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and, above all, the idea of a Cosmos, an unbroken order, to which
every
advance in knowledge contributes, justified and fostered the free
play
of the intellect. Foreign as yet, however, to the minds of
widest
breadth, was the conception of the inclusion of MAN himself in
the
universal order. Duality--Nature overruled by supernature--was
the
unaltered note; the supernature as part of Nature a thing undreamed
of.
Nor could it be otherwise while the belief in diabolical agencies
still
held the field, sending wretched victims to the stake on the evidence
of
conscientious witnesses, and with the concurrence of humane
judges.
Animism, the root of all personification, whether of good or evil,
had
lost none of its essential character, and but little of its
vigour.
"I flatter myself," says Hume, in the opening words of the essay
upon
Miracles, in his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, "that I
have
discovered an argument of a like nature (he is referring to
Archbishop
Tillotson's argument on Transubstantiation) which, if just,
will,
with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kind
of
superstitious delusion, and, consequently, will be useful as long as
the
world endures." Hume certainly did not overrate the force of the
blow
which he dealt at supernaturalism, one of a series of attacks which,
in
France and Britain, carried the war into the camp of the enemy,
and
changed its tactics from aggressive to defensive. But none the less
is
it true that the "superstitious delusions" against which he planted
his
logical artillery were killed neither by argument nor by
evidence.
Delusion and error do not perish by controversial warfare. They
perish
under the slow and silent operation of changes to which they are
unable
to adapt themselves. The atmosphere is altered: the organism can
neither
respond nor respire; therefore, it dies. Thus, save where lurks
the
ignorance which is its breath of life, has wholly perished belief
in
witchcraft; thus, too, is slowly perishing belief in miracles, and,
with
this, belief in the miraculous events, the incarnation,
resurrection,
and ascension of Jesus, on which the fundamental tenets of
Christianity
are based, and in which lies so largely the secret of its long
hostility
to knowledge.
_PART III._
THE RENASCENCE
OF SCIENCE.
A. D. 1600 ONWARDS.
"Though science, like Nature,
may be driven out with a fork,
ecclesiastical or other, yet she surely
comes back again."--HUXLEY,
Prologue to Collected Essays, vol.
v.
The exercise of a more tolerant spirit, to which reference has
been
made, had its limits. It is true that Dr. South, a famous
divine,
denounced the Royal Society (founded 1645) as an irreligious
body;
although a Dr. Wallis, one of the first members, especially
declared
that "matters of theology" were "precluded": the business being
"to
discourse and consider of philosophical inquiries and such as
related
thereunto; as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy,
Navigation,
Staticks, Magneticks, Chymicks, and Natural Experiments; with
the
state of these studies, and their cultivation at home and
abroad."
Regardless of South and such as agreed with him, Torricelli worked
at
hydrodynamics, and discovered the principle of the barometer;
Boyle
inquired into the law of the compressibility of gases; Malpighi
examined
minute life-forms and the structure of organs under the microscope;
Ray
and Willughby classified plants and animals; Newton theorized on
the
nature of light; and Roemer measured its speed; Halley estimated
the
sun's distance, predicted the return of comets, and observed
the
transits of Venus and Mercury; Hunter dissected specimens, and laid
the
foundations of the science of comparative anatomy; and many
another
illustrious worker contributed to the world's stock of
knowledge
"without let or hindrance," for in all this "matters of theology
were
precluded."
But the old spirit of resistance was aroused when,
after a long lapse of
time, inquiry was revived in a branch of science which,
it will be
noticed, has no distinct place in the subjects dealt with by the
Royal
Society at the start. That science was Geology; a science destined,
in
its ultimate scope, to prove a far more powerful dissolvent of
dogma
than any of its compeers.
It seems strange that the discovery of
the earth's true shape and
movements was not sooner followed by investigation
into her contents,
but the old ideas of special creation remained unaffected
by these and
other discoveries, and the more or less detailed account of the
process
of creation furnished in the book of Genesis sufficed to
arrest
curiosity. In the various departments of the inorganic universe
the
earth was the last to become subject of scientific research; as in
study
of the organic universe, man excluded himself till science compelled
his
inclusion.
After more than two thousand years, the Ionian
philosophers "come to
their own" again. Xenophanes of Colophon has been
referred to as
arriving, five centuries B. C., at a true explanation of the
imprints of
plants and animals in rocks. Pythagoras, who lived before him,
may, if
Ovid, writing near the Christian era, is to be trusted, have
reached
some sound conclusions about the action of water in the changes of
land
and sea areas. But we are on surer ground when we meet the
geographer
Strabo, who lived in the reign of Augustus. Describing the
countries in
which he travelled, he notes their various features, and
explains the
causes of earthquakes and allied phenomena. Then eleven hundred
years
pass before we find any explanation of like rational character
supplied.
