PRINCIPLES or
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PRINCIPLES —
~ ANTHROPOLOGY
2
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BUREAU’ OF ETHNOLOGY, |
~— 3968
1894
LIBRARY.
REV. THOMAS HUGHES, S.J.
BY
She o ND. 2p Ll ON,
New York, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO:
BENZIGER BROTHERS,
Printers to the Holy Apostolic See.
1890.
~
COPYRIGHTED,
1889, <8
- By J. P. FRIEDEN.,
PREFACE,
THIs reproduction of four lectures, delivered be-
fore the members of the Detroit College Alumni
Association, and published by the same gentlemen
during the winter of 1888-89, is respectfully dedi-
cated to the cultured classes of the community,
and to the advanced students in colleges and acad-
emies, who frequently ask what line of theoretic
truth is to be followed, in the midst of so much
scientific research. If we would ‘not lose the best
part of the practical results which science offers us,
we must keep scrupulously to the line of truth
which sound logic requires us to follow.
THE AUTHOR.
New York, July 31st, 1890.
3
CONTENTS.
ANTHROPOLOGY.
CHAPTER I.
PREHISTORIC RACES.
(N. B. The numbers refer to the paragraphs.)
The prehistoric difficulty, 3; barbarism, 6; geography
of the prehistoric, 10 ; methods of induction, 13 ; geologi-
cal chronology, 15 ; argument of induction, 16.
Archeology, 18 ; ages of metal, 19; neolithic age of pol-
ished stone, 25; evidence, 28; palzolithic age of chipped
stone, 29; glacial epoch, 30; epochs, periods, formations,
31 ; results of archeology, 32.
Paleontology, 33 ; extinction of species, 34 ; subdivisions
’ of the ages, 35. |
Anthropology, 36; tertiary man, 38 ; man and geology,
46 ; man and the universe, 47.
CHAPTER) If,
ACTUAL RACES IN HIsToRY.
The term, species, 51; the test of species, 52; the term,
race, 55; analogies of the lower orders, 56; variations, 58 ;
argument of analogy, 59.
6 Contents.
Results of direct observation, 61 ; physical and physiologi-
cal conclusions, 63. Intellectual qualities : speech, 65 ; talk-
ing apes and submerged continents, 66; tongues, 68; con-
science, 69 ; charity, 71 ; religion, 73.
Differentiation of races, 76; conditions of life, or environ-
ment, 77; radical nature and racial nature, 80 ; vitiated con-
ditions of life, 81.
Hunters, shepherds, farmers, 82; cost of acclimatization,
83; migrations, 85; instincts of sociability, 88; the man of
the future, 93.
Recapitulation: results of anthropology, 95.
BIOLOGY.
CHAPTER Ait.
SPECIES ; OR, DARWINISM.
Naturalism or materialism, 100; species, race, Io4 ; the
origin of Darwinism, 105. Sophisms: analogy, equivoca-
tion,comparison, erudition, hypothesis, begging the question,
106, |
Likeness, filiation, heredity, tog. Three objections to.
natural selection: Dr. Romanes, 112 ; (a) sterility of species,
113; (6) time and other accidents, 114 ; (¢) utilities, —a vicious
circle, 115 ; Mr. Darwin’s manner of answering, 117; more
sophisms : chance, induction, post hoc, non-causa, 121.
Deduction : (a) uninterrupted descent, 122; (4) unities and
varieties in nature: law of permanent characterization, 123;
(c) a plea for genuine biology, 126; the miraculous in science,
the sophism ad odium, 128.
Rudiments, 129 ; evolution and degeneration, 132; hybrids
and mongrels, 133 ; reversion, disordered variation, atavism,
134; law of correlation, 135; use and non-use,136; the struggle
for existence, 139 ; the economy of nature, 142; survival of
the fittest, 143 ; natural selection, 145.
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Contents. 7
CHAPTER <4LV.
CELLS ; OR, EVOLUTION.
The microscope and animalcules, 148 ; the cell, 150; pro-
toplasm, 151; no neutral ground between life and non-life :
negative argument, 155 ; positive argument, (2) by culture ;
the microbe, 157; (4) by observation in nature, 160; multi-
cellular organisms, 161; One vivum ex vivo, ex cellula,163;
embryonic development, 164.
History of the cell in the universe: first and second days
of Moses, 166; third day, 167; fourth day, 169; fifth day,
170.
Sixth day, first part, 172 ; progress of species not a descent
of species, 173; no transitional types, 176 ; the ascidian and
amphioxus, 178 ; the tertiary age, 182; nature as it is, 184;
nature as it was, 188; the facts of progress, 189; (a) from
the simple to the complex; Haeckel’s phylogenesis, 190 ; (4)
conditions of the progress, 192; (c) its arithmetic, 193; (d)
no single chain of beings, 196.
Sixth day, second part: psychology, 197; conclusion:
points not touched in these four chapters, 200.
ANTHROPOLOGY.
CHAPTER I.
PREHISTORIC RACES.
1. In the congress of German naturalists and
physicians held at Wiesbaden, the celebrated Berlin
professor, Virchow, delivered an address on the
progress of anthropology and biology. Reviewing,
under the double aspect of prehistoric and historic
man, the present state of anthropology, he ex-
pounded several views at considerable length. An-
thropology is the science which treats of the human
species 1n its natural groups and general formation.
It involves the study of all human characteristics,
as well physical, physiological and pathological, as
moral, social, and political. ‘The professor stated
that, as to prehistoric anthropology, every positive
advance which we had made in that study had re-
“moved us farther than before from any proof of
evolution to be found there. Man has not arisen
from the ape, nor has any ape-man existed linking
the two species together. Then, as to historic races,
he proved that the Australian, which is quoted as
being the most imperfect among them, is shown to
9
10 Prehistoric Races.
be nowise ape-like, but entirely human, like our-
selves. Finally, touching the biological question
of the transformation of species, he affirmed that it
is not yet possible to give any certain proofs of
man’s tertiary origin in the world.
2. Such a statement of the question, coming
from such a quarter, seems to be a propitious
augury that the great fight of evolution, after last-
ing for more than thirty years, is, like other wars of
long duration, approaching a final issue. Many -
signs of the same coming event have been discerned
elsewhere. And, taking this state of things as our
point of departure, we may review the anthropo-
logical question, as it has stood thus far, and as it
seems to be nearing its solution to-day. Subse-
quently we shall take up the question in biology.
The manner of treatment which recommends itself
is not that of the specialist, but that of the philo-
sophical critic, who gauges the value of scientific
proofs by the general laws of reason and philosophy.
Leaving, then, the German and other specialists
aside, it is with this school of criticism that we
venture to range ourselves.
eee es
3. To apprehend the prehistoric difficulty which
attaches itself to anthropology, I would invite you
The Prehis. t0 take a stand upon some commanding
toric Diffi- | spot, whence the whole field of the con-
oe tention may be surveyed. We can thus
conceive, too, some preliminary notions on the pre-
The Prehistoric Difficulty. I
historic and savage states of humanity. Perhaps
no better position offers itself than this present
moment of time which is now passing, and this
point of space in which we now happen to be. We
are here, and now: we are defined by this moment
and this point. How different has it been with the
family to which we belong! Men and women have
lived, and their hearts have throbbed, all over the
habitable space on this globe of ours, and all the
way back through the ages past, in places where we
have never set a foot, in ages long before we were
born. The course of our family’s history, origin-
ating in a definite place and at a definite time, has
flowed outward and onward to all the borders and
limits of this habitable globe. Unlike the fated
sameness of any dumb species of animals, with its
instincts running in a fixed channel, and the ex-
pression of its life about as rigid as a scientific for-
mula, the story of our family has been rather that
of a turbulent sea, swelling and surging in all direc-
tions. It has ever had afree and self-willed nature.
It has ever been a restless body of vitality, just
kept within some bounds of time and space and
eternal laws, by one Power which knows how to
limit the tide.
4. Defining in particular the position of our an-
cestry, with reference to the knowledge
that posterity were to acquire of them,
we may note that different fortunes
have attended different lines in the family’s an-
Outside of
History.
12 Prehistoric Races.
tecedents. Some parts of its eventful course have
been happy enough to find historians, and have been
described in the faithful reports of men living, observ-
ing and writing at the time that events happened, or
within a reasonable and speaking distance of men
who lived at the time. Such reports give us what is
called documentary or monumental history. But
there are parts also which are prior to certain lines
of documentary history, or which lie, some way or —
other, outside of the margins of any local records.
They are like the portions which the Chinese com-
prise in their annals, but which they expressly desig-
nate “parts outside of history.” Such unrecorded
antecedents of our history the phere ag has been
pleased to call “the prehistoric.”
5. Thus in France, Denmark and England, in
America, North and South, we may
discern with the aid of archzology the
tidal remains of an ancient humanity,
which must have welled up from its primal springs
somewhere, probably in the East, but thence over-
flowed and rolled on to what were as yet but vacant
shores. Whether such relics are to be found in |
China and Japan, we are not yet informed. As
that overflowing population rolled so far away from
its origin and its source, it lost in many instances
the best part of its civilization, just as we should
lose it now, with all our culture, nay, because of
our delicate culture, if we were stranded on barren
islands. It lost its social depth, and carried with
Outside of
Civilization.
Barbarism. 13
it but the fractured relics of facts, traditions and
histories, of arts and crafts, and even of the very
means and methods of subsistence. If, then, in the
lands of its colonization, the dire evil of famine, and
the intense cold of an age of ice overtook it, what
else should we expect but to find it in holes and
dens, with the bear and the deer in its very midst,
destitute and soon degraded, in numbers few, like
the Esquimaux or Alaskans, and with families ex-
tremely small? This last circumstance, of a limited
offspring, seems to follow in such surroundings,
either because of other reasons that we might think
of, or, as the latest official report from Alaska men-
tions, simply because of the hardships of their con-
dition. And what hardships those are, when the
wife so inevitably becomes a mere drudge, a slave,
even to her youngest sons! On these terms a few
generations would plunge the most civilized of us
into barbarism.
6. Barbarism is a state of things which results
from the composition of two factors, human beings
to become destitute, and desperate con-
ditions of life to make them so. ‘Sic
is plenty of room to imagine well-nigh desperate
conditions of existence, and therefore impossible
conditions of civilization. The caves and holes of
an icy cold age, with wild beasts prowling about,
and, instead of lending us their skins to keep us
warm, choosing rather to make their meals on us,
and on our children—these and other such inter-
14 Prehistoric Races.
esting situations, which prehistoric archeology, as
we shall see, quite significantly suggests, would
reduce the best of us to the abject condition of
“cave men,” taken at their worst. And, possibly,
if there was nothing better to be had, we might
reconcile ourselves to things as they were; espe-
cially when, all distinct recollection of a better state
dying away in the course of time, custom with its
strong, nervous bonds of a second nature could give
men a positive preference for a cave or a hole, as
we know it gives some a preference for a craggy
hill-top or a smoky tent. Thus, in fact, we see that
troglodytes, or men who live in caves, are recorded
all through history.
7. Not a little rhetoric has been expended on the
savagery of these cave-men, and the origin which
must have been theirs down among the
tribes of apes. So it 1s worth our while
to observe that, on the contrary, the more civilized
the men had been before, that is to say, the more
resources they had enjoyed outside of themselves
for procuring food, clothing, and shelter, the fewer
resources then would they find in themselves, and
the more abject would their condition be, in the
circumstances which we are contemplating. We
may bring this matter home to ourselves ; for it is
quite possible that the present civilization will
collapse into depths undreamed of now. Other great
civilizations have vanished like a dream of the
night before us. And what we say is this, that in a
Cave-men.
Barbarism. 15
similar contingency, starvation would follow for
ourselves and our posterity. Add, then, to the
physical conditions which are always within easy
distance of realization, as geologists, astronomers,
and physiologists of the sea can tell us—add the
moral conditions so soon to follow, of rapine,
cruelty, and the other vices attendant on a collaps-
ing state of society. Why, with all the terrors of
menacing war and civilized control around, how
hard is it to keep in check the brutal element of
human nature, either in a country at large or ina
single great city! One is reminded of the story
how Adonibezec fled from the battle-field, and they
pursued him and took him, and cut off his fingers
and toes. And what did the wretched man say?
“Seventy kings,” he said, “ having their fingers and
toes cut off, have gathered up the leavings of meat
under my table!” What must it be when civil
authority is no more, martial law has no terrors to
display, traditions are dying out, religion breaking
up into idolatry, every man’s hand against his
neighbor, and all ready to pounce upon the weak-
est! Such individualism issues in barbarism, yes,
African degradation, cave-men, troglodytes, almost
ape-men. But then the ape-men will have come
down from above; they will not have mounted up
from below!
8. And when out of chaos order does arise again,
owing to the infusion of a new blood, or to some
genius actuating the potential vigor of human
16 Prehistoric Races.
nature, human still in the midst of its degrada-
tion, yet states and periods, republics and empires
Periods never Have no such resurrection before them.
recur. They have only a single course to
run, a single goal to reach and turn, and, fleeting
like a courier, they are seen no more. They live,
grow, and dissolve; there is no resurrection for
them. So that, if the records are not saved before
the courier disappears, he will never return to bring
them. All will have faded into the prehistoric.
9. The obscurity enveloping such a movement
of transition, when barbarism is one of the termini,
has given some wide scope to certain
platitudes about these cave-men. ‘The
air of an ascertained geography and
chronology is thrown about these ancestors of ours,
who are to be conceived, it is said, as crouching in
caves and crunching the bones of wild beasts. A
specimen of such platitudes offended our eyes the
other day, when, answering the ex-Premier of Eng-
land, a noted writer discoursed some rhetoric thus,
in his most conclusive style: “It is hardly possible
to conceive of the years that lie between the caves
in which crouched our native ancestors crunching
the bones of wild beasts, and the home of the civil-
ized man. Think of the billowed years that must
have rolled between these shores!” Here is an air
of scientific geography and an immeasurable chron-
ology thrown about poor people, who certainly were
badly off. But it scarcely requires science to see
Prehistoric
Platitudes.
Geography of the Prehistortc. 17
that a short time can suffice to drag people down;
and not quite an interminable time is needed to lift
them up again. The great and active energies in
human nature are only waiting for the right touch
and pressure to yield up their resources for use and
development. How it has been with them in the
past, we shall see, when we have determined the
facts of the case.
This is enough, then, of the preliminary notions,
which will serve to fix the scientific imagination on
the study before us. Now let us address ourselves
to the facts of the case, and see what interpretation
they call for, and will bear. |
to. We may first sketch the outlines of the geog-
raphy which the prehistoric has really covered.
Then the chronology will come in order, when we
consider the ages, as they are called, of
iron, bronze and stone. Pray observe Gesraphy of
; the Prehis-
that the geography here will reproduce, toric.
in its distribution of human fortunes,
some of the same social phenomena which we wit-
ness on a smaller scale in the mixed population of
any great city. There you may find opposite ex-
tremes at the same time of penury and opulence,
within a stone’s throw of one another, separated by
just a street or two on the right hand or the left.
And here, in the geography before us, you will find
the prehistoric separated from the historic only by
a natural boundary, as the Alps or the Danube;
such barriers as have always been enough to sepa-
18 Prehistoric Races.
rate one race from another, and keep both unmixed.
Or else the prehistoric dissolves into the historic, on
the same ground; as in America, which is certainly
now the subject of luminous history, we have only
to go back four hundred years and we reach the
line and cross it, and we are away in dim prehistoric
America. So too is it with the greater part of
Africa. In Iceland, Britain, Gaul, and Germany, in
the lands of the North-East, overflowing with that
population of Hun and Goth which poured into
Kurope, we have to travel back not two thousand
years and we are stranded on the shores of the pre-
historic. All the while, during four and six thou-
sand years, other lands are abounding in monuments,
written records, trustworthy traditions. But, over
the ground of the prehistoric, records are wanting ;
the induction of science alone is available; and we
interpret as best we can the relics of archeology, of
paleontology, of anthropology, which have escaped
the ravages of time; and we note the few geological
touches which the same ravages of time have left
behind them. These geological data are few, for
the records of the rocks were far on toward com-
pleting the last chapter of their history, when man
with his hopes and his fears entered on this arena
of his short and anxious career. 7
11. Some lands seem never to have had a pre-
Lands never historic humanity to grace them sor ae
Prehistoric. blight them. All humanity there, how-
ever ancient, is in the full light of history.
Geography of the Prehistoric. 19
Beyond it there gleams a dawn of mythology and
fable—but not the fable of an ape-man coming
up from the tribes of brutes; quite the opposite,
gods coming down to be heroes and men. Nor is
there any reason to believe that these are the
youngest of the nations; rather they are the oldest.
