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Full text of "The Story Of Creation A Plain Account Of Evolution"

A PLAIN ACCOUNT OF 
EVOLUTION 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



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NEBULA OF ORION 
Kiiltirgctl from a fhotogmph taken direct ly Mr. Common 



THE 



STORY OF CREATION 



A PLAIN ACCOUNT OF EVOLUTION 



BY 

EDWARD 

AUTHOR OF 'THB CHILDHOOD^ OF jrHB f w0Jtf-D 




NEW EDITION 



LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

%*** 

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 

NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 

1904 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. 
First Edition January 1888 ; Reprinted March 
and July i$$S, June 1890, March 1891; Revised 
Edition December i%9$; Reprinted February 1896, 
April 1898 ; New Edition January 1901, and 
Augttst 1904. 



TO 

GRANT ALLEN. 

MY DEAR ALLEN, 

The inscription of this little book to you 
whose interest in it has been constant since its frame- 
work was shown you, enables me not only to repeat the 
obligations which are set down in the Preface, but also 
to say, what is more gratifying to me, how deeply 
I value your friendship. 

Yours, eyer, sincerely ,^ 

EDWARD CLQ1JD. 



PREFACE. 



THE scope and purpose of this book are explained in 
the Introductory chapter, but the justification for its 

publication in these days of over-production has to be 
given. 

This lies in the fact that, so far as I know, no work 
of the kind exists in brief and handy compass ; complete 
expositions of the theory of Evolution, foremost among 
which ranks Mr, Herbert Spencer's, being in bulky 
volumes with which few readers have the time or courage 
to grapple. In attempting to give a clear idea of the 
mechanism of the universe, I have felt the difficulty 
expressed years ago by such authorities as Sir W, R, 
Grove and Professor Tyndall* arising from the lack of 
precision in standard books on physics in the use of 
..the terms c force ' and * energy/ When talking over this 
matter with my friend Grant Allen, I was delighted to 
find that he had published (although privately) a 
pamphlet on the subject, in which rigid and definite 
meanings arc given to 4 force * and ' energy * as the two 
fuk! and opposite forms of Motion manifest through 



JE THE STORY OF CREATION 

Matter; and in that sense, as affording thei reader a 
clearer conception of cosmic dynamics, those terms are 
used throughout this book Mr. Allen has plunged me 
deeper in his debt by the labour of reading my proof- 
sheets, a service which, to their further gain, has also 
been kindly rendered by my friend Mr. H. W. Bates, 
KR.S. 

The chief authorities consulted in the preparation 
of this book are duly acknowledged in foot-notes. As 
for the work as a whole, there is probably not a new 
idea in it, but only an attempt to explain matters of 
abiding interest and deep significance in as simple 
and untechnical a style as possible. 

E. C 

ROSEMONT, TUFNELL PARK, LONDON, N. : 

December 1887. 



PREFACE. 



THE seopc and purpose of this book are explained in 
the Introductory chapter, but the justification for its 
publication in these days of over-production has to be 
given. 

This lies in the fact that, so far as I know/no work 
of the kind exists in brief and handy compass ; complete 
expositions of the theory of Evolution, foremost among 
which ranks Mr. Herbert Spencer's, being in bulky 
volumes with which few readers have the time or courage 
to grapple. In attempting to give a clear idea of the 
mechanism of the universe, I have felt the difficulty 
expressed years ago by such authorities as Sir W. R. 
Grove and Professor Tyndall, arising from the lack of 
precision in standard books on physics in the use oi 
the terms * force ' and ' energy.' When talking over this 
matter with my friend Grant Allen, I was delighted to 
find that he had published (although privately) a 
pamphlet on the subject, in which rigid and definite 
meanings are given to * force ' and ' energy ' as the two- 
fold and opposite forms of Motion manifest through 



CONTENTS, 

FAGfi 

IMTRQDUCTORY t i 

PART I. DESCRIPTIVE. 

CHAPTER 

1. THE UNIVERSE : ITS CONTENTS , , 7 

1, Matter 7 

2. Motion , , 12 

. Force .,,,., , , 13 

J. Energy 13 

II. DISTRIBUTION OF MATTER IN SPACE ... ," 18 

III. THE SUN AND PLANETS , , 21 

The Earth : General Features 25 

IV, THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH . . , . 29 

Character and Contents of Rocks of 

1. Archsean Epoch ...... 33 

2. Primary Epoch ....... 36 

3. Secondary Epoch * 43 

4. Tertiary Epoch 5 

5. Quaternary Epoch 57 

V, PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 65 

Physical Constituents and Unity 66 

A. Plants 76 

1. Flowerless 77 

2. Flowering ,..,.,. 80 
8. Animals . 9 1 

1, Protozoa ....... 92 

2. Ccelenterata 9^ 

3, Echinodermata I0 3 

4. Annelida and Arlhropoda 104 

5, Mollusca n 3 

6. Vertebrata n 5 



xii THE STORY OF CREATION 

PART //. EXPLANATORY. 

CHAPTBU AGE 

VI THE UNIVERSE : MODE OF ITS BECOMING AND GROWTH 135 

1. Inorganic Evolution 

Stellar Systems * * 37 

2. Solar System ....... 140 

3- Earth 143 

VXL ORIGIN OF LIFE ........ 145 

Time: Place: Mode . . , , . . 146 

VIII. ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS . . , . . .153 

Priority of Plant or Animal 155 

Cell-structure and Development 158 

IX. ORIGIN OF SPECIES 165 

Argument : 

1. No two individuals of the same species are alike ; 

each tends to vary 165 

2. Variations are transmitted, and tend to become 

permanent 166 

3. Man takes advantage of them to produce new 

varieties 167 

4. More organisms are born than survive . . . 169 
$. The result is a ceaseless struggle for food and 

place . 170 

6. Natural selection tends to maintain the balance 

between living things and their surroundings . 176 

X- PROOFS OF THE DERIVATION OF SPECIES . . . . 190 

1. Embryology , ' 190 

2. Form .... ... 193 

3. Classification 194 

4. Succession in Time 194 

5. Distribution in Space . . . . . 195 
Objections . 204 

XI. SOCIAL EVOLUTION 206 

1. Evolution of Mind 206 

2. Society 21 1 

3. Language, Art, and Science . . 215 

4. Morals 218 

5. Theology - 224 

Summary , 2-s8 

INDEX . * , , . . . 33 



CONTENTS ii 



TABLES. 

PAGE 

TABULAR STATEMENT OF MATTER AND MOTION , , , , IJ 

GEOLOGICAL EPOCHS AND TYPICAL LIFE-FORMS 28 

SUCCESSION OF TYPICAL LIFE-FORMS 63 

EXISTING PLANTS AND ANIMALS 65 

SUB-KINGDOMS OF ANIMALS ... .... 9! 

CLASSES OF MAMMALS 129 

RACES OF MAN , , 132 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



riG. PAGE 

NEBULA dF ORION . Frontispiece 

1. SUN-SPOTS .22 

2. LUNAR CRATER: COPERNICUS 24 

3. FOOTPRINTS OF FOSSIL BIRDS . - - 3 1 

4. TABLE OF STRATIFIED SYSTEMS WITH TVPICAL FOSSILS To face 32 

5. EOZOON CANADENSE 33 

6. FORAMINIFER 34 

7. SECTION OF GRAVESEND CHALK 35 

8. ORGANISMS IN ATLANTIC OOZE . . , .* 35 

9. DIATOMS 35 

10. TRILOBITB 35 

11. FOSSIL AND LIVING GANOID FISH . . . . 37 

12. INSECTS IN AMBER 39 



xiv THE STORY OF CREATION 

P 1G. PAGE 

13. FOSSIL PI ANTS FROM COAL BEDS . , , * , 4 2 

14. BELEMNITES 45 

15. FOSSIL SEA-LIZARD ; PLESIOSAURUS 46 

16. FOSSIL FLYING LIZARD : PTERODACTYLUS 4.6 

17. FOSSIL BIRD ; ARCH/EOPTERYX ....... 4.7 

IS ..MMONITE . , 49 

19 FOSSIL BONY FISH : PERCH AND SALMON 49 

20. NUMMULITES FROM THE GREAT PYRAMID .... $2 

21. FEET OF ANCESTORS OF THE HORSE . . . . . 54 

22. STONE IMPLEMENTS : ANCIENT STONE AGE . . .56 

23. MAMMOTH OR WOOLLY-HAIRED ELEPHANT . . . . 58 

24. PREHISTORIC PICTURES 59 

25. STONE IMPLEMENTS : NEWER STONE AGE 60 

26. VENUS'S FLY-TRAP ^9 

27. DIAGRAM OF CELL 74 

28. DIAGRAM OF CELL AND NUCLEI ...... 74 

29. DIAGRAM OF OVUM OF MAMMAL . . . . 75 

30. DIAGRAM OF FLOWER So 

31. FERTILISATION OF PLANT . 8l 

32. CYCAD OR PALM-FERN 82 

33- FERTILISATION OF FLOWER BY INSECT .... 86 

34. TRANSITION FROM STAMENS TO PETALS IN WHITE LILY . 87 

35. MONERA . 92 

36. AMCEBA 97 

37. INFUSORIA 98 

38. STRUCTURE OF SPONGE 99 

3Q. HYDRA 100 

40. JELLY-FISH . IOI 

41. SECTION OF SEA-ANEMONF. 1O2 

42. CORAL ...... - . 102 

43. SEA -CUCUMBER . . . , 103 

44. DIAGRAM OF ANNELID ........ 105 

45. SECTION OF WORM ." 106 

46. ROTIFER OR WHEEL ANIMALCULE IO7 

47. PERIPATU^C*" , I08 

48. GENERALISED INSECT 109 

49. NERVOU3 SYSTEM OF BEETLE 1 10 



ILLUSTRATIONS xv 

IG. PAGE 

50. SECTION OF EYE OF INSECT HI 

51. ANATOMY OF BIVALVE MOLLUSC 1*4 

52. SKELETON AND OUTLINE OF BAT Il6 

53. BALANOGLOSSUS , , , . Il8 

54. SEA-SQUIRT ... 119 

55. DIAGRAM OF SEA-SQUIRT . , . '"> "9 

56. DIAGRAM OF LANCELET 121 

57. MUD-FISH , . 123 

58. GROWTH OF HAIR 125 

59. DUCKBILL 127 

60. SPINY ANT-EATER 128 

61. SKELETONS OF MAN AND APES. . ... 13! 

62. DIAGRAM OF LIFE-DEVELOPMENT , To f(lCC 132 
6j. CHLOROPHYLL IN LEAF-CELLS 154 

64. CELLS OF ROOT OF FRITILLARY 3157 

65. CELL 159 

66. STAGES OF CELL-DIVISION 159 

67. MORULA OR MULBERRY-LIKE STAGE l60 

68. GASTRULA OR PRIMITIVE STOMACH STAGE . . . . l6o 
69 EMBRYO STAGE t , l6l 

70. EMBRYOS OF FISH, DOG, AND MAN 1 62 

71. LEAF INSECT 173 

72. WALKING-STICK INSECT 174 

73. GORILLA WALKING 1 82 

74- BRAIN OF MAN AND CHIMPANZEE 1 84 

75. EMBRYOS OF DOG AND MAN 191 

76. EMBRYO OF TORTOISE 19* 

77. ARM OF MAN, FORE-LEG OF DOG, AND WINO OF BIRD . , 193 

78. FOSSIL BIRD-REPTILE: COMPSOGNATHUS . . . , 195 
79- GIGANTIC FOSSIL WINGLESS BIRD OF NEW ZEALAND 199 



First man appeared In the class of inorganic things, 

Next he passed therefrom into that of plants. 

For years he lived as one of the plants, 

Remembering nought of his inorganic state so different \ 

And when he passed from the vegetive to the animal state, 

He had no remembrance of his state as a plant, 

Except the inclination he felt to the world of plants, 

Especially at the time of spring and sweet flowers ; 

Like the inclination of infants towards their mothers, 

Which know not the cause of their inclination to the breast 

Again, the great Creator, as you know, 

Drew man out of the animal into the human state. 

Thus man passed from one order of nature to another, 

Till he became wise and knowing and strong as he is row. 

Of his first souls he has now no remembrance, 

And he will be again changed from his present soul.' 

Masnav" (Bk. IV.) of JAL!L AD DIN (i3th. CenturyV 



THE 

STORY OF 

INTRODUCTORY 

Happy the man whose lot it is to know 
The secrets of the earth, He hastens not 
To work his fellows' hurt by unjust deeds, 
But with rapt admiration contemplates 
Immortal Nature's ageless harmony, 
And how and when her order came to be. 
Such spirits have no place for thoughts of shame* 

EURIPIDES, Fmgm. 902. 

ON the 27th of December 1831, Charles Darwin, then in 
his twenty-third year, embarked at Plymouth as volun- 
teer naturalist on a five years' voyage in the Beagle, a 
ten-gun bri, which was commissioned to survey the 
shores of South America, and to circumnavigate the 
globe. 

Few marked the departure of that ship ; none could 
foretell what memorable results would follow from her 
voyage, or know that she carried the man whose theory 
was destined to revolutionise or profoundly modify every 
department of human x thought and every motive to 
human action. But so it was. The true epoch-maker, 
never dreaming to what far-reaching and momentous 
issue his work would lead, retired, some time after his 
return, to a quiet home in Kent there to consider the 

B 



2 THE STORY OF CREATION 

significance of the materials gathered during his voyage. 
The distribution of living things in South America, and 
markedly in their relation to those in the Galapagos 
Islands, a group lying five hundred miles from that 
continent, was among the chief causes l which led Darwin 
to convictions regarding the mutability of species, and 
finally to a solution of the problem of their origin, which, 
after the lapse of nearly a quarter of a century spent in 
the testing of every fact and argument telling in favour 
of or against his theory, was published in the famous 
'Origin of Species/ That book is the imperishable 
record of the most momentous advance in man's know- 
ledge of the operations of nature since the publication 
of Newton's < Principia.' 

The pens of many experts, ready writers withal, 
have enriched our scientific literature with clear and 
charming expositions of Darwin's theory for the benefit 
of a public which runs so fast that it has little time to 
read. But that theory deals only with organic evolution, 
i.e. with the origin of the myriad species of plants and 
animals ; and the prominence given to it in virtue of its 
more immediate interest makes us apt to overlook the 
fact that it is only a small part of an ail-embracing 
cosmic philosophy. For whatever lies within the ph* 
nomenal the seen or felt and therefore within tl> 
sphere of observation, experiment, and comparison, 

1 ' In July opened first note-book on Transmutation of Species. Had 
been greatly struck from about the month of previous March on character 
of South American fossils, and species on Galapagos Archipelago. These 
facts (especially latter) origin of all my views. J Extract from Pocket- 
book for 1837, Darwin's Life andLetters, i. p. 276. Referring to the same 
matter, Darwin says in a letter to Sir J. D. Hooker, dated January n, 1844, 
* Gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to 
the opinion I started with) tfiat species are not (it is like confessing a 
murder) immutable.' /W. vol. u. p. 25. 



INTRO D UCTOR Y 3 

whether galaxy which only the telescope makes knovvn, 
or monad whose existence only the microscope reveals, 
is subject-matter of inquiry, both as to its becoming and 
as to its relation to the totality of things. It is this 
more general conspectus of evolution as a working hypo- 
thesis which, if it does not explain every fact, is incon- 
sistent with none, that the following pages are designed 
to give in clear and, as far as possible, simple words. 

Before attempting this it is desirable to outline the 
phenomena which that theory explains ; and the first 
part of this book will therefore describe such matters as 
the stuff of which all things are made, its. combinations, 
affinities, and distribution ; the relation, likeness, and 
unlikeness between the stellar and solar systems, and 
between the earth and its fellow-planets ; the varied 
forms and conditions of past and present life, and the 
relation between these and the inorganic or non-living 
in brief, whatever makes up the visible universe. Many 
facts will, therefore, be set down which every schoolboy 
is supposed to kno\v, but which most folks whose 
school days are long past have probably forgotten. But 
the repetition may make easier that which follows by 
way of explanation, and, moreover, may foster the 
growth of that feeling of an underlying and indivisible 
unity between the remote and near, the past and present, 
the living and non-living, which is apt to lie dormant 
when things in chemical or vital relation are treated as 
separate, or as differing in kind. Astronomer or chemist, 
geologist or palaeontologist, psychologist or physiologist, 
botanist or zoologist, all are members one of another, 
and none can say to his fellow, ' I have no need of thee. 1 
The astronomer captures the truant light from the stars, 
and the chemist, decomposing it, compels from it the 
secret of their structure, even the direction in which 

B 2 



THE STORY OF CREATION 

they travel. The geologist rives the strata asunder, and 
discloses their succession and contents ; the palaeonto- 
logist, disengaging the fossils embedded in them, or 
altogether composing them, finds the ancestral forms of 
living species and the missing links in the unbroken 
chain of life. The psychologist may analyse and 
catalogue the operations of the mind, but the key to 
understanding them lies in the study of brain structure 
and function, of which the physiologist is master ; while 
the botanist and zoologist alike miss the significance- of 
the phenomena of plant and animal life if these are 
treated as separate departments of biology. Truly, as 
Emerson says, ' the day of days, the great day of the 
feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the 
unity in things/ 

Yet must we exclaim with the chorus in the ( Anti- 
gone/ and in these days with a deeper meaning, l Who 
can survey the whole field of knowledge ? Who can grasp 
the clues, and then thread the labyrinth ? ' For the mate- 
rial is so wide-ranging and varied that only the barest 
outline is possible ; and in dealing whether with star or, 
species, the one must often represent the whole, the 
individual the class. ' For the purpose of getting a 
definite knowledge of what constitutes the leading modi- 
fications of animal and plant life it is not needful to 
examine more than a comparatively small number of 
animals and plants/ 1 Our knowledge will, however, 
thereby advance from the particular to the general, and 
be enlarged from a mere storage of facts to an all-in- 
clusive philosophy of things ; so that although we may 
not escape errors of detail, we shall be saved by true 
apprehension of the universal. 

The limits of this book demand the exclusion of 

1 Huxley's American Addresses^ p, 154. 



INTRODUCTORY 5 

reference to old cosmogonies, and to attempts to square 
them with facts. What this or that philosopher has 
guessed, what this or that ancient manuscript or tablet 
records, about the heaven and earth, 'and all that in 
them is/ has only an historical interest and value. To 
deal with such matters here would give them a false 
importance, and, moreover, confuse things proved with 
obsolete speculations. Still more does this apply when 
the mechanical explanation of the general and simple 
phenomena of the lifeless is extended to the special and 
complex phenomena of life in its ascending scale from 
rnoneron to man, without pause wherein 'caprice or chance 
could enter to disturb the sequence. But caprice and 
chance are not : the nebulous stuff of which the universe 
is the product held latent within its diffused vapours not 
only the elements of which the dry land and the waters 
are built, and from which the boundless varieties of 
plants and animals have been evolved, but aught else 
that, through work of man for good or ill, has composed 
the warp and woof of this world's strange, eventful story. 
Be it borne in mind, however, at the outset, that although 
much Is explained by evolution, and although no limita- 
tions to its application can be admitted within the sphere 
of the phenomenal, there remains much more than is 
dreamt of in our philosophy unexplained, around the 
impenetrable marge of which imagination, and the sense 
of mystery that feeds it, can play. ' Positive knowledge 
does not and never can fill the whole region of possible 
thought. At the uttermost reach of discovery there 
arises, and must ever arise, the question, What lies be- 
yond ? ' l The whence of the nebula and its potential 
life is an abiding mystery that overawes and baffles us. 
The 'beginnings of the crystal are no less unknown and 

1 First Principles, p. 1 6, 3rd cd, 



6 THE STORY OF CREATION 

tin discoverable than the beginnings of the cell : the ulti- 
mate causes which lock the atoms of the one in angular 
embrace, and which quicken with pulsating life the cor- 
puscles of the other, lie beyond our ken. And if of 
the beginnings nothing can be known, so is it with the 
things themselves, which affect us by their colour, their 
weight, and movement They remain the unknown cause 
of sensations which are themselves, as Helmholtz says, 
and as Descartes said two centuries before him, only 
symbols of the objects of the external world, correspond- 
ing to them in some such way as written characters 
or articulate words to the things which they denote. 
There is no greenness in the grass ; there is no redness 
in the rose ; there is no hardness in the diamond : that 
which our sensations report to consciousness as colour 
and hardness being the result of myriads of unlike 
motions, some of which are repeated as often every 
second as there are seconds in thirty millions of years. 

Thought and emotion have their antecedents in 
molecular changes In the matter of the brain, and are as 
completely within the range of causation and as capable 
of mechanical explanation as material phenomena, but 
of them no material qualities, as weight and occupancy of 
space, can be predicated. Heat may be expressed in 
equivalent foot-pounds, light and sound and" nervous 
transmission in measurable velocities, but these never. 
We cannot make the passage from chemistry to con- 
sciousness, or transform motions of nerve-tissue into Iove 3 
reverence, and hate. 

But let us, without further preamble, advance to the 
matter in hand, since, to quote the author of the Book 
-of Maccabees, 'it is a foolish thing to make a long 
prologue and to be short in the story itself/ 



PART I.-DESCRIPTIVE 



CHAPTER l. 

THE UNIVERSE: ITS CONTENTS. 

THE Universe is made up of Matter and Motion. 

I. Matter, Under this term are comprised all sub- 
stances that occupy space and affect the senses, Matter 
is manifest in four states solid, liquid, gaseous, and ultra- 
gaseous in the form of electrically-charged corpuscles 
projected into space. It is probably also present through- 
out the universe in the highly tenuous form called ether. 

Between the above states there is no absolute break, 
matter assuming any one of them according to the 
relative strength of the forces which bind, and of the 
energies which loosen, the component parts of bodies ; 
in other words, according to the temperature or pressure. 
Eg., water becomes solid when its latent heat or con- 
tained motion is dissipated; and gaseous to invisibility 
when its particles are driven asunder by heat. 1 

Since the ultimate nature of matter remains unknown 
and unknowable, we can only infer what it is by learning 
what it does. The actions of bodies, whatever their states, 
are explicable only on the assumption that the bodies are 
made up of infinitely small particles which, in their com- 

1 In choosing water as an example, its peculiar action in expanding as 
it approaches the solid state should be noted. Perhaps this is due to the 
(brm in which, as in snow, its molecules crystallise. 



8 THE STORY OF CREATION 

bined state as mechanical units, are called molecules ; 
and in their free state, as chemical units, are called 
atoms. The molecule is a compound body reduced to 
a limit that cannot be passed without altering its nature. 

The atoms, or so-called elementary substances, 
number, as far as is known at present, between seventy 
and eighty, but many of them are extremely rare, and 
exist in such minute quantities as to be familiar only to 
the chemist. They were called ' atoms ' on the assump- 
tion of their indivisibility, but: this has been recently 
disproved. The atom is an aggregation of what are 
called ' electrons/ which are in ( a state of rapid inter- 
locked motion/ and concerning which, Sir Oliver Lodge 
says, r it is a fascinating guess that they constitute the 
fundamental substratum of which all matter is com- 
peted. . . . On this view, the ingredient of which the 
whole of matter is made up, is nothing more or less than 
electricity.' 1 It is estimated that an atom of hydrogen 
contains 700 electrons ; an atom of sodium 16,000, and 
an atom of radium 160,000. An atom of matter possess- 
ing an electron in excess is called an f ion/ and it is the 
1 ions ' which act, a negative charge causing the impulse 
to motions of enormous velocity. Each atom may be 
compared with the solar or stellar systems as containing 
a number of bodies moving in rapid orbits. *But the 
comparison fails when the age of the one and that of the 
other is estimated, since ' it is probable that the changes 
in the foundation stones of the universe, the more stable 
elemental atoms themselves, must require a period to 
be expressed only by millions of millions of centuries.' 1 

Although no known energy that we can apply can 
separate any one atom into two, so that, as Dalton said, 
'no man can split an atom/ we do not any longer speak of 

1 Romanes Lecture (1903), Modern Views on Matter, pp. 12, 13. 



THE UNIVERSE : ITS CONTENTS g 

atoms,, in the words of Clerk Maxwell, as f the founda- 
tion stones of the material universe, unchanged and un- 
changeable, not capable of wear, but as true to-day as 
when they were coined at the mint of the mighty 
Artificer/ 

Nothing escapes the law of change. The shrewd 
speculations of Heraclitus the Ionian, who lived two 
thousand five hundred years ago, that everything is in a 
state of flux, and, therefore, that the universe is always 
* becoming,' have added confirmation in every discovery 
of modern physics. An atom, say, of oxygen, entering 
Into myriad combinations, may exhibit the same 
qualities for millions upon millions of years, but its 
destiny to ultimately become something other than it is, 
perchance every atom dissolved, as Sir William Crookes 
suggests, into ' the formless mist ' of protyle assumed 
the primordial matter is irrevocable. 

Nearly a century ago, Dalton discovered that atoms 
combine in definite proportions of weight and volume 
with other atoms. Many workers followed on the lines 
laid down by him, notably Prout, who formulated the 
theory that the atomic weights are multiples of the 
atomic weight of hydrogen, the lightest of the so-called 
elements. 

The researches of the past few years establish the 
fact that certain of the elements possess such strongly 
marked likenesses as to warrant their classification into 
groups, but these groups did not appear to be connected 
with one another, nor to have any relation to the far 
larger number of elements not falling into groups. 
Recently, however, a marked advance towards proof of 
the common origin of all the elements has been made 
by a Russian chemist, MendeleefT, 1 who, following New- 
lands, has shown that if they are arranged ( in the order of 
1 Cf. Ad. Wurtz's Atomic Theory, pp. 154-163. 



10 THE STORY OF CREATION 

their atomic weights, from hydrogen as I,' to radium, 1 
the heaviest yet known, as about 225, the series does not 
exhibit continuous advance, but breaks up into a number 
of sections, in each of which the several terms present 
analogies with the corresponding terms of other series. 
Thus, the whole series does not run a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, &c. 
&c, 5 but a, b, c, d ; A, B, C, D ; a, & 7, S, and so on, in 
recurring similarities.' In this we have aperiodic law, as it 
is called, which embraces all the elements according to the 
increasing value of their atomic weights, and which has 
restored to their rightful place in the succession certain 
elements for which no place in any of the series of groups 
could be found. More than this, and as evidencing 
the fruitful play of the imagination, Mendeleeff, finding 
certain gaps between neighbouring elements, pointed 
out that they could be filled only by elements possessing 
chemical and physical properties which he accurately 
specified. And, sure enough, some of these vacancies 
have been filled by the discovery of elements with the 
properties which Mendeleeff predicted they must possess. 
This is "as interesting a romance as the discovery of 
Neptune, the existence of which, it will be remembered, 
M. le Verrier and Professor Adams independently 
deduced from the anomalous movements of Uranus, 
which ' swam into the ken ' of Dr. Galle at Berlin when 
he pointed his telescope to that part of the heavens where 
the mathematicians told him he would find the planet 

Commenting on this significant grouping of atoms, 
Professor Huxley, in his masterly survey of the progress 
of science in Mr. Humphry Ward's * Reign of Queen 
Victoria/ says that 'this is a conception with which 
biologists are very familiar, animal and plant groups 
constantly appearing as series of parallel modifications 

1 This strange substance, in which the riddles of matter and energy 
seem to be focussed.' Edinburgh Review^ Oct. 1903, p. 387. 



THE UNIVERSE: ITS CONTENTS n 

of similar yet different primary forms. In the living 
world, facts of this kind are -now understood to mean 
evolution from a common prototype. It is difficult to 
imagine that in the not-living world they are devoid of 
significance. Is it not possible, nay, probable, that they 
may mean the evolution of our " elements" from a primary 
form of matter? Fifty years ago such a suggestion 
would have been scouted as a revival of the dreams of 
tlie alchemists. At present it may be said to be the 
burning question of physico-chemical science/ 

The elements seldom occur in a free state, nearly all 
bodies being compound, or formed by the uniqn of two 
or more, rarely exceeding four, elements. Oxygen, 
which is the most abundant and important of all, and, 
when uncombined, a tasteless and invisible gas, enters 
into nearly one-half of the crust of the globe ; while of 
such limited variety of stuff is the infinite complexity of 
things in earth and heaven produced, that the mass of 
matter in the universe, as the spectroscopic analysis of 
light radiated from the heavenly bodies shows, is made 
up of about fourteen elements. Living things are 
mainly composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and 
nitrogen. 

Our knowledge of molecules, as of atoms, is yet in 
its infancy, and it would seem that particles which are 
beyond the range of our most powerful microscopes to 
reveal may be as astoundingly complex as the giant 
orbs of the heavens nay, as the universe itself. Many 
ingenious experiments and calculations have been made 
to arrive at their size and structure, but they leave the 
problem where they found it The seven-hundred- 
millionth part of an inch is considerably under the 
thickness to which, if it could be done, a plate of zinc or 
copper could be reduced without making it cease to be 



THE STORY OF CREATION 

zinc or copper as we know and handle them. The film 
of a soap-bubble scarcely reaches the millionth of a 
millimetre ("03937 f an inch) in thickness. The size of 
a molecule of water is about ^ooooooQir f an inc ^ * n 
diameter ; that is to say, if a drop of water the size of 
a pea were enlarged to the size of the globe, the mole- 
cules would be about as large as cricket balls. The 
number of molecules of albumen in a cube of j^^- of an 
inch of horn is reckoned at seventy-one billions ; while 
the egg of a mammal, which averages -j-^ of an inch in 
diameter, may be estimated to contain ' so many mole- 
cules, that if one were lost or developed in every second, 
they might not all be exhausted until after five thousand 
six hundred years.' * But, as showing how only approxi- 
mate such estimates are, the highest optical aid brings 
us no nearer a knowledge of the ultimate structure of 
organic bodies than we should be of the contents of a 
newspaper seen with the naked eye one-third of a mile 
off. It is, however, impossible for the mind to grasp the 
ideas which such figures and comparisons are intended to 
give. 

We have now reached a point when the grounds 
for the assumptions made concerning the nature of 
matter throughout space, whether in masses, large or 
small ; m molecules, atoms, electrons, or in trie tenuous 
ether ; must be stated. 

If atoms are unchangeable under their present con- 
ditions, and changeable only in their relations through 
combination with other atoms, and in their distribution 
in space, it follows that all changes are due to motion. 

2. Motion. Motion throughout the universe is pro- 
duced or destroyed, quickened or retarded, increased 

1 Cf. Mr. Sorby's Presidential Address to the Royal Microscopic 
Society, Microscopic Journal^ March 1876. 



THE UNIVERSE: ITS CONTENTS 13 

or lessened, by two indestructible powers of opposite 
nature to each other (a) Force, and () Energy. 

(a) For the present purpose, Force is defined as that 
which produces or quickens motions binding together 
two or more particles of ponderable matter, and which re- 
tards or resists motions tending to separate such particles. 

When Force acts between visible masses of matter, 
large or small, distant or near, it is called Gravitation \ 
when it acts between the molecules composing masses it 
is called Molecular Attraction, or Cohesion ; when it acts 
between the atoms uniting them chemically into mole- 
cules it is called Chemical Attraction, or Affinity. 

As Force inheres in, and can never be taken from, 
ponderable matter, every atom possesses the tendency to 
attract, and, in the absence of any opposing energy 
sufficient to overcome such tendency, the power to attract, 
every other atom, as well as to resist any separating 
power or counteracting energy. The sum-total of Force 
is constant, and its several qualities are grouped under 
one doctrine, called the Persistence of Force. 

(ff) For the present purpose, Energy is- defined as 
that which produces or quickens motions separating, and 
which resists or retards motions binding together, two 
or more particles of matter or of the ethereal medium. 

The sum-total of Energy in the universe is a fixed 
quantity, but it is not, like Force, bound up with matter 
so that it cannot be transferred. It exists whether it \ 
acts or not, and therefore it can be stored up. 

Energy is of two kinds, active and passive, or, in the 
terms of science, kinetic and potential. E.g., a stone 
lying on -a roof or on a mountain ; a clock wound up but 
not going ; a bed of coal ; a barrel of gunpowder, have 
potential energy. This becomes kinetic when the stone 
falls, the clock goes, the coal burns, or the powder 



14 THE STORY OF CREATION 

explodes. Not only does the potential pass into the 
kinetic, and vice vers&> but the several forms of kinetic 
energy pass into one another motion into heat, heat 
into electricity, electricity into heat, light, and chemical 
action ; a definite amount of any one form of Energy 
passing into an equivalent amount of the other, the one 
disappearing as the other appears. And the tendency of 
all passive Energy is to be converted into active Energy 
until a dead or uniform level is reached, as in bodies of the 
same temperature, wherein no differences of separating 
power remain. The significance of this will be apparent 
when the ultimate destiny of the universe is considered. 

These qualities of convertibility and indestructibility 
are grouped under one doctrine, called the Conservation 
of Energy. 

The persistence of Force and the conservation of 
Energy may be grouped together under the doctrine of 
the Indestructibility of Motion. Force is the attracting or 
pulling power ; Energy is the repelling or pushing power ; 
and by the antagonism of these the work of the universe 
is done. - Every mass pulls every other mass by the force 
of gravitation ; the earth the moon, the sun the earth, 
some other star the sun, and vice versd. And the moon 
would fall to the earth, as also the earth to the sun, but 
that the energy of their orbital motion overcomes the 
force. When a loaded waggon is pulled, especially up- 
hill, the muscular- power which, in the form of kinetic 
energy, is expended by the horse overcomes the attrac- 
tive power inherent in the earth to draw the waggon 
towards its centre and keep it there. When the energy 
of heat which drives asunder the particles of bodies, 
changing them from the solid to the liquid or gaseous 
form, is expended, then the particles resume the solid 
form in virtue of the force of cohesion. 



THE UNIVERSE: ITS CONTENTS 15 

ff Force had unresisted play, all the atoms in the 
universe would gravitate to a common centre, and ulti- 
mately form a perfect sphere in which no life would 
exist, and in which no work would be done. If Energy 
had unresisted play, the atoms in the universe would be 
driven asunder and remain for ever separated, with the 
like result of changeless powerlessness. But with these 
two powers in conflict, like the Ahriman and Ormuzd of 
the old Persian religion, the universe is the theatre 
of ceaseless redistributions of its contents, whether in 
the sweep of the stars and their attendant systems through 
space, or in the pendulum-like vibrations of the invisible 
particles of every body, or in the throbs of the ethereal 
medium. So rapid are the motions, the rebounds be- 
tween each molecule in hydrogen gas numbering seven- 
teen thousand millions per second, that even if the 
molecules were within microscopic range we could not 
see them ; and yet these collisions are few compared 
with the oscillations of light waves, which number 
hundreds of millions of millions in the same time. 

Such action shows that just as there are spaces or dis- 
tances between the stars measureless in their vastness, so 
there are pores or spaces between the molecules of bodies, 
and between the atoms which compose the molecules (to 
say nothing of the spaces between the electrons in each 
atom), measureless in their minuteness. And if .added 
proofs of these interrnolecular and interatomic and inter- 
electronic spaces were needed, we find them in the con- 
traction and expansion of bodies through the quickened or 
retarded vibrations due to the separating energy manifest 
as heat ; in the compressibility, although slight, of liquids ; 
in the actual solidification of air and of certain refractory 
gases under extreme cold and pressure, nitrogen being 
frozen and hydrogen liquefied by the cold produced by 
their evaporation under the air pump. But more than this. 



16 THE STORY OF CREATION 

These pores between invisible particles, these spaces 
between star and star, spaces so vast that the diameter 
of the earth's orbit, measuring one hundred and eighty- 
eight millions of miles, seen from the nearest star, Is but 
a pin's point, are not vacant. Speaking of the force of 
gravitation, Newton said that to conceive of one body 
acting upon another through a vacuum is so great an 
absurdity, that no man who had ' in philosophical matters 
a competent faculty of thinking ' could ever fall into it 

And the like applies to the transmission of light, heat, 
and other forms of energy between bodies far and near. 
Therefore for the explanation of these varied and yet 
related phenomena it is a necessary assumption that the 
minutest intervals between atoms, as well as the awful 
spaces of the universe, are filled with a highly rarefied, 
elastic medium called Ether, which, ever tremulous with 
unentangled vibrations, Is the vehicle of Energy alike 
from the infinitely great and the infinitely small. 

That matter should be .unseen and unfelt is no new 
conception to us. Its existence In an ultra-gaseous state 
as proven by the action of molecules in tubes where as 
high a vacuum as seems possible is obtained ; its Invisi- 
bility in air the vehicle of sound ; in steam, and 
in substances vaporised by the voltaic arc ifs extreme 
rarefaction in such bodies as comets, the stuff of whose 
tails, spreading across millions of miles, could be 
compressed into a small vessel ; prepare us to conceive 
unseen realities. Thus, when the sensory organs are 
powerless to report the facts, Science, excluding no 
faculty from wholesome exercise, bids Imagination use 
her larger insight to make clear the significance of the 
things which eye hath not seen not ear heard. 

The value of the foregoing abstract of the relations 
between Matter and Motion will be proved or disproved 



THE UNIVERSE: ITS CONTENTS 



u* che degree in which it squares with the phenomena to 
be hereafter described and explained. Meanwhile the 
subjoined tabular summary may set the subject in a 
clearer light 



MATTER. 



Masses 



Molecules 



Atoms 



MOTION. 
1 



FORCE. 



.GY. 



J 

Attraction between 
Masses, or Gravi- 
tation 


POTENTIAL, OR 
PASSIVE. 
Separation of Masses 
(commonly called 
Visible Energy of 
Position) 
Ex. Stone on a roof 
A head of water 


KINETIC, OR 

ACTIVE. 1 

Motion of M asses 
Ex* Moon's motion rou:d 
the earth 
Stone falling 
Water falling 



Attraction between 
Molecules, or 
Cohesion 



Attraction between 
Atoms, or Che- 
mical Affinity 



Electrons Ionic charges 



Separation of Mole- 
cules 
Ex. Steam 



Separation of Atoms 
Ex. Atoms in a free 
state 

Paired electrons, i.e. 
equal Positive and 
Negative 



Ether (?) 



(No evidence of 
aggregating power 
inhering in it) 



Motion of Molecules 
Ex. ^ Steam _ condensing 

into liquid 

Heat- vibrating particles 
of a poker 

Motion of Atoms 
Ex. Atoms rushing to 
form molecules 

Extra Negative elec- 
trons (ions) 



, (All Kinetic Energy, 
except the small pro- 
portion intercepted by 
bodies in spaqe, passes 
from matter to the ethe- 
real medium. This is_the 
doctrine of the Dissipa- 
tion of Energy) 



* Each kind of Kinetic Energy has separative, combining, and continuous or neutral 
motion. Example of Separativea stone thrown upwards ; example of Combining- a 
stone falling ; example of Neutral-~a lop spinning in the same place. 

NoTE.-~f he foregoing reference to atoms and electrons has to be taken m con- 
nection with recent theories of atomic constitution propounded by Lodge, Thomson, 
Crookes, and other physicists. 



S THE STORY OF CREATION 



CHAPTER II. 

DISTRIBUTION OF MATTER IN SPACE. 

MATTER is both visible and invisible, ponderable and 
imponderable. In its ponderable form it is distributed 
throughout space in bodies of varying densities ; in its 
imponderable form as ether it fills the intervals between 
the particles composing those bodies, as also the vast 
intervals between the bodies themselves. The most 
important of these as the sand by the sea-shore, innu- 
merable are the ' fixed ' stars, so called from having 
no apparent motion of their own, although in reality 
travelling at enormous velocities. Each of these, unless 
it be an extinct, burnt-out sun, shines by its own light, 
and is probably, like the sun, which is itself a star, the 
centre of a system of planets with their satellites or 
moons and other bodies. * One star differeth from 
another star in glory/ Not, speaking broadly, in the 
stuff of which all are made, for the light thrown by the 
spectroscope on the chemistry of the heavenly bodies 
has revealed their general identity of structure. No 
matter how distant the star, so long as the light emitted 
is strong enough ; broken on prisms, it reveals through 
its spectrum not only what elements are present in the 
glowing vapour, but even the 'direction of the star's 
motion, i.e. whether it is receding from or approaching 



DISTRIBUTION OF MATTER IN SPACM ig 

our system. The annual parallax (or the apparent 
change of position as seen from opposite points of th^ 
earth's orbit) of the nearest fixed star, Alpha Centaurir 
is nearly one second of arc, giving a distance of twenty 
millions of millions of miles. - So vast is the interval, 
that our solar system would appear as only a point in 
space when viewed from this star, the light from which, 
travelling at the rate of one hundred and eighty-six 
thousand miles per second of time, takes nearly three 
years and a half to reach us, so that we see the star as it 
'then shone. 

The differences between the stars are in their sizes, 
their brilliancy or magnitude, and their colours, this last 
giving some clue to their stage of development For 
there are stars young, middle-aged, old and decrepit ; 
and there are stars cold and dead, radiating no energy, 
and whose existence can be known only by their 
influence exerted through the force of gravitation upon 
the proper motion of other bodies, as, e.g., of Sirius by 
its dimly seen companion. 

Astronomers have not yet arrived at any certain 
conclusions regarding the general distribution of matter 
in space. But the combinations, as seen from our 
system, are as varied as they are complex. Besides 
double and multiple stars their apparent nearness to 
one another often being due to their lying in nearly the 
same straight line from our system there are the con- 
stellations, many of the names of which are relics of that 
animistic stage in man's belief when everything was 
personified. There are also star-clusters, light, cloudy- 
looking patches, made up of suns which, from our point 
of view, lie densely packed together in numberless 
galaxies. 

Besides the fixed stars and their systems, straggling 



2o THE STORY OF CREATION 

in scattered groups on either side of the milky way or 
composing its cloud-like arch, there are the vast masses of 
glowing matter called, in contradistinction to the stellar 
nebulae, which the telescope has resolved into stars, 
gaseous nebulae. These are of regular and irregular shape, 
circular, elliptical, and spiral ; they are the raw stuff of 
which suns and systems are formed. There are also dark 
nebulas capable of reflecting, and also of partially 
obscuring, light. 

These nebulae ; the fixed stars } with whatever apper- 
tains to them, and the vagrant bodies known as comets, 
with their more or less associated myriad meteor streams ; 
down to the fine cosmic dust that falls on polar snows 
or sinks into the deep ocean ; comprise the ponderable 
matter of the universe. The sum-total of the radiant 
energy of all luminous bodies, save the small proportion 
intercepted by one from the other, is in course of con- 
tinuous transfer to the imponderable ethereal medium. 

The results of modern research into the structure 
of the universe, in which inquiry the late Richard 
Proctor took a distinguished and important part, are 
thus summed up by him in the article on * Astronomy J 
in the eighth edition of the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica ' . 

c The sidereal system is altogether more complicated 
and more varied in structure than has hitherto been sup- 
posed : in the same region of the stellar depths coexist 
stars of many orders of real magnitude ; all the nebulae, 
gaseous or stellar, planetary, ring-formed, elliptical, and 
spiral, exist within the limits of the sidereal system ; and 
lastly, the whole system is ahve with movements, the 
laws of which may one day be recognised, though at 
present they are too complex to be understood.' 



CHAPTER III, 

THE SUN AND PLANETS. 

THE Solar System comprises i, the Sun , 2, the 
Planets, large, small, and minor ; 3, Moons or Satel- 
lites ; 4, Comets, together with .Meteors or Shooting 
Stars. 

The Sun consists of a nucleus, surrounded by enve- 
lopes called the photosphere and the chromosphere, 
outside which lies the mysterious corona, whose deli- 
cate silver radiance forms the glorious nimbus of a total 
eclipse. The nucleus is a gaseous mass, burning at a 
temperature of which we have no conception, being pro- 
bably millions of degrees ; but the condensation which 
goes on under the radiation of energy may have already 
reduced the core to a liquid or putty-like state. The 
disc which we see includes the vaporous photosphere, with 
its puzzling grain-like face, here and there pitted with 
the cloud-patches or spots, from the mpvements of which 
we learn that the sun rotates on his axis in twenty-five 
days. The chief constituents of the chromosphere are 
hydrogen and * helium/ which last-named was discovered 
in the mineral 'cleveite' by Professor Ramsay in 1896, and 
which the spectroscopic researches of Sir William and 
Lady Huggins and Sir William Ramsay show may be a 
product of radium, therefore evidencing the transmutation 
of the elements. It is from this chromosphere that the red 
prominences or tongues, which often reach a height of one 
hundred thousand miles, are expelled, Vast as is the sun's 
volume, exceeding several hundred times all the other 



22 THE STORY OF CREATION 

members of his system, he is by no means the biggest 
of the stars, and, as compared with them in brightness, 
probably does not exceed the third or fourth magnitude. 
But he has the greatest interest and importance for us, 
seeing that to him are due those manifold energies by 
which the processes of nature, both chemical and vital, 




FIG. i. Sun-spots. 

are carried on within the limits of his system Further, 
with the knowledge which has been gained during late 
years concerning the sameness of the stuff of which 
nebulae, stars, and planets are spun, the nature and 
arrangement of the contents of our solar system enable 
us to make lawful analogies concerning the contents of 
systems beyond it 



TffJS SUN AND PLANETS 23 

Of the solar radiant energy the planets receive or 
intercept only the two hundred and thirty millionth 
part, the earth receiving but the two thousand one 
hundred and seventy millionth part. Even a large pro- 
portion of this energy is immediately, and the whole of 
it finally, radiated into space, 

The planets, one and all, revolve in nearly circular 
orbits, but on rather differently inclined planes, round 
the sun, in virtue of that energy of orbital motion with 
which each was endowed at birth, and which counteracts 
the opposing force of the sun's gravitation, which would 
otherwise pull them into him, absorbing them in his mass. 
Including the swarm of minor planets' or asteroids, of 
which new ones are being frequently discovered, they 
are perhaps to be numbered by thousands. They are 
of various sizes and densities, and in different stages 
of progress and decay. The evidence for the primitive 
gaseous state of all bodies now possessing greater density 
will be given hereafter, but our system itself witnesses 
to the passage of planets and satellites to an ultimately 
solid form. Some, like our earth and Mars, have cooled 
down sufficiently to be covered by a hard crust, and to 
be fit abodes for living creatures j others, like Jupiter and 
correspondingly huge bodies, are still in a more or less 
heated and partly self-luminous condition The smaller 
bodies have long been cold and inert, like our airless, silent, 
and barren moon. In her pale reflected light, her scarred 
surface, and her vast ringed craters, illumined no longer 
by flame of central fires, we learn that what she is the 
planets and the sun himself will one day become. 

