and of land, at the same time that it saw the
appearance of a great many species of small and inconspicuous
mammals, among which doubtless were our own humble forebears.
Extreme specialization in any direction may narrow an animal's
chances of survival; they have but one chance in the game of life,
whereas an animal with a more generalized organization has many
chances. Man is one of the most generalized of animals; no special
tools, no special weapons--his hand many tools and weapons in one.
Hence he is the most adaptable of animals; all climes, all foods,
all places are his; he is master of the land, of the sea, of the
air.
Animal life is often curiously interdependent. I asked our guide in
the Adirondacks if there were any ravens there. "Not nearly as many
as there used to be," he said, and his explanation of their
disappearance seems thoroughly scientific; it was that the wolves
and the panthers kept them in meat, and now that these animals had
disappeared, the ravens had little to feed upon. If the moose were
compelled to graze from off the ground, like a sheep or a cow, the
species would probably soon become extinct. Osborn thinks it
probable that the huge beast called titanothere finally became
extinct early in Tertiary times owing to the form of its teeth,
which were of such a type that they could not change to meet a
change in the flora upon which the creature fed. Of course we shall
never know what narrow escapes our race had from extinction in the
remote past; some forms have ended in a blind alley, like the
sea-urchin and the oyster. Arthropoda have continued to evolve and
have reached their high-water mark of intelligence in bees and
ants. The vertebrates went forward and have culminated in man.
Bergson thinks that in the vertebrates intelligence has been
developed at the expense of instinct, and that in the invertebrates
instinct has been perfected at the expense of intelligence.
Are we not compelled to adopt what is called the monophyletic
hypothesis, that is, that our line of descent started from one pair,
male and female, somewhere in the vast stretch of geologic or
biologic time, and to reason that, had that pair been out of the
race, we should not have appeared?
Can we narrow life to a single point, a single cell, in the past?
Was there one and only one first bit of protoplasm? If we were to
say that life first appeared on the globe in Cambrian times, just
what should we mean? That it began as a single point, or as many
points? When we say that the primates first appeared in Eocene
times, do we mean that one single primate appeared then? If so, what
form went immediately before him? This is all a vain speculation.
Does man presuppose all the vertebrate sub-kingdom? Was he safe as
long as one vertebrate form remained? Are his forebears many, and
not one pair? Can we think of his ancestry under the image of a
tree, and of him as one of the many branches? If so, nothing but the
destruction of the tree would have imperiled his appearance, or the
lopping off of his particular branch. Probably all such images are
misleading. We simply cannot figure to ourselves the tangled course
of our biological descent. If thwartings and accidents arid delays
could have cut man off, how could he have escaped? We cannot think
of man as one; we are compelled to think of him as many; and yet in
all our experience the many come from the one, or the one pair.
How thick the field of animal life in the past is strewn with
extinct forms!--as thick as the sidereal spaces are strewn with the
fragments of wrecked worlds! But other worlds and suns are spun out
of the wrecked worlds and suns through the process of cosmic
evolution. The world-stuff is worked over and over. Extinct animal
forms must have given rise to other, allied forms before they
perished, and these to still others, and so on down to our time.
The image of a tree is misleading from the fact that all the
different branches of the animal kingdom, from the protozoa up to
man, have come along with what we call the higher branches, the
mammals; the suckers have kept pace with the main stalk, so that we
have the image of a sheaf of branches starting from a common origin
and all of equal length. Man has brought on his relations along with
him.
There is no glamour of romance over that past. It was all hard,
prosy, terrible fact. The earth's crust was less stable than now,
the upheavals and subsidences and earthquakes more frequent, the
warring of the elements more fierce and incessant, deluge and
inundation in more rapid succession, and the riot and excesses of
animal life far beyond anything we know of. And our line of descent
was taking its chances amid it all. The widespread blotting out of
life at the end of Palaeozoic time, and again at the end of Mesozoic
times, when myriads of forms were cut off, probably from some
convulsion of nature or some cosmic catastrophe; and again during
the ice age, when the camel, the llama, the horse, the tapir, the
mastodon, the elephant, the giant sloth, became extinct in North
America--how fared it with our ancestor during these terrible ages?
There is no sure trace of him till late Tertiary times, and it is
probably not more than two hundred thousand years ago that he
assumed the upright attitude and began to use tools. Probably in
Europe fifty thousand years ago he was living in caves, clothed in
skins, contending with the cave bear and cave lion, using rude stone
implements, and hunting the hairy mastodon, etc. In Asia the
probabilities are that he was farther on the road toward the dawn of
history.
We may think of our descent in the historic period under the image
of the stream, though of a stream many times delayed and diverted,
even many times diminished by wars and plagues and famine, but a
stream with some sort of unity and continuity, since man became man.
The stream of life is like any other stream in this respect. Divert
or use up part of the water of a stream, yet what is left flows on
and keeps up the continuity and identity of the stream; dip your cup
into it here, and you will not get precisely the same water you
would have got had none of it been diverted or used far back in its
course--you get the water that was allowed to flow by.
Had there been no loss of life by war and pestilence and accidents
of various kinds, the different countries would have been occupied
by quite other men and women than those that fill them to-day. The
course of life in every neighborhood is changed by what seem like
accidental causes, as when a family is practically wiped out by some
accident or dread disease. This brings new people on the scene. The
farm or the business falls into other hands, and new social
relations spring up, new men and women are brought together or the
old ones driven apart, marriage is hastened or retarded,
opportunities for family life are made or unmade, and fewer
children, or more children, as the case may be, are the result. The
issue of some battle hundreds or thousands of years ago may have
played a part in your life and mine to-day--other races, other
individuals of the race, would have been thrown together had the
issue been different, and other families started, so that some one
else would have been here in our stead.