And some do not recede even into the twilight of
mythology; they are historic back to the very first,
scientifically and critically historic, if documentary
and monumental records have any value upon
earth. Cradle-lands such as these never had any-
thing to do with prehistoric races, except as bor-
dering on them, or as originating them, in the sense
which we shall explain farther on; inasmuch as
these are the lands which sent forth such races on
their melancholy wanderings, till the day should
come when, dead or alive, their relics would be re-
vealed in the far-off history of the future, and be-
come the subject of a science, anthropology, yet to
be. Alive, such relics appear in Australia and in
the land of the Bushman; dead, in the extinct
races of Canstadt, Cro-Magnon and others.
12. The nations that stayed at home were those
of Egypt, Babylonia, Arabia, Persia, Phoenicia,
India. They were stationary In MOTE Notions that
senses than one. Theystayed at home, never retro-
and they were conservative besides. ®™#¢°*
In consequence, they never lost so much that they
reached a state of savagery, or that they ever had
a journey to take back toward civilization. It may
20 Prehistoric Races.
be said of them that, if they are not progressive
peoples, one reason is this: they never retrograded
so far as to become nations of progress under the
spur of reaction. Had they fallen lower, they
might now stand higher. But their immobility
forbade progress. ‘The conservatism of these sons
of Sem is not that recuperative power which the
sons of Japhet have, and which the sons of Ham.
conspicuously have not. Vet they must have lost
something under the friction of ages. Their con-
servatism could not guarantee them against the
wear and tear of time. Hence that very immobil-
ity of theirs,so proverbial in history, serves this ex-
cellent purpose of showing that since they never
gained anything, for it was not in them, and yet they
must have lost not a little, for that is the condition
of all things human, they are a standing monument
of people who could not have come up from a state
of savagery to be what they are to-day. ‘They, and
the rest of us too, have come down from a state of.
higher civilization. It is so easy a matter to run
down, as every organism and every mechanism
shows us! The whole history of our family comes
to this: it has done best when it kept what it had, and
next to best when it got back what it had lost. We
have yet to find the nation which, without the help
of revealed religion, shows signs of having still as
much as the family, by all accounts, possessed at
its origin. Some have never declined much, some
have declined to rise again, others never to rise
The Inductions of Science. 21
again; and all alike show that we have never risen
higher than our origin, and those amongst us have
done best who have kept nearest to the level of
that.
13. Let this suffice to sketch the geographical
outlines of our subject. We may now state the
methods which science adopts to form its
inductive conclusions. It endeavors to
find all the traces possible of human life
prior to historic times. It deciphers and interprets
such traces, as indicative of the physical, intellect-
ual or social condition of the men who existed
then. ‘These traces and indications of antecedent
human life are to be found in the nature of certain
objects imbedded in the soil, or otherwise pre-
- served; they are also deciphered in the location,
situation, where such objects are met with undis-
turbed.
14. The objects in question are, first, the fossil
relics of men themselves. These appertain to an-
thropology proper. Secondly, they are the fossil
relics of animals that lived with men; and these
pertain to palzontology. In the third place, there ©
are weapons and utensils which men made and used
—articles of industry. ‘The degree of perfection or
imperfection discernible in their make reflects upon
the degree of civilization which produced them. For
the material out of which they are made may have
been easier or harder to procure, as stone is easier
to get, or a bone, than bronze or iron. Or the
Methods of
Induction.
22 Prehistoric Races.
work expended on the material may be better or
worse, as chipping the stone is an inferior process
to smoothing and polishing it. All this is the sub-
ject-matter of archeology. Finally, as to the loca-
tions, these objects, of whatever kind or workman-
ship, have been preserved for us, as a general rule,
by the successive deposits of soil covering them in
the course of time, and thereby “ fossilizing”” them;
that is to say, putting them in the condition that
we have to dig them up, or unearth them now.
Deposits of soil, or stratification by natural agents,
are referred to geology, which thus is called upon
to interpret the antiquity of those strata, and there-
fore to settle the antiquity and chronology of pre-
historic man, whose relics are found in the strata.
15. We may estimate at once the value of this
geological chronology, this determination of time
by the computations of geology.
Whether this science is engaged in con-
templating the last sediment deposited
right under our eyes in the Mississippi, or in com-
puting the time required for the entire formation of
the terrestrial globe, it cannot be credited with the
qualifications of an exact time-keeper; nor in its
practical efforts, when tested by actual observation,
has it come out felicitously in its results. The rea-
son seems to be that it has a time of its own, in-
deed; but geological time is not our historic time;
and there is no ascertained formula to make the
reduction of one in terms of the other. The meas-
Geological
Chronology.
Geological Chronology. 23
ure which natural forces employ in laying down a
stratum of clay on the bed of a river is certainly
not the same as the measure which divides the
story of mankind into days and years and centuries,
by solar and terrestrial revolutions. Nor is it the
same as that which marks off generation from gen-
eration among mankind, dividing them by the
births and deaths of men. Geology, in the order
-and in the thickness of its deposits, agrees with
neither of these processes, neither that of astronomy
nor that of anthropology. If the astronomicai
revolutions have been regular, if the revolving cy-
cles of human generations have been quite irregular,
the evolution of the earth’s present surface has had
a measure of its own, a time of its own, not identi-
cal with either of theirs. Yet, to derive any light
from geology on the subject of man’s antiquity, its
time must be made commensurate with man’s time.
And accordingly the inductive effort has been made
to argue from what we see, in present circumstances,
going on in certain places that we know, to what
we have not seen, in circumstances and places en-
tirely different and unknown. But this inductive
effort is faulty, because there is no induction about
it. |
16. Induction, as a form of argument, requires a
sutficient enumeration of phenomena to
formulate a general law, which is found
to stand the test of verification on be-
ing applied to cases known, and which, therefore,
Argument of
Induction.
24 Prehistoric Races.
may bevrelied on to interpret things rightly when
applied to the unknown. Here thereis no suff-
cient enumeration of facts to formulate any law.
Solitary facts known are compared with solitary
unknowns; and conclusions are jumped at from
such premises as logic will not admit, to begin
with. And the end of the argument corresponds
to the beginning. For when the hastily constructed
law, derived from- a few known facts, is tested in ~
actual cases under our eyes, it is found so often
faulty in its sum total of years required to fossilize
a tree on the bank of the Mississippi, or to lay down
ten or twenty feet of loam, that, whenever geology
pretends to measure its time in terms of history,
we are perfectly justified in suspending our judg-
ment, until it has found a common denominator for
historical duration and its own duration—two very
different things.
17, It does mark the order of successvam
whether in the soils deposited, or in the objects
uae which those deposits contain. It marks
Inductive. | too the relative proportion of duration,
which respective thicknesses of the stra-
tification seem to have required. But, with all that,
the conditions of earth, and water, and air, and sky
have been so different at the different periods of ter-
restrial evolution that, to read the lesson of strati-
fication aright, there would seem to be needed an
equipment of science on pretty nearly all the laws
of the universe. Astronomy, meteorology, geogra-
Archeology: Ages of Metal, 25
phy are referred to in explaining geological forma-
tions; natural physics and terrestrial physics; min-
eralogy and chemistry; botany, zodlogy, physiology;
comparative anatomy. Geology, in fact, is a sci-
ence of induction which bases itself on all the or-
ders of facts and on all the laws in the boundless field
of nature.
No doubt, within the restricted limits of the pres-
ent question, that of the prehistoric antiquity of
man, it does not lie open to all these uncertainties,
because it does not appeal to so many exact sci-
ences. Still, not being exempt from a limited sum
of the scientific references, it remains hable toa
moderate sum of the consequent uncertainties. In
brief, geology is not the science to arrange an exact
chronology for the prehistoric periods. Let us see
if archeology has done so, or paleontology, or
anthropology, strictly so called.
18. The archzological results are as follows.
Prehistoric articles of industry have been found in
great numbers; and numerous, too, are
the localities in which they have been
unearthed. There are stones, and bronzes, and cop-
per; tools, chips and flints; there are places called
Danish 47¢kken-moddings, and there are Swiss lake-
dwellings; besides old hearths and camping-grounds,
and caves and other holes in the earth. |
19. The reports from these and about them are
summed up in the theory of what are called the
ages of iron, bronze, copper, stone. Supposing
Archeology.
26 Prehistoric Races.
ourselves to be at present, as is evident, in an age
of iron, we must go backward to where
written or historic annals began to be
dated over the greater part of Europe; and we
come upon a prehistoric time, in which also it
is found that iron was used. This is, therefore,
reckoned a prior age of iron to our own, and is
otherwise called the Halstattian age. In this most
recent prehistoric period, various specimens of iron
work and great swords of iron are found; also
special types of workin bronze. There are ornaments
and razors in bronze, vases and other objects done
in Tuscan style. It is the time of burying under
mounds, whether with or without cremation.
20. These iron implements, which are taken to
denote an earlier age of iron, are found in England,
France, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and
Norway, Italy; in America; in Egypt, Western
Asia, New Caledonia, the Isles of the Ocean.
Bronze relics, which some take to mark an age of
bronze, are found in most of the same European
countries, in Egypt besides, as also in Mexico and
Peru. Copper objects too are met with in North
America.
21. There is a grave objection to this idea of an
Objection to 28° being prehistoric, in any sense to
theAgesof suit the purpose of evolution, if metal
Metal. was used at all and worked as a material
of industry. Metal is used in all modern times,
and. requires advanced workmanship. Stone, as
Ages of Metal.
a Archeology: Ages of Metal. 27
being easier to grind or to chip, might antece-
dently be regarded as the material for savage days.
But we shall see that even stone has its uses at all
times, within historic limits too; and, upon occa-
sions, seems to be preferred. What ground can
there be for dividing off a prehistoric age of metal?
22. If the ground is this—a preconceived theory
that metallurgy, or the working of metals, must be
found somewhere in an incipient and transitional
state, following on a supposed earlier age of igno-
rance and ape-like incapacity, we have only to re-
mark that such a latent theory is, in the first place,
a gratuitous postulate, assuming the very thing to
be proved, if evolution is to be made to stand. In
the second place, it is invalidated or contradicted
by scientific and documentary evidence. For sci-
entific explorations in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia,
show the use of metals there so far back in the past
that there is no warrant as yet for affirming the exist-
ence of a previous age, either of stone or of any-
thing else. And positive documentary history in-
forms us that, in Asia, tools of bronze and iron were
a product of industry as far back as Tubal-Cain, very
long, indeed, before historic annals began to be
dated over Europe.
23. As to bronze, in particular, authors consider
themselves qualified to deny entirely
that such an age existed anywhere.
Perhaps, however, in a modified sense, that may be
called an age of bronze g r
, BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY
mar
Bronze.
U
is94
LIBRARY.
5S Prehistoric Races.
which witnessed a great local development of this
kind of metallurgy, as the rich stations of bronze-
remains in those places seem to indicate. Or, at
times, it would appear that bronze was specially
imported into a certain country, as Egypt; or, gen-
erally, becoming an article of commercial import-
ance, it overspread Europe with Tuscan work.
24. But if this is all that the “age of bronze”
comes to, or the “ age of iron,” then the analysis of
history is making these prehistoric periods less dis-
tinct, the more we know. It looks as if this ro-
mance of a scientific generation were coming down
to the homely synthesis of Moses, Homer and Livy,
and as if the imposing term “ prehistoric,” which
has been so vaguely magnificent in science, because
so magnificently vague, were but a-new phrase for
the old idea, “ Once upon a time!” equally obscure,
but less pretentious.
25. Older than the age of the metals is that of
stone, and, first, of polished or ground
stone. This is otherwise called the
neolithic, or newer stone age; the one to be men-
tioned next being called paleolithic, or older stone
period. The specimens of work which are referred
to it are axes, chisels, etc., made of such materials
as diorite, serpentine, basalt, quartzite. There are
clay vessels, too, hand-made but elegant. In the
artificial shell-deposits which are seen in Denmark,
and are referred to this epoch, there are found
tools of flint, horn and bone, fragments of a rude
Neolithic Age.
Archeology: Age of Polished Stone. 209
kind of pottery, charcoal and ashes, but no objects —
of metal. The earlier great stone, or megalithic
monuments of Europe, called dolmens, or cham-
bered tumuli, belong to this period.
26. The men who lived then were not mere
hunters; they were tillers of the soil. The bearing
of this distinction will appear subsequently. Some
are inclined to believe that the polished stone
period was inaugurated in Europe by the spreading
of a new population, in which they would recognize
the first wave of Aryan immigration. That there
was a sudden infusion of some new people is ren-
dered plausible by the gap which is found in the
process of transition from the implements of an
earlier age to those which characterize this one:
there is a want of intermediate forms to mark what.
might be considered stages of evolution. Besides,
there is noticed the presence now of divers species
of domesticated animals, presumably brought by a
new people from distant countries.
27. The lands, in which this neolithic age is dis-
cerned, are the same European countries
enumerated before for the age of iron; poets! "i
along with North and South America,
Terra del Fuego, Australia, New Caledonia, South
Africa, the Isles of the Ocean. The oldest lake
settlements of Switzerland belong to the same
period. Many, however, of the settlements in the
most Western Swiss lakes must have been flourish-
ing rather late in history. For what do we find?
30 Prehistoric Races.
There come to light various articles of bronze,
weapons of iron, and even coins of Roman origin.
Does this mean that the prehistoric age of polished
stone is coeval with Roman history? It begins to
appear that the prehistoric man of even the stone
age was a man that trafficked, and perhaps fought,
with the dread legionaries of the Roman republic,
or perhaps the Roman empire. In fact, it dawns
upon us, as scientific investigation advances from
hazy theory into the broad light of ascertained re-
sults, that he is only our well-known European
cousin, or American, or Australasian, studied by
other lights than those of written history; whom
we have met often enough under a different name
from the “ prehistoric’”’ in the pages of his contem-
poraries, Herodotus, Livy, and even Tacitus, or
writers later still. The dimness of our view in this
study is owing to the fact that we are looking at
him under the light of inductive or inferential evi-
dence, not that of palpable observation, or docu-
mentary record.
28. We may note, in passing, the different kinds
of evidence that may be brought to bear
on asubject. There is written history,
which furnishes documentary evidence: this is the
chief means of knowing our human family. There
is pure theory, which carries with it a kind of spec-
ulative light, to show the possibility of things being
true. There is natural science, which proceeds by
way of direct observation and experiment; and this
Evidence.
Archeology: Age of Rough Stone. 31
gives us evidence which is immediate and conclu-
sive; but its application is limited to our surround-
ings, and cannot reach into the past or future, or
to things distant. To reach those things which do
not fall under observation or experiment, natural
science infers from what it does observe, from the
_data which are thus supplied; but the evidence be-
comes then only indirect and inferential. If any
elements of mere theory or hypothesis are now
added to the inferential process, evidence ceases
and we have probability instead; and the final con-
clusion partakes more and more of theoretic prob-
ability, or even bare possibility, according as more
elements of theory are inserted in the premises.
And, if an ingredient of false theory is anywhere
added, the final precipitate of the compound pro-
cess will be anything but the truth. It may be an
agreeable doctrine, popular, fair to see; but not true.
29. Older than the neolithic age, with its man of
the ground and polished stone, is the
paleolithic or ancient stone age, with
its man of the chipped or flaked stone.
He helped himself to what utensils or weapons he
needed, by chipping rude stones into some shape or
other of axes, lance-heads, or the like. The man of
this time was probably a hunter or warrior, the van-
guard of coming immigration. He was overtaken,
apparently, by a period of such intense cold, that
it reduced the greater part of Europe to the con-
_ ditions of an Arctic climate,
Paleolithic
Age.
32 Prehistoric Races.
30. Among the theories devised to account for this
Glacial cold period or glacial age, as to which it
Epoch. is still dubious whether there was only
one such spell, or more than one, the latest hypo-
thesis, that of an Italian philosopher, connects
it with the deluge, a phenomenon reported to
us with the most exact documentary evidence.
According to this theory, the glacial period coin- -
cided with the flood, in the sense that the reign of
ice was brought on by the causes which operated
during or after the deluge. So that the deluge
would have to be conceived as an event, which,
either before or after or concomitantly, involved a
revolution in all parts of the globe. And the part
which we know of so well, as described by eye-wit-
nesses in the Mosaic narrative, would then be
merely one phase, one scene in a tragedy very
great, one episode in a terrible drama that-involved
the whole of our orb. How the paleolithic man
dipped into the glacial age in Europe, we do not
see distinctly stated; whether it was that, after the
deluge, roaming far away from the cradle-lands of
the family, he found himself in places suffering
from this Arctic cold, and he became hopelessly
ice-bound there; or that, according to another
most recent speculation, the value of which is not
yet determined, the flood of overflowing waters did
not actually reach all parts of the earth; and he,
in his own home, was enveloped in some of its mar-
ginal phenomena, among which was this intense
Epochs, Periods, Formations. 33
atmospheric cold. All these, however, are speci-
mens of purely theoretic probabilities so far; the
major part of the light to illumine them being noth-
ing more than speculation.