The moons revolve round their several planets under 
similar restraint of force and freedom of energy as the 
planets themselves. The gaseous masses composing 
comets and meteo* streams travel in very eccentric orbits, 



THE STORY OF CREATION 




FIG, 2. Lunar Crater : Copernicus, 



THE SUN AND PLANETS 25 

In fine, motion is everywhere, in ether, atom, molecule, 
and mass ; the sun, like his fellow-stars, has his proper 
motion, carrying with him planets, satellites, and what- 
ever other bodies are within the influence of his force of 
gravitation This is itself obedient to the attractions of 
bodies perchance as much exceeding his own in power 
as he exceeds the mote dancing in his beams. 

The mass of matter called the earth is of nearly 
spherical shape, being" slightly flattened at the poles and 
bulged towards the equator 

It consists of a core within a rocky crust, three- fourths 
of which is covered by a layer of water, and the whole 
surrounded by an atmosphere. 1 

The entire mass, solid, liquid, and gaseous, spins on its 
axis at the rate of about one thousand miles every hour, 
and speeds through space in its orbit round the sun at the 
rate of more than one thousand miles every minute. 

The atmosphere is composed, in the main, of the un- 
combmed elements oxygen and nitrogen; 2 the water is 
chiefly compounded of combined but mobile oxygen and 
hydrogen. Of every hundred parts of the crust, ninety- 
nine are made up of about sixteen out of the seventy-odd 
elementary substances, and of these sixteen the larger 
number exist in small proportion. It is computed that 
fully one-half of the crust consists of oxygen which 
it has taken into itself from the atmosphere, and that 
already one-third of the water of the ocean has been ab- 
sorbed by minerals. 3 The average density of the earth 
is about five times and a half that of a body of the same 
size made of pure water, but the large extent covered 
by the ocean in the southern hemisphere, whither the 

1 Taking the earth's suiface as I, the sea coveis 0734 parts, and the 
land 0-266 parts. 

2 Add to these the constituent ' argon,' discovered in 1895, 
a (Jeikie's Text-book of Geology > pp. 30, 298, 



26 THE STORY OF CREATION 

tendency to collect was probably manifest at the outset 
when the steamy vapours condensed and filled the 
depressions in the crust, points to an excess of density 
in that direction. 

What the inside of the earth is like no man can 
tell ; the latest theory, which has the support of Sir 
Archibald Geikie, is that beneath the solid crust there is 
a molten magma over one hundred miles in depth, which 
shades continually inwards into a gaseous centre. This 
theory goes far to explain the crumpled and fractured sur- 
face, and also earthquake movements and volcanic action. 1 

These show that the unquiet earth has not yet lost 
the whole of the original store of energy which it ac- 
quired during the aggregation of the particles of which it 
is built up in their passage from a diffused nebulous state 
to one of increasing density under the action of the 
force of gravitation. But the escape of that energy 
through the crust to the ethereal medium is uniriter- 
mittent, and its final dissipation into space is therefore 
pnly a question of time. 

The crust was probably never uniformly smooth, 
because the contraction of the interior mass as it cooled 
would bring about a state of tension causing shrinkage 
of the surface, producing intense heat .Hence the 
beginnings of those wrinkled, cracked, and crumpled 
features which 6ther agencies would score more deeply 
in the face of the globe, giving thereby beauty and 
variety in valley, mountain, table-land, and all else that 
makes the earth so fair a dwelling-place. 

Our knowledge of the crust extends only to a rela- 
tively small depth, the aggregate thickness of the strata 
or layers of rock already measured being about twenty- 
five miles, or the one hundred and sixtieth part of the 

1 Cf- Geilde, Text-book of Geology, vol. i. p. 73 (1903 edition). 



THE SUN AND PLANETS 27 

earth's semidiameten The term ' rock ' is applied alike 
to hard granite and loose sand, to ore veined with metal 
and to mud from country lanes, as including the mate-, 
rials composing the crust or shell. Rocks are divided 
into two classes unstratified and stratified, The un~ 
stratified, which are also called igneous or Plutonic, 
embrace all rocks which, as they now exist, have been 
fused together by heat, or erupted from the earth's in- 
terior by volcanic agency. The stratified^ which are 
also called aqueous or Neptunic, embrace all rocks which 
have been deposited as sediment by the action of water 
or of the atmosphere, or which are due to the growth 
and decay of plants and animals, With this class 
are grouped the metamorphic^ for the most part strati- 
fied rocks which have been metamorphosed into a 
crystalline state by the action of heat and pressure, 
resulting in effacement of their original character, 
and in the destruction of traces of any organic 
remains In them, Throughout the entire series of 
rocks the newer have been, and are being, formed 
out of the older, which, unless upheaved, are always 
found at the bottom ; but of the original crust perhaps 
no trace remains. 

The 'depth to which the unstratified rocks extend is 
unknown, and as they contain no organic remains they 
tell us nothing concerning the origin and succession of 
life on the earth. The stratified rocks, which alone 
throw light on this question, have been divided for con- 
venience, and not as implying any gaps between their 
several formations save where natural causes have ope- 
rated, into four, or sometimes five, epochs. These, to- 
gether with the typical remains of plant and animal 
associated with each, are as follows : 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



Epoch 


Thickness of 
Strata 


Plant 


Animal 


'Archsean or Eozoic (dawn fife), 
chiefly metamorphic 


70,000 feet 


AlgK 

(Chiefly 


Monera 
marine) 


Primary or Palaeozoic (ancient life) . 


48,000 


Ferns 


Fishes 


Secondary or Mesozoic (.middle life) 


15,000 


Pine forests 


Reptiles 


Tertiary or Cainozoic (recent life) , 
Quaternary or Post-Tertiary . 


3,000 
600 


Leaf- bearing 
forests 
Existing 


Mammals 
species 



CHAPTER IV, 

THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH, 

GEOLOGY deals with the stuff of which the earth is 
made, its origin, structure, and arrangement. But so 
interrelated is the material of which all things are formed, 
that inquiry into the structure of rocks has to be ex- 
tended well nigh at the outset to their contents that 
is, to the fossil remains of ancient life which are not 
only preserved within the larger number of strata, but 
entirely compose vast masses, as coal-beds, chalk hills, 
and coral islands. Therefore the interest which the 
study of the erupted, fire-fused, and water-laid rocks 
awakens, especially in their witness to ceaseless changes 
through an ever-receding past, becomes more immediate 
and human when the relics of ancient life-forms are 
examined > and when their appearance, persistence, or 
disappearance, their order and succession in an ever- 
varying, ever-ascending scale, are traced. For in them 
lies the record of life on the earth through measureless 
time ; the life that was, parent of all life that is ; from 
simpl^lime-speck to structure of subtlest complexity 
named man, with its passionate story of agonies and 
joys, of struggle towards a kingdom of heaven yet 
unentered. 

True it is that the record is very imperfect, that the 



30 THE STORY OF CREATION 

gaps remain wide and numerous, even when supple- 
mented by fossils from different parts of the globe. But 
the wonder is that the blanks are not greater when the 
nature and extent of the changes to which all rocks have 
been, and are being, subjected, are considered. In addi- 
tion to the havoc and erTacement wrought by the earth's 
internal heat, the formation of every deposit involves the 
waste of an older deposit, which has in its turn been 
derived from more primitive stuff, the effect throughout 
being mutilation or destruction of the organic contents. 

It is impossible that the vast number of lowest life- 
forms, whether plant or animal, should have been pre- 
served. Traces of marine organisms survive in the trails 
and borings of sea- worms, or in the imprint of carcasses of 
jelly-fish stranded on the ripple-marked mud of ancient 
sea-shores ; but of the soft-bodied creatures themselves 
not a vestige remains. Only such hard parts as the 
shells or skeletons of animals, and the bark, wood, and 
seeds of plants, would reach the fossil state in more or less 
perfect form ;, and even their preservation is contingent 
upon the nature of the beds in which they are interred. 
As it is, but a remnant of all that ever lived in the water, 
and a far less proportion of the smaller population of the 
land, are represented in actual fragments. Sometimes 
only an impression survives, as when a dissolved shell 
has left its witness in cast or mould, in clay or mud, or 
an extinct bird or reptile its footprints on the sands of a 
far-off time. Sometimes^ in the compensating action of 
nature, chemical agents, in destroying the original struc- 
ture, infiltrate the vacancy with minerals, replacing the 
form, occasionally in minutest detail. 

Rich as are igneous rocks in wealth-yielding mineral 
veins and ores, they are, save where recent plants and 
animals have been accidentally enveloped in the flowing 



THE PAST LIFE-HTSTORY OF THE EARTH 31 

lava or dust of volcanic eruptions, destitute of fossils. 
There was a period in the earth's history when life was 
not, and its beginnings, which, as will be shown here- 
after, were probably in polar regions, were certainly 
subsequent to the ejection of the molten or pasty 
masses which cooled into true volcanic or fire-formed 
rocks, 




FIG 3 Footprints of Birds, with (2) marks of Raindrops. 

Although fossils are found only in sedimentary 
rocks, they are not universally present in them Varied 
and mixed as those rocks are in composition, it suffices 
here to group them under two heads i, those derived 
from sediment, in its several states of gravel, sand, and 
mud; and 2 3 those formed of the remains of plants, as 
coal in its several stages from peat to the hard graphite 
or black-lead of the older formations ; or of the remains 



& THE STORY OF C& RAT/ON 

of animals, composing chalk, limestone, and other organ!* 
cally-derlved rocks. But whatever their source, and how- 
ever much the original order of strata has been deranged 
by hidden agencies which have tilted them at all angles, 
cleaved and contorted them, and superposed the older on 
the newer, there is a well-ascertained .succession in them 
which their fossils alone have enabled us in determine, 
each formation having Its owncharaclciisiic kinds or domi- 
nant types of plant and animal. Not that there are any 
hard and fast lines between the disappearance of an earlier 
species and the appearance of a later species, the forma 
being often commingled Some of the low and simple 
types persist through almn.stall formations ; some of the 
owe complex are found in only VUG or two formations i 
but there is a merging of one into another ; there are 
gradations and alliances of type, as of birds with reptilian 
char.ictor.s, and vice vew& And although seemingly 
isolated types occur, or the divergence between earlier 
and later types has binned their relating it will be seen 
that the modern are the ancient slowly and wondroiwly 
modified. In shoit, the life history of the globs h one 
both f tinhiokcu relation and progress ; the gaps oxist 
tHT.itiKe the record Ls mutilated. Nature, like the Sibyl 
of Cuma\ has destroyed her honks. 

The fossil .yiVldinj* rocks arc subdivided into the 
systems slujuit nit fijj, 4, Tfu*u* is no me stn tbtt of tht* 
tMilhs i'rusl wheti 1 u coniplrte seiies is to be fountl wilh 
luytT sMjH'i|K'etl on layer like the skin** of an oitiou ; 
hut whatever j'.ips exist Ineally do nut uflVit tin: u*I;divc 
;i|*e utul pluce of f^ch strittusu f which t i* unnrtrktnl 
tlH*vv, iiir fixed l*y the ftralH Nu uisifujni |mtu a i|*lr \\m 
ji-\Tnu*d thcthtiuv of tlu: syhtcm-iiiUTics. Ktntietiiues 
they mtituite the plare where n ftirnmtion in utaikntiy 
an the Silunaii (from the 



FIG. 4. TABLE OF STRATIFIED ROCKS. 



(To /ace fa 32. 



QUATERNARY. 

TERTIARY 

01 
CAINOZOIC. 



SECONDARY 

or 
MESOZOIC, 



SYSTEM. 

13. RECENT . . 
12 PLIOCENE . 
ii, MIOCENE, , 

\io. EOCENE . , 
9, CRETACEOUS 



8, JURASSIC or 
OOLITIC . 



7. TRIASSIC, 
d PERMIAN . 



5. CARBONIFEROUS 



4. DEVONIAN 



STRATA. TYPICAL FOSSILS. 



PRIMARY 

or 
PALEOZOIC 



3. SILURIAN 



^ CAMBRIAN , , 
AROUEAS] 

or -i, PRE-CAMBRIAX, 
Eozoic j 




i. Univalve (Ctritkium). 
i. Conifer (Sequoia). 



1. Nummulite. 

2. Univalve (A'atica). 



2. Ammonite, new form (Tvrritiles), 

3. Bivalve (P/t). 

4. Ammonite, new form (Hamitts). 

1. Bivalve (Phtladomya). 

2. Bivalve (Trigmia), 



1. Fish-lizard (Ichthyosm 

2, Ammonite. 

4- Footprints of Labyrinthodoif. 

i. Bivalve (o*nwffi4 

3- Ganoid (Palaoniscus). 

1. Precursors of Ammonites (GaiiaKteY 

2. Club-moss (Lefidodcndron) ' 
3- Horsetail Plants (Catamite), 

Ganoid Fish (Pttrichthys). 



{i. Strojhomittih 
2. Zfltfxb. 
3. Pentamtntt, 
Trilobite 4, Cgfymau. 



Seaweed (OWnmia). 



i. Traces of Worms, Sponges, etc, 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 33 

a tribe of ancient Britons), the people formerly inhabiting 
the district ; sometimes they denote typical features of 
the formation : but they are the accepted nomenclature 
in treatises on geology, and are therefore adopted here. 
i. ARCHAEAN : also named Eozoic (datvn life) and 
Prc-Cambrian. These rocks have different names in 
different parts of the globe. For example, in Shrop- 
shire they are called Unconian (from the old Roman 
military station Uriconium, on the site of which the 
village of Wroxeter stands) ; in North America they arc 




FIG. 5. -Fragment of Eozoon Canademe,, naimal SMC. 

known as Laurentian, after the St Lawrence river basin, 
and also as Huronian, after Lake Huron. They have 
been subjected to vast changes which prevent any 
systematic classification of them, and which make the 
placing of the few fossils traces of worms, sponges, and 
plants found in them, in any order of geological time 
very difficult. They fall into three main types: I, 
coarse crystalline gneisses and schists associated with 
plutonic rocks ; 2, finer grained crystallines associated 
with volcanic and metamorphic rocks ; and 3, sedi- 
mentary rocks with volcanic ashes and lavas. 



34 THE STORY OF CREATION 

The Laurentian rocks excited much attention some 
years ago from the supposed discovery of a large 
foraminiferal animal to which the name Eozoon Cana- 
dense was given. But although the deposits of carbon, 
notably in the almost pure form known as graphite, 
point to the agency of organisms, the mineral origin of 
Eozoon Canadense appears now to be beyond question. 1 

' The longevity of an organic type has, on the whole, 




FIG 6 Foraminifer, Gfobigenna bulloides, magnified seventy diameters 
This foim is found floating in tiopical and temperate i,eas. 

<> 

been in inverse proportion to its perfection ;' 2 and some 
of the lower types may smile at man's * claims of long 
descent/ for they have survived through the long and 
change-bringing millions of years to this day, shedding 
their shells on the ocean floor, as their ancestors shed 
theirs.,, forming vast chalk and limestone hills and 
mountain ranges in relatively shallow seas. Not in deep 
oceans, as was formerly held, since the fossils are shown 

1 Geikie's Text-look of Geology, n. p. 879, 
* Cf. Geikie, p. 612. (First edition,) 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 3 



to resemble present shoal water deposits rather thai 
similar oozes found in water over a thousand fathom- 
deep, which further confirms the theory that the grea 




. 7. Section of Gravesend 
Chalk 



F(G. 8. Organisms in Allan lie 
Ooze (highly magnified). 




FIG. 9. Diatoms from * Infusorial 

Earth ' of Richmond, Virginia 

(highly magnified). 



FIG. 10. Tnlobite. 



ocean beds have never been upraised. While some 
secrete chalk, others secrete flint Among the lattei 
are the minute plants known as diatoms, whose remain ; 
compose, among other deposits, the * rotten-stone ' used 

D 2 



36 THE STORY OF CREATION 

as polishing 1 powder, of which no fewer than forty-oni 
thousand million skeletons go to make up a cubic inch, 

2. PRIMARY. The Cambrian rocks, although les 
metamorphic, add little to our knowledge of primitiv 
plant-forms, such as are preserved being probably algae 
or seaweed, corresponding to the tangles covering larg 
areas of the Atlantic, especially the region called th 
Sargasso Sea. But the system is fairly rich in fossil 
of marine animals, themselves the descendants of a loni 
line of perished ancestors. Sponges, sea lilies, and lo\ 
forms of mollusca, or true shell-fish, are found ; bu 
the typical and most perfect fossil is that of the three 
lobed crustaceans called trilobttes, 1 which swarmed \\ 
those ancient seas, and survived till the Carboniferou 
period. 

The Silurian rocks, although exhibiting in crumple< 
and rugged mountain chains the action of agents botl 
above and below the earth, are much less metamorphose* 
than the preceding systems. They are in large measur 
the worn fragments of land areas which stretched acros 
Northern Europe for above two hundred miles into th 
Atlantic, the sediment being deposited in a shallow se 
which then covered Central and Southern Europe, am 
the floor of which was slowly raised aa, a primitiv 
European continent at the close of the Silurian perioi 
by subterranean movements The land plants, whic 
are the earliest as yet met with, are allied to huge club 
mosses, ancestors of the gigantic forest-kings of Devonia 
and Carboniferous times The most ancient of all know 
land animals is a scorpion found in the upper Siluria 
beds of both Scotland and Sweden ; while the marin 
remains are varied and numerous, comprising seaweeds 
foramimfera, corals, star-fish, shell-fish of every kinc 
1 Trilobites with antennae have been found in the Hudson River shales. 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 37 

trilobites, and huger lobster-like crustaceans, sometimes 
measuring above six feet in length. 

But the most important fossils are those of the 
earliest known vertebrates, in the form of armoured fishes, 1 
allied lo the sturgeon, and called ganoids (Gr. ganos, 
splendour ; and eidos, form), from the brilliancy of their 
enamelled scales, 

In this seemingly sudden appearance of highly or- 
ganised animals marking so great an advance in struc- 




FIG J i. A, Recent Ganoid Fish ; B, Ganoid from Devonian strata. 

ture on the higher invertebrates, the imperfection of the 
geological record is brought home to us. For if later' 
forms are modified descendants of earlier, then not only 
are the transitional ancestral forms of the ganoids missing, 
but the species itself is enormously older than the fossils 
imply. The inquirer, however, need not despair, for 
only a limited portion of the dry land has as yet been 
explored with any completeness, and there are vast fossil- 
holding areas submerged and inaccessible ; yet one by 

1 Discovered by Professor Claypole near the "base of the Upper Silurian 
in Pennsylvania; cf. Smithsonian Report ', 1884, p 622. 



3 THE STORY OF CREATION 

one missing links are being found. Probably the pre 
decessors of the ganoids, the skeletons of which an 
cartilaginous, were of a structure too soft to permit o 
their preservation in a fossil state 

In this brief survey of the three earliest systems w< 
have already traversed more than half the total thicknes: 
of the fossiliferous rocks, the deposit of which involved 
lapse of time and series of changes of which no concep 
tion is possible. The base-line of our life is too shon 
for measurement of the distance which separates the 
foraminifera from the ganoids ; of time, as of space, we 
see neither beginning nor end. 

The Devonian and Old Red Sandstone rocks, while 
evidencing frequent redistribution of sea and land, have 
undergone, as compared with the older systems of the 
Primary epoch, but slight disturbance from the upheaving 
and contorting agencies beneath. They are widely dif- 
fused, extending far north within the Arctic circle ; and 
although their fossil contents are very incomplete, they 
bring less fragmentary witnesses to that continuity oi 
life the record of which is so markedly broken in more 
ancient deposits. This is specially apparent in the 
relative abundance of vegetable remains, by which we 
may for the first time construct some pictvre of plant- 
life on the globe in Palaeozoic times. Not only do we 
find huge tree-like plants of which our club-mosses and 
ferns are pigmy representatives, but true trees, as proven 
by the concentric rings of growth in their trunks. Of 
land animals, the preservation of which is so rare in all 
deposits, there are no traces ; no reptiles wallow in the 
lagoons and marshy flats, neither are the verdant yet 
flowerless forests brightened by the plumage, nor their 
stillness broken by the song, of birds. But we find the 
earliest known insects ; 'some happy chance, like that 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 39 

which envelops the insects of Tertiary forests in amber 
the fossil resin of their conifers has preserved a 
fragile wing, with the remains of a stridulatmg organ 
attached, as in the grasshopper and cricket, wherewith 
then, as now, mates were attracted or rivals challenged 
perchance ' the first music of living things that geology 
as yet reveals/ 

Fresh-water fossils abound, but the predominant 
types are marine large sponges and corals ; ( lamp- 





FIG. 12. Insects in Amber. 

shell ' mollusca, which have persisted in varying forms 
from Cambrian times to the present j crustaceans huger 
than any that have lived since, and of which even the 
spawn masses are sometimes preserved More or less 
special types appear and then vanish, through inability 
to adapt themselves to new surroundings and changed 
climates. But the Devonian is notably the ' age of 
fishes/ and its waters swarmed with the ganoid type. 

Coal is formed of compressed and chemically altered 
plants, and occurs in all water-laid rocks, although in 



40 THE STORY OF CREATION 

very different states and kinds. Sachs remarks thai 
every experiment on nutrition with green-leaved plants 
confirms the theory that their carbon is derived solely 
from the atmosphere, and we get some idea how enor- 
mously large that derivation has been on 'reflecting 
that the deposits of coal, lignite, and turf spread over 
the whole earth, and the bituminous substances as great 
or even greater in quantity which permeate mountain 
formations, besides asphalte, petroleum, &c., are products 
of the decomposition of earlier vegetations, which in 
the course of millions of years have taken from the 
atmosphere the carbon contained in these substances, 
and transformed it into organic substance/ l 

The climate and soil, during long eras of the Carboni- 
ferous system, specially favoured the growth of plants 
most fitted for coal formation. A large part of Europe 
(and the like conditions apply wherever the true coal 
measures abound) was then covered with shallow waters, 
both salt and fresh, divided by low ridges, bases of 
future mountain chains ; and dotted with islands ; while 
numerous rivers traversed the land, and silted up lagoons 
and lakes with the debris worn from older rocks. Vege- 
tation flourished apace on these river banks and marshy 
flats, and, with intermittent subsidence of the soil occur- 
ring again and again, was buried under sand and mud, 
becoming changed into coal of varying seams of thick- 
ness. Hence the abundance of this mineral in the Carboni- 
ferous strata, which, as a whole, yield more of value 
and variety for the service of man than all the other 
systems put together. Sandstones for building ; marbles 
for decoration ; metals for machines ; coals wherewith to 
drive them ; purest oil from muddy shale , jet for the 
lapidary's art ^ loveliest colours, exquisite perfumes, and 

1 Sachs's Lect. on the PhysioL of 'Plants \ p. 294 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 41 

curative drugs from gas-tar, even sugar therefrom, three 
hundred times sweeter than that from the cane these 
are the rich gifts of the deep rocks, which, struck by 
a more magic rod than Moses wielded, have given up 
their treasures for man's needs and delight 

Of the plants forming the coal measures, the larger 
number are obliterated, but they all belong to the lower 
orders, as do the club-mosses, tree-ferns, and other forms 
which, in the warm, moist atmosphere of those times, 
reached a gigantic size, and had a world-wide range far 
into north polar regions, where coal seams have been 
found. Of the animal life that dwelt amongst them 
we know very little, nor do the extant fragments 
represent a tithe of the forms then flourishing. In the 
later deposits the lower sub-kingdoms are represented 
by spiders and large scorpions , by land-snails, beetles, 
cockroaches, 1 of which above eighty species occur, walk- 
ing-stick insects a foot long, huge May-flies, and other 
insects ; the honey-seeking, pollen-carrying species being 
still absent from the sombre forests. The first known 
land vertebrates appear in the salamander-like and long- 
extinct amphibians called labyrinthodonts, from the 
labyrinthine structure of their teeth. The marine remains 
are still dominant, The lower types persist ; the trilo- 
bites are on the verge of extinction, but higher forms of 
the same group, allied more nearly to the lobster and 
the shrimp, succeed. The first known oysters appear, 
and, to the joy of the epicure, have survived all changes 
until now, spreading themselves over the whole northern 

1 The cockroach is historically one of the most ancient, and structur- 
ally one of the most primitive, of our surviving insects (cf. Miall and 
Denny's Cockroach^ p, 22). It is amusing to find Gilbert White speaking 
of this household pest, for which we have to thank the East, with curious 
interest, as f an unusual insect in one of my dark chimney closets ; and 
find since that in the night they swarm also in my kitchen.' (Selborne, 
Obs, on Insects.} 



THE STORY OF CREATION 




Lepidodendron, 



Calamite. 
FIG, 13, Fossil Plants from Coal-beda, 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 43 

hemisphere. Forerunners of the beautiful ammonites 
are found ; and the fish, while still of the armoured species, 
have a more reptilian character than their Devonian an- 
cestors. 

The life-features of the Permian system, the last 
division of the Primary epoch, differ but little from those 
of the Carboniferous; the only, although important, 
distinction is in the remains of true reptiles with croco- 
dile-like characters. 

3. SECONDARY. We now leave the Primary epoch 
and enter the Secondary epoch, with its widely different 
features and contents, explicable only by a great break 
in the succession of strata, and by an enormous lapse of 
time for the modification of the life-forms. Although, 
as in every period, volcanic action is manifest, the 
igneous rocks being pushed through the strata, or now 
and again alternating with them, we meet with few traces 
of the metamorphism which so baffles examination of 
the earlier rocks ; we can mark more definitely the 
boundaries of land and water, measure more accurately 
the changes, and trace more clearly the relations 
between the successive life-forms, of which the marine 
are still the preponderating, and the reptilian the most 
marvellous, r 

In the earliest division of this epoch, the Triassic, many 
of the leading Palaeozoic types are extinct. Several 
plants of the Coal and Permian systems have disap- 
peared, and the flora consists mainly of ferns, of cycads 
or palm-ferns, and of conifers, or pines and firs, to 
which the cycads are allied. Among the invertebrate 
animals certain molluscs are no longer found, but there 
is an intermingling of old and new types. Oysters and 
whelks and members of the cuttle-fish group are abun- 
dant. As yet fishes exhibit no marked advance in 



44 THE STORY OF CREATION 

structure, and the labyrinthodonts, the time-range of 
which is thus shown to have been enormous, are changed 
only in size, as their footprints evidence. Reptiles allied 
to the crocodile group, and sea-lizards, which attained 
gigantic size in later periods, are now the dominant 
types Whether certain bipedal footprints in the Triassic 
sandstones are those of birds is doubtful ; perhaps they 
are tracks of reptiles with bird-like movements. But 
in the absence of proof that they are due to birds, 
assuming that these preceded mammals in the succes- 
sion of species, 1 a great link is missing in the Trias, 
since that system has yielded teeth of the earliest 
'known mammal. 2 It was probably of the marsupial 
or pouched order, a form now represented most nearly 
by the Australian phalangers and the American opos- 
sums. 

The Jurassic or Oolittc system occupies extensive 
areas in both hemispheres, and ranges from the Arctic 
circle to Australia, Its strata, largely composed of 
coral growths and other organic remains, are rich in 
special life-forms which are limited to the Secondary 
epoch. 

Its seas, which overspread the greater part of Europe, 
covering the large salt lakes of the Trias, swarmed with 
exquisite spiral ammonites, large and small ; with 
conical bolt-like belemnites, allied to the cuttle-fish 
group ; with lobsters, prawns, and crabs, which succeeded 
the trilobites and other crustaceans ; with ganoid fishes, 
sharks, and rays. And * there were giants in those 

1 Cf. Heilprin, p. 161. 

z * I entertain no sort of doubt that the reptiles, birds, and mammals of 
the Trias are the direct descendants of reptiles, birds, and mammals which 
existed in the latter part of the Palaeozoic epoch, but not in any area of the 
present dry land which has yet been explored by the geologist.' Huxley's 
s and Addresses^ p. 213. 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 45 



days' monsters of the deep in the ferocious sea- 
lizards, with their fish-like bodies and flipper-like limbs ; 
monsters of the land, too, of dread aspect and size 
seen neither before nor since, one found in North 
American beds being, it is computed, nearly one hun- 
dred feet in length and above thirty feet in height 
Very interesting and unique 
remains of the marine lizard 
plesiosaurus have recently been 
found in the shape of minute 
mummies under five inches 
long, in which the substance of 
the flesh is perfectly preserved, 
even the circle of the eyes and 
the constituent bones being 
clearly distinguished There 
were flying lizards, winged 
like bats, hollow-boned like 
birds, and with claws, skin, and 
teeth like reptiles ; and it is 
in a Jurassic limestone stratum 
that the oldest known true 
bird, a creature about the size 
of a rook, cajled archseopteryx, 
is found. It does not corre- 
spond to any known past or 
present birds, but represents a 
transitional type, having both bird- and reptile-like 
characters. In addition to free claws to each wing, 
the tail is long, and made up of separate bones or pro- 
longed vertebrae, a feature noted in the embryos of birds, 
The remains of a bird about the size of a crane, but 
with uncertain affinities, have also been found in the 
Jurassic beds of Wyoming, 




FIG. 14 Belemmtes. 



*> 



THE STORY OP CREATION 




Kio, 15, Plesiosaurus, 




Fio, 16, - Pterodactyl (Wmg.ftnger)* 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 47 

While the sea, then, as ever, was the more thickly 
peopled, the land had a far more important air-breathing 
population, both of small fhinga and great The hum 




FIG. 17 Archoeopteryx. A, Fossil, showing tail and leg, from specimen 
in the British Museum (South Kensington). B, Head from Berlin 
Museum. (Both reduced ) C, Archseopteryx restorer 



48 THE STORY OF CREATION 

of insect life filled the cycadaceous forests, butterflies ! 
sported in the sunshine, spiders spread their webs for 
prey, and the remains of marsupials point to the range of 
these small but highly organised creatures over Western 
Europe. The plants and animals of the British Isles 
in Jurassic times probably resembled those still found 
in Australia, which, by reason of its long isolation from 
other continents, has preserved in its pouched mammals, 
its mud-fish, and its cycads more ancient life-forms than 
any other country, perhaps New Zealand excepted. 

The vast chalk formations of the globe are the 
typical features of the Cretaceous period, when the sea 
overspread a large part of Europe, Asia, and Northern 
Africa, receiving on its floor the foramini feral shells 
which were converted into chalk, and the skeletons of 
sponges and other organisms round which silica has 
gathered, forming the flints which occur in limestones 
of all ages from the Silurian downwards. Molluscs, 
nautiluses, belemnitcs, ammonites, some of them the 
size of a cart-wheel, swarmed in its waters ; and with 
them the huge reptiles of Jurassic times, sea-h>ards 
and sea-serpents, also ganoids and sharks ; and, what is 
important to note, bony-skeletoned fish allied to the 
salmon, herring, and perch families. 

Jn the North American formations, which have so 
largely added to our knowledge of ancient life-forms, 

1 Mr, Bates remarks that butterflies, owing to the registry of all changes 
of the organisation on the wings, are * better adapted than almost any other 
group of annuals 4r plants to furnish facts in illustration of the modifies,- 
tions which all species undergo in nature under changed local conditions, 
As the laws of nature must be the same for all beings, the conclusions 
furnished by this group of insects must be applicable to the whole organic 
world ; therefore the study of butterflies creatures sekcted m the typa ol 
airiness and frivolity will someday be valued as one of the most important 
branches of biological science, 'Naturalist <m the Ammom, pp, 347 48, 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 49 




FIG. 1 8. Ammonite, 




FIG, 19. I, Fossil Perch ; 2, Fossil Salmon. 



50 THE STORY OF CREATION 

1 dragons of the prime/ crocodile-like, bird-like, and 
bat-like, are found ; also toothed birds, with reptile-like 
brains, and the remains of true birds, these last being rare 
in the Old World Little trace of the Cretaceous land- 
areas remains, but the plants of the upper strata resemble 
existing vegetation, as angiospermous exogens, or leaf- 
bearing trees having a true bark, and growing from the 
outside, with their seeds enclosed in a vessel. They 
are called ' exogens ' in contrast to ' endogens,' or palms, 
grasses, and lilies, which have no true bark, and grow 
by additions from the inside. 

Of the total thickness of the stratified rocks, estimated 
at one hundred and thirty thousand feet, the Secondary 
systems occupy only fifteen thousand, or less than one- 
ninth of the whole. But their importance, like that of 
later and thinner formations, is not to be measured by 
the space which they fill, since it is during their deposi- 
tion, when,, as the coal seams and coral deposits of ex- 
treme northern zones show, warm climates prevailed, that 
the marked advance in specialisation of plant and animal 
forms is manifest. 

4 TERTIARY. Those warm climates continued far 
into the Tertiary epoch, but they were followed by 
declining temperatures, which at last resulted in the long 
and intermittent period of intense cold known as the 
Glacial epoch Large areas of Europe and North 
America were then swathed in ice, which gouged and 
moulded the subsiding land, choking the sea with debris, 
and destroying numberless species of plants and animals, 
to the lasting biological impoverishment of after times 
In the end the temperature gradually rose to its present 
level. 

The Tertiary epoch marks the beginning of the 
present order ot things, and of the existing distribution 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 51 

of land and sea, as also the uprising of most of the great 
mountain chains 

Although much of the existing land-area was then 
submerged under shallow seas, the sites of the great 
continents of both hemispheres had well-nigh the same 
outlines as now. Varied as are the life-forms of that 
epoch, unrelated and, save in the nummulitic limestones, 
detached as are the strata, those life-forms manifest a 
gradual approach to existing species and a marked di- 
vergence from the species of older epochs. The colossal 
reptiles of Jurassic and Cretaceous times, the coiled 
ammonites and other rnollusca of their seas, are extinct 
The age of huge reptiles has given place to the age of 
mammals, with their intermediate forms, but with no 
one group dominant, and with no important group un- 
represented. Larger animals have always been less able 
to resist changes than smaller animals. When the parti- 
cular conditions which enabled them to attain to a great 
size have altered, they have been the first to perish. It 
is the smaller, nimbler, and larger-brained animals that 
adapt themselves to changed conditions ; hence their long 
time-range compared with that of animals of unwieldy 
structure and small brains. And while the big reptiles 
of the Secondary epoch, like the big plants of the 
Carboniferous system, have left only dwarfed represen- 
tatives, it is from the persistent smaller types that the 
higher mammals are descended. 

The links between the Secondary and the Tertiary 
epochs are, except meagrely in the United States, unre- 
presented by any known strata, denudation having swept 
away the intermediate deposits with their contents. And 
so confused are the Tertiary strata that their order in time 
is determined solely by the proportion of their shell-fish 
to existing species, ranging from as low as three per 



a THE STORY OF CREATION 

cent in the oldest beds to ninety-five per cent in 
the newest Mollusca have been called the alphabet of 
palaeontology, because their extensive distribution through 
the several epochs renders them the most valuable and 
trustworthy of all organic remains in assigning the order 
in time and the conditions of life, not only of their own 
species, but of other species whose life-history is briefer, 
and whose range is more limited. 

The rocks of the Tertiary epoch witness to wide- 
spread aqueous and volcanic action. This is specially 




FIG. 20. -Fragment of Nummulitic Limestone from the Great Pyramid. 



noticeable in the Eocene strata, prominent among which 
are the vast beds of limestone laid down when Europe, 
its north-west corner excepted, and Central Asia were 
covered by the sea ; when the rock from which the 
Sphinx was to be hewn was being formed, and when the 
two Americas were partially submerged. These beds 
extend from the Pyrenees to China and Japan, and also 
largely compose the Alps, Carpathians, Himalayas, Atlas, 
and lesser mountain chains. Not many noble nor mighty 
are called to the enduring tasks of nature. It is the 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 53 

minute agents, unresting and widespread, that have been 
the efficient causes of much that is grandest in earth- 
structure ; and it is of shells of the coin-like nummulites 
that these stupendous formations are mainly composed. 
Their foundations were laid in archaean times in the 
fissures opened in the crust by volcanic action. Into 
these fell the sediment and organic deposits of ancient 
seas, which ultimately, as the cooling crust caved-in by 
its own weight upon the shrinking hot nucleus, were 
squeezed and puckered and overturned by lateral pressure 
into numberless folds ; or, according to a later theory a 
plicated and bulged through the heat generated by the 
accumulation of sediment 1 Then, when the twisted and 
crumpled strata were upheaved above sea level, water 
and the powers of the air sculptured them into pinnacle 
and peak, into ravine and valley. So the big mountainSj 
as we know them, are relatively modern ; the lesser ones 
are the older, as longest subject to the wear and tear oj 
eroding agents. Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn are 
not older than the Eocene marine clay on which Londor 
stands; and the Righi, a fresh- water shingle bed, isyoungei 
still 

Broadly grouping the life of Eocene seas, we fine 
large whales, teleost or bony-skeletoned fish in abun 
dance, and the persistent ganoids. Birds and bats an 

1 Mr Mallard Reacle's Origin of Mountain Ranges is an import an 
contribution to a difficult subject. The authoi contends that the eaith' 
cooling has not extended to such a depth as to make internal contractioi 
a cause of mountain ranges. He regards these as due to sedimentation 
whether organic or inorganic, accompanied by local change of temperatur 
in the crust. The heaping up of the sediment produces a rise in tempers 
ture, which causes expansion in all directions. This is illustrated by th 
effect in the course of time on the lead lining of a sink, which, throug 
alternate heatmg and coolmgj gets bulged up in ridges. 



54 THE STORY OF CREATION 

In the air ; crocodiles and turtles swarrn in the shallows ; 
snakes and serpents make their appearance ; the mam- 
mals are no longer restricted to pouch-bearers, for the 
placentals huge quadrupeds, carnivora, hornless deer, 
and hog-like forms of a type between the tapir and the 
horse appear in large numbers. Among the most re- 
markable fossils from North American beds are those oi 
the ancestor of the horse, a creature about the size of a 
fox, with four hoofed toes on each foot, and in one form 



.... 4 




FIG, 21* -Feet of Ancestors of the Ilorsc (JRqtitt 



A, OrohippitB, Eone; B, Andiitlierium* tipper Kwerie ; r, Hipparion, Upper 
Miocene ; n, horie oi Pliocene and Quaternary. The figure milicnta the 
nurabens of tue digith En the five-fingered hand of mammal*, 

(Phcnaeothts) with the rudiments of a fifth toe, A still 
more significant biological link is found in the iemunwls 
of the Upper Eocene (which belong to the Primates, or 
order of mammals including man and ape), possessing 
characters allying them to one or other of the hoofed 
quadrupeds then living, The plants, which ware slowly 
dispersed over the northern hemisphere from polar 

J * More true turtles have left their remains m the London day at (h* 
mouth of the Thames than arc known to exist in the whole world*' Sir R 
Owen, Pal&ont&faiyt p, a&i, 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY Of THE EARTH 55 

regions, were tropical in character, as shown by remains 
in the Thames delta and corresponding deposits. 

The like character applies to the flora of early 
Miocene (in which is included Oligocene) times, which are 
represented by only a patch or two of deposit in Britain, 
Timber trees, evergreens, and water-lilies flourished 
within eight degrees of the north pole, with which 
Europe and America were connected by way of the Faroe 
Islands, Iceland, and Greenland, or of Behring Straits 
The animals approximated more nearly to those of the 
present, save in the huge size of some of the mammals, as 
of the mastodon and other creatures allied to the elephant 

Small rhinoceroses, hornless deer, anthropoid apes 
as large as man, and, probably, the ape-like ancestors 
of man himself, appeared ; the horse corresponded more 
nearly to his modern descendant, the variation being 
that each foot had three toes, of which only one touched 
the ground. Birds and insects were abundant : of the 
latter, thirteen hundred species have been found in 
Switzerland alone. 

The Pliocene period ushered in great local changes in 
land and water distribution. The lofty ndge, clothed 
with oaks and vines, that had stretched from France to 
Greenland, and the remnants of whose volcanic chain, 
of which Hecla is the sole active relic, are extant in the 
Hebrides and the Highlands of Scotland and Wales, was 
submerged. Europe was thus severed from America, 
but Britain was left as a peninsula, the newly invading 
waters of the North Sea dividing Scotland from Norway. 
On the other hand, the Eurasian continent was upraised 
in parts, leaving the deeper basins o'f the Black, the Aral, 
and the Caspian Seas as remnants of the shallow waters 
that had linked together the Baltic and the Persian Gulf, 
and also the Arctic and the Indian Oceans, 




s^_y v s >^:. ^gi 

, za, Stone Implements: Palaeolithic Age. 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 57 

Except in the larger species, which gradually died 
out, the hippopotamus alone among them surviving to 
this day, the quadrupeds varied little from those of the 
Miocene ', the most remarkable among the carnivora being 
fierce sabre-toothed felines. 

But for us the most interesting Pliocene relics are 
the scanty fragments of the skeleton of man, and the 
flints bearing marks of artificial chipping, which have 
been found not only in France, Italy, and Portugal, 1 but, 
what is far more important, in the Pliocene gravels of 
California. 2 For as it is agreed that the birthplace of man 
was in the Old World, probably, in the judgment of some 
authorities, in the Indo-Malaysian region, the time- 
range of the genus from which he is descended has to 
be extended to allow for his development and dispersion. 

Pliocene fauna and flora alike witness to a cooling 
climate. The life-destroying agencies are at work ; the 
cold fingers of the ice-giant are being spread over the 
northern hemisphere to the fiftieth parallel of latitude, 
dinting and rounding its surface, and leaving to this day 
the traces of their impress in the snow-fields and glaciers 
of Scandinavia and Switzerland. Glacial action swept away 
the northern flora, never to return, the existing vegetation 
being almost .entirely post-glacial and of eastern origin. 

5. QUATERNARY. Upon the glacial deposits or 
boulder clays, only the most recent of which contain fossils, 
and these poor and scanty, rest the strata of the present 
geological epoch, the Quaternary \ or Post-Tertiary ', or 
Pleistocene^ as it is variously called This is subdivided 
into the Post-Pliocene and the Recent, the former con- 
taining the remains of many extinct animals, as huge 

1 Cf. M. de Quatrefages* Introduction & F Etude des Races Humaines, 
p. 91 (Paris, 1887) ; and, for opposite views, Prof. Boyd Dawkins's Early 
Man in Bntain t pp. 90-92. 

* On the authority of Prof. J. D, Whitney, U.S. Geol. Survey. 



THJ& STORY OF CREATION 




THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 59 

wingless birds and sloth-like mammals, and the latter 
the remains of none but existing species. The Post- 
Pliocene beds furnish plentiful evidence of man's presence 




FIG. 24. A, Mammoth scratched on ivory, found in the Madelaine 
cavern in the Dordogne. B, Fight between Reindeer : scratched on 
slate. 

in Western Europe, although more in his works than in 
himself, since only the scantiest remains of his fragile 
skeleton have been preserved. The roughly chipped 




. 25*- Stone Implements : Newer itone age. 
* flint mwhoiMl; % stems ixi*4iTOtlhi j 3, fif loilfej ^ btvK 
5, bane needle ; 6, pcrforatod horn 1 7, SPOOR for swoplng jnnrrow fmm 



THE PAST LIFE-HISTORY OF THE EARTH 6t 

stone tools and weapons with which he made shift 
have been found buried in ancient river gravels with 
bones of the mammoth or woolly-haired elephant, and 
other arctic animals, as well as with bones of temper- 
ate and tropical animals, probably witnessing to sharp 
alternations of climate. When the foundations were 
being dug for Drummond's new bank at Charing Cross 
the following fossils were found in the Pleistocene 
gravels : Cave lion ; tusks and bones of the mam- 
moth ; extinct Irish deer ; rhinoceros ; extinct oxen ; 
red deer and the remains of a species allied to the 
fallow deer. Stone implements and rude works of art 
of a somewhat more advanced race have also been found 
associated with remains of sub-arctic animals in lime- 
stone caverns, 

Man's occupancy of Europe has been continuous 
since his migration thither, probably by way of Northern 
Africa, in the remote period known as the Palaeolithic or 
Old Stone Age. The succeeding periods into which 
prehistoric time is divided are the Newer Stone Age, 
the age of Bronze, and, lastly, the age of Iron, which 
merges into the brief and modern period embraced by 
the historian. 

In the foregoing rapid summary of the earth's past 
zoology and botany much of detail has been left out for 
clearer presentment of the typical features of each epoch, 
and of the scale of life as an ascending scale. The older 
the rock the simpler the life- forms. 

The seaweed and the lichen, stemless and leafless, are 
lower than the club-moss and the tree-fern ; these are 
lower than the true timber tree, with its complex arrange- 
ment of trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. The 
sponge, rooted plant-like to the rock, is lower than the 
coral or the star-fish ; these, again, than crabs or shell- 



62 TH STORY OF CREATION 

fish, the most highly organised of which are lower than 
the vertebrates, between the several groups of which the 
ascents are manifest in fish, reptile, bird, and mammal 
And among these last there are the lesser and the 
greater : the pouch-bearers, bringing forth their young 
immature, are less specialised than the placentals, bring- 
ing forth their young fully developed ; while here, also, 
the ascending grades are seen in whales, ungulates, 
carnivora, monkeys, men. 