But the question of hazard to the race of man in geologic time is
quite a different one. Here our fate seems to hang by a single
thread--a golden thread, we may call it, but, in that terrible maze
of clashing forces and devouring forms of the vast geologic periods,
how liable to be broken! It is not now a question of the continuity
of a stream, but of the continuity of a single evolutionary process,
or, as Haeckel says, the continuity of the morphological chain which
stretches from the lemurs up through tailed and tailless anthropoid
apes to man. If the evolutionary impulse had been checked or
extinguished in the lemur--that small apelike animal that went
before the true ape, the fossil remains of which have been found on
this continent and the survivals of which are now found in
Madagascar--would man have appeared? Again, if the race of lemurs
developed from a single pair, how precarious seems our fate! In
fact, if any of the transitional forms between species can be
reduced to a single pair--as the forms that connect the reptiles
with the mammals--our fate would seem to be in the keeping of these
forms. Over this single frail bridge which escaped the floods and
the tornadoes and the earthquakes of those terrible ages we must
have passed. What risky business it all seems! Was it luck or law
that favored us? Doubtless, if we could penetrate the mystery, we
should see that there was no chance or risk in the matter. We cannot
go very far in solving these great fundamental questions by applying
to them the tests of our own experience, Numberless specific forms
become extinct, but the impulse that begat the form does not die
out. Thus, all the giant reptiles died out--the dinosaurs, the
mesosaurs--but the reptilian impulse still survives. How many types
of invertebrates have perished! but the invertebrate impulse still
goes on. How many species of mammals have been cut off! yet the
mammal impulse has steadily gone forward. These things suggest the
wave that moves on but leaves the water behind. The vertebrate
impulse began in wormlike forms, in the old Palaeozoic seas, and
stopped not till it culminated in man. This impulse has left many
forms behind it; but has this impulse itself ever been endangered?
If one looks at the matter thus in an abstract instead of a concrete
way, the problem of our descent becomes easier.
When we look at the evolution of life on a grand scale, nature seems
to feel her way, like a blind man, groping, hesitating, trying this
road and then that. In some cases the line of evolution seems to end
in a cul de sac beyond which no progress is possible. The forms thus
cornered soon become extinct. The mystery, the unaccountable thing,
is the appearance of new characters. The slow modification or
transformation of an existing character may often be traced; natural
selection, or the struggle for existence, takes it in hand and
adapts and perpetuates it, or else eliminates it. But the origin of
certain new parts or characters--that is the secret of the
evolutionary process. Thus there was a time when no animal had
horns; then horns appeared. "In the great quadruped known as
titanothere," says Osborn, "rudiments of horns first arise
independently at certain definite parts of the skull; they arise at
first alike in both sexes, or asexually; then they become sexual, or
chiefly characteristic of males; then they rapidly evolve in the
males while being arrested in development in the females; finally,
they become in some of the animals dominant characteristics to which
all others bend." Nature seems to throw out these new characters and
then lets them take their chances in the clash of forces and
tendencies that go on in the arena of life. If they serve a purpose
or are an advantage, they remain; if not, they drop out. Nature
feels her way. The horns proved of less advantage to the females
than to the males; they seem a part of the plus or overflow of the
male principle, like the beard in man--the badge of masculinity. The
titanothere is traceable back to a hornless animal the size of a
sheep, and it ended in a horned quadruped nearly as large as an
elephant. It flourished in Wyoming in early Tertiary times. Nature
did not seem to know what to do with horns when she first got them.
She played with them like a child with a new toy. Thus she gave two
pairs to several species of mammals, one pair on the nose and one
pair on the top of the skull--certainly an embarrassment of weapons.
The first horns appear to have been crude, heavy, uncouth, but long
before we reach our own geologic era they appear in various species
of quadrupeds, and become graceful and ornamental. How beautiful
they are in many of the African antelope tribe! Nature's workmanship
nearly always improves with time, like that of man's, and sooner or
later takes on an ornamental phase.
The early uncouth, bizarre forms seem to be the result of the excess
or surplus of life. Life in remote biologic times was rank and
riotous, as it is now, in a measure, in tropical lands. One reason
may be that the climate of the globe during the middle period, and
well into the third period, appears to have been of a tropical
character. The climatic and seasonal divisions were not at all
pronounced, and both animal and vegetable life took on gigantic and
grotesque forms. In the ugliness of alligator and rhinoceros and
hippopotamus of our day we get some hint of what early reptilian and
mammalian life was like.
That Nature should have turned out better and better handiwork as
the ages passed; that she either should have improved upon every
model or else discarded it; that she should have progressed from the
bird, half-dragon, to the sweet songsters of our day and to the
superb forms of the air that we know; that evolution should have
entered upon a refining and spiritualizing phase, developing larger
brains and smaller bodies, is a very significant fact, and one quite
beyond the range of the mechanistic conception of life.
Our own immediate line of descent leads down through the minor forms
of Tertiary and Mesozoic times--forms that probably skulked and
dodged about amid the terrible and gigantic creatures of those ages
as the small game of to-day hide and flee from the presence of their
arch-enemy, man; and that the frail line upon which the fate of the
human race hung should not have been severed during the wild turmoil
of those ages is, to me, a source of perpetual wonder.
III
The hazards of the future of the race must be quite different from
those I have been considering. They are the hazards incident to an
exceptional being upon this earth--a being that takes his fate in
his own hands in a sense that no other creature does.
Man has partaken of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, which
all the lower orders have escaped. He knows, and knows that he
knows. Will this knowledge, through the opposition in which it
places him to elemental nature and the vast system of artificial
things with which it has enabled him to surround himself, cut short
his history upon this planet? Will Nature in the end be avenged for
the secrets he has forced from her? His civilization has doubtless
made him the victim of diseases to which the lower orders, and even
savage man, are strangers. Will not these diseases increase as his
life becomes more and more complex and artificial? Will he go on
extending his mastery over Nature and refining or suppressing his
natural appetites till his original hold upon life is fatally
enfeebled?
It seems as though science ought to save man and prolong his stay on
this planet,--it ought to bring him natural salvation, as his
religion promises him supernatural salvation. But of course, man's
fate is bound up with the fate of the planet and of the biological
tree of which he is one of the shoots. Biology is rooted in geology.