This was furnished by the Arabian philosopher, Avicenna, whose
theory of
the origin of mountains is the more marvellous when we remember
what
intellectual darkness surrounded him. He says that "mountains may be
due
to two different causes. Either they are effects of upheavals of
the
crust of the earth, such as might occur during a violent earthquake,
or
they are the effect of water, which, cutting for itself a new route,
has
denuded the valleys, the strata being of different kinds, some
soft,
some hard. The winds and waters disintegrate the one, but leave
the
other intact. Most of the eminences of the earth have had this
latter
origin. It would require a long period of time for all such changes
to
be accomplished, during which the mountains themselves might be
somewhat
diminished in size. But that water has been the main cause of
these
effects is proved by the existence of fossil remains of aquatic
and
other animals on many mountains" (cf. Osborn's From the Greeks
to
Darwin, p. 76). A similar explanation of fossils was given by
the
engineer-artist Leonardo de Vinci in the fifteenth century, and by
the
potter Bernard Palissy, in the sixteenth century; but thence
onward,
for more than a hundred years, the earth was as a sealed book to
man.
The earlier chapters of its history, once reopened, have never
been
closed again. Varied as were the theories of the causes which
wrought
manifold changes on its surface, they agreed in demanding a far
longer
time-history than the Church was willing to allow. If the reasoning
of
the geologists was sound, the narrative in Genesis was a myth.
Hence
the renewal of struggle between the Christian Church and
Science,
waged, at first, over the six days of the Creation.
Here and
there, in bygone days, a sceptical voice had been raised in
denial of the
Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Such was that of La
Peyrere who, in
1655, published an instalment of a work in which he
anticipated what is
nowadays accepted, but what then was akin to
blasphemy to utter. For not only
does he doubt whether Moses had any
hand in the writings attributed to him:
he rejects the orthodox view of
suffering and death as the penalties of
Adam's disobedience; and gives
rationalistic interpretation of the appearance
of the star of Bethlehem,
and of the darkness at the Crucifixion. But La
Peyrere became a Roman
Catholic, and, of course, recanted his opinions. Then,
nearer the time
when controversy on the historical character of the
Scriptures was
becoming active, one Astruc, a French physician, suggested, in
a work
published in 1753, that Moses may have used older materials in
his
compilation of the earlier parts of the Pentateuch.
But,
practically, the five books included under that name, were believed
to have
been written by Moses under divine authority. The statement in
Genesis that
God made the universe and its contents, both living and
non-living, in six
days of twenty-four hours each, was explicit. Thus
interpreted, as their
plain meaning warranted, Archbishop Usher made his
famous calculation as to
the time elapsing between the creation and the
birth of Christ. Dr. White, in
his important Warfare of Science with
Theology, gives an amusing example of
the application of Usher's method
in detail. A seventeenth century divine,
Dr. Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor
of Cambridge University, computed that "man
was created by the Trinity
on 23d October, 4004 B. C., at nine o'clock in the
morning." The same
theologian, who, by the way, was a very eminent Hebrew
scholar,
following the interpretation of the great Fathers of the
Church,
"declared, as the result of profound and exhaustive study of
the
Scriptures, that 'heaven and earth, centre and circumference, and
clouds
full of water, were created all together, in the same
instant.'"
The story of the Deluge was held to furnish sufficing
explanation of the
organic remains yielded by the rocks, but failing this, a
multitude of
fantastic theories were at hand to explain the fossils. They
were said
to be due to a "formative quality" in the soil; to its "plastic
virtue";
to a "lapidific juice"; to the "fermentation of fatty matter"; to
"the
influence of the heavenly bodies," or, as the late eminent
naturalist,
Philip Gosse, seriously suggested in his whimsical book Omphalos:
an
Attempt to untie the Geological Knot, they were but simulacra
wherewith
a mocking Deity rebuked the curiosity of man. Every explanation,
save
the right and obvious one, had its defenders, because it was
essential
to support some theory to rebut the evidence supplied by remains
of
animals as to the existence of death in the world before the fall
of
Adam. Otherwise, the statements in the Old Testament, on which
the
Pauline reasoning rested, were baseless, and to discredit these was
to
undermine the authority of the Scriptures from Genesis to the
Apocalypse. No
wonder, therefore, that theology was up in arms, or that
it saw in geology a
deadlier foe than astronomy had seemed to be in ages
past. The Sorbonne, or
Faculty of Theology, in Paris burnt the books of
the geologists, banished
their authors, and, in the case of Buffon, the
famous naturalist, condemned
him to retract the awful heresy, which was
declared "contrary to the creed of
the Church," contained in these
words: "The waters of the sea have produced
the mountains and valleys
of the land; the waters of the heavens, reducing
all to a level, will at
last deliver the whole land over to the sea, and the
sea successively
prevailing over the land, will leave dry new continents like
those which
we inhabit." So the old man repeated the submission of Galileo,
and
published his recantation: "I declare that I had no intention
to
contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all
therein
related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of
fact.
I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the
earth,
and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses."
That
was in the year 1751.
If the English theologians could not
deliver heretics of the type of
Buffon to the secular arm, they used all the
means that denunciation
supplied for delivering them over to Satan. Epithets
were hurled at
them; arguments drawn from a world accursed of God levelled at
them.
