THE LITERARY EXAMINER.

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Churchill.

In this small and unpretending volume we have found so many great results of knowledge and reflection, that we cannot too earnestly recommend it to the attention of thoughtful men. It is the first attempt that has been made to connect the natural sciences into a history of creation. An attempt which presupposes learning, extensive and various; but not the large and liberal wisdom, the profound philosophical suggestion, the lofty spirit of beneficence, and the exquisite grace of manner, which make up the charm of this extraordinary book.

To say that the writer of such a book is as modest as he is bold, is in other words to say that he has earnestly investigated Nature. Bacon’s remark of Aristotle, Audax simul et Pavidus, applies to all such men. They are bold, in an assured certainty of the Laws which govern everything to which knowledge can penetrate; they are humble, in an awful contemplation of the Divine Author of those Laws.

“We advance from law to the cause of law, and ask, What is that? Whence have come all these beautiful regulations? Here science leaves us, but only to conclude, from other grounds, that there is a First Cause to which all others are secondary and ministrative, a primitive almighty will, of which these laws are merely the mandates. That great Being, who shall say where is his dwelling-place, or what his history! Man pauses breathless at the contemplation of a subject so much above his finite faculties, and only can wonder and adore!”

In this spirit the book before us is written. It contains much that at a first reading may startle a devout and religious mind; it contains nothing that such a mind will do well to reject on more calm and full reflection. We believe nothing to be so certain as the assumption on which the writer proceeds: that while we give a respectful reception to what is revealed through the medium of Nature; we can at the same time fully reserve our reverence for all we have been accustomed to hold sacred, “not one tittle of which it may ultimately be found necessary to alter.” Let all be welcome who bring new truths, if so they can be proved. Let the confident hope animate us, that these new truths will in time be found harmonious with the old. Error is the only thing we need to be afraid of: it is useless to fear or to persecute in any other direction. We may for ever force the Galileos on their knees to renounce the motion of the earth, but on their lips as they arise, the e pur si muove will still be found.

This is not the place for any detailed examination of the opinions set forth in the volume; and in abstaining, we would not be understood to assent to all that it contains. But we will endeavour to show its general drift and purpose.

It opens with a chapter on the arrangement and formation of the Bodies of Space, and on the wonderful relationships that exist between the constituents of our system. The result of the reasoning in this chapter would seem to be, that the formation of bodies in space is still and at present in progress, and that, among the thousands of worlds suspended there in all stages of formation, there is evidence, altogether apart from human traditions, for the probability of the comparative youth of our system, as one whose various phenomena, physical and moral, as yet lie undeveloped, while myriads of others are fully fashioned and in complete arrangement. The constituent materials of the earth and the other bodies of space are next considered, and from this there is a natural transition to the earth’s first formation and settlement.

We take one of two familiar illustrations from these early chapters to show the simplicity of the writer’s manner, and the beauty of his style.

EXTENT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM.

“The mind fails to form an exact notion of a portion of space so immense; but some faint idea of it may be obtained from the fact, that, if the swiftest race-horse ever known had begun to traverse it, at full speed, at the time of the birth of Moses, he would only as yet have accomplished half his journey.”

Yet the distance of other known stars which do not belong to our system, Sirius for example, is seven times as great as this! And the elder Herschel computed distances beyond Sirius, thirty-five thousand times more remote than even that star!! Observe, in connexion with these immensities, the

SUBLIME SIMPLICITY OF NATURE.