The higher forms of life did not arbitrarily appear, they flowed out
of conditions that were long in maturing; they flowered in season,
and the flower will fall in season. Man could not have appeared
earlier than he did, nor later than he did; he came out of what went
before, and he will go out with what comes after. His coming was
natural, and his going will be natural. His period had a beginning,
and it will have an end. Natural philosophy leads one to affirm
this; but of time measured by human history he may yet have a lease
of tens of thousands of years.
The hazard of the future is a question of both astronomy and
geology. That there are cosmic dangers, though infinitely remote,
every astronomer knows. That there are collisions between heavenly
bodies is an indubitable fact, and if collisions do happen to any,
allow time enough and they must happen to all. That there are
geologic dangers through the shifting and crumpling of the earth's
crust, every geologist knows, though probably none that could wipe
out the whole race of man. The biologic dangers of the past we have
outlived--the dangers that must have beset a single line of descent
amid the carnival of power and the ferocity of the monster reptiles
of Mesozoic times, and the wholesale extinction of species that
occurred in different geologic periods.
Nothing but a cosmic catastrophe, involving the fate of the whole
earth, could now exterminate the human race. It is highly improbable
that this will ever happen. The race of man will go out from a slow,
insensible failure, through the aging of the planet, of the
conditions of life that brought man here. The evolutionary process
upon a cooling world must, after the elapse of a vast period of
time, lose its impetus and cease.
XIII
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE
I
The other day a clergyman who described himself as a preacher of the
gospel of Christ wrote, asking me to come and talk to his people on
the gospel of Nature. The request set me to thinking whether or not
Nature has any gospel in the sense the clergyman had in mind, any
message that is likely to be specially comforting to the average
orthodox religious person. I suppose the parson wished me to tell
his flock what I had found in Nature that was a strength or a solace
to myself.
What had all my many years of journeyings to Nature yielded me that
would supplement or reinforce the gospel he was preaching? Had the
birds taught me any valuable lessons? Had the four-footed beasts?
Had the insects? Had the flowers, the trees, the soil, the coming
and the going of the seasons? Had I really found sermons in stones,
books in running brooks and good in everything? Had the lilies of
the field, that neither toil nor spin, and yet are more royally clad
than Solomon in all his glory, helped me in any way to clothe myself
with humility, with justice, with truthfulness?
It is not easy for one to say just what he owes to all these things.
Natural influences work indirectly as well as directly; they work
upon the subconscious, as well as upon the conscious, self. That I
am a saner, healthier, more contented man, with truer standards of
life, for all my loiterings in the fields and woods, I am fully
convinced.
That I am less social, less interested in my neighbors and in the
body politic, more inclined to shirk civic and social
responsibilities and to stop my ears against the brawling of the
reformers, is perhaps equally true.
One thing is certain, in a hygienic way I owe much to my excursions
to Nature. They have helped to clothe me with health, if not with
humility; they have helped sharpen and attune all my senses; they
have kept my eyes in such good trim that they have not failed me for
one moment during all the seventy-five years I have had them; they
have made my sense of smell so keen that I have much pleasure in the
wild, open-air perfumes, especially in the spring--the delicate
breath of the blooming elms and maples and willows, the breath of
the woods, of the pastures, of the shore. This keen, healthy sense
of smell has made me abhor tobacco and flee from close rooms, and
put the stench of cities behind me. I fancy that this whole world of
wild, natural perfumes is lost to the tobacco-user and to the city-
dweller. Senses trained in the open air are in tune with open-air
objects; they are quick, delicate, and discriminating. When I go to
town, my ear suffers as well as my nose: the impact of the city upon
my senses is hard and dissonant; the ear is stunned, the nose is
outraged, and the eye is confused. When I come back, I go to Nature
to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once
more. I know that, as a rule, country or farming folk are not
remarkable for the delicacy of their senses, but this is owing
mainly to the benumbing and brutalizing effect of continued hard
labor. It is their minds more than their bodies that suffer.
When I have dwelt in cities the country was always near by, and I
used to get a bite of country soil at least once a week to keep my
system normal.
Emerson says that "the day does not seem wholly profane in which we
have given heed to some natural object." If Emerson had stopped to
qualify his remark, he would have added, if we give heed to it in
the right spirit, if we give heed to it as a nature-lover and
truth-seeker. Nature love as Emerson knew it, and as Wordsworth knew
it, and as any of the choicer spirits of our time have known it, has
distinctly a religious value. It does not come to a man or a woman
who is wholly absorbed in selfish or worldly or material ends.
Except ye become in a measure as little children, ye cannot enter
the kingdom of Nature--as Audubon entered it, as Thoreau entered it,
as Bryant and Amiel entered it, and as all those enter it who make
it a resource in their lives and an instrument of their culture. The
forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of
religion--the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence
of the inscrutable universe--persists. Indeed, these seem to be
renewing their life to-day in this growing love for all natural
objects and in this increasing tenderness toward all forms of life.
If we do not go to church so much as did our fathers, we go to the
woods much more, and are much more inclined to make a temple of them
than they were.
We now use the word Nature very much as our fathers used the word
God, and, I suppose, back of it all we mean the power that is
everywhere present and active, and in whose lap the visible universe
is held and nourished. It is a power that we can see and touch and
hear, and realize every moment of our lives how absolutely we are
dependent upon it. There are no atheists or skeptics in regard to
this power. All men see how literally we are its children, and all
men learn how swift and sure is the penalty of disobedience to its
commands.
Our associations with Nature vulgarize it and rob it of its
divinity. When we come to see that the celestial and the terrestrial
are one, that time and eternity are one, that mind and matter are
one, that death and life are one, that there is and can be nothing
not inherent in Nature, then we no longer look for or expect a
far-off, unknown God.
Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in
stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
Even when it contains a fossil, it teaches history rather than
morals. It comes down from the fore-world an undigested bit that has
resisted the tooth and maw of time, and can tell you many things if
you have the eye to read them. The soil upon which it lies or in
which it is imbedded was rock, too, back in geologic time, but the
mill that ground it up passed the fragment of stone through without
entirely reducing it. Very likely it is made up of the minute
remains of innumerable tiny creatures that lived and died in the
ancient seas. Very likely it was torn from its parent rock and
brought to the place where it now lies by the great ice-flood that
many tens of thousands of years ago crept slowly but irresistibly
down out of the North over the greater part of all the northern
continents.
But all this appeals to the intellect, and contains no lesson for
the moral nature. If we are to find sermons in stones, we are to
look for them in the relations of the stones to other things--when
they are out of place, when they press down the grass or the
flowers, or impede the plow, or dull the scythe, or usurp the soil,
or shelter vermin, as do old institutions and old usages that have
had their day. A stone that is much knocked about gets its sharp
angles worn off, as do men. "A rolling stone gathers no moss," which
is not bad for the stone, as moss hastens decay. "Killing two birds
with one stone" is a bad saying, because it reminds boys to stone
the birds, which is bad for both boys and birds. But "People who
live in glass houses should not throw stones" is on the right side
of the account, as it discourages stone-throwing and reminds us that
we are no better than our neighbors.
The lesson in running brooks is that motion is a great purifier and
health-producer. When the brook ceases to run, it soon stagnates. It
keeps in touch with the great vital currents when it is in motion,
and unites with other brooks to help make the river. In motion it
soon leaves all mud and sediment behind. Do not proper work and the
exercise of will power have the same effect upon our lives?
The other day in my walk I came upon a sap-bucket that had been
left standing by the maple tree all the spring and summer. What a
bucketful of corruption was that, a mixture of sap and rainwater
that had rotted, and smelled to heaven. Mice and birds and insects
had been drowned in it, and added to its unsavory character. It was
a bit of Nature cut off from the vitalizing and purifying chem-
istry of the whole. With what satisfaction I emptied it upon the
ground while I held my nose and saw it filter into the turf, where I
knew it was dying to go and where I knew every particle of the
reeking, fetid fluid would soon be made sweet and wholesome again by
the chemistry of the soil!
II
I am not always in sympathy with nature-study as pursued in the
schools, as if this kingdom could be carried by assault. Such study
is too cold, too special, too mechanical; it is likely to rub the
bloom off Nature. It lacks soul and emotion; it misses the
accessories of the open air and its exhilarations, the sky, the
clouds, the landscape, and the currents of life that pulse
everywhere.
I myself have never made a dead set at studying Nature with
note-book and field-glass in hand. I have rather visited with her.
We have walked together or sat down together, and our intimacy grows
with the seasons. What I have learned about her ways I have learned
easily, almost unconsciously, while fishing or camping or idling
about. My desultory habits have their disadvantages, no doubt, but
they have their advantages also. A too strenuous pursuit defeats
itself. In the fields and woods more than anywhere else all things
come to those who wait, because all things are on the move, and are
sure sooner or later to come your way.
To absorb a thing is better than to learn it, and we absorb what we
enjoy. We learn things at school, we absorb them in the fields and
woods and on the farm. When we look upon Nature with fondness and
appreciation she meets us halfway and takes a deeper hold upon us
than when studiously conned. Hence I say the way of knowledge of
Nature is the way of love and enjoyment, and is more surely found in
the open air than in the school-room or the laboratory. The other
day I saw a lot of college girls dissecting cats and making diagrams
of the circulation and muscle-attachments, and I thought it pretty
poor business unless the girls were taking a course in comparative
anatomy with a view to some occupation in life. What is the moral
and intellectual value of this kind of knowledge to those girls?
Biology is, no doubt, a great science in the hands of great men, but
it is not for all. I myself have got along very well without it. I
am sure I can learn more of what I want to know from a kitten on my
knee than from the carcass of a cat in the laboratory. Darwin spent
eight years dissecting barnacles; but he was Darwin, and did not
stop at barnacles, as these college girls are pretty sure to stop at
cats. He dissected and put together again in his mental laboratory
the whole system of animal life, and the upshot of his work was a
tremendous gain to our understanding of the universe.
I would rather see the girls in the fields and woods studying and
enjoying living nature, training their eyes to see correctly and
their hearts to respond intelligently. What is knowledge without
enjoyment, without love? It is sympathy, appreciation, emotional
experience, which refine and elevate and breathe into exact
knowledge the breath of life. My own interest is in living nature as
it moves and flourishes about me winter and summer.
I know it is one thing to go forth as a nature-lover, and quite
another to go forth in a spirit of cold, calculating, exact science.
I call myself a nature-lover and not a scientific naturalist. All
that science has to tell me is welcome, is, indeed, eagerly sought
for. I must know as well as feel. I am not merely contented, like
Wordsworth's poet, to enjoy what others understand. I must
understand also; but above all things I must enjoy. How much of my
enjoyment springs from my knowledge I do not know. The joy of
knowing is very great; the delight of picking up the threads of
meaning here and there, and following them through the maze of
confusing facts, I know well. When I hear the woodpecker drumming on
a dry limb in spring or the grouse drumming in the woods, and know
what it is all for, why, that knowledge, I suppose, is part of my
enjoyment. The other part is the associations that those sounds call
up as voicing the arrival of spring: they are the drums that lead
the joyous procession.
To enjoy understandingly, that, I fancy, is the great thing to be
desired. When I see the large ichneumon-fly, Thalessa, making a loop
over her back with her long ovipositor and drilling a hole in the
trunk of a tree, I do not fully appreciate the spectacle till I know
she is feeling for the burrow of a tree-borer, Tremex, upon the
larvae of which her own young feed. She must survey her territory
like an oil-digger and calculate where she is likely to strike oil,
which in her case is the burrow of her host Tremex. There is a vast
series of facts in natural history like this that are of little
interest until we understand them. They are like the outside of a
book which may attract us, but which can mean little to us until we
have opened and perused its pages.