To all which the fossil-yielding rocks bring their 
witness. Imperfect as is their record, obscure as in 
certain cases are the causes of modification resulting in 
the appearance of new types, the evidence as to ascent 
of life from the simple to the complex, and as to its 
succession, is overwhelming. There was a time when 
the earth was devoid of life, and we are very far from its 
'protoplast' beginnings in the earliest known organic 
remains, just as all species probably cam^ into being long 
before we have any trace of them. But no evidence as 
to their first appearance that may be gathered from parts 
still unexplored is likely to alter the relative order 
assigned to the several types as compared with one 
another. 

The history of the earth is written by fire and water ; 
its life-history by water alone. 

The volcanic and other modes of igneous disturbance 
tnat have upheaved, depressed, contorted, and fissured 
its cooling crust are due to the internal energy manifest 
in the escape of pent-up heat and in chemical action. 
The more potent agents of change in the visible crust, 
however, have not been from within, but from without. 
As the internal energy, derived from contraction of the 
hot nucleus, decreased, the energy derived from the sun 
became more effective, giving rise to changes wherein 



THE PAST LTF&-HISTORY OP THE EARTH 63 



TABLE OF THE SUCCESSIVE APPEARANCE OF TYPICAL 
LIFE-FORMS. 



1 
Epoch 


i 
System 


Animal 


Plant 


PRIMARY or 
PALAEOZOIC 
(Earliest known 
Life-forms) 


Cambrian 
Silurian 


Sponges ; corals , Crustacea ; 
shell -fish 
Huge Crustacea , the lowest 
known vertebrates (ganoids or 
armoured fish) 


_ Seaweeds ; 
club -mosses 


(Age of Terns 
and Fishes) 


Devonian 
Carboniferous 

Permian 


Insects , swarms of ganoids 
Land vertebrates (labyrmtho- 
donts) 
Reptiles 


(Ferns , cala- 
mites . cycads 


SECONDARY or 
MESOZOIC 
(Age of Pines 
and Reptiles) 


Tnassic 
Jurassic 
Cretaceous 


Immense reptiles , sea-lizards , 
marsupial mammals 
Immense bird-reptiles . true 
3m& 1 
Bony-skeletoned fish , large am- 
monites 


^Conifers, palms 


TERTIARY or 
CAINOZOIC 
(Age of Leaf- 
forests and 
Mammals) 


Eocene 

Miocene and 
Pliocene 


T&u.gfiplacentctlma.'m.m&h ; ser- 
pents ; nummulites 
True whales , man-like apes 


\ Trees, shrubs, 
herbs alhed 
- to existing 
sub-tropical 
j species 


(Glacial epoch intervening, and continuing into the ) 




QUATERNARY 


Post-Pliocene 

Recent or His- 
toric 


Mammoth and other woolly 
quadrupeds , man 
Existing species 


) Arctic and tem- 
1 perate 
Existing species 



variations of temperature and the circulation of air and 
water over the surface of the earth would come into play 
It is to these to the solvents of the atmosphere and 
rain, to the drjving wind, to water in its several states 
and movements, whether of disrupting frost, grinding 
glacier, eroding river, or waves and currents of the sea 
that the five-and-twenty miles and more of stratified rocks 
(for the same stuff has been used over and over again), 
with all the varied contour of the earth's surface, are 
mainly due 

1 The discovery of the lowest mammalian forms in earlier strata than 
those containing birds seems opposed to the accepted order of succession, 
but there is considerable uncertainty as to the exact period of the first 
appearance of birds. 



Vast, slow, and continuous as are the changes, they 
occur within defined limits. The deep ocean basins, 
the lines or seams of the great mountain chains, have 
probably been permanent from the remotest geological 
epochs, and the variations in land and water distribution, 
although enormous and unceasing, have been confined 
to certain areas. All the evidence furnished by the 
aqueous rocks, from the earliest primary to the alluvial 
formations of to-day, point to their tranquil deposition 
on the floors of relatively shallow seas, where they have 
been converted by pressure and other means into solid 
beds, entombing organic remains which give the key to 
their relative place. Then, on their upheaval above the 
sea, the eroding agents have begun their slowly levelling 
work, and the dtbris of lands, where life-forms have 
flourished and perished, have returned to the waters 
whence they uprose, to become once more ' the dust of 
continents to be.' And so 'the thing that hath been, it 
Is that which shall be ; and that which is done is that 
which shall be clone : and there is no new thing under 
the sun,' Between the opposing agents of waste and 
repair, of upheaval and subsidence, with interplay of the 
organic in growth and decay, as m limestone ranges, coral 
Isles, and coal-beds, and the action of man himself on 
nature, the ancient earth is maintained ffom age to age 
mother of all living. 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 65 



CHAPTER V. 

PRESENT LIFE-FORMS. 

I. PLANTS. 

Sea and other water-weeds (Alga] . \ 

Fungi . , j- Gymnospores, i e. naked spores 
Lichens J 



Ferns and Horsetails , . . [ Angiospores / e. enclosed spores. 

Club-mosses ..... ) 

Pines and Palm Ferns . . Gymnosperms, t.e. naked seeds. 

(Many seed-lobes ) 
Grasses, Sedges, Palms . . .\ 

(One seed-lobe.) . . , , 

Trees, Shrubs, Herbs . . . A^giosperms, '' Closed seed^ 
(Two seed-lobes.)) 

II. ANIMALS. 

i. INVERTEBRATES, i.e. without backbone : 
Monfira 1 (Gr. monos, single) . Structureless, sticky, alike all over. 

, , , , v /Slight unlikeness of parts: always 

Amoebae ' (Gr. w*fe, change) { changing shape . 

_ . . y , f /'Secrete shell or skeleton of lime from 

Foramimfera (Lat. foramen, an 



Show to forther UD . 

likeness in parts. 
Polycystina (Gr pohts^ many Secrete shell or skeleton of flint froin 

and kustiS) a cyst) . . I water. 
Sponges. 
Coral animals, anemones, 1 jelly-fish. 2 

1 No fossils of these soft-bodied lowest forms exist. 

2 Impressions of bodies only. 

F 



66 THE STORY OF CREATION 

Sea-lilies, star-fish. 

Worms of all kinds . , . ) Annelida and Arthropoda 

Crabs, spiders, centipedes, insects . ) 

Oysters, snails, cuttle-fish . . ) 

Sea-squirts (Ascidia) . . J 



2 VERTEBRATES: 



A. Pisces. 



Lancelet (Amphioxus). ' 
Fish of all kinds 



B. An 



Toad, frog. 



C. Reptiha 



Serpent, lizard, crocodile, 



turtle 



D. Aves 



Birds of all kinds. 



E. Mammalia, 

i Aplacental (bringing forth immature young) -.Monotremes, 
or one- vented: duckbill, spiny ant-eaten Marsupials^ 01 
pouched : kangaroo, opossum. 

2. Placental (bringing forth mature young) : Ant eater, sloth, 
manatee; whales and porpoises; horse and all other hoofed 
animals; elephant; seal, dog, lion, tiger, and all other flesh, 
feeders; hare and all other gnawing animals; bats; moles and 
all other insect-feeders ; apes ; man. 

If the life-forms of the past somewhat baffle us by 
their scantiness and imperfectness, those of the present 
embarrass us by their abundance. But although the 
existing species of plants and animals are numbered by 
hundreds of thousands, and the tale is not yet complete) 
they are classified into a few primary divisions or sub- 
kingdoms representing certain allied types, of which 
the several species included in each sub-kingdom are 
modified forms. For example, olives and daisies are 
grouped as angiosperms because their seeds are enclosed 
.within a seed-vessel; flies and lobsters, beetles and 
crabs, are grouped together, although somewhat loosely, 
because they are alike composed of distinct segments ; 
boys and frogs, pigs and herrings, are grouped in the 
sub-kingdom of the Vertebrata, because they alike 
1 No fossils, 



PRESENT LIFE FORMS 67 

possess in internal bony skeleton, the most important 
feature of which is the spine or veitebial column And 
this classification is applicable alike to past and present 
organisms, thete being thioughout the whole senes of 
fossil remains no form, howevei unlike any existing 
living thing, that is not to be placed in one or other of 
the sub kingdoms 

All things the world which fill 
Of but one stuff are spun } 

and this stuff) the basis of all life, the foimative power, 
'universally known and yet essentially unknown/ 1 to 
which the name protoplasm (Gr piotos, first, plasma, 
moulded) has been given, is a semi fluid, sticky matetial, 
full of numbeilcss minute gianules m ceaseless ind tapid 
motion ' It is not a compound, but a sti uctuie 2 built up 
of compounds, consisting of the elementaiy substances 
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitiogen, m vety complex 
union ' They are the essential elemcn ts, but a few othei s 
entei into the chemistry of life, with resulting slight dif 
feiences mthe incidental elements in animals ind phnts 
Moieovei, a fundamental unity of foim and of function 
underlies and peivades living mattei, from the slime of 
a stagnant ditch to the most complex ammil , the dif- 
ferences between living things being in degree, and not 
in kind Therefore, although each genus, nay, in most 
cases, each species, needs for its complete study the hbour 
of a lifetime, it suffices for the majonty of us, grateful for 
the results which the zeal of specialists has achieved, to 
acquaint ourselves with the essential chancteustics which 
maik the mam divisions of the twin sciences of botany 

1 Sachs, p 294 

1 Sir Henry Rosmr's ftttufatttal Atfdrtts to tht British Association^ 



fi8 THE STORY OF CREATION 

and zoology. If this is the only possible thing for us, 
it is the one thing needful for all, whether specialists or 
non-specialists ; otherwise the significance of facts, in 
their relation and dependence, is missed, and the larger 
generalisations are swamped in a sea of detail, so that 
we cannot, as the phrase goes, see the wood for the 
trees. 

In the old division of the three kingdoms of nature 
into the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal, we were 
taught that stones grow ; that plants grow and live ; while 
animals grow, live, and move. But this no longer holds 
good, at least in respect of the lower life-forms. There 
are locomotive plants and stationary animals. The 
swarm-cells or zoospores which are expelled from some 
of the lower plants, as algae and certain fungi, behave like 
animals, darting through the water by the aid of hair- 
like filaments called vibratile cilia, finally settling down 
and growing into new plants. Other plants, as diatoms 
and desmids, are locomotive throughout life ; certain 
marine animals, as sponges and corals, are rooted to the 
spot where they grow ; while there are organisms which 
appear to be plants at one stage of their growth and 
animals at another stage. 

Other marks of supposed unlikeness have vanished, 
It was formerly held that among the distinctive features 
of animals are (i) a sac or cavity m which to receive 
and digest food ; (2) the power to absorb oxygen and 
exhale carbonic acid ; and (3) a nervous system. But 
although nearly all animals, in virtue of their food being 
solid, have a mouth and an alimentary cavity, the lowest 
forms are without these organs ; and although plants, in 
virtue of their food being liquid or gaseous, need not 
that cavity, there are some that have it. Not only is 
the process of digestion apparent in the leaves of car- 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 69 

nivorous plants, the hair-like glands on which contain 
pepsin, but embryonic forms have been found to secrete 
a ferment similar to the ferment in the pancreatic 
secretion of animals, by which they dissolve and utilise 
the food-stores in their seed-lobes as completely as food 
is digested in our stomachs. And although green plants, 
under the action of light, break up carbonic acid and 
release the oxygen, they do the reverse in the dark, as 
also in respiration ; while the quasi-animal fungi which 
are independent of light absorb oxygen and give off 
carbonic acid. 




FIG. 26. Vemis's Fly-trap 

a, bristles in triplets, which when touched cause the sides of the leaf to collapse 
and enclose the intruder. 

In the ' irritability ' of the sundew, Venus's fly-trap, 
md other sensitive plants, still more so in subtile and 
hidden movements in plant-cells, we have actions cor- 
responding to those called ' reflex ' in animals, as the 
contraction of the shapeless amoeba when touched, or 
the involuntary closing of one's eyelid when the eye is 
threatened, or the drawing back of one's feet when 
tickled. The filament in the amoeba which transmits 
the impulse causing it to contract differs only in degree 
from the sensory nerves in ourselves which transmit the 
impression to the motor nerves, causing the muscles to 
act ; and since there is every reason for referring the 



70 THE STORY OF CREATION 

contractile action of plants, i.e their movements in 
obedience to stimulus, to like causes, the germs of a 
nervous system must be conceded to them The minute 
observations of Darwin and his son into the large class 
of quasi-animal movements common to well-nigh all 
vegetable life go far to confirm this The highly sensi- 
tive tip of the slowly revolving root, in directing the 
movements of the adjoining parts, transmitting sensation 
from cell to cell, seems to ' act like the brain of one of 
the lower animals ; the brain being seated within the 
anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the 
sense-organs and directing the several movements/ l 

In these and kindred vital processes, in the so-called 
sleep-movements of leaves and flowers, both regulated 
by the amount of light, apparently acting on them as 
it acts on our nervous system ; in the detection of 
subtile differences in light which escape the human eye, 
by plants ; in the higher range of sensation which they 
manifest, as compared to some animals ; in their choice 
of food, and of the material of the covering which some 
of them secrete ; in their general sensitiveness to external 
influences ; even in the diseases which attack them, and 
the study of which Sir James Paget has commended to 
pathologists, we have the rudiments of attributes and 
powers which reach their full development in the higher 
animals, and therefore a series of fundamental corre- 
spondences between plant and animal which point to 
the merging of their apparent differences in one com- 
munity of origin 

In fine, that which was once thought special to one 
is now found to be common to both, and to this there 
is no exception. Not only is there correspondence in 
external form in the lower life-groups, but, fundamentally, 

1 Darwin's Movements of Plants t p 572. 



>RESENT LTFE FORMS 71 

planU and animals aie alike in internal structure, and 
in the dischaige of the mysterious processes of iepro 
duction and of nutrition, although) as will be shown 
piesently, this last forms a convenient line of sepaiation 
Notwithstanding agt cement in essential points of com- 
parison, there is this difference to be noted, that while 
animals, the lower forms excepted, leich a given de- 
velopment, the vast majority of plants do not, but 
continually put foith growing points, so that life goes 
on indefinitely, and is multiplied and distubuted ovei 
large areas The life of the highei animals is indivisible 
and, as compared with the plant, buef, while cuttings or 
tubers from a single plant are taken without detriment 
to the vigour and duration of the parent life 

Of couise the difficulty of classifying vanishes m the 
higher foims , the lowest plants are allied to the lowest 
animals, but the higher the plant the moie it diveiges 
fiom the animal, which is evidence that in the succession 
of life the highest plants do not pass into the lower 
animals Descent is not lineal, but lateral , the relations 
between the two kingdoms aie represented by two lines 
starting from a common point and spreading m different 
directions (see diagiam, fig 62) Even Mower' and 
'higher 1 aie relative terms, the organisation of the 
amoeba is as complete for its purpose as is that of man 
for his purpose, the modification in the complex forms 
being due to the division of functions which aie per- 
formed in every part by the simple forms The like 
does everything , the unlike does some things 

Although the foregoing and numbeiless other facts, 
together with the evidence fiom continuity, alike fotbid 
the drawing of any haid and fast lines, and involve Lhe 
conclusion, to bouow Piofessor Huxley's words, 'that 
the problem whether in a given case an oigamsm is in 



72 THE STORY OF CREATION 

animal or a plant may be essentially insoluble/ there 
exists, as noted already, a broad distinction in the mode 
of nutrition. 

The plant possesses the mysterious power of weaving 
the visible out of the invisible, of converting the lifeless 
into the living This it does by virtue of the green 
colouring matter called chlorophyll, which is found 
united with definite portions of the protoplasm mass, 
of which it is a modification, the exact nature being 1 
unknown. The water supplied by the root and the 
carbonic acid which the plant absorbs through the num- 
berless stomata or mouth-pores in its leaves or integu- 
ments are, when the sunlight falls upon them, broken 
up by the chlorophyll, 1 which sets free the oxygen, and 
locks together the hydrogen and carbon, converting 
this hydrocarbon into the simple and complex cells and 
tissues of the plant, with their store of energy for service 
to itself and to other organisms Animals cannot clo 
this ; they are powerless to convert water, salts, gases, or 
any other inorganic substances into organic : they are 
able only to assimilate the matter thus supplied by the 
plant, nourishing themselves therewith, either directly, 
by eating the plant ; or indirectly, by eating some plant- 
feeding animal. In other words, the plant manufactures 
protein from the mineral world, and the animal obtains 
the protein ready made ; the plant converts the simple 
into the complex, and this the animal, by combining 
it with oxygen, consumes, using up the energy which 
it thereby obtains in doing work. So the plant is the 
origin of all the energy possessed by living things ; but 
how it can convert the stable inorganic into the 

1 The formation of chlorophyll in complete daikncas, tmt under imfE- 
cienlly high temperature, has been observed in a few instunew, m m the 
seed -leaf of some coniicrs and in the leaves of ferns, 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 73 

unstable organic, while the animal cannot, we do not 
know 

Structurally, the lowest animal is below the lowest 
plant, since it is a speck of relatively formless, colourless 
protoplasm, whereas the protoplasm of the lowest plant 
is visibly organised to the extent that it has formed 
for itself an outer layer or membranous coat called the 
cell-wall. For example, the vegetable character of 
yeast-granules is determined, apart from their mode of 
nutrition, by the protoplasm being enclosed within a 
cellulose coat ; and the animal character of the amceba 
is determined, not because of contractile or locomotive 
power, or of inability to manufacture protein from in- 
organic matter, but by the absence of any such covering. 
The vegetable cells sealed their fate when enclosed 
within a hard thick shell, because they became thereby 
less accessible to external influences, less able to combine 
for the construction of nervous and muscular tissues, 
than animals, and condemned to an automatic life. For 
while the animal remained free to wander, and developed 
organs of digestion and motion, the plant, being fixed, 
perforce struck its tentacles into the soil for foothold, 
and developed a large surface of green leaf to take in 
the food which the wind and the water brought it 
In changing tile substance of its cell-wall into woody 
tissue it prevented the evaporation of the food-carrying 
fluids, and gained that solidity and form of which man 
has availed himself in the use of timber for the needs 
and arts of life 

Organ and function are developed together, and where 
function is not localised there is no variation of parts ; 
life probably began in combinations having no visible 
distinction of parts. And as the cell is the first step 
in visible organisation, it is the fundamental structure of 



74 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



living things ; * it marks only where the vital tides have 
been, and how they have acted ' l The lowest organisms 
consist of one cell only, and the higher consist of many 
cells, which, increasing in complexity or diversity of 
form adapted to their different functions at later stages, 




FIG. 27. Diagram of a Cell 
/s, protoplasm * nucleus , ', nucleolus 




FIG 28 Structure of Cells and Nuclei, 



A, cell from the marrow : j*, protoplasm , , irregular nucleus, B, gland-cell : 
M, cell membrane , #, protoplasm , n t nucleus with convoluted filament. C, 
part of the filament greatly magnified. 

are modified into the special tissues, with resulting un- 
likeness in parts or organs^ of which all higher plants and 
animals are composed. Every variation in structure is 
therefore due to cellular changes, and every living thing 
is propagated in one way or another by cells : by their 



Huxley, in Brit, and For, Medico-Chirurgical JRev , 1853, xti 



P* M- 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 



75 



self-division or fission ; or by gemmation, i.e throwing 
off buds ; or by the union of like cells ; or in more com- 
plex mode, by the spontaneous or aided union of unlike 
cells, as the sperm-cell of the male with the germ-cell of 
the female, giving rise to a seed or egg from which grows 
offspring more or less like its parents. 

In both plant and animal the cell contents, although 
here again exceptions occur in some of the lowest 




FIG, 29. Semi-Diagram of Ovum of Mammal. 

zp t membrane ; vi, protoplasm filled with fatty granules , gv, nucleus or germinal 
vesicle , jfjr, nucleulus or germinal spot 

organisms, exhibit a rounded body called the nucleus? 
which itself often encloses another body called the 
nucleolus, but the functions performed by both in cell 
development are obscure. That even this much is known 
of cell structure may awaken wonder when it is re- 
membered that we are dealing with bodies for the most 
part beyond the range of our unaided vision. Bacon 

1 When the cells are very large or long, nuclei are present in large 
numbers. (Sachs, p, 86 ) 



THE STORY OF CREATION 

L A y saye that ' the complexity of nature exceeds the 
subtilty of man ; ' the infinite divisibility of matter is 
apparent in the organic as in the inorganic. And size 
counts for little : the oak and pine, the acacia and the 
rose, are lower in the scale of life than the thistle 
and the daisy ; 1 the elephant is one hundred and fifty 
thousand times heavier than the mouse, but the egg of 
the one is nearly as large as that of the other ; and it has 
been calciilated that if one molecule in the nucleus of the 
ovum of a mammal were to be lost in every second of 
time, the whole would not be exhausted in seventeen 
years. 

These molecules are the sufficing material media of 
transmission of resemblances, both striking and subtile, 
between parent and offspring ; and of the vast sum- 
total of inherited tendencies, good or bad, which are the 
product of no one generation, but which reach us charged 
with the gathered force of countless ancestral experi- 
ences. 

Born into life, man. grows 

Forth from his parents' stem, 

And blends their bloods, as those 

Of theirs are blent in them ; 
So each new man strikes root into a far foretime. * 



A. Plants. 

Plants are divided into two main groups or sub- 
kingdoms : I. Cryptogams (Gr. kruptos^ hidden ; gamos^ 
marriage), or flowerless. II. Phanerogams (Gr. phaneros^ 
open ; gamos> marriage), or flowering, 

1 See Grant Allen's Flowers and their Pedigrees, p. 42 
1 Matthew Arnold* Empedocles on Etna- 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 77 

I. The Cryptogams are subdivided into 

1. Thallophytes (Gr thallos,*. shoot; pkyton> a plant), 
comprising 1 algae, fungi, and lichens. These have no 
leaves, stems, or roots ; many of them are one-celled. 

2. Bryophytes (Gr. bryon^ moss), comprising mosses 
and liverworts. These have leaves and stems, but no 
true roots. 

3. Pteridophytes (Gr. pteris, a fern), comprising 
ferns, horsetails, and club-mosses. These have stems, 
leaves, and roots. 

The feature common to the cryptogams is the absence 
of any conspicuous organs, ie. true flowers, with stamens 
and pistils for the production of seeds or fruits. The 
simplest or single-celled plants increase by subdivision, 
each cell carrying on an independent life and repeating 
the process of division. But sexuality is manifest in 
plants very low down in the scale, the mode of repro- 
duction varying a good deal in different species. In 
some cryptogams it is almost as complex as in the 
flowering plants ; but notwithstanding the different kinds 
of sexual organs, there is this fundamental resemblance 
between them, that the union of the contents of two cells, 
a male or sperm cell, and a female or germ cell, each of 
which is by itself incapable of further development, is 
essential to the production of the embryo or seed. 

The lowest cryptogams are congregations of simple 
fibreless cells united in rows, or gathered round one 
another, and spreading on all sides. At the bottom of 
the scale are the AlgcB^ comprising some ten thousand 
species, from the microscopic fresh-water desmids, one- 
millionth of an inch in length, with their whip-like cilia the 
two hundred millionth of an inch long, to the giant sea- 
weeds or tangles, hundreds of feet in length, that cover 
thousands of square miles of ocean. The green scum of 



78 THE STORY OF CREATluiv 

stagnant ponds, the waving filaments in streams, the 
shell-coated microscopic diatoms that people the ocean, 
tmgeing its depths with olive-green, and whose skeletons 
form deposits hundreds of miles in length ; the rose and 
purple weeds that flourish in shallow seas, and are cast 
upon their shores, are all members of a group which 
is perhaps the most venerable of living things. For 
although their generally fragile forms have been fatal to 
their preservation as fossils, there is little doubt that the 
algae flourished in dense masses in primeval oceans, and 
were the chief, if not the sole, representatives of plant 
life on the earth during millions of years. Like the fora- 
minifera and other low animal organisms, they illustrate 
the persistency of the earlier forms, in virtue of their 
simplicity of structure, despite changing conditions ; 
whereas the more complex structures, by reason of the 
greater delicacy of their parts, can less readily adapt 
themselves to altered surroundings, and therefore have a 
much narrower distribution both in time and space. 

Next to the algae in ascending order are those fan- 
tastic products of decay, the quick-growing, short-lived 
Fungiy animal-like in their mode of nutrition, plant-like 
in their fixity, and through untold epochs the agents 
by which dead plants and animals are resolved into the 
inorganic, and made available to enter into new com- 
binations Next in order are the Lichens, which, it is 
now generally agreed, are composite plants, being a 
special kind of parasitic fungi growing on algse. These 
are widely spread, living, after the adaptive manner of 
simple forms, where nothing else can live ; unwithered 
by the heat, unsmitten by the frost ; redeeming the 
earth's desolate places, from treeless desert flats far as 
the lines of enduring snow, where, like the mosses, they 
shine in hues of gold and purple , spreading their flower- 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 79 

less patches of richest colours in metallic-like stains over 
rock and ruin ; incrusting the trees with tint of fresh- 
ness or touch of age, with hoary fringe or mock hiero- 
glyph ; and in their decay yielding rich soil wherein fern 
and flowering tree may strike root 

In Mosses^ whose glossy, many-coloured masses 
weave softest carpet over the earth, sharing in the ser- 
vice rendered by the humble lichens, the cells have 
become developed into rudimentary root, stem, and leaf, 
manifesting still further transition towards unlikeness in 
parts which is due to division of function. But the struc- 
ture is still cellular, i.e. there are no tissues and fibres. 
The mosses represent the intermediate forms between 
the lowest and the highest cryptogams, between the green 
algse, out of which liverworts were probably developed, 
and ferns, which arose out of liverworts. 

In Ferns the larger number of cells have joined 
together to form fibrous vessels, lengthening or thicken- 
ing in varying shape and texture according to the func- 
tions to be discharged by them, resulting in the woody 
tissue which enters into the structure of all the higher 
plants. The cells, thus converted into tissue, cease to 
grow ; the formative protoplasm is always becoming the 
formed ; 'tis < an infinite dying, and in that dying is 
life/ since there is locked up in the compacted material 
a store of energy on which the higher organisms 
depend 

The ferns and club-mosses and horsetails of the 
present day are the puny representatives of the stately 
and luxuriant, although sombre, flowerless trees that 
composed the dense jungles of green vegetation in the 
Devonian and succeeding Primary periods, during which 
our fossil fuel was chiefly formed The existing palm- 
like vegetation of the tropics more nearly approaches 



8o THE STORY OF CREATION 

its Devonian prototype, but it falls far behind it in 
abundance as well as in size. 

II. The Phanerogams have their flowers with stamens 
and pistils conspicuous, and are divided, according to 
the formation of their seeds, into 

I. Gymnosperms, or naked-seeded, the ovum not 
being enclosed within a seed-vessel or ovary, but carried 




FIG. 30. Diagram of a Flower. 

Kt, calyx , K> corolla , f, filament of stamen , a, anther, showing pollen 
sacs open a nd pollen grains escaping , F, ovary , g, style , , stigma , 
on which are pollen grams, one of which, p t is sending down us 
spermatozoid, ps, to the micropyle of the ovum, the central structure 
in F , i is the integument of the ovum , .$", the nucleus , em, the 
emtryo sac , J, the germinal vesicle, close to the pollen tube near 
the micropyle. 

ctpon a cone, as in pines and allied species. The gym 
nosperms are the connecting link between the flowerless 
and the flowering plants 

2. Angiosperms, or cover-seeded, the ovum being 
enclosed within an ovary. 

This group is subdivided into (a) plants having one 
cotyledon or seed-leaf, from which they are developed, 
as palms, lilies, orchids, and grasses; and () plants 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS Bi 

having two seed-leaves, as oaks, beeches, and all trees 
and shrubs not included in the foregoing. 

In naked-seeded plants the pollen or male element 
falls on the exposed ova; in cover-seeded plants it falls 
on the stigma, passes down the pistil into the seed-vessel, 
and enters the ovum through an opening in it called the 
micropyle, or 'little gate.' It has been recently ascer- 
tained that malic acid is the agent by which the sperma- 
tozoids are guided to the ovaries. 




FIG. 31 Fertilisation of Ovum 

A) section of ovum, after fertilisation , pt^ placenta , a, outer, and *, Innei , 
integument ,/, spermatozoid entering micropyTe , e, embryo sac B, apex 
of embryo sac, with eb t young embryo of three cells. C, same further 
developed 

Whilst the gymnosperms are, on the one hand, most 
nearly allied in the order of descent to ferns, the sombre 
flowers which they bear giving them only by strict 
botanical classification a place among phanerogams, they 
are, on the other hand, more complex in structure than 
the single seed-leaf plants, because their bark, wood, and 
pith are clearly defined, as in the double seed-leaf plants, 
Their lowest representatives comprise the cycads or 

G 



82 THE STORY OF CREATION 

palm-ferns, so called from their resemblance to palms^ 
for whichj with their crown of feathery leaves, they are 
often mistaken. Next in order is the much more varied 
and widely districted conifer family, notably pines, 
firs v and larches,'* and, lesser in importance, cedars and 
cypresses A still higher class, various in its modes of 
growth, marks the transition to angiosperms, the flowers 
of both having many features in common. 

The single seed-leaf angiosperms have no visible 
separation of their woody stuff into bark, stem, and pith, 




FIG. 32 Cycad (Australia). 



and. have no rings of growth, the wood exhibiting an 
even surface, dotted over with small dark points. Their 
leaves have parallel veins or ' nerves/ as in the onion 
and tulip ; and the blossom-leaves, or petals, are most 
usually grouped in threes or multiples of three. Among 
their several representatives we may single out the lilies 
for their beauty and fragrance, and the cereals for their 
value and importance, both classes being in near con- 
nection, since the grasses from which man has developed 
wheat, barley, oats, rice, and maize are, in a botanical 
sense, degenerate descendants of the lily family. 

The double seed-leaf plants include all the highes-t 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS g 3 

and most specialised varieties. Bark, stem, pith, and 
concentric rings of growth, by which the age of the 
plants may frequently be reckoned, are clearf^ defined; 
the leaves are netted-veined, and^jjjepetals are most 
usually grouped in fours or fives o7rn%f%i!2|@^of %%?se 
numbers. The lowest class, represented by the catkin- 
bearers, as the birch and alder, the poplar and the oak, 
and by plants allied to the nettle and to the laurel, are 
nearly related to the highest gymnosperms. """ Ne^t in 
order are the crown-bearers, or flowers with corollas, "as 
the rose family, which includes most of our fruit-yielders, 
from strawberries to apples ; while the highest and most 
perfect of all are plants in which the petals are united 
together in bell shape or funnel fashion Such are the 
convolvulus and honeysuckle, the olive and ash, and, at 
the top of the plant-scale, the family of which the daisy 
is the most familiar representative. Its position among 
plants corresponds to man's position among animals. 
As he, in virtue of being the most complex and highly 
specialised, is at their head, albeit many exceed him in 
bulk and strength, so is the daisy with its allies, for like 
reasons, above the giants of the forest. 

The primary function for which the organs of plants 
known as flowers exist is not that which man has long 
assumed. He once thought that the earth was the 
centre of the universe, until astronomy dispelled the 
illusion ; and there yet lingers in him an old Adam of 
conceit that everything on the earth has for its sole end 
and aim his advantage and service. Evolution will 
dispel that illusion. But our delight in the colours and 
perfumes of flowers will not be lessened, while wonder 
will have larger field for play, in learning that the coloured 
leaves known as flowers, together with their scent and 
honey, have been developed in furtherance of nature's 



84 THE STORY OF CREATION 

supreme aim the perpetuation of the species. For that 
alone the flowers blossom and the fruits ripen. And truly 
the contrivances to secure this which are manifest in 
plant-life are astounding, even to those who perceive 
most clearly the unity of function which connects the 
highest and lowest life-forms together. It is difficult to 
deny the existence of a rudimentary consciousness in 
the efforts of certain plants to secure fertilisation. For 
example, in a well-known aquatic plant, Vallisneria 
spirahs, the male flower with its matured pollen is 
detached from the stem and rises to the surface, where, 
as it floats, it comes into contact with and fertilises the 
ovary of the female flower, whose stalks then contract 
and carry the ovary to the bottom, where the seeds can 
ripen in safety. Most flowers are hermaphrodite, i.e 
have their male and female organs within the same 
petals, and in some cases fertilise themselves by scatter- 
ing the pollen from the bursting stamens on the stigma 
or head of the pistil But nature is opposed to this ; 
' tells us in the most emphatic manner that she abhors 
perpetual self-fertilisation/ * with its resultant puny and 
feeble offspring; and we find a number of contrivances 
to prevent this, and to secure fertilisation by the pollen 
of another plant, to the abiding gain all round of the 
plant, whose blood, as we may say, is thus mixed with 
that of a stranger. Consequently, the most effective 
mode of reproduction is that in which two individuals 
are concerned All organisms in which the sexes are 
separate have descended through many gradations from 
hermaphrodite ancestors, and it is to this division of 
function between male and female that not only a more 
vigorous offspring, but also progress among the higher 
animals, is, in the first instance, due. Were there no sex 

1 Darwin's Fertilisation of Orchids > p. 359 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS g s 

there would be no social instincts, no love, no depend- 
ence, no unity. This, however, by the way, 

Two agencies are unwittingly concerned in the 
fertilisation of plants insects, and the wind * that kisses 
all it meets ' ; while in the dispersion of the matured seed, 
birds and other animals, and again the wind, play an 
important part. 

Plants which are wind-fertilised have no gaily 
coloured petals or sepals, and do not secrete nectar. 
Such are the naked-seeded groups whose sombre flowers 
are borne on dull brown cones , and, among cover-seeded 
groups, grasses and rushes with their feathery flowers, 
and willows and birches with their long waving clusters 
of catkins. All of these provide against the fitfulness of 
the wind, which is as likely to blow pollen one way as 
another, by producing it in large quantities, so that it 
sometimes falls in thick showers, covering wide areas. 

Plants which are insect-fertilised attract their visitors 
by secreting honey and developing coloured floral organs. 
The way in which this came about is probably as 
follows. 

The common idea about flowers is that they are 
made up of petals and sepals, whereas the essential parts 
are the stamens ^and pistils, i e. the male or pollen-pro- 
ducing organs, and the female or seed-containing organs. 
The earliest flowers consisted of these alone, having no 
coloured whorl of petals within another coloured whorl 
of sepals, and were only scantily protected by leaves, 
as are many extant species. These the food-seeking 
insects then, as now, visited for the sake of the pollen, 
to the detriment of the plant, which lost the fertilising 
stuff and gained nothing in return, Besides the pollen, 
most plants secreted the sweet juice called honey, espe- 
cially when in the act of flowering, for the nourishment 



86 THE STORY OF CREAflON 

of -the blossom. This juice was often stored ir> nectaries 
near the seed-vessels, where the insects could not get at 
it without covering their bodies with some of the pollen, 
which they unknowingly rubbed on the pistils of the 
plant next visited, and thus fertilised the ovum, pro- 
vided that the plants were nearly related Honey being 




FIG. 33. Fertilisation of Flower (Meadow Sage) by Insect. 

, calyx ; b, curved upper lip , c, under lip, on which the bee stands while suck- 
ing the honey , d, pistil ; d', pistil at a later stage , e, stamen , e 1 , stamen 
shedding the pollen from its anther on the back of the bee , /, bee's proboscis 
wherewith it reaches the honey. 

sweeter to the taste than pollen, the plants that produced 
most honey stood the better chance of repeated visits 
from insects, and therefore of fertilisation, to the mani- 
fest advantage of their species over others Thus, as 
first shown by Conrad Sprengel in 1794, there were 
developed in the course of long ages intimate relations 
between the two, and also marvellous contrivances to 
secure the visits of welcome insects of a certain form and 
size, and to prevent the intrusion of unwelcome insects, 
as well as to arrest the washing out of pollen by rain or 
dew. For as plants are rooted to one spot, they cannot 
act on the aggressive. They have to develop defensive 



PRESENT LME-FORMS g 7 

structures to resist attacks of devouring enemies : hence 
their thorns, prickles, spikes, hairs, nauseous taste, and 
the like. Some plants have an eel-trap sort of arrange- 
ment of the hairs at the base of their petals to retain the 
desired honey- seeker till the pollen is rubbed on it, when 
the hairs relax and release it Others have become 
specially adapted to certain insects by secreting the 
honey at the bottom of a tube (nearly a foot long in some 
rare orchids), and the insect has developed a corre- 
spondingly long proboscis to reach it The one aim of 
all these modifications of structure is to economise the 
pollen and ensure its use for fertilisation, to the advantage 
of the plant in the struggle for life. 

Still more were any plants favoured on which spots 
or patches of colour appeared, attracting the eye of the 
insect, and developing through its agency into tinted 
petals and sepals, which 
have changed the earth's 
once flowerless meadows 
into fields of cloth of gold. 
Both petals and sepals 
are modified or trans- 
formed stamens, which 
have exchanged their 
function of pollen-pro- 
ducers for that Of insect- ^ 3 ^_ Tiansitionfrom stamen to 
allurers ; and as both Petal in White Lily, 

stamens and pistils are 

leaves aborted or modified for the special function of 
reproduction, Wolff's generalisation that the leaf is the 
type or fundamental organ of the plant has a large 
measure of truth in it. But before speaking further 
about colour-development in plants it may be useful to 
say a little about colour itself. 




88 TJOE STORY Of CREATION 

Since everything is black in the dark, and moreover 
has no colour in itself, it follows that colour is in some 
way a property of light. Now light, which is itself in- 
visible, is due to vibrations or oscillations set up in all 
directions by any luminous body whether the sun or a 
rushlight in the ethereal medium which pervades all 
space, and is composed of rays of different refrangibility, 
^*e. change of direction in passing from one medium into 
another, say from the ethereal medium to the denser 
atmosphere. White light is due to the combination of 
all these rays, which range through innumerable grada- 
tions of colour from red to violet, and it is to the absence 
of one or more of them that the infinite variety of colours 
is due. If a body is quite opaque, or otherwise so con- 
stituted as to absorb none of the rays, it appears white ; 
if it absorbs them all it appears black ; if it absorbs green, 
blue, and violet, and not red, it appears red , if it absorbs 
red, orange, and violet, and returns or reflects green, it 
appears green. The colours which bodies reflect are 
therefore regulated by their structure ; the way in which 
their molecules are arranged determines the number and 
character of the light vibrations or ether waves which 
are returned to the eye, and which rule the colour we 
see For example, charcoal and the diamond are both 
pure carbon ; the dull opacity of the one and the 
trembling splendour of the other are solely due to the 
arrangement of the several molecules of each. 

It is thus obvious that any change in the nature or 
structure of a thing is accompanied by change in its 
colour, and to this cause the various pigments in plants 
are to be referred 

All growth involves expenditure of the energy which 
the plant has stored within itself, and which becomes 
active when the hydrocarbons combine with oxygen, 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 89 

resulting in cellular change, and appearance of other 
colours than the green of the chlorophyll. Thus may be 
explained the colour of sprouting buds and young shoots, 
the more or less intensified colours of leaves and flowers, 
and the lovely tints of autumn ; one and all being due to 
oxidation, the minutest changes inducing subtile varia- 
tions in colour. As the stamens of most flowers are 
yellow, the earliest flowers, being derived from stamens, 
were probably yellow also ; and all subsequent changes 
in colour take place in a regular order, yellow passing 
into white or pink, and then through red and purple 
into blue, but never in a reverse direction nor in any 
other order. 1 

Whichever plants made most show of colour would 
the sooner catch the eye of insects, however dim their 
perception of the difference in colours might be, and 
would thus get fertilised before plants which made less 
display. Thus have insects been the main cause in the 
propagation of flowering plants, the plants in return 
developing the colour sense in insects. The flower 
nourishes the insect ; the insect propagates the flower, 
Other contrivances to meet the need for fertilisation 
might be cited, as the markings upon the petals to guide 
the insect to the nectary ; the exhalation of scent by 
inconspicuous flowers, as mignonette, or by such as 
would attract visitors at night, as the night-smelling 
stock ; but enough has been adduced to show that the 
chief, if not the sole, function of flowers is to attract 
insects, and thus secure cross-fertilisation. Nor does the 
provision stop here. The fertilised seed is not left to 
chance, but, like the fertilising pollen, is entrusted to 
secondary agents, to the care of the birds and the breezes, 

1 Colour of Flowers as illustrated by the British Flora^ pp, 1 7-60, by 
Grant Allen 



90 THE STORY OF CREATION 

Where not scattered by the bursting of the ovary it is 

winged with gossamer shafts, as in the thistle and the 

dandelion, and floated on gentlest zephyr or rushing 

storm to a genial soil Such wind-wafted seeds, like 
wind-fertilised flowers, are rarely coloured ; neither are 
the seeds of the larger trees, since their abundance 
ensures notice by food-seeking animals ; nor the nuts 
which are protected *1$j/ shelly coats. But other seeds 
enwrap themselves in sweet pulpy masses, called fruits, 
whose skins brighten as they ripen, and attract the eye 
of fruit-loving birds and beasts, 1 The seeds pass through 
their stomachs undigested, and are scattered by them in 
their flight over wide areas. As with the brightest hucd 
and sweetest scented flowers, so it is with the brightest 
and juiciest fruits ; they sooner attract the visitors whose 
services they need, and thus gain advantage over less 
favoured members of their species, developing by the 
selective action of their devourers into the finest and 
pulpiest kinds. And, as Grant Allen shows In his 
delightful and exhaustive book on the colour sense, the 
origin and development of this sense in the sub-kingdom 
which includes man is clue to the same cause, man being 
descended from a fruit-eating animal 'who shared the 
common vertebrate faculty of colour perception and the 
common frugivorous taste for bright" hues/* 4 The 
subject is of course closely connected with the evolution 
of the sense of beauty, which, ut first evoked by things 
connected with physical needs, was developed by 
leisurely contemplation of natural forms, colours, and 
groupings, 



b are much influenced in their choice of food by colour, for 
though white currnntn arc much Hwccter fruit than rd, yet lliry ttddom 
touch the former til! they have devoured every hunch of the hitter* 

* Olwwtfwns m 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 



B. Animals. 

All animals fall into two main groups ; the structure- 
less, or one-celled, called Protozoa ; and the many-celled, 
called Metozoa. 

The several types upon which they are constructed 
are usually classed under the following primary divisions, 
called sub-kingdoms : 





/Protozoa (Gr. frotos, first; 
zoon t animal) 


Simplest forms 


Ex. Moneron, amoeba 


eg 


Coelenterata (Gr. hollos, hol- 
low; enteron t bowel) 


Hollow-bodied 


Ex. Sponge, polyp, anemone, 
coral-builder 


fl 
-a 


Echinodermata (Gr. echinos^ 
a hedgehog ; dcrma^ skin) 


Spiny-bodied 


Ex. Sea-urchin, star-fish 


> 

c 


Annelida (Lat. annulus^ a 
ring), and Arthropoda (joint- 
ed-footed) 
Mollusca (Lat. mollis, soft) 


Joint-bodied 

Soft-bodied 
(but usually pro- 
tected by a shell) 


Ex. Worm, crab, spider, ant 

Ex. Sea-squirt, oyster, snail, 
cuttle-fish 




Vertebrata (Lat. vertebra-, 
joint) 


Back-boned 


Ex. Fish, and all other higher 
life-forms to man 



Tabular forms are convenient for clear presentment, 
but their hard and fast divisions are apt to be mistaken 
for real lines of separation, whereas the several sub- 
kingdoms merge one into the other, like the colours of 
the rainbow. As further reducing the number of types, 
animals may be^divided into three grades : the Protozoa, 
which have no body cavity ; the Ccelenterata, which 
have a body cavity ; and the Ccelomata, including all 
animals, from echinoderms to man, which have a digestive 
cavity separate from the body cavity. Any consecutive 
arrangement can only broadly indicate the relative order 
of the several life-forms, because development has not 
proceeded in direct line e.g. the ant, which belongs to 
the Arthropoda, is the highest of all invertebrates ; but 
it is not therefore most nearly allied to the lowest 



92 THE STORY OF CREATION 

vertebrate. As will be shown later on, the connecting 
link between invertebrates and vertebrates is to be found 
in such animals as the remarkable worm-like Balano- 
glossus ; the bottle-shaped sea-squirt or Ascidian (Gr. 
askidion^ a leathern bottle) ; and the headless lancelet If 
we go back far enough we find the common starting- 
point of all, whence they travelled for a while along the 
same road, and then diverged wider and wider apart, 
until it now seems difficult to believe that the lowest and 
highest, both of plant and animal, are one in community 
of origin. 





FIG. 35. Monera, without nucleus. A, showing pseudopod, 
B, process of fission. 

I. Protozoa. 

The lowest member of this group in other words, 
the lowest known animal, if we except certain parasites 
is the moneron (Gr. monos, single). Like the lowest 
plants, it lives in water, the element in which life had 
beginning. It is an extremely minute, shapeless, colour- 
less, slimy mass, alike all over, and therefore without 
any organs. When we say that it is alike all over we 
mean that our range of vision does not enable us to 
report otherwise, for doubtless the simplest and smallest 
living thing is very complex in structure. And we mean, 
further, that there is no differentiation, as it is called, 
i.e. no formation of specific organs for the performance 



PRESEN7* LIFE-FORMS 93 

of specific functions. The functions of living things 
are threefold nutrition, reproduction, and relation ; in 
other words, to feed, to multiply, to respond to the outer 
world ; and all these the organless moneron discharges. 
Every part of it does everything ; it takes in food and 
oxygen anywhere, and digests and breathes all over its 
body. Like the happy peptician of whom Carlyle tells, 
it ' has no system.' It literally * gets outside ' its food, 
having the power of throwing out blunt finger-like 
prolongations, called pseudopods or false feet, with 
which it propels itself and spreads over its prey, sucking 
the soft body even from shelly creatures, and casting away 
the refuse. So far as the function of nutrition, which 
includes digestion, circulation, and rejection of waste, 
and the function of reproduction are concerned, the 
moneron performs these as completely as the highest 
animals. For these, with their complex sets of organs 
lungs, heart, stomach, &c. cannot do more than nourish 
themselves and keep the body in health ; very often they 
cannot, through folly or misfortune, do that And in 
reproduction, which the moneron effects by dividing itself 
into two, as do the lowest plants, wherein, as in it, there 
is neither male nor female, it accomplishes in simple 
fashion what the higher life-forms can do only in a more 
complex way. " So that the difference and this only 
in degree, not in kind between a slime-speck of proto- 
plasm and the higher organisms is in the discharge of 
the function of relation. 