“The law which causes rotation in the single solar masses, is exactly the same which produces the familiar phenomenon of a small whirlpool or dimple in the surface of a stream. Such dimples are not always single. Upon the face of a river where there are various contending currents, it may often be observed that two or more dimples are formed near each other with more or less regularity. These fantastic eddies, which the musing poet will sometimes watch abstractedly for an hour, little thinking of the law which produces and connects them, are an illustration of the wonders of binary and ternary solar systems. . . . . The tear that falls from childhood’s cheek is globular, through the efficacy of that same law of mutual attraction of particles which made the sun and planets round. The rapidity of Mercury is quicker than that of Saturn, for the same reason that, when we wheel a ball round by a string, and make the string wind up round our fingers, the ball always flies quicker and quicker as the string is shortened. Two eddies in a stream, as has been stated, fall into a mutual revolution at the distance of a couple of inches, through the same cause which makes a pair of suns link in mutual revolution at the distance of millions of miles. There is, we might say, a sublime simplicity in this indifference of the grand regulations to the vastness or minuteness of the field of their operation.”

The formation of the earth is described in its various eras. We have the Era of the Primary Rocks, and the commencement of organic life. The Era of the Old Red Sandstone, and of the Secondary Rocks. We have the formation of land and the commencement of land plants; the New Red Sandstone Era, and the commencement of land animals; the Oolite Era and commencement of mammalia; and we have the various incidents which belong to the Cretaceous, Tertiary, and Superficial Formations. The geological revelations of the earth’s wondrous history are thus laid succinctly before us: their narrative closing suddenly as man is about to enter on the scene.

THE EARLIEST LIVING CREATURES ON EARTH.

“And what were those creatures? It well might be with a kind of awe that the uninstructed inquirer would wait for an answer to this question. But nature is simpler than man’s wit would make her, and behold, the interrogation only brings before us the unpretending forms of various zoophytes and polypes, together with a few single and double-valved shell-fish (mollusks), all of them creatures of the sea. It is rather surprising to find these before any vegetable forms, considering that vegetables appear to us as forming the necessary first link in the chain of nutrition; but it is probable that there were sea plants, and also some simpler forms of animal life, before this period, although of too a slight a substance to leave any fossil trace of their existence.”

The Origin of Life it is indeed difficult to approach without a “kind of awe.” But it is well perhaps to divest ourselves of it, as much as may be. The world on which we live is no such mighty matter, when we think of it, as this book teaches us to think of it, in its relations to its mighty Creator. We are inhabitants of but a little planet; third of a series which is but one of hundreds of thousands of series; the whole of which again form but one portion of an apparently infinite globe-peopled space, where all seems analogous!

Remembering this, let us listen with humility to such suggestions as a wise and earnest inquirer has to offer, on the mode in which the Divine Author may have proceeded in the Organic Creation.

“The fact of the cosmical arrangements being an effect of natural law, is a powerful argument for the organic arrangements being so likewise, for how can we suppose that the august Being who brought all these countless worlds into form by the simple establishment of a natural principle flowing from his mind, was to interfere personally and specially on every occasion when a new shell-fish or reptile was to be ushered into existence on one of these worlds?”

But it is not a matter of general likelihood, simply; science supplies facts which bring the assumption more nearly home to nature; and in the philosophical application of these facts, we observe the most striking feature of originality in the work under consideration. It will be well that the student should bring to this part of it, not only the modesty which is always useful in inquiries of this kind, but some recollection of past historical experiences.

“There is a measure of incredulity from our ignorance as well as from our knowledge, and if the most distinguished philosopher three hundred years ago had ventured to develop any striking new fact which only could harmonize with the as yet unknown Copernican solar system, we cannot doubt that it would have been universally scoffed at in the scientific world, such as it then was, or at the best interpreted in a thousand wrong ways in conformity with ideas already familiar.”

The hypothesis of the origin of life admitted (as the Result, not of any immediate or personal exertion on the part of the Deity, but of Natural Laws which are expressions of His will), we proceed to that of the development of the vegetable and animal kingdoms. The general fact of an obvious gradation among the families of both vegetable and animal kingdoms, from the simplest up to the highest orders, is not disputed, we believe, by any inquirer. The author of this book reasons, therefore, from the examples that have led to this inference, for the fundamental unity, in one system (the whole creation of which must have depended upon one law or decree of the Almighty, though it did not come forth at one time), of all the various organic forms of our world. He believes the whole train of animated beings to be a series of advances of the principle of development; he believes those advances to have been arranged from the first in the counsels of the Divine Wisdom, as under necessary modifications gradually to take place (a system foreshadowed by Plato); and he lays down the first step as of advance, under favour of these peculiar conditions, from the simplest forms of Being to the next more complicated, “through the medium of the ordinary process of generation.”