Saint Jerome, living in the fourth century, had pointed to the
cracked
and crumpled rocks as proof of divine anger: now Wesley and others
saw
in "sin the moral cause of earthquakes, whatever their natural
cause
might be," since before Adam's transgression, no convulsions
or
eruptions ruffled the calm of Paradise. Meanwhile, the probing of
the
earth's crust went on; revealing, amidst all the seeming confusion
of
distorted and metamorphosed rocks, an unvarying sequence of strata,
and
of the fossils imbedded in them. Different causes were assigned for
the
vast changes ranging over vast periods; one school believing in
the
action of volcanic and such like catastrophic agents; another in
the
action of aqueous agents, seeing, more consistently, in present
operations
the explanation of the causes of past changes. But there
was no diversity of
opinion concerning the extension of the earth's
time-history and life-history
to millions on millions of years.
So, when this was to be no longer
resisted, theologians sought some
basis of compromise on such non-fundamental
points as the six days of
creation. It was suggested that perhaps these did
not mean the seventh
part of a week, but periods, or eons, or something
equally elastic; and
that if the Mosaic narrative was regarded as a poetic
revelation of the
general succession of phenomena, beginning with the
development of order
out of chaos, and ending with the creation of man,
Scripture would be
found to have anticipated or revealed what science
confirms. It was
impossible, so theologians argued, that there could be aught
else than
harmony between the divine works and the writings which were
assumed to
be of divine origin. Science could not contradict revelation,
and
whatever seemed contradictory was due to misapprehension either of
the
natural fact, or to misreading of the written word. But although
the
story of the creation might be clothed, as so exalted and moving a
theme
warranted, in poetic form, that of the fall of Adam and of the
drowning
of his descendants, eight persons excepted, must be taken in all
its
appalling literalness. Confirmation of the Deluge story was found
in
the fossil shells on high mountain tops; while as for the giants
of
antediluvian times, there were the huge bones in proof. Some of
these
relics of mastodon and mammoth were actually hung up in churches
as
evidence that "there were giants in those days"! Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire
tells of one Henrion, who published a book in 1718 giving the
height of
Adam as one hundred and twenty-three feet nine inches, and of Eve
as
one hundred and eighteen feet nine inches, Noah being of rather
less
stature. But to parley with science is fatal to theology.
Moreover,
arguments which involve the cause they support in ridicule may be
left
to refute themselves. And while theology was hesitating, as in
the
amusing example supplied by Dr. William Smith's Dictionary of the
Bible
(published in 1863) wherein the reader, turning up the article
"Deluge,"
is referred to "Flood," and thence to "Noah"; archæology produced
the
Chaldæan original of the legend whence the story of the flood
is
derived. With candour as commendable as it is rare, the
Reverend
Professor Driver, from whom quotation has been made already, admits
that
"read without prejudice or bias, the narrative of Genesis i. creates
an
impression at variance with the facts revealed by science"; all
efforts
at reconciliation being only "different modes of obliterating
the
characteristic features of Genesis, and of reading into it a view
which
it does not express."
While the ground in favour of the literal
interpretation of Genesis was
being contested, an invading force, that had
been gathering strength
with the years, was advancing in the shape of the
science of Biology.
The workers therein fall into two classes: the one,
represented by
Linnaeus and his school, applied themselves to the classifying
and
naming of plants and animals; the other, represented by Cuvier and
his
school, examined into structure and function. Anatomy made clear
the
machinery: physiology the work which it did, and the conditions
under
which the work was done. Then, through comparison of
corresponding
organs and their functions in various life-forms, came
growing
perception of their unity. But only to a few came gleams of that
unity
as proof of common descent of plant and animal, for, save in
scattered
hints of inter-relation between species, which occur from the time
of
Lord Bacon onward, the theory of their immutability was dominant
until
forty years ago.
Four men form the chief vanguard of the
biological movement. "Modern
classificatory method and nomenclature have
largely grown out of the
work of Linnaeus; the modern conception of biology,
as a science, and
of its relation to climatology, geography, and geology, are
as largely
rooted in the labours of Buffon; comparative anatomy and
palæontology
owe a vast debt to Cuvier's results; while invertebrate zoology
and the
revival of the idea of Evolution are intimately dependent on the
results
of the work of Lamarck. In other words, the main results of biology
up
to the early years of this century are to be found in, or spring out
of,
the works of these men."
Linnaeus, son of a Lutheran pastor, born
at Roeshult, in Sweden, in
1707, had barely passed his twenty-fifth year
before laying the
ground-plan of the system of classification which bears his
name, a
system which advance in knowledge has since modified. Based on
external
resemblances, its formulation was possible only to a mind intent
on
minute and accurate detail, and less observant of general principles.
In
brief, the work of Linnaeus was constructive, not interpretative.
Hence,
perhaps, conjoined to the theological ideas then current, the
reason
why the larger question of the fixity of species entered not into
his
purview. To him each plant and animal retained the impress of
the
Creative hand that had shaped it "in the beginning," and,
throughout
his working life, he departed but slightly from the plan with
which he
started, namely, "reckoning as many species as issued in pairs" from
the
Almighty fiat.