Reference has been made to the response to stimulus 
from external things manifested by the lowest life-forms, 
although there is no trace of a nervous system in them ; 
and now that we are treating of a living mass that not 
only feeds and digests and breathes all over, but likewise 
feels all over, a few remarks upon the function 



94 THE STORY OF CREATION 

origin of nerves may supersede the need for any detailed 
account of the several nervous systems in the representa- 
tive animal types. 

The function of the nerves is to bring the organism 
into relation with its surroundings ; they are the special 
media of communication between the body and the 
external world, and between the brain and every move- 
ment of the parts of the body. Starting in the higher 
animals from the encased brain and ensheathed spinal 
cord, and diffused in the lower animals in less complex 
arrangement, they report from without to within. The 
vibrations of the ethereal medium that affect us as light 
enter the eye and pass along the optic nerve, which 
conveys the impulse to the brain, and it is the brain, not 
the eye, that sees. So with the air-vibrations that travel 
along the aural nerves, the sensation of sound resides in 
the brain, not in the ear ; so with all the manifold 
sensations that we feel. The unity of the sensations is 
fundamental ; the differences lie in the vibrations. The 
correlation of the senses, as we may term it, is shown in 
the familiar trick of getting a blindfolded person to tell 
whether he is drinking port or sherry, or whether the 
pipe he is smoking is alight or not. 

Wherever there is sensitiveness to impressions, how- 
ever dim and feeble this may be, there "the function of 
relation is being exercised. This sensitiveness is 
exhibited by the moneron in its shrinking when touched, 
and in its grip of food ; but the sensitiveness is diffused, 
and not located in any organs. In members of the 
same sub-kingdom there are faint traces of approach to 
nerve-structure, and the development of this is manifest 
in ascending scale, till in the highest life-forms among 
certain invertebrates, as ants, and vertebrates, as man. 
It reaches subtlest complexity. 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 95 

Now, as every part of an organism Is made up of 
cells, and as the functions govern the form of the cells, 
the origin of nerves must be due to a modification in cell 
shape and arrangement, whereby certain tracts or fibres 
of communication between the body and its surroundings 
are originated. 

But what excited this modification ? The all-sur- 
rounding medium, without which no life had been, which 
determined its forms and limits, and touches it at every 
point with its throbs and vibrations. In the beginnings 
of a primitive layer or skin exhibited by creatures a 
stage above the moneron, unlike nesses would arise, and 
certain parts would by reason of their finer structure be 
the more readily stimulated by, and the more quickly 
responsive to, the ceaseless action of the surroundings, 
the result being that an extra sensitiveness along the 
lines of least resistance would be set up in those more 
delicate parts. These, developing, like all things else, 
by- use, would become more and more the selected paths 
of the impulses, leading, as the molecular waves thrilled 
them, to structural changes or modification into nerve- 
cells and nerve-fibres of ever-increasing complexity as 
we ascend the scale of life. The entire nervous system 
with its connections ; the brain and all the subtile 
mechanism with Vhich it controls the body ; the organs 
of sense, with their mysterious selective power the 
olfactory organs, probably the earliest developed, so 
acute in man as to detect the presence of the one- 
three-billionth of a grain of mercaptan (sulphuretted 
alcohol), and yet coarse by comparison with the antennae 
of insects ; the eye, to receive and sift vibrations travelling 
twelve million miles in a minute ; the ear, with its three 
thousand strings of Corti, each vibrating in response to a 
particular sound-wave j the organs of taste, guarding the 



96 THE STORY OF CREATION 

entrance to the digestive canal and refusing admittance 
to contraband food alike begin as sacs formed by in- 
foldings of the primitive outer skin. In contrast to 
the eyes of invertebrates, the sensitive elements of the 
eyes of vertebrates are formed from a paired outgrowth of 
the fore brain. The brain, trillion-celled seat of sensa- 
tion, arose from the infoldings sinking down beneath the 
surface and finally becoming imbedded in other tissues ; 
the eye and the ear, as their parts developed, were joined 
from within by outgrowths from the brain. Such, in 
fewest words, is that theory of the origin of nerves which, 
formulated by Herbert Spencer, has been confirmed by 
all recent biological research. 1 

Development by cell-modification applies to the body 
throughout to bone, to cartilage, and sinew, as well as 
to the myriads of nerve-tissues, varying between the 
fifteen-hundredth and the twelve-thousandth of an inch 
in breadth, that keep us in touch with the universe. 
But, easy as it is to dissect and describe the nervous 
mechanism, the nature of the connection alike between 
nervous impulse and consciousness in a man, and between 
sensation and contractile action in a moneron, remains 
an insoluble mystery. 

What has been said concerning the diffused sensitive- 
ness of the lower animals adds force and suggestiveness 
to the fact that the plant limited the action of the outer 
world upon it when the protoplasm enclosed itself within 
a wall of cellulose. This isolation, or lessened suscepti- 
bility to the vibrations of air and ether, to changes of 
temperature, and a thousandfold subtile influences, the 
animal escaped by remaining mobile, and setting up no 
barriers between itself and its environment 

A short step upward from the moneron brings us to 

1 Cf. Balfour's Com$>. Embryology^ ii. pp 400-4. 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 



97 



the Amoeba^ so called from its constant change of shape 
as it protrudes and withdraws the pseudopods. It shows 
approach towards unlikeness in parts in the modification 
of the protoplasm into a membranous skin at the surface, 
and in a nucleus near the centre, with an expanding and 
contracting cavity for distributing food and oxygen in 
the body a primitive apparatus for digestion and circu- 
lation. Therein the beginning of a distribution of labour, 
leading to cell-modification into organs, is illustrated. 
The white corpuscles in the red blood of man and other 
animals are called { amceboids ' because they are like the 




FIG. 36. Amoebae (highly magnified). 

amceba in structure, size, and movements, changing their 
shape, living an independent life, and even taking-in 
food. 

Some of the lowest amoebae secrete, like the diatoms 
among plants, solid matter from the sea, building for 
themselves primitive organs of shelter and defence in the 
shape of exquisitely formed chambered shells pierced 
with holes, through which the soft body flows and the 
pseudopods are pushed for capture of food. Some form 
their skeletons of lime, others of flint, evidencing to the 
possession of a selective power or dim sentience by even 

H 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



the minutest creatures ; and, as shown already, It Is of 
these skeletons that vast deposits are composed. 

Still more marked advance 
towards unlikeness in parts is 
manifest in the Infusoria, so 
called because readily deve- 
loped in infusions of exposed 
vegetable matter, where they 
crowd by myriads in the space 
of a water-drop. Instead of the 
pscudopods of the moncron and 
the amoeba, we find vibrating 
filaments or cilia, by which 
supplies are swept into the body, which is furnished 
with a rudimentary mouth and short gullet, through 
which the food and oxygen pass to the body -cavity. 





FIG. 37, Three Ciliated 
Infusoria, 



2. 

The 'hollow-bodied' animals are made up of two 

layers of cells more or less modified. But they are still 
of low organisation, one evidence of which is that, like 
the Protozoa, they have no vital parts, and that there is 
no separate canal for absorbing food and carrying away 
refuse, the mouth still opening direct into the body-cavity, 
The lowest members of this sub-kingdom are the 
Sponges, They were long regarded as colonies of 
amoebse, and therefore classed among Protozoa, but 
fuller knowledge of their structure as many-celled or- 
ganisms, some of the highest among which show slight 
traces of nerves and sense-organs, has caused them to be 
ranked In a division called Porifera (Lat /ww, a pore ; 
and/m?, to bear), Very lovely are the skeletons which 
some of them secrete* such as Venus's flower-basket* with 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 99 

its graceful fretted spirals ; but more familiar to us are 
the useful fibrous and porous domestic sponges, woven 
of material said to be chemically allied to that spun by 
silkworms. Being rooted to one spot, the sponge-cells 




FIG. 38. Structure of Sponge. 



A. Vertical section of outer layer magnified 75 times. /, pores or openings^ of 

canals for conducting- water, which flows to tf, sacs ; e, canal for expulsion 
of water; g, early stages of spores. . 

B. Sac transversely divided (800 diameters), showing sponge-particles with cilia. 

C. Sponge-particle highly magnified. f> cilium ; nt, collar ; , nucUus ; 

c, contractile vesicle. 



have become specially modified for ingathering food 
and oxygen. Only the cells on the outside of the horny 
or flinty skeleton can procure food and oxygen easily ; 
those living in the inside effect this by means of cilia, 



ioo THE STORY OP CREATION 

the whip-like action of which drives the water, charged 

with food and oxygen, through the innumerable canals, 
whence, having served its purpose, it is driven out 
through other canals, carrying the refuse of the colony 
with it The whole sponge represents, as has been aptly 
said, a kind of submarine Venice, 4 where the people are 
ranged about the streets and roads in such a manner 
that each can easily appropriate his food from the water 
as it passes along/ 

Cilia also cover extensive surfaces 
of the higher animals* They abound 
about the eyes, the ears, the windpipe, 
and the brain of man ; mysteriously 
moving independently of any other 
part, even of the nervous system, but 
fulfilling much less important functions 
than in the bodies of the lower animals. 
Next in rank above the sponges are 
the tiny cup or tube-shaped, jelly-like* 
green -hued (because chlorophyll-con* 
fnydroMoE taming) polyps named Hydr& % colonies 
of which, with their bud-like clusters 
of young scion to start in life on their 
own account-" are found clinging mouth 
downwards to weeds and rubbish in fresh water. From 
the mouth hang a number of tentacles containing cells, 
in which He barbed threads coiled up in a poison-fluid* 
When anything touches these tentacles they contract, 
the cells burst and fling the thread, las,solike, around 
the prey, poisoning it with the fluid, From of the 

marine species which tubes of flint, and project 

themselves therefrom like flowcr t no that the a depths 
are covered with their waving, plant-like forma, the buds 
detach themselves and become the beautifully tinted 




wdistwrbed, C* The 
same with the filament 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 101 

Medusa we jelly-fish. These produce eggs wlifch become 
rooted polyps, so that the offspring never resembles its 
parents, but always its grandparents. All living matter 
is largely made up of water, the average proportion rang- 
ing from seventy to ninety per cent., but in the jelly- 
fish it is about four hundred to one. Yet, fragile as is 
the creature, its structure is complex. Canals traverse 




FIG. 40. Jelly-fish. 

the swimming-bell, and carry food and oxygen to every 
part ; rudimentary muscles in the shape of contractile 
tissues propel the animal along in rhythmic grace of 
motion ; a nervous system runs round the margin of the 
bell ; there are rudimentary eyes in bead-like pigment- 
spots, and rudimentary ears in small sacs along the 
margin ; and the hanging tentacles are charged, as in its 
fresh-water ally, with deadly fluid. 



102 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



Lovelier still, and of slightly more complex structure, 
are the variously coloured Sea-anemones^ with their 
petal-like tentacles ; while nearly allied to these are the 




FIG. 41. Vertical Section of Common Sea-anemone. 

, mouth ; trS, primary cavity; itt", secondary cavity ; *, ectoderm or outer sldn ; 
J, endoderm or inner skin ; *, tentacle ; *', 'ovary ; <, disc of attachment ; j, 
body-cavity. 




FlG. 42. Coral 

The left side of the figure shows the coral denuded of soft parts ; on the right 
the animal matter is shown, while at the upper part several of the polyps are 
seen projecting. 

colonies of Coral-builder 's y which, despite the surging wave 
and drifting current, raise their tree-like structures, 
foundations of solid land on which the bird builds her 
nest and man sets his dwelling. 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 



103 



3. Echinodermata. 

This division includes all rayed animals, the skin 
being hardened by the secretion of jointed or leathery 
plates, or of spines or hedgehog-like prickles. In some, 
as the star-fish, the rays spring from a common centre ; 
in others, as the Sea-urchin, they are coiled to form a 
globular body ; in the Sea-lilies, which abounded as 




FlG. 43. a, Sea-cucumber ; b and <r, young stages of the same. 

far back as Silurian times, but which are now limited in 
range, they spring, flower-like, from the end of a fixed 
stalk ; in the slug-like Sea-cucumbers^ which possess the 
power dyspeptics may envy of throwing away the inside 
of the body and growing it anew, the skin is tough, the 
limy matter being secreted in scattered spxcules. 

The echinoderms show marked advance towards 
unlikeness of parts in having a digestive canal shut off 
from the body-cavity, affording special provision for 
nutrition. This is effected by a number of canals which 



104 THE STORY OP CREATION, 

communicate with the outside of the body, and through 
which the sea water is driven by cilia, as in the sponges, 
The water is also pressed from the canals into numerous 
little suckers, by which the animal crawls along" -nature's 
first essay in locomotion on solid ground, There is a 
distinct nervous system, the fibres of which in the star- 
fish run along each ray, at the tip of which is an eye 
having about two hundred crystal lenses, and a primitive 
eyelid in the form of a filmy covering, 

Thus far an intimate relation may be noted between 
the life-forms of the invertebrates. The differences 
between the secretions of limy matter by the amoeba and 
by the sea-urchin, between the contractile action of the 
moneron in every part and the localisation of nerve- 
function in the medusa and the star-fish, between the 
vacuole of the amotrbaand the digestive canal of the sea- 
cucumber, are differences of degree and not of kind. 
They are one and all due to cell-modification arising 
out of advance from the like to the unlike, from the 
simple and general to the complex and special, from the 
organlcss to the organised; and any addition to the bare 
details given above would only bring the more promin- 
ently into relief the fact of an indissoluble, underlying 
unity. 



4, Annelida 

The gradations between the infinite variety of life- 
forms are nowhere sharply marked, and this has led to 
the grouping of large numbers under one sub-kingdom, 

as in the case of the very miscellaneous animals long 
included together as Annulosa (Lat, annnlm, a ring) 
because of the division of the body (which is developed 
from three layers of cells) into more or less well-defined 
rings or segments. It is also, like the body of vertebrates, 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS i<x 

bilaterally symmetrical, i.e., double and correspondent: 
so that if it were split lengthways the two halves would 
be seen to be almost exactly alike. The nervous system, 
which runs along the belly, consists of two fine cords, 
knotted at different points into ganglia or masses of nerve- 
cells, the first pair of ganglia being above the gullet, so that 
the cords which join the second pair form a collar round 
it The important part which the mouth plays as the 
immediate channel between the animal and its surround- 
ings accounts for the development of the higher organs 
of communication near it ; the anterior or front segments 
most completely undergo concretion, and in this way 




FIG. 44. Diagram of Annelid Animal. 

A. a, digestive canal ; #, heart ; c, nervous system, 

B. Nervous system enlarged, showing double cord and ganglia. 

the portion that carries the mouth, the chief nervous 
centre or brain, and the sensory organs, as eyes, ears, 
antennae, is formed. Hence the position of the head or 
skull, as the protecting structure round the more special- 
ised parts, is ruled by the position of the mouth. The 
heart, which is tube-shaped, lies along the back, and the 
digestive canal lies between the heart and the nervous 
system. This arrangement distinguishes both earth- 
worms and wasps, leeches and crabs, centipedes and 
beetles, lobsters and ants in fine, all but the very lowest- 
classes. But the advance in complexity of structure in 



io6 THE STORY OF CREATION 

other words, in division of labour Is especially shown in 
the more elaborate arrangements for the conveyance 
of nutrition throughout the body as compared with 
that exhibited in the lower sub-kingdoms : e.g^ in the 
moneron food and oxygen enter at any and every part ; 
in the amoeba they are driven throughout the body by 
means of a pulsating vacuole ; in the polyp they are 
brought by the water which flushes it within and bathes 
it without; in the sea-urchin and the star-fish the nutri- 
ment is carried by canals in their bodies which communi- 
cate direct with the water, In the higher organisms 
the oxygen and food are circulated by a more highly 
organised fluid called blood, which carries them to every 
part, and likewise removes the 
waste and effete matter, the im- 
mediate motor power by which 
the blood is driven through the 
body being the heart The acra- 
_____ tion of the blood in other words, 
Ki.4S. Section of tlie supply of oxygen and the 
SttcomKScgmmofWorm. removal of carbonic acid is 
effectol b y ^ Passage through 

SS^rU^raV*; thc rcs P iratw y organs. Only 
vjMmwiiiottas/'.iBWMindn., the back-boned animals breathe 

through the nostrils, the lower 

animals breathing through pores or sacs* in their sides, 
which subdivide into countless tubes, 

But this grouping of animals so variously modified in 

structure, however fundamentally related in type, in the 
sub-kingdom Awwiosa, has been abandoned, especially 
as it included a number of primitive unsegmented forms. 
In fact, thc term itself is given up by thc best authorities, 

who are, however, by no means agreed as to thc mode 

of classification to be substituted, 




PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 



107 



For the purposes of this section, the life-forms rang- 
ing from worms to insects may be divided into the 
Annelida or footless, comprising worms and leeches ; 
and the Arthropoda or footed, compris- 
ing crabs and other Crustacea, spiders, 
scorpions, centipedes, and all insects. The 
jointed organs of locomotion known as 
Hmbs, and which have been developed 
from muscle-fibres, are arranged in pairs. 

Among the lowest members of the 
Annelida, with which the higher animals 
are more or less connected in descent, are 
VermeSj or worms ; these ranging from 
the flat or ribbon-like, and thread-like 
forms, of which a vast number live as para- 
sites outside or inside the bodies of nearly 
all animals, passing, in some cases, from 
one animal to another, in curious changes, 
man having his full share of them, to the 
ringed forms, of which earth-worms, marine 
worms, and leeches are the leading repre- 
sentatives. The interest in the structure 
of the NemertineS) or ribbon-worms, has 
greatly increased of late, because 'certain 
points in their organisation appear to indi- 
cate a remote degree of relationship to the 
ancestral forms which must have preceded 
the Chordata, to which the vertebrate 
animals also belong.' l 

This is perhaps the most convenient place to make 
reference to the isolated Rotifers, so-called because of 
the ceaseless wheel-like movements of the cilia round 
the mouth. These degenerate specks, many of which 

1 ZooL Articles from the Ency. BriL p. 83 (1891). 



FIG. 46. 
Common 
Rotifer. 

t mouth ; <5, eye- 
spots; a, chew- 
ing organ ; f, 
alimentary 
canal; /&, deve- 
loping embryos; 
/, anus. 



io8 THE STORY OF CREATION 

are visible to the naked eye, are highly organised. They; 
have a nerve ganglion which sends out threads to the ruby 
eye or eyes and antennae ; they have jaws and teeth, often 
a hard skeleton ; the females have one and sometimes 
two stomachs, but the poor male has none. They can 
remain for years in a state of suspended animation, 1 

The Arlhropoda include the remarkable worm-like 
Peripatus ; the Crustacea (lobsters, crabs, shrimps, &c.) ; 
Myriofoda (centipedes, millepedes) ; Insecta ; ArachnMa 
(spiders, scorpions, mites, &c.). 

Penpatus is * regarded as an animal of the very 
highest importance and antiquity, and is believed to be 
a nearly-related representative of the ancestor of all 
air-breathing Arthropoda, t\e. of all insects, spiders, and 
myriopods/ It has the appearance of a black cater* 




Fit;* 47.' lVri{mtu& 

pillar, and sometimes is more than three inches in 
length, It is provided with a single pair of small, 
simple eyes, with horn-like antenna.*, and with a double 
pair of horny jaws* It has seventeen pairs of short > hook- 
clawed feet, and it breathes air by means of tracheal (or 
windpipe-like) tubes like those of insects. * It appears 
probable that we have existing in Peripatm almost the 
earliest stage in the evolution of trachea:, and that 
these air-tubes were developed in the first trachcatc 
animal out of skin glands scattered all over the 
body. In higher tracheate animals the trachea! open- 
ings have become restricted to certain definite positions 
by the action of natural selection/ The sexes arc 

1 Cf. limlfwm nwl Uojfse'tt magnificent monograph, Th* 

9 *39 (Longmans)* 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 



109 



distinct in Perzpatus. Its antiquity ' is proved by its wide 
and peculiar distribution. It is found at the Cape of 
Good Hope, in Australia, New Zealand, Chili, the 
Isthmus of Panama, and the West Indies. If its horny 
jaws were only larger they would no doubt be found 
fossil in strata as old as the Old Red Sandstone at least/ 1 




FIG. 48. Generalised Insect (Grasshopper). 



, , 

legs ; /, tibia (corresponding to shin-hone) ; yn t tarsus (flat part of foot) ; 
abdomen. 

The typical form head, thorax or chest, and abdo- 
men or belly of the numerous varieties of the widely 
diffused Crustacea, or hard-shelled class, whose three- 
lobed ancestors, the trilobites, flourished in the seas of 

1 Moseley's Notes by a Naturalist on ?,M*S. ( Challenger* pp. 137-8 
(edit. 1892). 



no 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



the Cambrian and later periods, is the same, with infinite 
modifications in detail, as that of the Insecta and 
Arachnida, But in Insects these three divisions are 
sharply marked, the chest, to which the legs and wings 
are attached, and the belly, being sometimes joined by 
a mere thread, whence the name given to that class, 
Insecta, 'cut into/ The aquatic origin of insects is 
certain. Their wings have been developed from organs 
which were adapted for breathing in the air as the 
necessity arose, and they ultimately became organs of 
flight when the creature left the water for the land. 
Here, as in aught else, the process was gradual, only 
such as were able to exist for a time out of the water 
winning in the struggle for life. 

The larger number of animals pass through well- 
marked series of changes, but these take place within 
the egg, the food- store of which suffices for their deve- 
lopment Through lack of this 
supply most insects quit the egg in 
an immature condition, passing 
through the metamorphoses of 
grub, chrysalis, and imago. Like 
the rotifers, they rebuke the vulgar 
notion that bigness is greatness, 
and that wonder is to be propor- 
tioned by the size of the thing 
which arouses it. For the infinitely 
small is as fully charged with 
mystery as the infinitely great ; the 
movements offerees and energies in 
both cell and crystal are more com- 
plex than the motions of the giant 
bodies of the heavens ; the ultimate analysis of the atom 
is more elusive than that of the mass which it makes up. 




FIG. 49. Nervous Sys- 
tem of Beetle, showing 
double nerve-cord and 
chain of ganglia. 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS in 

In the beauty and delicacy of insect structure 
notably in the wings, more perfect for flight than those 
of birds ; in the infinite division of organs ; the spider, 
with its six hundred teats, spinning its web of as many 
strands ; l the dragon-fly, with its twelve thousand eyes, 
each with its own lens, cone, and rod ; the caterpillar, 
with its fifteen hundred air- tubes we learn that 
magnitude is not necessary to complexity. In the high 
nervous organisation of insects, and the variety of func- 
tions, many of these quasi-human, which they discharge ; 
in the dexterity of their actions, and the manifest 
adaptation of means to ends ; in the social order of 
certain species, notably the ant 
commonwealth, with its division 
of labour, its slave and fighting 
population, its farmers and 
miners, 2 its nurseries for pets 
and weaklings, its burial cus- 
toms, its political and industrial 

order, which has not, like ours, 
FIG. 50. Section of Eye of . , . , ., 1r u r , 

Insect. to readjust itself by peaceful or 

bloody revolutions to changing 

conditions we have striking evidence of the interrela- 
tion of all living things and of the unreality of the 
distinctions which man has set up between instinct and 
reason : in fine, evidence of fundamental correspondence - 
between the nervous systems of the lowest and the 
highest. Complexity, not size ; mental, not physical 
power, mark advance in the organism ; and it is in the 
specialisation of the nervous system, and in the propor- 
tion of its controlling centre, the brain, to the rest of the 

1 At the Melbourne Observatory a breed of spiders is kept, the strands 
of whose webs are used for micrometer?. 

* Cf. Bates's Amazons, pp. 350-360, on foraging ants. 




n-2 THE STORY OP CKEAT1QM 

structure, that the mechanical explanation of intelligence 
lies, 1 Darwin remarks that the brain of an ant, which 
is proportionally larger than that of any other insect, 
although itself not so largo as the quarter of a small pin's 
head, 'is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter 
in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man, 1 a 

There is much force in the argument that the long 
period of infancy, with its consequent dependence on 
parental love and care, through which man, and, in lesser 
degree, the highest apes and other animals, pass, has 
tended to develop the feeling of sympathy and of its 
expression in service of the helpless by which the family 
is knit together, and out of which has grown the social 
instinct which forms tribes and nations. Nor does the 
argument stop here. The longer the baby stage, the 
more intelligent is the animal ; for where there is a 
complex nervous system its specialisation goes on after 
birth; whereas in the case of an animal with low 
capacities all the nervous connections are formed before 
birth, so that it begins life in lusty independence, fully 
equipped for work, and therefore with no tic to bind it 
to its parents, while its isolated life is fatal to mental 
development, 

Now the ant, with other communal insects, as bees 
and wasps, has to pass through a relatively long grub- 
hood, and in this we may have the explanation of its 
high social organisation, which has had measureless time 
for its development, since the remains of Hymcnoptcra 
are found as far back as the Jurassic age, And if the 

1 In the c:kdmfer the j<wfw*rtiwj of hrtiin i< h<x!y is 1 u 3*500 5 In 
the worker lxrc l to 174 ; in the whttte, I to J/wn in the diiiiijtAtwc^ 1 
to 50, Bi as fvitlcnrtul l*y thr large liruift of flit* |sffiw*Iwg ami llit 
dolphin, the convolutions* move ttutit the voluitw of limit*, rt the 
of cftjwtrity, 

rf1/i, p. 54, ami c4 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 03 

argument has any force in the case of man, the evolu- 
tionist is bound to apply it to the ant, with the import- 
ant difference that the limits of the ant's development 
were reached long ago, the capacity to change varying 
inversely with the persistence of inherited qualities. 

But in the highest members of the Arthropoda we 
arrive at the extremity of one branch of the life-tree, 
and we must descend to reach the starting-point which 
leads us to the loftier branch whose topmost twig is 
man. 

5. Mollusca. 

This sub-kingdom, the importance of whose fossil 
remains has been indicated, includes a wide range of 
* organisms, any common definition of which is difficult. 
Many of them appear, like the fallen angels, not to 
have ' kept their first estate ' as, e.g., the lowest class, 
which resembles polyps, and was formerly erroneously 
grouped with them. In the larger number of molluscs 
symmetry of form is more the exception than the 
rule. Some Mollusca have neither heads nor hearts, or 
at least quite imperfect ones ; others have heads and 
chambered hearts ; some grow together in colonies; others 
live an independent life ; but all are alike soft-bodied, 
lacking segmented or jointed structure. Some, as the 
sea and land slugs, are naked, although furnished with a 
delicate shell when young ; others have a leathery or 
gristly covering ; the rest, the shell-fish proper, are pro- 
tected by single or double valves, which in their spiral 
forms and fadeless colouring sometimes surpass the 
loveliest flowers, or which, as in the pearl oyster, yield 
the lustrous substance which, according to ancient fable, 
is formed of rain-drops falling into the open valve, where 
some mysterious agency transmuted them. The power 

I 



114 THE STORY OF CREATION 

of secreting matter from the surrounding water for the 
construction* of their shells is one of the most persistent 
characteristics of the Mollusca, the shells (which are not 
cast periodically, as with the Crustacea) being formed 
along the surface of the thick flexible skin called the 
' mantle/ the crumpled line of which determines their 
shape. They range in size from the enormous Tridacna 
of tropical seas, which sometimes weighs five hundred 
pounds, to the minute species of our coasts, thousands of 



\ 




FIG. 51 Anatomy of Bivalve Mollusc. 

, anus ' , abductor muscle; <r, heart ; et^ nerve ganglia ; e, adductor muscle; 
f, mouth ; , stomach ; A, gills ; /, intestine surrounded by liver. The tubes 
marked by arrows are the canals of the siphon. The water enters by the 
lower and leaves by the upper tube. 

which scarcely exceed an ounce in weight. One species, 
the Clio borealis, about an inch long, which is so abun- 
dant as to colour the surface of the Arctic seas for 
leagues, has no less that 360,000 suckers for capture of 
its prey attached to the wing-like organs which spring 
from its head. 

The lowest molluscs are the plant-like, fixed Sea- 
mats and Sea-mosses ; the highest are represented by the 
Briareus-like Cuttle-fish, from the common species of 
our seas to the octopus, with its rudimentary internal 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 115 

skeleton and its chameleon-like power to change its 
colour ; and by the pearly Nautilus, the sole survivor of 
an ancient family that swarmed in the waters of the 
Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Between these range 
the more familiar shell-fish, notably the oyster, which, in 
common with all bivalves, is headless ; and the peri- 
winkle, whose land congener is the air-breathing 
snail 

6. Vertebrata. 

We now reach the last and highest of the divisions 
of animal life, the sub-kingdom of the back-boned, which 
includes man. 

Professor Cope says that the simplest expressions 
which shall cover all organs are the solid segment, the 
hollow sac and tube/ * The back-boned animals witness 
to this ; they have fundamentally the same organs and 
parts as earthworms, passing through the same grades of 
structure. But while all invertebrates, except the lowest, 
consist of a single tube or cavity containing the nervous 
and vascular systems in common, and have an outside 
skeleton, which is simply a hardening of the skin, 
vertebrates consist of two tubes or cavities, the smaller 
of which encloses the central parts of the nervous system, 
or the brain and spinal cord, and the other the vascular 
system, or the organs of digestion and circulation, and 
have an inside skeleton. The most important part of 
this is the spine or back-bone, which separates the tubes, 
and is made up of a number of jointed bones or vertebrae, 
united by remains of the cartilaginous notochord, which 
give flexible action to the whole column. The advantage 
of this combined strength and ease of movement is seen 
in fishes as they dart through the water, in the gliding of 

1 Origin of the Fittest, p. 185. 

I 2 



IX 6 THE STORY OF CREATION 

the snake, the leap of the antelope, and the spring of the 
lion ; while, as compared with animals which are either 
naked, or covered by a rigid horny skeleton, cumbersome 




as the armour of our ancestors, vertebrates have an 
enormous superiority in their internal framework of living 
bone, which adapts itself to, as well as nourishes and 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS n 7 

protects, the softer parts. Vertebrates, like the Annelida 
and Arthropoda, are bilaterally symmetrical, and are 
composed of segments placed one behind the other ; but 
the lines of junction have become hidden by overlying 
muscles or effaced by structural modification as, e.g., in 
the formation of the skull, which is composed of nine 
or more coalesced segments. The threefold division of 
the body into head, chest, and belly, characteristic of 
Crustacea and insects, is, however, more obvious. The 
limbs never exceed four in number, and are in pairs, 
whether as fins of fish (not reckoning the unpaired fins 
as limbs), wings and legs of birds and bats, fore and hind 
legs of quadrupeds, or arms and legs of man ; all being 
modifications of one type, as in the prolonged bones of 
the bat's wing, which correspond to our fingers. 

Such, in crude outline, are the principal features of 
the highest animals, but no general description can cover 
the infinite variety of vertebral forms. The sturgeon and 
the shark have a gristly spine ; the frog has no ribs ; the 
tortoise is encased in a shield composed of the hardened 
skin of its back and belly ; and even in the marked 
division of vertebrates into cold-blooded, embracing fish 
and reptiles, and warm-blooded, embracing birds and 
mammals, exceptions occur in warm-blooded fish, as the 
tunny and the bonito. But no differences in detail can 
obscure the fact that vertebrates are all modifications of 
a common type, the variations in structure being due to 
differences of function determined by unlike modes of life. 
Moreover, details obscure relations ; and since it is with 
the relation of all life-forms that we are chiefly concerned, 
we may pass to further evidence of connection between 
the highest invertebrate and the lowest animal of verte- 
brate character. This is furnished by the marine worm 
Sj because it is shown to possess gill-slits 



n 8 THE STORY OF CREATION 

like sea-squirts and lancelets, and to develop in early life 
a short notochord. 1 Of perhaps greater interest to the 
evolutionist are the transparent bag-shaped Sea-squirts, 
or Ascidians>'w\&&\ were formerly classed by themselves 
under Tunicata (Lat tunica^ a cloak). Most of the 
species are immobile, attaching themselves to rocks, 
shells, and other objects, sometimes growing separately, 
and sometimes in colonies on a common stem. Of the 
two openings in their gristly covering, which is largely 
made up of cellulose, a characteristic element in plants, 
one is the mouth and the other the vent. The mouth 
opens into a breathing sac, furnished with numerous 
gill-slits and cilia, and leading through the gullet to the 




FIG. 53. Balanoglossus.* 

digestive organs stomach and intestine which are 
connected by a sharp bend with the vent, whence the 
inhaled water, after giving up its oxygen to the blood, 
is expelled. The heart, a tube-shaped organ, is placed 
at the lower end of the body-cavity, which fills the space 
around the intestine. The circulation forms a remarkable 
exception to that of every other known animal, the current 
being reversed after the heart has beat a certain number 
of times. The nervous system, consisting of a single 
ganglion, lies between the mouth and vent. The position 
of this ganglion gives a valuable clue to the connection 
between the ascidians and the vertebrates, but still more 

1 See Prof. Ray Lankester's art. * Vertebrata,' in Zoological Article* 
contributed to the Ency. Brit. (1891). 

2 This illustration and that of Peripatus (p. 108) are, with the kind per- 
mission of Mr. John Murray, copied from Thomson's Study of Animal Life, 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS u 9 

important evidence as to this is supplied in the early 
stages of the ascidian's development In certain species 
the egg gives rise to a larva resembling the tadpole of 
a frog, both outwardly and inwardly a resemblance 
( reaching absolute identity when we examine the way 
in which the various organs arise from the primitive 





FIG. 55. Diagram of Structure of 
Sea-squirt. 

a, mouth ; b, vent ; c, gullet-opening ; d, nerve- 
ganglion ; *, stomach ;f, test or outer layer; 
-, tunic or inner layer ; Ji, branchial sac. 



FIG. 54. Sea-squirt. 
a, mouth ; ^, vent, 

egg-cell/ the only important difference being that the 
ascidian has but one eye. In connection with this Mr. 
W. B. Spencer's Important discovery of a small eye 
beneath the skin on the top of the head of the Hatteria 
lizard in New Zealand, the representative of reptiles 
whose fossils occur in the Trias, may be noted. The 



120 THE STORY OF CREATION 

larvae of the ascidian and of the frog alike possess four 
structures which are common to every back-boned 
animal at some stage of its development, and the posses- 
sion of which is explicable only on the theory of the 
descent of sea-squirts and vertebrates from a common 
ancestor. These four structures are (i) the throat with 
its gill-slits ; (2) the primitive back-bone a gristly rod 
called the notochord developed from the alimentary 
canal, and which is found in no invertebrates except the 
ascldians ; (3) the brain and spinal cord ; and (4) the 
eye, which is inside the brain. In all invertebrates 
which have eyes the retina or sensitive part is developed 
from the outer skin, and its outgrowth from the brain 
in vertebrates is ingeniously accounted for by Professor 
Ray Lankester l on the theory that the original vertebrate 
was a transparent animal, through every part of whose 
clear skin the light passed and acted on the tissues of 
the inlying brain. But as the skin became tougher and 
denser, and functions consequently more localised, the 
eye-bearing part of the brain had to grow outwards till 
skin-vesicle and brain-vesicle met, and the eye was 
formed at the surface. 

Similar as are the larvae of the tadpole and the sea- 
squirt, they diverge at later stages. While the one 
advances from the fish-like form to the amphibian, ex- 
changing gills and tail for lungs and limbs, and, in fine, 
epitomising in its development the series of forms through 
which its ancestors passed, the other fixes itself by suckers 
to stone or plant Tail, notochord, nerve- cord, and eye 
disappear, the brain remains small, the throat enlarges, 
the gill-slits increase in number, the skin becomes hard 
and leathery, and the eyeless, footless thing sinks, as its 
manufacture of cellulose markedly shows, well-nigh to the 

1 Cf. Degeneration, pp. 47-49, Nature Series (Macmillan). 



PRESENT LIFE- FORMS 121 

plant level, its vegetating mode of nutrition sealing its 
degeneration. 

The old classification of Vertebrates started with the 
lancelet (so called from its lance-like shape), or A mphioxus 
(Gr. amphi) both ; and oxus, sharp, both ends being 
nearly alike). The mouth of this headless, one-eyed, 
semi-transparent animal has cilia for driving-in the 
food-carrying water, and opens through the breathing 
slits into a wide gullet, in which the water, after giving up 
its oxygen to the colourless blood, enters, and is expelled 
at the vent There being no muscular heart, the blood 
is circulated by contractions of the vessels. 



**!> k 




J 

FIG. 56 Lancelet. 

, mouth ; , c, heart ; d. liver ; , respiratory organs ; k~p, digestive canal ; 
/, notocnord ; m t spinal marrow ; 0, tail fin. 

Now this boneless creature is classed among back- 
boned animals because it has the primitive gristly 
notochord from which the spine is developed in all true 
vertebrates. Above this rod lies the nervous system, 
composed of a single cord, which bulges slightly as a 
primitive brain near the mouth. The short notochord 
and single nerve-ganglion of the ascidian correspond, as 
far as they go, to like organs in the lancelet ; and if they 
were lengthened, so as to run along the whole of the 
back of the ascidian, the positions in the two animals 
would be found to agree exactly. This certainly points 
to their common descent. 

Fishes, as the least specialised vertebrates, although 



122 THE STORY OF CREATION 

by no means so stupid as is commonly thought, are 
placed in the lowest class, many species, as sharks, rays, 
and sturgeons, representing in their gristly back-bones, 
uneven tails, and spiny or plated skins, the armoured 
ganoids which mark the gradations between cartilage and 
bone in structure. All fish breathe by means of gills, the 
structure of which varies a good deal in the different 
orders, but are essentially the same in having like 
functions to discharge. 1 

Just as we had to retrace our steps in search of a 
link between vertebrates and invertebrates, so we must 
again go back a step or two to find the intermediate 
forms between aquatics and amphibians. These forms, 
the evolution of which is probably due to their occasional 
exposure to the atmosphere, developing in them different 
organs of breathing, are represented by certain fishes 
called Dipnoi^ or ' double-breathers/ because, while they 
have gills for taking up the oxygen from the water, they 
can also breathe on land by means of the air-bladder or 
sound, which thus discharges the functions of a lung. 
Such are the mud-fish of the Amazons, and the jeevine 
of Australia, both of which show tendency towards 
modification of the paired fins into limbs, 2 those of the 
mud-fish being thong-like, and those of the jeevine being 
jointed, for locomotion on land. Other fish, as eels and 
the climbing perch of India, can also leave the water, their 
breathing being effected by modification of the gills. 

Here, then, we find another intermediate step between 
land-dwellers and water-dwellers, the most perfect and 

1 In his Naturalist in North Celebes (1889), Dr. Hickson gives an 
account (p. 30) of certain jumping fishes which breathe mainly by the tail, 
the greater part of their lives being spent with head and gills out of the 
water. 

2 Cf. Professor Ray Lankester's preface to Gegenbaur's Comp, Anatomy, 
p. xi, ' On the Origin of Limbs.* 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 123 

familiar example of which is supplied by the common 
frog's life-history. The gill-breathing, limbless, tailed 
plant - eating, aquatic tadpole 
develops into the lung-breathing, 
four-legged, web-footed, tailless, 
animal-eating, amphibian frog, 
unable, save when torpid, to live 
in water without corning to the 
surface for air. Some amphibians 
possess both lungs and gills 
throughout life, but all the higher 
vertebrates, whether they live in 
water or not, breathe through 
lungs, which arise, like the air- 
bladder of fishes, as sac-like out- 
growths of the primitive gullet. 

Reptiles, which include forms 
as diverse as the nimble lizard, 
the sluggish crocodile, and the 
limbless snakes, are for the most 
part the relatively insignificant 
descendants of the monsters of 
the land, air, and water, that 
flourished in the Age of Reptiles 
amidst the dense vegetation of a 
swampy world, until conditions 
fatal to them, and favourable to 
the development of more plastic 
life-forms, supervened. 

Birds, at the head of which 
our best authorities place the 
crow family, possess a number of special characters, 
chiefly connected with the power of flight, from the path 
of which Roman augurs drew their omens of good or 




124 THE STORY OF CREATION 

evil, as do the Papuans of to-day. Their exact sequence 
In the development of vertebrates is unknown, but their 
descent from reptiles is certain. Not, as might be 
thought, from the flying species, for these were featherless, 
and more like bats than birds in the membranous wings 
which stretched from limb to body, but from land species 
resembling the dinosauria. But, although structural 
likenesses between birds and reptiles survive to attest 
former close relation as, e.g., the union of the skull to 
the spine by a single joint, instead of by two joints, as 
in most amphibians and in all mammals, and the union 
of the skull to the jaw by the quadrate bone, which 
enables the jaws to be opened very widely manifold 
causes, working through long periods, have brought about 
marked differences of external and internal structure. 
Notable among these is the modification of the three- 
chambered heart of nearly all reptiles into the four- 
chambered heart of birds and mammals, by which the 
fresh and used-up blood are kept separate, and the 
higher temperature of the body is maintained. The 
scales of the one, and the feathers or downy covering of 
the other, are alike modifications of the outer skin ; for 
although the intermediate stages between the plumage 
of birds and the horny plates of reptiles are missing in 
fossil remains, it is certain that these and kindred struc- 
tures, as hairs, claws, nails, and hoofs, are all outgrowths 
of the skin. Even teeth, the variety of form and 
arrangement of which render them of great value in 
determining the habits and general structure of the 
animal to which they belonged, are secreted from the 
skin. It has been shown already that the nervous system 
and sense-organs are also formed from the skin ; nor 
should the variety ~of function which it discharges, and 
therefore the variety of structure into which it is modified, 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 



125 



surprise us when we reflect how continuous has been the 
action of the medium with which it is in immediate con- 
tact upon the external surface of all organisms, so that' 




FIG. 58, Growth of Hair. 

A. Hair-rudiment from an embryo of six weeks. , horny layer of cuticle ; 6, 

mucous layer of cuticle ; c, cells of the future hair ; a, basement mem- 
brane. 

B. Hair-rudiment with the young hair formed, "but not yet risen through the 

cuticle. 

C. Hair protruded. 

the slight film or integument of the lowest has developed 
into the complex layers which enclose the highest. 

Space prevents more than bare reference to the 
varied and helpful material furnished to the evolutionist 



126 THE STORY OF CREATION 

by birds, and to the significant evidence of their develop* 
ment as compared with their reptilian ancestors in larger 
proportion of brain to body, with the intelligence which 
this connotes. A remarkable proof of this may be seen in 
the wide range and method of their migrations, involving 
powers of vision and memory exceeding that possessed by 
man. On this instinct, about which we know very little, 
but which probably had its origin in the search after food, 
Darwin remarks, ' How a small and tender bird coming 
from Africa or Spain, after traversing the sea, finds the 
very same hedgerow in the middle of England, where it 
made its nest last season, is truly marvellous.' 

It is interesting to note that in the oldest known 
picture in the world, a fresco in the Boolak museum -at 
Cairo taken from a tomb dating about 3000 B.C., three 
species of geese are depicted, two of which are so well 
drawn as to be readily identified. 

The lowest members of the diversified group of 
Mammals or milk-givers resemble birds in being tooth- 
less, and in having a common sac into which the intes- 
tines and other organs open, for which reason they are 
called Monotremes, or one-vented. These quasi-mammals 
are represented by the ornithorhynchus, 1 or duckbill, a 
beaver-like creature with a horny bill, the feet being 
furnished with both webs and claws ; and by the echidna, 
or spiny ant-eater, which resembles a large hedgehog, 
being snouted and covered with prickles. Each is found 
in Australia, that land of primitive forms, and recent 
discoveries invest them with the greatest importance 
as links in the chain of mammalian descent For they 
both lay eggs like reptiles and birds, the duckbill laying 

1 Ornitkorhynchus paradoxus, the older naturalists named it ; for when 
they were assured that the creature was not a fraud of the stuffer, they 
thought it must be a freak of nature. 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 



127 



two at a time, which she deposits in her underground 
nest, and the echidna laying one, which is probably 
hatched in her pouch. And the eggs further correspond 
with those of birds and reptiles in containing not only the 
protoplasm from which the embryo is formed, but also 




FIG. 59. Duckbill, 

the food-yolk on which it is nourished until* 1 hatched, 
when it lives on the milk obtained from the mammary 
glands in some way not yet fully ascertained. Now an 
animal that unites in itself these reptilian and mammalian 
features is to be classed among the interesting anomalous 
and intermediate forms which Darwin has happily 
termed ' living fossils/ Whether monotremes are de- 



128 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



scended in direct line from reptiles, with the internal 
structure of which they have much in common, and 




mammals from monotremes, or whether there was an 
ancestral form or rootstock from which both reptile and 
mammal branched off, so that mammals are as old as 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 129 

reptiles and older than birds, Is not clear, although the 
rocks may one day reveal it. But the interrelation of 
reptiles and mammals is proven beyond question. 