We cannot within our limits exhibit, with any justice to the writer, his course of reasoning to this remarkable hypothesis. But we will give one or two examples of the more striking order of his facts.

THE STAGES OF ORGANIC LIFE.

“An insect, standing at the head of the articulated animals, is, in the larva state, a true annelid, or worm, the annelida being the lowest in the same class. The embryo of a crab resembles the perfect animal of the inferior order myriapoda, and passes through all the forms of transition which characterise the intermediate tribes of crustacea. The frog, for some time after its birth, is a fish with external gills, and other organs fitting it for an aquatic life, all of which are changed as it advances to maturity, and becomes a land animal. The mammifer only passes through still more stages, according to its higher place in the scale. Nor is man himself exempt from this law. His first form is that which is permanent in the animalcule. His organization gradually passes through conditions generally resembling a fish, a reptile, a bird, and the lower mammalia, before it attains its specific maturity. At one of the last stages of his foetal career, he exhibits an intermaxillary bone, which is characteristic of the perfect ape; this is suppressed, and he may then be said to take leave of the simial type, and become a true human creature. Even, as we shall see, the varieties of his race are represented in the progressive development of an individual of the highest, before we see the adult Caucasian, the highest point yet attained in the animal scale.”

Of these truths of physiology, strange as they may seem, there is no doubt. Each animal has been found to pass, in the course of its germinal history, through a series of changes resembling the permanent forms of the various orders of animals inferior to it in the scale. The changes indicated in the human being are in his brain and heart, which in their progress to complete formation are found to assume the various conditions of the insect, the fish, the reptile, the bird, and the lower mammalia. A difficulty remains, however, in what we see around us of the apparently invariable production of like by like. But the writer argues with great force that this can be held for no other than the ordinary procedure of nature in the time immediately passing before our eyes. He gives a remarkable suggestion, from some data of Mr Babbage’s calculating machine, that this ordinary procedure may be subordinate to a higher law which only permits it for a time, and in proper season interrupts and changes it.

“The gestation of a single organism is the work of but a few days, weeks, or months; but the gestation (so to speak) of a whole creation is a matter probably involving enormous spaces of time. Suppose that an ephemeron, hovering over a pool for its one April day of life, were capable of observing the fry of the frog in the water below. In its aged afternoon, having seen no change upon them for such a long time, it would be little qualified to conceive that the external branchiae of these creatures were to decay, and be replaced by internal lungs, that feet were to be developed, the tail erased, and the animal then to become a denizen of the land. Precisely such may be our difficulty in conceiving that any of the species which people our earth is capable of advancing by generation to a higher type of being. During the whole time which we call the historical era, the limits of species have been, to ordinary observation, rigidly adhered to. But the historical era is, we know, only a small portion of the entire age of our globe. We do not know what may have happened during the ages which preceded its commencement, as we do not know what may happen in ages yet in the distant future.”

In the phenomena of the generation of bees there is a curious illustration of the principle of development, so far as varieties of sex are concerned, which gives something like a distinct support to these parts of the author’s reasoning. And how pregnant with matter of reflection, in the present condition of the world, are his remarks on the changes of the human family!

“It is fully established that a human family, tribe, or nation, is liable, in the course of generations, to be either advanced from a mean form to a higher one, or degraded from a higher to a lower, by the influence of the physical conditions in which it lives. . . . . Prominence of the jaws, a recession and diminution of the cranium, and an elongation and attenuation of the limbs, are peculiarities always produced by these miserable conditions, for they indicate an unequivocal retrogression towards the type of the lower animals. Thus we see nature alike willing to go back and to go forward. Both effects are simply the result of the operation of the law of development in the generative system. Give good conditions, it advances; bad ones, it recedes. . . . . . . Monstrosities are the result of nothing more than a failure of the power of development in the system of the mother, occasioned by weak health or misery.”