The nature-lover is not looking for mere facts, but for meanings,
for something he can translate into the terms of his own life. He
wants facts, but significant facts--luminous facts that throw light
upon the ways of animate and inanimate nature. A bird picking up
crumbs from my window-sill does not mean much to me. It is a
pleasing sight and touches a tender cord, but it does not add much
to my knowledge of bird-life. But when I see a bird pecking and
fluttering angrily at my window-pane, as I now and then do in
spring, apparently under violent pressure to get in, I am witnessing
a significant comedy in bird-life, one that illustrates the limits
of animal instinct. The bird takes its own reflected image in the
glass for a hated rival, and is bent on demolishing it. Let the
assaulting bird get a glimpse of the inside of the empty room
through a broken pane, and it is none the wiser; it returns to the
assault as vigorously as ever.
The fossils in the rocks did not mean much to the earlier
geologists. They looked upon them as freaks of Nature, whims of the
creative energy, or vestiges of Noah's flood. You see they were
blinded by the preconceived notions of the six-day theory of
creation.
III
I do not know that the bird has taught me any valuable lesson.
Indeed, I do not go to Nature to be taught. I go for enjoyment and
companionship. I go to bathe in her as in a sea; I go to give my
eyes and ears and all my senses a free, clean field and to tone up
my spirits by her "primal sanities." If the bird has not preached to
me, it has added to the resources of my life, it has widened the
field of my interests, it has afforded me another beautiful object
to love, and has helped make me feel more at home in this world. To
take the birds out of my life would be like lopping off so many
branches from the tree: there is so much less surface of leafage to
absorb the sunlight and bring my spirits in contact with the vital
currents. We cannot pursue any natural study with love and
enthusiasm without the object of it becoming a part of our lives.
The birds, the flowers, the trees, the rocks, all become linked with
our lives and hold the key to our thoughts and emotions.
Not till the bird becomes a part of your life can its coming and its
going mean much to you. And it becomes a part of your life when you
have taken heed of it with interest and affection, when you have
established associations with it, when it voices the spring or the
summer to you, when it calls up the spirit of the woods or the
fields or the shore. When year after year you have heard the veery
in the beech and birch woods along the trout streams, or the wood
thrush May after May in the groves where you have walked or sat, and
the bobolink summer after summer in the home meadows, or the vesper
sparrow in the upland pastures where you have loitered as a boy or
mused as a man, these birds will really be woven into the texture of
your life.
What lessons the birds have taught me I cannot recall; what a joy
they have been to me I know well. In a new place, amid strange
scenes, theirs are the voices and the faces of old friends. In
Bermuda the bluebirds and the catbirds and the cardinals seemed to
make American territory of it. Our birds had annexed the island
despite the Britishers.
For many years I have in late April seen the red-poll warbler,
perhaps for only a single day, flitting about as I walked or worked.
It is usually my first warbler, and my associations with it are very
pleasing. But I really did not know how pleasing until, one March
day, when I was convalescing from a serious illness in one of our
sea-coast towns, I chanced to spy the little traveler in a vacant
lot along the street, now upon the ground, now upon a bush, nervous
and hurried as usual, uttering its sharp chip, and showing the white
in its tail. The sight gave me a real home feeling. It did me more
good than the medicine I was taking. It instantly made a living link
with many past springs. Anything that calls up a happy past, how it
warms the present! There, too, that same day I saw my first
meadowlark of the season in a vacant lot, flashing out the white
quills in her tail, and walking over the turf in the old, erect,
alert manner. The sight was as good as a letter from home, and
better: it had a flavor of the wild and of my boyhood days on the
old farm that no letter could ever have.
The spring birds always awaken a thrill wherever I am. The first
bobolink I hear flying over northward and bursting out in song now
and then, full of anticipation of those broad meadows where he will
soon be with his mate; or the first swallow twittering joyously
overhead, borne on a warm southern breeze; or the first high-hole
sounding out his long, iterated call from the orchard or field--how
all these things send a wave of emotion over me!
Pleasures of another kind are to find a new bird, and to see an old
bird in a new place, as I did recently in the old sugar-bush where I
used to help gather and boil sap as a boy. It was the logcock, or
pileated woodpecker, a rare bird anywhere, and one I had never seen
before on the old farm. I heard his loud cackle in a maple tree, saw
him flit from branch to branch for a few moments, and then launch
out and fly toward a distant wood. But he left an impression with me
that I should be sorry to have missed.
Nature stimulates our aesthetic and our intellectual life and to a
certain extent our religious emotions, but I fear we cannot find
much support for our ethical system in the ways of wild Nature. I
know our artist naturalist, Ernest Thompson Seton, claims to find
what we may call the biological value of the Ten Commandments in the
lives of the wild animals; but I cannot make his reasoning hold
water, at least not much of it. Of course the Ten Commandments are
not arbitrary laws. They are largely founded upon the needs of the
social organism; but whether they have the same foundation in the
needs of animal life apart from man, apart from the world of moral
obligation, is another question. The animals are neither moral nor
immoral: they are unmoral; their needs are all physical. It is true
that the command against murder is pretty well kept by the higher
animals. They rarely kill their own kind: hawks do not prey upon
hawks, nor foxes prey upon foxes, nor weasels upon weasels; but
lower down this does not hold. Trout eat trout, and pickerel eat
pickerel, and among the insects young spiders eat one another, and
the female spider eats her mate, if she can get him. There is but
little, if any, neighborly love among even the higher animals. They
treat one another as rivals, or associate for mutual protection. One
cow will lick and comb another in the most affectionate manner, and
the next moment savagely gore her. Hate and cruelty for the most
part rule in the animal world. A few of the higher animals are
monogamous, but by far the greater number of species are polygamous
or promiscuous. There is no mating or pairing in the great bovine
tribe, and none among the rodents that I know of, or among the bear
family, or the cat family, or among the seals. When we come to the
birds, we find mating, and occasional pairing for life, as with the
ostrich and perhaps the eagle.