31. Before the glacial period, which bound the
zone of temperate Europe in fetters Of pyoens,
ice, the climate in the same parts was Periods,
most mild, and even tropical. The fos- Formations:
_ sils of the tertiary age, which had just elapsed, ex-
hibit palms, cypresses, plane-trees, fig-trees, laurels,
cinnamon, all growing in the Northern, and even
the Arctic regions. Then followed the glacial
epoch with its chilly exhibition of phenomena,
when even the South became Arctic, with Northern
bears and mammoths prowling about, and men hid-
ing themselves in holes. After that comes the
quaternary period, which brings us to our own
times, itself subdivided into two formations, the
diluvial or post-pliocene, and the alluvial or re-
cent. The prehistoric men whom we have been
speaking of thus far, whether neolithic or palzo-
lithic, are identified as diluvial, of quaternary times.
These geological distinctions we mention because
of this term “ diluvial,” as applied to the man whom
we have been speaking of as palzolithic or neolithic.
The other name for diluvial, that is, post-pliocene,
is so conceived as referring to the last portion of
the age which was previous to the quaternary, or
fourth age, and which is therefore called tertiary,
or the earlier, third age. This tertiary, like other
34. Prehistoric Races.
ages, is subdivided into various geological forma-
tions, of which the earliest is called eocene, and
the latest pliocene. Thus, then, we are to under-
stand terms: when we speak of alluvial or recent,
and of diluvial or post-pliocene, we are in quatern-
ary times; when we go back farther, crossing the
glacial epoch, we come to tertiary times, with its
various formations, the latest pliocene, the earliest
eocene. And if we hear, therefore, as we shall
soon, of a tertiary man, eocene or pliocene, we mean
one of whom traces are found in the corresponding
geological formations. While farther back still, if.
an ancestor of ours existed in the ages of the sec-
ondary or primary formations, he would be called
by a corresponding designation. There is no ques-
tion of such a being.
32. The results of all the archeology brought to
bear upon prehistoric humanity is to discredit the
idea that the human being then was of a
different species from the human being
now. ‘The diluvial man’s relative de-
gree of civilization marks no specific difference be-
tween him and ourselves. We might as well think
of classifying the Asiatic mountaineer of to-day
among things and men prehistoric. For the dwell-
ers on Mount Roraima are just now described as
persisting in the manufacture of stone implements;
at a time, too, when every possible advance in art
and industry is being made elsewhere, with the
help of steam, electricity and all manners of inven-
Results of
Archeology.
Results of Archeology. (35
tion. Yet the said Asiatic is quite like the rest of
us. Nor are we, by implication, very much in a
state of barbarism, because we live contemporane-
ously with the stone age of Mount Roraima, 1888.
And, in general, most nations have been found to
use stone in the course of their history, the Israel-
ites, Egyptians, Romans, the Indians, the Germans,
the Lombards and Anglo-Saxons. Wherefore, the
archeological ages of stone and metal seem to have
been only relative, partial, local. Relative, too, and
partial, is the antiquity which they indicate. And
if there is any evolution in the question, it is only
that of the sequence of stages in some nation’s local
development.
To despatch all the literature pertaining to dilu-
vial man, we need add but little more. He has,
indeed, played a conspicuous part in the hypothesis
of evolution; and he still figures prominently in
magazines and reviews for the entertainment of
cultured classes, as also in the preliminary notions
of children’s text-books of history. We ought not,
then, to close our obituary notice of him, without
satisfying the reasonable curiosity of future genera-
tions. We shall just briefly look into the two re-
maining chapters of his record. And as, upon his
withdrawal, his place was boldly aspired to by what is
called the tertiary man, we shall say a word upon
him also. The two chapters to which we refer are
the paleontology and the anthropology of the di-
luvial or quaternary man,
36 Prehistoric Races.
33. Paleontology, or the science of extinct or-
ganic life, has shown usa series of animals which ex-
isted a long time ago; which were con-
temporaneous with man; and which have
now died out. ‘This seems to indicate a very re-
mote antiquity for the prehistoric man who lived
with them. Consider the long series of the cave-
bear, the cave-hyzna, the mammoth, the woolly
rhinoceros, the hippopotamus major, the Irish elk,
and such like beasts. Their presence in prehistoric
man’s time is betrayed by genuine fossils, or the
remains of their bony structures, which, whether
petrified or not, have been unearthed, or dug up,
that is to say, are “fossil.” And that man lived
with them is shown by his industrial remains, or
his own bones being found among theirs. All
these species of animals are now extinct; and how
far away in the past must the man coeval with
them have lived and died! “ One’s head is seized
with dizziness !” is the reflection of the modern
thinker, M. Renan: Ox est pris de vertige !
34. Scientists, however, criticizing this point a
little, have merely asked some pertinent questions:
How long does it take a species to die?
Whatever time it may take, did these
species wait for another, and gracefully
walk off the stage, each in its turn? Suppose the
environment did become unfit for them, and this,
indeed, was the chief cause of their extinction,
must it have been quite slow in becoming so? Or,
Paleontology.
Extinction of
Species.
Paleontology: Extinction of Spectes. 37
does all science admit that great convulsions took
place over the globe, great cataclysms which
changed abruptly all the features of localities and
of whole countries? Or, let us with great liberality
suppose that the whole number of species now ex-
tinct, among which man lived then, amounted to
almost a hundred; and that they chose to die out
gracefully, one at a time; and that the species were
content with half a century each for its obsequies;
how many years would that require? Less than
five thousand; not so far back as some chronologi-
cal tables put the birth of Noe. As to their being
found petrified and preserved in soils, and rocks,
that does not prove the lapse of tens of thousands
of years. It proves a little chemistry paying them
a tribute, which is due to their remains, no doubt,
but is not at all relevant to the question of their
antiquity. Besides, scientists point out species that
die out, right under our eyes, and that too rapidly
enough; as the ddus and dinornis of the islands
Bourbon and Mauritius.
35. The animals with which men lived have
served some observers as a guide to distinguish pre-
historic times into three epochs. First,
that of the great cave-bear; secondly,
that of the mammoth; thirdly, that of
the reindeer. This succession, however, being
ill-substantiated, gave way to an archeological
classification, taken from the stations in which in-
dustrial remains were found. Four periods have
Subdivisions
of the Ages.
38 Prehistoric Races.
thus been named respectively from St. Acheul,
Moustiers, Solutré, La Madeleine.
36. Anthropology, strictly so called, considers the
prehistoric man himself; and, finding in certain
Anthropol- fossil bones and skulls a type of man- .
ogy: kind very different, as it appears, from
the normal type of the present, it has supplied the
evolutionary theory with an important link in the
question of our descent. Various signs are noted
in those skulls, indicative of an inferiority to the
man of our time, physically as well, no doubt, as
intellectually. Those found in the caverns of
Engis and Neanderthal have become famous, if
only for the number of scientific monographs writ-
ten upon them, to show forth the low state of hu-
manity exhibited in their conformation. For in-
stance, they are dolichocephalous, that is to say,
long-headed; the longitudinal diameter being ab-
normally longer than the transverse diameter.
Many other points besides this are brought to bear,
anthropologically, on the question of our descent;
which is so illumined, in consequence, that, not to
mention others, Max Bartels has brought together,
in a monograph of nearly one hundred pages, the
literature and notices of men with tails. We must
confess that we have not made any closer acquaint-
ance with this valuable work than to read the bib-
liographical record of it in the Smithsonian report
for 1885. But that does not dispense us from pay-
Anthropology: Physical Varteties. 30
ing a due regard and close attention to the points
which anthropology has noted in these skulls.
37. The first observation that occurs is this. No
sooner was dolichocephalism, or long-headedness,
noted, than a comparison was instituted
at once, in the interests of science, with
the actual races of mankind, of which we
shall treat expressly in the second part. And it was
found that existing men show every type and meas-
urement, as well of this cranial conformation, as
of its opposite, brachycephalism, and of every other.
M. de Quatrefages transcribes long lists of measure-
ments which show this. In the second place, a
number of other anatomical elements, thought to
be peculiar in these fossil skulls, such as the super-
ciliary prominences, the small and receding forehead,
the form of the ciliary arcs, the amplitude of the
occiput, are found to be but the individual and ac-
cidental varieties of men living amongus. Neither
the low-minded amongst us, nor the high-minded,
nor even distinctive eminence in cultivation and
genius has appropriated any exclusive form of cra-
nium. The formcanbe modified before birth, and
the peculiarities become congenital. It can be
modified after death, and they are posthumous;
physical and chemical agents so far affecting the
skeleton as to change the proportions. Other
causes operate during life; and they are either arti-
ficial in their nature, as the forced compression of
the skull, a practice still holding among certain
Physical
Varieties.
4O Prehistoric Races.
tribes; or they are natural, as heat, light, actinism,
moisture, atmospheric contamination, drink, food,
resources, scenery, degree of natural security, con-
sanguineous marriages, sickness, and the like.
It would appear that a great many elements were
necessary to conclude a logical argument here. In
the absence of the argument, what becomes of our
poor savage species, the ape-man, who yet must
be found somewhere, if evolution is to hold its
ground ?
38. There is one resource left. Ifthe diluvial man
of quaternary times is nowhere at the service of
evolution, perhaps a tertiary man of
the times gone before would be so, if
only he could be found. To the satisfaction of a
goodly number of scientists, French, German and
others, such a prehistoric being of the tertiary age,
both phocene and eocene, has been found, and that
several times over. Not that he himself has quite
shown himself. His friends admit that. But he is
hypothetical in other things, which certainly have
been found. To find himself then is only a ques-
tion of time, when a future day will reveal him;
and faith in the vindication of science is long-suf-
fering enough to await that day in patience. The
things, in which the tertiary man has betrayed him-
self, are flint-chips, and flints burnt, and irregular
incisions made in the bones of animals, all of which
are found in tertiary formations, and belong to ter-
tiary times, and therefore—reveal a tertiary man.
Tertiary Man.
Anthropology: The Tertiary Man. AI
39. It is a little singular, on the face of it, that
his own bones do not appear just as readily as
theirs. ‘There is no natural law requiring the more
rapid consumption of human bones than of beasts’
bones. If one kind are fossilized, why not the
other? Cuvier demonstrated that the bones of an-
client warriors show no more readiness to decom-
pose than those of their horses.
40. Still, not to be wanting to the true spirit of
scientific thought, let us contemplate those flints or
stones of the tertiary age, some with what is called
a conchoidal fracture or a bulb of percussion in
them, such as would result from an intentional blow,
and therefore indicating a person who intended the
blow; some apparently scorched, as having their
outer surface disintegrated; and therefore indicat-
ing a person who scorched them. Now, we are to
consider these signs as being so indifferent in their
character, that they point indeed to a man who
made them, but they postulate only an ape-man, an
_ anthropitheque, one who knew just enough to do
that, but knew no more and knew no better. This
is the logic which satisfied the French scientists in
the gathering at Grenoble; and they agreed by vote
that the existence of a tertiary being was now
proved.
41. Wecannot help thinking that other scientists,
of quite an opposite school, have some ground to
be well pleased with this course of reasoning. The
form of the logic used impresses the mind favor-
42 Prehistoric Races.
ably. We fancy that we see in it a strong reassur-
ance of some general revival in sound
logic and solid thought. For if, froma
chance percussion in a chance stone,
such a fracture as appears over and over again on
our roadways, made by the hoofs of horses, or by
the rolling of wheels, the sagacious minds of men
can discern the presence of an unknown being
whom no other sign manifests, and can just measure
his intellectual capacity and portray his physical
build, it is quite evident that many of the noblest
sciences are in a fair way to being reinstated. And,
as for teleology in particular, as for theism and
theology generally, the good time is coming when
no man’s mind will fail to see, in the marks of
beautiful order impressed on the world and the uni-
verse, a magnificent testimony to the existence of
One who must have intended it, and made it, and
almost a description of Him, who having made it,
is now preserving and governing it. So much for
the form of the argument, or the manner of the
logic.
42. Nowawordonits matter. It has been asked,
in a somewhat critical spirit, whether similarly
broken stones, which are found to be
scattered about on a_ shingly beach,
argue the presence of men all about
there to do the breaking? Again, M. Arcelin, a
French scientist, most prehistoric in his tastes and
specialties, picks up, in the argillaceous silex of
Form of the
Logie.
Matter of the
Logic.
Anthropology: The Tertiary Man. 43
the Maconnais, flints of precisely this description,
with the fracture which is thought to reveal an in-
tentional act of breaking, and yet which is referable
in this case to atmospheric agents. Besides, were
there no hoofs, no tramping, no rolling, no crashing,
in the days of the great mammalians, and among
the gigantic disturbances of past ages; when inthe
ordinary flow of those mighty volumes of water,
that eroded the primitive beds of rivers, the col-
lapsing of huge blocks of silex brought about col-
lisions, more than are needed for myriads of con-
choidal fractures and bulbs of percussion to be
laid out on the bottom of the waters? Again, if
any tertiary man broke some of the flints, he must’
have lived at the bottom of the sea to do it; for
those exhibited by M. Cels, just recently, to the
Anthropological Society of Brussels, by way of
proving the tertiary man’s existence, are taken from
lower eocene sediments which are observed to be
altogether marine, containing mollusks, fishes, chel-
onians, and the like.
43. Nor does the disintegration of the surface in
a flint seem to be due to fire alone. If it is, how-
ever, were there no prairie fires, no forest fires,
breaking out spontaneously then, as they do now?
44. And, again, if we inspect those fossil bones
of animals, with the irregular incisions made in
them, are we inclined to believe that a man only —
could make an incision, particularly an irregular
one? It may be that wild beasts preyed upon one ©
4A Prehistoric Races.
another then, as they do somewhat freely now, and
that with teeth which could scrape one another’s
bones pretty incisively. Scientific men go to the
trouble of pointing out effective teeth of that age,
such as seem to suit the incisions exactly, those of
the lusty beasts called carcharodon megalodon, sargus
serratus, and others. These dreadful names insinu-
ate nothing but teeth! In fine, the critics urge the
importunate question: Did the beasts of prey spare
man himself, and not scrape his bones for him?
If so, where are they,—be they scraped or un-
scraped ?
45. It is easy to ask questions, and for irreverent
minds to ask irrevent ones. But professors of Ber-
lin, and scientists of the French school
itself, nimble as that school is in its logic
and its fancy, have thought it was rather
easy to make random statements, and scandalize
science by settling things with a vote. If things
are true, they need no vote. And the only result
of the pronounced discredit which this controversy
has thrown upon the tertiary unknown, is to show
him unknowable, probably because he is not there.
Twenty years of contention about him have left
him where so many are leaving the missing link
generally; and that is nowhere.
46. It really makes very little difference where the
first appearance of man is placed, and how it came
about, if only he was there. We shail learn much
that is useful, when we ascertain where it was, in the
Voting in
Science.
Man and the Universe. AS
order of geological formation, that he did first ap-
pear on this globe. He will throw as
much light on geology and the other
sciences as they throw on him. At
present, he is not shown to have walked this earth at
any point farther back than the diluvial period; as
M. d’Estienne just now affirms,“ there is no geologist
of note who admits any longer even the possibility
of man having existed in the lower tertiary age.”
General considerations forbid us to expect that we
shall ever find it shown. For, if man is the head
and completion of the physical and organic world,
as all admit, and evolutionists no less than others,
he could not appear till the physical conditions of
things, and both the vegetable and animal kingdoms,
had received their just development. As competent
science affirms, he must be the last in both the
stratigraphical and the palzontological lines. Be-
fore that, he were an anachronism.
47. So, to conclude this criticism of the prehis-
toric ape-man, whose geography and chronology we
' have subjected to a little analysis, we
may express ourselves in the fine gen-
eralization of Agassiz. He says that, as
the reptiles of the secondary age are in no respect
descended from the fishes of the primary or palezo-
zoic age, so man in the fourth or quaternary nowise
descends from the animals before him in the third
or tertiary period. The link by which they are all
connected is of a higher and immaterial nature.
Man and
Geology.
Man and the
Universe.
46 Prehistoric Races.
Their connection is to be sought for in the view of
the Creator Himself, whose aim in forming the
earth, in allowing it to undergo the successive
changes which geology points out, and in creating
successively all the different types of animals which
have passed away, was to introduce Man on the
surface of the globe. Man is the end towards
which all the animal creation has tended from the
first appearance of the palzozoic fishes.