The general result to which we are brought by the close of the investigation is, that the simplest and most primitive type of organic life, under a law to which that of like-production is subordinate, gave birth to the type next above it, that this again produced the next higher, and so on to the very highest. Applying this to the wonderful system of circular analogies and affinities in nature (of which Macleay is the principal author) it is found that the only appearance of imperfection, as though in this direction the laws of life were not yet accomplished, is in the circle to which man belongs. Doubtless the ideas which rise in consequence are not a little startling.

“Is our race but the initial of the grand crowning type? Are there yet to be species superior to us in organization, purer in feeling, more powerful in device and act, and who shall take a rule over us? There is in this nothing improbable on other grounds. The present race, rude and impulsive as it is, is perhaps the best adapted to the present state of things in the world; but the external world goes through slow and gradual changes, which may leave it in time a much serener field of existence. There may then be occasion for a nobler type of humanity, which shall complete the zoological circle on this planet, and realize some of the dreams of the purest spirits of the present race.”

The writer seems but little cognizant of the notions of the Greek philosophers, and it is the more strange to what an unconscious and large extent he corroborates many of their most striking views. This idea of a higher race was held by Pythagoras, who connected it with that view of more consummate worlds in space, inhabited in their turn by beings more perfect and beautiful than those of earth, which we have, in an earlier part of this notice, seen to be in some sort sanctioned by the results of astronomical inquiry. Another idea of the philosopher of Samos may be said to form the basis on which the writer of this volume, unconsciously, has raised its whole philosophical structure. Pythagoras held the world to be an harmonical development of the First One, advancing from the less beautiful and good to the better and more beautiful.

Two remarkable chapters which follow those we have named are on the Early History of Mankind and the Mental Constitution of Animals.

MENTAL ACTION.

“Simple electricity, artificially produced, and sent along the nerves of a dead body, excites muscular action. The brain of a newly-killed animal being taken out, and replaced by a substance which produces electric action, the operation of digestion, which had been interrupted by the death of the animal, was resumed, showing the absolute identity of the brain with a galvanic battery. Nor is this a very startling idea, when we reflect that electricity is almost as metaphysical as ever mind was supposed to be. It is a thing perfectly intangible, weightless. Metal may be magnetized, or heated to seven hundred of Fahrenheit, without becoming the hundredth part of a grain heavier. And yet electricity is a real thing, an actual existence in nature, as witness the effects of heat and light in vegetation—the power of the galvanic current to re-assemble the particles of copper from a solution, and make them again into a solid plate—the rending force of the thunderbolt as it strikes the oak; see also how both heat and light observe the angle of incidence in reflection, as exactly as does the grossest stone thrown obliquely against a wall. So mental action may be imponderable, intangible, and yet a real existence, and ruled by the Eternal through his laws.”

THE MIND OF MAN.

“We have faculties in full force and activity which the animals either possess not at all, or in so low and obscure a form as to be equivalent to non-existence. Now these parts of mind are those which connect us with the things that are not of this world. We have veneration, prompting us to the worship of the Deity, which the animals lack. We have hope, to carry us on in thought beyond the bounds of time. We have reason, to enable us to inquire into the character of the Great Father, and the relation of us, his humble creatures, towards him. We have conscientiousness and benevolence, by which we can in a faint and humble measure imitate, in our conduct, that which he exemplifies in the whole of his wondrous doings. Beyond this, mental science does not carry us in support of religion: the rest depends on evidence of a different kind. But it is surely much that we thus discover in nature a provision for things so important. The existence of faculties having a regard to such things is a good evidence that such things exist. The face of God is reflected in the organization of man, as a little pool reflects the glorious sun.”