The next stage in mammalian development is marked 
by the Marsupials, OYyduc/iecTmilk-givers* as kangaroos 
and opossums, the young of which are born in an imperfect 
condition, and nourished and kept in the mother's pouch 
till they can run alone. Their fossil remains evidence 
a wide range in Triassic times, and the Post-Pliocene 
beds of Australia yield bones of marsupials as large as 
elephants ; but their habitats are now limited to that 
island continent, and to lands similarly long isolated 

In all other mammals * the young are born fully 
formed, being attached during the time of their develop- 
ment within the mother to a structure called the placenta, 
through which they are nourished by her, whence the 
general term placental mammals, of which the insect- 
feeders appear to be the primitive type. Starting thus 
more or less fully equipped in the struggle for life, the 
chances in their favour were incomparably greater than 
those of animals which are precariously hatched or born 
in an imperfect state ; hence, among other causes, the 
dominance of the placentals, and their development into 
the highest organisms yet reached. They are usually 
divided into the following classes, which indicate structural 
characters common to the animals included under each, 
arid not the exact relative place of the class in the sub- 
kingdom. No linear arrangement of classes, nor even of 
species, is possible, for the succession of forms is not as 
that of steps of a ladder, but as of a many-branched tree ' 

I. TOOTHLESS Sloths; ant-eaters; armadillos, These show 

{Edentata} affinities linking them nearer to monotremes 

than to marsupials. (The term Edentata is mis- 
leading, as only two members of the order, the 
Great and the Scaly Ant-eater, are without teeth.) 

K 



130 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



2. SIRENS 
(Sirenia) So called 
from their fancied 
resemblance to mer- 
maids or sirens. 

3. WHALE-LIKE 
(Cetacea) 

. HOOFED . 
(Ungulata) 



5. HYRAX, or ROCK- 

RABBIT . 
(Hyracoidea} 

6. TRUNKED . 
(Proboscidea] 

7. FLESH-FEEDERS. 
(Cami'oora) 

8. GNAWERS . 
(Rodmtia) 

9. INSECT-FEEDERS 
(Insectivora} 

10. FINGER-WINGED 
( Cheiroptera) 

u. LEMURS . 
(Lemuroidea) 



12. PRIMATES . 



Dugongs and manatees, or sea-cows ; fish-like in 
form, the fore limbs modified into paddles, the 
hind limbs absent : both these are plant-feeders. 



Whales ; dolphins ; porpoises ; also adaptation of 
structure to aquatic life. 

Very numerous and valuable order. Divided into 
the odd-toed -as the horse, the tapir, and his 
near relation the rhinoceros; and the even-toed 
as swine, and their near relation the hippo- 
potamus ; camel j deer ; sheep ; ox : ail these 
are plant-feeders. 

Represented by a small animal, the coney of the 
Bible. The shape of the teeth points to affinities 
with hoofed animals on the one hand and gnaw- 
ing animals on the other. 

Represented only by the elephant, the longest- 
lived and most acute of plant-feeders. 

Seals; bears; weasels; wolves and other members 
of the dog family ; lions and other members of 
the cat family. 

Hare ; rat ; beaver ; squirrel. A very widespread 
class. 

Mole ; hedgehog ; shrew. 

Bat, highly organised, closely allied to insect- 
feeders. 

The lemurs are sometimes grouped with monkeys 
in the order of the ( four-handed,' a division 
falling into disuse ; but they have marked affini- 
ties with marsupials, gnawers, and insect- 
feeders. The 'flying lemur,' or colugo, a 
squirrel-like creature with webbed hands, ap- 
pears to be an interesting link between insect- 
feeders and Primates. 

Monkeys ; baboons ; man-like apes (gibbon, 
orang-outang, chimpanzee, gorilla), big-jawed, 
small -brained, stooping posture ; MAN, big- 
brained, erect posture divided into races ac- 
cording to shape of skull, colour of skin, nature 
of hair. 



PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 




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THE STORY OF CREATION 




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PRESENT LIFE-FORMS 133 

In the foregoing survey of past and present life- 
history no break in the continuity of life, or in its fun- 
damental unity, is found. In the unstableness of the first 
living matter lay the tendency to that variation which, 
acted upon by manifold agencies in the production of 
unlikeness, both seen and unseen, has resulted in ever- 
increasing complexity of forms. But, strive as we may 
not to overlay with detail, it is not easy to keep clear 
and constant before the mind the relationship between 
all life that is and that has been, as well as the identity 
of that life with, and its dependence upon, the not-living. 
Perhaps this interrelation may be made more apparent 
in the exposition of the theory of evolution which is now 
to follow the description of the things evolved. 



PAR T iL EXPLANATORY. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE UNIVERSE: MODE OF ITS BECOMING AND 
GROWTH, 

It must be so, for miracles are ceased ; 

And therefore we must needs admit the means 

How things are perfected. 

Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry V^ act i. sc. I. 
The gases gather to the solid firmament ; the chemic lump arrives at 
the plant and grows ; arrives at the quadruped and walks ; arrives at the 
man and thinks. EMERSON. 

IN the first chapter a summary account was given of the 
materials which make up the universe. These were 
comprised under the terms Matter and Motion, as con- 
venient names for an observed order of facts of whose 
ultimate nature we know nothing. As explained 
already, it is upon the twofold and opposite action of 
Motion that we base our assumptions as to the nature 
of Matter i.e. as consisting of atoms of infinite minute- 
ness, centres of ceaseless activities. 

That form. of Motion which draws the atoms to- 
gether into larger or smaller masses, and which resists, 
their separation, we distinguish as Force ; that form of 
Motion which drives the atoms apart, and resists their 
combination, we distinguish as Energy. Both Force 



156 THE STORY OF CREATION 

Energy are, like matter, indestructible ; In other 
words, the sum- total of each is a fixed quantity. 
Force Inheres in, and cannot be taken from, each atom 
of weighable matter ; but Energy passes from atom to 
atom, and fmm mass to mass, Its vehicle being that 
umveighable ethereal medium which, it is assumed, fills 
the spaces between bodies and between ths particles of 
bodies. In this diverse way each is ceaselessly acting, 
Force aggregating the particles round various centres, 
Energy separating them and passing into space, only 
fractions of it striking intervening bodies, as ? e.g. y in the 
interception of the sun's radiant energy by the planets. 
And the result, however immeasurably distant, is that 
all the Energy of our universe, as that universe now 
exists, will be dissipated ; and that Its matter, like that of 
other dark, burnt-out star-systems, will become cold, 
solid, and Inert under the resistless action of Force. 

The problem we have now to consider Is this : 
Given Matter and Motion as the raw materials of the 
universe, Is the interaction of Motion, under Its two 
forms of a combining Force and a separating Energy, 
upon Matter, sufficient to account for the totality of 
non-living and living contents of the universe ? 

Of the beginning, of what was before the present 
state of things, of \vhat will follow the end of it, we know 
nothing, and speculation about It Is futile. Science Is 
concerned with the universe as we find It, the mobile 
vehicle of orderly succession ; the Evolved, or Unfolded ; 
das Wcrden^ as the Germans say, or the Becoming : 
not less wrapped In mystery because we describe It as 
a mechanical process, and do not fall back upon un- 
known agencies or assume unknown attributes of 
Matter or Motion to explain it. 

But bince everything points to the finite duration of 



THE UNIVERSE 137 

the present universe for what it now is it once was 
not, and its state is ever changing we must make a 
start somewhere. And we are therefore compelled to 
posit a primordial nebulous, non-luminous state, when the 
atoms, with their inherent forces and energies, stood apart 
from one another. Not evenly distributed, else Force 
would have drawn them together as a uniform spherical 
mass round a common centre of gravity, and Energy, 
awakened by the collision of atom with atom, would 
have passed profitlessly in the form of heat to the 
ethereal medium ; but varying in position and charac- 
ter, with special gravitation towards special centres. 
This theory of unstableness and unlikeness at the out- 
set squares with the unequal distribution of Matter, 
with the movements of its masses in different directions 
and at different rates, and with the ceaseless redistribu- 
tion of Matter and Motion. All changes of state are due 
to the rearrangement of atoms through the play of 
attracting forces and repelling energies, resulting in the 
evolution of the seeming like into the actual unlike, of 
the shapeless into the shapely, of the simple into the 
more and more complex, till the highest complexity is 
reached in the development of living matter. If all 
that is, from fire-fused rock to the genius of man, was 
wrapped up in primordial matter, with its forces and 
energies, we can speak of simplicity only in a relative 
sense as contrasted with the infinite variety around us 
which has been evolved. 

i. Inorganic Evolution. Under this head we may 
apply the foregoing principles to the earliest stages of 
cosmical change, to the Evolution of Stellar Systems. 

The existence of nebulous or cloud-like objects in 
space, which the telescope, aided by the analysis of the 
spectroscope, proves to be immense masses of glowing 



1 38 THE OF 

far to justify the assumption of a yet more 
state of the atoms which formed the material 
universe at the outset But s although we are familiar 
with matter In an Invisible state, as^ e,g^ In the element 
oxygen, which, In a combined state, forms nearly half 
the solid framework of the globe ? we can form no con- 
ception of the extreme rarefaction of the primitive atoms. 
Upon this Helmholtz remarks that * If we calculate the 
density of the mass of our planetary system at the time 
when It was a nebulous sphere which reached to the 
path of the outermost planet s we should find that It 
would require several millions of cubic miles of such 
matter to weigh a single grain. 1 Given, however, the 
play of force and energy upon this diffused matter, the 
mechanics of the process which resulted In the visible 
universe are not difficult of explanation. The Force 
Inherent in each atom } acting as affinity, combined the 
atoms as molecules ; acting as cohesion* it united the 
molecules into masses ; acting as gravitation. It drew the 
masses toward their several centres of gravity. One of 
these masses, by no means the largest, became the 
nucleus of our solar system* which may be taken as a 
type of all other masses whose evolution into stellar 
systems is as yet complete. 

As the atoms rushed together, Energy, which had 
hitherto existed in a state of rest as passive separation, 
became active In molar and molecular form. As motet 
energy It imparted motion to each mass a motion of 
rotation on its own axis ; and a motion In an orbit, as In 
the proper motion of double stars, and of the planets 
round the sun. As molecular energy It Imparted a rapid 
vibratory backwards and forwards motion to the mole- 
cules , which motion was forthwith converted Into the 
radiant energy of heat and light, rendering the mass 



THE UNIVERSE 139 

self-luminous. From the moment of their conversion 
the dissipation of both forms of energy ensued. The 
friction of the ethereal medium slowly retards the 
orbital motion of every mass, the molar energy thus lost 
passing into that medium, until finally the orbital 
motion will be stopped, and the force of gravitation, no 
longer resisted by energy, will draw the smaller masses 
to the larger, as vagrant meteors are being ceaselessly 
drawn to planets and sun. Moons will gravitate to their 
planets, planets to their suns, and so on, until the matter 
of the universe, with intermediate outbursts of energy, 
becomes cold, inert, and solid, and Force will have 
subdued all things unto itself. The molecular energy 
likewise passes, but more rapidly, into the ethereal 
medium, throbbing ceaselessly in all directions to the 
farthest marge of space, if any marge there be. Small 
portions of it are intercepted by each mass, but of these 
the larger proportion is reflected back, the remainder 
setting up separative motions on the surface, as, e.g.> in 
the familiar case of the action of the sun's radiant heat 
on the earth. Of this solar energy, which is radiated 
equally in every direction, the earth does not intercept 
much more than the two thousand millionth part. And 
of this the larger proportion is reflected back, only a 
fraction, to be itself finally dissipated, being used to 
maintain the earth as the theatre of atmospheric and 
superficial changes whose highest result is life. 

2. Evolution of the Solar System. We may now 
leave the general for the particular, and apply the theory 
to the evolution of that particular stellar system to which 
we belong, and to that portion of it which we call the earth. 
If the explanation of the origin of the sun and planets 
repeats somewhat of the foregoing, it will only bring 
home to us the uniformity of the process, and show that 



140 THE 57O/VF "/" tA' 

is tsue of the whole holds good for every part, and 
for the part:* n f every part down to the atoms of which 
all thi n i^ arc a^unied to consist. 

Two striking pieces of evidence of the common 
origin of the sun and planets may be cited at the outset : 
(l) They are made of like materials ; (2) they have like 
motions, 

1 l ) The spectroscope has revealed to us the chemical 
constitution of several of the fixed stars, their enormous 
distance not affecting the trustworthiness of the analysis. 
It evidences the existence of substances In the glowing 
vapours of their atmospheres akin to those which feed 
the fires of the sun ; and If such Identity of stuff Is 
proved to exist between the sun and other stars,, we may 
with reason look for still closer identities of material 
between him and Ms family of planets, moons, and erratic 
bodies. In fact, the sun is known to consist of materials 
largely represented in our earth. 

(2) The planets and* with rare exceptions* their 
satellites, revolve round him In the same direction ; they 
also* so far as Is known, rotate on their axes In the same 
direction, and very nearly coincide In the shape and 
planes of their orbits, which are almost in a plane with 
the sun's equator. Now, since the consequences would 
be the same were these motions, both on axis and in 
orbit, in the reverse direction, the Inference is obvious 
that there was a uniform motion of rotation of the mass 
from which they were severally formed. 

As with the primitive nebula from which that mass 
was detached, so with the mass itself ; there were differ- 
ences of density throughout On rjo other theory Is its 
segregation into a multitude of bodies explicable. As 
the rotation of the mass quickened with the indrawing 
of the particles towards the common centre of gravity, 



THE UNIVERSE 141 

the energy of molar separation acted most powerfully 
in the region of the bulging equator, and, overcoming 
the force of cohesion along the line of least resistance, 
detached certain portions one after another at irregular 
intervals from the central mass as it retreated within 
itself. These portions were the nuclei of the planetary 
groups, in which the like processes of contraction and 
rupture were repeated, the masses detached becoming 
moons, or, as in the case of Saturn, rings of satellites. 
In respect of the diffused and highly energised fugitive 
masses, as comets and meteors, Mr. Proctor has adduced 
cogent reasons in support of the theory that they are 
products of expulsion from suns, from giant planets, 
and from orbs like our earth when in the sun -like state.' L 

1 The nebular theory of Laplace, some features of which are given in 
the foregoing text, assumed the casting-off of equatorial rings of matter 
from the central mass, the rings drawing together as planetary bodies, from 
which, in like manner, other rings, which became moons, were thrown off. 
But the coherence of rings into globes is not proven, and in this, as in some 
other matters, Laplace's theory breaks down. Every astronomer agrees that 
there was a primitive solar nebula, and that the planets were once an integral 
part of it, but how it became ordered and organised, how it collected into 
spheres, leaving wide interspaces clear, the wisest are perplexed to decide.' 

For a lucid criticism of the defects of Laplace's theory, more especially 
in its failure to account for the peculiar distribution of the larger and 
smaller planets, the reader may study with advantage Mr. Proctor's essay 
on i How the Planets Grew, 5 in his Expanse of Heaven. 

A footnote on Sir Norman Lockyer's theory of the meteoric origin of 
the heavenly bodies was appended to previous editions of this book. The 
paper in which that theory was expounded was enlarged into a volume 
entitled The Meteoritic Hypothesis, and the theory has been re-stated in 
Sir Norman Lockyer's The Surfs Place in Nature. That re-statement, 
together with the mis-statement in Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace's fantastic 
Man's Place in the Universe that Sir Norman Lockyer's theory is * gradu- 
ally spreading among astronomers and mathematicians, 3 make it desirable 
to say that the objections summarised in the foot-note have lost none of 
their weight, but have, in fact, gathered force from the inability of Sir 
Norman Lockyer to prove his assumption of identity between the spectrum of 
meteoric dust and that of nebulae. His contention that the chief nebular line 
, is due to magnesium is met by proof that it differs, both in position and cha- 
racter, from the spectrum of that element. In fact, such eminent 1 author!- 



143 OP 

The origin of the and their moons being 

found in the mode described above, it Is obvious that in 
their primitive they were molten, and shone by 

their ll-^ht All hot part with their heat 

to cooler bcu j > : and when equilibrium of temperature 
Ls rescbc-n all separative motions cease no work can 
b\ d^ne The smaller the body, the sooner would its 
mf'lu'Uidr cr.erjy be dissipated; in other words, the 
quicker it loM; its heat. The present In a large degree 
interprets the past, and explains the several stages of 
the of our system, according to their bulk 

Fhc sun, mass exceeds the combined mass of all 

the planets than 700 times. Is still slowly contract- 

ing therefore still radiating energy. In this con- 
tra*, tii'ti lie- ^onic explanation of the maintenance of his 
c n c r jjy, \\ hie h at the j *rcsent rate of dissipation would cause 
hi* whole cliametLT to contract 220 feet yearly, or four 
milc< in a century, <o that the sun may become as dense 
as the earth in a few million years, 1 The cloud-laden 
atmospheres of the larger planets, as Jupiter and Saturn^ 
are torn by cyclones second only to those of the sun in 
their fury, and the molten centres feed volcanic outbursts 
to which of Vesuvius and Krakatoa are mere squibs. 

tse* as !'T< ffswvrft ^cheiner Xewcomb are of opinion that the theory is 
r4 uoiifa thv" time needed to refute it, and this opinion is fully endorsed by 
war highest authority on *pectrum analysis, Sir William Huggins, P.R.S. 
1 Recent researches show that contractioB of the sun's mass Is not the 
*ole, nor, |*r!iAps, even a chief, cause of the mainteBance of his heat. 
Po^ith ridium may IK? present In saflideBt quantity to play a large part 
in ?!,i*, aud, as Mr. Maunder saggests in Knowledge (November 1903), the 
same **? Mnalar radio-artwe properties may be possessed by other solar con- 
*-titufrit4* 01 by the son himself as a whole. By radio-activity is understood the 
ripontaneuu- emi>sion of minate particles which a few elements, as uranium, 
thorium, ami fa-hum, give off ir^int!y without any apparently exciting 
caiUM'. litit the more we advance inlmowledge the more do the mysteries 
ofcosiiac i}narnics multiply, and in the jxrnetration of these the achieve- 
fntttH vf the twentieth century may wirpass those of the nineteenth century. 



THE UNIVERSE *43 

But as for the smaller bodies, their turmoil is calmed 
and their light extinguished ; the store of energy is 
exhausted ; the forces of affinity and cohesion have 
gained the upper hand and drawn the particles together 
into the solid form. Thus it is with the moon, on whose 
dead and barren surface we may read the future of the 
giant planets and the sun himself. For the history of one 
is the history of all ; each has passed, or is passing, 
from the indefinite nebulous state, through numberless 
modifications, to the definite and solid state, by decrease 
in volume and increase in density. What the earth is, 
the moon was ; what the moon is, the earth will be. 

3. Evolution of the Earth* To this passage from the 
sun-like to the solid state the earth bears witness. Its 
flattened poles, its bulging equator, its spheroidal shape, 
are the effects of rotation on a fluid or viscous mass ; 
whilst the geologically oldest parts of the crust for there 
is no primogeniture in matter are of a structure which 
is producible only by the fusion of particles under 
intense heat. As that crust, thin and mobile at the 
outset, continued to cool and thicken, it evidenced more 
strikingly the play of forces and energies within, and 
of energies and, in lesser degree, of forces without. The 
cooling and shrinking of the internal mass, as the stored - 
up energy slipped away, caused tension of the crust, 
which, yielding to the force of gravitation, was drawn 
inwards, and cracked and crumpled into mountains and 
valleys, and into the deep depressions which the great 
oceans have filled since the time when their waters were 
first condensed from the thick primitive vapours that 
swathed the cooling earth. Then the continuous action 
of the sun's radiant energy, operating through air and 
water upon the increasingly rigid crust, dissolved its 
superficial particles, and re-deposited them as stratified 



144 THE OP 

rocks, in variety, over the surface of 

the globe, And herein Hes the major cause of our 
earth's present condition as a possible abode of life. 
For Its native supply of energy- -that of position derived 
from the momentum given It when thrown off from the 
mass ; and the still unspent, but always lesseninr, 
of internal heat manifest in the volcano and lue 
earthquake would not suffice to arrest effeteness and 
the wrapping of the globe in a winding-sheet of ice. It 
Is the imported supply from the sun which alone does 
that, for in its absence the trivial tidal energy due to the 
moon would be futile, because the and oceans would 
be solid. Opposing the force which attracts everything 
Into Inert union, the solar energy up the separative 
motions, the redistributions, which give rise to 

the grand climatal and vital phenomena of nature. 
Expanding the air, it causes the inrush to which winds 
and storms are due ; heating the water, it excites the 
currents, and draws heavenward the aqueous 
vapour, which, driven by the wind, returns* when its 
energy is lost, as rain and snow, those silent yet mightiest 
agents of mechanical* chemical, and vita! changes. But 
the full significance of the work done by the sunbeams 
that strike the earth's surface will appear when we treat 
of the relation of the living to the non-living. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 

THE fascination which the question of the origin of life 
possesses is not lessened by the slow abrasion of the 
artificial lines which divide the living from the non-living. 
Round it, like planet tethered to sun by the invisible 
force of attraction, the mind of man revolves, unable to 
disentangle itself and escape into a larger orbit, whence 
the truer proportions of things may be seen \ nor will 
"the undue importance accorded to the living vanish 
until there is deepened within us that sense of the un- 
broken interrelation of all things to which science brings 
her ' cloud of witnesses. 5 

It is agreed that there was an ' azoic ' or lifeless 
period in the history of the earth therefore that life had 
a beginning ; and it is with the evidence as to continuity 
or gap between the azoic and the zoic epochs that the 
present chapter is concerned. 

The azoic stage is evidenced by the primordial tem- 
perature of the globe, which, taking the present tem- 
perature of the sun as a fair standard of comparison, is 
computed to have been 14,000 times hotter than boiling 
water. Under such highly energetic conditions chemical 
combinations of the vaporous particles, and, a fortiori, 
vital combinations, were impossible, But with the slow 



146 THE STORY OF CREATION 

cooling consequent upon the continuous passage of the 
earth's molecular energy into space, the combining forces 
came into more and more active play, forming first the 
extremely simple and more stable compounds, as water ; 
then the more complex and less stable, as salts ; and so 
on in increasing complexity of material and unlikeness 
of structure. Obviously an enormous fall in the temper- 
ature took place before the superheated mass became 
cool enough to permit the formation of an outer crust 
It was into the depressions of this crust that the vapours 
which floated over it fell as they condensed, forming 
water, which at first was probably at the temperature of 
a dull red heat. 

Thus far, in broad outline, the material foundation 
for the superstructure of life. 

When, where, and how did life begin ? 

As to the time, we have no evidence whatever. Life 
is enormously older than any record of it. Even the 
higher forms were developed long before the periods in 
which we first find their remains. 

As to the place, probably in polar regions, as Buffon 
suggested in his ' Epoques de la Nature.' 

As the globe cooled, those regions would be the 
earliest to reach a temperature under which life is 
possible. The Comte de Saporta, whose researches give 
large support to Buffon's theory, remarks that the richest 
fossil-yielding rocks are found in northern latitudes of 
50 to 60 and beyond, and show that far back as Silurian 
times the north pole was warm enough to maintain life 
of a tropical character, and that it was the centre of 
origin of successive forms down to the Tertiary epoch ; 
the Miocene flora, which has now to be sought 40 farther 
south, being profusely represented. In Carboniferous 
times a warm, moist, equable climate prevailed over the 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 147 

whole globe, due, as De Saporta argues, to arrest of 
radiation by a highly vaporous atmosphere, and also, 
perhaps, to the greater difFuseness of the sun's light by 
reason of his larger volume. Thiselton Dyer says that all 
the great assemblages of plants seem to admit of being 
traced back at some time in their history to the northern 
hemisphere with its preponderating land-surface. 

It is therefore to the north pole, more than to the 
south pole, whose secrets, however, no man has yet wrested, 
that all evidence points as the area of the origin and dis- 
tribution of life. The great land-masses radiate south- 
wards, forming, with their alternations of submergence 
beneath shallow seas, and of upheaval, channels of migra- 
tion for life-forms, the modifications in which have arisen 
from causes to be dealt with presently. In contrast to 
this, the south pole, through its isolation by the deep 
oceans, whose beds have never been dry land since the 
waters filled their cavities, has maintained only a slender 
connection with the continents and large islands tapering 
towards it, and its plants and animals have been unable 
to make headway against the ceaseless life-stream from 
the north. So that given time, evolution, continental 
continuity, changes of climate and elevation of the land, 
and it would appear that the dominant types may be 
traced back to the northern hemisphere. 1 

1 Cf. the Comte Gaston de Saporta's VAndenne Vtgttation Polaire, 
in Compte Rendu of the International Congress of Geography held in Paris, 
1875 (published 1877); extracts from Sir J. D. Hooker's Address to the 
Royal Society, 1877, m Proceedings of Royal Geog. Soc. 9 vol. i., 1879, fr m 
which the following is quoted : * Perhaps the most novel idea in Count 
Saporta's essay is that of the diffused sunlight which (with a densely clouded 
atmosphere) the author assumes to have been operative in reducing the con- 
trast between the polar summers and winters. If it be accepted, it at once 
disposes of the difficulty of admitting that evergreen trees survived a long 
polar winter of total darkness, and summer of constant stimulation by bright 
sunlight : and if, further, it is admitted that it is to internal heat we may 

J, 3 



148 THE STORY OF CREATION 

As to the mode> let us approach the problem by treat* 
ing of what is common to both the lifeless and the living. 
Now, in brief, there are no elements in the one which do 
not occur in the other. The most complex plant and 
animal, and the lowest living germ, so apparently devoid 
of structure that it can only by courtesy be called an 
organism, are alike made of materials derived, directly or 
indirectly, from earth and air and water. These materials 
are oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, with a little 
sulphur and phosphorus, and still fainter traces of other 
elements, combined in extreme and elusive complexity. 
Of the several elements entering into this subtile com- 
bination, carbon is probably the element to which the 
most prominent part is to be assigned. Its affinity for 
itself, and its faculty of uniting in manifold relations both 
of number and weight, cause its compounds to be more 
numerous and important than those of all the other 
elements taken together. Combining with the foregoing 
elements, it gives rise to protoplasm, from which by 
successive modifications, slow in their operations, the 
teeming variety of living things has been developed. 
These, as explained already, are made up of myriads 
of cells, each of which is a life-centre, their combi- 
nation being the sum-total of the life of the organism, 
As the cell itself is an organisation formed from proto- 

ascribe the tropical aspect of the former vegetation of the polar region, 
then there is no necessity for assuming that the solar system at those periods 
was in a warmer area of stellar space, or that the position of the poles was 
altered, to account for the high temperature of pre-glacial times in high 
northern latitudes ; or, lastly, that the main features of the great continents 
and oceans were very different in early geological times from what they 
now are.' Also Wallace's Island Life, ch. xxiii. passim-, Thiselton 
Dyer's lecture on * Plant Distribution as a Field of Geographical Research,' 
Proc. Royal Geog. Soc. 9 xxii. 415, 1878; Grant Allen's Vignettes from 
Nature. < The Fall of the Year ; ' and Sir J. W. Dawson's Geol ffist. of 
Plants^ pp. 221, 257, 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 149 

plasm, and marks the first stage in visible structure, 
the question as to the mode of origin of life narrows 
itself to the origin, not of complex organisms, nor 
of cells, but of protoplasm. Given the matter which 
composes it, and the play of forces and energies of 
which that matter is the vehicle, wherein lies the differ- 
ence which gives as one result non-living substance, 
and as another result living substance? The answer 
obviously is that, the ingredients being the same, the 
difference must lie in the mixing. 

We are already familiar in the inorganic world with 
the existence of the same element in more than one 
form, but with different characteristics e.g., of carbon, 
as diamond, graphite, and charcoal ; the difference being 
doubtless due to molecular arrangement. Chemistry 
also reveals intimate likeness of materials in the com- 
pounds known as isomeric, in which the physical and 
chemical properties vary considerably. It has also 
manufactured organic compounds, as starch, urea, and 
alcohol, the production of which was once thought im- 
possible ; and if the experiments to produce the living 
out of the non-living by decoctions of hay and extracts 
of beef have failed, as we might expect they would, this 
failure can have no weight against the argument that 
we cannot think any limit to the possibilities of nature's 
subtile transmutations during the vast periods that the 
earth has been a possible abode of life. And is not the 
transmutation of the inorganic into the organic ceaselessly 
going on within the laboratory of the plant under the 
agency of chlorophyll ? 

The ultimate cause which, bringing certain lifeless 
bodies together, gives living matter as the result, is a 
profound mystery, ' The transition between the organic 
and the inorganic energies may be possibly found in the 



i$o THE STORY OF CREATION 

electric group. Its influence on life, its production of 
contractions In protoplasm, and its resemblance to nerve- 
force, are well known. It also compels chemical unions 
otherwise impracticable/ ] But, although the living thing 
affects us much more nearly than lifeless stones and rain, 
it hides no profounder mystery than they. The * affini- 
ties/ as in our ignorance we name* them, which lock 
the elements into beautiful crystalline forms, are no 
whit less wonderful than the motions in matter through 
which the same elements manifest the phenomena of life. 
The origin of life is not a more stupendous problem to 
solve than the origin of water. Both protoplasm and 
water have properties that do not belong to the individual 
atoms which compose them, and the greater complexity 
of the living structure does not constitute a difference 
in kind, but only in degree. 2 It does not seem, after all, 
such a far cry from the crystal to the amoeba as from 
the amoeba to Plato and Newton. The crystal and the 
amoeba take their place as independent products of 
physical and chemical change, and cannot do other than 
obey the law of their development The crystals of rock- 
salt, determined by the mutual action of the attractive 
and repellent poles of their atoms, dispose themselves 
as cubes ; the crystals of snow as hexagons ; of sulphur 
as rhomboids ; and the protoplasmic atoms, obeying 
their polarities and charged with separating energies, 
dispose themselves { each after his kind/ But whilst the 
crystal grows by accretion at the surface, although even 
this distinction has its rare exceptions, the cell grows by 
assimilation or intussusception, i.e. by inflowing of nutri- 
tion amongst all its parts, 2 the new replacing the old> 

1 Cf. Cope's Origin of the Fittest, p. 436. 

- Cf. Huxley's Collected Essays, i. 152, 154, iii. 371, vi. 285 ; also 
Response in the Living' and Non-living, by Jagadis Chunder Bose, M.A. 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE rfi 

yet maintaining its structure and composition, like the 
tabled ship of Theseus, which remained the same although 
repaired so often that not an original plank was left. 

Speaking relatively for nothing is absolutely motion- 
less the crystal is stable, irresponsive : the cell is plastic, 
unstable, responsive, adapting itself to the slightest 
variation ; it * stoops to conquer/ and so undergoes 
ceaseless modification by interaction with its ever-chang- 
ing environment Life involves delicacy of construction ; 
hence the transient nature of the organic in contrast to 
the abiding nature of the inorganic. And, strange as it 
may seem, separation is life ; integration is death. For 
life is due to the sun's radiant energy, which, setting up 
separative movements, enables the plant to convert, 
through its mysterious alchemy, the lifeless into the 
living, thus forming energetic compounds, which are used 
partly by the thrifty plant for its own vital needs, and 
largely by the spendthrift animal for its nutrition, to 
repair waste and maintain functions. Ultimately the 
energy thus derived from the sun, directly by the plant 
and indirectly by the animal, passes into space, and 
' the dust returns to the earth as it was.' For life is 
only a local and temporary arrest of the universal 
movement towards equilibrium. 

Turning to mental phenomena, from its lowest mani- 
festations in the simplest reflex action of the amoeba or 
the sundew when touched, to its highest manifestations 
in consciousness or self-knowledge, we find the connec- 
tion between it and the bodily movements a greater 
crux than the connection between the inorganic and the 
organic. We know that all the thoughts we think, and 
all the emotions we feel, involve a physical process ; that 

(Longmans, 1902) ; and Prof. Butschli's Investigations on Microscopic 
Forms and on Protoplasm , 1894. 



1 52 THE STORY OF CREATION 

is to say, they are accompanied by certain chemical 
changes or molecular vibrations in nerve-tissue, involving 
waste or large expenditure of energy, which is repaired 
by food. We know that the healthy working of the 
brain depends upon nourishment, upon abstinence from 
excess, upon freedom from injury. Starve, or stun, or 
stupefy a man, let palsy or paralysis afflict him, and the 
complex machinery is thrown out of gear. And we 
know that the larger the proportion of brain to body, 
and especially the more numerous and intricate the 
furrows and creases in the grey matter of the brain, the 
higher in the life-scale are the mental powers. 

But the gulf between consciousness and the move- 
ments of the molecules of nerve-matter, measurable as 
these are, is impassable ; we can follow the steps of the 
mechanical processes of nerve-changes till we reach the 
threshold which limits the known, and beyond that 
barrier we cannot go. We can neither affirm nor deny ; 
we can only confess ignorance. * * If any one says that 
consciousness cannot exist except in the relation oi 
cause and effect with certain organic molecules, I must" 
ask how he knows that ; and if he says that it can, I 
must put the same question/ 1 That is the impregnable 
position of physical science as defined by the greatest 
expositor of our era. ' Soul is only known to us in a 
brain, but the special note of soul is that it is capable of 
existing without a brain or after death/ 2 That is the 
unverifiable assumption of dogmatic theology. 

1 Professor Huxley on * Science and Morals/ Fortnightly Review, 
December 1886. 

2 Principal Tulloch, Modern Theories in Philosophy and Religion^ 
p. 328. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS. 

MOISTURE as well as heat is essential to life ; there- 
fore life had its beginnings in water, 1 the earliest 
organisms being, probably, plants. As to this the fossil- 
yielding rocks tell us nothing, and the lowest and 
simplest organisms have so much in common that any 
attempt to gather evidence from them on the matter must 
fail. But, however closely the earliest life-forms were 
related, there is, as noted already, fundamental difference 
to be drawn between their successors in the mode of 
nutrition^ a difference which may throw some light upon 
the problem of priority, and which is not effaced by the 
existence of certain flesh-eating plants and vegetating 
animals, since this witnesses to the interchange of modi- 
fications of which protoplasm is capable. 

It has been shown that the plant alone has the power 
to convert the elements of lifeless matter into the living 
solid state, thereby storing up energy for its own use in 

1 * It was in the littoral region that all the primary branches of the 
zoological family tree were formed ; all terrestrial and deep-sea forms have 
passed through a littoral phase 8 and amongst the representatives of the 
littoral fauna the recapitulative history in the form of series of larval con- 
ditions is most completely retained ' Professor Moseley, Nature, September 
3, 1885. And the primary condition of animal development was the de- 
velopment of plant-life in the same region. 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



growth and germination, and for the use directly or 
indirectly of the animal. This the plant is enabled to 

do solely in virtue of 
its chlorophyll, which 
absorbs certain sun-rays, 
and sets up chemical 
action by which carbon 
is separated from oxy- 
gen in carbonic acid 
gas, and hydrogen from 
oxygen in water, form- 
ing hydrocarbons in 
which energy is stored 
up. Now, if the animal 
is entirely dependent 
upon the plant for this 
energy, it would seem 
that plants were deve- 
loped first 

For, remarks Pro- 
fessor Sachs, ' as all ani- 
mals are devoid of 
chlorophyll - containing 
organs, and are thus 




B 



unable to form organic 
substance from carbon 



FIG 63, Chlorophyll Granules m Leaf- dioxide and water, al- 

cells (magnified 550 diameters). , , . , . 

v * 30 though they build up 

A Granules of chlorophyll, with starch grains ,1 - r j- r i_ 

imbedded in the protoplasm of the cells. tlieir DOQieS trom SUCH 

B. Separated granules, a. o t young granules ; i , .. /- -,* , 

ff t V' granules dividing ; c, d, t % old Substance, it follows ob- 

granules ; X granule swollen by water ; < ,1 , . -, , 

1 starch granules in which water has VIOUSly that the SUb- 

destroyed die chlorophyll, (After Sachs.) , r . , 11- e 

y stance of the bodies of 
all animals is originally produced in the chlorophyll 
cells of plants. The few lower animals which appa- 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS 155 

rently contain chlorophyll certain Infusoria, Sponges^ 
and Planaria 1 contain chlorophyll as a matter of fact, 
not as a proper constituent of the body, but, as Brandt has 
recently shown, have vegetable cells (Algae) containing 
chlorophyll in their bodies ; by means of the assimilation 
of these green bodies such animals may be nourished 
under certain circumstances/ 2 

Grant Allen has marshalled the facts in support 
of the priority of plants in a paper of great force and clear- 
ness, which has apparently received but scant attention 
from biologists. 3 He submits that as the solar rays are, 
in the absence of chlorophyll, powerless to set up the 
separative action resulting in the material on which alone 
life can be sustained, the inference is obvious no chlo- 
rophyll, no life. In other words, life being due to energy 
radiated from the sun, which energy is inoperative with- 
out chlorophyll, protoplasm plus chlorophyll is the phy- 
sical basis of life. 

Against this we have the opinion of authorities of 
the rank of Professor Ray Lankester among zoologists, 
and of Thiselton Dyer among botanists, that the earliest 
protoplasm was destitute of chlorophyll. They contend 
that since chlorophyll is a modification of certain parts 

1 The following list of chlorophyllian animals has been drawn up by 
Professor Ray Lankester : 

Foraminifera. Coelentera. 

Radiolaria. Hydra mridis. 

Rhaphiophrys mridis Anthea smaragdina, 

Heterophrys myriapoda. Vermes. 

Infusoria. Mesostomum viride. 

Stentor Multeri, &c. Bonellia mridis. 

Spongida. Chastopterus Valenciennesil 

Spongitta ftuviatilis. Crustacea (Isopoda). 

Idot&a mridis, 
* Sachs, pp. 298 -99. 
% Gentleman's Magazine, June 1885, art. * Genesis,' 



156 THE STORY OF CREATION 

of the protoplasmic cells, it Is not a thing of primary 
origin, but a later acquirement slowly attained. Both 
authorities incline to regard certain forms of fungi as 
representing ' more closely than any other living forms 
the original ancestors of the whole organic world ] 
. . . which existed before plants possessed chlorophyll 
at all.' But fungi 'draw their nutriment from com- 
pounds derived from other organisms, and therefore in 
a higher state of aggregation than those the green 
plants make use of, so far approaching animals in the 
mode of their nutrition/ 2 That is to say, fungoids 
are like animals ; they use up the energy which the 
plants accumulate, and fill a secondary place in the 
succession of life-forms. The strength of the argument 
in support of plant-priority lies in this, that mewing life 
as a froduct of Motion operating under its separating 
action of Energy upon Matter, an energy-storing organism 

1 Encyclop. Brit., arts. * Protozoa,' p. 832, and ' Biology,' p. 691. 

2 * Looking back through the prodigious vista of the past, I find no 
record of the commencement of 'life , and therefore I am devoid of any means 
of forming a definite conclusion as to the conditions of its appearance. 
Belief, in the scientific sense of the word, is a serious matter, and needs 
strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, 
that I have any belief as to the mode in which the existing forms of life 
have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation 
is permissible where belief is not ; and if it were given me to look beyond 
the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period 
when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, 
which it can no more see again than a man may recall his infancy, I should 
expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not-living 
matter. I should expect to see it appear under forms of great simplicity, 
endowed^ like existing fungi , with the power of determining the forma- 
tion of new protoplasm from such matters as ammonium carbonates > oxalates 
and tartrateS) alkaline and earthy phosphates^ and water , -without the aid 
of light* That is the expectation to which analogical reasoning leads 
me ; but I beg you once more to recollect that I have no right to call my 
opinion any thing but an act of philosophical faith.' Huxley's Critiques and 
Addressee p. 238. (The italics are mine.) 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS 



157 



must have come first. If the first protoplasm lacked 
chlorophyll, it had within it the possibilities which per- 
mitted its secretion at an early stage ; it was, to use an 
unavoidably long word, chlorophyllaceous. The ques- 




y IG . 64. Cells of Root of Fritillary (magnified 550 diameters). 

A. Very young cell from near apex. 

B. From two mm. above it. 

C. From about eight mm. h, cell-wall ; /, protoplasm; k, nucleus; kk. 

nucleoli ; J, vacuoles and cell-sap cavity. (After Sachs.) 

tion, however, is of no serious importance in view of the 
common evolution of living things, and we may pass to 



158 THE STORY OF CREATION 

less debatable ground in inquiry into the causes which 
have developed them in countless variety from specks of 
relatively formless protoplasm. 

The cell is the structural starting-point of all life. 
The nucleus which it encloses is the result of the first 
visible approach of protoplasm to unlikeness of parts, 
and is the chief centre of activity. Every cell arises by 
separation from a pre-existing cell, and every living 
organism is made up of one cell or of many cells. The 
single cell of which the lowest organisms are composed 
does everything appertaining to life: it feels, moves, 
feeds, and multiplies. In the complex or many-celled 
organisms these functions are divided among the cells, 
each of which is independent, but nevertheless adapts 
itself for the work it has to do, acting in common with 
its fellow-cells. Division of labour causes difference of 
structure stem, root, sap, leaf, and seed in the plant ; 
bone, muscle, nerve-tissue, blood, and egg in the animal : 
all are communities of cells of astounding minuteness 
variously modified. The organism is the sum of life of 
all the cell-units. . 

The one-celled forms increase by division. ' Growth 
is the balance of repair over waste ; and when through 
assimilation of food into its substance the cell reaches a 
certain size, the force of cohesion is overcome by the 
release of the energy derived from food, and the cell 
divides equally at the kernel or nucleus. I The slimy pro- 
-toplasm distributes itself around each nucleus as the two 
part company, to grow and divide again in like manner 
ad infinitum. To these lowest Protozoa we may apply the 
words, ' thou art the same, and thy years shall have no 
end/ at least till all life here has end ; for they were the 
Alpha, and may be the Omega, in the earth's life-history ; 
neither is one before nor after the other, since there is no 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS 



159 



descent amongst them, but only lateral multiplication. 
In many Protozoa a small portion of the parent is 
detached a process known as generation by budding ; 
but this and other modes of whole or partial fission are 
classed together as reproduction by multiplication. 

The next stage in structure is when the cells in 



-Erato pi a am 
Nucleus 




FIG. 65. Cell. 



dividing remain, to their common advantage, grouped 
together, as in all animals above the Protozoa. 

The cells divide 1 in definite order into two, then into 
four, eight, sixteen, and so on, clustering together in a 




FIG. 66. Stages of Cell division, 

morula, or mulberry-like mass, in which a cavity filled 
with fluid is formed, the cells being parted and driven to 
the surface. Mutual pressure, as they continue to sub- 
divide, causes them to flatten and range themselves 

1 Cell-division does not extend to the food-yolk which the eggs of 
birds, reptiles, and many other animals contain for the nutriment of the 
embryo. 



160 THE STORY OF CREATION 

side by side in a single layer, forming what is called a 
blastosphere (Gr. blastos, a bud). By a process which is 
somewhat obscure (for we are dealing with the move- 
ments of very minute bodies), but which corresponds to 
the conversion of a small india-rubber ball, having a 
pinhole in it, into a two-walled cup by pushing it in with 
the ringer, the single-layered sphere becomes changed 
into a double layered hood- or horseshoe-like structure, 
called a gastrula (Gr. dim. of gaster y stomach). 1 The 





l-JB 



FIG. 67. Morula Stage. FlG - 68. Gastrula Stage. 



A, upper cell layer ; B, lower cell 
layer ; C, primitive mouth ; D, 
tody-cavity. 

simpler stationary animals, as sponges and polyps, do 
not advance beyond this stage, but in all animals above 
them, in which bilateral structure, probably through free 
movement in a given direction, is developed, a third 
laj r er larger and more complex arises. The other two 
layers apparently take an equal share in its formation, 
and from its subdivision the greater number of organs 
of the body, be it of a worm or a man, are developed. 
Passing over much technical detail, it must suffice to 
say that the upper layer gives rise to the skin, the 

1 On the variations in the gastrula type, see Haeckel's Evolution of Man, 
i. 231, and plates 2 and 3, pp. 240-2. 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS 



161 




nervous system, and organs of sense ; the lower layer to 

the intestinal canal and appendages; and the middle 

layer to the general 

skeleton, the heart, and \ 

other important organs. 

Thus does the future 

animal emerge from the 

gastrula stage, and pass 

into the embryo stage, 

until an advanced period 

of which the embryos of 

vertebrates, whether fish, 

tortoise, dog, ape, or man, 

cannot be distinguished 

from one another, so FIG. 69. Embryo Stage. 

close are the likenesses 

both in outward form and 

structure. 

All plants and animals above the lowest are repro- 
duced by the agency of special cells, the impregnation of 
the nucleus of the germ or egg-cell of the female by the 
nucleus of the sperm-cell of the male being necessary 
to set up the series of changes which result in the future 
animal. 1 There are numerous variations in the organs 
of reproduction, but whatever unlikenesses exist in detail 
do not affect this general statement ; alga and oak, 

1 At the present time the cell theory, in consequence of recent inves- 
tigations into the structure and metamorphosis of the nucleus, is under- 
going a new development of great significance, which, among other things, 
foreshadows the possibility of the establishment of a physical theory of 
heredity on a safer foundation than those which Buffon and Darwin 
devised. (Huxley, art. * Science,' Reign of Queen Victoria, ii. 376.) * The 
pith of the matter is that structural elements of the male nucleus appear to 
he associated with those of the female in the fecundated ovum and all its 
derived cells.* (Extract from a letter from Professor Huxley to the .author. ) 
And cf. Wie4ersheim's Com$, Anat. of Vertebrates, pp. 4, 300. 



a, b t brain vesicles ; c, blastoderm ; d, primi- 
tive vertebrae ; ?, medullary cord ; f t upper 
layer or body-wall. 