Not so Buffon, born on his father's estate in
Burgundy in the same year
as Linnaeus, whom he survived ten years, dying in
1788. His opinions,
clashing as they did with orthodox creeds, were given in
a tentative,
questioning fashion, so that where ecclesiastical censure fell,
retreat
was easier. As has been seen in his submission to the Sorbonne, he
was
not of the stuff of which martyrs are made. Perhaps he felt that
the
ultimate victory of his opinions was sufficiently assured to
make
self-sacrifice needless. But, under cover of pretence at inquiry,
his
convictions are clear enough. He was no believer in the
permanent
stability of species, and noted, as warrant of this, the
otherwise
unexplained presence of aborted or rudimentary structures. For
example,
he says, "the pig does not appear to have been formed upon an
original,
special, and perfect plan, since it is a compound of other animals;
it
has evidently useless parts, or rather, parts of which it cannot
make
any use, toes, all the bones of which are perfectly formed, and
which,
nevertheless, are of no service to it. Nature is far from
subjecting
herself to final causes in the formation of her creatures."
Then,
further, as showing his convictions on the non-fixity of species,
he
says, how many of them, "being perfected or degenerated by the
great
changes in land and sea, by the favours or disfavours of Nature,
by
food, by the prolonged influences of climate, contrary or
favourable,
are no longer what they formerly were." But he writes with an eye
on the
Sorbonne when, hinting at a possible common ancestor of horse and
ass,
and of ape and man, he slyly adds that since the Bible teaches
the
contrary, the thing cannot be. Thus he attacked covertly; by adit,
not
by direct assault; and to those who read between the lines there
was
given a key wherewith to unlock the door to the solution of
many
biological problems. Buffon, consequently, was the most stimulating
and
suggestive naturalist of the eighteenth century. There comes between
him
and Lamarck, both in order of time and sequence of ideas,
Erasmus
Darwin, the distinguished grandfather of Charles Darwin.
Born
at Eton, near Newark, in 1731, he walked the hospitals at London
and
Edinburgh, and settled, for some years, at Lichfield, ultimately
removing to
Derby. Since Lucretius, no scientific writer had put his
cosmogonic
speculations into verse until Dr. Darwin made the heroic
metre, in which
stereotyped form the poetry of his time was cast, the
vehicle of rhetorical
descriptions of the amours of flowers and the
evolution of the thumb. The
Loves of the Plants, ridiculed in the Loves
of the Triangles in the
Anti-Jacobin, is not to be named in the same
breath, for stateliness of
diction, and majesty of movement, as the De
rerum Natura. But both the prose
work Zoonomia and the poem The Temple
of Nature (published after the author's
death in 1802) have claim
to notice as the matured expression of conclusions
at which the
clear-sighted, thoughtful, and withal, eccentric doctor had
arrived in
the closing years of his life. Krause's Life and Study of the
Works of
Erasmus Darwin supplies an excellent outline of the contents of
books
which are now rarely taken down from the shelves, and makes clear
that
their author had the root of the matter in him. His observations
and
reading, for the influence of Buffon and others is apparent in
his
writings, led him to reject the current belief in the separate
creation
of species. He saw that this theory wholly failed to account for
the
existence of abnormal forms, of adaptations of the structure of
organs
to their work, of gradations between living things, and other
features
inconsistent with the doctrine of "let lions be, and there were
lions."
His shrewd comment on the preformation notion of development has
been
quoted (p. 20). The substance of his argument in support of a
"physical
basis of life" is as follows: "When we revolve in our minds
the
metamorphosis of animals, as from the tadpole to the frog; secondly,
the
changes produced by artificial cultivation, as in the breeds of
horses,
dogs, and sheep; thirdly, the changes produced by conditions of
climate
and of season, as in the sheep of warm climates being covered with
hair
instead of wool, and the hares and partridges of northern
climates
becoming white in winter; when, further, we observe the changes
of
structure produced by habit, as seen especially by men of
different
occupations; or the changes produced by artificial mutilation
and
prenatal influences, as in the crossing of species and production
of
monsters; fourth, when we observe the essential unity of plan in
all
warm-blooded animals--we are led to conclude that they have been
alike
produced from a similar living filament." The concluding words of
this
extract make remarkable approach to the modern theory of the origin
of
life in the complex jelly-like protoplasm, or, as some call it,
nuclein
or nucleoplasm. And, on this, Erasmus Darwin further remarks: "As
the
earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions
long
before the existence of animals, and many families of these animals
long
before other animals of them, shall we conjecture that one and the
same
kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic
life?"
Nor does he make any exception to this law of organic development.
He
quotes Buffon and Helvetius to the effect--"that many features in
the
anatomy of man point to a former quadrupedal position, and indicate
that
he is not yet fully adapted to the erect position; that, further,
man
may have arisen from a single family of monkeys, in which,
accidentally,
the opposing muscle brought the thumb against the tips of the
fingers,
and that this muscle gradually increased in size by use in
successive
generations." While we who live in these days of fuller
knowledge
of agents of variation may detect the _minus_ in all
foregoing
speculations, our interest is increased in the thought of their
near
approach to the cardinal discovery. And a rapid run through the
later
writings of Dr. Darwin shows that there is scarcely a side of the
great
theory of Evolution which has escaped his notice or suggestive
comment.