As for the rights of property among the animals, I do not see how we
can know just how far those rights are respected among individuals
of the same species. We know that bees will rob bees, and that ants
will rob ants; but whether or not one chipmunk or one flying
squirrel or one wood mouse will plunder the stores of another I do
not know. Probably not, as the owner of such stores is usually on
hand to protect them. Moreover, these provident little creatures all
lay up stores in the autumn, before the season of scarcity sets in,
and so have no need to plunder one another. In case the stores of
one squirrel were destroyed by some means, and it were able to
dispossess another of its hoard, would it not in that case be a
survival of the fittest, and so conducive to the well-being of the
race of squirrels?
I have never known any of our wild birds to steal the
nesting-material of another bird of the same kind, but I have known
birds to try to carry off the material belonging to other species.
But usually the rule of might is the rule of right among the
animals. As to most of the other commandments,--of coveting, of
bearing false witness, of honoring the father and the mother, and so
forth,--how can these apply to the animals or have any biological
value to them? Parental obedience among them is not a very definite
thing. There is neither obedience nor disobedience, because there
are no commands. The alarm-cries of the parents are quickly
understood by the young, and their actions imitated in the presence
of danger, all of which of course has a biological value.
The instances which Mr. Seton cites of animals fleeing to man for
protection from their enemies prove to my mind only how the greater
fear drives out the lesser. The hotly pursued animal sees a possible
cover in a group of men and horses or in an unoccupied house, and
rushes there to hide. What else could the act mean? So a hunted deer
or sheep will leap from a precipice which, under ordinary
circumstances, it would avoid. So would a man. Fear makes bold in
such cases.
I certainly have found "good in everything,"--in all natural
processes and products,--not the "good" of the Sunday-school books,
but the good of natural law and order, the good of that system of
things out of which we came and which is the source of our health
and strength. It is good that fire should burn, even if it consumes
your house; it is good that force should crush, even if it crushes
you; it is good that rain should fall, even if it destroys your
crops or floods your land. Plagues and pestilences attest the
constancy of natural law. They set us to cleaning our streets and
houses and to readjusting our relations to outward nature. Only in a
live universe could disease and death prevail. Death is a phase of
life, a redistributing of the type. Decay is another kind of growth.
Yes, good in everything, because law in everything, truth in
everything, the sequence of cause and effect in everything, and it
may all be good to me if on the right principles I relate my life to
it. I can make the heat and the cold serve me, the winds and the
floods, gravity and all the chemical and dynamical forces, serve me,
if I take hold of them by the right handle. The bad in things arises
from our abuse or misuse of them or from our wrong relations to
them. A thing is good or bad according as it stands related to my
constitution. We say the order of nature is rational; but is it not
because our reason is the outcome of that order? Our well-being
consists in learning it and in adjusting our lives to it. When we
cross it or seek to contravene it, we are destroyed. But Nature in
her universal procedures is not rational, as I am rational when I
weed my garden, prune my trees, select my seed or my stock, or arm
myself with tools or weapons. In such matters I take a short cut to
that which Nature reaches by a slow, roundabout, and wasteful
process. How does she weed her garden? By the survival of the
fittest. How does she select her breeding-stock? By the law of
battle; the strongest rules. Hers, I repeat, is a slow and wasteful
process. She fertilizes the soil by plowing in the crop. She cannot
take a short cut. She assorts and arranges her goods by the law of
the winds and the tides. She builds up with one hand and pulls down
with the other. Man changes the conditions to suit the things.
Nature changes the things to suit the conditions. She adapts the
plant or the animal to its environment. She does not drain her
marshes; she fills them up. Hers is the larger reason--the reason of
the All. Man's reason introduces a new method; it cuts across,
modifies, or abridges the order of Nature. I do not see design in
Nature in the old ideological sense; but I see everything working to
its own proper end, and that end is foretold in the means. Things
are not designed; things are begotten. It is as if the final plan of
a man's house, after he had begun to build it, should be determined
by the winds and the rains and the shape of the ground upon which it
stands. The eye is begotten by those vibrations in the ether called
light, the ear by those vibrations in the air called sound, the
sense of smell by those emanations called odors. There are probably
other vibrations and emanations that we have no senses for because
our well-being does not demand them.
We think it reasonable that a stone should fall and that smoke
should rise because we have never known either of them to do the
contrary. We think it reasonable that fire should burn and that
frost should freeze, because this accords with universal experience.
Thus, there is a large order of facts that are reasonable because
they are invariable: the same effect always follows the same cause.
Our reason is developed and disciplined by observing the order of
Nature; and yet human rationality is of another order from the
rationality of Nature. Man learns from Nature how to master and
control her. He turns her currents into new channels; he spurs her
in directions of his own. Nature has no economic or scientific
rationality. She progresses by the method of trial and error. Her
advance is symbolized by that of the child learning to walk. She
experiments endlessly. Evolution has worked all around the horizon.
In feeling her way to man she has produced thousands of other forms
of life. The globe is peopled as it is because the creative energy
was blind and did not at once find the single straight road to man.
Had the law of variation worked only in one direction, man might
have found himself the sole occupant of the universe. Behold the
varieties of trees, of shrubs, of grasses, of birds, of insects,
because Nature does not work as man does, with an eye single to one
particular end. She scatters, she sows her seed upon the wind, she
commits her germs to the waves and the floods. Nature is indifferent
to waste, because what goes out of one pocket goes into another. She
is indifferent to failure, because failure on one line means success
on some other.
IV
But I am not preaching much of a gospel, am I? Only the gospel of
contentment, of appreciation, of heeding simple near-by things--a
gospel the burden of which still is love, but love that goes hand in
hand with understanding.
There is so much in Nature that is lovely and lovable, and so much
that gives us pause. But here it is, and here we are, and we must
make the most of it. If the ways of the Eternal as revealed in his
works are past finding out, we must still unflinchingly face what
our reason reveals to us. "Red in tooth and claw." Nature does not
preach; she enforces, she executes. All her answers are yea, yea, or
nay, nay. Of the virtues and beatitudes of which the gospel of
Christ makes so much--meekness, forgiveness, self-denial, charity,
love, holiness--she knows nothing. Put yourself in her way, and she
crushes you; she burns you, freezes you, stings you, bites you, or
devours you.