162 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



sponge and man, are alike developed from germs vari- 
ously called spores, sacs, seeds, and eggs The structure 
of the fertilised egg of the parent determines the 
structure of the offspring, which to some extent repro- 
duces the series of forms through which its ancestors 
passed as it progresses to its adult state. In other words, 
the individual, as it develops from the egg-cell, epito- 
mises the history of the ancestral forms of its species. 

The transmission of parental form and structure, as 
well as of mental character, to offspring, being clear, the 
question suggests itself, How have variations, resulting 




FIG. 70- Corresponding stages in the development of 

Fish Dog Man 

a , brain ; , eye ; c, ear ; d^ gills ; e, tail. 

in millions of past and present species of plants and 
animals, arisen ? 

Professor Huxley says that the great need of the 
doctrine of evolution is a theory of variation/ l When, 
however, we consider the mobility and -minute com- 
plexity of structure of living things invisible to the 
naked eye, and their response to every shiver of energy 
from without, we have sufficing factors to produce 
unstableness which will result in unlikeness of parts. 
Given a body which, although a minute speck, contains 
billions of molecules performing complicated movements 

Qriti^ues and Addresses, p. 299 ; and cf, Science and Culture, p. 307. 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE-FORMS 165 

of immense rapidity, and sensitive In an inconceivable 
degree to the play of vibrations impinging upon them 
at the rate of hundreds of trillions per second, would not 
the marvel be if these quivering particles of the structure, 
shaken by energies within, and by still more potent 
energies without, did not undergo continuous redistribu- 
tion ? l 

The position may be thus stated : The organism 
has (i) Infinite complexity of structure ; (2) inherited 
tendencies ; (3) mobility and continuous motion, there- 
fore capacity to vary. (4) Variations are induced by 
the surroundings on which, as vehicles of energy, life 
depends ; (5) when the surroundings change, the 
organism adapts itself or not to the change ; (6) such as 
fail to adapt themselves perish ; (7) such as adapt them- 
selves vary in greater or lesser degree ; (8) these varia- 
tions, being transmitted, are stages in the development 
of different life-forms. To put the matter briefly, like- 
nesses are inherited, variations are acquired. 

This brings us to the theory linked with Darwin's 
name, which explains by what operation of natural 
causes the highest plants and animals have descended 
by true generation and slow modification from less 
complex life-forms, and these in ever-lessening degrees 
of complexity and unlikeness, until the common start- 
ing-point from the lowest or one-celled organism is 
reached. 

1 ' What organism can pass through life without being subjected to more 
or less new conditions ? What life is ever the exact fac-simile of another ? 
And in a matter of such extreme delicacy as the adjustment of psychical 
and physical relations, who can say how small a disturbance of established 
equilibrium may not involve how great a rearrangement ? } Luck or 
Cunning ? p. 273, by Samuel Butler. 

In his Problems of Evolution^ pp. 33, 38, Mr. F. W. Headley has 
some suggestive remarks on probable causes of variation. 

M 2 



1 64 THE STORY OF CREATION 

Following Lyell's method of explaining the past by 
agencies still in operation, and adapting hints from 
Malthus l and other writers in the clearing up of questions 
suggested by observations extending over many years, 
Darwin propounded a theory which, in the judgment 
of every biologist unfettered by predilections or pre- 
judices, accounts in large degree for the origin of 
species. 2 

1 See Darwin's Letter to Hseckel, Hist, of Creation, i. 134; also 
Darwin's Life and Letters, i. 83. 

2 * I am satisfied that natural selection is a true cause ; and whatever 
may be the final result of our present inquiries whether animated nature 
be derived from one ancestral source or from many the publication of the 
Origin of Species will none the less have constituted an epoch in the history 
of biology. But how far the present condition of living beings is due to 
that cause ; how far, on the other hand, the action of natural selection 
has been modified and checked by other natural laws, by the unalterability 
of types, by atavism, &c. ; how many types of life originally came into 
being, and whether they arose simultaneously or successively these and 
many other similar questions remain unsolved, even admitting the theory 
of natural selection.' Lubbock's Origin, &c. t of Insects, p. 83; and cf. 
Spencer's Factors of Organic Evolution, passim, for discussion of the limi- 
tations of Darwin's theory. As opposed to the so-called Neo-Darwinians, 
who plead, with Weismann, for the 'all-sufficiency of natural selection, 1 
Mr. Spencer defends, with modifications, the theory of Lamarck that the 
influence of external conditions and the exercise of their organs by animals 
have been factors in the origin of species. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 

THE history of the slow but sure preparation of the 
scientific world for the reception of a theory displacing 
the old notions of the fixity of species the record of the 
kings and prophets who foreknew the coming day, but 
who died c without the sight * are told by Grant Allen 
in his monograph on { Charles Darwin.' Commending 
the reading of that book, especially of the fifth chapter, 
as superseding the need for repeating the story here, we 
may pass to a rapid summary of the evidence as to the 
mutability of species. 

It should be noted at the outset that c species ' is a con- 
venient term to denote groups of individuals having certain 
characters in common, but that no one definition of 
( species ' has satisfied all naturalists. The term ' variety ' 
is almost equally difficult to define ; but practically, when 
a naturalist can unite by means of close intermediate 
links any two forms, he treats the one as a * variety 3 ot 
the other, ranking the most common, but sometimes the 
one first described, as the c species,' and the other as the 
variety/ 1 

I. No two individuals of the same species are exactly 
alike ; each fends to vary. Of this obvious fact every 
1 Cf. Origin of Species, p. 33, 6th ed. 



1 66 THE STORY OF CREATION 

species, with their several varieties, from man downwards, 
supplies abundant illustration. Of the hundreds of 
thousands of faces that we meet in the course of the year 
in any large city, each has some feature to mark it from 
every' other ; the practised eye of the shepherd recognises 
each sheep in his flock, of the Laplander each reindeer 
among the herd crowded 'like ants on an anthill,' and 
of the gardener each hyacinth among a thousand bulbs. 
Children of the same parents vary in size, feature, com- 
plexion, character, and constitution, often very obviously, 
but sometimes too obscurely for cursory detection ; and 
this law of general resemblance, with more or less varia- 
tion in detail, applies to all animals and plants. 1 The 
tendency to vary, which in our ignorance of its ultimate 
causes we say ' inheres J in the organism, and of which 
what are called 'sports ' furnish the best illustration, 2 Is 
fostered by the change of condition in which the animal 
or plant may be placed, as shown in its more marked 
tendency to vaiy in a domesticated than in a wild state. 
For example, when the common ringed snake, which in 
its natural state is oviparous, is confined in a cage in which 
no sand is strewn, it becomes viviparous. 

Throughout these pages stress has been laid on the 
fact that the organ adapts itself to the work which it 
has to do ; hence changes of structure in a species are 
necessitated to fit it for an altered state of things. This 
implies increased or lessened activity on the part of 
certain organs, the use or disuse leading, under the action 
of natural selection working through long ages, to their 
development or suppression. 

2. Variations are transmitted, and therefore tend to 

1 Cf. Animals atzd Plants under Domestication^ i. 445 ; ii, 23^ 

2 Origin of Species > p. 8 : A. and P., i. 397. 



THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 167 

become permanent. In other words, what Is peculiar to 
the parent plant or animal reappears in the offspring. 
This is known as * descent with modification/ the Import 
of which will be shown later on. 

3. Man takes advantage of these transmitted unlike- 
nesses to produce new varieties of plants and animals. 
He selects certain individuals possessing variations which 
he wants to preserve, and allows only them to breed 
together, by which means in the course of time he pro- 
duces varieties differing greatly from the parent form with 
which he started. The stock example of this is the pigeon. 
All our domestic pigeons, exceeding in number a 
hundred well-marked races, are descended from the 
ordinary blue rock pigeon of the European coasts. 
Variations as marked as the fan-tail, the tumbler, and 
the pouter have been produced by the breeder selecting 
birds with certain peculiarities, and choosing from each 
successive brood only those which exhibited the same 
peculiarities in more marked form, the result being, after a 
long time, the production of entirely new varieties. The 
same method has given us different races of dogs, sheep, 
horses, and other domestic animals. The fleetest horses 
are chosen to breed together ; then the fleetest offspring 
of these in succession, until horses are produced whose 
swiftness far exceeds that of the originally selected pairs. 
In the development of the cart-horse, strength, not speed, 
is the quality selected ; while in the marked unlikeness 
between dogs we see the result of artificial selection in 
producing such varieties as the bloodhound, the terrier, 
and the spaniel. What varieties in flowers, vegetables, 
and fruits as, for example, the development of the 
numerous kinds of apples from the small, sour crab 
species the like method has induced, is too well known 
to need detailed reference here. When we see how 



1 68 THE STORY OF CREATION 

successfully this choice of slight variations has brought 
about plants and animals best adapted to the service of 
man, we may desire the time when man shall so realise 
his duty to the race that the multiplication of the 
rickety, both physically and morally, will cease, and only 
men and women of the highest type reproduce their 
kind. 

Now the important work which Darwin did was to 
show that what man does on a small scale within a 
limited range of time, nature does on a large scale 
during countless epochs ; with the further difference that 
the action of nature is not purposive, as is the action of 
man, but involved in the necessities of things. We may 
quote what Darwin says on this matter : 

1 As man can produce, and certainly has produced, a 
great result by his methodical and unconscious means of 
selection, what may not natural selection effect ? Man 
can act only on external and visible characters : Nature, 
if I maybe allowed to personify the natural preservation 
or survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances, 
except in so far as they are useful to any being. She 
can act on every internal organ, on every shade of con- 
stitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. 
Man selects only for his own good : Nature only for that 
of the being which she tends. Every selected character 
is fully exercised by her, as is implied by the fact of 
their selection. Man keeps the natives of many climates 
in the same country ; he seldom exercises each selected 
character in some peculiar and fitting manner ; he feeds 
a long and a short-beaked pigeon on the same food ; he 
does not exercise a long-backed or long-legged quadru- 
ped in any peculiar manner ; he exposes sheep with long 
and short wool to the same climate. He does not allow 
the most vigorous males to struggle for the females 



THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 169 

He does not rigidly destroy all inferior animals, but 
protects during each varying season as far as lies in his 
power, all his productions. He often begins his selection 
by some half-monstrous form, or at least by some 
modification prominent enough to catch the eye or to be 
plainly useful to him. Under Nature the slightest dif- 
ferences of structure or constitution may well turn the 
nicely balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be 
preserved. How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of 
man ! how short his time ! and, consequently, how poor 
will be his results, compared with those accumulated by 
Nature during whole geological periods ! Can we 
wonder, then, that Nature's productions should be far 
" truer " in character than man's productions ; that they 
should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex 
conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of 
far higher workmanship ? ' l 

4. More organisms are born than survive. To quote 
Darwin once more, ' there is no exception to the rule 
that every organic being naturally increases at so high a 
rate that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be 
covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow- 
breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at 
this rate in less than a thousand years there would 
literally not be standing room for his progeny/ 2 If all 
the offspring of the elephant, the slowest breeder known, 
survived, there would be in seven hundred and fifty years 
nearly nineteen million elephants alive, descended from 
the first pair. If the eight or nine million eggs which 
the roe of a cod is said to contain developed into adult 
cod-fishes, the sea would quickly become a solid mass of 
them. So prolific is its progeny after progeny, that the 
common house-fly is computed to produce twenty-one 

1 Cf. Origin of Species, p. 65. 2 fbid.^ p. 51. 



170 THE STORY OF CREATION 

millions in a season ; while so enormous is the laying 
power of the aphis, or plant-louse, that the tenth brood 
of one parent, without adding the products of all the 
generations which precede the tenth, would contain 
more ponderable matter than all the population of China, 
estimating this at five hundred millions ! 

It is the same with plants. If an annual plant 
produced only two seeds yearly, and all the seedlings 
survived and reproduced in like number, one million 
plants would be produced in twenty years from the 
single ancestor. Should the increase be at the rate of 
fifty seeds yearly, the result, if unchecked, would be to 
cover the whole globe in nine years, leaving no room 
for other plants. The lower organisms multiply with 
astonishing rapidity, some minute fungi increasing a 
billionfold in a few hours, while the protococcus, or red 
snow, multiplies so fast as to tinge many acres of snow 
with its crimson in a night But we need not give 
further examples of this fecundity whereby nature, ' so 
careless of the single life/ secures the race against 
extinction. 

5. The result is obvious : a ceaseless struggle for food 
and place. In that struggle the race is to the swift, and 
the battle to the strong ; the weaker, be it in brain or 
body, going to the wall, the vast majority never reaching 
maturity, or, if they do arrive at it, attaining it only to be 
starved or slain. As, amongst men, competition is sharper 
between those of the same trade, so throughout the organic 
world the struggle is less severe between different species 
than between members of the same species, because 
these compete most fiercely for their common needs 
plants for the same soil, carnivora for the same prey. 
But whether the battle is fought between allied or un- 
allied species, the victory is never doubtful ; it is assuied 



THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 171 

to the plant or animal that has some advantage, how- 
ever slight, which its opponent lacks. Among plants 
growing in a dry soil, those whose leaves have thickei 
hairs upon them will absorb more moisture from the air 
than plants with less hairy leaves, and, competing suc- 
cessfully with these, will survive to transmit their advan- 
tageous variations. Again, such as are better abk to 
resist the depredations of burglarious insects by protec- 
tion of thorny or prickly stems, or by nauseous taste, 
will thrive and multiply, while plants lacking these de- 
fences dwindle and become extinct. So with those 
which by showy colours of their flowers and sweeter 
nectar attract insects whose visits are desired as carriers 
of pollen from stamens to pistils. These secure propa- 
gation, while plants less attractive remain barren. The 
birds that are strongest on the wing reach the land 
whither they migrate, while the weaker perish by the 
way. The lions of sharper sight and more supple 
spring, the wolves of keener scent, secure their prey, 
while the feebler members starve. It is with man as 
with the organisms below him : the quickest in intellect, 
and those with greater power of endurance, distance the 
weak or the stupid, who fall behind, and finally slip out 
of the ranks altogether. Sometimes the area of struggle 
is narrowed, and survival secured by retreat, as of the 
sloth to trees, and of digging and burrowing animals 
underground. 

The subtlety and variety of the conditions upon which 
natural selection seizes escape the keenest observers. 
Of their success, however, in tracing the varying fortunes 
of species Darwin gives a striking illustration in his ex- 
planation of the absence of wild oxen and horses in 
Paraguay. This is due to the action of a small fly which 
lays its eggs in the navel of newly bora calves and foals, 



r?2 THE STORY OF CREATION 

the maggots hatched from the eggs causing the death 
of the young animals. - Now, supposing this parasitic 
fly to be destroyed by an insect-eating bird, oxen and 
horses would abound in a wild state, and, as they would 
eat certain plants, the vegetation would be altered, and 
these changes in the flora and fauna would involve 
changes of increasing complexity. 

The interrelation between the proportion of old 
maids and an abundance of red clover is not, primd 
facie> quite as obvious. But it may be proved in 
this wise. The clover is fertilised by humble-bees, 
the number of which is determined by the number of 
field-mice, which destroy their nests. The number 
of field-mice, again, is determined by the number of 
cats, and the number of these, finally, by the number 
of old maids who keep them ! Therefore, as red clover 
is excellent food for cattle, and cattle are excellent 
food for man, elderly spinsters are ^benefactors to their 
species ! 

The important part played by WAWUI cmJ mimicry : 
in the struggle for life has been demonstrated by Darwin, 
Wallace, Bates, 2 Belt, and other acute observers. The 

1 This word is not used as implying conscious imitation, but as con- 
veniently grouping resemblances which } in the degree that they are pro- 
tective or helpful, give advantage to the individual exhibiting them. 

2 Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazons Valley (Trans. Linn. 
Sec., Nov. 1861), of which Darwin says, in a letter to Bates (Life and 
Letters^ ii. 391) : * It is one of the most remarkable and admirable papers 
I ever read . . . solving a wonderful problem. * This paper should not 
be allowed to lie buried in a learned society's Transactions, for the illustra- 
tions of mimetic analogies between members of widely distinct families and 
between insects and their surroundings which it gives are, as Darwin adds, 
* truly marvellous.' Such are those of moths, whose wings are coloured 
and veined like the fallen leaves on which they lie motionless, of hunting- 
spiders which mimic flower-buds, and of large caterpillars which resemble 
poisonous snakes. An abstract of the paper is given in my Memoir of 
Bates (pp. xxxviii-xliv) prefaced to reprint of his Naturalist on the Amazons t 
1892. 



TEE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 173 

more closely that an animal approximates in form and 
hue to its surroundings, the easier does it escape de- 
tection by its pursuer, and the easier does it avoid the 
notice of the prey which it pursues. In conformity with 
this we find that most animals are protectively coloured, 
while those which are not are so constituted as to render 
such protection needless. As illustrative of the opera- 
tion of natural selection in this matter, we may borrow 
an admirable example from Grant Allen's ' Charles 
Darwin/ 

' In the desert, with its monotonous sandy colouring, 
a black insect or a white insect, 
still more a red insect or a blue 
insect, would be immediately de- 
tected and devoured by its natural 
enemies, the birds and the lizards. 
But any greyish or yellowish in- 
sects would be less likely to attract 
attention at first sight, and would 
be overlooked as long as there 
were any more conspicuous indi- 
viduals of their own kind about for Fia 7i- T Leaf Insect and 

its JtLgfiT 

the birds and lizards to feed on. 
Hence in a very short time the desert would be de- 
populated of all but the greyest and yellowest insects ; 
and among these the birds would pick out those which 
differed most markedly in hue and shade from the 
sand around them. But those which happened to vary 
most in the direction of a sandy or spotty colour would 
be most likely to survive, and to become the parents 
of future generations. Thus, in the course of long ages, 
all the insects which inhabit deserts have become sand- 
coloured, because the least sandy were perpetually 
picked out for destruction by their ever-watchful foes, 




t74 THE STORY OF CREATION 

while the most sandy escaped, and multiplied and re- 
plenished the earth with their own likes/ l 

Thus, then, is explained the tawny colour of the 
larger animals that inhabit the desert, the stripes upon 
the tiger, which, parallel with the vertical stems of 
bamboo, conceal him as he stealthily nears his prey, the 
brilliant green of tropical birds, the leaf-like form and 
colours of certain insects, the dried twig-like form of 
many caterpillars, the bark-like appearance of tree-frogs, 




FIG. 72. Walking-stick Insect. 

the harmony of the ptarmigan's summer plumage with 
the lichen-coloured stones on which it sits, the dusky 
colour of creatures that haunt the night, the bluish 
transparency of animals which live on the surface of 
the sea, the gravel-like colour of flat-fish that live at the 
bottom, and the gorgeous tints of those that swim among 
the coral reefs. 

Among the secondary causes of modification of 
species among animals Darwin gives prominence to 
1 sexual selection/ or the struggle between males for the 

1 P. 97 ; and cf. G. A.'s art. * Mimicry,' EncycL Brit. xvi. p. 341. 



THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 175 

possession of females ; the result being that the stronger 
males secure mates, and transmit the qualities which have 
given them the mastery to their offspring. Every farm- 
yard combat illustrates the truth of Gilbert White's prose l 
and Schiller's poetry : 

Meanwhile, until Philosophy 
Sustains the structure of the world, 
Her workings wilj be carried on 
By hunger and by love, 

and among the larger animals as stags and deer, and 
notably sea-lions 2 the deadliest combats take place at 
certain seasons for possession of the females. But there 
is competition less fierce in character, if not less fatal to 
the weaker or unendowed, strength giving place to grace 
of form, brightness of colour, 3 and witchery of song, the 
females making choice of the male who by his beauty of 
form, colour, odour, or voice, attracts them most, or who, 
as among the highest species, has wealth or good social 
position. These last condone infirmity and ugliness. 

It is clear that sexual selection largely explains the 
development of special features, which, transmitted in in- 

1 White's Selborne^ letter xi., to Hon. Daines Barrington. 

a Cf. Elliot's An Arctic Province^ ch. x,, for a vivid account of the 
battles between the males for priority on the breeding-grounds of the 
Pribylov Islands. 

3 * As colours seem to be the chief external sexual distinction in many 
birds, these colours do not take place till sexual attachments begin to 
obtain. And the case is the same in quadrupeds, among whom, in their 
younger days, the sexes differ but little ; but as they advance to maturity, 
horns and shaggy manes, beards and brawny necks, &c. &c. , strongly dis- 
criminate the male from the female. We may instance still farther in our 
own species, where a beard and stronger features are usually characteristic 
of the male sex ; but this sexual diversity does not take place in earlier 
life ; for a beautiful youth shall be so like a beautiful girl* that the difference 
shall not be discernible.* White's Selborne > letter vi., to Hon. Daines 
Barrington. 



176 THE STORY OF CREATION 

creasing degree through a series of generations, have con- 
tributed to the survival of the fittest. For whatever these 
features may be, whether weapons of defence or attack, 
plumage and song of birds, colour of butterflies, perfume 
as of the musk-deer, or acrid taste as of the toad, their 
presence is explained by their utility, since, as with the 
flowers and scents wherewith plants attract insects to 
secure fertilisation, the primary function of colour, form, 
ornament, and whatever else has given advantage to 
plant or animal over its competitors, is its service to the 
organism, and not, as man in his fond delusion has as- 
sumed, the delight or profit which it has given to him. 

6. Natural selection tends to maintain the balance 
between living things and their surroundings. These sur- 
roundings change; therefore living things must adapt 
themselves thereto >, or perish. 

In treating of the obscurity which hangs around the 
ultimate causes of variation, stress has been laid on 
the ceaseless and elusively complex interplay between 
organisms and the medium which surrounds, quickens, 
and nourishes them. As Gegenbaur remarks, 1 the ener- 
gies which cause change in the organism either lie with- 
out it, or for the most part are to be sought for without 
it, the range of variation of the plant being, by reason 
of its fixed conditions, limited as compared with that of 
the locomotive animal. 

It has been shown already that the touch of the 
medium was the first quickener of variation in the rise 
of the earliest approach to unlikeness at the surface, as in 
the membranous film which envelops the lowest life- 

1 Comp. Anat. (English ed.), p. 57. *I have been led to place some- 
what more value on the definite and direct action of external conditions.' 
JLetter to Cams, May 1869, Darwin! $ Life and Letters t iii. 109 ; and cf. 
letter to Morjtz Wagner, October 1876, ibid, p. 159. 



THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 17? 

forms, and, among the higher animals, In the gradual 
specialisation of lines of communication the nervous 
system and sense organs with the outer world from 
infoldings of the skin. The diffused sensitiveness to 
smell, light, and sound became localised, the sense of 
touch remaining general over the body-surface, except 
where horny skin is secreted. Obviously, therefore, the 
tendency to vary which inheres in living things being 
stimulated by interaction between them and their sur- 
roundings, the degree in which variations are useful to 
living things i.e. in enabling them to win in the uni- 
versal struggle for food and place determines, under 
the action of natural selection, their survival,. 

The slow but ceaseless changes in things without 
have involved adaptive changes in all organisms except 
the lowest Seemingly, all things remain as they were 
from the beginning. The range of our experience is too 
narrow, the time since scientific observation of nature 
began is comparatively so recent, the changes in living 
things often so beyond direct detection, that we cannot 
wonder at people's reluctance to accept the theory that 
the countless species of plants and animals which have 
succeeded one another have a common descent, through 
infinite modification, from structureless germs. And, in 
fact, not only is life vastly older than any record of it, 
but the fossil-yielding rocks supply no key to the origin 
of the leading groups, whose representative types of to- 
day are so little altered that every fossil as yet found can 
be put into existing classes. Huxley remarks that * the 
whole lapse of geological time has thus far yielded not 
a single new ordinal type of vegetable structure ; ' and 
although < the positive change in passing from the recent 
to the ancient animal world is greater, it is "still singularly 

N 



178 THE STORY OF CREATION 

small/ * The variation in ordinal type of animal structure 
Is only about ten per cent of the whole. 

Yet we know that nothing is rigid ; the earth records 
the gradual ascent of life-forms in structure, and the 
changes in its crust, in a scripture that cannot be broken. 
The agencies within, and the far more potent agencies 
without, that have wrought those changes, pursue with- 
out pause their slow and sometimes sudden working. 
The earth itself speeds through space, heedless of the 
freight of life that throbs and struggles on its surface, 
and that at last is laid to sleep in its bosom ; careens 
and brings the seasons in their sureness ; spins and 
gives, unfailing, the glory of the sunrise and the sunset ; 
and, in periodic changes of its orbit, crowns at one epoch 
its northern pole with vines and oaks and water-lilies, and 
at another epoch covers it with impassable ice. 

Changes of climate and level, with the alterations in 
soil which they bring about, profoundly affect food and 
the power to obtain it And the necessity for food being 
a strong perhaps the strongest stimulus to motion, 
the organism which the more readily adapts itself to the 
changed conditions, or is better equipped to resist them, 
wins in the struggle. The new functions to be dis- 
charged involve changes in structure, because the organs 
exist for the work which they have to do, not the work for 
the organs. Moreover, changes which arise in the structure 
are not limited to one part, the whole organisation being, 
in Darwin's words, c so tied together during its growth 
and development, that when slight variations in any one 
part occur, and are accumulated through natural selec- 
tion, other parts become modified.' Take, for example, 
the growth of the deer's antlers, which in some species 
attain a weight of seventy pounds in a few weeks. The 

1 Lay Sermons, p. 2*6. 



THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 179 

increased supply of blood which this involves necessitates 
readjustment of circulation, and the increased weight 
which the skull has to bear necessitates more powerful 
muscles and ligaments, with increased strength of the 
bones to which they are attached. More food is needed 
to supply the energy thus expended, involving more 
active digestion, and therefore modification of the 
digestive organs. Again, in man the slow acquirement 
of an erect position led to flattening of the feet, and 
to projection of the heel as support ; to altered position 
of the head with its added weight of brain, so as to 
be nicely balanced on the spine, which became pecu- 
liarly curved ; and to the readjustment of a large num- 
ber of muscles. Then there are the changes wrought 
after long lapses of time by use and disuse, in the one 
case leading to the development of organs, in the other 
case to their decline. 1 * Thus I find, 3 Darwin remarks, f in 
the domestic duck that the bones of the wing weigh less 
and the bones of the leg more in proportion to the whole 
skeleton than do the same bones in the wild duck ; and 
this change may be safely attributed to the domestic 
duck flying much less and walking much more than its 
wild parents/ 2 or, more correctly, its wild ancestors. But 
there are many changes induced in organs by their use 
or disuse on the part of the animal which are not trans- 
mitted ; they die with the individual in which they occur. 
Like mutilations of parts of the body,, which are practised 

1 The question how far use and disuse are true causes of change of 
organic type has long exercised the attention of biologists, some among 
whom, notably Professor Weismann, contend that changes acquired by the 
individual are never transmitted. But the arguments as yet adduced by 
Mm leave his case not proven. The subject is, however, too technical for 
enlargement here. See article by the author in Ckaml&rs*$ Cyclop, s.v. 

2 Origin of Sp&cie$ t p. 8, and cf. pp. 131, 401, 410 ; Animals ana 
Plants, ii. 313, 345. 

N 2 



8o THE STORY OF CREATION 

through successive generations of individuals, they are 
powerless to affect the type. 

It is to natural selection that we must more often 
refer modifications which, appearing as relics of structure 
common to large groups, have a specious look of being 
due to individual use or disuse. Take the familiar 
example of the true whale. The epitome of its ancestry 
which the embryo presents reveals its descent from land 
mammals having short fore and hind limbs, scanty 
covering of hair, broad beaver-like tails, teeth of different 
shape, and well-developed sense-organs, especially of smell. 
These forefathers of the whale probably lived in marshy 
districts, and, being omnivorous, sought their food in 
both swamp and shallow water ; but as conditions more 
and more adverse to life on land supervened, they were 
gradually modified under the action of natural selection 
into dolphin-like creatures, living in fresh water, and at 
last finding their way into the ocean, from which the 
huge sea-lizards of earlier epochs had disappeared, leav- 
ing these leviathans scope * to play therein/ Hence are 
explained the adaptive changes of structure : the fore 
limbs were modified into flippers enclosed in a fin-like sac, 
but retaining the bones corresponding to like structures in 
other mammals, as in the arm of man, the wing of the 
bat, and the fore leg of the horse. Traces of the hind 
legs may be detected in a few species ; the tail, which 
acted as a powerful swimming organ, became divided into 
two lobes ; the head became fish-like in shape ; the 
seven bones of the neck, common to most mammals., grew 
together ; the skin became hairless ; and the teeth, which 
appear in the young of the true whale but are never cut, 
gave place to hanging fringes of whalebone, in the meshes 
of which the" animal entangles the minute organisms 
it feeds upon. In the seal, which is the modified dc 



THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES ifiJ 

scendant of land flesh-feeders, the hind legs have been 
developed, while the tail remains rudimentary. 

The explanation is that both whales and seals are 
the gradually modified descendants of ancestors who, in 
virtue of their favourable adaptation to altered conditions, 
survived under the agency of natural selection, while the 
majority, being unfit or less adapted, perished. 

Variety of readjustment to altered surroundings, 
through like causes, resulting in progress in some direc- 
tions and in stagnation in other directions, is further 
evidenced in existing modifications of the common 
mammalian type. We find one large group the plant- 
feeders developing organs suited to their functions, as 
teeth for grinding instead of for tearing ; large stomachs ; 
and horny or bony structures for combat, the evolution 
of which in the deer's ancestry is recapitulated year 
by year in the individual from the boss to the noble 
branching antlers. In the flesh-feeders we find that 
higher intelligence which the stealthy or open pursuit 
of other animals required, economy of bulk, great 
muscular strength united to quickness of action, and 
teeth and claws adapted for attacking and readily seizing 
prey. 

In both groups we find progression of parts which 
in the Primates, the group including man, are well-nigh 
stationary. Among this group, limbs, teeth, and organs 
of digestion have all been slightly modified, and no 
organs of defence or attack developed. The explanation 
is that these animals, being unable to compete with the 
larger mammals, took to an arboreal life, which induced 
few variations of bodily structure, the most important 
being opposable thumbs and great toes for grasping 
But the need for alertness against foes sharpened their 
wits, and the need of combination quickened the social 



r82 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



instincts, so that the energy which in the flesh-feeders 
and the plant-feeders was 'stored in limb and muscle 
was diverted in the Primates to development of brain. 
They thus escaped the limitations of one condition, 
which determined the development of lions and rhino- 
ceroses in a given direction, and they preserved the 
power to adapt themselves to very diverse conditions. 
Whichever among the arboreal creatures possessed any 
favourable variation, however slight, in structure of brain 
and sense-organs, would secure an advantage over less 

favoured rivals in the 
struggle for food and 
mates and elbow-room. 
The qualities which 
gave them success 
would be transmitted 
to their offspring, the 
distance gained in one 
generation would be 
increased in the next, 
brain-power conquering 
brute force, and skil) 
outwitting strength. 
And while some of them remained arboreal in habits, 
never moving easily on the ground, although making 
some approach to bipedal motion, as seen in the sham- 
bling gait of the man-like apes, others developed a mode 
of walking on the hind limbs which entirely set free the 
fore limbs as organs of support, and enabled them to be 
used as organs of handling and throwing. Whatever 
were the conditions which permitted this, the enormous 
advantage which it gave is obvious. It was the making 
of man. His bipedal and erect position involved ex- 
change of tree-life for life on the ground, bringing him 




FIG. 73. Gorilla walking. 

(From Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, p. 49.) 



THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 183 

Into new relations with his surroundings, and ultimately 
giving him the mastery over them. 

We see in lower animals, as the elephant, the monkey, 
the opossum, and the parrot, that their power to grasp 
an object by reason of their prehensile organs, and thus 
to learn something about its nature, raises them in the 
scale of intelligence ] ; and when we find in man a yet 
more perfect instrument to carry out the behests of his 
brain, we may see in the interaction of brain and hand a 
main factor in his development The structural differ- 
ences between him and the man-like apes are insignifi- 
cant ; the impassable chasm lies in his larger and more 
complex thinking apparatus. The action of natural 
selection became restricted, except in minor changes, 
as of the jaw, to his mental faculties. Yet even in brain- 
structure the differences between him and the chim- 
panzee are slight when compared with the differences 
between the brain of the chimpanzee and the lemur. It 
is in the deeper furrows and the more intricate convolu- 
tions that the distinction lies ; but even here the gap 
between civilised and savage man is greater than that 
between the savage and the man-like apes. 2 There- 
fore, in following evolution to its highest operations 
and results, the comparison lies between the several 
races of mankind. Darwin says that he does not believe 
it possible to describe the difference between savage and 
civilised man. f It is the difference between a wild and 
tame animal ; and part of the interest in beholding a 
savage is the same which would lead every one to desire 
to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in 
the jungle, and the rhinoceros wandering over the wide 



1 Cf. Spencer's Principles of Psychology t i. pp. 

2 Cf. Huxley's Man's Place in Nature > p. 78 ; and his Note to chap. 
vii. of Descent of Man. 




FIG. 74.- Hemispheres of Brain of Chimpanzee and of Man, showing 

relative proportions of the parts. 

(From Huxley's Man's Place in Nature* p. TO*.) 

, posterior lobe : , lateral ventricle : c, posterior cornu ; x, hippocampus minoi. 



THE ORIGJN OF SPECIES 185 

plains of Africa/ He describes the Fuegians, who rank 
amongst the lowest savages, as men * whose very signs 
and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of 
the domesticated animals men who do not possess the 
instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of 
human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that 
reason/ l Such races are somewhat nearer to the ape 
than to the European, and it is from like accounts of 
existing savages 2 that we may form a rough picture of 
( primitive ' man. 

Doubtless he was lower than the lowest of these a 
powerful, cunning biped, with keen sense-organs (always 
sharper, in virtue of constant exercise, in the savage than 
in the civilised man, who supplements them by science), 
strong instincts, uncontrolled and fitful emotions, small 
faculty of wonder, and nascent reasoning power ; unable 
to forecast to-morrow or to comprehend yesterday, living 
from hand to mouth on the wild products of nature* 
clothed in skin or bark, or daubed with clay, and finding 
shelter in trees and caves ; ignorant of the simplest arts, 
save to chip a stone missile, and perhaps to produce fire ; 
strong in his need of life and vague sense of right to it 
and to what he could get, but slowly impelled by common 
perils and passions to form- ties, loose and haphazard at the 
outset, with his kind, the power of combination with them 
depending on sounds, signs, and gestures. 

To quote the striking description from Lucretius, 
' during the revolution of many lustres of the sun through 
heaven they led a life after the roving fashion of wild 
beasts. No one then was a sturdy guider of the 
bent plough, or knew how to labour in the fields with 
iron or plant in the ground young saplings. What the 

1 Naturalises Voyag& round the Wortd, p. 504, ed. 1879. 

fi Cf. Lumholtz's Among Cannibals (1889), pp. 101, 179, 254, 271. 



iS6 THE STORY OF CREATION 

sun and rain had given, what the earth itself brought 
forth, was guerdon enough to content their hearts/ } 

Such, in broad outline, was probably the general con- 
dition of the earliest known wanderers, the rude relics oi 
whose presence are found associated with the bones of 
huge extinct mammals m old river beds and limestone 
caverns. As the successive deposits and their contents 
show, not till long ages had passed, bringing new and 
settled conditions, with knowledge of agriculture, metals, 
and other useful arts, do we find any marked progress 
among mankind. Even that progress, often checked in 
its zigzag course, and never an unmixed good, neither 
synonymous, as the many think, with a nation's imports 
and exports, has been confined to a minority of the 
species and to a narrow zone, while, compared to the 
antiquity of man, it is but as yesterday. The enterprise 
of the higher races has explored and utilised large tracts, 
and the pressure of population at the centres of civilisa- 
tion has within quite recent periods vastly extended their 
periphery ; but whole empires, like China, advancing to a 
certain stage, have, through isolation and the tyranny of 
custom or dread of change, stagnated, whilst the lowest 
races have remained unmodified, like the lowest organisms, 
and have more or less succumbed before the imported 
vices and the weapons of the white man. But the causes 
of arrest and of advance are alike complex : man, like 
every other living thing, is the creature of outward and 
inward circumstances, and many influences have worked 
in the shaping of his destiny. Certainly, extremes of 
climate have been fatal to advance beyond a given stage ; 
it is in the temperate zones that the incentives exist to 
continuous and indefinite progress. 

In reviewing the several operations by which species 

1 De Rerum Waturd, v. 933-938; and c Odyssey, ix. 106-1 15. 



THE OR f GIN OF SPCfS 187 

have arisen, it is essential to bear in mind that natural 
selection is not causal, but only directive. It is powerless 
to bring about the slightest variation in organisms ; it 
is all-powerful to preserve variations 'beneficial to the 
being under its conditions of life ; ... it can do nothing 
until favourable individual differences occur, and until a 
place in the natural polity of the country can be better 
filled by some modification of some one or more of 
its inhabitants/ l Moreover, since it tends to establish 
balance between life and its surroundings, it does not 
imply all-round development of the higher from the 
lower. Its keynote is adaptation. To quote Herbert 
Spencer's remarks on the erroneous conception of 
evolution as implying that everything has an intrinsic 
tendency to become something higher, ' if in the case of 
the living aggregates forming a species the environing 
actions remain constant from generation to generation, 
the species remains constant. If those actions change, 
the species changes until it is in adjustment with them. 
But it by no means follows that this change in the 
species constitutes a step in evolution. Usually neither 
advance nor recession results ; and often, certain pre- 
viously acquired structures being rendered superfluous, 
there results a simpler form. Only now and then does 
the environing change initiate in the organism a new 
complication, and so produce a somewhat higher type.' 2 
The parasites notably, the sea-squirts, lancelets, and 
the marvellous rotifers, are examples of recession. Nor 
these alone ; the history of mankind, with its degenerate 
races, Bushmen, Fuegians, and, perhaps, Australians ; 

1 Origin of Species y pp. 63, 132, 137 ; An. and PL , i. 6-8, chap, xxiv.- 
xx vi. ; Heilprin^ pp. 125, 212. " 

2 Principles of Sociology > p. 107 j Huxley's Amer t Add. 9 p. 38 ; and 
in Letter to Lyell, Darwin's Life and Letters* ii. 210. 



1 88 THE STORY OF CREATION 

with its relics of ancient civilisations, whose art we can 
only feebly imitate, and whose types of manliness we can* 
not hope to excel ; furnishes its monitions of the lethargy 
and love of ease which precede the downfall of peoples. 

Examples of persistence of type are supplied in the 
unaltered condition of the simplest forms since the ap- 
pearance of their earliest known representatives. Their 
simplicity has been their salvation. A high organisation 
brings with it many disadvantages, for the more complex 
the structure the more liable is it to get out of gear, 
We cannot have highly convoluted brains, and at the 
same time digestive organs simple and renewable like 
those of the sea-cucumber. Death is the price paid for 
complexity. 

Of the propositions expounded in the present 
chapter this is the sum : No two living things are 
exactly alike. Their inherent tendency to vary is ex- 
cited by their surroundings, on which all life depends, 
and to changes in which they must adapt themselves or 
perish. Every living thing transmits its qualities, and 
therefore, among them, its variations, to its offspring ; the 
more useful the variation, the better is the plant or animal 
equipped in the struggle for life. For as all living 
things tend to multiply so rapidly that the earth would 
be too small in a very short time for a single species, a 
fierce and ceaseless struggle is waged, chiefly between 
the same species, for food and place. The result is that 
by far the larger number never reach maturity, or are 
killed and eaten. In the long result variations give rise 
to new species. 

The only assumption at the base of Darwin's theory 
is that sufficient time has elapsed since the beginning of 
life for the development of all past and present species 
of plants and animals from a common ancestry. As to 



THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 189 

the age of the earth, more especially as a fit and possible 
abode of life, geologists and physicists are not agreed. 
The geological estimate rests chiefly upon the rates at 
which the deposit of sediment, or the wearing away of 
soil by rain and rivers, is going on ; but that estimate is 
based upon the assumption that present changes are the 
measure of past changes, whereas uniform action does 
not exclude the possibility of great and sudden revolu- 
tions. On the whole, the argument from geological 
evidence is strongly in favour of the lapse of not much 
less than one hundred million years since the earliest life- 
forms appeared and the oldest stratified rocks began to 
be laid down. This is much longer than the physicists, 
reasoning from the origin and age of the sun's heat, the 
rate of the earth's cooling, and other data, are willing 
to allow. 1 But, however the question may be finally 
settled, the result cannot affect the evidence in support 
of the theory of descent, 

1 See Professor Perry's article n 'The Age of the Earth,' Nature* 
Januarys, 1895: Professor Poulton's Address in Section D, Brit. Assoc., 
Nature^ Sept. 27, 1896. In a letter to the author, dated Nov. 6, 1894, 
Professor Huxley says : ' I am so much out of the world now that I had 
not heard of the "rift within the lute" of the mathematicians. But that 
a big crack would show itself sooner or later I have never doubted.' And 
see the author's Thomas Henry Huxley, p. 84. 



1 90 THE STORY OF CREATION 



CHAPTER X. 
PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES 

THE evidence supplied by living things in support of 
their common descent is fivefold : viz. i, by embryology, 
or likeness in their beginnings and development ; 2, by 
morphology, or structural likenesses ; 3, by their classifi- 
cation ; 4, by their succession in time ; and 5, by their 
distribution in space. 

i. Embryology. The eggs or germs from which all 
organisms spring are, to outward seeming, exactly alike, 
and this likeness persists through the earlier stages of 
all the higher animals, even after the form is traceable 
in the embryo. In proof of this Darwin quotes the 
following from von Baer, the discoverer of this remark- 
able fact : 

' In my possession are two little embryos in spirit, 
whose names I have omitted to attach, and at present I 
am quite unable to say to what class they belong. They 
may be lizards, or small birds, or very young mammalia, 
so complete is the similarity in the mode of formation of 
the head and trunk in these animals. The extremities, 
however, are still absent in these embryos. But even if 
they had existed in the earliest stage of their develop- 
ment we should learn nothing, for the feet of lizards and 



OF 

mammals, the wings and feet ot ,* . . 

t j j r , r 11 . P *w man, abortive 

hands and feet of man, all arise L ' r , 

^ "on, and so forth. 

,r~V">f life-forms in 
persist- 
"less ; 




FIG. 75. - Dog (4 weeks). Man (4 weeks). 

Magnified about 7 diameters. (After Haeckel. ) 

*, gill-arches; ^ mid-brain ; c, eye ; d, nose ; <?, fore-brain ;f, fore-leg ; ^, hind-lej 




FIG. 76. Tortoise. (4 weeks). 

*, grill-arches ; 3, ear ; c, eye ; d, nose ; <r, fwe^brain ; f, fore-leg ; r , hind-leg. 

mental form. 31 In further evidence of this interrelation 
of living things, their embryos, as we have seen, epito- 

1 Origin of Species, p. 388. 



THE Sfy OF CREATION 



Mt the series of changes through 
forms passed in their ascent from 
, complex ; the higher structures pass- 
-c same stages as the lower structures up 
^ut when they are marked off from them, yet 
ver becoming in detail the form which they repre- 
sent for the time being. For example, the embryo of 
man has at the outset gill-like slits on each side of 
the neck like a fish ; these give place to a membrane 
like that which supersedes gills in the development of 
birds and reptiles ; the heart is at first a simple pulsat- 
ing chamber like that in worms ; the back-bone is 
prolonged into a movable tail ; the great toe is ex- 
tended or opposable, like our thumbs and like the toes of 
apes ; the body three months before birth is covered all 
over with hair except on the palms and soles. At birth the 
head isrelatively larger and the arms relatively longer than 
in the adult ; the nose is bridgeless ; both features, with 
others which need not be detailed, being distinctly ape- 
like. Thus does the egg from which man springs, a 
structure only one hundred and twenty-fifth of an inch in 
size, compress into a few weeks the results of millions of 
years, and set before us the history of his development 
from fish-like and reptilian forms, and of his more im- 
mediate descent from a hairy, tailed quadruped. That 
which is individual or peculiar to him, the physical and 
mental character inherited, is left to the slower develop- 
ment which follows birth. 

Besides the past history which the embryo recapitu- 
lates, there are the rudimentary structures of which 
relics remain as witnesses to the former close connection 
of organisms. Among these are teeth in foetal whales, 
remnants of hind limbs in certain snakes, wings under 
the wing-cases of insects that do not fly. rudiments of 



PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES 193 



pointed ears and of a third eyelid In man, abortive 
stamens in plants, as in the snapdragon, and so forth. 
Except as evidence of the modification of life-forms in 
which they occur from other life-forms, and of persistr- 
ency of type, these vestiges of organs are meaningless ; 
the functions they once discharged have long ceased, 
being exercised only in other and allied living things 
where they are found fully developed. 





A B G 

FIG. 57. A, Arm of Man. B, Fore-leg of Dog. C, Wing of Bird, 
A, humerus ; r, radius ; K, ulna ; e, carpus ; *#, metacarpus ; /, phalanges, 

2. Morphology. Large groups of species, whose habits 
are widely different, present certain fundamental like- 
nesses of structure. The arms of men and apes, the fore- 
legs of quadrupeds, the paddles of whales, the wings of 
birds, the breast-fins of fishes, are constructed on the 
same pattern, but altered to suit their several functions. 
Nearly all mammals, from the long-necked giraffe to the 
short-necked elephant, have seven neck-bones ; the eyes 





*94 THE STORY OF CREATION 

of the lamprey are moved by six muscles which corre- 
spond exactly to the six which work the human eye ; 
all insects and Crustacea moth and lobster, beetle and 
cray-fish are alike composed of twenty segments ; the 
sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils of a flower are all 
modified leaves arranged In a spire. Such facts need no 
comment. 