Grant Allen, in his excellent little monograph on Charles Darwin,
says
that the theory of "natural selection was the only cardinal one in
the
evolutionary system on which Erasmus Darwin did not actually
forestall
his more famous and greater namesake. For its full perception,
the
discovery of Malthus had to be collated with the speculations
of
Buffon."
In the Historical Sketch on the Progress of Opinion on the
Origin of
Species, which Darwin prefixed to his book, he refers to Lamarck as
"the
first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much
attention;"
rendering "the eminent service of arousing attention to the
probability
of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world,
being
the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition." Lamarck
was
born at Bezantin, in Picardy, in 1744. Intended for the Church,
he
chose the army, but an injury resulting from a practical joke cut
short
his career as a soldier. He then became a banker's clerk, in
which
occupation he secured leisure for his favourite pursuit of
natural
history. Through Buffon's influence he procured a civil
appointment,
and ultimately became a colleague of Cuvier and Geoffroy St.
Hilaire in
the Museum of Natural History at Paris. Of Cuvier it will here
suffice
to say that he remained to the end of his life a believer in
special
creation, or, what amounts to the same thing, a series of
special
creations which, he held, followed the catastrophic
annihilations
of prior plants and animals. Although orthodox by conviction,
his
researches told against his tenets, because his important work in
the
reconstruction of skeletons of long extinct animals laid the
foundation
of palæontology.
To Lamarck, says Haeckel, "will always
belong the immortal glory of
having for the first time worked out the Theory
of Descent as an
independent scientific theory of the first order, and as
the
philosophical foundation of the whole science of Biology." He
taught
that in the beginnings of life only the very simplest and
lowest
animals and plants came into existence; those of more complex
structure
developing from these; man himself being descended from
ape-like
mammals. For the Aristotelian mechanical figure of life as a
ladder,
with its detached steps, he substituted the more appropriate figure
of
a tree, as an inter-related organism. He argued that the course of
the
earth's development, and also of all life upon it, was continuous,
and
not interrupted by violent revolutions. In this he followed Buffon
and
Hutton. Buffon, in his Theory of the Earth, argues that "in order
to
understand what had taken place in the past, or what will happen in
the
future, we have but to observe what is going on in the present."
This
is the keynote of modern geology. "Life," adds Lamarck, "is a
purely
physical phenomenon. All its phenomena depend on mechanical,
physical,
and chemical causes which are inherent in the nature of matter
itself."
He believed in a form of spontaneous generation. Rejecting
Buffon's
theory of the direct action of the surroundings as agents of change
in
living things, he sums up the causes of organic evolution in
the
following propositions:
1. Life tends by its inherent forces to
increase the volume of each
living body and of all its parts up to a limit
determined by its own
needs.
2. New wants in animals give rise to new
movements which produce organs.
3. The development of these organs is in
proportion to their employment.
4. New developments are transmitted to
offspring.
The second and third propositions were illustrated by examples
which
have, with good reason, provoked ridicule. Lamarck accounts for the
long
neck of the giraffe by that organ being continually stretched out
to
reach the leaves at the tree-tops; for the long tongue of the
ant-eater
or the woodpecker by these creatures protruding it to get at food
in
channel or crevice; for the webbed feet of aquatic animals by
the
outstretching of the membranes between the toes in swimming; and for
the
erect position of man by the constant efforts of his ape-like
ancestors
to keep upright. The legless condition of the serpent which, in
the
legend of the Garden of Eden, is accounted for on moral grounds,
is
thus explained by Lamarck: "Snakes sprang from reptiles with
four
extremities, but having taken up the habit of moving along the earth
and
concealing themselves among bushes, their bodies, owing to
repeated
efforts to elongate themselves and to pass through narrow spaces,
have
acquired a considerable length out of all proportion to their
width.
Since long feet would have been very useless, and short feet would
have
been incapable of moving their bodies, there resulted a cessation of
use
of these parts, which has finally caused them to totally
disappear,
although they were originally part of the plan of organization in
these
animals." The discovery of an efficient cause of modifications,
which
Lamarck refers to the efforts of the creatures themselves, has
placed
his speculations in the museum of biological curiosities; but
sharp
controversy rages to-day over the question raised in Lamarck's
fourth
proposition, namely, the transmission of characters acquired by
the
parent during its lifetime to the offspring. This burning
question
between Weismann and his opponents, involving the serious problem
of
heredity, will remain unsettled till a long series of
observations
supply material for judgment.