When we have arrived at that stage of the inquiry by which we discover that there is a general adaptation of the mental constitution of man to the circumstances in which he lives, as close as between all the parts of nature to each other; when we find that, for our physical constitution, the Almighty Author of all things has destined it, like everything else, to be developed from inherent qualities, and to have a mode of action depending solely on its own organization; the inquiry seems complete. We have seen the masses of space formed by Law, and in due time made theatres of existence for plants and animals; we have seen in like manner developed and sustained in action by Law, sensation, disposition, and intellect; and we have observed that in the case of inorganic nature, the Law is Gravitation, and in organic, Development. But the question so inexpressibly interesting remains, of man’s final condition on the earth in his relations to Supra-Mundane things.

It is the subject of the last chapter of the book. Its views may in certain points seem too material, but let them not be hastily judged. We might again resort to the Greek philosophy for resemblances unheeded by the writer. The Socratic idea of science is, that nothing can be known except together with the rest and along with its relation to all things beside. And it would be hazardous to say that a nobler definition of philosophy has been or could be given, than that which declares it to consist not in a partial cultivation either of morals or physics, but in the co-existence and intercommunion of both. We take a passage of the most benignant wisdom from this concluding chapter.

“To secure the immediate means of happiness it would seem to be necessary for men first to study with all care the constitution of nature, and, secondly, to accommodate themselves to that constitution, so as to obtain all the realizable advantages from acting conformably to it, and to avoid all likely evils from disregarding it. It will be of no use to sit down and expect that things are to operate of their own accord, or through the direction of a partial deity, for our benefit; equally so were it to expose ourselves to palpable dangers, under the notion that we shall, for some reason, have a dispensation or exemption from them: we must endeavour so to place ourselves, and so to act, that the arrangements which Providence has made impartially for all may be in our favour, and not against us; such are the only means by which we can obtain good and avoid evil here below. And, in doing this, it is especially necessary that care be taken to avoid interfering with the like efforts of other men, beyond what may have been agreed upon by the mass as necessary for the general good. Such interferences, tending in any way to injure the body, property, or peace of a neighbour, or to the injury of society in general, tend very much to reflect evil upon ourselves, through the re-action which they produce in the feelings of our neighbour and of society, and also the offence which they give to our own conscientiousness and benevolence. On the other hand, when we endeavour to promote the efforts of our fellow-creatures to attain happiness, we produce a reaction of the contrary kind, the tendency of which is towards our own benefit. The one course of action tends to the injury, the other to the benefit of ourselves and others. By the one course the general design of the Creator towards his creatures is thwarted; by the other it is favoured. And thus we can readily see the most substantial grounds for regarding all moral emotions and doings as divine in their nature, and as a means of rising to and communing with God. Obedience is not selfishness, which it would otherwise be—it is worship. The merest barbarians have a glimmering sense of this philosophy, and it continually shines out more and more clearly in the public mind, as a nation advances in intelligence. Nor are individuals alone concerned here. The same rule applies as between one great body or class of men and another, and also between nations. Thus if one set of men keep others in the condition of slaves—this being a gross injustice to the subjected party, the mental manifestations of that party to the masters will be such as to mar the comfort of their lives; the minds of the masters themselves will be degraded by the association with beings so degraded; and thus, with some immediate or apparent benefit from keeping slaves, there will be in a far greater degree an experience of evil. So also, if one portion of a nation, engaged in a particular department of industry, grasp at some advantages injurious to the other sections of the people, the first effect will be an injury to those other portions of the nation, and the second a re-active injury to the injurers, making their guilt their punishment. And so when one nation commits an aggression upon the property or rights of another, or even pursues towards it a sordid or ungracious policy, the effects are sure to be redoubled evil from the offended party. All of these things are under laws which make the effects, on a large range, absolutely certain; and an individual, a party, a people, can no more act unjustly with safety, than I could with safety place my leg in the track of a coming wain, or attempt to fast thirty days. We have been constituted on the principle of only being able to realise happiness for ourselves when our fellow creatures are also happy; we must therefore both do to others only as we would have others do to us, and endeavour to promote their happiness as well as our own, in order to find ourselves truly comfortable in this field of existence. These are words which God speaks to us as truly through his works, as if we heard them uttered in his own voice from heaven.”