3. Classification. It has been shown somewhat in 
detail that all plants fall into two main groups, the 
rlowerless and the flowering, and that all animals may be 
reduced to three types : (i) those without body cavity ; 
(2) those with body cavity ; (3) those with digestive 
cavity separate from body cavity. And the general 
likenesses of structure upon which division into sub- 
kingdoms is based having been given in the chapters on 
existing life-forms, it here suffices to repeat that the old 
attempts at a linear arrangement have failed, and that 
the only true mode of presentment, both of the life that 
is and that was, is that of a tree with short trunk, 
indicating common origin cf the living from the non- 
living, and divided into two large trunks representing 
plants and animals respectively. From each of these 
start large branches representing classes, the larger 
branches giving off smaller branches representing 
families, and so on with smaller and smaller branches 
representing orders and genera, until we come to leaves 
as representing species, the height of the branch from 
which they are hanging indicating their place in the 
growth of the great life-tree. 

4. Succession. Each formation has its peculiar 
groups of fossil remains representing the life-forms of the 
period ; the older the rock, the simpler are its organic 
contents ; and, what is of no mean importance, although 
transitional forms are from their nature fewer and less 



PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES 



permanent than forms which have arrived at balance 
with their surroundings, the fossil-yielding rocks have 
disclosed the existence of several hitherto missing links 
between species. Reference has been made to the proofs 
of descent of the one-toed horse of to-day, with his knee 
corresponding to our wrist or ankle, from the five-toed 
primitive horse found in the Eocene beds of North 
America, and to the connecting link between birds and 
reptiles supplied by the archseopteryx. To these may 
be added, among others } 
the compsognathus, with its 
swan-like neck, its toothed 
jaws, and hind limbs on 
which it walked. Then there 
are the links between pigs 
and hippopotamuses in the 
anoplotherium ; between 
tapirs, horses, and rhino- 
ceroses in the palseothe- 
rium ; between seals ard 
whales ; between sloths and 
beavers ; between lemurs 
and man-like apes ; and in 
the Devonian strata forms 
occur which are considered 
intermediate between ganoids and mud-fishes* Thus 
one by one the blanks are being filled up ; the faith of 
the biologist is justified by his works. 

5. Distribution. Emerson says that ' the man of this 
age must be matriculated in the university of sciences 
and tendencies flowing from all past periods;'' and 
certainly if we would know something of the complicated 
subject of the geographical distribution .of plants and 
animals we must study the past as well as the present, 

02 




FIG. 78. Compsognathus. 



196 THE STORY OF CREATION 

and learn both from geologist and astronomer, the one 
telling us of the shiftings of land and water, and the 
other accounting for the great climatal changes that have 
swept over the globe. 

Every living thing has its definite area of range: 
the sloth is peculiar to America ; the hippopotamus to 
Africa ; the chamois to the Alps. The higher we climb, 
the hardier and more stunted is all vegetation ; tropical 
plants perish in cold or even temperate zones ; Arctic 
plants wither under the equator ; while a vast number of 
plants flourish only in water, their primeval life-home. 
Among animals a few, notably man and the cat genus, 
have spread themselves well-nigh everywhere, but as a 
rule certain life-forms and this holds good of their fossil 
representatives also are restricted to certain regions. 
Hence the land has been divided into life-regions corre- 
sponding to that distribution, and the water into life- 
regions measured by the limits of depth at which marine 
forms are found. Speaking broadly, the plants and 
animals of countries in unbroken connection resemble 
one another, while those of countries remote or cut off 
are unlike. But although, at first sight, climate and 
separation would appear to account for this, there are 
likenesses and unlikenesses which are not to be thus 
explained. In fine, exceptions meet us at every turn. 
Great Britain and New Zealand are much alike in general 
conditions, yet the life- forms of New Zealand, now being 
fast supplanted by aliens, are the little-altered survivors 
of plants and animals once dominant over the globe. 
On the other hand, as Mr. Wallace tells us, thfc English- 
man visiting Japan finds its woods and fields tenanted by 
the singing birds familiar to him at home. Tapirs, whose 
origin in the ^north-western parts of the Old World is 
indicated by their fossil remains in Miocene beds, are 



PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES 19; 

now separated by nearly half the globe's circumference, 
being found only In South America and Malacca, while 
the man-like apes are found only in West Africa and 
Borneo. 

But puzzling and seemingly capricious as is the dis- 
tribution of life, the general causes are not far to seek. 

Distribution is due to the slow but ceaseless migration 
and transport of living things rendered necessary by 
their rate of increase. While climate has much to do 
with it in compelling organisms, in proportion to their 
power of dispersion, to shift their quarters, the struggle 
for life between them has had more influence still, so 
that the past and present habitats of plants and animals 
throw welcome light not only on changes in the relations 
of land and water, but also on the origin of species. 

Where unallied forms are found on the same conti- 
nent we may infer that the physical barriers between 
them have been permanent through long periods ; where 
allied forms which are unable to cross the seas are found 
in lands now separated, as In Britain and Japan, In South 
Europe and North Africa, we have evidence of former 
union. The degree in which life-forms have been modi- 
fied gives some key to the remoteness of that union ; as, 
for example, when we find more ancient types in New 
Zealand than in Australia, and more ancient types in 
Australia than in Madagascar. 

Islands afford important aid in the study of the 
intricate problem of distribution. They are of two 
kinds, continental and oceanic. The continental, as 
the British Isles, Japan, ancient Madagascar with its 
lemurs, and New Zealand with its wingless birds and 
Hatteria lizard, have been broken off from the mainland. 
The oceanic, as the Azores and Sandwich Islands, are 
of volcanic or coralline formation, and depend for their 



fO<? THE STORY OF CREATION 

life- forms upon their relative position to the mainland, 
and also to the winds and ocean currents that prevail. 
Exclusive of animals introduced by man, they are found 
destitute of frogs and other batrachians ;' also of mam- 
mals, bats excepted ; the explanation being that sea 
water kills frogs and toads and their spawn, and that 
only flying animals can cross the ocean. For this reason 
bats, at least the insect-eating species, are found every- 
where, except at the poles ; and the range of birds, 
although defined, is much wider than that of all the 
larger and wingless land animals. 1 

Isolated islands like St. Helena are peopled with 
waifs and strays from all quarters, while in continental 
islands like our own the life-forms are, for the most part, 
identical with those of the nearest mainland. But here, 
again, exceptions exist The islands of Bali and 
Lombok in the Malay Archipelago, although only fifteen 
miles apart, differ far more from each other in their 
birds and quadrupeds than do England and Japan, the 
birds being extremely unli&e* As shown by the deep 
soundings, Bali belongs to the Indian region, and 
Lombok to that zone of ' living fossils/ the Australian 
region. Australia contains only the lowest mammals, as 
duckbills and kangaroos for there is little doubt that the 
dingo or wild dog was introduced by man witnessing to 
its severance from Asia millions of years ago during the 

1 Although the dispersal of the larger animals is instanced in this sum- 
mary of facts of distribution, it should be added that far more striking, if 
less obvious, evidence could be cited from the dispersal of insects. Their 
great powers of flight, and their extreme lightness, cause them to be trans- 
ported enormous distances by the wind ; their eggs and larvge, deposited in 
the bark or crevices of logs, are carried with these as they float to far-off 
shores, while their immense antiquity largely explains the wide areas over 
which they range. Cf. Wallace's Island Life> p. 75. 
/7>7 t /., p. 4. 



PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES 199 

Secondary epoch. It is' an ancient and little altered 
fragment, preserving as in a museum the types of 
plants and animals which were then dominant on the 




FlG. 79. Dinomis ekphantopw, "New Zealand. 

great shifting land areas, and from which the higher 
forms have been developed. 

Oceanic islands, with their population of birds, flying 
insects, and a few creeping things, are the refuge spots 
f*f castaways. Strange are the ways and means of dis 



200 THE STORY OF CREATION 

persai Winds waft the light -seeds of plants to great 
distances ; currents drift to far-off shores icebergs laden 
with earth and seeds, or masses of floating vegetation, 
sometimes so matted with soil as to forrr; island rafts, 
with trees upstanding, and carrying with them not only 
numbers of grubs and eggs of insects, but even large 
animals. Darwin found beetles swimming in the open 
ocean seventeen miles from land ; and one even ing, when 
ten miles from the Bay of San Bias, in the Pacific, the air 
was thick with butterflies it snowed them, as the sailors 
said. But the most remarkable instance cited in his 
Journal is the arrival of a grasshopper when the ship 
was three hundred and seventy miles from the coast of 
Africa. Birds are important agents in plant distribution, 
transporting seeds embedded in dirt sticking to their 
feet or beaks, or the barbed seeds of certain plants, as 
the hook-like spikes of the curious Uncinia, which cling 
to their feathers, or the undigested seeds and stones of 
fruits which are passed through their bodies. A swift- 
winged bird may drop cherry ^stones a thousand miles 
from the tree they grow on ; a hawk, in tearing a 
pigeon, may scatter from its crop the still fresh rice it 
had swallowed at a distance of ten degrees of latitude. 
Among the many suggestive experiments which Darwin 
made in this matter, he cites the case of the leg of a 
wounded partridge to which a ball of hard earth weigh- 
ing six and a half ounces adhered. The earth had been 
kept for three years, but when broken, watered, and 
placed under a bell-glass, no fewer than eighty-two sepa- 
rate plants of about five distinct species sprang from it 
Very important also, although more remote in its 
ultimate results, is the agency of man, especially of 
civilised races, in the distribution of life. Both with and 
without intent He distributes and destroys, as his needs 



PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPECIES 201 

or caprices demand. Clearing forest, draining lake and 
bog, reclaiming land from sea, or uniting ocean with 
ocean, he disturbs, or mingles, or kills their life-forms. 
He imports strange plants and noxious insects in his 
merchandise ; the sheep-walks of the antipodes are cursed 
with the fecund rabbit, and their river beds choked with 
our water-cress ; while the European rat has left our 
shores as a stowaway to oust the native rat wherever it 
goes, as the white man ousts the coloured man. But 
man blesses as well as curses ; he transports the healing 
cinchona plant from Peru to India, or the salmon ova 
from our native streams to the rivers of Australia ; 
and to him is due the reintroduction of the horse into 
America, which had been extinct there long before the 
arrival of Columbus. c The hortus siccus of a botanist 
may accidentally sow seed from the foot of the Hima- 
layas on the plains that skirt the Alps ; and it is a fact of 
very familiar observation, that exotics, transplanted to 
foreign climates suited to their growth, often escape from 
the flower-garden and naturalise themselves among the 
spontaneous vegetation of the pastures. When the cases 
containing the artistic treasures of Thorwaldsen were 
opened in the court of the museum at Copenhagen where 
they are deposited, the straw and grass employed in pack- 
ing them were scattered upon the ground, and the next 
season there sprang up from the seeds no less than twenty- 
five species of plants belonging to the Roman Campagna, 
some of which were preserved and cultivated as a new 
tribute to the memory of the great Scandinavian sculptor, 
and at least four are said to have spontaneously natural- 
ised themselves about Copenhagen.' l 

It surprises one to learn how many of our familiar 
flowers are foreigners, which happy chance or wise intent 

1 Marsh's Man and Nature^ p. 67. 



202 THE STORY OF CREATION 

have acclimatised. The daisy and the violet are natives, 
but not the laburnum and jasmine, nor 

Sweet William with his homely cottage smell, 
And stocks in fragrant blow. 

While needless destruction has often followed in 
the wake of man, as he kills out of sheer wanton- 
ness, or seeks profit by gratifying the cruel freaks of 
fashion, his enterprise and needs have, on the other 
hand, rid the earth of harmful and baneful plants 
and animals, produced food and clothing from wild 
species, luscious fruit from sour and dwarfed varieties, 
and developed domestic animals, the dog probably 
earliest of all, from the fierce beasts of the forest and 
the field. 

Enough has been cited to show that no preordained 
scheme of fitness for their several habitats has placed 
plants and animals where they are found. Remember- 
ing what has been said about the probable polar origin 
of life, we are prepared to find that, so far as most of 
the higher forms are concerned, our best authorities, with 
Mr. Wallace at their head, incline to the theory of their 
development in the Euro- Asiatic continent when the 
temperature was comparatively warm from the pole to 
the antipodes. The wave of migration rolled over the 
Old World far south by routes now long submerged, 
and into the New World, where other life-forms appear 
to have been developed, by a northerly route. One 
among several proofs of the existence of an old land con- 
nection between North America and Europe is supplied 
by the musk-sheep (or musk-ox), which flourished ages 
ago in Eurasia, and is now confined to Greenland. And 
it is interesting to note that the path taken by some birds 
in their migration^ gives further clue to other ancient 



PROOFS OF DERIVATION OF SPK^IES 203 

(and connections. 1 Incapable as they are of crossing the 
wide oceans, we find them migrating between Europe 
and Africa by way of Greece, Malta, and Gibraltar,, the 
three points "at which the two continents were formerly 
united. They follow instinctively the route which their 
ancestors have taken for countless seasons. 

Widespread as is the distribution of the races of 
mankind, they are probably of common origin. All of 
them being fertile with one another, they are to be 
classed as varieties of one species, whose physical and 
mental differentiations from their nearest congeners, the 
highest apes, had been acquired before their dispersion. 
The modifications which exist have been developed 
through the potent agency of natural and sexual selec- 
tion acting upon variations induced by diverse condi- 
tions conditions which have surrounded man in virtue 
of his migrations from pole to pole, and which have 
called his industry and resource into full play. Perhaps 
the most striking Illustration -throughout history of the 
rapid rise of a variety is "supplied by the Anglo-American 
race, the vigour of which may be primarily due to the 
blending of many bloods, pre-Celtic, Celtic, Saxon, 
Norman, and Dane, in its British ancestry. 

1 * A bird may travel from England to the equator without launching 
out and exposing itself to boundless seas, and that by crossing the water at 
Dover, and again at Gibraltar. . . . When arrived there the birds do 
not 

" Ranged in figure wedge their way, 
and set forth 

Their airy caravan high over seas 
Flying, and over lands with mutual wing 
Easing their flight " (Milton)^ 

but scout and hurry along in little detached parties of six ^r seven, and 
sweeping low, just over the surface of the land and water, direct their course 
to the opposite continent at the narrowest passage tKey can find. 1 White's 
Selbonte* letter ix., to the Hon. Daines Barrington. 



204 THE STORY OF CREATION 

* That many and serious objections may be advanced 
against the theory of descent with modification through 
variation and natural selection I do not deny. I have 
endeavoured to give them their full force.' 1 < The sixth, 
seventh, and tenth chapters of the ' Origin of Species ' 
are proof of this, Darwin shirked no difficulty, and in 
laying stress upon whatever told against his theory he 
made its foundations more sure. One great, but unduly 
overrated, stumbling-block the absence of intermediate 
forms in the fossil-yielding rocks has been removed by 
the discovery of many more connecting links in the long 
chain of life than could be expected when we take into 
account the small minority of ancient forms which have 
escaped the havoc of the past, and when we remember 
how much smaller are the chances in favour of the pre- 
servation of the more fragile, rare, and unstable tran- 
sitional forms than of the species which they connect. 

Another leading objection, drawn from the barren- 
ness of hybrids 2 as, e.g., of the mule loses much of its 
force in view of the numerous examples to the con- 
trary, both in plants and animals, as amongst genera 
of the thistle and of the laburnum, and as in the cases 
of fruitful hybrids of sheep and goats in Chili. 3 But, 
as against natural selection, the real difficulty lies in 
the interbreeding of species developed by selective 
breeding from a common stock/ For example, the 
different species of pigeons have been developed from 
the wild rock-pigeon, and these are fertile with one 
another, which would seem to tell in favour of the 
fixity of species, unless the carrier, pouter, and tumbler 

1 Origin of Sjbecus i p. 404. 

2 Animals and Plants, ii. 130-156, and ch. xix. passim. 
s Hseckel's Hist, of ' Creation ^ i. 145-149. 

4 For some suggestive *srnarks on this matter, see Quarterly Review, 
January 1901, pp. 269, 271. 



PROOFS OP DERIVATION OF SPECIES 205 

are, after all, to be regarded only as varieties or sub- 
divisions of species. The matter, however, is too ab- 
struse for these pages, and, moreover, it has no weight 
as against the theory of derivation. We know very little 
as to the complex conditions ruling fertility and barren- 
ness ; we know that the reproductive organs are pecu- 
liarly sensitive to altered habits and surroundings ; and 
we know, further, that it is through changes in those 
organs that the barriers to interbreeding have arisen, 
and the consequent multiplication of countless inter- 
mediate varieties been arrested. Happily, the Darwinian 
theory has no fatal element of rigidness in it, and those 
who would mould it into a dogma know not what spirit 
they are of. It admits of alterations in detail at the 
behest of fresh facts, and of such correction of proportion 
as time alone gives to things new and near. But the 
truth of the theory of which it is a subordinate part 
will thereby stand out the clearer, and the full accord 
of past and present to the oneness of things appear 
more manifest So far as the doctrine of organic evolu- 
tion is concerned, the evidence from embryology and 
palaeontology in support of it is so conclusive that it 
would remain unshaken if the theory of natural selection 
could be disproved. 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



CHAPTER XL 

SOCIAL EVOLUTION. 

I. Evolution of Mind. If the theory of evolution be 
not universal, the germs of decay are in it. And here 
we pass from what is interesting to what is of serious 
import for us, because if the phenomena of mind are not 
capable of the like mechanical explanation as the phe- 
nomena of stars and planets, and of vegetable and animal 
life, evolution remains only a speculation to fascinate 
the curious. It can, in that case, furnish no rule of life 
or motive to conduct, and man, ' the roof and crown ot 
things,' would be the sole witness against their unity and 
totality. If there be in him any faculty which is no part 
of the contents of the universe, if there be anything done 
by him which lies outside the range of causation, then 
the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy falls to 
pieces, for man has the power to add to that which 
the physicist demonstrates can neither be increased nor 
lessened. 

The ground already covered need not be retrodden 
to show that man is one in ultimate beginnings, and in 
the stuff of which he is made, with the meanest flower 
that blows, and that in mode of development from the 
egg to the adult state there is exact likeness between 
him and other mSLmmals. But some repetition of the 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 207 

process of mental development from the lowest life-forms 
to the highest is needful. 

< Structure for structure/ remarks Professor Huxley, 
down to the minutest microscopical details, the eye, 
the ear, the olfactory organs, the nerves, the spinal cord, 
the brain of an ape, or, of a dog, correspond with the 
same organs in the human subject. Cut a nerve, and 
the evidence of paralysis, or of insensibility, is the same 
in the two cases ; apply pressure to the brain, or admin- 
ister a narcotic, and the signs of intelligence disappear 
in the one as in the other. Whatever reason we have 
for believing that the changes 'which take place in the 
normal cerebral substance of man give rise to states of 
consciousness, the same reason exists for the belief that 
the modes of motion of the cerebral substance of an ape, 
or of a dog, produce like effects/ l 

Let us begin, however, at the bottom of the life- 
scale. The lowest things, being organless, or alike all 
over, respond to touch, ' the mother-tongue of all the 
senses/ in every part, simply changing their shape from 
moment to moment. A step higher we find forms in 
which unlikenesses in parts begin to show themselves 
e.g. in the formation of a layer at the surface ; and here 
the responses to the stimuli, as they are called, become 
localised, because the movements set up by the stimuli 
take place, like all modes of motion, along the lines of 
least resistance. These movements give rise to changes 
in the structure of the organism, driving the molecules 
out of their places, and, following in incredibly rapid suc- 
cession, finally lay down permanent nerve-tracks, built 
up of the more sensitive parts of the skin. All sense- 
organs, whether the whiskers of a cat or the eye of a 
man, all the wondrous network of nerves and the brain 

1 English Man of Letters, Hume, p. 105. 



208 THE STORY OF CREATION 

itself, have thus originated. Practice makes perfect ; 
and, as the result of their incessant repetition, the lowest 
and simplest nerve-actions, known as reflex, take place 
automatically in plants and animals Suck are the con- 
tractions of an amceba or of the leaves of a mimosa, the 
shutting up of an oyster when the shell is touched, 
breathing, the action of the heart, winking of the eyes 
in short, all actions which are performed unconsciously, 
and repeated in virtue of the tendency to do them -being 
innate in the structure which each organism inherits from 
its ancestors. Besides these natural reflex actions, there 
is a group of artificial reflex actions which our higher 
intelligence enables us to acquire, as the arts of reading, 
playing instruments, &c. 

As every one knows, it takes a soldier a long time 
to learn his drill for instance, to put himself into the 
attitude of * attention 1 at the instant the word of 
command is heard ; but after a time the sound of the 
word gives rise to the act, whether the soldier be think- 
ing of it or not There is a-, story, which is credible 
enough though It may not be true, of a practical joker, 
who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his 
dinner, suddenly called out Attention ! ' whereupon the 
man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his 
mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been 
thorough, and its effects had become embodied in the 
man's nervous structure. ' The possibility of all educa- 
tion is based upon the existence of this power, which the 
nervous system possesses, of organising conscious actions 
into more or less unconscious, or reflex, operations. 2 

Instinct is a higher form of reflex action. The 
salmon migrates from sea to river ; the bird makes its 
nest or migrates from one zone to another by an unvary- 

, p. 306. 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 209 

mg route, even leaving its young behind to perish ; the 
bee builds its six-sided cell ; the spider spins its web ; 
the chick breaks its way through the shell, balances itself, 
and picks up. grains of com ; the new-born babe sucks 
its mother's breast all in virtue of like acts on the part 
of their ancestors, which, arising in the needs of the 
creature, and gradually becoming automatic, have not 
varied during long ages, the tendency to repeat them 
being transmitted within the germ from which insect, 
fish, bird, and man have severally sprung. 1 Touching on 
larger matters for a moment, even the so-called necessary 
truths and innate ideas of the mind, as of time and 
space, take their place among transmitted experiences. 
' Being/ as Herbert Spencer says, ' the constant and 
infinitely repeated elements of thought, they must 
become the automatic elements of thought of which it 
is impossible to get rid/ 

More than a century ago Gilbert White remarked 
that ' the maxim that defines instinct to be that secret 
influence by which every*species is compelled naturally 
to pursue at all times the same way or track without any 
teaching or example, must be taken in a qualified sense, 
for there are instances in which instinct does vary and 
conform to the circumstances of place and convenience/ a 
Herein that delightful observer, perhaps without suspect- 
ing what he was conceding to the brute, indicates where 
instinct passes into Reason. For the main difference 

1 An interesting illustration of this was supplied by a St. .Bernard dog 
belonging to a relative. The dog was born in London, and taken into the 
country when a puppy. After a few months a sharp fall of snow happened, 
and * Ju, 1 who had never seen snow before, was frantic to get outdoors, 
When she was set free, she rolled in the snow, bit it, and dug it up with 
her claws as if rescuing some buried traveller. The same excitement was 
shown whenever snow fell. 

8 Letter Ivi,, to Hon. Daines jBarrington. 



2io THE STORY OF CREATION 

between the two Is that while the one Is done because 
the animal cannot help doing it, and has no knowledge 
of tfre relation between the end and the means, the other 
is the conscious adjustment of means to* ends selec- 
tion as the result of reflection. In the one there Is no 
pause, In the other there is a measurable interval ; 
the stimuli to action are more complex and less rapid, 
giving time for that perception of likenesses and unlike- 
nesses in things which Is essential to rational action. 
This is manifested by all animals except the lowest, 
which, however, form the vast majority. The latter start 
fully equipped for their functions : their actions are reflex 
and unvarying from birth to death. But in the higher 
animals the same mental processes are apparent as in 
man. There is not a faculty of the human mind which 
Is not possessed in lesser or greater degree by them ; 
oftenest In lesser degree, sometimes in larger degree, as in 
the showing forth of affection and devotion that puts 
man's selfishness to shame. Where some of .the highest 
animals approach him, although? longo intervatto^ is in their 
passage through a period of helpless infancy, because 
the brain and connecting apparatus are not complete 
at birth ; and in this lies the explanation of the capacity 
for receiving Instruction and for profiting by experience, 
which reaches its fullest development in man. And it 
is because the knowledge that is gained, and the habits 
that are acquired, in early life abide with us, determining 
character, that the importance to ourselves and to others 
of learning what is true, and of cultivating what is good, 
is paramount Vast, therefore, as are the differences 
between the highest and lowest mental actions, there Is 
no break in the series which, starting with the reflex 
movements of e an amoeba or of a carnivorous plant, 
advances along the* line of animal instinct and intelli- 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 21 1 

gence, and ends with the complex movements of the 
brain of civilised man, with its infinite modes of response 
to infinite stimuli. 

2. Evolution of Society. Like every other species, man 
multiplies beyond the means of subsistence. Civilised 
races are more prolific than savage races. Under pro- 
sperous conditions they double their numbers in a quarter 
of a century, a rate at which the present population of 
the United States alone would in six hundred and fifty 
years cover the terraqueous globe so thickly that four 
individuals would have to stand on each square yard 
of surface. 1 Consequently the, mortality of the human 
species, though far less than that of any -other animal, 
is still enormous: It is computed that more than seven 
hundred million human beings are every century pounded 
back to nothingness without knowing that they ever 
lived, to which have to be added the vast number that 
die before reaching manhood, and the wholesale destruc- 
tion of communities by wars, pestilences, famines, and ca- 
tastrophes. In various wyys natural selection weeds out 
the least fit ; and although under civilised conditions the 
weak and diseased are coddled and even permitted to 
multiply their kind, this check is too local to affect the 
larger result, while that which the race might gain in 
physique by its removal is not to be compared to the 
loss that would ensue from the repression of mercy and 
sympathy. In a barbaric society, or among the civilisa- 
tions where infanticide was practised, weaklings like 
Newton and hunchbacks like Pope would have been 
left to perish : modern civilisation spares them, and 
humanity is enriched by their genius. 

When the weeding process has done its utmost, there 
remains a sharp struggle for life between the survivors 

1 Decent of Man, p. <$. 

P? 



**2 THE STORY OF CREATION 

Man's normal state Is therefore one of conflict ; further 
back than we can trace, it impelled the defenceless 
bipeds from whom he sprang to unity, and the more so 
because of their relative inferiority in physique to many 
other animals. The range of that unity continued 
narrow long after he had gained lordship over the brute ; 
outside the small combinations for securing the primal 
needs of life the struggle was ferocious, and, under one 
form or another, rages along the line to this day. 
4 There is no discharge in that war.' It may change its 
tactics and its weapons : among advanced nations the 
military method may be more or less superseded by the 
industrial, and men may be mercilessly starved instead 
of being mercifully slain ; but be it war of camps or* 
markets, the ultimate appeal is to force of brain or 
muscle, and the hardiest or craftiest win. In some 
respects the struggle is waged more fiercely than in olden 
times, while it is unredeemed by any element of chivalry. 
Moreover, the greater strength of man's emotions, and 
the persistent craving for excitement, acting upon his 
inherited savage instincts, have made that struggle more 
terrible in his case than any that rages between the lower 
animals. These fight for food and mates, not for the mere 
love of fighting. No brute ever tortured its kind or gloated 
over the agonies of its prey as man has tortured in fiendish 
glee the victims of his revenge, intolerance, and hate. 
True it is that peace has been wrung from pain ; that 
war is a nation-builder ; that slavery and superstition have 
been agents of progress, whereby the many, through 
the sacrifice of the few, have gained freedom, unity, and 
larger life ; that in the death-struggle for food, curiosity, 
the mother of knowledge, ha? been awakened* never more 
to sleep ; that in the fight for mates the germ of the highest 
and purest love of fnan for woman has been developed ; 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 213 

chat in the conflicts between tribes, patriotism, morals, 
and the hardy virtues have been evolved : but when we 
count the cost, all this would afford small content did 
we not have faith that the slow-footed years are bring- 
ing us nearer to the goal where might shall be sub- 
dued by right, and where injustice and selfishness shall 
be swallowed up by goodness, because this shall have 
become spontaneous to man. 

The social instincts to which his progress is due are 
without doubt inherited from his pre-human ancestors. 
1 There is/ wrote Gilbert White* in 1775, ' a wonderful 
spirit of sociality in the brute creation, independent of 
sexual attachment ;' and Darwin remarks that * the social 
animals which stand at the bottom of the scale are 
guided almost exclusively, and those which stand higher 
in the scale are largely guided by special instincts in the 
aid which they give to the members of the same com- 
munity ; but they are likewise in part impelled by 
mutual love and sympathy,, assisted apparently by some 
amount of reason/ 1 In the degree that animals are 
social we find them higher in the scale, as ants, bees, 
and wasps among insects ; and among domestic animals, 
dogs, whose wild ancestors hunted in packs, as compared 
with cats, which inherit the solitary and wandering habit? 
of their wild ancestors. 

We do not know what the earliest social unions 
among mankind were like. Probably there were no 
family arrangements as we understand the term, but 
only various kinds of relations, more or less fugitive, 
between groups of men and women. 2 The details, how- 

1 Descent of Man.) p, 109. 

2 Cf., e.g.> Sir A. C. Lyall's account of the Bh^els, n undoubted rem- 
nant of the aboriginal tribes of India. * They may be taken to represent 
generally the barbarian type before the earliest civilisation had brought in 



2 1 4 THE STOR Y OF CREA TION 

ever, do not affect the general fact of social intercours^ 
in which community of interest was the binding force, 
impetus was given to more personal and permanent 
relationships by the longer period of infancy in man as 
compared with the same period in the man-like apes, in 
whom, again, it is much longer than in the lower mon- 
keys. 3 For as the maternal instinct ' sublimes the pas- 
sions, quickens the invention, and sharpens the sagacity 
of the brute creation/ 2 so this period of helplessness 
would draw parent and child closer together, evolving 
love and sympathy, and developing those enduring and 
exalting relations of the family which widened into tribal 
life. Struggles against common foes brought the bravest 
to the front as leaders, turbulent elements within involved 
the rule of the ablest, disputes called for the settlement 
of the wisest; and thus the rough foundations of law 
and order were laid. As the wants and capacities 
of the ever-increasing community multiplied, the work 
done by each one under rucje conditions was divided 
among the many ; hence specialisation of the people into 
classes, with all the complex duties of modern societies. 
Carlyle says that the great man shapes the age; 
Herbert Spencer says that the age shapes the great man. 
The truth lies in the mean ; the great man is the product 
of past tendencies and present conditions, and he is 
supreme in virtue of these operating in him in higher 
degree ; hence he acts upon society for good or evil. 

ideas and prejudices about food, worship, and connubium. So far as can 
be ascertained, the Bheels are all subdivided into a variety of distinct 
groups, a few based on a reputed common descent, but most of them appar- 
ently muddled together by simple contiguity of habitation, or the natural 
banding together of the number necessary for maintaining and defending 
themselves.' Asiqfic Studies t p. 160. 

1 Cf. Fiske's Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy , ii. 342-346. 

2 White's Selborne> letter xiv., to Mr. Barrmgton. 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 215 

3. Evolution of Language^ the Useful Arts, and 
Science. Man is markedly separate from the highest 
brute, not only by his brain-power and his erect 'atti- 
tude, with its free command over the hands, but also by 
language. 1 Not that the * dumb ' animals, as they are 
called, are all voiceless* many of them having no small 
or inexact gamut of sounds by which to express their 
thoughts and emotions. But although the love-calls of 
birds and the danger-cries of beasts may be not more 
unintelligible to us than the language of savages like the 
Fuegians, which Captain Coqk compared to a man 
clearing his throat, the distinction abides that language, 
as the plastic symbol of ideas of unlimited range and 
complexity, marks the impassable gulf between the 
.mental capacity of man and every other animal. Its 
origin lies in his need to communicate with his fellows ; 
and but for it all attempts after social union, except 
of the lowest and most fleeting kind, would have been 
as the weaving of a rope of sand. ' Nature/ says Lucre- 
tius (v. 1028, 9), * impelled them to utter various sounds 
of the tongue, and use struck out the names of things/ 

Words themselves reveal under analysis the his- 
tory of their origin from a few simple root-sounds, 
which were instinctive cries or imitations of various 
natural noises very largely aided at the outset by signs 
and gestures. Speech is but one way of expressing 
thought ; deaf mutes can converse only by gesture ; to 
this day it is the chief mode of communication between 
certain wandering tribes of American Indians, and 
among the vivacious races of Southern Europe it 
largely supplements talk. We can never know what 
the first sound-signs were like, but their choice and cur- 
rency obviously depended on the ucc*ess with whic" 

1 On the evolution of the organs of articulate speech, see the author 
"Thomas fhury Huxley^ pp. 120-122. 



2i6 THE STORY OF CREATION 

they conveyed the meaning of those who invented them 
a principle, of course, applicable to every stage of lan- 
guage, from the simple names of objects with which it 
began to the ultimate transfer of those names to abstract 
ideas. For all abstract terms have a concrete origin. 
The words just used evidence this ; abstract meaning 
' dragged away/ and concrete e grown together.' Even the 
verb to be is made up of ' the relics of several verbs which 
once had a distinct physical significance. Be contained 
the idea of " growing " ; am, art, is, and are, that of 
" sitting " ; was and were,ft&t of" dwelling," " abiding." ' l 
Certain it is that from mimetic sounds, with their bound- 
less variety of modulation, there have been developed not 
merely the scanty and shifting speech of the lower races, 
but the wondrously rich, copious, and ever-growing to 
languages of civilised races, the sound-carriers not only 
of man's common wants, but of the lofty conceptions 
which are enshrined in prose and poetry, and without 
which, now made the common intellectual wealth of 
nations through the arts' of writing and printing, how poor 
and dwarfed would human life have been ! Language 
has, therefore, followed the common law of evolution in 
advance from the simple to the complex, from nouns and 
verbs to the elaboration of families of words and of parts 
of speech, with their subtile shades of meaning whereby 
no thought remains unexpressed. Thus does it pnWe it- 
self one of the many instruments which the skill of man 
has perfected from raw materials as his social needs 
have impelled him and as his intelligence has increased. 
And the like adaptation of means to ends applies to 
the development of the useful arts, as well as of those 
arts in which the head is more concerned than the hand. 
The primal neds of clothing and shelter, of weapons of 

1 Professor W. D. Whitney's LecL on Language^ p. 115. 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 217 

vvar and of the chase for the sword and bow precede 
the spade and hammer the need, under more settled 
conditions, of implements for the household and. the 
field, set man's wits at work to supplement and improve 
that which nature supplies in the rough. For if he is 
not the only tool-user, he is the only tool-maker among 
the Primates. Every instrument of his culture bears 
traces of its development from simpler forms : the spear 
and knife-blade from the sharp-edged flint flake; the 
saw from the jagged-edged flake ; the matchlock from 
the crossbow ; the warrior's armour from the scaly hide 
of beasts ; the plough from the stag's antlers or the tree 
branch ; the mill from pounding stones ; the ship from 
the scooped-out trunk ; the oar from the hands or feet 
as primitive paddles ; the house from the sun-baked clay 
hut, or, as in China, from the Tatar tent ; the pyramid 
from the earth mound or cairn : all art from imitation 
the alphabet from picture-writing ; sculpture and paint- 
ing from rude scratchings on bone and horn ; stringed 
instruments from the twa*ng of the hunter's bow ; wind 
instruments from the blast of his horn ; the f blowing into 
hollow stalks from the whistling of the zephyr through 
the hollows of reeds ; ' melody and dance from the rude, 
impassioned chant of thesavage, time-marked by yell and 
tamtam ; arithmetic from primitive perception of more 
or less ; counting and measuring, as shown in our words 
cubit, ell, 1 foot, hand, digit, span, fathom, and in cognate 
terms of other languages, from using the fingers, toes, 
and other parts of the body ; geometry, or 



1 Some confusion of measures of length having occurred in the reign of 
Henry I., he commanded that the ancient ell (Lat. ulna)., which corresponds 
to our yard, should be made of the exact length of his own arm. The span, 
which is nine inches, is the space from the end of the thumb to the end oi 
the little finger when extended, or the eighth of a fathom (A.S. fcetbem, 
Ihe bosom), trie space to which a man's arms can ordinarily be extended. 



2i S THE STORY OF CREATION 

ing, from early perceptions of space ; all science from 
crude and false guesses about the nature and causes ol 
things, from illusions of alchemist and astrologer, which, 
made attainment of the truth more possible to chemist 
and astronomer ; and so on through the whole range oi 
man's social and intellectual development. 

4. Evolution of Morals. Man by himself is not only 
unprogressive, he is also not so much immoral as unmoral. 
For where there is no society there is no sin. Therefore 
the bases of right and wrong lie in conduct towards one's 
fellows ; the moral sense or conscience is the outcome of 
social relations, themselves the outcome of the need of 
living. The common interests which impel to combination 
involve praise or blame of the acts of each individual in the 
degree that they aid or hinder the well-being of all in 
other words, add to their pleasure or their pain ; and this 
praise and blame constitute the moral code, the collective 
or tribal conscience. Society, like the units of which it 
is made up, has to fight for its life, and all primitive 
laws are laws of self-preservation. Tribal self-preserva- 
tion is based on sympathy between the several members, 
and it is therefore the ultimate foundation of the moral 
sense ; whatever is helpful to it is right^ whatever is a hin- 
drance to it is wrong. Although union involves limitation 
and restraint, so that the units can no longer do exactly as 
they like, self-interest comes into play, since a man best 
insured respect for his own rights by respecting the rights 
of others. Society is not possible where a man is not 
true to his fellow ; there is, as the phrase goes, honour 
among thieves, probably even among savages as low as 
the Jolas of the Gambia, every one of whom does as he 
likes, the most successful thief being the greatest man. 
In that model of so,und and clear reasoning, so refreshing 
a contrast to the tedious word-mongering of many 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 2 

writers on ethics, the chapter on the growth of t] 
moral sense in the * Descent of Man/ l Darwin points o 
how man's instinctive sympathy would lead him to vali 
highly the approval of his fellows, and how his actio; 
would be determined in a high degree by their express* 
wishes ; unfortunately, often by his own selfish desires. B 
while the lower instincts, as hunger, passion, and thirst f 
vengeance, are strong, they are not so enduring or sati 
fying as the higher feelings which crave for society ar 
sympathy. And the yielding to the lower, howev 
gratifying for the moment, would be followed by tl 
feeling of regret that he had thus given way, and I 
resolve to act differently for the future. Thus at last me 
comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps inherit* 
habit, that it is best for him to obey his more persiste, 
impulses. It is this self-accusing feeling of remor 
(literally, biting again), due to power of reflection on a 
tions and motives, that makes the difference so profoui 
between man and the lower animals, whose moral sen: 
does not advance beyond the stage which commits < 
avoids certain acts according as they are remembers 
as pleasurable or painful to the creature itself. - 

Special value would be set by the tribe upon bra^ 
and unselfish deeds as contributing to the common wea 
praise and honour would reward ttie doer, encouragin 
that love of the tribe in which lay the germ of love 
country. For he who is not a good citizen cannot be 
true patriot, and he who holds not his fatherland de< 
can never become a well-wisher to mankind. The coi 
ceptions which these larger interests involve are, howeve 
of very slow growth ; for a long time the feeling 
Tightness and wrongness was limited to acts harmful 

1 Chap. iv. passim ; and cf. Clifford's Lectures ana assays, ii. pp. IO< 



SOCIAL SVOLUT1OM 21 

writers on ethics, the chapter on the growth of th 
moral sense in the c Descent of Man/ l Darwin points on 
how man's instinctive sympathy would lead him to valu 
highly the approval of his fellows, and how his action 
would be determined in a high degree by their expressei 
wishes ; unfortunately, often by his own selfish desires, Bu 
while the lower instincts, as hunger, passion, and thirst fo 
vengeance, are strong, they are not so enduring or satis 
fying as the higher feelings which crave for society an< 
sympathy. And the yielding to the lower, howeve 
gratifying for the moment, would be followed by th< 
feeling of regret that he had thus given way, and b] 
resolve to act differently for the future. Thus at last mai 
comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps inheritec 
habit, that it is best for him to obey his more persisten 
impulses. It is this self-accusing feeling of remors< 
(literally, biting again), due to power of reflection on ac 
tions and motives, that makes the difference so profoum 
between man and the lower animals, whose moral sens< 
does not advance beyonS the stage which commits oj 
avoids certain acts according as they are rememberec 
as pleasurable or painful to the creature itself 

Special value would be set by the tribe upon brave 
and unselfish deeds as contributing to the common weal 
praise and honour would reward t^ie doer, encouraging 
that love of the tribe in which lay the germ of love o; 
country. For he who is not a good citizen cannot be % 
true patriot, and he who holds not his fatherland deai 
can never become a well-wisher to mankind. The con- 
ceptions which these larger interests involve are, however 
of very slow growth ; for a long time the feeling o1 
rightness and wrongness was limited to acts harmful 01 

5 Chap. iv. passim ; and cf. Clifford's Lectures and Essays* ii. pp. 106- 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 2i< 

writers on ethics, the chapter on the growth of the 
moral sense in the * Descent of Man/ l Darwin points ou1 
how man's instinctive sympathy would lead him to value 
highly the approval of his fellows, and how his actions 
would be determined in a high degree by their expressed 
wishes ; unfortunately, often by his own selfish desires. But 
while the lower instincts, as hunger, passion, and thirst for 
vengeance, are strong, they are not so enduring or satis- 
fying as the higher feelings which crave for society and 
sympathy. And the yielding to the lower, however 
gratifying for the nloment, would be followed by the 
feeling of regret that he had thus given way, and by 
resolve to act differently for the future. Thus at last man 
comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps inherited 
habit, that it is best for him to obey his more persistent 
impulses. It is this self-accusing feeling of remorse 
(literally, biting again), due to power of reflection on ac- 
tions and motives, that makes the difference so profound 
between man and the lower animals, whose moral sense 
does not advance beyond the stage which commits or 
avoids certain acts according as they are remembered 
as pleasurable or painful to the creature itself. 

Special value would be set by the tribe upon brave 
and unselfish deeds as contributing to the common weal ; 
praise and honour would reward tl^e doer, encouraging 
that love of the tribe in which lay the germ of love of 
country. For he who is not a good citizen cannot be a 
true patriot, and he who holds not his fatherland dear 
can never become a well-wisher to mankind. The con- 
ceptions which these larger interests involve are, however, 
of very slow growth ; for a long time the feeling of 
Tightness and wrongness was limited to acts harmful or 

3 Chap. iv. jpassim ; and cf. Clifford's Lectures atz4 Essays, ii. pp. 106- 
176. 



220 THE STORY OF CREATION 

helpful to the tribe ; in fact, that which was a crime 
within its borders became a virtue, and even a duty, 
outside them. What Caesar says of the ancient Germans 
'Robberies beyond the bounds of each community 
have no infamy, but are commended as a means of 
exercising youth and lessening sloth ' l still applies to 
barbaric peoples, and has its survival in the slowly decay- 
ing prejudices of civilised nations. 

Morals are relative, not absolute ; there is no fixed 
standard of right and wrong by which the actions of all 
men throughout all time are measured. The moral 
code advances with the progress of the race ; conscience 
is a growth. That which society in rude stages of 
culture approves, it condemns at later and more refined 
stages, although such is the power of custom in investing 
the antique with sanctity, such the persistence of authority, 
and so deep its interest against change, that moral 
qualities are grafted upon acts apart from any question 
of their bearing upon character. Such, for example, are 
the prohibitions against certain^ foods and the commands 
to keep certain days sacred ; such also the tyranny of 
caste, as among the Bhattias of India, who regard dining 
at an hotel as a greater sin than murder. Among 
the Mohammedan sect of the Wahhabees murder and 
adultery are venial offences compared to the smoking 
of tobacco. Among many savage peoples it is worse 
to marry a girl within the tribe than to murder one 
of another tribe. Among ourselves society condones 
a seduction, but not a mesalliance, and forgives an 
offence against etiquette less readily than an act of 
dishonour. 

Although tending of late to unwise laxity towards 
offences for which death is the rightful penalty, the 

Comm.} bk. vi. cap. 23. 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 221 

alterations in criminal codes witness to progress in 
morals and humaneness, and to the recognition of crime 
as more or less of the nature of disease. We need, not 
go back to the time when laws punishing heresy and 
witchcraft were in force, since within the last century 
people were burned to. death for coining false money, 
hanged for stealing a few shillings' worth of goods, and 
imprisoned for paltry debts, death being often the only 
bringer of release. Among the sights of London were 
the procession of, condemned criminals to Tyburn every 
six weeks, and the auctions of negroes at the Poultry 
Compter. These and a hundred other barbarities went 
on without protest from the humane, whether Christians 
or non-Christians, for the collective conscience did not 
question their Tightness, and their abolition was ulti- 
mately due to the efforts of individuals in whom a higher 
sense of human rights and duties was aroused, and 
through whom the general moral tone was -advanced. 
That heightened tone, which is a yet stronger note of 
our time, is, in the main, due to the progress of science, 
using the term as including not merely knowledge of 
the operations of nature, but knowledge of human life as 
affected by divers causes, and of the community of blood 
in all mankind. 

It is this which has broken down the barriers of pre- 
judice between the classes of each nation and between 
nations themselves, bringing home the force of the 
Italian proverb, * Tutto il mondo e paese ' ' all the world 
is one country.' This larger view extends the range of 
human sympathy and of the service of man to his fellows, 
as well as to the lower animals, which that sympathy 
inspires. Terrible are the ills which the misuse of know- 
ledge in the hands of the selfish and the -ruffian inflicts, 
but these are as dust in the balance against the good 



222 THE STORY OJP CREATION 

which has been wrought The conduct of a nation is 
no longer regulated solely by Its own interests without 
regard to what is due to others, neither does it draw its 
sanction from the tribal legislation of a barbaric past, 
but from what, after ages of dearly bought experience, 
has proved itself to be best for man. In this, as in aught 
else which endures, nothing- is rigid or final. Man's 
capacity can never overtake his loftiest ideals ; in their 
conception is the spur to their pursuit. What dead 
weight of care do morals, thus regarded, lift from the 
heart of man ! what new energy Is, given to his efforts ! 
Thought becomes fixed on the evolution of goodness 
instead of on the origin of evil ; time is set free from 
useless speculation for profitable action ; evils once 
deemed inherent in the nature of things, and therefore 
irremovable, are accounted for and shown to be within 
our power to extirpate. 