Lamarck, poor, neglected,
and blind in his old age, died in 1829. Both
Cuvier, who ridiculed him, and
Goethe, who never heard of him, passed
away three years later. The year
following his death, when Darwin was an
undergraduate at Cambridge, Lyell
published his Principles of Geology,
a work destined to assist in paving the
way for the removal of one
difficulty attending the solution of the theory of
the origin of
species, namely, the vast period of time for the life-history
of
the globe which that theory demands. As Lyell, however, was then
a
believer--although, like a few others of his time, of wavering
type--in
the fixity of species, he had other aims in view than those to which
his
book contributed. But he wrote with an open mind, not being, as
Herbert
Spencer says of Hugh Miller, "a theologian studying geology."
Following
the theories of uniformity of action laid down by Hutton, by
Buffon, and
by that industrious surveyor, William Smith, who travelled the
length
and breadth of England, mapping out the sequence of the rocks,
and
tabulating the fossils special to each stratum, Lyell demonstrated
in
detail that the formation and features of the earth's crust
are
explained by the operation of causes still active. He was one
among
others, each working independently at different branches of
research;
each, unwittingly, collecting evidence which would help to demolish
old
ideas, and support new theories.
A year after the Principles of
Geology appeared, there crept unnoticed
into the world a treatise, by one
Patrick Matthew, on Naval Timber and
Arboriculture, under which unexciting
title Darwin's theory was
anticipated. Of this, however, as of a still
earlier anticipation, more
presently. About this period Von Baer, in
examining the embryos of
animals, showed that creatures so unlike one another
in their adult
state as fishes, lizards, lions, and men, resemble one another
so
closely in the earlier stages of their development that no
differences
can be detected between them. But Von Baer was himself
anticipated by
Meckel, who wrote as follows in 1811: "There is no good
physiologist who
has not been struck, incidentally, by the observation that
the original
form of all organisms is one and the same, and that out of this
one
form, all, the lowest as well as the highest, are developed in such
a
manner that the latter pass through the permanent forms of the former
as
transitory stages" (Osborn's From the Greeks to Darwin, p. 212).
In
botany Conrad Sprengel, who belongs to the eighteenth century, had
shown
the work effected by insects in the fertilization of plants.
Following
his researches, Robert Brown made clear the mode of the development
of
plants, and Sir William Hooker traced their habits and
geographical
distribution. Von Mohl discovered that material basis of both
plant and
animal which he named "protoplasm." In 1844, nine years before Von
Mohl
told the story of the building-up of life from a seemingly
structureless
jelly, a book appeared which critics of the time charged with
"poisoning
the fountains of science, and sapping the foundations of
religion." This
was the once famous Vestiges of Creation, acknowledged after
his death
as the work of Robert Chambers, in which the origin and movements
of the
solar system were explained as determined by uniform laws,
themselves
the expression of Divine power. Organisms, "from the simplest
and
oldest, up to the highest and most recent," were the result of
an
"inherent impulse imparted by the Almighty both to advance them from
the
several grades and modify their structure as circumstances
required."
Although now referred to only as "marking time" in the history of
the
theory of Evolution, the book created a sensation which died away
only
some years after its publication. Darwin remarks upon it in
his
Historical Sketch that although displaying "in the earlier
editions
little accurate knowledge and a great want of scientific knowledge,
it
did excellent service in this country in calling attention to
the
subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for
the
reception of analogous views."
Three years after the Vestiges,
there was, although none then knew it,
or knowing the fact, would have
admitted it, more "sapping of the
foundations" of orthodox belief, when M.
Boucher de Perthes exhibited
some rudely-shaped flint implements which had
been found at intervals in
hitherto undisturbed deposits of sand and
gravel--old river beds--in the
Somme valley, near Abbeville, in Picardy. For
these rough stone tools
and weapons, being of human workmanship, evidenced
the existence of
savage races of men in Europe in a dim and dateless past,
and went far
to refute the theories of his paradisiacal state on that
memorable "23
October, 4004 B. C.," when, according to Dr. Lightfoot's
reckoning (see
p. 103), Adam was created. While the pickaxe, in disturbing
flint knives
and spearheads, that had lain for countless ages, was disturbing
much
besides, English and German philosophers were formulating the
imposing
theory which, under the name of the Conservation of Energy, makes
clear
the indestructibility of both matter and motion. Then, to complete
the
work of preparation effected by the discoveries now briefly
outlined,
there appeared, in a now defunct newspaper, the Leader, in its
issue of
20th of March, 1852, an article by Herbert Spencer on the
Development
Hypothesis, in which the following striking passage occurs:
"Those who
cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately
supported
by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported
by no
facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given
belief,
they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but
assume
that their own needs none. Here we find, scattered over the
globe,
vegetable and animal organisms numbering, of the one kind (according
to
Humboldt) some 320,000 species, and of the other, some 2,000,000
species
(see Carpenter); and if to these we add the numbers of animal
and
vegetable species that have become extinct, we may safely estimate
the
number of species that have existed, and are existing, on the earth,
at
not less than _ten millions_. Well, which is the most rational
theory
about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there
have
been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that
by
continual modifications, due to change of circumstances, ten millions
of
varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced
still?...
Even could the supporters of the Development Hypothesis merely
show
that the origination of species by the process of modification
is
conceivable, they would be in a better position than their
opponents.