Yet I would not say that the study of Nature did not favor meekness
or sobriety or gentleness or forgiveness or charity, because the
great Nature students and prophets, like Darwin, would rise up and
confound me. Certainly it favors seriousness, truthfulness, and
simplicity of life; or, are only the serious and single-minded drawn
to the study of Nature? I doubt very much if it favors devoutness or
holiness, as those qualities are inculcated by the church, or any
form of religious enthusiasm. Devoutness and holiness come of an
attitude toward the universe that is in many ways incompatible with
that implied by the pursuit of natural science. The joy of the
Nature student like Darwin or any great naturalist is to know, to
find out the reason of things and the meaning of things, to trace
the footsteps of the creative energy; while the religious devotee is
intent only upon losing himself in infinite being. True, there have
been devout naturalists and men of science; but their devoutness did
not date from their Nature studies, but from their training, or from
the times in which they lived. Theology and science, it must be
said, will not mingle much better than oil and water, and your
devout scientist and devout Nature student lives in two separate
compartments of his being at different times. Intercourse with
Nature--I mean intellectual intercourse, not merely the emotional
intercourse of the sailor or explorer or farmer--tends to beget a
habit of mind the farthest possible removed from the myth-making,
the vision-seeing, the voice-hearing habit and temper. In all
matters relating to the visible, concrete universe it substitutes
broad daylight for twilight; it supplants fear with curiosity; it
overthrows superstition with fact; it blights credulity with the
frost of skepticism. I say frost of skepticism advisedly. Skepticism
is a much more healthful and robust habit of mind than the limp,
pale-blooded, non-resisting habit that we call credulity.
In intercourse with Nature you are dealing with things at first
hand, and you get a rule, a standard, that serves you through life.
You are dealing with primal sanities, primal honesties, primal
attraction; you are touching at least the hem of the garment with
which the infinite is clothed, and virtue goes out from it to you.
It must be added that you are dealing with primal cruelty, primal
blindness, primal wastefulness, also. Nature works with reference to
no measure of time, no bounds of space, and no limits of material.
Her economies are not our economies. She is prodigal, she is
careless, she is indifferent; yet nothing is lost. What she lavishes
with one hand, she gathers in with the other. She is blind, yet she
hits the mark because she shoots in all directions. Her germs fill
the air; the winds and the tides are her couriers. When you think
you have defeated her, your triumph is hers; it is still by her laws
that you reach your end.
We make ready our garden in a season, and plant our seeds and hoe
our crops by some sort of system. Can any one tell how many hundreds
of millions of years Nature has been making ready her garden and
planting her seeds?
There can be little doubt, I think, but that intercourse with Nature
and a knowledge of her ways tends to simplicity of life. We come
more and more to see through the follies and vanities of the world
and to appreciate the real values. We load ourselves up with so many
false burdens, our complex civilization breeds in us so many false
or artificial wants, that we become separated from the real sources
of our strength and health as by a gulf.
For my part, as I grow older I am more and more inclined to reduce
my baggage, to lop off superfluities. I become more and more in love
with simple things and simple folk--a small house, a hut in the
woods, a tent on the shore. The show and splendor of great houses,
elaborate furnishings, stately halls, oppress me, impose upon me.
They fix the attention upon false values, they set up a false
standard of beauty; they stand between me and the real feeders of
character and thought. A man needs a good roof over his head winter
and summer, and a good chimney and a big wood-pile in winter. The
more open his four walls are, the more fresh air he will get, and
the longer he will live.
How the contemplation of Nature as a whole does take the conceit out
of us! How we dwindle to mere specks and our little lives to the
span of a moment in the presence of the cosmic bodies and the
interstellar spaces! How we hurry! How we husband our time! A year,
a month, a day, an hour may mean so much to us. Behold the infinite
leisure of Nature!
A few trillions or quadrillions of years, what matters it to the
Eternal? Jupiter and Saturn must be billions of years older than the
earth. They are evidently yet passing through that condition of
cloud and vapor and heat that the earth passed through untold aeons
ago, and they will not reach the stage of life till aeons to come.
But what matters it? Only man hurries. Only the Eternal has infinite
time. When life comes to Jupiter, the earth will doubtless long have
been a dead world. It may continue a dead world for aeons longer
before it is melted up in the eternal crucible and recast, and set
on its career of life again.
Familiarity with the ways of the Eternal as they are revealed in the
physical universe certainly tends to keep a man sane and sober and
safeguards him against the vagaries and half-truths which our creeds
and indoor artificial lives tend to breed. Shut away from Nature, or
only studying her through religious fears and superstitions, what a
mess a large body of mankind in all ages have made of it! Think of
the obsession of the speedy "end of the world" which has so often
taken possession of whole communities, as if a world that has been
an eternity in forming could end in a day, or on the striking of the
clock! It is not many years since a college professor published a
book figuring out, from some old historical documents and
predictions, just the year in which the great mundane show would
break up. When I was a small boy at school in the early forties,
during the Millerite excitement about the approaching end of all
mundane things, I remember, on the day when the momentous event was
expected to take place, how the larger school-girls were thrown into
a great state of alarm and agitation by a thundercloud that let down
a curtain of rain, blotting out the mountain on the opposite side of
the valley. "There it comes!" they said, and their tears flowed
copiously. I remember that I did not share their fears, but watched
the cloud, curious as to what the end of the world would be like. I
cannot brag, as Thoreau did, when he said he would not go around the
corner to see the world blow up. I am quite sure my curiosity would
get the better of me and that I should go, even at this late day. Or
think of the more harmless obsession of many good people about the
second coming of Christ, or about the resurrection of the physical
body when the last trumpet shall sound. A little natural knowledge
ought to be fatal to all such notions. Natural knowledge shows us
how transient and insignificant we are, and how vast and everlasting
the world is, which was aeons before we were, and will be other
aeons after we are gone, yea, after the whole race of man is gone.
Natural knowledge takes the conceit out of us, and is the sure
antidote to all our petty anthropomorphic views of the universe.