We have finished with prehistoric humanity. We
shall review next, in a more constructive spirit, the
anthropology of the actual races which are; and
shall find in them the key to all the pe
difficulty which has been.
ANTHROPOLOGY .—Continuea.
CHAPTER: iH:
~ ACTUAL RACES IN HISTORY.
48. We have considered whether, in the past,
there ever existed a species of men, different from
that which we know of now. This was the ques-
tion of prehistoric anthropology. It still remains
to be seen whether, in historic times, any man of a
different species from our own has existed, and
can exhibit in his person the link which is sought
for to connect us with a lower order of animals.
The most imperfect races of mankind are judged
to be those in Australia, and others, such as the
Bushmen, in Africa. But these are now pro-
nounced, by the most unexceptionable science of
the day, to be altogether men of our own organiza-
tion. So that, if we go by the authority of scien-
tific men, the question is closed. ‘There is not,
and there has not been, any species of mankind
distinct from the one which we know. All men
are, and have been, of one formation, one organi-
zation, whether they are looked at anatomically,
physiologically, or intellectually.
47
48 Actual Races in Htstory.
49. But if, instead of merely taking the authori-
ty of scientific men, we examine the scientific re-
sults for ourselves, we shall derive profit in two
ways. On the one hand, we can enjoy the ad-
vantage of seeing the facts for ourselves, and of
concluding that there is no color whatever, in the
observations of science, for the hypothesis of an
ape-man. On the other hand, a philosophical view
opens out before us regarding the course of man’s
progress upon earth. We are thrown back into the
same vein of thought with which we started, that
evolution of man’s history, from its origin onwards,
through its varied and divergent course. We con-
template down many an avenue and vista of human
history thus distributed over the face of the globe,
and down through the ages of time, how the whole
progress, so divergent to begin with, is converging
towards a final reunion of the human family, when
God’s designs shall have received their entire ac-
complishment over the children of men. This is
a physical side to man’s ethical and intellectual
history. Itis credited to the science of anthro-
pology. )
50. Let us observe, then, that in the collection
of individuals, called mankind, there are many
differences, as well anatomical and physiological, as
intellectual and moral. Organs and functions,
ways of thinking and acting, are all found to be
diversified in various natural groups, which are
called Races. Now, what do we affirm? That, in
The Terms, Species, Race. 49
spite of all differences, the races are of one Species.
And, moreover, being of one species, they are in-
ferred to have had one common origin; which, in
biological matters, means that they’ sprang from
one primitive pair. If this is so, scientific evidence
corroborates, with its process of induction, the doc-
umentary evidence presented in the narrative of
Moses. We begin by recurring to biology (No.
104, etc., below) for the explanation of these
terms: species, race. Then we shall apply them
to the subject of anthropology.
51. By the term, species, we mean a collection of
organic individuals more or less resembling one
another, in their external aspect or in-
ternal structure; productive in _ their
unions among themselves, so that they
perpetuate the same collection in nature, by generat-
ing other individuals of their own kind; and one of
the consequences thereof is, that originally all can
have descended from one primitive pair, identical in
kind with them. This description of species, which
is evidently founded in nature, and is exemplified in
the whole of biology, is not to be confounded with
another use of the term, species, whereby it is taken
to signify any mere class. Thus, a distinguished
paleontologist, attached to the U. S. Geological
Service, uses the term, as if in biology we signified
by it any mere group. We classify, he says, organ-
ic beings, as we would classify bottles; and there-
fore, he concludes, there is no reason why one
The Term,
Species.
50 Actual Races in History.
species should not turn into another, by what is
called “‘ descent,” or “transformation of species;”
just as among bottles we can reassort classes, and
have in one group to-day the bottles which we had >
in a different group yesterday. Here we must re-
mark that the term, species, is taken in quite a
different meaning from what it must have if we
are to discuss at all the question of the descent of
species. And indeed any one arguing so, on this
subject, commits the logical error which is called
equivocation, that is, playing on the same word in
two different senses. Considering the scientific
and philosophical gravity of this error or sophism
in particular, we should desire nothing more than
to see it first pilloried, and then petrified in every
text-book of grammar, rhetoric and logic to the end
of time; till a future age of anthropologists shall
unearth it, and wonder wisely, what kind of pre-
historic barbarians devised such a fossil piece of
industry, and made it, and used it.
52. In the scientific idea of species, it is not any
resemblance that determines the class. The like-
The Test of ness among individuals may be more or
Species. less. It may be lost so far im appareme
unlikenesses, that other beings of a different species
may come closer to the type, in appearance, than
organisms of really the same species; as in all
classes of things we see that extremes touch, or
even overlap one another. In biology, it is a lke-
ness indeed that determines the species; but it is a
The Terms, Species, Race. 51
radical and primary likeness, one so deep as to be
tested by nothing less than a deep-seated physio-
logical-or vital function, which of course is a radical
quality. All physiological qualities are deeper than
morphological proportions, or anatomical structure;
these latter do not exist but for the former; exter-
nal proportions and structure and the organs of
life do not exist, but for the vital or physiological
functions to be performed through them. If
there is any precedence between physiological
function and organic structure, it 1s not the organ
that is prior to the function, but the function that
is prior to the structure, and is the reason for its
_ existence.
53. Now, there is a function of reproduction,
whereby a living organism reproduces its kind.
This is a law in every order of living things:
“ Like produces like,” s¢mle generat simile. If that
class only of living beings is called a species, which
can unite and reproduce its kind, you see a physi-
ological quality is referred to, very different from
the external likeness among bottles, which Pro-
fessor Cope offers to define species by; or the
structural likeness between man and the ape,
whereby other Professors suggest that species
should be determined. The power of reproduc-
ing its kind, or generative productiveness, is the
test of species.
54. In biology, they would illustrate the matter
thus. The animal class called the horse has prop-
52 Actual Races in Fitstory.
agated itself from time immemorial. So has the
ass. The mule never yet—perhaps to our great
relief. Horses are a species. So are asses. But
the hybrid mule, which is a cross-breed between
the horse and the ass, is not a species. Hence we
see that organisms can exist without constituting a
species of their own. Others exist, and do make a
perpetual family of their own. While no families
ever pass over from one line of propagation to
another, giving us what 1s called a descent, or trans-
formation of species. ‘This we shall see in biology.
55. The idea of race is much easier to apprehend.
It originates in the fact that every species admits
of varying traits in the individual, as dis-
tinguished from any other of the same
species. Indeed, no two individuals are
in all respects alike. The specific likeness, remaining
common to all,is modified accidentally. Now, these
accidental modifications may keep within certain
normal limits, usual in the species; or they may be
exaggerated or diminished, moving in a positive or
negative direction, outside of a usual area of un-
dulation, observed in that species. So doing, they
become exceptional. And the individual which
bears an exceptional character of this kind is
called a Variety. Should this variety transmit its
peculiar modifications to other individuals, by way
of descent, there results a line of posterity marked
with an hereditary divergence from the common
type. Com
parison,
he has never seen occur, the formation £rndition,
of species out of mere varieties, or races. ee
: ‘ : 2 egging the
So the point to be explained is gratuitous; Question.
and the hypothesis assumed to explain
it is equally so; nay, more so, for the natural selec-
tion, which he invokes to explain it, only tells, ac-
cording to his own observation, in the opposite
direction. Still he sets up his hypothesis that
natural selection had formed different species
when artificial breeding had formed only different
races. Here he commits a fallacy in analogy,
likening two things to one another there where
precisely they are seen to be different. While one
process of breeding is seen to select and form races,
96 Species; or, Darwinism.
and the other forms none at all, he argues about
both alike as being each a process of selecting, and —
calls both “selection.” Unless it be that he com-
mits the error of mere verbal equivocation, when
he uses the same term, “selection,” for things so
entirely different,—one process of breeding being
but a chance result of chance combinations, the
other a result aimed at by man through combi-
nations designed to reach it. In either of these
alternatives, you haveasophism illustrated. Thirdly,
he commits the fallacy of an inverted comparison.
For, comparing the two kinds of breeding together,
he should have concluded that, as man’s artificial
selection had not formed different species, still less
could the blind, mechanical operation of nature do
so... This is the argument of likelihood, @ majori ad
minus: what was the more likely did not occur,
therefore neither could the less likely. In the face
of the obvious facts, he infers the opposite, that
perhaps blind, natural selection brought all exist-
ing species into being. Fourthly, having entered
on this path, he will proceed on it with all the
pomp of abounding observation and experiment
pleasantly described, which in the premises is but
another fallacy, that of misguided and misleading
erudition, .
That leads to bewilder and dazzles to blind.
Whatever he says henceforth will have the air of
induction, to establish the point to be proved. He
will describe facts of natural history; he will por-
Six Fallacies. 97
tray the action of the environment, and the condi-
tions of life; he and the Darwinians will show that
a number of facts established in the comparative
study of organic species are just as they should be,
if species were descended from one another. Hence,
fifthly, one hypothesis will be made on demand to
fit into another; and a huge system of hypotheses
will grow round—what? to prove what? He has
not defined in nature the ground of the original
question—what a species is? and whether there is‘a
single derivative species existing, as a matter of fact,
to lend some color to the question and hypothesis
which he suggests! So that it is a system of
gratuitous hypotheses, gratuitous because uncalled
for by any facts, and gratuitous because unproved
by the subsequent hypotheses. Wherefore, sixthly,
it is not surprising that, besides being gratuitous,
the system should elaborately be only begging the
question which it pretends to prove, and begging
for new hypotheses to prove it. The fecundity of
this school, in devising something newer still to
prove what is very new, seems a happy illustration in
logic of what I quoted before, das /mmerwerden des
Neuen, “the ever becoming of the new;” and in-
deed it is a process which, if it once has a reason for
beginning, need never be checked by any sufficient
reason for ending. Every day we are witnessing
new phases of its evolution, 7eternel devenir, in
logic as well as elsewhere. And as to the materials
on which Mr. Darwin’s erudition expands at large,
98 Species; or, Darwinism.
variability, laws of correlation, permanent char-
acterization of species, use and non-use, struggle
for existence, survival of the fittest,—some small
portion of them are substantial matter of obser-
vation, others are plausible, others are not so. But
they prove nothing in his theory, since logically
there is nothing to prove. Hence the pertinent
remark of the German scientist, Wigand, that Dar-
win has done nothing but “wrap a theory up in
facts;”’ leaving us, I suppose, to unpack the bundles,
eliminate the smuggled theory, and reassort the
facts as they should be. 3
107. He was quite alive however to the difficulty
arising from the true definition of species (No. 51,
52), that by which the physiological test of it is de-
termined, and which weshalltake up at once. How
he endeavors to elude it, we shall then record.
108. To resume our definition then, the term
species, like other terms such as genera, tribes,
families, orders, might be taken to designate classes,
assorted for the sake of convenience. We defined
it on a former occasion most strictly, following
therein the advice of Paul Broca, as quoted approv-
ingly by Otis T. Mason of the Smithsonian Insti-
tute: “ Let everything have a name; and let it have
only one; and let that name designate only one
thing.” We noticed before how the fallacy of
equivocation was committed with this very term,
species (No. 51). Following M. de Quatrefages, we
formulated a definition or description to this effect,
Likeness, Filiation, Heredity. 99
that a species was a collection of organic individuals
more or less resembling one another, in their external
aspect, or internal structure; productive in their
unions among themselves, so that they perpetuate
the same collection in nature, by generating other
individuals of the same kind; and one of the conse-
quences thereof is, that originally all can have de-
scended from one primitive pair, identical in kind
with themselves.
tog. In this definition you have divers elements.
There is that of likeness, whereby they Likes.
resemble one another more or less. Filiation,
There is that of filiation, whereby the aan
members of the group, or the posterity spoken of as
continuing the same collection in nature, are the off-
spring of their predecessors in the same class.
There is heredity, whereby the group perpetuates cer-
tain qualities, having received them by the process
of generation, that is to say, by proceeding as
living beings from living beings in the same likeness
of nature.
110. Such classes as these are what the term,
species, strictly taken, is meant to designate. Now
does scientific induction show that such classes
really exist in nature? Itdoes. Nearly one hun-
dred and fifty thousand are enumerated in the ani-
mal world alone. The individuals composing any
such class may differ in form, shape, size, features;
but they remain identical in a certain natural ca-
pacity for uniting among themselves, and perpetuat-
100 Species; or, Darwinism.
ing their kind by fertile generation. This one
physiological attribute common to the members of
a species reveals an essential likeness among them
all, one deeper than proportion or structure, than >
morphology or anatomy. It may not be patent to
the eye: it may not be discernible with the help of
the measure or scales... Yet consider, Hie jee
parents with respect to the offspring. Even suppos-
- ing the likeness between them is not very apparent,
still it must be there, according to the law that
“Like begetteth like,” and “No one gives what he
has not got.” 1 If the. parents give, it 1s what they.
have got that they give; and in every order in which
they give, in anatomy, morphology, physiology.
The resemblance passes down from the beings pro-
ducing to the beings produced, as the old philo-
sophical definition of generation clearly enunciates:
“ The process of a living being from a living being,
unto a likeness of nature.” Consider, secondly, the
parents themselves. Suppose that previously the
likeness between them was obscure. Yet, from the
moment they produce an offspring common to both,
that offspring is like to them, and they must be like
one another; according to the mathematical prin-
ciple, that things which are equal to the same are
equal to one another; and this, albeit nobody knew
of it before, perhaps because their color or stature
was different, or their origin, their antecedents or
concomitants generally. They were never different
species, if they are found to be capable of fertile
Specific Likeness. IOI
unions. Science may have mistaken the case, as
science has yet many a mistaken case to rectify.
Not so nature.
111. By the very necessities of the case then, all
the individuals of one lineage are endowed with an
essential identity, as a family heritage. It shows
itself first and radically in the physiological function
we speak of, that of mutual fertility for perpetuating
their kind. Secondly, it does not fail to reveal
itself in form or structure, notwithstanding many
variations. For, though individuals and races are
quite susceptible of these variations, whether mi-
nute, as Mr. Darwin generally supposes, or abrupt, ©
wide and even monstrous, it 1s noteworthy that
such as diverge most from the middle, normal type
of a species, are the least stable in maintaining
themselves distinct: they tend to fall back and re-
sume the more ordinary type. Hence, as we saw in
the observations made by Mr. Darwin upon pigeons,
the races left to themselves in a wild state did not
vary much; they differed only in shades of color.
That was the operation of natural selection, or of
the native conditions of life; while it was only man’s
interference and watchful supervision which availed
to make races diverge widely, to keep them apart
and unmixed; so that, as Mr. Darwim says, the 150
races, differentiated by man’s artificial selection,
would in form and appearance claim to be
classified, not only in different species, but in three
or four different genera. Some species show less
102 Species, or, Darwinism.
plasticity than others in yielding to selection and
forming varieties, as Mr. Darwin observed in the
case of the goose. But, in general, so great is the
power of scientific breeding, or artificial selection,
that, as Lord Somerville remarks of the sheep-
breeders in particular, “it would seem as though
they had chalked out upon the wall a form perfect
in itself, and then had given it existence.”
112. What we are saying here is so fully borne
__ out and developed further by Dr. G. Ro-
Three Objec-
finns 0 manes, that we cannot do better than
Natural refer here to his falling out with Mr. Dar-
Selection.
win. This extreme Darwinian had, so
far as we ever observed, only turned the whole
force of his scientific journal, Vature, with all the
tactics of which he was capable, towards maintain-
ing, defending, propounding, explaining Darwinism,
with a zeal more than discreet and enthusiastic,
rather fanatical than scientific. Yet about a couple
of years ago he proposed a new theory of his own,
called Physiological Selection, saying querulously of
Mr. Darwin’s theory: “ Natural Selection has been
made to pose as a theory of the origin of species,
whereas in point of fact itis nothing of the kind.”
He says there are three cardinal difficulties, which
stand in the way of natural selection being considered
a theory of the origin of species. Reduced to a
brief compass, the difficulties stand thus:—
113. The first is with respect to mutual fertility;
a huge difference exists here between species and
(pee a lal
eee
Darwinians against Darwin. 103
racial varieties. If species are only the modifica-
tions of organic types produced by nat- ity
: 1. Sterility
ural selection, how have they come to be pegneeies.
mutually sterile, when even greater mod- \
ifications of such types, produced under our very
eyes by artificial selection, do so generally continue
fertile? There seems to be only one answer, that
the said natural species were never produced by
natural selection.