But they can do much more than this. They can show that the
process of
modification has effected, and is effecting, decided changes in
all
organisms subject to modifying influences.... They can show that
in
successive generations these changes continue, until ultimately the
new
conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in
cultivated
plants, domesticated animals, and in the several races of men,
such
alterations have taken place. They can show that the degrees
of
difference so produced are often, as in dogs, greater than those
on
which distinctions of species are in other cases founded. They can
show,
too, that the changes daily taking place in ourselves--the facility
that
attends long practice, and the loss of aptitude that begins
when
practice ceases--the strengthening of passions habitually gratified,
and
the weakening of those habitually curbed--the development of
every
faculty, bodily, moral, or intellectual, according to the use made
of
it--are all explicable on this same principle. And thus they can
show
that throughout all organic nature there is at work a
modifying
influence of the kind they assign as the cause of these
specific
differences; an influence which, though slow in its action, does,
in
time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked
changes--an
influence which, to all appearance, would produce in the millions
of
years, and under the great varieties of condition which
geological
records imply, any amount of change."
This quotation shows,
as perhaps no other reference might show, how, by
the middle of the present
century, science was trembling on the verge of
discovery of that "modifying
influence" of which Mr. Spencer speaks.
That discovery made clear how all
that had preceded it not only
contributed thereto, but gained a significance
and value which, apart
from it, could not have been secured. When the
relation of the several
parts to the whole became manifest, each fell into
its place like the
pieces of a child's puzzle map.
LEADING MEN OF
SCIENCE.
A. D. 800 TO A. D.
1800.
--------------------+-----------------+------+------------------------
|
Place and date | |
NAME. | of birth. |
Died.|
Speciality.
--------------------+-----------------+------+------------------------
Geber
(Djafer). |Mesopotamia, | .... |Earliest known
Chemist.
| 830. | |
Avicenna (Ibu
Sina).|Bokhara, 980. | 1037 |Expositor of
Aristotle;
| | | Physician
and
|
| | Geologist.
Averroes (Ibu |Spain, 1126. | 1198
|Translator and
Roshd). | | | Commentator
of
| | | Aristotle.
Roger
Bacon. |Ilchester, 1214. | 1292 |First
English
|
| | Experimentalist.
Christopher |Genoa, 1445. | 1506
|Discoverer of America,
Columbus. |
| | 1492.
Vasco de Gama. |Sines, 1469. | 1525 |Sailed round
the South
|(Portugal.) | | of Africa,
1497.
Ferdinand Magellan. |Ville de | 1521 |Circumnavigator
of
| Sabroza, 1470. | | the Globe,
1519.
Nicholas Copernicus.|Thorn, 1473. | 1543 |Discoverer of the
Sun
|(Prussia.) | | as the Centre of
our
| | | System.
Andreas
Vesalius. |Brussels, 1514. | 1564 |Human Anatomist.
Conrad
Gesner. |Zurich, 1516. | 1565 |Classification
of
| | | Plants and
Animals.
Andrew Caesalpino. |Arezzo, 1519. | 1603 |Comparative
Botanist.
|(Tuscany.) | |
Tycho
Brahe. |Knudstrup, | 1601 |Collector
of
| 1546. | | Astronomical
Data.
|(Sweden.) | |
Giordano
Bruno. |Nola, 1550. | 1600 |Expounder of
the
| | | Copernican
System
| | | and
Philosopher.
Francis, Lord Bacon.|London, 1561. | 1626 |Expounder of
the
| | | Inductive
Philosophy.
Galileo Galilei. |Pisa, 1564. | 1642 |Numerous
Astronomical
|
| | Discoveries.
Johann Kepler. |Wurtemburg, | 1630
|Discoverer of the
| 1571. | | Three
Laws of
| | | Planetary
Movements.
Thomas Hobbes. |Malmesbury, | 1679 |One of the
Founders
| 1588. | | of Modern
Ethics.
Rene Descartes. |La Haye, 1596. | 1650 |Resolution of
all
|(Touraine.) | | Phenomena into
Terms
| | | of Matter and
Motion.
|
| | (Dualism.)
Benedict Spinoza. |Amsterdam, | 1677
|Resolution of
all
| 1632. | | Phenomena into
Terms
| | | of
Substance=God.
|
| | (Monism.)
John Locke. |Wrington, 1632. | 1704 |Moral
Philosopher.
|(Somerset.) | |
Gottfrid
Wilhelm |Leipsic, 1646. | 1716 |Philosopher and
Leibnitz.
| | | Mathematician.
Sir Isaac Newton.
|Woolsthorpe, | 1727 |Expounder of the
Law
| 1642. | | of
Gravitation.
|(Lincoln.) | |
Edmund
Halley. |London, 1656. | 1741 |Astronomer.
David
Hartley. |Illingworth, | 1757 |Psychology of
Man.
| 1705. | |
Carl von
Linnaeus. |Roeshult, 1707. | 1778 |Systematic Botany
and
|(Sweden.) | | Zoology.
Count de
Buffon. |Burgundy, | 1788 |Contributions
from
| 1707. | | Biology toward
Theory
| | | of Evolution
and
| | | Geology.