Again:

“It may be that, while we are committed to take our chance in a natural system of undeviating operation, and are left with apparent ruthlessness to endure the consequences of every collision into which we knowingly or unknowingly come with each law of the system, there is a system of Mercy and Grace behind the screen of nature, which is to make up for all casualties endured here, and the very largeness of which is what makes these casualties a matter of indifference to God. For the existence of such a system, the actual constitution of nature is itself an argument. The reasoning may proceed thus: The system of nature assures us that benevolence is a leading principle in the divine mind. But that system is at the same time deficient in a means of making this benevolence of invariable operation. To reconcile this to the recognised character of the Deity, it is necessary to suppose that the present system is but a part of a whole, a stage in a Great Progress, and that the Redress is in reserve. Another argument here occurs—the economy of nature, beautifully arranged and vast in its extent as it is, does not satisfy even man’s idea of what might be; he feels that, if this multiplicity of theatres for the exemplification of such phenomena as we see on earth were to go on for ever unchanged, it would not be worthy of the Being capable of creating it. An endless monotony of human generations, with their humble thinkings and doings, seems an object beneath that august Being. But the mundane economy might be very well as a portion of some greater phenomenon, the rest of which was yet to be evolved. It therefore appears that our system, though it may at first appear at issue with other doctrines in esteem amongst mankind, tends to come into harmony with them, and even to give them support. I would say, in conclusion, that, even where the two above arguments may fail of effect, there may yet be a faith derived from this view of nature sufficient to sustain us under all sense of the imperfect happiness, the calamities, the woes, and pains of this sphere of being. For let us but consider that a system is here laid open to view, and we cannot well doubt that we are in the hands of One who is both able and willing to do us the most entire justice. And in this faith we may well rest at ease, even though life should have been to us but a protracted disease, or though every hope we had built on the secular materials within our reach were felt to be melting from our grasp. Thinking of all the contingencies of this world as to be in time melted into or lost in the greater system, to which the present is only subsidiary, let us wait the end with patience, and be of good cheer.”

What are these, but, in another and simpler shape, the noblest thoughts and the loftiest aspirations that have consoled and elevated the hopes of humanity in this world? What is it that hath sustained the Martyrs of our race in all their great extremities, if not a like sublime persuasion that the Good and Beautiful in the world were not ordained for the beginning, but only as in fulness of time to be brought about, by the development of the Divine Essence, and the entire completion of the Divine Will. What is the comfortable faith and trust to which the mere unassisted truths of natural science have led this ardent and sincere investigator, if it is not that which the Religion of Christ has assured to its humble and undoubting followers—that this Present Existence is the preparation for a Better, and that the road leading thither is the love of God and Man, the practising every virtue, the living reasonably and justly while we are here, the proportioning our esteem to the value of things, and the so using the world as not to abuse it.

Let the writer of this book, then, take his own lesson, and himself “be of good cheer.” He doubts the reception of his labours, and intimates that, for reasons connected with them, his name will in all probability never be generally known. For this last he cares little, we will dare to say. The writing of such a book implies the power of waiting its due appreciation, however long deferred. But it is possible that he underrates the aptness of the time for an inquiry conducted with so much modesty and so much knowledge. With a firm persuasion that the Truth can never be unseasonably urged, we believe that there is now abroad in the world a certain rare disposition to hear it patiently, when a beneficent spirit accompanies it, and when its actuating principle would seem to be, as in the case before us, establishment of just principles among men and a reverent admission of the Goodness and the Mercy of God.