114. In the second place, you suppose that uni-
form conditions of existence may have acted for
long periods of time on the physiological , asi. ana
system of certain varieties, soas to make other
them mutually sterile, and thus create Accidents.
our present species. Such a supposition will not
stand. .This sterility, to be of any use in the theory,
would have to arise at once when the variety or
race was just beginning to develop; it would have
had to protect the variety from intercrossing with
the original form, which otherwise would swamp it
forthwith. So we are to make the gratuitous sup-
position, that sterility arose all at once, at the pre-
cise moment it was wanted, and just by chance.
If you will insist upon supposing again (hypothesis
upon hypothesis, which is true Darwinism!) that
uniform conditions of life happened to act upon a
sufficient number of individuals, during the same
interminable periods of time and ever in the same
way; and effectually guarded the new develop-
ment, and happened to prevent intercourse with the
104 Species, or, Darwinism.
original form, and so forth, bringing about the actual
sterility in some way or other—all this is such an
assumption for you to make, that, if you must make
it to meet the difficulties, you only increase the dif-
ficulties by doing so; andthe whole theory becomes
as desperate as the assumption, for which “ even the
chapter of accidents has no room.”
115. Thirdly, utility, or the consideration of fit-
ness, is the great mainstay of the natural
selection theory, and of the survival of
the fittest. But pray tell us, what utilities are to be
found in the differences between many of the
species? Is there any utility about them? They
show on the surface of things only small and trivial
differences of form and color, and meaningless de-
tails of structure. If natural selection proceeds by
the survival of the fittest, there is very little fitness,
and still less of the fittest, apparent in such distinc-
tions. You suggest that, after all, these distinctions
may be of a disguised utility. Butthat is to reason
round and round in a circle—the czrculus vitiosus of
logic. These species survive because they are the
fittest. And why are they the fittest? We do not
know, except that otherwise they would not survive!
“Tt is certainly too large a demand on our faith in
natural selection to appeal to the argument from
ignorance, when the facts require the appeal to be
made over so large a proportion of instances.” So
far Dr. Romanes.
116. To these words we have only to add, that
3. Utilities.
Darwin's Answers. More Fallacies. 105
if “ rudiments,” as Mr. Darwin calls them, are tobe
claimed as a proof of natural selection and survival
of the fittest, we shall yet see how very little any
principle of utility could have operated to produce
such utterly useless parts as rudiments are seen to
be (No. 129-131).
117. And Mr. Darwin,—how does he forearm him-
self against the inevitable and insoluble 4. pa mwins
difficulties which loomed up before his Manner of
theory even in those times, and which now “4nswerins-
are made to stand out clearly around the whole ho-
rizon of science, thanks to the reaction against his
aggressive speculation? His defence is quite char-
acteristic. I call your closest attention to it, not
because it is hard to catch, or rare, but because it is
precious. He speaks thus in his “ Variation of
Plants and Animals:”—“ Since species do not owe
their mutual sterility to the accumulative action of
natural selection (so he granted the point before-
hand), and a great number of considerations show
us that they do not owe it to a creative act (this is
an argument ad odium, to excite the anti-religious
prejudice against another theory), we ought to admit
that it has been produced incidentally during their
gradual formation (this is begging the question
which he ought to: prove, fetitio principiz), and is
connected with some unknown modification of their
organization.” (This last is such an ineptitude,
that, instead of dignifying it with the name of any
106 Species; or, Darwinism.
sophism in logic, we may prefer the term of Mr. St.
George Mivart’s, and call it “a puerility.”’)
118. Elsewhere, not knowing how to deal with
the fact that mongrels or cross-breeds between
races are always fertile, while species remain so
sterile, a fact of observation as big as the world, an
argument of complete induction which we have
ascertained, and we know, Mr. Darwin: placidly
remarks: “ We do not know whether the mongrels |
of wild races may not be sterile.”
119. Postto absurdo, sequitur guodtibet, said the old
axiom: ‘“ Admit an absurdity once, and anything
will follow.” Make one absurd supposition, and
there is no freak of logic which is too much for you,
no figure or curve of fancy which you cannot exe-
cute. Put up one hypothesis which will not stand,
and, as in other questionable avocations, your
genius and the best of memories will be taxed for
twenty others more and more deftly contrived to
keep the first one up, some way or other.
120. “Unknown!” and therefore we must grant
it! Or, as he says of the missing links in the chain
of beings which geology should yield up, but does
not, ‘‘ They may now be in a metamorphosed con-
dition, or buried in the ocean.” It is like Profes-
sor Haeckel’s assurance when, tm the gravest of ar-
guments, as that of biogenesis, he requires such and
such admissions to be made “ for the most weighty
general reasons;” or that the existence of some un-
)
known animal, the sozoura, must be granted, since
Four more Fallactes. 107
the proof of its existence arises from the necessity
of its being there! The philosopher, Mr. Herbert
Spencer, besprinkles his pages with this kind of
formulas. It is all begging the question, assuming
what has to be proved. But then the assumptions
once made are taken as the basis of subsequent
“demonstrations.” And here, with Mr. Darwin,
his point is not proved; it is positively disproved.
. The answer is: No, let us say we do not know any-
thing about it, and therefore grant it!
121. Hence we have a museum of paralogisms and
sophisms in the modern school of science.
We may note four or five more, in addi- era aun
tion to the half-dozen already instanced. Induction,
In the first place, chance, possibility, or Sait
their own personal convictions are taken
by these scientists to be convincing reasons for
others. Chance is an essential element in Darwin-
ism, for this theory excludes anything like a princi-
ple of evolution upwards; it posits only mechanical
adaptation to whatever conditions of environment
may occur. Possibility, a term oftentimes denoting
the impossible, is taken as a demonstration; and,
once used, it is thenceforth kept before the mind
by a suitable term; as we now see the term “ evolu-
tion” on every side, or the term “ simian,” ape-like,
or of apish affinities; as if these things had been
proved once for all to be facts, and now needed only
aterm torecallthem. This is only taking for granted
the thing to be proved. Or,secondly,the assumption
108 Species, or, Darwinism.
of having proved the point is borrowed from another
side; when, finding things to suit their anticipations,
the scientists argue that evolution must be true
because the facts are shown to be in entire accord-
ance with it. This is what Professor Huxley calls
the demonstrative evidence of evolution. And it
would be soif all the facts were shown to be in
perfect accordance with the theory, as all the celes-
tial phenomena are in keeping with the Copernican
system, which is consequently no longer an hypoth-
esis but a thesis. But not so, if only some facts
agree, while others and many others contradict the
theory. Then the hypothesis is disproved; and to
take it as demonstrated on the strength of some
coincidences is a fallacy of sophistical induction,
like that which we noted in geology (No. 16). And,
thirdly, here comes in the use of another sophism,
when those very facts, cited as being in perfect ac-
cord with the theory, are so indeed, but are in
entire accord with a different and contradictory
theory. Thus, Professor Huxley finds his demon-
strative evidence of evolution in the series of fossil
horses, representing different stages of evolution up
to the recent, modern form. In the fourth of his
American lectures on the subject, he shows the
fossil forms, orohippus, mesohippus, muohippus,
hipparion, pliohippus, all verging in the same direc-
tion, and finally the series terminates in the modern
horse. This is just, he says, what evolution would
require. One may answer: But it is just what
Four more Fallactes. 109
Leibnitz and Linnzus would require, who held the
principle that xzatura non facit saltum, ‘‘ Nature is
continuous.” It is also what St. Thomas Aquinas
and Aristotle require; for the scholastic principle
is, supremum infimt attingit infimum supremt, “The
extremes of different orders touch one another.”
These philosophers did not sustain evolution in the
sense of Haeckel or Huxley; yet they can claim for
the genuine philosophy of evolution the argument
drawn from the series of horses, and return thanks
for it to Professors Huxley and Marsh. When
therefore, at this late date, a scientist claims the
argument for his new and latest theory, he is reason-
ing post hoc, ergo propter hoc, on account of evolution
because the discovery of the fossil forms happens
to date after the theory, and to fall in with it.
That was a post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument, which
Lord Bacon pleasantly records as used by the
house-fly; perched on a chariot wheel, which
was whirling along and raising clouds of dust,
the fly said complacently: “See what a dust I
raise!’ —a sophism quite familiar to us nowadays.
Fourthly, not very different from this is the line
which Mr. Darwin follows when he fills his books
with descriptions and narratives of what nature
does. And, having described the facts, he assumes
that he has explained the cause; and in the light of
his theory he calls the description, “natural selec-
tion.” There isno harm in calling your description
anything you like; just as Mr. Spencer is free to
110 Species; or, Darwinism.
define evolution any way he likes. But ‘it is not
well to give the name of your definition or the
name of your description to nature herself and her
processes, if the facts do not answer the name.
That would be the fallacy of assigning the wrong
cause or no cause, instead of the right one, zon-
causa pro causa. But enough of logical fallacies for
the present. |
122. If any one should like to see the working of
a true cause and its true effects, let him take that
é idea of species (No.108) which we have
Deduction :—
1. Uninters reported as truly drawn from the facts by
rupted a process of strict induction; and, revers-
Descent. : :
ing the process to one of deduction, let
him look out upon the order of nature, and see the
organic world resulting as in exact accordance with
that idea of species. He will observe three philo-
sophical corollaries proceeding therefrom, and going
far towards accounting for all the unities and varie-
ties discernible in organic nature, as well as for
many of the errors discernible in natural science.
In the first place, he will see that descent by gen-
eration implies fertility in the parents, as well as an
essential similarity between them. It also implies
similarity between the parents and the offspring,
simile generat simile, “ Like begetteth like.” So the
offspring will be fertile among themselves; since
that is included in the essential likeness to their
fertile parents. Thus then descent imples con-
tinued fertility; and fertility secures continued
Species and Logical Deduction. It
descent; and the species goes on indefinitely
throughout time, extending over the globe. Retro-
spectively also the species must have subsisted thus
with respect to likeness, to fertility, and uninter-
rupted descent, from the time one primitive pair
produced this collection which originated in them.
Whence did that pair originate? Darwinism does
not say, beyond suggesting that there were four or
five original stocks from which all species started.
Evolution, in the wider sense, must go far beyond.
And though, as we heard before (No. 98), even such
ardent evolutionists as Haeckel and Vogt are now
reduced to admitting separate origins for the princi-
pal species, still genuine evolution must go on boldly
to affirm that all organic life sprang from non-life;
and, if necessary for the purpose, it must affirm
spontaneous generation. But of that after a while
(No. 154-160).
123. In the meantime we must take note of a
second corollary, with respect to the essential like-
ness, which, as the axiom says, is the 4 pasties
ruling attribute of a species, szmzle stmilz and Varieties
gaudet, “Like rejoiceth in like.” That ‘™ Nature.
likeness consists first and foremost in a unity of
function, by means of which it is inclusively fertile
and exclusively sterile. It sets up specific barriers,
within which it includes all individuals and varieties
of the one descent, while it excludes all of any other
descent. If we look out over the organic world at
large, we see these specific barriers maintaining all
112 Species; or, Darwinism.
the unities and varieties which characterize organic
beings, and making up of them all, in their species
and genera, a beautiful world; inasmuch as, exclu-
sively viewed, the species are different, are out-
side of one another; precisely because, inclusively
viewed, their physiological characters remain con-
stant, and keep each just what it is. There is in
them what Mr. Darwin chooses to call a “law of
permanent characterization,” keeping a species per-—
manent in its characters. |
124. Indeed, beyond the species, throughout all
the genera which comprise them, there is visible a
more general likeness, a still wider unity, in func-
tion and form, in the elements whether anatomi-
cal, chemical or mechanical,—a unity so marked
and express, that the schools of evolution, struck
by the analogies throughout all nature, are prone
to see nothing else there but a solid unity, without
the varieties; or, if they will see the varieties, pay
such exclusive court to the unity as to reason that
all must have come from one, if they are so bound
up in one plan. So far the reasoning is correct;
because, as the axiom says, multa non reducuntur
ad unum nist per unum, “Many things are not
brought to unity but by a unit,’—a unit in the
design and in the designer. But they proceed
otherwise, and infer that all must have come from
one stock, descending thence as in a single family
or species. No doubt, if they were of a single
family descent, they would be bound up in a unity
Species and Logical Deduction. rT3.
of likeness. But it does not follow, wéce versa,
that if all are of one make, therefore they are
all of one descent. Or else, metal, a stone, a house
ought to be of one descent with ourselves, since we
all have weight, are impenetrable, and the like.
There would be a fallacy in drawing such a conse-
quence.
125. No, the true statement of this general unity
may well be made in the words of the Duke of Ar-
gyll, on the Reign of Law: “Never in all the
changes of time has there been any alteration
throughout the whole scale of organic life, in the
fundamental principles of chemical and mechanical
adjustment, on which the great animal functions of
respiration, circulation and reproduction have been
provided for.” And as to the explanation of such
a unity, if it can be given without recourse to a de-
sign, a designer, and provider, let such explanation
be brought forward. But I think we have seen
such an attempted explanation put forward at
its best in the course of these twenty-five years,
elaborated with the combined efforts which all the
schools of natural science have made in civilized
countries, and with the help of all the marvellous
appliances for observation and experiment now un-
der their control. And what the outcome of their
work happens to be we are just examining, with a
slight degree of pardonable curiosity.
126. A third corollary to be noted here is this,
that you will look in vain for such a definition of
114 Species; or, Darwinism.
species anywhere else save in a genuine,well-ground-
8. A plea for ©d science of biology. Itis not the out-
Genuine come nor the subject-matter of medical
Nema observation, for this regards primarily the
material human subject, as such, not any species in
its subject. It is not familiar to the paleontolo-
gist, who has nothing else to deal with but the bare
elements or proportions of fossils or old bones. It
is true that, speaking from amidst the narrow re-
sources of his own specialty, Professor Cope said
to the American Association at Minneapolis: “ Bio-
logical science is a case of analysis and forms.
What the scales are to the chemist and physicist,
the rule and measure are to the biologist. It is a
question of dimensions.”’ But he was confounding
biology with his own department of paleontology,
and so missed the point of the question. For the
question of species is evidently a matter of life, not
of death. And, if he meant to apply the rule and
measure to the things of hfe, we should like to
know the linear dimensions of a live instinct, or
the cubic root of heredity and filiation. Finally,
species thus described does not come in the way of
entomologists, conchologists, etc., who classify what
they call species by purely external characters, and
treat their insects or shell-fish, even when alive, as
they would treat fossils, which are more than de-
funct. The question is centred upon a physiolog-
ical quality, that called reproductive fertility. And,
compared with physiology, all structure and form
Miracles and Creative Acts. IIS
are but superficial, resultant attributes, far from
being deep enough to determine the order, kind and
beauty of the organic kingdoms. Even outside, in —
the inorganic world, you will find something deeper
than form and structure. You can see it in the
crystal, and in the commonest chemical elements.
How much more in the unity, totality and economy
of a living being! .
127. Take, for instance, yellow phosphorus and
red phosphorus. To the chemist they are an
identical element, though he recognizes that the
same element must be in different states. Quite
so; for the element as yellow phosphorus is an
active poison, while as red it is inert. There must
be something here besides what chemistry weighs
in its scales; and chemistry no less than biology
becomes philosophical, in its endeavor to explain it.
Again, why should piperine, asks Professor Tidy,
be the poison of all poisons to keep you awake, and
morphine the poison of all poisons to put you to
sleep, although to the chemist these two bodies are
of identical composition?
128. Oh, to the truly philosophical mind what a
revelation runs through all nature of a design and
a designer playing at all times, playing 4. wiracu-
in the world, delighting to reveal himself 1ous in
and give occupation to the children of *en¢e
men! All that we know in every range and sweep
of nature is but the smallest part of what remains
to break upon us in number, weight and measure,
116 Species; or, Darwinism.
in species, form and order. Ah! but miracles!
exclaims materialistic science. Miracles! re-echoes
naturalism. “ True science eliminates the super-
natural from nature; it cannot admit creative acts
or miracles!” This is all an appeal to prejudice,
and is called in logic the sophism ad odium. ‘The
mention of God creates aversion in the bosoms of
some men; and, if a revolution in science means
the dethronement of His ancient dynasty, then
welcome the revolution! But if in the same per-
sons’ minds there is something worse than a sin, if
there is such a thing as a blunder, I would beg to
submit that here there is a blunder in the facts and
in the logic. In no sound theory of the world’s ma-
terial development or evolution, of which some three
or four might be sketched, is there any question of
creation, creative acts or miracles. After the first
creation of matter, there is only the normal action of
a Supreme Cause’s administration, or government;
and that is not creative, nor miraculous. If anything
were miraculous in the development of nature, it
would be species evolving by descent out of ances-
tors or elements that never contained them, if the
nature of the case admits of no such production.