David
Hume. |Edinburgh, | 1776 |Philosophy of
the
|
| | Anti-supernatural;
| 1711. | | all
Science Converging
| | | in
Man.
Immanuel Kant. |Konigsberg, | 1804 |Formulator of
the
| 1724. | | Nebular
Theory.
James Hutton. |Edinburgh, | 1797
|Geologist:
| 1726. | | Uniformitarian.
Erasmus
Darwin. |Elton, 1731. | 1802 |(_See_
BUFFON.)
|(Lincolnshire.) | |
Sir
William |Hanover, 1738. | 1822 |Astronomer.
Herschel.
| | |
Jean Baptiste |Bazantium, | 1829
|Biologist:
Contributions
Lamarck. | 1744. | | against
fixity
| | | of
Species.
Marquis de Laplace. |Beaumont-en-Ange,| 1827 |Expounder of
the
| 1749. | | Nebular
Theory.
Conrad Sprengel. |Pomerania, | 1833
|Botanist.
| 1766. | |
John
Dalton. |Eaglesfield, | 1844 |Formulator of
the
| 1767. | | Modern
Atomic
|(Cumberland.) | | Theory.
Baron
Cuvier. |Montbeliard, | 1832 |Palæontologist
and
| 1769. | | Anatomist.
Geoff.
St. Hilaire. |Etampes, 1772. | 1844 |Zoologist.
Alexander von |
Berlin, 1769. | 1859 |Explorer.
Humboldt. |
| |
William Smith. |Churchill, 1769. | 1840 |Geologist:
mapped
|(Oxon.) | | Strata of
Great
| | | Britain.
Boucher
de Perthes. |1788. | 1868 |Discoverer of
Evidences
| | | of
Man's
| | | Antiquity.
Sir
William Hooker. |Norwich, 1785. | 1865 |Botanist.
Sir Charles
Lyell. |Kinnordy, | 1875 |Geologist:
developed
| 1797. | | Hutton's
Theory.
|(Forfarshire.) | |
Ernst von
Baer. |Esthonia, 1792. | 1876 |Embryologist: Law
of
| | | Organic
Development.
Sir Richard Owen. |Lancaster, 1804. | 1892
|Palæontologist.
Hugo von Mohl. |Germany, 1805. | 1872 |Discoverer
of
| | | Protoplasm.
Theodor
Schwann. |Neuss, 1810. | 1882 |Founder of the
Cell
|(Prussia.) | | Theory.
Hermann
von |Potsdam, 1821. | 1894 |Formulator of
the
Helmholtz. | | | Doctrine of
the
| | | Conservation
of
|
| | Energy.
--------------------+-----------------+------+------------------------
_PART
IV._
MODERN EVOLUTION.
1. _Darwin and Wallace._
We
have to deal with Man as a product of Evolution; with Society as
a product
of Evolution; and with Moral Phenomena as products of
Evolution.--HERBERT
SPENCER, Principles of Ethics, § 193.
CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN (the second
name was rarely used by him) was born
at Shrewsbury on the 12th of February,
1809. He came of a long line of
Lincolnshire yeomen, whose forbears spelt the
name variously, as Darwen,
Derwent, and Darwynne, perhaps deriving it from
the river of kindred
name. His father was a kindly, prosperous doctor, of
sufficient
scientific reputation to secure his election into the Royal
Society,
although that coveted honour was then more easily obtained than now.
Of
the more famous grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, the reminder suffices
that
both his prose and poetry were vehicles of suggestive speculations
on
the development of life-forms. Dealing with bald facts and dates
for
clearance of what follows, it may be added that Charles Darwin
was
educated at the Grammar School of his native town; that he passed
thence
to Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities; was occupied as
volunteer
naturalist on board the Beagle from December, 1831, till
October,
1836; that he published his epoch-making Origin of Species in
November,
1859; and that he was buried by the side of Sir Isaac Newton
in
Westminster Abbey on the 26th of April, 1882.
[Illustration: Alfred
R. Wallace]
As with not a few other men of "light and leading," neither
school nor
university did much for him, nor did his boyhood give indication
of
future greatness. In his answers to the series of questions addressed
to
various scientific men in 1873 by his distinguished cousin,
Francis
Galton, he says: "I consider that all I have learnt of any value
has
been self-taught," and he adds that his education fostered no methods
of
observation or reasoning. Of the Shrewsbury Grammar School, where,
after
the death of his mother (daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the
celebrated
potter), in his ninth year, he was placed as a boarder till
his
sixteenth year, he tells us, in the modest and candid
Autobiography
printed in the Life and Letters, "nothing could have been worse
for the
development of my mind." All that he was taught were the classics,
and
a little ancient geography and history; no mathematics, and no
modern
languages. Happily, he had inherited a taste for natural history and
for
collecting, his spoils including not only shells and plants, but
also
coins and seals. When the fact that he helped his brother in
chemical
experiments became known to Dr. Butler, the head-master, that
desiccated
pedagogue publicly rebuked him "for wasting time on such useles |
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