V
I was struck by this passage in one of the recently published
letters of Saint-Gaudens: "The principal thought in my life is that
we are on a planet going no one knows where, probably to something
higher (on the Darwinian principle of evolution); that, whatever it
is, the passage is terribly sad and tragic, and to bear up at times
against what seems to be the Great Power that is over us, the
practice of love, charity, and courage are the great things."
The "Great Power" that is over us does seem unmindful of us as
individuals, if it does not seem positively against us, as
Saint-Gaudens seemed to think it was.
Surely the ways of the Eternal are not as our ways. Our standards of
prudence, of economy, of usefulness, of waste, of delay, of
failure--how far off they seem from the scale upon which the
universe is managed or deports itself! If the earth should be blown
to pieces to-day, and all life instantly blotted out, would it not
be just like what we know of the cosmic prodigality and
indifference? Such appalling disregard of all human motives and ends
bewilders us.
Of all the planets of our system probably only two or three are in a
condition to sustain life. Mercury, the youngest of them all, is
doubtless a dead world, with absolute zero on one side and a furnace
temperature on the other. But what matters it? Whose loss or gain is
it? Life seems only an incident in the universe, evidently not an
end. It appears or it does not appear, and who shall say yea or nay?
The asteroids at one time no doubt formed a planet between Mars and
Jupiter. Some force which no adjective can describe or qualify blew
it into fragments, and there, in its stead, is this swarm of huge
rocks making their useless rounds in the light of the sun forever
and ever. What matters it to the prodigal All? Bodies larger than
our sun collide in the depths of space before our eyes with results
so terrific that words cannot even hint them. The last of these
collisions--of this "wreck of matter and crush of worlds"--reported
itself to our planet in February, 1901, when a star of the twelfth
magnitude suddenly blazed out as a star of the first magnitude and
then slowly faded. It was the grand finale of the independent
existence of two enormous celestial bodies. They apparently ended in
dust that whirled away in the vast abyss of siderial space, blown by
the winds upon which suns and systems drift as autumn leaves. It
would be quite in keeping with the observed ways of the Eternal, if
these bodies had had worlds in their train, teeming with life, which
met the same fate as the central colliding bodies.
Does not force as we know it in this world go its own way with the
same disregard of the precious thing we call life? Such long and
patient preparations for it,--apparently the whole stellar system in
labor pains to bring it forth,--and yet held so cheaply and
indifferently in the end! The small insect that just now alighted in
front of my jack-plane as I was dressing a timber, and was reduced
to a faint yellow stain upon the wood, is typical of the fate of man
before the unregarding and unswerving terrestrial and celestial
forces. The great wheels go round just the same whether they are
crushing the man or crushing the corn for his bread. It is all one
to the Eternal. Flood, fire, wind, gravity, are for us or against us
indifferently. And yet the earth is here, garlanded with the seasons
and riding in the celestial currents like a ship in calm summer
seas, and man is here with all things under his feet. All is well in
our corner of the universe. The great mill has made meal of our
grist and not of the miller. We have taken our chances and have won.
More has been for us than against us. During the little segment of
time that man has been upon the earth, only one great calamity that
might be called cosmical has befallen it. The ice age of one or two
hundred thousand years was such a calamity. But man survived it. The
spring came again, and life, the traveler, picked itself up and made
a new start. But if he had not survived it, if nothing had survived
it, the great procession would have gone on just the same; the gods
would have been just as well pleased.
The battle is to the strong, the race is to the fleet. This is the
order of nature. No matter for the rest, for the weak, the slow, the
unlucky, so that the fight is won, so that the race of man
continues. You and I may fail and fall before our time; the end may
be a tragedy or a comedy. What matters it? Only some one must
succeed, will succeed.
We are here, I say, because, in the conflict of forces, the
influences that made for life have been in the ascendant. This
conflict of forces has been a part of the process of our
development. We have been ground out as between an upper and a
nether millstone, but we have squeezed through, we have actually
arrived, and are all the better for the grinding--all those who have
survived. But, alas for those whose lives went out in the crush!
Maybe they often broke the force of the blow for us.
Nature is not benevolent; Nature is just, gives pound for pound,
measure for measure, makes no exceptions, never tempers her decrees
with mercy, or winks at any infringement of her laws. And in the end
is not this best? Could the universe be run as a charity or a
benevolent institution, or as a poor-house of the most approved
pattern? Without this merciless justice, this irrefragable law,
where should we have brought up long ago? It is a hard gospel; but
rocks are hard too, yet they form the foundations of the hills.
Man introduces benevolence, mercy, altruism, into the world, and he
pays the price in his added burdens; and he reaps his reward in the
vast social and civic organizations that were impossible without
these things.
I have no doubt that the life of man upon this planet will end, as
all other forms of life will end. But the potential man will
continue and does continue on other spheres. One cannot think of one
part of the universe as producing man, and no other part as capable
of it. The universe is all of a piece so far as its material
constituents are concerned; that we know. Can there be any doubt
that it is all of a piece so far as its invisible and intangible
forces and capabilities are concerned? Can we believe that the earth
is an alien and a stranger in the universe? that it has no near kin?
that there is no tie of blood, so to speak, between it and the other
planets and systems? Are the planets not all of one family, sitting
around the same central source of warmth and life? And is not our
system a member of a still larger family or tribe, and it of a still
larger, all bound together by ties of consanguinity? Size is
nothing, space is nothing. The worlds are only red corpuscles in the
arteries of the infinite. If man has not yet appeared on the other
planets, he will in time appear, and when he has disappeared from
this globe, he will still continue elsewhere.
I do not say that he is the end and aim of creation; it would be
logical, I think, to expect a still higher form. Man has been man
but a little while comparatively, less than one hour of the twenty-
four of the vast geologic day; a few hours more and he will be gone;
less than another geologic day like the past, and no doubt all life
from the earth will be gone. What then? The game will be played over
and over again in other worlds, without approaching any nearer the
final end than we are now. There is no final end, as there was no
absolute beginning, and can be none with the infinite.
THE END
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