This kind of evolution would be the miraculous in
very deed. And M. Ferriére, an evolutionist of the
_most materialistic type, turns round sharply upon
Haeckel for maintaining the miraculous, and the
absurdly miraculous. Professor Haeckel had said in
a discourse delivered at Paris: “ Whoever does not
Rudiments. ei?
believe in spontaneous generation (life out of non-
life), admits miracles.” Ferriére of Haeckel’s own
school answers in his book on Darwinism: “As if
the formation of living beings, by a crystallization
of carbon or lime, were not a miracle just as absurd
as” creation—but, after italicizing the absurdity of
Haeckel, he expresses the idea of creation in terms
not unworthy of the school and its ancestry. Pro-
fanity, it would seem, is included by some of these
men among their scientific credentials, to commend
them to their kind. But, if that is only asin which
they rather affect, there is something which is worse
in their eyes, and they seem unable to avoid it—
that is blundering. Without however pursuing any
such psychological rudiment back to its origin in
their moral structure, I prefer to hurry on to a char-
acteristic argument of theirs in the present question
of species, and with it to finish the definition of
species which has occupied us thus far. I refer to
what Mr. Darwin has called rudiments.
129. It is found that in many an organism there
appear certain local structures quite useless as they
now stand. Man has certain muscles
for moving his ears; but he never moves
them now; they seem to have lost some pristine am-
plitude, when the muscles might have been useful.
The great finny monster called the whale has imper-
fect legs, or similar structures of motor significance;
so has the boa; but these beasts never walk now.
And though the young whale in the foetus state has
Rudiments.
118 Species, or, Darwinism.
teeth, yet the teeth are reabsorbed, andthe whale
does without them. So too with rudimentary wings
in the ostrich, etc. Now, says Mr. Darwin, in order
to understand the presence of such organs, we have
only to suppose that some remote ancestor possessed
in a perfect state the parts which are at present re-
duced to this condition. Such a supposition coin-
cides with the descent of species. Hence the ex-
istence of rudiments corroborates that theory.
130. This argument merits a remark or two, as to
its matter and form. Could anything show more
The Matter of Clearly that true Darwinism is not a sys-
this Argu- tem of progressive evolution in any sense
i whatever? It is only a plan of adapta-
tions, of self-adjustment to circumstances, in any
direction, whether towards better or worse, or
neither way; a blind, mechanical variability, hav-
ing within itself no principle of development to-
wards a higher life and higher species. In fact,
such is really the Darwinism of Darwin. ‘Taking
this instance of rudiments on Darwin’s own presen-
tation of them, we find that a locomotive apparatus,
which no one will fail to recognize as very useful
to a whale if stranded on a sand-bank, is lost to
the monster, one knows not why—a case apparently
of mere degeneracy; and yet that unexplained loss
fits in perfectly well with Darwinism. Certainly
there is no progressive evolution here. Nor is the
locomotive apparatus lost totally; so it appears
doubly useless, as well in what is gone, as in what
ua
ctf)
Rudiments. 119
remains, encumbering the organism as it does with
the silent reproach of the better times that were!
That is not evolution. Why, too, on the Darwin-
ian presentation and hypothesis, should the animal
lose its incisors, when once it had them in its
mouth? They might be vastly more useful than
mere whalebone for much of the food which was
yet to come into its jaws. As to the matter then
of this argument, there is no upward evolution
conspicuous in it.
131. And, as to the manner or form of the argu-
ment, there is rather a suspicion of downward evo-
lutioninit. Heuillustrates these obscure,
functionless organs, not by what is clear
and substantiated as matter of fact, but by what
is obscurer still, the full legs which no science has
ever yet verified in the whale or the boa, the long
asinine or apish ears, which no one has yet seen in
man. “Ah! but—” a well-intentioned scientist
answers—‘‘ wherever rudimentary organs exist in
one type, they are sure to be found in their normal
state in a neighboring type!” The reply to this
argument is very simple: it is merely to ask, what
does that prove? We do not want these crude
premises with only implied consequences, after the
style of Mr. Darwin, who wraps up a theory in
crude facts, and leaves it there. We should like to
know distinctly what does that argument prove;
and to see that no fallacy creeps into the conse-
quence. If the gentleman desires it, we shall give
Its Manner.
120 Species; or, Darwinism.
a somewhat analogous argument, and draw the con-
sequence clearly, in the terms of Carl Vogt: then
he will see what his own premises prove. In Eu-
rope and America, there are two parallel and inde-
pendent lines of horses coming down from remote
geological ages. These races of horses are of like
structure. Consequently, by evolution, they should
have had a common origin; just as our friend is re-
ferring the rudimentary organ in one type to a
common origin with the perfect organ in another,
simply because they are alike. Vogt affirms that
the facts are quite otherwise. The more Gnesi
cedes into geological ages, among the fossils of
these horses, the more does he find the races reced-
ing from one another; so that far from having di-
verged, on leaving a common ancestor in the past,
they have converged from different origins, and
merely assumed a common type in the present. I
quote these observations from the Revue des Ques-
tions Sctentifiques for April, 1887, under the head,
Monophyletism; and they are useful not only for
gauging this rudimentary argument, but also for
suggesting a fitting reflection on Professor Huxley’s
series of horses, and “‘ their demonstrative evidence
of evolution” (No. 121). The whole argumentation
on the rudiments is either that of a false analogy,
or the fallacy of explaining the unknown and ob-
scure by what is more so; pretending to prove and
not doing so. Still it passes current in science as
a proof good enough for Darwinism,
Evolution and Degeneration. 121
132. And not for Darwinism alone. It is only »
fair to state, that evolution of the wider, higher kind
which introduces into its subject some 5 tion
evolving principle of progress from non- and Degen-
life to life, and from the lowest forms °T#tio™
of cell-life to the highest complex organisms, goes
two ways, and every way, no less than Darwinism;
it goes up and down. The upward form is com-
monly called Evolution; the downward form is
technically styled Catagenesis, or Degeneration.
Hence they are found blended together, and a com-
posite theory is formed of evolution upwards supple-
mented by downward phases of Catagenesis, tharfks
to the genius of Dohrn and Lankester. So that by
combining a tree of ascent with a tree of descent,
one with its roots below in spontaneous generation,
according to Professor Haeckel, and thence shooting
upwards to man, the other with its roots upwards in
consciousness or sensibility, according to Professor
Cope, and thence running down to the amphioxus
and the ascidian, and “ the polar tensions of chem-
ism,” a perfect spectacle is exhibited of the ascent
of species, or descent, or both at the same time,
like a mirage in the desert. Argumentation like
this, in the anatomy of a system, makes it quite as
interesting a specimen for study as the rudimentary
teeth of the foetal whale, or the legs with which the
boa cannot run away, or the wings with which the
ostrich cannot. fly. Provisionally, we might sub-
scribe so far to the Darwinian doctrine of rudi-
122 Species, or, Darwinism.
ments, as to consider this specimen of logic a
rudiment of some better state of philosophy and
thought, which may have graced the hapless scion
in its ancestry. Indeed, stretching our imagination
backward, to use Mr. Tyndall’s happy phrase, “ be-
yond the experimental boundaries,’ we may be
permitted to discern the secret of its birth. And
if so, we cannot fail to see that, child as it must be
with some ancestry or other, possibly at some point
of paleontology it had a noble sire.
We have finished with the idea of species, and
also of race. Having been discursive enough to
think now of closing, we shall add a few words on
the other Darwinian terms, and leave to the next
chapter all that remains of the criticism on Life,
Cells, and Evolution.
133. To finish the terms which occur in the present
question, we may mention that there are cross-
breeds between races, and, in spite of
the natural sterility so often spoken of,
there are cross-breeds between species.
The former, which are abundant in nature, are
called Mongrels; the latter, which are rare, go by
the name of Hybrids.
134. From this it appears that the test of natural
sterility is, as Dr. Romanes puts it, neither abso-
lutely constant, nor constantly absolute. Never-
theless, as a test for the question of the possible ©
descent of species, it remains quite uncompromis-
ing, for all practical purposes. This is brought out
Hybrids and
Mongrels.
rag 'ybrids and their Phenomena. 123
into bold relief by merely reporting the circum-
stances of successful hybridation, or the crossing of
species. In the first place, it is man’s interference
that brings it about. Nature does not affect it;
though there are some native instances reported in
almost every order. M. Suchetet sums them up
in an exhaustive article on the subject, in the num-
ber for iast July of the Revue mentioned before.
Secondly, hybrids are rare. Asto their number in
the state of nature, considering that there are
143,000 species classified among animals by zodlo-
gists, the facts of hybridism which are reported from
every quarter and through every channel, “ might
be multiplied,” says the same authority, “ten tithes
over without acquiring any importance in the ques-
tion.” So they are rare. Thirdly, they are sterile,
as is well known in the case of the mule, which is
the commonest and most uniformly successful ex-
periment of hybridation. It is narrated that Arab
populations, which ought to be better acquainted
with the natural facts of horse, ass and mule than
any other people, have been thrown at times into
the depths of superstitious dread by the report cir-
culating that a mule had been productive. Fourth-
ly, however, hybrids have maintained themselves
for some time in a line of descent; and elaborate
experiments with animals and plants have shown
the phenomena that now come into play. It re-
quires extraordinary care to maintain them at all.
In spite of the care, some of the offspring at each
124 Species, or, Darwinism.
generation revert to one or other of the specific
types which were crossed. Then they never re-
sume the other type, as if they had rejected all par-
ticipation in a mixed specific nature. This is the
phenomenon of Reversion. Others, which do not
revert, throw all calculations about them into a
distressing state of confusion, by showing extra-
ordinary and mutually divergent variations. This
is the phenomenon called Disordered Variation;
and it testifies to the irregularity which has been
put upon nature and which is continued through
man’s interference. Fifthly, there is only one
hope, at length, of the hybrid progeny surviving,
and that is by absolute reversion to one or other
parental type; so that the case, as one of hybrida-
tion, is utterly extinguished. With mongrels (No.
133), on the contrary, the fertility is even increased
by the mixing of races; and, when a distinctive race
has been formed, individuals may still at any time
reproduce as native traits the special characters of
one or other parental race, which originally blended
to form this mongrel new one. Such a reproduc-
tion of ancestral traits is called Atavism.
135. The variability which gives rise to varieties
and races as the result of self-adjustment to the
environment, is not restricted to any single organ,
which adjusts itself in that manner. A proportion-
ate adaptation takes place in other parts also. This
might be understood from what we said before on
acclimatization and naturalization (No. 77, 78),
Use and Non-use. 125
Mr. Darwin has, however, applied a special term,
that of the “law of correlation,” to signify this pro-
portionate adjustment. |
136. Moreover, itis noticed that an organ, if long
unused, can become reduced in weight and some-
what in size; just as by active use it Use and Non-
may become stimulated and developed. "8%
Observation has not shown that any unused organ
becomes a mere rudimentary structure, as if forsooth
non-use or disuse were a morbid affection superven-
ing to destroy such local structure. And, as to the
effects of use, one limit or condition is imposed by
philosophy and common sense; it 1s that a thing
or an organ must be, before it can be used and de-
veloped, or can use and develop itself. Yet Mr.
Darwin introduces the element of non-use, as a
sufficient reason for the disappearance of entire
organs into that condition which he calls rudimen-
“tary, and which we criticized above. And he as-
signs the element of use, as an adequate suggestion
why a local structure should begin to be; because
under the touch and stimulus of environment, the
general organism, that comes to want it, uses it and
works it by minute degrees into existence. Here
you have an instance of the marvelous simplicity
which has charmed the minds of men, and won
them over to Darwinism, with a magic more potent
than logic.
137. But Iam tempted to quote the master of
anatomical science, George Cuvier, who in his
126 Species; or, Darwinism.
Comparative Anatomy speaks thus: “If any one
should be bold enough to assert that a fish, by dint
of standing up continually on dry land, would see
its scales fall away and change into feathers; or
that thus it would become a bird; orif any one
tells us that a quadruped, by dint of squeezing
itself through.narrow ways and stretching itself out
while walking, might change into a serpent, he would
do nothing else but give proof of the most pro-
found ignorance of anatomical science.” And
again, in his discourse on the Revolutions of the
Globe, he instances the dog, which has accompanied
man everywhere, has undergone all kinds of modi-
fications, has in short been subjected to artificial
selection in its fullest sense. Hence the different
races of dogs differ in every conceivable way, as
much, for instance, in their measurements as one
to five; yet, he continues, “in spite of so many and
such great differences, the relations of the bones®
remain the very same, and never does the form of
the teeth differ in any point of consequence.”
» 138. I do not venture to say whether science has
improved on these very peremptory conclusions.
They seem to be admitted now as much as in
Cuvier’s time. A walking animal, it is granted,
cannot be descended from a climbing one. Vogt,
in placing man among the primates, that is, among
the apes, declares without hesitation that the lowest
class of apes have passed the landmark (the com-
mon ancestor) from which, according to evolution,
The Strugele jor Existence. 127
the different types of this family should have origi-
nated and diverged. And, in the most recent mor-
phological speculations, I observe that it is pro-
nounced avery unsafe principle “to make the apex
of any one group in nature the base of the next,”
as if one type of anatomy could change into an-
other. So that no amount of use can originate
organs, and, still less, species; no matter what
incantation of environment Mr. Darwin employs to
invite them into existence, or what “law of perma-
nent characterization’”’ he invokes to fix a species,
when once he has conjured it into being.
139. Finally, there remain three terms, the strug-
gle for existence, the survival of the fittest, and
natural selection. Mr. Darwin takes up
an idea already familiar in the English
school of political economy, and he
reckons that every kind of animal and plant tends
to multiply itself indefinitely, according to the ratio
of a geometrical progression; just as Malthus had
supposed in his theory of population as regards
the human species. From this Mr. Darwin infers
that every organic individual is put through a
severe “struggle for existence,” so that only the
requisite few survive; just as Malthus had inferred
that preventive and repressive measures should be
employed to keep down human population. In ,
point of fact, Mr. Wallace tells us that the sum
total of animal and vegetable population remains
almost stationary.
Struggle for
Existence.
q
128 Species; or, Darwinism.
140. It will be useful however for both schools
to observe that, in sound philosophy, no such sup-
position can be admitted, as that the economy of
nature involves a perpetual and universal struggle,
either physically among the brutes, or morally
among men. Every problem which nature proposes
she solves herself; and what is overdone or under-
done in one direction, she makes compensation for
in another. There is no need of interposing with
such fictitious elements as a system of repression
to control, or an imaginary struggle to interpret,
what in the last resort is. but the smoothly rolling
economy of nature. A struggle for existence, if
the words are taken to mean what they say, inti-
mates a state of violence; and universal organic
nature cannot be undergoing habitual violence.
Hence the supposition implied in the meaning of
the term, struggle for existence, must from a philo-
sophical point of view be simply denied. |
141. But as far as the term is taken to signify
that endeavor on the part of organic beings to ad-
just themselves, as best they can, to their condi-
‘tions of life, the idea is true and real, without being
really a struggle. In this true sense, the play of
such a factor, which is otherwise called acclimati-
cation or naturalization, is only a small element in
the problem, as to which individuals will actually
survive. It expresses only, in the organic king-
doms generally, what we have already considered
(No. 77-81), how nature’ tends to discriminate in
Lhe Economy of Nature. 129
favor of the better qualified races, and less favor-
ably with regard to the rest. Some of the less pro-
vided ones may even be eliminated; but it is all a
matter of races, and never touches the question of
species. It may exterminate a species; but it can-
not create a new one, or transform an old one.
142. All that is only one factor in the problem.
There are others besides. Perhaps it is not fair to
ask many questions of an ill-digested
hypothesis; or we should lke to inquire
what possible application can this idea of
a struggle for existence meet with universally in na-
ture, when there are entire orders of beings evidently
meant, not so much to exist themselves, as to keep
others in existence by being eaten up continually;
and therefore, as useful means to support the higher
life of others, the individuals of these lower orders
are multiplied in numbers beyond the grasp of or-
dinary mathematics. Without pretending to deter-
mine the rank of herrings, for instance, in the scale
of being, we may consider the shoals of them that
are provided for the whales and other big feasters
eeamc ceep. Their struggle to exist, if existence
means fitness to do their work in life, must be to
come forward and get themselves eaten up. Con-
sider the spectacle on the banks of Newfoundland.
All nature there, above and below water, is de-
scribed as a system of gigantic depredation. Near
the shore, the smaller classes of fish, such as can
be netted in a pocket-handkerchief, are swallowed
The Economy
of Nature.
130 Species; or, Darwinism.
up by the next larger; and so on out to sea, where
the full-grown cod-fish les in wait to devour his
brethren and cousins in every degree, and literally
eats his way through a hundred miles into shore.