For in proving the unvarying relation between cause 
and effect in morals as in, physics, science gives the clue 
to the remedy for moral ills. -Moreover, that which man 
calls sin is shown to be more often due to his imperfect 
sense of the true proportion of things, and to his lack of 
imagination, than to his wilfulness ; ' evil is wrought by 
want of thought as well as want of heart.' As Herbert 
Spencer says, * the world is governed or overthrown by 
feelings to which ideas serve only as guides ; ' ] and the 
lack of imagination, which is itself largely due to defec- 
tive training of the intellect, prevents a man from putting 
himself in the place of others, and deprives him of that 
sympathy which is essential to the unselfish life. Since 
morals are due to the social instinct, the highest morality 
is that wherein each one shares to the full the life of all 
The terrible mass of wrong-doing can only be lessoned 

1 Social Statics t quoted in Essays, iii. 69. 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 223 

and finally removed by suppression of the over-self ; by 
the maintenance of the balance between such care of 
oneself as shall best fit us for the service of man, and 
such thought for others as shall inflict on them no suf- 
fering through our selfishness, nor loss through our gain. 1 
The crises of history are .now rare when great principles 
or causes, demanding the sacrifice of the individual life, 
are at stake, but the world has never lacked a Curtius, 
and the spread of the scientific spirit has not proved 
fatal to the heroic. 

Especially is science a preacher of righteousness in 

making clear the indissoluble unity between all life past, 

present, and to come. We are only on the threshold of 

knowledge as to the vast significance of the doctrine of 

heredity, but we know enough to deepen our sense of 

debt to the past and of duty to the future. We are what 

our forefathers made u$,flfas the action of circumstances 

on ourselves ; and in like manner our children inherit the 

good and evil, both of body and mind, that is in us. 

Upon us, therefore, rests tke duty of the cultivation of 

the best and of the suppression of the worst, so that the 

future of the race suffers not at our hands. More 

imperious is that duty since nothing not omnipotence 

Itself can step in between us and the consequences of 

our acts. The forgiveness ' of which men talk shows the 

charity of the injured, and may win the wrong-doer to a 

better life ; but the thing * forgiven '- who can undo its 

effects ? * ' c Our deeds are like the children bora to us 

1 Cf. the eloquent and stimulating chapter on the * Cultivation of 
Human Nature,* in Mr. Cotter Morison's Service of Man* 

2 ' " Do you know, Wilfrid, I once shot a little bird for no good, but 
just to shoot at something. It wasn't that I didn't think of it -don't say 

that. I did think of it. I knew it was wrong. When I had levelled my 
grin I thought of it quite plainly, and yet I drew the trigger. It dropped, 
& heap of ruffled feathers. I shall never get that little bird out of my 



224 THE STORY OF CREATION 

they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, chil- 
dren may be strangled, but deeds never.' * 

Self-conquest lies in obedience, obedience lies in 
knowledge ; and if to know that it rests with man to 
make or to mar the lives of others be not sufficing 
stimulus to learning the true-tfcat we may do the right, 
no other motive can avail. Whatever power the threats 
of punishment and the promises of reward in an after 
life may have had in lawless and superstitious ages, they 
have now but the smallest effect on conduct; their 
remoteness exhausts their power, and, moreover, the 
belief in them is slowly decaying. 

For the conduct of life brief maxims are enough ; all 
the law and commandments are in the golden rule ; all 
ethics in the teaching that if man be true to himself he 
cannot be false to his fellows ; while in the knowledge 
that life's demands will always exceed its opportunities 
we may feel 

How fair a lot to fill 

Is left to eacb man still. 

5. Evolution of Theology. Theology may be defined 
as dealing with man's relations to the- god or gods in 
whom he believes ; morals," as dealing with his relations 
to his fellow-men. 

Unfortunately, the two have become a good deal 
mixed in the degree that conduct has been made to rest 
on supposed divine commands as 1 to what men shall 

head. And the worst of it is, that to all eternity I can never make any 
atonement." 

"But God will forgive you, Charley." 

'"What do I care for that," he rejoined almost fiercely, **when the 
little bird cannot forgive me ? " ' George Macdonald's Wilfrid ' Cumber jnedf^ 
p. 179- ' c 

^ p. 150 (ohe-voL edition). 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 225 

and shall not do an assumption which serves a useful 
purpose as a restraint upon the brutal and ignorant, but 
which has been a powerful engine of terrorism in the 
hands of impostors and fanatics. The confusion, how- 
ever, disappears when it is seen that the evolution of 
belief in spiritual beings is a thing apart from the evo- 
lution of morals, which* as has been shown, are based on 
social instincts and sympathies guided by reason and 
strengthened by inheritance and practice. For primitive 
theology is primitive science ; it is the outcome of man's 
first efforts to explain the nature of his surroundings, 
and of the divers influences which affect him for good, 
and still more for ill. At this stage of his mental growth 
the emotions have foremost play, because feeling pre- 
cedes reason, and its exercise is more easy, its results 
more rapid, although, on that account, less trustworthy. 
Moreover, the phenomena on which experience, as the 
sole guide to true knowledge of things, is based, are too 
vast for a single life to rompass, even were the reasoning 
faculty capable of dealing with them. It needed the 
lapse of long time ere man found out how his senses 
tricked him at every turn, and ere he could form any con- 
ception of orderly relation in his surroundings. So far 
as effort to supply his lower needs sharpened his wits, he 
did not go far astray ; in his struggle against material 
foes the weapons of his warfare were carnal, but as 
against spiritual powers he was defenceless. Ignorance, 
always the mother- of mystery, made him the slave of his 
fears. The vacuity of his mind gave admission to all the 
demons of panic and terror. The universal instinct of 
the savage leads him to ascribe an indwelling life to 
everything that moves, from the sun in heaven to the 
rustling leaves, and the stones that roll from the hill-side 
across his path. In this he acts as we s&e shying horses, 

Q 



226 THE STORY OF CREATION 

timid pups, and young children act, until they learn from 
experience what things move of their own accord and 
what things do not. Shakespeare might have added 
Caliban to f the lunatic, the lover, and the poet/ as of 
imagination all compact, and on whom it plays such 

tricks 

That if it would but apprehend some joy, 

It comprehends some bringer of that joy. 

Ever on the alert against enemies, man's fancy multi- 
plied them on all sides ; and since he naturally attributed 
passions like his own to the unseen beings in whom he 
believed, he dreaded /some bringer of that ' harm from 
every quarter, especially from things near at hand whose 
dire effects touched him closely, as the whirlpool and the 
breaker, the falling tree, the devouring beast, or venom- 
ous reptile. Phenomena farther off and less fitful 
moved him less, but although day succeeded night, both 
sun and moon were in turn often swallowed and dis- 
gorged by the black cloud-monsters, and in the wake of 
the fire- and wind-dragons of the lightning and the storm 
there followed destruction and death. 

What man fears, but is powerless to control, he seeks 
to appease. Hence the prominence of devil-worship, of 
belief in baleful spirits amongst lower races ; hence, like- 
wise, the persistence of kindred beliefs among the igno- 
rant in civilised countries ; hence the world-wide custom 
of averting the wrath of gods or of buying their favour 
by sacrifices, smearing their images with human blood, 
and wreathing them with human intestines. Hence, also, 
the rise of a special class, l medicine-men J and priests, into 
whose hands all ghastly and ghostly functions fall, and 
who secure dominance over their fellow-men by pre- 
tending to be the mouthpiece of the gods, to forgive sins 
in their name an*d tomake known their will. 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION *W 

This animism, or general doctrine of spiritual agents, 
was largely fostered by personal experience supplied by 
dreams about both, the dead and living, hallucinations, 
swoons, and- by the shadows or reflections which objects 
cast, all which seemed to witness to the existence of a 
second self or soul, that came and went at pleasure 
during life, and haunted its old home after death. The 
burial-place became the spot where the living brought 
their gifts to the dread spirits of the departed, whose 
worship is a leading feature of barbaric religions. The 
grave was the cradle of beliefs about the departed ; the 
tomb became the temple. Combined with the belief in 
life wherever power or movement was manifest, these 
ideas have built up all theologies, from the polytheistic 
to the so-called monotheistic, the common element in 
each being the ascription of personality to unseen powers. 
Given the intellectual stage which a people has reached, 
the character of their gods can be predicted, although 
the higher theologies will retain persistent traces of the 
barbaric conceptions of deity in which they arose. They 
are not, as shallow carpers have argued, the ingenious 
inventions of self-seeking men ; they arise out of the 
necessity of human nature to frame an explanation of 
that which affects it deeply and constantly. Their roots 
draw nutriment from a common soil ; the frenzy of the 
savage and the ecstasy of the saint have a common base 
in undisciplined imagination. 

Theology is purified from gross conceptions only in 
proportion as it is purged of the false science with 
which, to its own hurt, it identified itself in the past, and 
to the remnants of which it still clings. The function 
of science is to clarify the mind, and to show how the beliefs 
of the past are the myths of the present ; the duty of 
theology is to readjust itself to what science proves to be 

Q a 



228 THE STVKlf OF CREATION 

true, since science has no facts to Interpret save those 
which man has gained from experience. Of aught else 
as Ornar Khayyam sings 

Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument 
About It and about, but evermore 
Came out by the same door wherein I went. 

Creeds may die, rites and ceremonies become matters 
of archaeological interest, but human needs endure. 
Conduct is everything, because r duty never lapses. 
Theology, uncorrected, troubles itself about the fate of a 
man who denies its speculative doctrines ; morals bid 
him remember, as the one thing needful, that what he 
sows he or his will reap. In the end, when it is seen 
that theories about gods and all other spiritual beings 
have nothing whatever to do with man's duty to his 
fellows, theology and morals will again becom'e distinct 

In the chapters now brought^o an end a vast field, the 
limits of which shade into the unlimited on all sides, has 
been roughly surveyed We began with the primitive 
nebula, we end with the highest forms of consciousness ; 
the story of creation is shown to be the unbroken record 
of the evolution of gas into genius. 

Let us epitomise in fewest words what, after all, is 
itself but a summary of a large subject : 

I. Description. The universe is made up of Matter 
and Motion, both of which are indestructible. Matter 
contains above seventy so-called elementary substances, 
which exist in a free or combinecl state as solid, liquid, 
gaseous, or ultra-gaseous ; it is also present throughout 
space in the imponderable state known as ethereal. 
Motion acts in a Twofold and opposite way, viz. as 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 229 

a pulling or combining Force, and as a pushing or 
separating Energy. Force inheres in matter, and acts 
continuously whatever the distance ; Energy is both 
passive or stored up, and active or in a state of trans- 
fer from body to body, the sum-total being in gradual 
course of transfer to the ethereal medium, where 
its power to do work ends. Ponderable matter is dis- 
tributed throughout space in bodies of various size and 
density, from molecules to sidereal or solar systems. 
Such a system is our central sun, with his company of 
planets and their moons, and^of comets and other wan- 
dering gaseous bodies. The planet on which we live is a 
nearly spherical body, three-fourths of which is covered 
by water, and the whole surface enveloped by an atmo- 
sphere. So far as its rind or crust can be examined, it is 
found to consist of solid rocks, the lowest of which have 
been fused by fire, and the uppermost laid down by 
water. The water-laid rocks contain the remains of 
plants and animals which have escaped the general de- 
struction of organisms* m the wear and tear which the 
rocks undergo ceaselessly. The simplest fossils are 
found in ~tte Boldest deposits, the more advanced in the 
newer, and so on in ascending scale until we reach 
the newest deposits, which contain the highest forms. 
The existing species of plants and animals comprise 
the lowest and simplest, which have probably persisted 
throughout the entire life-period, as well as the highest 
and some others, the vast majority of intermediate 
species having died out All plants and animals are made 
of the same materials, and have to do the same work, 
That work is threefold : to feed, to multiply their kind, and 
to respond to the outer world. The cells of which every 
part of every plant and animal is JDuih up are variously 
altered and arranged according to the way in which that 



230 THE STORY OF CREATION 

work is more or less divided amongst the several parts. 
The main difference between plant and animal is in the 
mode f of feeding ; the plant is alone able, in virtue of its 
chlorophyll, to convert the inorganic into the organic, 
and the animal therefore depends on the plant for its 
food supply. 

2. Explanation. At the beginning of the present 
universe Matter was a diffused vaporous mass, unequally 
distributed throughout space. Force, acting on the un- 
stableness of that mass, drew its particles together, and 
the resulting collision set fr c ee thestored-up Energy, which 
became active in two forms : the molar, causing the 
several masses into which the particles had gathered to 
spin round in an orbit; and the molecular, causing a 
swing-like motion among the particles, which motion was 
diffused as light and heat The masses into which 
the primitive nebula was broken up became sidereal or 
solar systems, each of which, like the parent mass, threw 
off, as it was indrawn towards its common centre of 
gravity, masses which became the planets, and from 
these were detached, in like manner, masses which 
became moons. Comets and other fugitive bodies are 
probably due to expulsion. " Both in its shape and 
general condition the earth gives proof of this passage 
from the gaseous to the solid state. As one of the 
smaller bodies, it long ago ceased to shine by its own 
light, but a vast period elapsed before it became cool 
enough to form a crust and to condense the vapours that 
swathed it into primeval oceans. The simplest com- 
pounds of its elements were formed first, the combinations 
becoming more and more complex until they reached 
that subtile form which is the physical basis of life, and 
which, starting in w^ater as a structureless jelly, has 
reached its fullest development in man. The organic 



SOCIAL EVOLUTION 231 

is dependent upon the inorganic ; and mind, as a special 
form of life, takes its place as the highest product of 
the action qf Motion upon Matter. From the act!on of 
mind on mind has arisen that social evolution to which, 
in a supreme degree, is owing the progress of man in 
knowledge, whereby he has subdued the earth. 

The ultimate transference of all energy to the ethereal 
medium involves the end of the existing state of things. 
But the ceaseless redistribution of matter, force-clasped 
and energy-riven, inyolves the beginning of another state 
of things. So the changes ape rung on evolution and 
dissolution, on the birth and death of stellar systems 
gas to solid, solid to gas, yet never quite the same 
mighty rhythmic beats of which the earth's cycles, and 
the cradles and graves of her children, are minof 
rhythms. 

Thus the keynotes of Evolution are Unity and Con- 
tinuity. All things are made of the same stuff differently 
mixed, bound by one force, stirred by one energy in 
divers forms. Force inheres in matter; Energy acts 
through it; therefore both have neither more nor less 
claim to objective 'reality than matter. And as science 
tends to the conclusion that all kinds of matter are 
modifications of one primal element, and that all modes 
of motion are varied operations of one power, perchance 
these three Matter, Force, and Energy are one. 

But into these and like speculative topics Evolution 
does not intrude. Dealing with processes, and not with 
the nature of things in thefnselves, it is silent concern- 
ing any theories that may be formulated to gratify man's 
insatiate curiosity about the whence and whither. Since 
it can throw no light on the genesis of matter, or on the 
origination of motion, or on the beginnings of life or of 



232 THE STORV OP CREATION 

mind, it leaves great and small alike a centre of im- 
penetrable mystery. It may correct, but it does not 
repress, the imagination ; neither does it r impose any 
limits on thought ; it has a larger charity for supersti- 
tion than for irreverence ; it has no shibboleths the 
sui render of which can awaken dread ; its temper is not 
aggressive ; it seeks to inform life with the love of truth, 
and to let the facts which it reveals, and whose signi- 
ficance is its chief concern, win their way on their own 
merits ; since ' a dogma learned is only a new error 
the old one was perhaps as good ; whereas a spirit com- 
municated is a perpetual possession/ Our sense of 
the beauty of Nature is not dimmed by fuller and truer 
knowledge of her works and ways ; the more we feel 
our oneness with her the more do we desire to know 
her as she is ; while all that it really suffices us to learn 
for the discharge of life's duties, and all the motive that 
is needed to impel us thereto, is supplied in the theory 
which has so profoundly and permanently affected every 
department of human thought. 



INDEX. 



ABD 

A BDOMEN, 107, 108 " 

-^ Affinity, 13, 17, 138 
Air bladder, 122, 123 
Algoe, 28, 36, 68, 77, 155 
Allen, Grant, 76, 89, 90, 148, 155, 

173 

Alpha Centaiui, 19 

Amber, 39 

America, connection of, with 
Europe, 55, 202 

Ammonites, 43, 44, 48, 51 

Amoeba, 69, 73, 97, 210 

Amceboids, 97 

Amphibians, 41, 122, 123 

Amphioxus, 121 

Ancestor-worship, 227 

Anemone, 102 

Angiosperrns, 50, 80, 82 

Anglo-American race, 203 

Animals, chlorophyllian, 155 

Animals, dispersal of, 200 ; exist- 
ing, 65 ; language, 215 ; mind, 
210, nutrition, 72; stationary, 
68 

Animals and plants, priority of, 
*53> 15^?* sub-kingdoms, 91; 
unity, 68, 70, 84, 92, 206 



BEE 

.Apes and man, brain of, 183 

skeletons, 131 
Aphis, increase of, 170 
Aqueous action, 27, 63, 144, 229 
Archiean Epoch, 28, 33 
Archaeopteryx, -45, 47/195 
Arctic circle, 38 
Arnold, Matthew, 76 
Arthropoda, 66, 91, 104, 107 
Artificial Selection, 167 
Arts, evolution of, 216 
Ascidians, 118 

Ascidians and Vertebrates, 92, 1 1 8 
Asteroids, 23 
Atlantic ooze, 35 
Atmosphere, earth's, 25 
Atomic theory, 8, 9 
Atoms, 8, 10, n, 12, 13, 138; 

separation of, 17 ; weight and 

volume, 8 
Attraction, 13, 17 
Australia, ancient life-forms of, 

48, 122, 126, 129, 197, 198 
Autumn, tints of, 89 
Azoic, 33, 145 



234 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



Beetles, 41 

Belemnites, 44, 48 

Bell-shaped petals, 83 

Bhattias, 220 

Bheels, 213 

Bilateral symmetry, 105, 117,160 

Birds, 53, 55, 123 ; as seed-dis- 
persers, 85, 89, 200; descent, 
124 ; earliest, 45 ; footprints, 

31, 44 ; migration, 126 ; place, 
63 ; range of, 198 ; reptile-like, 

32, 45. 50 I2 4 5 wingless, 159 
Bivalve, 114 

Black lead, 31 

Blastosphere, 160 

Blood, 97, 1 06, 121 ; salt in, 8 

Bodies, colours of, 88 ; primitive 
state, 23; states of, 7, 15 

Body-cavity, 98, 103, 160 

Boolak, 126 

Bose, Jagadis Chunder, 150 

Brain, 94, 95, 96, in, 115 ; func- 
tion, 94, 152 ; origin, 96 ; pro- 
portion of, to body, no; and 
thought, 6 

of ant, 112 ; of man and apes, 
183 

Brandt, 155 

Breathing, organs of, 106, 122 

Bronze, Age of, 67 

Bryophytes, 76 

BufFon, 146 

Butler, Samuel, 163 

Butschli, Prof., 151 

Butterflies, 48 



, 220 

Cainozoic Epoch, 28 
Calyx, 80 

Cambrian system, 36 
Carbon, n, 67, 72, 88, 148, 149 

products of, 40 

Carbonic acid, 68, 69, 72, 106 
Carboniferous system, 40, 43, 146 
Carlyle, 93, 214 
Carnivora, 54, 181 
Carnivorous plants, 69, 15^ 210 
Carpenter, W. B., 33 
Catkin-bearers, 83, 85 



COR 

Cave-lion, 61 

Cell, 73, 95, 148, *5 8 ; changes, 

104; division^ *5 8 ; growth, 

150 ; layers, 98, 104, 160 ; 

wall, 73 

Cellulose, 73, 96, 118 
Chalk, deposit of, 34, 4$ 
Charcoal, 88 

Charing Cross, fossils at, 6 1 
Chemical attraction, 13, 17 
Chimpanzee, 112, 183 
Chlorophyll, 72, 88, 100, 149; 

action of, 154; in animals, 155 
Chromosphere, 2 1 
Cilia, 68, 77, 98, 100, 107, 118, 121 
Circulation, organs of, 97, 104? 

115 ; of sea-squirts, 118 
Civilisation, 186 
Classification, 194 
Clifford, Prof., 219 
Clio borealis, 1 14 
Club-mosses, 36, 38, 41, 77, 79 
Coal, 31, 36 ; nature of, 39 
Cockchafer, 112 
Cockroaches, 41 
Cod, increase of, 169 
Coelenterata, 91, 98 
Ccelomata, 91 
Cohesion, 13, 14, 17, 138 
Colonial animals, 100, 113 
Colour, nature of, 6, 87 ; of 

flowers, 89 ; order of, in flowers, 

89 - 

Colour Sense> The, 90 
Colouring, protective, 173 
Comets, 1 6, 20, 23 
CompsognathuSj 195 
Conifers, 39, 43, 72, 82 
Conscience, 218, 220 
Consciousness, mystery of, 6, 96, 

151 

Conservation of energy, 14, 206 
Constellations, 19 
Continents, relative permanence 

of, 51, 64 

Cook, Captain, 215 
Cope, Prof., 115, 150 
Copernicus, crater of, 24 
Coral, 36, 39, 68, 102 
Corolla, 80 



INDEX 



235 



Corona, 21 

Corti, strings of, 95 

Cotyledon, So 

Crabs, 44 

Cretaceous system, 48 

Crime, nature of, 221 

Crocodiles, 44, 54 

Crookes, SirW., 9, 17 

Crown bearers, 83 

Crust of the earth, 11, 25 

Crustacea, 37, 39, 109 

Cryptogams, 77 

Crystals, formation and growth of, 

150 

Cuttle-fish, 43, 114 
Cycads, 43, 48, 82 



r)AISY, 76, 83 

J ~ / Dalton, 8, 9 

Darwin, i, 70, 84, 112, 126, 127, 

163, 1 68, 171, 178, 183, 200, 

204, 219 
Darwin's theory, 2, 164; summary 

of, 1 88 
Life and Letters, 2, 1645 172,, 

176, 187 

Dawkins, Prof. Boyd, 57 
Dawson, Sir J. W. , 33 
Death, 151, 188 

Deer, antlers of, 178, iSi \ horn- 
less, 54, 55 ; Irish, 61 ; Red, 61 
Degeneration, 120, 187 
Descartes, 6 

Descent of Man, 21 1, 213, 219 
Descent, theory of, 163, 167 ; 

proofs of, 190; objections to, 

204 

Desmids, 68, 77 
Devil-worship, 226 
Devonian system, 38, 39, 79, 195 
Diamond, 88 
Diatoms, 34, 68, 78 
Digesti veosgans, 68, 97, 103, 115, 

118 

Dinornis, 199 
Dinosauria, 124 
Dipnoi, 122 

Distribution of life-Lrms, 195 
Dog, embryo of, i62 3 191 



EUR 

Double-breathers, 122 

Duck, 179 

Duck-bill, 126, 127 

Duty, 223 

Dyer, Thiseiton, 147, 155 



tpARTH, age of, 189; cooling, 
- 1 -* 143, 146; core, 25, 26; 
crust, u, 25, 26, 143 ; density, 
25 ', destiny, 143 ; evolution, 
143 ; motions, 25 ; orbit, 1 6, 
25 ; past life-history, 29 ; primi- 
tive temperature, 145 ; shape, 25 
Echidna, 126, 128 
Echinodermata, 91 
Education, 208, 210 
Egg, of mammal, 12, 76 ; of man, 

192 

Electric energy, 150 
Electrical units, 17 
Electrons, 7, 8, 12, 15, 17 
Elements, 8, 25 ; classification of, 
9 ; common origin, 9 ; groups, 
9 j periodic law, 9 ; states, 1 1 
Elephant, increase of, 169 
Elliot, 175 
Embryo stage, 161 
Embryology, 190 
Emerson, 4, 135, 195 
Emotion, 6, 225 
Encydop&dia Britannica^ 20 
Endogens, 50 

Energy, 7 ; active and passive, 13, 
17 ; conservation of, 14 ; de- 
finition of, 13, 135 ; destiny, 
14 ; dissipation, 14, 17, 23, 26, 
136, 151 ; molar, 138 ; mole- 
cular, 13$ ; radiation, 21 ; solar, 
23, 139, 142, 144, 151, 155; 
storage, 13; sum total, 13; 
tabular summary, 17. 
Eozoic Epoch, 28, 33 
Eozoon Canadensgy 33, 34 
Epochs, Geological, 28 
Ether, 7, 12, 16, 17, 18 
Ethereal medium, 13 17, 20, 88, 

139, 229 

Europe, connection of, with 
America, 55, 202 



236 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



Europe in Carboniferous period, 
40 ; Eocene, 5 2 Jurassic, 44 ; 
Plfocene, 55 ; Silurian, 36 

Evolution, 2, 136, 287 ; conditions 
of, 187 ; limitations, 231 ; sum- 
mary, 230 

Evolution of art, 217 ; beauty, 90; 
earth, 143 ; eye, 96, 120 ; gods, 
225 ; language, 215 ; life, 145 ; 
man, 182 ; mind, 206 ; morals, 
218 ; plant and animal, 153 ; sci- 
ence, 217; society, 211; solar 
system, 139 ; species, 165; stellar 
systems, 137 ; theology, 224 

Exogens, 50 

Eye, evolution of, 96, 120 ; of 
Hatteria, 119; of insect, 107, 
ill j of sea-squirt, 116 



-pEATHERS, 124 

* Females, fights for, 175, 212 

Ferns, 28, 38, 43, 77, 79 5 Age of, 
63 

Fertilisation, 84, 89 

Firs, 43 

Fishes, 28, 122 ; Age of, 39, 63 j 
bony-skeletoned, 48, 53 ; em- 
bryo of, 162 

Fiske, 214 

Fission, 75 

Fixed stars, 18 

Flint, 34, 48 ; chipped, 57, 61 

Flowers, earliest, 85 ; essential 
parts of, 85 ; fertilisation, 86 ; 
function, 83 

Fly, increase of, 169 

Flying lizards, 45 

Footprints, fossil, 31 

Foraminifera, 33, 36, 48 

Force, 7 ; definition of, 13, 135 ; 
inherence, 13, 231 ; persistence, 
13, 136; sum-total, 13; tabu- 
lar summary, 1 7 

Fossils, 30 ; succession of, 32 

Frog, 123 

Fruit-yielders, 83 

Fruits, function of,r84, 90 

Fuegians, 185, 187, 215 r 

Fungi, 68, 69, 77, 78, 156, 170 



PALAPAGOS Islands, 2 
l r Ganglia, 105, 118, 121 
Ganoids, 37, 3?, 39> 44> 4$, 53* 

122 

Gaseous state of matter, 7, 23 

Gases, solidifying of, 15 

Gas-tar, products of, 40 

Gastrula, 1 60 

Gegenbaur, 122, 176 

Geikie, Sir Archibald, 26 

Text-Book of Otology, 25, 26, 

34 

Gemmation, 75 
Geological record, gaps in, 30, 32, 

37, 38, 51, 62, 195 
Germ-cell, 75> 77 
Gestures, 215 
Gills, 122, 192 
Gill-slits in man, 192 ; sea-squirts, 

1 20 

Glacial action, 57 ; epoch, 50 
Gods, evolution of, 225 
Gorilla, 131, 182 
Graphite, 31, 36 
Grasses, 82 
Gravitation, 13, 14, 16, 17, K>, 

25, 26, 138, 230 
Gymnosperras, 65, 80 



TJT DECKEL, 160, 164, 204 

-*-- 1 - Hair, 125 

Hand J importance of, 182, 215 

Hatteria lizard, 119, 197 

Head, 105 

Heart, 105, 124 

Heat, 6, 7, 14, i$ 

Heilprin, 33, 44, 187 

Helium, 21 

HelmhoHz, 6, 138 

Hcraclilus, 9 

Heredity, 75, 76, 163, 182, 209, 

223 

Hermaphrodite, 84, 93 
Hippopotamus, 57 
Honey, 85 

Hooker, Sir J. I). , 147 
Horn, molecules of, li 
Horse, 167; ancestor of, 54, j; t 



INDEX 



237 



Horsetails, 77, 79 

Huggins, Lady, 26 

Huggins, Sir William, P.R.S., 26, 

142 
Huxley, Prof., 4, 10, 44, 71, 74, 

150, 153, 156, 161, 162, 177, 

183, 187, 207 
Hybrids, 204 
Hydra, 100 

Hydrocarbon, 72, 88, 154 
Hydrogen, 8, 9, ir, 15, 21, 25, 

67, 72, 148 ; solidifying of, 15 



TCE, action of, 57, 63 

* Igneous rocks, 30, 43 

Indestructibility of Motion, 14, 228 

Infancy, period of, 112, 210, 214 

Infanticide, 211 

Infusoria, 98 

Inorganic evolution, 137 

Insects, adaptation of, to plants, 
87 ; in amber, 39 ; earliest, 38 ; 
Miocene, 555 origin, no; in- 
telligence, VII ; social, 112, 213 

Insect-feeders, 129 

Insect-fertilisation, 85 

Instinct, 208 

Intermediate forms, 45, 54, 122, 
195, 204 

Invertebrates, 65, 91, 115 ; eyes 
of, 96 

Ions, 8, 17 

Iron, Age of, 61 

Islands, 197 

Island Life ', 198 

Isomeric compounds, 149 

TEEVINE, idz. 
J Jelly-fish, 10 1 
Jolas, 218 
Jupiter, 23, 142 
Jurassic system. 44, 112 



T ABYRINTHODONTS. 41, 
44 

Lamp-shells, $y 
Lancelet, 92, 121 
Language, evolution, of, 215 
Lankester, Prof. Ray, 118, 120, 

155 

Laplace, theory of, 141 

Laurentian rocks, 33, 34 

Laws, changes in, 221 

Leaf, as type of plant, 87 ; func- 
tion, 72 

Leaf-forests, Age of, 63 

Leaf- insects, 173 

Lemuroids, 54 

Eemurs, 130, 183 

Lichens, 77, 78 

Life, characteristics of, 151 ; 
chemistry, 67, 148, 155 ; 
mystery of origin, 145, 149, 
156 j regions, 196 ; unity, 223 

Life- forms, distribution of, 195 ; 
succession, 194 

Light, analysis of, 11 ; waves, 15, 
88 

Limbs, 1 06, 117, 122 

Limestone, 34, 48, 51, 52 

Liquids, compression of, 15 

Littoral life-region, 153 

Living things, composition of, 
ii ; functions, 93 

Lizards, flying, 45 ; sea, 44, 45, 48 

Lobsters, 44 

Lockyer, Sir Norman, 141 

Locomotion, organs of, 104, 107 

Lodge, Sir Oliver, 8, 17 

Lombok, 198 

Lubbock, Sir John (Lord Ave- 
bury}, 164 

Lucretius, 185, 215 

Lunar craters, 23 

Lungs, development of, 123 

Lyall, Sir A. C, 213 

Lyell, Jbir C., 164 



TT^ANGAROOS, 129 
-^ Khayyam, Omar, 228 
Kinetic energy, 13, 17 ; forms of, 
14, 230 



TWTACCABEES, .Book of, 6 
IV1 Macdonald, G., 224 
TMadn g^scar, *i 97 
MalicVcid, Si 



TtiE STORY OF CREATlOtf 



Malthus, 164 

Mammals, 28, 126; Age of, 51, 
63 ; w descent, 126 ; earliest, 44 ; 
egg of, 12, 75 ; molecules in 
egg) 12, 76 

Mammoth, 58, 59, 61 

Man, ancestors of, 55 ; birthplace, 
57 ,* colour sense, 90 ; develop- 
ment, 192 embryo, 162, 191 ; 
erect position, 179, 182 ; in- 
crease, 169, 21 1 ; 'primitive,' 
185 ; races, 132 ; remains, 57, 59 

Man, action of, on nature, 200 ; 
on species, 167 

Man and apes, brain of, 183 ; 
skeleton, 131 

Mankind, common origin of, 
203 ; struggles, 212 ; unions, 
213 

Mantle, 114 

Mars, 23 

Marsh, G. P., 201 

Marsupials, 44, 48, 54, 129 

Masses of matter, 13, 17 

Mastodon, 55 

Mates, fights for, 175, 212 

Matter, distribution of, 18 ; in- 
visibility, 16, 1385 primary 
form, 9, 10 ; rarefaction, 16 ; 
states, 7 ; tabular summary 9 1 7 

Maunder, 142 

Maxwell, Clerk, 9 

May- flies, 41 

Measuring, 217 

Medium, action of, 95, 125, 176 

Medusse, 101 ; eyes and ears of, 
101 

Mendeleeff, 9, 10 

Mesozoic Epoch, 28 

Metamorphic rocks, 27, 36 

Metamorphoses, no 

Meteors, 20, 23, 140 

Metozoa, 91 

Micropyle, Si 

Migration, 126, 202, 208 

Milky Way, 20 

Mimicry, 172; of sound, 215 

Mind, evolution of, 206 ; of 

animals, 210 
Mind and bodv. connection of, 151 



Miocene system, -55? 146, 196 
Molar energy, 138, 230 
Molecular attraction, 13 ; energy; 

138 
Molecules, 8, 12, 13, 152; rate 

of motion, 15; separation, 17 ; 

size, ir, 12; spaces between, 

Mollusca, 36, 48, 91, 92, 113; 

importance of fossil, 52 
Moneron, 28, 92, 94, 96 
Monotremes, 126 
Moon, condition of, 23 
Moons, 21, 23, 77, 141; origin 

of, -142 

Morals, evolution of, 2r8 
Morison, J. Cotter, 223 
Morphology, 193 
Morula, 159 

Moseley, Prof., 109, 153 
Motion, 7, 12, 14, 17, 135, 136, 

228, 231 

Mountains, origin of, 53, 143 
Mouth, 98, 105 
Mud-fish, 48, 122 
Music, 217 
Musk-sheep, 202 

TVTAXURAL SELECTION, 
xx 164, 168, 181, 203, 211 ; 

limitations of, 187 ; objections 

to, 204 

Nature* action of man on, 200 
Nautiluses, 48, 115 
Nebular theory, 139 
Nebulae, 20, 141 
Nectaries, 86 
Neptune, discovery of, xo 
Nerves, function of, 94 origin, 

95, 207 
Nerve-cells, 95 ; fibres, 95 ; 

tissues, 96, 152 
Nervous system, 68, 955 of 

annelida, 105; beetle, no; 

jelly-fish, 1 01 ; lancelet, 121 ; 

plants, 70; sea-squirt, 118; 

sponges, 98 ; star- fish, 104 
Newcomb, Prof., 142 
New Zealand, 48, 196, 197 



INDEX 



239 



Newknds, 9 

Newton, Sir I., ~, *6 

Nitrogen, u, 67, 148 

North American* fossils, 45, 48, 

54 
North Polar regions, climate of, 

4*5 5j 55 > origin of life in, ji, 

146, 202 

Notochord, 115, 121 
Nucleolus, 74, 75 
Nucleus, 74, 75, 76, 80, 97, 158, 

161 

Nummulites, 52, 53 
Nutrition, 71, 72, 93, 106, 153, 

230 



QCEANS, 25, 143 ; perman- 

^ ence of deep, 34, 64, 147 
Octopus, 114 
Odyssey, 186 

Old maids and clover, 172 
Old Red Sandstone system, 38 
Oligocene system, 55 
One-celled plants, 77 
Oolitic system, 44 
Opossums, 129 
Orbital motion, energy of, 14, 23 

139. 

Organic compounds, 149 
Organisms, rate of increase of, 

169 
Organs, 74, 97; prehensile, 181, 

183 
Origin of Species ^ 2, 164/166, 

I( 59, 179, 187, 191, 204 
Ornithorhynchus, 126 
Ovary, 80, 84, 102 
Owen, Sir R., 54 
Oxygen, n, 67, 69, 72, 97, 106, 

148, 154; solidifying of, 15, 

25 

Oysters, 41, 43, 115 



PAGET, sir j., 70 

Palaeozoic Epoch, 28 
Paraguay, 171 
Parasites, 107, 187 
Pearl oyster, 113 



Perch, fossil, 49 

Peripatus, 108 

Periwinkle, 114 

Permian system, 43 

Persistence of force, 13, 136 

Petals, 82, 83, 85, 87 ; markings 
on, 89 

Phanerogams, 76, 80 

Phosphorus, 148 

Photosphere, 21 

Pigeon, 167, 204 

Pines, Age of, 63 

Pistils, 77, 8 1, 84, 87 

Placentals, 54, 129 ; classes of, 
130 

Planets, orbits of, 23, 141 ; ori- 
gin, 142 

Plant-feeders, i8r 

Plants, action of green, 69 ; 
adaptation of, to insects, 87 ; 
carnivorous, 69, 153 ; defen- 
sive structures, 87, 171 ; dis- 
persal, 200 ; existing, 65 ; 
fossil coal, 41 ; increase, 170 ; 
locomotive, 68 ; nutrition of, 
72, 151, 153; one-celled, 77; 
one-seed-leaved, 80 ; sensation 
of, 70 ; sensitive, 69 ; sex in, 
77, 84 ; sleep of, 70 ; sub- 
kingdoms, 76 ; two-seed- 
leaved, 8 1 

Plants and animals, priority of, 
153; unity of, 68, 70, 84, 92, 
206 

Pleistocene, 57, 6 1 

Plesiosaurus, 45, 46 

Pliocene, gravels, flints in, 57 ; 
system, 55 

Polar region, origin of life in, 31, 
146, 202 

Pollen, 80, 84, 85, 87 

Polyps, 100, 1 60 

Porifera, 98 

Post-Pliocene system, 57 

Post-Tertiary Epoch, 28 

Potential energy, 13, 17 

Pouch-bearers, 44, 54 

Poultry Compter, 221 

Prawns, 44 

Pre- Cambrian Epoch, 33 



240 



THE STdRY OF CREATIQN 



Priests, 226 

Primary Epoch, 28, 36, 38, 43, 63 

Primafes, 54, 130, 181 

'Primitive' man, 185 

Proctor, Richard A. (the late), 20, 

141 

Progress, 186 
Prohibitions, social, 220 
Protein, 72 
Protoplasm, 67, 72, 74, 79, 93, 

96, 127, 148, 150, 155, 157, 

159 

Protozoa, 91, 158 
Prout, 9 

Pseudopods, 93, 97 
Pteridophytes, 77 
Pterodactyl, 46 



QUATERNARY Epoch, 28, 
W 57,63 
Quatrefages, M. de, 57 

T> ADIANT energy, 21, 23 

-*-^ Radio-activity, 142 

Radium, 10; 142 

Ramsay, Sir William, 21 

Reade, Mellard, 53 

Reason, 209 

Recent Period, 57 

Reflex action, 69, 208, 210 

Relation, function of, 93, 94 

Remorse, 219 

Reproduction, 71, 74, 77, 93, 161 

Reptiles, 123 ; Age of, 51, 63 

Rhinoceroses, 55 

Right and wrong, 218 

Rock, definition of, 26 ; igneous, 

30 ; stratified, 31, 32 ; varieties 

of, 27 

Romola^ 224 
Roscoe, Sir H., 67 
Rotifers, 107 
Rotten stone, 35 
Rudimentary structures, 192 

C ACHS, 40, 67, 75, 154 
^ Sacrifice, 226* 
St. Helena, 198 



Salmon, fossil, 49. 

Salt, 8, 146 

Saporta, Comte de, 146 

Sargasso Sea, 36* 

Saturn, 142 

Savage man, 183 

Scales, 124 

Scent, 89 

Scheiner, Prof., 142 

Schiller, 174 

Science, evolution of, 217 

Science and theology, 227 

Scorpions, 36, 41 

Sea-cucumber, 103 ; lilies, 3 

103- ; lizards,' 44, 45, 4 s J 

mats, 114; mosses, 114; 

squirts, 92, 118; urchii 

103 

Sea-squirts, degeneration of, is 
Seals, i So 

Secondary Epoch, 28, 43, 63 
Seeds, 75, 77 ; dispersal of, 

200 

Segments, 104, 115 
Selection, artificial, ^67 * natui 

164, 181, 203, 211 ;- sexi 

*75> 2 3 
_Senses, evolution of, 95 ; unity 

94 

Sepals, 85, 87 

Serpents, 54 

Sex, importance of, 84;, 

plants, 77 
Shakespeare, 226 
Sharks, 44, 48, 122 
Shells, 97 
Shell-fish, 36 

Sidereal system, structure of, 
Silures, 32 

Silurian system, 32, 36, 146 
Simple forms, persistence of, 

78, iSS 
Sin, 222 
Sirius, 19 
Skin, evolution of nerves etc. f 

95, 97, "7, 124, 177, 207 
Skull, development of, 105, ] 
Slugs, 113 
Smell, organs of, 95 
Smithsonian Report \ 36, 37 



INDEX 



241 



Snakes, 54, 166 

Snow, increase of red, 170 

Soap-bubble, thickness of, 12 

Social evolution, 112, 206 

Social instinct, growth of, 112 

Society, evolution of, 211 

Sodium, 8 

Solar energy, 23, 139, 142, 144, 

151 
Solar system, contents of, 21 ; 

evolution of, 139 
Solid form, passage of bodies to, 

23 

Sorby, H, C,, 12 
Soul, 227 

Soul and brain, 152 
Sound-signs, 215 
South Pole, isolation of, 147 
Southern hemisphere, 25 
Space, 209 ; distribution of matter 

in, 1 8 
Species, origin of, 165 ; persistence 

of, 34, 1 88 ; transmutation of, 2 
Spectrum of stars, 18, 141 
Spencer, Herbert, 5/96, 164, 183, 

187, 209, 214, 222 
Spencer, W. B., 119 
Sperm-cell, 75, 77 
Spermatozoids, 81 
Spider, 41, 48 ; web of, 1 1 1 
Spinal cord, 94 
Spine, development of, 121 
Spiny ant- eater, 126, 138 
Spirits, belief in, 225 
Sponges, 36, 39, 48, 68, 98, 155, 

1 60 ; structure of, 99 
Sports, 1 66 
Sprengel, Conrad, 86 
Stamens, 77, 84, 87 
Star- fish, 36, 103 
Stars, conditions of, 19 ; distance 

of nearest, 19 ; double, 19 ; 

fixed, 1 8 ; structure of, 1 8 
Stellar systems, evolution of, 137 
Stigma, So, Si, 84 
Stone Age, Old, 57, 61 
Stone Age, Newer, 60 
Stone implements, 57, 60 
Strata, thickness of, 26, 28, 50 
Stratified (fossil-yielding) rocks, 32 



UNI 

Structure, changes of, 166, 178, 

180 
Structures, likenesses ^f, 193 ; 

rudimentary, 192 
Struggle for life, 170, 197, 211, 

218 

Succession of life-forms, 194 
Sulphur, 148 
Summary, 228-231 
Sun, contents of, 21 ; radiant 

energy of, 23, 139; rotation, 

21 ; volume, 21 
Sundew, 69 
Sun-spots, 21 
Sun and planets, common origin 

of, 141 

""TADPOLE, 120, 123 
* Tapirs, 54 3 196 
Teeth, 124 
Teleost fishes, 122 
Tentacles of hydra, 100 
Tertiary Epoch, 28, 50, 63, 146 
Thallophytes, 77 
Theology, evolution of, 224 
Theology and science, 227 
Thomson, 17 
Thorax, 109 
Thought, 6, 151 
Timber, 73 

Time, 209 ; geological, 189 
Tortoise, embryo of, 191 
Touch, 95, 176, 207 
Trees, earliest true, 39 
Trias, 117 
Triassic system, 43 
Tribal conscience, 218 
Tridacna, 114 
Trilobites, 36, 41, 44, 109 
Tulloch, Principal, 152 
Tunicata, 118 
Turtles, 54 
Tyburn, 221 

TTLTIMATE causes, mystery 
U of, 6 ; I 3 6 

Universe, contents of, 7> I 35 J 
de*tiny,*i 4, 136, 139; elements, 
ii ; motion, 12 ; origin and 



242 



THE STORY OF CREATION 



UNS 

growth, 135 ; ponderable 
matter, 20 ; redistribution of 
contents, 15, 137, 231 

Unstratified rocks, 27 

Uriconian rocks, 33 

Use and disuse, 1 79 



VALLISNERIA spoils, 84 

Variations, 162 ; transmis- 
sion of, 1 66 

Varieties, 165, 167 

Venus's flower-basket, 98 ; fly- 
trap, 69 

Vermes, 107 

Vertebrates, 66, 91, 104, 115 ; 
earliest, 37 ; embryos of, 161 ; 
eyes of, 96 ; land, 41 

Volcanic action, 29, 36, 43, 52, 
62, 142, 144, 197 

Von Baer, 190 



WAHHABEES, 220 

Walking-stick insects, 41, 

174 



Wallace, A. R., 1-41, 148, 172, 

196, 202 

War, 212 

Water, 146, 150, 253; molecules 

of, 8, 12 

Water in living matter, 101 
Weapons, 217 
Weismann, 179 
Whales, 53, 1 12 ; development of, 

I So 

Wheat, 82 
Whelks, 43 
White's SelbornC) 41, 90, 174, 

203, 209, 213 
Whitney, J. D., 57 
Whitney, W. D., 216 
Wiedersheim, 161 
Wind-fertilisation, 85, 90 
Wings, no 
Wolff, 87 

Worm, segment of, zoo 
Wurtz, Ad. 3 9 



^EAST-GRANULES, 73 
* Yellow stamens, 89 



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