Upon the cod again, as well as upon the smaller
fry which he pursues, rushes the greedy shark, the
‘* bottle-nose,” a small species of whale, the “ pot-
head,’ the porpoise, and all the big marauders of
the ocean. Or, again, consider those other orders,
the microbes, which are not meant principally to
be eaten, but rather to eat up and eat out of or-
ganic existence all bodies of higher complex struct-
ure, as soon as dead. ‘These, if not quickly disin-
tegrated, would keep large quantities of matter
locked up, so to say, and lying idle in a dead state,
instead of being out and free in physical circulation.
Nature sets on them the microbe, multiplying any
single one of these microscopic animals at the rate
of a million millions in a short season. Now what
does the struggle for existence mean among them ?
To come forward and eat? Yes; but then they
die, countless billions of them, with the thing they
eat; and nothing alive remains of either. The ele-
ments of all are circulating freely again, in air or
water, to provide for the general life of other spe-
cles in creation, which need those same elements.
It is not precisely a struggle here for the individ-
ual’s own life. It is a work going on undera higher
principle in nature, which is providing for one or-
der by means of another; just as in the human
The Survival of the Fittest. 131
body there are organs generating secretions, which
they themselves do not need and cannot use, but
which other parts of the system require. So Dr.
Foster remarks of the function which produces
glycogen: “ Obviously the organ makes this not for
itself, but for other parts of the body; it labors to
produce, but they make use of, the precious mate-
rial, which thus becomes a bond of union between
the two.” Is anything more desired to show a de-
sign over things, than that one should labor, and,
if you like, “ struggle’ and perhaps die in the work,
while another reaps the fruit; and that all the while
the economy of nature should roll on indefectibly
and smoothly? Mr. Darwin does not understand
things thus: he means a struggle for the individual’s
own existence. In that case, whether you take itas
struggling or as simply living for the individual’s
own solitary good, there is but a limited play of
such individualism in the divinely contrived course
of nature.
143. Equally restricted is the meaning which un-
derlies the other phrase of Mr. Darwin’s, “the sur-
vival of the fittest.” This survival
should mean for his purpose, as it cer-
tainly does mean for the evolution which
moves on parallel lines with his, the origin of higher
species in the world, a general trending upwards of
the organic orders, the lower species which survive
becoming gradually higher. In this way, the lower
- orders which are meant to be the food of the higher,
Survival of
the Fittest.
132 Species; or, Darwinism.
the simpler and plainer which evidently sustain the
more complex and specialized, would pass out of
the stage of species more generally eatable and take
rank among the higher and higher, which are more
generally the eaters; and the lower ranks would be
vacaied. But we find a pronounced evolutionist
declaring that such an application or inference of
evolution will never suit the nutritive arrangements
of the universe. M. Gaudry says in his Primary
Fossils: “ There would be more superior animals
than inferior, more eaters than beasts to be eaten;
the harmony of the universe would long ago have
been broken.” So he requires that some of the
lower orders should not have advanced in the up-
ward march of evolution; they must benignly
have remained content with their humble lot, of re-
maining edible and acceptable to their betters.—
Does it not look as if some mild symptoms of cata-
genesis, or evolution downwards, broke in upon us
here, when we did not expect it? The gentle in-
firmity makes the system even more engaging, par-
ticularly when with such simplicity it serves the in-
terest of truth.
144. The true statement of this factor, the sur-
vival of the fittest, will be as follows. It signifies
the process of adaptation to environment; and here
those varieties in a species have the best chance to
live and thrive which are acclimatized, whatever
direction their self-adjustment may take; either
towards the- absolutely better, or the absolutely
Natural Selection. 133
worse. For, to illustrate lower things by higher, it
is thus that an inferior race of men can survive in
an African marsh, where the flower of Europe
would die; and, in fact, the degenerate races of
Africa do survive as the fittest where they are, be-
cause, in the struggle of centuries, endeavoring to
escape the evils of tyranny and slavery, they have
fled into the midst of poisonous miasmas; and, de-
generating to a degree of conformity with the worst
conditions of life, they have grown acclimatized
there and survive. This just illustrates what Mr.
Wallace notes of Darwin’s theory, that the minute
variations contemplated in it are really of any kind,
and in any direction. And the survival of the fit-
test means simply the course of nature, whereby
those survive who are fit to survive, or it may be,
are the fittest, but are not necessarily the best.
Therefore the theory has nothing to do with the
upward development even of races; much less of
species.
145. Now, if the struggle for existence comes to
designate only the economy of nature in the or-
ganic kingdoms, and similarly the sur-
vival of the fittest denotes the course of
nature, what remains to be covered by the
final term, “natural selection,” which is meant to con-
vey all the rest ? Just so, 1t conveys all the rest; and
that, as we see, is little enough. The rest tells us
little that is new. Besides, we have seen that this
complex term is logically a misnomer (No. 106), as
Natural
Selection.
134 Species, or, Darwinism.
compounded of simple terms which are incompati-
ble: if it is a selection that is really meant, it must
be artificial, not natural; if it is natural, as opposed
to artificial, then it is no selection. There is a ver-
bal equivocation in using the same term for two
different ideas. But if the conception was hon-
estly intended, then it rests upon a mistaken and
false analogy, as we hinted at in the same place.
So that to conclude with the words of M. Jean
d’Estienne, in the number for January, 1889, of the
Revue which I have quoted before: “‘ Reduced to its
most simple expression, stripped of all seduction of
style, and of all logical artifice, Darwinism comes
down to a very small affair. It is a system of hy-
potheses ingeniously applied to the justification of
a first hypothesis.”
We proceed next to the origin of life and its
progress on this globe. This will lead us to ex-
amine the Cell, and the march of Evolution.
aa
BIO LOGY , —(Continued. )
CHAPTER. [V.
CELLS; OR, EVOLUTION.
146. In the seventeenth century, an Italian
naturalist of eminence, by name Redi, undertook to
sift the question of spontaneous generation, which
we otherwise call organic evolution (No. 102). It
was a question older than Aristotle, whether lfe
could spring from non-life, living things from non-
living. They seemed to do so, as every one has
thought he saw for himself in decaying organic mat-
ter, in meat, cheese, and the like. Where does the
life come from, when it suddenly appears there, un-
less it starts up of itself from inanimate matter, and
from the mere chemical elements? Now this looks
like the evolution of organisms out of the inorganic.
Hence. the name we give to it, organic evolution.
But the system of philosophy then prevalent, that
which is called the Aristotelian system, was adverse
to such aview. Even in the absence of ocular evi-
dence to support its position, it affirmed, Ommne vivum
ex vivo, “The living comes only from the living.”
It preferred to fall back upon the active energy of
the sun, holding that to be a kind of universal cause
equivalent to organic parentage, rather than admit
that life could spring from inorganic matter without
135
136 Cells, or, Evolution.
any parental agency. It is a little singular, by the
way, that the diametrically opposite school to-day
Bt scientific materialism has recourse to the same
“potential energy of the sun,” for preci the
opposite conclusion.
147. The experiments which Redi performed
were not unworthy of science, for the epoch at
which he lived. By exposing meat in a couple of
jars, leaving one open to the insects of the air, and
closing the other, he found as he had surmised that
no life sprang into being where insects were ex-
cluded, and the usual abundance of minute animal-
cular life appeared, wherever they did enjoy free
access. Some exceptions were taken to certain fea-
tures of his experiment, but upon his modifying it,
the same results were obtained; and science was
satisfied. ‘The microscope had not as yet enabled
observers to detect the vast world of life, which re-
mained still invisible in decaying organisms.
148. When the microscope came into use, and
especially when the principle of achromatism was
applied to it by Professor Ehrenberg, a
The Micro- world of revelations broke upon the
scope and é i omg
Animaleules. @Stonished eyes of science. Living
things were observed breeding with ex-
treme rapidity in water that was poured over, or
‘infused upon,” dead organic matter; and the Pro-
fessor called them zzfusorza, or infusory animalcules.
Where did these come from? Surely, spontaneous
generation was now reinstated and proved.
The Microscope and Cells. 137
149. The animalcules thus discovered were, in
course of time, found to comprise a great variety of
minute living beings, which had nothing in common
except their microscopic minuteness. Plants as
well as animals, mollusks, crustaceans, insects, and
worms, larvz and perfect forms, were all found to
have been massed indiscriminately under one vague
term, animalcules. Consequently, that term is now
taken in no specific sense; but may be used to
signify all infinitesimal organic beings, of any size,
from the hundredth part of an inch to a minuteness
which the glass can scarcely distinguish, though
magnifying its object thousands of times.
150. Among them there is one class which is of
Some interest for the present question. We are
examining here the development and ere
origin of life, or the living organism cellular
which Darwin endeavors to transform 4nimalcule.
from one species across to another; which evolu-
tion, taken in a wider sense than Darwinism, en-
deavors to transform from the lowest and the lower
species up to the higher and the highest; and which
on the same principle should be found in the lowest
and simplest species only one remove, if at all re-
moved, from inorganic elements, from mere chem-
ical and physical forces. Now here among the
animalcules is found a class of living things which
are composed of single cells. The term cell desig-
nates the smallest integral portion of matter which
can exhibit life, can receive it, or can communicete
138 Cells; or, Evolution.
it to another. It is the physical. unit. And life, it
is now found, may be entire in little organisms
which consist each of only one cell, and are called
“unicellular.” In the great organisms too, consist-
ing of many cells, and called “multicellular,” it is
still the same physical unit of organic matter that
the organism extracts from the pabulum, transforms
into fitting material by digestion, informs with life,
and which, as a new living cell, it adds to its struct-
ure in skin, bone, cartilage, muscle, etc. In every
case therefore, the cell is conceived to be the last
physical unit, wherein life can be found, and in less
than which life cannot be.
151. Inside the wall or envelope of the cell, and
sometimes constituting the whole of it, is found an
element which seems indispensable. It
is a liquid substance of slimy consist-
ency; and, to follow the description of Gordon
Salamon in his recent lectures on Yeast, delivered
before the Society of Arts, it is “endowed with
specific organization, and is capable of exhibiting
motion.” This substance has been called proto-
plasm. Sometimes, as in the early stages of the
life-history of certain organisms like the slime
fungi, the protoplasm is not contained in any cell
envelope whatever; yet it can express its vitality in
terms of motion and constructive increase, that is,
it can move, grow, and multiply. Life is unknown
without the presence of this protoplasm, which is
to be found in every organic living cell, whether
Protoplasm.
Protoplasm. 139
animal or vegetable. Accordingly, it has been
treated of by Professor Huxley as “the physical
basis of life.” ;
152. Here the interesting question arose, whether
a chemical compound of this kind, understood to
be composed like all organic matter of
oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, re-
quired parental generation to produce it.
True, it was alive. But in its simplest forms it is not
embarrassed with any organs or local structures for
special work; it has no eyes, ears, mouth, stomach,
feet, head, or tail. Is not that the condition of
chemical elements,—they are unorganized and in-
organic? What prevents the unorganized proto-
plasm from being generated by the inorganic ele-
ments; the more so, as these are now compounded
in the laboratory to degrees of complexity more than
sufficient, it would seem, to equal this rude fabric
of cellular protoplasm?
153. Unorganized and inorganic! You see room
here for a brilliant equivocation, one indeed that
went some way for a while towards electrifying an
enlightened age. Imagine the “inorganic”? chem-
ical compound, which discharges no functions,
because forsooth it is not alive, becoming in the
chemist’s hands live protoplasm, which is “ unor-
ganized” also, though forsooth it discharges all
functions, and it moves and eats and digests and
sleeps, as higher structures do, though they do all
these things through a number of local organs.
Its
Chemistry.
140 Cells, or, Evolution.
You have only to consult Professor Leidy’s mono-
graph on the Fresh-Water Rhizopods, to see what
these little live cells can do and how they do it.
But, laying no stress on this minor point of com-
plete life being there, and regarding only the ground
for equivocation, we need not wonder at Professor
Huxley, in his essay on the Physical Basis of Life,
throwing out the phrase, “ protoplasm dead or alive,”
as if there were no important antithesis conveyed in
the term, “dead’or alive.” Alive, dead, and never
being either one or the other, have usually been
reckoned three different ideas; but not so, ap-
parently, in this chemistry which sinks all in one
phrase, dead and alive! )
154. So protoplasm seemed to command the
position between life and non-life. There was this
little cell, consisting chiefly, 1f not en-
aa Bree tirely, of protoplasm, exhibiting a posi-
Life. tive vitality, and a most negative organic
simplicity. And chemistry, feeling easily
sure of the simplicity, thought that now at last it had
the vitality also. A great future was dawning on
science; and the past history of the world was being
unrolled. It was by this stage that life must have
originally walked upon the globe. Who knows!
We were thrown back with Mr. Tyndall to “the
possible play of molecules in a cooling planet.”
Here protoplasm betrayed that first playing of hfe.
And the term protoplasm was devised to express
the first plastic development thereof; for the Greek
Spontaneous Generation. I4I
word, frotos, signifies “ first.” - At once ii was inter-
esting to see how at this plastic stage in the possi-
bilities of scientific development, a whole series of
primary elements sprang up in biology as by a kin-
dred instinct of spontaneous generation. There
were the orders of protists and protophytes and pro-
-tozoa, etc. And what added to the completeness of
the view, and the absolute establishment of organic
evolution, was that, at this stage of life, animal and
plant are indistinguishable. They were confounded
by Ehrenberg; and, if one evolved by spontaneous
generation, so could the other as well; yes, and we
may add, they could just as easily evolve from one
another besides.
155. All this is now a romance of the past, be-
longing to the dim border-land where _ _
: : : No Neutral
dreams and imagination love to dwell. — gyouna.
As Gordon Salamon remarked, ‘“‘ Even ‘Negative
: : : Argument.
protoplasm has a specific organization
of its own.” And, equivocation evaporating from
the moist product of imagination, the light of sci-
ence waxes strong, and the chemistry of the ques-
tion is precipitated to its own sedimentary level:
vitality rises to its proper sphere; and, between the
two, spontaneous generation, that again seemed to
be, has once more ceased to be.
156. A negative and a positive manner of proving
this have been successfully adopted; and the re-
sults are universally accepted. That was a nega-
tive way which was followed by Schwann, Van Ben-
eae: | Cells, or, Evolution.
eden, Pasteur, Tyndall. It consisted in precluding
all possibility of live germs penetrating into a given
medium: the medium contained some dead organic
matter, in which such germs or embryos of animal-
cular, bacterial or microbic life, as you choose to call
it, are known to grow: then it was kept under
strict examination, to observe whether, these con-
ditions being rigidly kept, any life appeared in the
dead material. Notice then the conditions of the
problem: a solution, called proteinaceous, is pro-
vided,-one capable of the highest putrescence, and
therefore prime material for putrefactive germs to
settle on and develop in; but the solution is abso-
lutely sterilized, that is, cleansed of every particle
which can possibly be a germ of life; and it is
placed in an optically pure, or absolutely calcined,
air. Now, the conclusion ascertained is this: while
such conditions are maintained, no matter what
length of time may be suffered to elapse, that pu-
trescible fluid will remain absolutely without trace
of decay. There is no putrefactive life in it, no
microbes, no bacteria, simply because there is no
antecedent parental life there to produce them.
Such is the exclusive, the negative way of proving
that life can come only from life. Omne vivum
2X U1VO. |
157. There remains the positive system, which
will take up the direct study of these animalcules,
and will tell us how each has come into being, upon
its being found to develop in any given medium.
Spontaneous Generation. eis
Here a double line of investigation is open. One
fixes upona given organism, in a medium ee
wherein that organism alone is “culti- Argument.
vated.” The other takes them indis- da Cul-
criminately as they appear in natural
conditions, and catches nature, as some one ‘has
said, “ off her guard.”’ In the first line of investi-
gation, a fitting pabulum is prepared, that is, an ex-
tract of meat carefully filtered from other kinds of
life, or an extract of fruit; and into this is admitted
a germ of the solitary kind of microbe which comes
up for examination. In this pabulum it develops
and multiplies. Now you have only to watch it;
and that is done to the extreme degree of scientific
solicitude by what has been called the unbroken-
watching system; a couple of competent observers
relieving one another, so that the object under in-
spection is never lost to the eye for a moment, not
even during the space of many days. ;
158. As an example of special cultivation we may
mention among others Dr. Koch’s treatment, two
or three years ago, of the germ which he considered
to be the cause of pulmonary comsumption, for it
was uniformly found in the epithelium of diseased
lungs. To test whether this was the specific cause
of that disease, he took agerm from a diseased lung,
and placed it in a medium where it would thrive and
multiply, but from which every other species of mi-
crobe had been carefully excluded. Then it was
necessary to go on cultivating this microscopic
144 Cells, or, Evolution.
thing, letting it grow, while modifying its surround-
ings in various ways, to see what would become of
it, and whether perhaps it would turn into some-
thing else. Dr. Koch cultivated his “stockiges
phthisis microbes so far that they lost nearly all
their virus, and were brought to the very verge of
sterility, and still the stock remained unchanged in
species. Identifying it thus as a distinct species,
he wanted to find out further, whether the identical
disease of consumption could be communicated by
it to a healthy lung. Now the cat is understood to
be particularly exempt from the attacks of this dis-
ease. So he communicated the microbe to a cat.
The animal became consumptive. And thus he
proved the disease to be contagious.
159. In the case before us, the object is cane
to see whence it is that the given organism under
view takes its rise; what is its life-history, or life-
cycle; and whether it has the character of a spe-
cies remaining unchanged, as like always produces
like. To cite the results of the Rev. Dr. Daliim=
ger’s observations on the bacterium termo, which he
identifies as the exciting cause of all putrefaction,
just as the yeast-plant is the exciting cause of what
is commonly called fermentation, “these organ-
isms, lowly and little as they are, arise in fertilized
parental products. There is no more caprice in
their origin than in that of a crustacean or a bird.”
Referring to the negative proof given before against
spontaneous generation, he says: “ By experiment
Spontaneous Generation. 145
it is established that living forms do not now arise
in dead matter. And, by the study of the forms
themselves, it is proved that, like all the more com-
plex forms above them, they arise in parental prod-
ucts. The law is as ever, only that which is liv-
ing can give origin to that which lives,” omne vivum
ex vivo. For the particulars of his observations I
refer you to his lecture, “ Researches on the origin
and life-histories of the least and lowest living
things,” in the scientific journal, ature, October
23 and 30, 1884.
160. This then is the first way, that of cultivat-
ing aspecial germ. Another way is that 9 pg, opeer-
of following these organisms while they vation in
are out in their own line of life, and %#tre
watching them in their natural conditions. In
these conditions, a number of forms are found to-
gether, as Ehrenberg observed; or they work con-
secutively on a given material, as Dr. Dallinger de-
scribes. I can but refer you again to the instruct-
ive account which this latter observer made the
subject of his address, on retiring from the presi-
dency of the Royal Microscopical Society, last
spring. It may be found in the Sczentific American
Supplement, April 28, 1888. His subject was re-
stricted to those organisms which do that special
work of fermentation, called putrefaction or decay.
But bis conclusions cover the whole ground before
us. There are putrefactive organisms resembling
in form those other microbes which are parasitic
146 Cells, or, Evolution.
or pathogenic, like the phthisis microbe mentioned
above; that is to say, which are capable of devel-
oping disease. However alike in form, these sets
of organisms are different in function; and, no less
than the great organisms in nature, they are differ-
ent in species. It appears in short that there is a
whole series of microscopic animals, which are re-
lated indeed, and which are altogether alike to the
eye, or are more or less so; but they are in many
respects greatly unlike, embryologically and physio-
logically. “ This is a region of life in which we
touch, as it were, the very margin of living things.
If nature were capricious anywhere, we might expect —
to find her so here. If her methods were in a slov-
enly or only half-determined condition, we might
expect tofind them here. Butitisnotso. Through
years of the closest observation it will be seen that —
the vegetative and vital processes generally of the
very simplest and lowliest life-forms are as much
directed and controlled by immutable laws as the
most complex and elevated.” ‘This then negatively
and positively settles the question of spontaneous
generation, which we have otherwise called organic
evolution.
161. That was one feat of science to discover
such beings as consisted only of asingle
cell, whether in the plant or animal order.
It was another achievement to unveil
the great fact that every organic being, no matter
how complex and perfect and individual in its unity
Multicellular
Organisms.
Cell-life. 147
and totality, consists only of cells and nothing elsc.
Skin, bone, cartilage, nerve, are very different to
the eye and touch; but they are all composed of
the self-same thing, cells. The cells, it appears,
are the same throughout in their origin and develop-
ment, till they become adult and perfect, when they
are all found specialized so as to discharge distinct
functions. In view of these distinct functions, the
anatomical form of the cells has become differenti-
ated, some taking one form, others another, cylin-
drical, hexagonal, polygonal, conical, pyramidal, len-
ticular, according to the place and work before them;
whether it be that of the muscular tissue, cartilag-
inous, osseous, fibrous, vascular, or the hke. Thus
the entire system, in its totality and individual unity,
is built up of many cells, and only cells: these go
to form all its organs.
162. Each individual cell is first young and then
old. In the same organism while some cells are
only beginning their development, while others are
carrying on theirs, another set are in full decrepitude,
_and a number are being disintegrated as effete. In
the young state of cells, to which stage is to be re-
ferred also the earliest condition of an embryo, that
is, the germ of another complete organism, it is not
possible to distinguish the growing, moving matter
which is to evolve an oak, from that which is the
germ of a vertebrate animal. Nor, in the building
up of the same organism, can any difference be dis-
cerned between the germinal matter of the lowest,
148 Cells; or, Evolution.
epithelial scale of man’s organism, and that from
which the nerve cells of his brain are to be evolved.
Hence you see that since the first germ from which
any organism springs, no matter how humble or
how elevated, whether it is to be of one cell or of
many cells, simple or highly complex, is just like the
first germ from which any other organism, whether
plant or animal, arises, it is not strange if, in their
primary stages, all organisms are indistinguishable
from one another. Yet strange inferences have
been drawn from this very plain fact, as we shall see
later on (No. 191).
163. You see too how a new form can be given
to the old axiom; and, instead of putting it ommne
vivum ex vivo, it may be changed into
omne vivum ex cellula. Biology, in the
last analysis, becomes now a study of
cells. And, in its highest synthesis, it remains
largely a study of cells; for the living being consists
in its entirety only of these same elements, diversely
modified for diverse functions, and so constituting
various organs. ‘The description then of all life, as
viewed from this material side of the element which
goes to compose it; which is assumed from the
pabulum or food, is developed for a special work
elsewhere, and then is worn out as effete; may be
comprised in still another shape of the same for-
‘easels which now becomes, omnis cellula ex cellula,
Omne vivum
ex cellula.
“cell from cell.”’
164. The embryo which begins even the hiokest
Cell-life. TAO
organic structure is only one of those cellular specks
of protoplasm. Then it develops into
a multicellular mass, without having as
yet any distinct local structures, or or-
gans, as they are called. Becoming the subject of
further changes, which tend to the production
of a complex structure, it now begins to consist
of parts different, but mutually dependent. At
the respective stages of this development, cer-
tain generic likenesses obtain between it and
other embryos—rather negative likenesses than
positive, becoming less as the positive qualities
and organs of each come out more; until all is lost
in that specific and unique identity being assumed,
which is unmistakable. With regard to these
generic or negative likenesses, Mr. Herbert Spencer
observes in his Principles of Biology: “ The resem-
blances which hold together great groups of em-
bryos in their early stages, and which hold together
smaller and smaller groups in their later stages, are
not special and exact, but general or approximate;
and in some cases the conformity to this law is very
imperfect.”’
165. Just one remark here. People go to much
pains in finding out points of likeness ay, aug
between species, to prove their transfor- —** Glorious
mation. But here is the most plausible ™#ssion-””
fact of all, that every organism in every species is
made up of cells, and every cell of itself is like
every cell in any other being, save only in the form
Embryonic
Development.
150 Cells, or, Evolution.
which it assumes according to its place in the struct-
ure. If matter is everything, as it is for the mate-
rialist, why should not anything change into any-
thing, since there is only the organic cell every-
where—if, I say, matter is everything. Nor is it
surprising that Professor Haeckel, an industrious
disciple of materialism, should give the cell “a
glorious mission;” albeit some of his fellow-dis-
ciples, like Edmond Perrier of the same school,
rather enjoy a laugh at his enthusiasm. For con-
templating Haeckel’s moneron or formless cell, and
the genealogical tree of phylogenesis (No.191 below),
sprung from that cell and from his enthusiasm into
every order of species, the materialist critic sneers
at materialistic ingenuity,—“ as if a certain living
being had received the glorious mission of conduct-_
ing life toits most elevated form, all the way up the
ladder of animal species,without once stumbling on
any one of those other forms, which were destined
to stay down, but with which it just acknowledges
common ancestors and (collateral) cousins!”
166. Let us examine what truth there may be, like
a germinal cell in history, to which such
ae Nebular 4 flourishing tree of theory may trace its
ypothesis.
First and genealogy. Throw yourself back to the
aires i time when, according to the nebular
hypothesis, this planet of ours, like so
many others, was still in a nebulous, fiery state, one
of intense light and heat. There was no question
of cells developing as: yet, nor of any cells existing
Geological Record of Life. I51
in such a furnace. Ages rolled on and this fiery
cloud gradually cooled. Rocks and metals, which
were thus far in a vaporous condition, came into
contact with the cold of surrounding space. ‘“ Void
and empty” as the planet itself was, it rolled in the
midst of space still more so. The vapors of rocks
and metals thus began to liquefy, and, like condens-
ing clouds, fell upon the earth in showers of molten
metal; and, if they rose again in vapors, they settled
again in a liquid state; until, by the continued loss
of heat, a thin crust of solidified metal and rock
formed on the surface of the burning mass. Radi-
ating heat as it continued to do into space, the
whole earth grew cooler every day. And the time
came when even the aqueous vapors of the planet
began to settle from their condition of steam into
that of liquid and seething water. And the roll-
ing waters began to form sedimentary deposits,
from the wearing of the rocks, as soon as they be
gan to roll. Continuous rains now prevailed, main-
taining athick darkness, “a cloud asa garment, and
a mist as swaddling-bands,” over the face of the
waters, all above and around upon that boundless
ocean which knew no shores, and had none; until
the constant upheavals of the thin crust of the earth
gave it “ bounds and a bar and doors,” and there it
began to “break its swelling waves.” The con-
tinuous rains from an unbroken belt of vapors
gradually ceasing, the vaporous clouds were broken.
The waters of the clouds above were separated from
152 Cells; or, Evolution.
the waters of the ocean below, and suspended in a
permanent atmosphere of lighter gases, which
Moses calls an “ expanse” or “ firmament,” dividing
the waters beneath from the waters above.
167. The crust of the earth heaving upwards in
some places, sank in other parts; and the waters
gathered together here, in seas, while the
dry land appeared there. ‘Those parts
which were never to be the home of man sank, ©
,nhever to rise more. Mr. John Murray informs the
world, as the last‘ results of the ~ Chetiemean.
explorations (No. 67 above), that the abysmal
regions of the Atlantic are unique: they Baye
never been elevated, never a continent Gr ag
land. “ The result of many lines of investigation
seem to show that in the abysmal regions we have
the most permanent areas of the earth's surface.”
I refer to his account, as reported in VVature, Octo-
ber 15,.1885. And Sir J. W. Dawson, of Canada,
informed the British Association in September of
the following year, that “the history of ocean and
continent is an example of progressive design, quite
as much as that of living things.”
168. There was now land and sea. There was
heat—an excess of it, even in the waters. And
there was ight. The sun was not as yet; and the
light was a phosphorescent or nebulous one, com-
ing from the molten, central mass, which, having
thrown off the earth already, had yet to throw off
other planets, and then to be condensed into a sun,
Third Day.
Geological Record of Life. 153
None of those phenomena therefore which depend
upon the special solar energy, could as yet appear
upon the earth, when, beginning a new phase of
activity, it now put forth the simplest forms of life,
or, as Moses says, it “ brought forth the green herb,
mieeouch as may seed.” Here is the cell and cel-
lular life, for the first time. It is noteworthy that
the lowest kind of plant, and the lowest kind of
animal, protophyte and protozoon as they are
called, do not require the sun’s special activity for
their development. More than that: there are
herbaceous trees, rich in pith, which, unlike the
forest trees that grow by concentric rings in the re-
volving seasons, require no more conditions for their
life than then prevailed, a warm soil, great humid-
ity, an atmosphere saturated with carbonic acid gas.
At this age then, besides the low form of vegeta-
tion which spread over the marshy land, there
came upon the earth a carboniferous period, called
by geologists the paradise of vegetation. Now was
laid up a great part of that carbonized fibre, with
which man would yet make himself comfortable,
and make other resources of the earth useful, by
mining it as coal,—a permanent reservoir of so
much heat and activity once lavishly spent upon
the globe in preparation for his coming.
wemavg. lhe ‘great nebulous mass in the centre,
which had thrown off the earth asa ring
or aplanet to wander thenceforth in an
orbit of its own, threw off its last contribution to
Fourth Day.
154 Cells, or, Evolution.
the bejewelling of our system with the revolving
gems of light; and then itself condensed into the
nucleus which now we call the Sun. That and
the earth’s own satellite, the Moon, stood henceforth
in the firmament of heaven, both of them to be in-
extricably bound up with all the experiences of
man’s physical and intellectual life, of his moral
and social history; determining the phenomena of
day and night, of seasons and years; the one ting-
ing with its golden rays the heyday of his prosper-
ity and his glory, the other silvering with its pen-
sive sheen the silent solitude of his path here be-
low; both acting as tutors by their coming and
their going, their radiance and their clouded brows,
to his wisdom and his fancy, to his choicest prose
and his deepest verse; verily, as Moses says, “two
lights to rule the day and the night, and to divide
the light and the darkness. And God saw that it
was good;” and our reason sees it too, and praises
Him. It praises Him as our first parents did,
when, according to the poet, “forth they came to
open sight of day-spring, and the sun, who, scarce
uprisen, with wheels yet hovering o’er the ocean
brim, shot parallel to the earth his dewy ray.”
They thus began, says Milton:
These are Thy glorious works, Parent of good,
Almighty! Thine this universal frame,
Thus wondrous fair; Thyself how wondrous then!
Thou Sun, of this great world both eye and soul,
Acknowledge Him thy greater; sound His praise
Geological Record of Life. 155
In thy eternal course, both when thou climb’st,
And when high noon hast gain’d, and when thou fall’st.
Moon, that now meet’st the orient sun, now fliest,
Re Let your ceaseless change
Vary to our great Maker still new praise.
170. Under the genial action of the solar energy,
an expansion of organic types, to adopt Professor
Dana’s phrase, took place upon the
globe; and there were found at once, be-
sides the lowest orders of life, also the highest orders,
but represented only in their lowest species. Such
as these were sufficiently provided for in the im-
proving conditions of life. Many species already
existing reached their stage of greatest prosperity,
in the evolving conditions which suited them best;
they passed that stage, and declined, either to die out
entirely, or to survive in a few families. The tribes
imei culminated so are those of the crinoids,
brachiopods, trilobites, ganoid fishes, amphibians,
true reptiles, mollusks. Many other tribes have
their era of culmination now, as gasteropods, birds,
higher insects, teliost fishes. Brute mammals were
to reach their climax in the Champlain period of
the quaternary. And all creation, as we shall see,
was to culminate in man, who never rose upon an
inferior order of his own kind, and is never to be
superseded or decline. His culmination is elsewhere;
and the fortunes of the earth culminate in him.
171. When the sun then by his beaming presence,
and the seasons which he controlled, had made the
Fifth Day.
156 Cells, or, Evolution.
earth more and more suited for the development of
higher types, then, to use the historical language of
Moses, was the proper age of the lower animals,
“those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping
and flying species of the land.” They were all
over the face of creation, and they represented in
comprehensive groups the main types of nature.
This is the fifth day of Moses. In the plant and
animal kingdoms alike, the sub-kingdoms are ail
present; the grand divisions are defined. The
specimens, which are representative of such divis-
ions, look perhaps somewhat as if they were a com- |
mon type of many other different forms, which
are more specialized and yet to come. But that
is always the case with things less perfect: they
are more common or general. Ǥ THOMAS L. GRACE,
Bishop of St. Paul.”
“. . The study of the ‘* Curistian MoTuHeEr ”’ would be a great help to
many a mother, in the work of their own sanctification, as well as in he
education of their children. y« E. O'CONNELL,
Bishop of Grass Valley.”
“*. . . It possesses the great advantage of being very practical, as it
proposes nothing extraordinary, nothing to interfere with the ordinary
discharge of parents’ domestic and family duties. ...
JOHN McEVILLY,
Bishop of Galway and Coadjutor of Tuam.
“. . . The little book should be introduced into every Catholic
family, for the instruction of parents as well as children, wherefore we
earnestly recommend it. y« JOHN VERTIN,
Bishop of Marquette.
‘“T am well pleased with it, and would like to see it in the hands of
every Christian mother. ...
ZEGIDIUS YUNGER, Bishop of Nesqually.”
BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago.
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